Following the previous post of E.E. Cummings’ poem-prayer “i thank You God for most,” I thought I’d post another poem I mentioned there. I do so in the spirit of Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin’s by-now famous statement, “I believe the world will be saved by beauty” and because we are living in a time when much of our world seems mired in the perpetuation of all things ugly, heinous, morally repulsive, difficult to look at, and offensive to beauty. Poetry is one of our most effective agents of beauty and a conscientious objector to the hideous, appalling, and repugnant.

We live in a time when our unhealthily and adult-constructed world is insistent on being increasingly inconsiderate of children. One that continues to violate their right to grow up and live in peace and safety with the freedom to flourish and the possibility to experience delight.

This is a simple—not cute, naive, or foolish—poem that cuts through some of the ugliness humans insist on spreading. It makes me smile which is as good a use of my face as I can muster these days. It reconnects us to the giddy joy of childhood with all its marbles and playful piracies, its intentionally unavoided mud puddles, and small hop-scotch and jump-roping ecstasies. It reawakens us to the springtime resurrection of the earth. It elicits a delight that is neither airy nor Pollyannaish.

The whistle-calling balloonman, to whom the children come running, is described three times as—the little / lame balloonman, the queer / old balloonman, the / goat-footed / balloonMan. He is the image of the impending loss of innocence, the incarnation of melancholy and mirth, but also a living reminder of the puddle-wonderful delight that is possible despite the hardships of this world and of a whistling hope capable of lifting us from our brokenness.

When reading this poem today as our TVs and radios and laptops remind us that our world is saturated in human-made woe, let us remember that as spring is an insurrection against the interminable deadness of winter so too allowing oneself to be moved enough to emote an ooh or aah, consciously taking delight in something or someone, enacting some not-so-random act of kindness, some gesture of mercy, some effort to listen generously to someone who doesn’t share our views, some movement toward making peace and nonviolence a way of life is an act of resistance against despair and the tyranny of callousness and cruelty.  

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