Strawberry Days

A friend recently introduced a poet who was entirely new to me, a poet with whom I felt an immediate affinity. When this happens, it's as though I've been given a delicious, but temporary secret which must be held and cherished for a while before sharing. I think it's time.

The poet, Max Garland, arrived in this world via Kentucky, where he spent fifteen years as a rural mail carrier. Perhaps this spoke to me, in part, because my grandfather, Moses, who raised sheep, was also a rural mail carrier, although a couple of generations earlier. It seems we are arriving at a time when both writing and distributing letters is coming to an end. I wish it were not so, but life goes on and now I wouldn't want to live without the immediacy of email. So, a price is sometimes paid, a new way emerges and we become accustomed.

Max is now living and teaching in Wisconsin, and is the poet laureate of that state. He has two books of poetry published, which I have on the table next to me. I read from them a little each day, lingering over each line, sometimes each word, as I recall days so similar in their nature that I could be reading from my own diaries or journals.

It's been difficult for me to choose the right poem to share here, as I know you would like so many of them, but just this morning I ran across this poem and knew it was the one. I was reminded of my grandfather and a particular day when I was very young. We walked down the cow path in our pasture to where the raspberries grew, wild and untended, ripe and ready. I recall sawdust on the ground from an old sawmill, the sun shining brightly, my grandfather bent towards the vines, filling his bucket with sweetness. There was a sense of enduring goodness, and I'm happy to say strawberries and raspberries still fill my summer days...

Now, I'll be quiet and let you read.


"Strawberries"
    ~ for Rayford Simmons

Whatever is truly delicious
cripples

according to a local Baptist proverb.
Whatever bides its life

under the leaves, patiently
undoing the bitter

green knot of itself, swelling outward,
deepening, reddening. Whatever ripens

in the sun, shaping itself
into a tiny version of the heart,

the sweetness at a berry's core
leaking slowly through the flesh.

We had nearly a half-acre to pick,
my grandfather and I, crawling

or stooping through the long rows.
Not much passing between us --

the faint snapping of the fruit
from the stem, the occasional

judgment of cigar smoke
trailing back to where I lagged,

knees stained almost to blossoms; the low vines

teaching the body to bend. The arc
of my grandfather's back, for example,

repeated the story of strawberry gathering,
spring after spring. Whatever is delicious

draws the man from the body, is the proverb,
coaxing the long, elderly nerve

through all the meandering hoops
of the spine. Until

after a while, my grandfather
thought it would be a good idea

to rest there. He thought
it would be a good idea to lie down

among the berries. According
to the Baptists, whatever it is

invites us, can almost taste us
near the end. He thought

it would be a good idea to sleep
down in the cool shadows

of the berry vines. Just for a while,
my grandfather thought. Just until

his mind was sweetness.
Just until his body was straw.


~ Max Garland,  The Postal Confessions





On my other blog, teresaevangelinespoetry.blogspot.com , I've posted a micropoem, one I wrote a few months ago, that seems to dovetail nicely with this post. I hope you'll visit me there...


Photograph: http://www.thehomesteadgarden.com/how-to-grow-strawberries/

Trees: Schools of Divinity

My love for trees continues unabated. Every time I walk through the meadow with Buddy and then enter the grove of large Norway pines, I stand for a few minutes and take them in. I breathe their air, feel their weight and the strength of life in their trunks. Yes, I have hugged them, even prayed to them. If there is divinity in this world, it's right there in the bark and the branches.

This morning, I came across this wonderful excerpt from Herman Hesse and wanted to share it with you. It looks like a commitment to read but I don't think you'll be sorry. It reads so beautifully and is well worth the time:


For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the more indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

~ Hermann Hesse, Baeume: Betrachtungen and Gedichte (Trees: Reflections and Poems)

Sweet Impossible Blossoms

I have always loved buying fruit at roadside stands, pulling the first peach of summer from a paper bag and biting into its sweetness. Then, later, I sit at the kitchen table and have another, one with cream and sugar, old-fashioned decadence in a small white bowl.

"From Blossoms"

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

~ Li-Young Lee, from Rose


Li-Young Lee is a contemporary poet.

No known attribution for the photograph.

What I Cannot Live Without

There are many things I could live without, but those that comprise our natural world are not among them. I could do some trading, but even that would be difficult. Perhaps if the trading went along these lines ...


 "Fifty-Fifty"

   You can have the grackle whistling blackly

   from the feeder as it tosses seed,

if I can have the red-tailed hawk perched

   imperious as an eagle on the high branch.

