Wage Peace : Poem In Your Post

Wage peace with your breath.   

Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings
and flocks of redwing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children
and freshly mown fields.

Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.

Breathe in the fallen
and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening:
hearing sirens, pray loud.

Remember your tools:
flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.
Play music, learn the word for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.

Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty
or the gesture of fish.

Swim for the other side.

Wage peace.

Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Don't wait another minute.

                                  - Judyth Hill (often misattributed to Mary Oliver


Although perhaps a bit didactically presented, the ideas are worth spreading, the images encouraging.

MFB,

L

The Risk : Poem In Your Post

The Risk

All the lovers, denying, pretending
they didn't know what was
coming. I knew ahead I might lose you.
Your coat sleeve, presences, topography, pricked my
recognition, through soul, a
lost stability.

Path to light, that angles darkness,
our lying in the grass on a
mountain, hoisted biographies in the fragmented clouds
we watched, it was clear as the winds
that changed them. Face of
fate, that didn't

either have to be.  Our incalculable
harmonies, bodies' lithe fabrication, seascape,
weather, mountains, the luck
whatever of place. Fulfillment swathed like
ammunition in the breeze,

your familiar warm shoulder, prescience -
so good there was nothing to say,
just the right pages turning,
beyond the storm, threat to our love,
their harbor risk.

                     - Jane Mayhall

At times, poems that I don't entirely fathom still move me, perhaps in part because their innate, near-animate power needn't be fully explicated or interpreted to be appreciated.  This one strikes me that way: accessible as a whole, but not so easy to parse as one might expect, given its universal theme and quotidian imagery.  

Perhaps you grasped all its nuances right away?  Or does one particular line or stanza reveal itself to you whole?  Please share your insights in the comments.

For more on Jane Mayhall (1918-2009) visit Knopf's page about her last collection, Sleeping Late on Judgment Day.  Be sure to click on the "author q and a" link: Mayhall's musings on her life history are fascinating, particularly if you - like me - admired Jennifer Donnelly's A Northern Light, as Mayhall's biography parallels Mattie's in some regards.  Mayhall gained recognition late in life and wrote some of her best poems - like this one - in her eighties. Heartening indeed.

And once again, let me recommend you sign up for next year's poetry month offerings from Knopf.  The emails are free, and I guarantee you will (re)discover fine poems and poets if you do.

MFB,
L

Hamlet with Yorick's skull, photographed by Sue Shaw of the Cloud Appreciation Society in England.  Catch the connection?

An Illuminated Rumi : Poem In Your Post

Come!
Let us choose one another as Companions.
Let us sit at one another's feet.

Come a little closer now,
so that we may see each other's faces.
Inside we share so many secrets —

Do not believe we are simply what these eyes can see.
Now we are music together
sharing one cup and an armful of roses.

                      - Mawlana Jalal Ad-din Mohammed Rumi







For a gloriously crafted collection of Rumi poems, translated by Coleman Barks and illuminated by Michael Green, start here.

You will want your own copy to peruse in contemplation, so why not take a mindful stroll to your local bookseller to enjoy the many wonders there too?

Sight : Poem In Your Post

Sight                                                                           

Once 
a single cell 
found that it was full of light 
and for the first time there was seeing 

when 
I was a bird 
I could see where the stars had turned 
and I set out on my journey 

high 
in the head of a mountain goat 
I could see across a valley 
under the shining trees something moving 

deep 
in the green sea 
I saw two sides of the water 
and swam between them 

I 
look at you 
in the first light of the morning 
for as long as I can

                      - W.S. Merwin


Learn more about prolific and oft-lauded poet-translator W.S. Merwin here.  Get a poem a day from Knopf throughout the month of April by checking the appropriate newsletter in the bar on the left side of their Poem-a-Day Page (with gratitude to a large publishing house that still celebrates poetry).  

MFB, briefly,
L

This Day : Poem In Your Post

This is not a day for asking questions,
not a day on any calendar.
This day is conscious of itself.
This day is a lover, bread and gentleness.

                              - Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

More poems by Mawlana Jalal Ad-din Mohammed Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks and Shahram Shiva.

Ask Me : Poem In Your Post

Some time when the river is ice ask me                                     

mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say. 
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

                                             - William Stafford

We are just a smackerel's-scooch away from National Poetry Month and I am so ready.   Please, Nature: up with the flowers, up with the sunshine and the baby birdies and the warm afternoons on the front porch perusing poems. 

This year, I'm following fate:  the confluence of reading a novel about Rumi & Shams and the dawn of my favorite annual word-fest will inspire this month's Poem In Your Post selections.  So expect a month-long series focused on moments when the numinous meets the undeniably solid, poems focusing our gaze on the ecstatic in the everyday.   In other terms:  pull up your "I welcome the cryptic" pants and get ready to ponder the mysteries.

