It is a strategy poets have employed since antiquity: to proceed by contraries – and Thomas DeFreitas uses it to bountiful effect in this poem from his first full-length collection, Winter in Halifax (Kelsay Books.) The poem is an eloquent prayer for the most pedestrian of things (the Harvard Square hangouts of his youth.) It uses the formal rhymes and entanglements of the villanelle while ushering us chockablock past the odd shops and cold facts of teenaged street life. It clearly portrays a landscape where a part of the speaker’s heart is anchored – and yet the history and personality of that devotional voice is veiled behind his catalog of landmarks. . .except in those moments when the emotional tenor of the images rises into a higher register (ah, the “ink-sleeves” on those “ghost-white arms”!) And then we may feel, for a moment, a curious kinship: we were all young once; the world was baffling and new; and we cared so passionately for this fragile existence that sometimes we too wished for some intercession, some clarifying force that would offer its blessing.
There is another category under which Thomas’ poem sits in my mind: it hints at the ubi sunt motif. Derived from the Latin phrase: Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt? ("Where are those who were before us?"), it represents a kind of nostalgia for people and places that proved to be (what a shock to our young psyches!) just as susceptible the forces of ephemerality as we. A generation before Thomas inhabited these very streets, I remember hitchhiking up to Cambridge in the summer of 1969, the first stop on a cross-country odyssey. Harvard Square was famous then for its artistic and intellectual scenes, and boasted an array of unique businesses. But this holiday, when I made my annual shopping trip to the Square, I was stunned to see how its gradual transformation had been dramatically accelerated by the economic effects of the pandemic. There were several empty storefronts – an unimaginable occurrence, here in one of the most valuable commercial districts in the Northeast! Parts of whole blocks were being gutted for restoration, and the quaint shops that had been fixtures for decades will be replaced by luxury chains. Even in this college town, the dozen or more bookshops I used to browse endlessly in my younger days had been reduced to a precious few. I experienced a ghostly sense of history being hollowed out and erased – and I stopped to imagine how downtowns all across our nation might be undergoing similar changes.
May the “Mother of winter roses” and that “spare-change Madonna” take pity on us all, and reassure that the future will not think too harshly of us and the choices we’ve made when, in the coming years, some undergrad poet writes his or her own ubi sunt?
Our Lady of Cambridge
Virgin of Harvard Square, gendering grace,
watch over Holyoke Center, the Garage,
Chameleon Tattoos, and the nose-ring place.
Pray for the pink-haired waif of mournful face
and ink-sleeves on both ghost-white arms. Take charge
(Mother of winter roses blushing with grace)
of Raven, Grendel’s, Peet’s; and, just in case,
tend to hungry undergrads at the large
Palace of Pizza near the nose-ring place.
Keep the Yard safe and sage. Make it your space.
Send down, María, pardon from the stars;
expand this city’s heart! Lady of grace,
shelter the sleepers crouched in church doorways
against the cold; protect the crowds in bars,
the punks in the Pit and at the nose-ring place.
Gather us all in your clement embrace;
hasten with healing for our wounds and scars.
Bless Newbury Comics, bless the nose-ring place,
spare-change Madonna, prodigal of grace! –– Thomas DeFreitas