For the Children
The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.
In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
–Gary Snyder from Turtle Island
Imagine that you had a dishcloth
Bigger than the one mothers put on the bread
To slow its cooling, that you could spread
Over the whole kitchen floor to bring up its face
As clearly as the features on the cake.
find the rest here.
Notes From A Marine Biologist’s Daughter
My mother loves the salty mud of estuaries,
has no need of charts to know what time
low tide will come. She lives
by an arithmetic of moon,
calculates emergences of mud,
waits for all that crawls there, lays eggs,
buries itself in the shallow edges
of streamlets and pools. She digs
for chaetopterus, yellow and orange
worms that look like lace.
She leads me where renilla bloom
purple and white colonial lives,
where brittle stars, like moss,
cling to stone. She knows
where the sea horse wraps its tail
and the unseen lives of plankton.
My mother walks and sinks into an ooze,
centuries of organisms ground
to pasty darkness. The sun
burns at her shoulders
in its slow passage across the sky.
Light waves like pincers
in her mud-dark hair.
By Anne McCrary Sullivan from Ecology II:Throat Songs From The Everglades at WorldTech Editions. This week Poetry Friday is hosted by Wild Rose Reader.
The Leaving
My father said I could not do it,
but all night I picked the peaches.
The orchard was still, the canals ran steadily.
I was a girl then, my chest its own walled garden.
How many ladders to gather an orchard?
I had only one and a long patience with lit hands
and the looking of the stars which moved right through me
the way the water moved through the canals with a voice
that seemed to speak of this moonless gathering
and those who had gathered before me.
I put the peaches in the pond’s cold water,
all night up the ladder and down, all night my hands
twisting fruit as if I were entering a thousand doors,
all night my back a straight road to the sky.
And then out of its own goodness, out
of the far fields of the stars, the morning came,
and inside me was the stillness a bell possesses
just after it has been rung, before the metal
begins to long again for the clapper’s stroke.
The light came over the orchard.
The canals were silver and then were not.
and the pond was–I could see as I laid
the last peach in the water–full of fish and eyes.
From Poets.Org
A poem in translation from Hindi:
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One Should See One’s Own Home From Far Off
One should see one’s own home from far off.
One should cross the seven oceans to see one’s home, in the helplessness of the unbridgeable distance, fully hoping to return some day. One should turn around, while journeying, to see one’s own country from another. One’s Earth, from space. Then the memory of what the children are doing at home will be the memory of what children are doing on Earth. Concern about food and drink at home will be concern about food and drink on Earth. Anyone hungry on Earth will be like someone hungry at home. And returning to Earth will be like returning home. Things back home are in such a mess Translation: 2002, Vinod Kumar Shukla and Daniel Weissbort
From: Survival (ed. by Daniel Weissbort and Girdhar Rathi) Publisher: Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 2002 |
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I’ve been reading a book by Kim Addonizio called Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within. Sometimes when I’m stuck or lost it helps to read the wise words of poets and writers. Addonizio introduced me to the concept of “American Sentences” created by Alan Ginsberg. Based on the syllable count from Haiku but with no line breaks it was a joy to discover. There is more about this form here.
Fence post leans at an angle slanting into the wind
The gate single-hinged wide open like a mouth
Still guarding the path to the jetty that runs
Between river, sea
Large rocks piled high, gaps filled with bits of shell
White as bone crowding gangs of anemones
Where it ends curtains of rockweed thick as hair
Slick, glass bottle green
Waves rush, slither like rivulets off black stone
Carve gentle crescents in gray sand that high up
Is powder dry in the scorching heat, below
Shines a mirrored glaze
Water breaks light to mosaic shards sharp in
Her eyes, tired, red and dry like cellophane
Burnt by the sun and the salt and the sound of
The waves constant roar
The following poems are some that I wrote for National Poetry Month 2009 from prompts from ReadWritePoem. The prompts were a wonderful inspiration and got me started writing. I will probably revise some of these.
04.15.09
low fog
gray sky
water like slate
and on one pylon
a cormorant drying
black wings
raccoon roadkill
a very old tractor
a grey horse
with a red blanket
chickens
new fence
drifting smoke
the lower pond
filled to the brim
two new bee boxes
tom’s burn pile
ray and maddie
hauling brush
chuck with the
chainsaw
abigail planting
rows of onions
chestnut hazelnut
apple blossoms
pear blossoms
hung like waves
in the air
red-winged black bird
song sparrow
steller’s jay
bald eagle
crow
* * * * * * * * * *
04.13.09
Pool
From the gate
we walked up
the rutted road.
The woman in a
county uniform
talked about
undergrowth,
deadfall and
salmon carcasses.
I’d seen a chinook
earlier, much bigger
than the sockeye.
He swamped them as
he slithered through
the riffles.
Fog burned off.
Water dripped
from lichen
in the trees.
A shadow passed,
over then back.
A hawk, hunting.
It’s here she said,
pointing.
I stepped up
the narrow trail,
looked down the
narrow fall of water.
The pool, an
open eye,
bright turquoise,
in the shadowed rocks.
* * * * * * * * * *
04.12.09
The Dogwood offered an escape
I was careful climbing out
The window, only used it twice.
