Poetry Friday: Back to School Edition

Tomorrow's Poetry Friday, the first one of the school year! We're finishing our first week with kids. It's gone pretty well, all things considered. 

One of the exciting things that happened this week was that I received Irene Latham's National Poetry Month postcard! This means it only took four months to wend its way to Uganda. I looked up my thank you note to her for the NPM postcard from 2023 and found that it took six months last year, arriving on November 9th. It's a National Poetry Month miracle, my friends!

Today I'd like to share a poem that I got recently in the Poets.org Poem-a-Day email. It's called "When it Really is Just the Wind, and Not a Furious Vexation," by Kyle Tran Myhre. It's hard to excerpt it, but I'm going to share the last four stanzas. You can read the whole thing here, and I recommend reading the whole thing, for sure!

So here's the end:

 

Because in every universe in which  

 

I am alive, it is because of other people. And I 
don’t always like them, but I love them. In every 
universe in which I am alive, it is less because I 
could fight, and more because I could  
forgive. Because I could cooperate. Because   

 

I could apologize. Because I could dance. Because 
I could grow pumpkins in my backyard and leave 
them at my neighbor’s door, asking for nothing in
return. In every universe in which I am alive, I am
holding: a first aid kit, a solar panel, a sleeping

 

cat. Never a rusty battle ax or rocket launcher—
sure, maybe sometimes a chainsaw, but only for 
firewood. I am holding: a cooking pot, a teddy bear, 
a photo album, a basketball, a bouquet of flowers.
Survival is not a fortress. It is a garden.  

 

Survival is not a siren. It is a symphony. And
yeah, we fight for it sometimes, but survival is not
the fight. It is the healing after: the soft hum of
someone you trust applying the bandage, the
feeling of falling asleep in a safe place. 

 

(from "When it Really is Just the Wind, and Not a Furious Vexation," by Kyle Tran Myhre, here.)

 

 

So good, right? I'm glad to be holding, instead of "a rusty battle ax or rocket launcher": a white board marker, a French textbook, a dishcloth, a pair of binoculars, a feather. "Survival is not a siren. It is a symphony." 

(P.S. That last stanza made me think of Emily St. John Mandel's novel Station Eleven, of which I wrote here in 2016, "'Twenty years after the end of air travel,' we meet the Traveling Symphony, a company of actors and musicians who travel around the ruined United States in horse-drawn caravans performing Shakespeare and various types of music, because 'survival is insufficient.' It's about connections, the power of the past, and healing.  'What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.'")

Janice is hosting this week's roundup.

Reading Update

I haven't done a reading update since May, but I've been reading. Some of the recent books:

 

Book #33 was Maame, by Jessica George, a novel about the child of Ghanaian immigrants navigating her twenties in London. 

Book #34 was a rererereread, The Silver Chair, by C.S. Lewis. I'll never stop reading these books again and again. "No one suggested doing anything. There was so obviously nothing to be done. For the moment, they did not feel it quite so badly as one might have expected; that was because they were so tired....'Now don't you let your spirits down, Pole,' said the Marsh-wiggle. 'There's one thing you've got to remember. We're back on the right lines. We were to go under the Ruined City, and we are under it. We're following the instructions again.'"

Book #35 was Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford. This was a rollicking read, in a hard-to-categorize way. It's a murder mystery, an alternative history, an adventure story. It imagines a world where Native Americans have not been marginalized, but are instead full and equal participants in US society. 

Book #36 was Written in My Own Heart's Blood, by Diana Gabaldon. This is the eighth Outlander book. I'm kind of thinking the tenth one is going to be coming out pretty soon (though no publication date has yet been announced and Gabaldon is still writing it), so I've been rereading these. 

Book #37 was The Summer of Songbirds, by Kristy Woodson Harvey. This is the story of three best friends who grew up going to the same summer camp, Holly Springs. I am a sucker for these tales of long friendships, but this one was a bit forgettable.

Book #38 was Trevor Noah's memoir Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. If you've listened to Trevor Noah talking at all, you'll recognize his distinctive voice in this book. 

Book #39 was Wrath Goddess Sing, by Maya Deane. As I've frequently written here, I love retellings of mythology. This one takes its inspiration from a story about Achilles that's found in ancient sources outside the Iliad. Thetis, Achilles' mother, doesn't want him to fight in the Trojan War, and she hides him in the court of Skyros, where he dresses as a princess and is discovered by Odysseus through a clever ruse of presenting a sword that Achilles can't resist. In this novel, the time in Skyros becomes a gender transition and Achilles is a powerful female warrior. As always when I'm reading retellings, I was fascinated to see how the author would include the characters and scenes from the story. The book is full of erudition and research, and while some of the content was a bit over the top for me (no spoilers so I won't say what), it was well-written and thought-provoking. 

Book #40 was Dear Committee Members, by Julie Schumacher, a novel made up of recommendation letters. 

Book #41 was The Other Mothers, by Katherine Faulkner. It's a "twisty thriller" set among wealthy new mothers in London. I didn't find it believable or like any of the characters at all, but it kept me reading.

Book #42 was How to Walk into a Room, by Emily P. Freeman. This only came out in March and it was already my second time through. This time I read it aloud to my husband, something we like to do while on road trips. We both found it compelling and it gave us a lot to talk about.

Book #43 was The Hunting Party, by Lucy Foley, another thriller about rich unlikable English people. 

Book #44 was The Husband's Secret, by Liane Moriarty. I just looked back over all my reviews of Liane Moriarty books, and a common thread seems to be that they seem light-hearted but then have heavy themes. This one was the ultimate example of this. If you think the husband's secret of the title (and actually a few husbands have secrets, as well as other people who aren't husbands) is going to be fun and amusing, you are WRONG. It is a terrible, awful secret that will make you feel bad the whole way through the book. Or at least, that's what it did to me. I HATE books where everyone has a secret and there are hundreds of pages of deception. So stressful. That said, I had to know what happened, so I read every word.

Book #45 was Running Scared: Fear, Worry, and the God of Rest, by Edward T. Welch, and book #46 was Corrie Ten Boom's Don't Wrestle, Just Nestle. Both were about dealing with anxiety and how we can trust God to take care of us. They both were full of good reminders that I needed. And if anybody has earned the right to talk about this topic, it's Corrie Ten Boom, who spent time in a Nazi concentration camp. 

Book #47 was Go Tell the Bees that I Am Gone, by Diana Gabaldon. #36 was the eighth in this series, and this one was the ninth. I think it's my favorite. I really like Claire and Jamie as an older couple, surrounded by children and grandchildren. I read this in 2022 and reread lots of it while lying awake for hours in the throes of jet lag after our recent trip back from the US. Now I'm ready for the tenth book to come out. Soon, I hope?

SJT: Pause to Reflect

A Facebook friend posted the following picture yesterday:

I'm sorry to say that nobody succeeded in preventing August from getting here: not the Grinch, not my Facebook friend, and not me. It's here, and that means we're going back to school in just a few days.

Our SJT host this month, Carol, is encouraging us to pause to reflect. That's a good idea, because it's going to be my last chance for a while. Ready or not, school is coming, with all the work and stress. We just got back to Uganda, and we're slammed by jet lag, but we're also enjoying a brief pause before the school year begins.

Psalm 46:10: "Be still and know that I am God." A pause to reflect reminds us that we're not in charge. God is. Even in August.

Read what others have to say about this topic here.