I suspect that - had he met Rumi and Shams - William Stafford would have given the ancients a run for their money in many ways, and all would have enjoyed the exchange.  Ah, the limits of perceived time...

So enjoy today's offering, live each moment in joy, and get ready to gyre and gimble in the wabe.

MFB,

L

Poet's Progress : Poem In Your Post

Poet's Progress

           for Sandra Cisneros

I haven't been

much of anywhere,

books my only voyage,

crossed no bodies

of water, seen anything

other than trees change,

birds take shape - like the rare

Bee Hummingbird that once hovered

over the promise of salsa

in my garden: a fur feathered

vision from Cuba in Boulder,

a wetback, stowaway, refugee,

farther from home than me.

Now, snow spatters its foreign

starch across the lawn gone

crisp with freeze.  I know

nothing tropical survives 

long in this season.  I pull

the last leeks from the frozen

earth, smell their slender

tubercular lives, stand

in the sleet whiteout 

of December:  roots

drawn in, threads of relatives

expand while solitude, the core,

that slick-headed fist of self, is 

cool as my dog's nose and pungent

with resistance.  Now when

the red-bellied woodpecker

calls his response to a California

owl, now, when the wound

transformer in the womb

slackens, and I wait

for potential: all

the lives I have

yet to name,

all my life

I have willed into being

alive and brittle with the icy

past.  And it's enough now,

listening, counting the unknown

arachnids and hormigas

who share my love of less

sweeping.  For this is what

I wanted, come to, left

alone with anything

but the girlhood horrors,

the touching, the hungry

leaden meltdown of the hours.

Or the future - a round negation,

black suction of the heart's 

conception.  Save me

from a stupid life!  I prayed.

Leave me anything but

a stupid life.

And that's poetry.  

                       - Lorna Dee Cervantes

Sometimes, rather than leading me into a reflection of my life, a poet lifts me out of my own time, place, and experience and sets me down intimately into another.  

I haven't lived what Cervantes is alluding to here, but I am transported into her (or her speaker's) consciousness long enough to experience these moments from within her awareness.  

For a short space of time, it's December in Boulder, and I haven't traveled, and I've seen a Bee Hummingbird, shared spaces with spiders, and prayed for a future that is, at least, not stupid. 

And now I'm returned to the present moment, sitting on my sofa in grey mid-March, looking out at my one black hen under her lichen-riddled plum tree as it reaches through the back fence, just about to burst into bloom.

MFB,

L

The Train : Poem In Your Post

I've been trying, my darling, to explain
to myself how it is that some freight train
loaded with ballast so a track may rest
easier in its bed should be what's roused

us both from ours, tonight as every night,
despite its being miles off and despite
our custom of putting to the very
back of the mind all that's customary

and then, since it takes forever to pass
with its car after car of coal and gas
and salt and wheat and rails and railway ties,

how it seems determined to give the lie
to the notion, my darling,
that we, not it, might be the constant thing.

                            - Paul Muldoon

Last night, as most nights, I stepped onto the front stoop as my dog tore out into the yard for her bedtime unburdening, and I heard the familiar yet strangely amplified thundering of a coal train's horn as it barreled down a track five or more miles away.  Our house, on the far side of the bowl-like system of hills that lifts such sounds to our doorstep, receives these haunting hoots five or ten times a day and thrice or more at night.  So I wondered if there might be a poem to capture that rumbling - now barely noticed, it's so routine - and its attendant sense of heft and speed and inexorability.  Apparently there was.

Thanks to Irish poet Paul Muldoon, and to Bill Moyers' book-length transcript of interviews with poets called Fooling with Words, who brought it to me.

MFB,
L

Three Lovely Ones For You, Friends : Poem In Your Post

For You, Friend

this Valentine's Day, I intend to stand
for as long as I can on a kitchen stool
and hold back the hands of the clock,
so that wherever you are, you may walk
even more lightly in your loveliness;
so that the weak, mid-February sun
(whose chill I will feel from the face
of the clock) cannot in any way
lessen the lights in your hair, and the wind
(whose subtle insistence I will feel
in the minute hand) cannot tighten
the corners of your smile. People
drearily walking the winter streets
will long remember this day:
how they glanced up to see you
there in a storefront window, glorious,
strolling along on the outside of time.

                               - Ted Kooser
 
The Illiterate

Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think that this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.
His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
that keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?
 
                                    - William Meredith

Wild Geese 

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
       love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

                                  - Mary Oliver

The first: a true love poem.
The second: a sonnet to send shivers down your spine.
The third: a popular reminder that romantic love is by no means the most important sort.