You can have the brown shed, the field mice

   hiding under the mower, the wasp’s nest on the door,

if I can have the house of the dead oak,

   its hollowed center and feather-lined cave.

You can have the deck at midnight, the possum

   vacuuming the yard in its white prowl,

if I can have the yard of wild dreaming, pesky

   raccoons, and the roaming, occasional bear.

You can have the whole house, window to window,

   roof to soffits to hardwood floors,

if I can have the screened porch at dawn,

   the Milky Way, any comets in our yard.

~ Patricia Clark, She Walks into the Sea, Michigan State University Press, 2009

Photograph by Russell Heimlich

More Light is Fermenting

There's almost a foot of new snow this morning and the wind is persistent, as it pushes it into snowdrifts around my porch. A part of me wants to complain, but I also realize it might be exactly what I need, perhaps even asked for, in order to stay here inside a bit longer...

"Spiced Manna"

Someone 
Will steal you if you don't 
Stay near

And sell you as a slave in the 
Market.

I sing
To the nightingales' hearts
Hoping they will learn
My verse,

So that no one will ever imprison
Your brilliant angel
Feathers.

Have I put enough spiced manna
On your plate
Tonight

In this tavern
Where Hafiz
Serves?

If not please wait,
For more light is now
Fermenting.

Someone will steal you if you
Don't stay near,

And sell you as a slave in
The market,

So your Beloved and I
Sing.

~Hafiz 



The photograph was taken yesterday evening at 6:00, as more snow continued to come down...

The Jukebox in My Mind

For reasons unknown a jukebox has been playing in my mind lately along with a few memories. My first jukebox was in a cafe about an hour from home where I sat with my parents and played, relentlessly, the Lennon Sister's "Sugartime." Shortly after that my parents bought a small cafe where the jukebox was perpetually fed with coins painted with a splotch of red which told us it was our money and not a true customer. It was a pretty simple accounting system. The records were changed regularly by a man who came around just for that purpose. But, the song I remember is Lefty Frizzell's "Saginaw Michigan." I have never gotten tired of that song. I still love it after all these years.

In seventh grade, when I thought having a boyfriend might be a good idea, I sat across from Allen at a cafe after our church youth group had taken us down to the YMCA for swimming and general mayhem. Allen is the young man with whom I exchanged a fair amount of kissing back in the days of that youth group; necking was far preferred to bible toting, so that's what I did. On the wall of this cafe was a jukebox that was being fed by the two of us and others sitting in the booth. What I remember was the brief discussion which ensued after the playing of Johnny River's, "Secret Agent Man." Yes, a few fools were certain it was Secret Asian Man, but since I was still considering a future as a secret agent I knew better.

Soon, it turned into the summer of '68 and I'm in an even smaller town where my then current boyfriend was living at the time. He was working at a resort in that same small town so my sister and I went down to a local club another friend's parents owned to hang out while we waited for him. When I walked through the door, my friend, Stan, whom I've talked about more than once on these pages, walked the length of the club with a big smile on his face. Man, he had a nice smile. We stood next to the jukebox on the wall and threw in a coin. What I remember is Bob Lind's, "Elusive Butterfly." We just stood there and listened. He was such a good friend. It's good to have friends like that.

No Place to Lose Your Wings

                    "This Sky"


                    This

                    Sky

                    Where we live

                    Is no place to lose your wings

                    So  love,  love

                    Love


                    ~ Hafiz






Please visit my poetry site: teresaevangelinespoetry.blogspot.com

The photograph is mine.

Every Thought and Action

"Now is the Time"

Now is the time to know
That all that you do is sacred.

Now, why not consider
A lasting truce with yourself and God.

Now is the time to understand
That all your ideas of right and wrong
Were just a child's training wheels
To be laid aside
When you finally live
With veracity
And love.

Hafiz is a divine envoy
Whom the Beloved
Has written a holy message upon.

My dear, please tell me,
Why do you still
Throw sticks at your heart
And God?

What is it in that sweet voice inside
That incites you to fear?

Now is the time for the world to know
That every thought and action is sacred.

This is the time
For you to compute the impossibility
That there is anything
But Grace.

Now is the season to know
That everything you do
Is sacred.

~Hafiz


Painting by Winslow Homer
I hope you'll click on it to enlarge ... it's truly gorgeous.

