Category Archives: poetry

Girl on Bachelors Button

my garden, poetry, ,

IMG_2706I knew that Bachelors Buttons get straggly, and that there was no obvious place that they would fit in my new garden, but I was drawn in by these phrases in the nursery description:

…well loved …. quite edible and delightful to sprinkle on cakes, in salads, and in herb infused waters …. range from deep clear blue to violet, deep burgundy, pale pink, fuchsia, and white…. grow to 3½ feet tall and flower continuously throughout the summer.

…so I bought a six-pack. I stuck them behind the playhouse where they grew leggily much higher that expected and are leaning on the hopbush. They are pretty if you focus on the colors of the flowers.

I went out this morning to take a picture before the sun broke all the way through the fog, and soon realized that a bee was enjoying them at the same time, surely even more than I. She is on a pale pink bloom in the upper left of this top photo. I began to focus on the fauna on my flora.

Now I can add her to my collection of bees on flowers. She was the easiest one I’ve ever tried to catch in the middle of her work, and she makes me glad I planted these buttons.

gl IMG_2716 bee on bachelor's button blue

Suddenly it occurs to me to post Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Girls, Girls” in its entirety. It is about these insects, and is what made me realize that I want to use the female pronoun when talking about them.

GIRLS, GIRLS

When the boys are alone,
they wash the dishes with facecloths.

When a honeybee is alone — rare, very rare —
it tastes the sweetness
it lives inside all the time.

What pollen are we gathering, anyway?
Bees take naps, too.
Maybe honeybees taste pollen side by side
pretending they’re alone.
Maybe the concept of “alone” means nothing
in a hive.

A bumblebee is not a honeybee.
It only pretends to be.

The cell phone in your pocket
buzzes against your leg.
It’s not a honeybee, though. It’s just a
mining bee, or leaf-cutter, or
carpenter.

You’re stung by messages from people far away.
You can’t make anyone well.
You can’t stop a war.
What good are you?

Bees drink from thousands of flowers,
spitting up nectar
so you may have honey
in your tea.

Maybe you don’t want to think about it
so much.
Pass the honey please.

During winter, bees lock legs
and beat wings fast to stay warm.
Fifty thousand bees can live in
a single hive.
Clover honey is most popular
and clover is a weed.
All the worker bees are female.
Why is that no surprise?

-Naomi Shihab Nye, from Honeybee

gl IMG_2728 irish bee from scotland 05

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Above, a bee decoration made in Ireland,
which I bought when Pippin and I were in Scotland.

Piñata

poetry,

A homemade video made the rounds of Facebook recently, showing a boy of two years engaging with a piñata fashioned in a vaguely human form, bigger than the toddler. At first he bats at the piñata, but without vigor, and seems to not care when the stick is soon taken from him and handed to an husky older boy. As he is letting go of the stick he is already headed toward the paper-maché man (the caption said it was Spiderman) to wrap him in a long, seemingly apologetic hug, his head on its shoulder.

This was all very sweet, but the response of the crowd of adults surrounding him pained me terribly — they only laughed and laughed. I thought of that scene when I read this poem from Mexico.

PIÑATA

In the night,
while we were asleep,
the birthday piñata
fell out of the tree
like an overripe fruit,
spilling all the candy.
We were happy
we did not have to break it
as it was a yellow lion
in a green hat.

-Jennifer Clement

translated by Consuelo de Aerenlund

from The Tree is Older Than You Are, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye

pinata 81
piñata I made back when

The clear eye on the map.

church, poetry, quotes, , , , ,

The Poem-a-Day selection for yesterday was about maps, by Carl Sandburg. I read it when I came home from church this afternoon, after hearing a homily about a map. In Liturgy we learned that the map to the Kingdom is in our heart — but many other things are in the heart, as is obvious from our own lives and from the daily news. One consequence that can result from contemplating the news of the world is an increase of fear and anxiety in our hearts.

The experience related in Sandburg’s poem seems to echo what St. Macarius describes, following the Prophet Jeremiah,  who said, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?“

St. Macarius: “Within the heart is an unfathomable depth. There are reception rooms and bedchambers in it, doors and porches, and many offices and passages. In it is the workshop of righteousness and of wickedness. In it is death, in it is life….The heart is but a small vessel; and yet dragons and lions are there, and there likewise are poisonous creatures….rough, uneven paths are there, and gaping chasms.”

EXPERIENCE

This morning I looked at the map of the day
And said to myself, “This is the way! This is the way I will go;
Thus shall I range on the roads of achievement,
The way is so clear—it shall all be a joy on the lines marked out.”
And then as I went came a place that was strange,—
’Twas a place not down on the map!
And I stumbled and fell and lay in the weeds,
And looked on the day with rue.

I am learning a little—never to be sure—
To be positive only with what is past,
And to peer sometimes at the things to come
As a wanderer treading the night
When the mazy stars neither point nor beckon,
And of all the roads, no road is sure.

I see those men with maps and talk
Who tell how to go and where and why;
I hear with my ears the words of their mouths,
As they finger with ease the marks on the maps;
And only as one looks robust, lonely, and querulous,
As if he had gone to a country far
And made for himself a map,
Do I cry to him, “I would see your map!
I would heed that map you have!”

-Carl Sandburg

Our pastor was preaching on Matthew 6, where Christ teaches us:

The light of the body is the eye. If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Therefore I say unto you, take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

Behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

It’s interesting to look at several translations of the words describing the healthy or unhealthy eye: cloudy or clear, evil or single, diseased or unclouded. Of course, Christ is our Light, He said so Himself, and if we keep our eye on Him, He will light the path, He will be the map in our heart, so that we find the best things that St. Macarius tells about:

“The heart is Christ’s palace…There Christ the King comes to take His rest, with the angels and the spirits of the saints, and He dwells there, walking within it and placing His kingdom there….the heavenly cities and the treasures of grace: all things are there.”

When Christ places His kingdom there, we understand that our heavenly Father is obligated to take care of us — He loves us and is, after all, our Father. Much more than any earthly father He loves us and wants to provide for our needs.

Today I also read a poem by Wendell Berry, on this blog, and he expresses and heeds the exhortation in today’s Gospel:

THE PEACE of WILD THINGS

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

-Wendell Berry

What a contrast Berry’s focus is to Sandburg’s narrator who wanders where “no road is sure,” and who longs for a good map. “We have been given the map!” I want to tell him. Keep your eyes on Christ, and walk on past the dragons and gaping chasms. Cling to Him, keep bringing your focus back to Him as a light that is far brighter than your “mazy stars,” and you will find your way to Christ’s palace, and take your rest, too, with the saints and angels, amid the treasures of grace.

Grasshopper Poetry

nature, poetry, , ,

On the Grasshopper and the Cricket

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead
In summer luxury,—he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

-John Keats

I am home again from visiting my children. I can relate to the grasshopper a little, as I rest at ease in the pleasant warmth of my town.  Normally I complain about the lack of summery evenings here, but at least most of the days I can bake a little in my garden without wearing a jacket.

At noon today when I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge the water itself was not to be seen below, the fog was so thick on San Francisco Bay. But this evening at Vespers everyone was dressed all summery, and several neighbors have parties in their back yards tonight, and the voices coming over the fences are telling of fun.

Here is a grasshopper making his sound.

I hope you also are not done with your seasonal delights. Chirp on!