MFB on the road,
L

Almost Spring, Driving Home, Reciting Hopkins : Poem In Your Post

                                                                                                                                                                  First, a glorious poem that both the late, great Maxine Kumin and I learned by heart:

Pied Beauty 

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

                                            - Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

Now, her lovely, modern experience and expression of it, "Almost Spring, Driving Home, Reciting Hopkins":

“A devout but highly imaginative Jesuit,”

Untermeyer says in my yellowed

college omnibus of modern poets,

perhaps intending an oxymoron, but is it?

Shook foil, sharp rivers start to flow.

Landscape plotted and pieced, gray-blue, snow-pocked

begins to show its margins. Speeding back

down the interstate into my own hills

I see them fickle, freckled, mounded fully

and softened by millennia into pillows.

The priest’s sprung metronome tick-tocks,

repeating how old winter is. It asks

each mile, snow fog battening the valleys,

what is all this juice and all this joy?

We lost a fine, fine poet yesterday, one whose craft appeared effortless and whose keen-eyed response to daily life helps us honor and even transcend it.

May all be well for you always, wherever you are, Ms. Maxine,
L

p.s.  To learn more about her and her work try: her website, her thorough and respectful NY Times obituary, and her page on the Poetry Foundation's website.

Superbowl 2014 : Poem In Your Post

A trio for tomorrow.

Football

I take the snap from the center, fake to the right, fade back...

I've got protection. I've got a receiver open downfield...

What the hell is this? This isn't a football, it's a shoe, a man's

brown leather oxford. A cousin to a football maybe, the same

skin, but not the same, a thing made for the earth, not the air.

I realize that this is a world where anything is possible and I

understand, also, that one often has to make do with what one

has. I have eaten pancakes, for instance, with that clear corn

syrup on them because there was no maple syrup and they

weren't very good. Well, anyway, this is different. (My man

downfield is waving his arms.) One has certain responsibilities,

one has to make choices. This isn't right and I'm not going

to throw it.

                                                   -  Louis Jenkins

Execution 

The last time I saw my high school football coach
He had cancer stenciled into his face
Like pencil marks from the sun, like intricate
Drawings on the chalkboard, small x's and o's
That he copied down in a neat numerical hand
Before practice in the morning. By day's end
The board was a spiderweb of options and counters, 
Blasts and sweeps, a constellation of players
Shining under his favorite word, Execution,
Underlined in the upper right-hand corner of things.
He believed in football like a new religion
And had perfect unquestioning faith in the fundamentals 
Of blocking and tackling, the idea of warfare
Without suffering or death, the concept of teammates 
Moving in harmony like the planets — and yet
Our awkward adolescent bodies were always canceling
The flawless beauty of Saturday afternoons in September, 
Falling away from the particular grace of autumn,
The clear weather, the ideal game he imagined.
And so he drove us through punishing drills 
On weekday afternoons, and doubled our practice time,
And challenged us to hammer him with forearms,
And devised elaborate, last-second plays — a flea-
Flicker, a triple reverse — to save us from defeat. 
Almost always they worked. He despised losing 
And loved winning more than his own body, maybe even
More than himself. But the last time I saw him
He looked wobbly and stunned by illness,
And I remembered the game in my senior year
When we met a downstate team who loved hitting
More than we did, who battered us all afternoon
With a vengeance, who destroyed us with timing
And power, with deadly, impersonal authority,
Machine-like fury, perfect execution. 

                                                          - Edward Hirsch

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

     

                             - Langston Hughes

MFB, Denver, because the Hawks will take home the trophy!!

L

Mindful : Poem In Your Post

Every day

I see or I hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It is what I was born for—
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world—
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant—
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations,
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these—
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

                  - Mary Oliver

My gratitude to "Inward Outward" for offering  poems almost as often as I do.  

This one beckons me into the light.

MFB,

L

Golden Retrievals : Poem In Your Post

Golden Retrievals

Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention

seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so.

Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh

joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then

I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue

of any thrillingly dead thing. And you?

Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk,

thinking of what you never can bring back,

or else you’re off in some fog concerning

—tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work:

to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving,

my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,

a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here,

entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.

                                                       - Mark Doty

I've offered poems by Mark Doty here before, and this is the second of his I've chosen that features a canine companion.   You can find the first here.   Rest assured though, Mr. Doty is by no means limited by or to this subject, as he's a talented essayist and poet who explores a range of issues in life and art.  I highly recommend him, and my students thoroughly enjoyed a peer's performance of the lighthearted little sonnet above.

MFB,

L

You might also admire his brilliant long-form essay Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy or his gorgeous memoir Dog Years.  Even if you are not "an animal person", the latter will move you.