Cowslips in the Hall

As we were finishing another school year, in the spring of '66, my sister and I and some of our fellow passengers on the school bus realized the cowslips were in bloom in a marsh along the road between my grandparents farm and the school. We were pretty animated about this discovery and asked the bus driver if he would stop and let us pick them. Lefty Summers, a wonderful bus driver who was willing to make safe allowances for the youth in his charge, agreed to stop the bus.

My sister and I, flower children from an earlier time, and a few older high school kids with brightly forming minds of their own - the beautiful, black-haired Dorothy among them - waded into the ditch and came back up with armloads of yellow cowslips. Then, amid unprecedented enthusiasm we rode on to school, talking to each other with a renewed joy for life apparent in the faces of everyone on that big orange bus. A few minutes later we filed out of the bus following a trail of unruly cowslips, strays that had fallen in the aisle between the seats.

Later, as I walked up the stairs and into the main hall, I saw cowslips strewn on the smooth hardwood floor in front of the principals' office - left there by some of the older kids along with drops of water from the stems. Out of the office came Lefty our beloved bus driver who had, it appeared, been called to task for what those in authority saw as a poor decision. He didn't appear upset, he just strode across those flowers and on down the hall. I stood there and watched, hoping he didn't pay a price or feel remorse for his choice. It was the best choice he ever made for this young girl's life.






My sister and I would sometimes bring cowslips to my grandmother, not for eating (although they are edible from what I understand), but for putting in a vase. I recently mentioned them in a two-part micropoem about an afternoon visit to my grandparent's farm:




... screen door opens to small faces / withered hands tenderly place drooping cowslips in a green vase

... crossed legs cradle a favorite book / on the page a grizzly bear scoops salmon from a stream / afternoon seeps through etched glass

Cowslips are also known as marsh marigolds. The photograph is mine.

Corn Crib Summer

A couple of days ago I came across this poem by Tom Hennen and knew I'd want to share it with you. I love this man's poems. They call up my own midwestern life - the experiences I had and continue to have. When I was young, my grandfather, Moses, raised sheep and I would often help move them to summer pasture so this poem evokes especially fine memories for me. Following it, is a micro-poem I recently wrote about my own corn crib summer. It's wonderful how life so often dovetails ideas, enriching them even further.


"Soaking Up Sun"

Today there is the kind of sunshine old men love, the kind of day when my grandfather would sit on the south side of the wooden corncrib where the sunlight warmed slowly all through the day like a wood stove. One after another dry leaves fell. No painful memories came. Everything was lit by a halo of light. The cornstalks glinted bright as pieces of glass. From the fields and cottonwood grove came the damp smell of mushrooms, of things going back to earth. I sat with my grandfather then. Sheep came up to us as we sat there, oily wool so warm to my fingers, like a strange and magic snow. My grandfather whittled sweet smelling apple sticks just to get at the scent. His thumb had a permanent groove in it where the back of the knife blade rested. He let me listen to the wind, the wild geese, the soft dialect of sheep, while his own silence taught me every secret thing he knew.”

~ Tom Hennen



And, my micropoem:

corn crib summer ...
floorboards lit by ribbons of sunlight
dried husks under foot
I climbed slatted walls
lay beneath the eaves




Photograph courtesy of Barbara at: folkwaysnotebook.blogspot.com and picayunephotos.blogspot.com
Thank you, Barbara, for allowing me to use your photograph to illustrate my post.

... a trail of half eaten stars

It's morning on River Road. Yes, it's the first day of spring, but it still seems a long way off from where I'm sitting. I know it can turn quickly, so I'm practicing patience and trying to stay present to what is. Before long I'll be back working in the yard, and then, a little beyond that, feeling grass beneath my bare feet. Until then, I continue to be entertained by the ongoing tussles between the birds and the squirrels on the feeder amid my never-ending appreciation for the ever-changing light. In the morning, long shadows lie across my flowers sleeping in their beds. By mid-afternoon the light has created blue snow, a reflection of the very blue sky. And, in the evening, silky ribbons of pink light fall across the back yard ~ afterglow from a setting sun.

Happy Vernal Equinox, everyone! Here are a few more micro-poems I wrote at https://twitter.com/bayousummer2 inspired by life right outside my window:


red tailed hawk sails upriver beneath a pale grey flannel sky

evening sun gathers in the trees / fills in the rough edged bark with left over light

under the lilac tree / snowshoe rabbit sleeps / dreams of spring

pink light / through snow covered pines / evening falls

moonlight calls ~ black bears leave their dens ~ dance in the snow

from across the frozen river / coyotes summon the rising moon / under the porch light / the dog listens

early march / snowbound again ... at the bottom of the mason jar / the last piece of summer

sheathed in grey linen / birch trees ... scratching life from the sky

on her way to love / she crosses the fence line / deep footprints in the snow

... she wanders ... somewhere between the frozen field and quarter moon / behind her ... a trail of half eaten stars

chickadees sing in the crab apple tree / the hoarfrost quietly lets go / surrenders to spring

Has Anybody Seen Yuri?