In bloom, the pedals were thick,
Cream-colored, pink-edged
Soft as my brother’s bottom.
At night car lights flashed
Branched shadows, patterns
Of rain drops along the wall
Behind my bed wide wake
Lying there waiting for sleep
Listening for the party to be over.
In July, after school was out
Twilight through the window
Awake again, late, still light out
Sounds from older kids
In the Fry’s pool, laughing
The smell of a barbecue.
The windows are wide open
The air dead still, drenched
So hot I strip off my pajamas
The cool sheet a relief but I dream
My mother’s yelling “You’re naked!
You can’t sleep naked!”
In late September, walking to school
Kicking through dead leaves
That crumbly, sweet, dry,
Red-orange scent rising around us
Pops burning piles of them in the yard
Roving smoke, tears in our eyes.
Halloween, skeletal leaves
Skidder down the street
Running from house to house,
My little brother in tow
Streetlights dropping puddles of
Yellow on the sidewalk.
The witch’s house on the corner.
In winter cars buried to their windows
The squeak of snow, days off
The school furnace broken down
Dad not able to reach the office.
Pulling us up the hill
Down we’d go shouting.
Up and down endlessly
The dog barking the whole way.
Until cold, wet, exhausted
Trudging home, joyful
The red front door gleaming
Bright in all that snow
* * * * * * * * * *
04.11.09
Flame
She remembered that time in the tub
splashing so fiercely they never noticed
the sting of the soap til his mom,
laughing, came in with the towels and
they both started to cry and she ran,
dripping, down the hall and down the stairs.
**********
On the trail in back of his house
Bets and the boys behind them trying
so hard to catch up and never succeeding.
At the cape, on the rocks
she was braver then he was but
he was funnier and better at drawing.
**********
High school hit them so hard they did not
know what to say other than a whispered hello
in the hallway except for prom night when
she asked him and they never even made it
through the door just drove and drove
heading to the port, to the sea.
**********
04.10.09
Light – a found poem
If we keep the eyes open in a totally dark place,
a certain sense of privation is experienced.
If we look on a white,
strongly illumined surface,
the eye is dazzled, and for a time
is incapable of distinguishing
objects moderately lighted.
If we pass suddenly from the one state
to the other, even without supposing
these to be the extremes, but only,
perhaps, a change from bright to dusky,
the difference is remarkable, and we
find that the effects last for some time.
The cases here under consideration
occur oftener than we are aware
in ordinary life; indeed,
an attentive observer sees these
appearances everywhere, while,
on the other hand, the uninstructed,
like our predecessors, consider them
as temporary visual defects, sometimes
even as symptoms of disorders in the eye,
thus exciting serious apprehensions.
A few remarkable instances may here be inserted.
I had entered an inn towards evening, and,
as a well-favoured girl, with a brilliantly
fair complexion, black hair, and a scarlet bodice,
came into the room, I looked attentively at her
as she stood before me at some distance
in half shadow.
As she presently afterwards turned away,
I saw on the white wall,
which was now before me,
a black face surrounded with a bright light,
while the dress of the perfectly distinct figure
appeared of a beautiful sea-green.
From Theory of Colours by Johann Wolfgang van Goethe. This is one of my all time favorite books. Of course Goethe was also a playwright and poet so perhaps this is cheating.
Goethe’s Theory of Colours from Google Books.
* * * * * * * * * *
04.09.09
Paradise
The engine’s steady low rumble
It is still light, one in the morning
Light layered with silver from
A rising moon on deck, silent
Three others watching, there is no way
I can sleep, afraid of what I’ll miss
Knowing that above us to the East
There are nothing but icefields
And the animals that live there
No human mark at all that I know of
And it’s such a relief, knowing
Thin sickle of beach, tangle of driftwood
Strands of falling water and at a distance
The blow of a whale
* * * * * * * * * *
04.07.09
Stones
Playing in the yard or in the house
She never heard them call her name
As if the strung together sounds
Called to some other child
A ghost girl more able, more loved
The names, the ones she found
On the beach or in the wood
She would pick up, carry home and
Hide in a box under the bed
To bring out at night in the dark
And pass from hand to hand like stones
A flat one the color of storm clouds
A round one the rust red of dried blood
They grew warm in her hands
When the time came to pack her things
And say goodbye she walked out the door
Did not hear them call to her
In the street she flung the names
Into the air like flowers
One settled into her hands
She kept it, savored it
* * * * * * * * * *
04.05.09
For Comfort
The forest he enters
A crow, no bird, watching
So softly in silence
He walks to the plain
———
A river, a ribbon
The rushes stand over
A willow, resplendent
And waiting for rain
———-
A heron flies over
Some folded enchantment
And dips to the water
To stand in the cane
———-
The man bound for chaos
Would settle for comfort
So turns to the forest
His path to regain
* * * * * * * * * *
04.04.09
Twilight/Midnight
Step out the back door.
A band of color between
horizon and sky.
Yellow fades to gray
gray to violet
violet to deepest blue.
Shadows pocket under trees.
Small birds settle.
A wind chime.
A cat returning home.
Turning, the sudden wash
of light, a rising moon.
InAHeron'sEye 