Storm in Brooklyn Subway<\/p>\n
Thistle of rain.
We seek temple from tempest,
litany in lightning,<\/p>\n
a mottled crowd huddled,
backs to the wall,
gasping for refuge.<\/p>\n
Then, in an instant, the heavens smile,
the firm ground forms
and the petrific hour<\/p>\n
once frail, now becomes flesh.
Grace greases every foothold \u2014
people hum all the way home.<\/p>\n
This week\u2019s poem is by Menna Elfyn, who was born in Glanaman, south Wales, in 1951, and is one of the best-known and most honoured contemporary Welsh-language writers. Storm in Brooklyn Subway appears in her wide-ranging new collection, Parch<\/a>.<\/p>\n Some of the poems in Parch have been translated into English by a distinguished cast of authors that includes Gillian Clarke, Robert Minhinnick and, an unexpected treat, RS Thomas. But Elfyn wrote many of the poems, including this week\u2019s choice, directly in English, celebrating, she says, the fact that \u201cthe Welsh language is now accepted and respected as an official language in Wales, following many years of non-violent campaigns.\u201d She goes on to explain: \u201cThis has allowed me to develop a feeling of affinity with the English language and, as a proud bilingual, I attest to Herta M\u00fcller\u2019s belief that \u2018holding one\u2019s own language up to the eyes of another leads to a solid relationship, a relaxed kind of love\u2019.\u201d There are two poems which appear in their original Welsh alongside Elfyn\u2019s English translations: both are elegies, composed after the loss of her sister in 2020 and her brother in 2022.<\/p>\n The collection\u2019s title, Parch, shouldn\u2019t be anglicised: it\u2019s the Welsh word which means \u201crespect\u201d. \u201cParch\u201d can also be the title for a spiritual leader in a nonconformist chapel, informally translatable as \u201cReverend\u201d. By association, I found myself suddenly remembering George Herbert and his poem The Church-porch<\/a> and applying the concept of the porch as shelter and entrance more generally to Elfyn\u2019s collection. There are poems centred on group activities: queueing, making a refuge from stones, demonstrating with peace activists, and sharing the chapel \u201cflower rota\u201d. While a New York City subway station might be seem an unlikely setting for shared communication, the movement in this poem seems to turn the act of sheltering from the deluge into a collective, near-religious experience, as if the station had been reimagined as a refuge, a sacred entrance, a porch.<\/p>\n The image in the first line, \u201cThistle of rain\u201d, is both aural and tactile, the hiss of rain and its sting on bare skin being brilliantly captured. Then the diction, carried by its verbal music, is lifted into the poem\u2019s transcendent imaginative process, the incoming crowd finding a \u201ctemple from tempest, \/ litany in lightning\u201d. A primitive fear and awe remain: the crowd still feels the effects of the fierce weather \u2013 \u201cbacks to the wall, \/ gasping for refuge\u201d. This crowd is \u201cmottled\u201d \u2013 another eloquent word that reveals the effects of the rain on clothing, something like a shared baptism, perhaps, which may unify the variety of faces and figures.<\/p>\n The shelter-seekers are additionally \u201chuddled\u201d, recalling the phrase from Emma Lazarus\u2019s The New Colossus: \u201cGive me your tired, your poor, \/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free \u2026\u201d Lazarus also describes her exiles as \u201ctempest-tost\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n Whether sacrament or warning, Elfyn\u2019s \u201ctempest\u201d is brief, and \u201cin an instant, the heavens smile\u201d. The smile goes beyond the stereotypical cheeriness of sunlight. It evolves into creative, or even Creatorly, participation. Events are set in motion, recorded in specific but unexpected language: \u201cThe firm ground forms \/ and the petrific hour \/\/ once frail, now becomes flesh.\u201d Something described as \u201cpetrific\u201d has the power of petrification, and the poem suggests that this process has gripped the people sheltering, once standing still and stonelike, but now enabled again to move. At the same time, the stoniness of the \u201chour\u201d was \u201cfrail\u201d, breakable, perhaps, before time returned in the shape of living plasticity. It\u2019s partly as if substances had changed place: people are malleable again, and the ground has become firm. The rain has stopped and the shelterers are freed from captivity.<\/p>\n The rain hasn\u2019t dried up instantly, though, and the association of \u201cgrace\u201d with \u201cgrease\u201d seems almost humorously to hint a warning to tread the wet ground carefully. The people\u2019s joy is unthreatened, and they \u201chum all the way home\u201d\u2013 perhaps with the pleasure of swiftness, hearing the new sounds that the cessation of the rain has made audible. In the words of The New Colossus, they \u201cbreathe free\u201d.<\/p>\n Storm in Brooklyn Subway is almost an imagist poem; it\u2019s a reminder of Ezra Pound\u2019s In a Station of the Metro<\/a>, that rarest moment of underground revelation in modern poetry. Elfyn\u2019s rich sense of verbal music is a bonus, and enables her to skim between worlds \u2013 underground and overground, sacred and secular \u2013 and, perhaps, between words. It seems that the interplay of Welsh may have helped produce lightning and luminosity in Elfyn\u2019s English-language poetry.<\/p>\n