The snow continues to come down. Winter has no intention of relenting until it's good and ready, and I'm starting to feel like a character in "Dr. Zhivago." Perhaps it's just my cabin-feverish mind playing tricks on me, but I'm expecting Yuri to show up any minute in a horse drawn sleigh.

Yesterday morning, I looked out the kitchen window and framed in the upper portion were three blue jays in perfect triangulation on the bare crab apple tree next to the feeder. The combination of blue feathers, grey throats, and the gray branches they sat on, with snow drifting down around them, looked like a scene in a snow globe, lightly shaken.

I sometimes wish I could design and create snow globes, add them to the small snow globe collection I began when traveling, where the criteria seems to have been the more kitschy the better. From time to time I would look in antique stores hoping to find an old one from some intriguing place I hoped to visit one day. I never found any there, but I know someone who has a few older ones and I have often looked at them longingly. Perhaps I need to solidify our friendship.

But first, I think I'll become better acquainted with the blue jays outside my window, and maybe that pine tree, the one that appears to be wearing an ermine cape wrapped around its shoulders. I wonder if it knows when Yuri is arriving ...

dust in the wind

... and the snow just keeps coming down. It's a winter wonderland out there, folks. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful.

Two black squirrels were tussling on the bird feeder this morning while the chickadees were still sleeping. They chased off two grays, duked it out after a tumble in the snow and then burrowed their way to where leftover seeds were waiting. What a fun way to start the morning. That's entertainment.

On a completely unrelated topic, this poem popped out of an anthology yesterday and I can't shake it. I could tell you a whole lot of stories that sound very much like this one, but I'll just let you guys tell yourselves your own stories, or feel free to share them here ... I bet you have some, too.


"Escape from Paradise, Iowa"

We are afraid of nothing.
At the diner,
you order a burger,
a grilled cheese for me.
We tell bad jokes,
pour salt on the table.
The waitress glares at us,
our clothes too tight,
my lipstick too red
for this small town.

This is the summer
of anger and beer.
We know everything:
how each blade of grass turns in the wind,
why the sunlight glints off the pool,
the shining of streetlights on black pavement,
the darkness of the lake at night.

At the bar
you say I am as Nordic
as blonde hair, these big bones
under the sheet of my skin
a frame for your thoughts.
I am the only one smoking.
My breath peels into the air like waves.

We have nothing in this town:
a beat-up Mustang,
a few songs on the jukebox,
the torn cover of a book you never read.
When we get in the car,
you pass me another beer.

We are scared of these random roads,
the small towns passing,
the gas tank nearly empty.
My head on your shoulder,
the eight track stuck again,
we're gonna drive this dirt road
all the way to Kansas City.

~Kathryn Kysar




Kathryn Kysar is a Minnesota poet  (1960 -   )

Image from tumblr, but no attribution was given.

What I Want to Know

"The Invitation" 

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living.

I want to know what you ache for

and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing

for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon ...
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

~ Oriah Mountain Dreamer

www.oriahmountaindreamer.com

Painting by Winslow Homer

Falling in Love with my Mid-western Life

This morning, I woke to a soft glow rising over the chicken coop - another day at Lonewolf, this place of unending beauty. The sun soon revealed a world covered in hoarfrost, a sight I never tire of seeing. I remain in awe of this immeasurable wonder.

As the morning opened further, the chickadees sang among the branches, and, as they sang, the hoarfrost quietly let go. I stepped outside to witness it, to feel it on my skin as it silently drifted down...

After returning to the kitchen, I opened a book of poems to William Stafford's, "One Home." And now, I've fallen in love all over again with my life and his words...

"One Home"

Mine was a Midwest home—you can keep your world.   

Plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code.   

We sang hymns in the house; the roof was near God.

The light bulb that hung in the pantry made a wan light,   

but we could read by it the names of preserves—

outside, the buffalo grass, and the wind in the night.

A wildcat sprang at Grandpa on the Fourth of July   

when he was cutting plum bushes for fuel,

before Indians pulled the West over the edge of the sky.