Like : Poem in Your Post

Sestina: Like

                      With a nod to Jonah Winter

Now we’re all “friends,” there is no love but Like,            

A semi-demi goddess, something like

A reality-TV star look-alike,

Named Simile or Me Two. So we like

In order to be liked. It isn’t like

There’s Love or Hate now. Even plain “dislike”

Is frowned on: there’s no button for it. Like

Is something you can quantify: each “like”

You gather’s almost something money-like,

Token of virtual support. “Please like

This page to stamp out hunger.” And you’d like

To end hunger and climate change alike,

But it’s unlikely Like does diddly. Like

Just twiddles its unopposing thumbs-ups, like-

Wise props up scarecrow silences. “I’m like,

So OVER him,” I overhear. “But, like,

He doesn’t get it. Like, you know? He’s like

It’s all OK. Like I don’t even LIKE

Him anymore. Whatever. I’m all like ... ”

Take “like” out of our chat, we’d all alike

Flounder, agape, gesticulating like

A foreign film sans subtitles, fall like

Dumb phones to mooted desuetude. Unlike

With other crutches, um, when we use “like,”

We’re not just buying time on credit: Like

Displaces other words; crowds, cuckoo-like,

Endangered hatchlings from the nest. (Click “like”

If you’re against extinction!) Like is like

Invasive zebra mussels, or it’s like

Those nutria-things, or kudzu, or belike

Redundant fast food franchises, each like

(More like) the next. Those poets who dislike

Inversions, archaisms, who just like

Plain English as she’s spoke — why isn’t “like”

Their (literally) every other word? I’d like

Us just to admit that’s what real speech is like.

But as you like, my friend. Yes, we’re alike,

How we pronounce, say, lichen, and dislike

Cancer and war. So like this page. Click Like.

                                             - A. E. Stallings

Stallings is swiftly becoming one of my favorite contemporary poets.  If you find this sestina as refreshing as I do, then you might wish to take a peek at her page on the Poetry Foundation's website, and this interview at Poetry Daily.  Alternatively, you could hop over to my post from last year that features her rich poetic retelling Actaeon's story.

MFB,

L

Lost Generation : Poem In Your Post

A Poem by Jonathan Reed, Spoken by Brooke Wojdynski





MFB as light widens into a new year,
L

The Poet : Poem In Your Post

The Poet

Loses his position on worksheet or page in textbook
May speak much but makes little sense
Cannot give clear verbal instructions
Does not understand what he reads
Does not understand what he hears
Cannot handle “yes-no” questions

Has great difficulty interpreting proverbs
Has difficulty recalling what he ate for breakfast, etc.
Cannot tell a story from a picture
Cannot recognize visual absurdities

Has difficulty classifying and categorizing objects
Has difficulty retaining such things as
addition and subtraction facts, or multiplication tables
May recognize a word one day and not the next

                                           - Tom Wayman, 1989

I can't wait to talk about this heartbreaking yet ultimately triumphant sonnet (of sorts) with my students because its effect turns on complex relationships among poet/creator, title, tone, content, and reader's response.  And yet it's immediately accessible.

FYI:  Wayman is a Canadian poet who lives and works in Calgary and BC, and two of his poems are featured on Poetry 180 (an excellent site for easily accessible poems).  You might want to read "Did I Miss Anything?" when you visit his author page at Canadian Poetry Online.  (All you teachers out there will recognize the question and may smile at his speaker's multiple responses...)

MFB,
L

p.s.  I'll bring this to my students as one of a trio of poems, including WCW's "This Is Just To Say", talk a bit about "found" and "concrete" poetry (I'll define those clearly but apply them broadly), and then send us all out on our own scavenger hunt to find most painful and triumphant words and things of our lives.  We'll then use that material as a springboard for our own poems.

Elegy in X Parts, Part X : Poem in Your Post

X.

My foreshadow stretches

out in front of me.

We stand on the soles

of each other's feet.

I am a field

and there's a man

standing in the middle

of me saying,

God is the sky pinning

me to my body.

I am a man

and there is a field

under me saying,

A dead man makes

love to the earth

by just lying there.

             -          Matt Rasmussen

This fine poet was selected for the Walt Whitman Award by a favorite poet of mine, Jane Hirshfield.  And he was just nominated for the National Book Award on October 16th.  He has a job teaching poetry at a college in Minnesota, so I envy him a tad too.

New to me - and perhaps to you too - his work is clean and spare.  

You will find more on his Poets.org page.

MFB on a deluge-y day,

L

p.s.  In researching Mr. Rasmussen, I stumbled upon this fabulous page featuring free e-books that contain excerpts from all the National Book Award nominees!  How great is that?