Celebrate :: Poetry

Spring overall.  But inside us

there's another unity.

Behind each eye here,

one glowing weather.

Every forest branch moves differently

in the breeze, but as they sway

they connect at the roots.

--Rumi

Friday April 27, 2013

"Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, 

but of stretching out to mend 

the part of the world that is within our reach."

--Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Poetry is not a luxury

"...poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives."

--Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

Every Friday we light candles.  

We light them for ourselves and for everyone.

"Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold."

-Leo Tolstoy

Celebrate :: Poetry

The Writer
Richard Wilber 1976

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten.  I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

Every Friday we light candles.  

We light them for ourselves and for everyone.

"The work of mindfulness is also play.  

It is far too serious to take too seriously--

and I say this in all seriousness!"

--Jon Kabat Zinn

Celebrate :: Poetry

 

I had other plans for April, some idea of what this month might be about for me and my family.  What I'm finding is that pushing that plan is tragically, comically painful.  On the other hand, what is showing up without any effort at all, is quite lovely.  April, National Poetry Month.  I'd be hard pressed to conjure up something, from inside my own head, that I'd enjoy celebrating more than a month full of poetry.  

So welcome to April on my blog.  A month of Monday poems.  Starting with the one I found hanging from the tree at the end of my block.  (I know, it's hard to believe, but I live on a block where poetry grows on trees.  You should see it for yourself sometime).

Is it a coincidence that the poem I chose, at random, was written by a poet who was born in North Carolina, who was raised in California, who went to school in the Bay Area, and worked in New York City?  It might have been a celebration, so strong the presence....It doesn't come fresher picked than this....

The Past

by Barbara Guest

The form of the poem subsided, 

it enters another poem.

A witness was found for the markings 

inscribed upside down.

It might have been a celebration, 

so strong the presence

of the poem.  

The sky sinks slowly inside the past.