To anyone who looked at us we said, “My friend”;   

liking the cut of a thought, we could say “Hello.”

(But plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code.)

The sun was over our town; it was like a blade.   

Kicking cottonwood leaves we ran toward storms.   

Wherever we looked the land would hold us up.

~ William Stafford

My images from this morning

While Poetry Holds the Mirror

In returning this morning to a poetry anthology from the early 1970's, I was again amazed at how little things have changed. We appear doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, brandishing our weapons and then using them, whether they be guns, bombs, or drones. I urge you to familiarize yourself with what is happening, and not just how we are using drones to conduct warfare around the world, but how they are being used right here at home. The FAA has issued 30,000 permits for drones here in the U.S. which have the capability of gathering and cataloging our every move. Many drones are armed, which means they can be detonated anywhere, at anytime, with no advance warning. I don't know about you, but I don't sleep as well as I used to.

I'm very concerned about the direction this country is taking, our utter disregard for human life in other parts of the world. What our government refers to as "collateral damage," is really the tally of those we've killed along with the intended target, and that number continues to grow. The official number of children killed in Pakistan since early September of last year still stands at 176, children murdered by our drones because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it's a number which has really grown to just under 300. Somehow it never gets updated.

This poem by Olga Cabral, rediscovered in my anthology this morning, reveals the sad, awful reality: war has become a way of life and greed is commonplace. Poets continue to hold up the mirror that reveals the truth, a truth we may not like, may even blanch at, but ignorance is not bliss, it's just ignorance, and in this day and age there is no excuse for not being informed. Change the geographical location from Vietnam to, well, pretty much any place in the world where we are taught to believe the Other exists, and here we go again:


"Another Late Edition"

This morning the sun
for the first time in 7,000,000 years
reported late for work.
A major disaster was declared,
the major crawled underneath Manhattan
with his Mark Cross survival kit,
governments in Saigon
chased each other through revolving doors,
molten metal fell from the eyes of Bartholdi’s Statue
which went public and was sold at noon
on the Stock Exchange.
    Leaving our dinosaur footprints through the streets of cities
    what future tarpits will reveal our bones?
    what amber of what eye
    preserve this age?

Sheriff Rainey shifted his plug
of Red Man tobacco
and spat clear to Washington,
staining the White House and the white walls of the Capitol
with dark runnels of derision.
Whose blood? Whose Blood
on the Lincoln Monument?
Chaney’s. Goodman’s. Schwerner’s.
They are dragging Walt Whitman through the streets of
              Mississippi.
(Bearded Jew from Brooklyn.)
They’ve got a rope around Abe Lincoln’s neck.
(What’d we do that’s wrong if we
killed two Jews and one Nigger?)

    Then all the ovens of Maidanek
    opened their mouths.
    I saw the enemy, a seven-year-old boy.
    I heard him screaming for his cooked eyeballs.
    I saw the granny blazing like a bundle of reeds,
    heard the infant wailing in a winding-sheet of flame
    in a village of thatched huts
    hit by napalm.

The stones hate us.
The eyes are bitter.
Every tree is out to strangle us.
The grass mistrusts us.
We are strangers here at a million bucks a day.
They say the richest man in the world has just
foreclosed Fort Knox.
A million bucks a day can buy
a President. A war. A world.
    But not one hair of the head of the
                   seven-year-old boy
    in a village that went up in napalm.


~ Olga Cabral




Olga Cabral was born in the West Indies and then moved to New York (1909 - 1997).

Painting "Under the Palms," by Winslow Homer.

The Hummingbird Gives Birth to Summer

This morning I'm dreaming of summer: hands in the earth, bare feet on cool grass, and hummingbird wings.

In a tiny nest of moss and seeds and spider webs - a nest no bigger than a walnut shell - the hummingbird lays her eggs. I find this fascinating:
http://www.worldofhummingbirds.com/nest.php




Image from the National Geographic

The Slow Irregular Blooming of Peace

"When Great Trees Fall"

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.
When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly.  Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed.  They existed.
We can be.  Be and be
better.  For they existed.

~ Maya Angelou







Image of a forest in Arizona courtesy of Google wallpaper.

Monday Morning with Vincent, Mary, and Lao Tzu

Waking early and not wanting to do anything but relax into the written word, I decided to open a book of Mary Oliver's poems (at random, of course), and see what she had to say. Lately, I've been appreciating images with small bursts of color, or words that immediately bring a certain color to mind, particularly in the form of a berry:


"This Morning I Watched the Deer"

This morning I watched the deer
   with beautiful lips touching the tips
of the cranberries, setting their hooves down
   in the dampness carelessly, isn’t it after all
the carpet of their house, their home, whose roof
   is the sky?

