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?

The Snowman : Poem In Your Post

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

                                  - Wallace Stevens, 1921

This afternoon I greet another snowfall with joy, as always, yet I sense that many in other regions of our land will greet their coming storms with resignation or frustration or even fear. Different circumstances, different reactions.  

Perhaps if your circumstances won't allow you to fully embrace the beauty of snowfall because of its potentially damaging or uncomfortable results, then you might summon the "mind of winter" that Stevens suggests here and find yourself in stark harmony with the natural world.

MFB,
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.