Category Archives: poetry

We’ve learnt on our bodies.

poetry, summer, ,

JUNE

Dried up old cactus
yellowing in several limbs
sitting on my kitchen window
I’d given you up for dead
but you’ve done it again overnight
with a tasselled trumpet flower
and a monstrous blare of red!
So it’s June, June again, hot sun
birdsong and dry air;
we remember the desert
and the cities where grass is rare.
Here by the willow-green river
we lie awake in the terrace
because it’s June, June again;
nobody wants to sleep
when we can rise through the beech trees
unknown and unpoliced
unprotected veterans
abandoning our chores
to sail out this month in nightgowns
as red and bold as yours;
because it’s June, June again.
Morning will bring birdsong
but we’ve learnt on our bodies
how each Summer day is won
from soil, the old clay soil
and that long, cold kingdom.

-Elaine Feinstein

Summer Evening on the Porch, Konstantin Korovin

Becoming the soil of their birth.

nature, poetry, , ,

PEONIES

The peonies, too heavy with their beauty,
slump to the ground. I had hoped
they would live forever but ever so slowly
day by day they’re becoming the soil of their birth
with a faint tang of deliquescence around them.
Next June they’ll somehow remember to come alive again,
a little trick we have or have not learned.

-Jim Harrison

Theo van Rysselberghe, White Peonies

 

The heat and the oxygen.

poetry, , , , , , , , ,

“I ask this much” was the title of a post I wrote ten years ago, not long after my husband died. My thoughts then were inspired by the poem below, which I recently revisited. Yesterday I began to notice afresh the near constancy of my murmuring and complaining; today I was encouraged by the testimony of my former self, who wrote back then,

And every day, I feel a great Love surrounding me, like the pleasant air that holds me and gives me oxygen even while I am having those pity parties. Or like the sun whose heat is keeping me alive and giving me energy.

Let us be up and doing! And let’s start by asking the great Maker of the sun and of us, for His light, and strength, and joy. Our asking will be the beginning of the receiving.

PRAYER at SUNRISE

O mighty, powerful, dark-dispelling sun,
Now thou art risen, and thy day begun.
How shrink the shrouding mists before thy face,
As up thou spring’st to thy diurnal race!
How darkness chases darkness to the west,
As shades of light on light rise radiant from thy crest!
For thee, great source of strength, emblem of might,
In hours of darkest gloom there is no night.
Thou shinest on though clouds hide thee from sight,
And through each break thou sendest down thy light.

O greater Maker of this Thy great sun,
Give me the strength this one day’s race to run,
Fill me with light, fill me with sun-like strength,
Fill me with joy to rob the day its length.
Light from within, light that will outward shine,
Strength to make strong some weaker heart than mine,
Joy to make glad each soul that feels its touch;
Great Father of the sun, I ask this much.

–James Weldon Johnson 1871-1938

On the edge of a forest.

poetry, , ,

LAY BACK THE DARKNESS

My father in the night shuffling from room to room
on an obscure mission through the hallway.

Help me, spirits, to penetrate his dream
and ease his restless passage.

Lay back the darkness for a salesman
who could charm everything but the shadows,

an immigrant who stands on the threshold
of a vast night

without his walker or his cane
and cannot remember what he meant to say,

though his right arm is raised, as if in prophecy,
while his left shakes uselessly in warning.

My father in the night shuffling from room to room
is no longer a father or a husband or a son,

but a boy standing on the edge of a forest
listening to the distant cry of wolves,

to wild dogs,
to primitive wingbeats shuddering in the treetops.

-Edward Hirsch

Isaac Levitan – Birches, Forest Edge