Why, then, was I suddenly miserable?

Well, this is nothing much.
This is just the heaviness of the body watching the swallows
   gliding just under that roof.

This is the wish that the deer would not lift their heads
   and leap away, leaving me there alone.
This is the wish to touch their faces, their brown wrists-
   to sing some sparkling poem into
the folds of their ears,

then walk with them,
over the hills
and over the hills

and into the impossible trees.

~ Mary Oliver


After sitting with this for several minutes, I turned to Lao Tzu for illumination on a question I had posed to myself as I lay in bed this morning. The answer came in the form of a poem I opened to, first the book and then my heart:


Thinking and talking about the Integral Way are not
   the same as practicing it.
Who ever became a good rider by talking about
   horses?
If you wish to embody the Tao, stop chattering and
   start practicing.
Relax your body and quiet your senses.
Return your mind to its original clarity.
Forget about being separated from others and from the
   Divine source.

As you return to Oneness, do not think of it or be
   in awe of it. This is just another way of separating
   from it.
Simply merge into truth, and allow it to surround you.

~ Lao Tzu

Both images are by Vincent van Gogh

Light Action on a Minnesota Morning

When I awoke this morning, a little later than usual after a good night's sleep, there was a mist hanging over the yard, the old chicken coop, and beyond. It was such a peaceful thing to wake up to I wanted to capture it so I could share it with you. Yes, I've taken its picture before. The beauty of really learning to see the world around me is in this very thing: I could photograph that coop every day of my life from the same place and always see something new, something slightly different from the day before.

Apparently, there is a big storm moving into New England and plans are being made. There is something very satisfying about being snowbound, if one is well-stocked and ready. All that snow creates a shelter in one's mind and a perfectly good excuse for shutting out the world for a while, something we could all benefit from now and then.

Not long after I arrived in Santa Fe, after turning the corner on the winter of '02, I went to a reading at a bookstore downtown, just off the plaza, called Collected Works. It had long been a favorite stopping place when traveling through in earlier times and I was very grateful I could now frequent it at my leisure. Barry Lopez, one of my favorite nature writers, was going to be reading from his latest book and I was very much looking forward to hearing him read and seeing him in person. I had a sense he would have very good energy, and I was right.

He spoke for a while about the world and the changes that had been wrought by recent events. I'm certain I'm not the only one in that small room who found his words comforting. Then, he read a selection from his book, Light Action in the Caribbean, followed by a brief period of questions. Afterwards, I took my place in line with the book I had just purchased while trying to keep at bay the anxiety that kept wanting to intrude. Another marriage had recently ended, 9/11 had changed the world, and my own view of it was riddled with angst. This did not go undetected by Mr. Lopez.

As I stood before him, the book lying on the table awaiting his signature, he stood and looked directly in my eyes. While holding both of my hands in his, he told me he hoped I would soon find peace and healing, and reassured me that life was a good place to be. His smile wiped away the tears that were threatening to fall and then he signed my book with a kind personal message. I have to tell you, the man has beautiful handwriting to match his beautiful soul.

This morning, I picked up that book and opened it to this:

My father, David Whippet, moved a family of eight from Lancaster, in the western Mojave, up onto the high plains of central North Dakota in the summer of 1952. He rented a two-story, six bedroom house near Westhope. It was shaded by cottonwoods and weeping willows and I lived in it for eleven years before he moved us again, to Sedalia in central Missouri, where he retired in 1975. I never felt the country around Sedalia. I carried the treeless northern prairie close in my mind, the spine-shattering crack of June thunder--tin drums falling from heaven, Mother called it--an image of coyotes evaporating in a draw ...

That first summer in North Dakota, 1952, the air heated up like it did in the desert around Lancaster, but the California heat was dry. The humid Dakota weather staggered us all. I got used to the heat, though the hardest work I ever did was summer haying on those plains. I'd fall asleep at the supper table still itching with chaff. I grew to crave the dark cold of winter, the January weeks at thirty below, the table of bare land still as a sheet of iron ...


These paragraphs were a good reminder of why I can, at times, still embrace living here in Minnesota and even love it wholeheartedly. The cold air and the fresh snow often bring the world into a much-needed balance. It also was a clear reminder of why I love words, how they're placed on the page, the sounds and the images they elicit as they roll through our minds and off our tongues. My lord, that man can write.