Poetry Friday, Good Friday

I am enjoying the Progressive Poem; aren't you? Here it is today, hanging out at A Reading Year. Who knows what will happen to it before it comes to visit me on the 15th? It's absurd how excited I've been every day to track its progress.

We had a half day yesterday. Today and Monday are holidays. Most schools in this country are on full-blown vacation right now, so our students are not at all satisfied with the four and a half day weekend we're getting.

The sakura is in bloom in Tokyo, and I've been enjoying photos from various Japan-based Facebook friends. I'm thinking of this poem:


Loveliest of trees, the cherry now...
A.E. Housman

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.


But it's not time for "wearing white for Eastertide" yet. First we have Good Friday, and the long wait, the grave. Before the triumph is the suffering. Before the resurrection is the death. Before the joy comes in the morning, there's the night of weeping. So here's a poem about grief.


'No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief.'
By Gerard Manley Hopkins

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."'

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.


The mind does, indeed, have mountains, and there are times when no comforting is to be found. Hopkins knew this; he suffered with depression for much of his life.

"According to his own testimony Hopkins was subject to melancholy all his life, but his 'terrible pathos,' as Dixon called it, is most obvious in these late sonnets. Following Saint Ignatius, Hopkins defined 'spiritual sloth' or 'desolation' as 'darkness and confusion of soul ... diffidence without hope and without love, so that [the soul] finds itself altogether slothful, tepid, sad, and as it were separated from its Creator and Lord.' Called acedia in Latin, this sin is differentiated from physical sloth by the fact that the victim realizes his predicament, worries about it, and tries to overcome it."

(You can read this passage, and much, much, much more about Gerard Manley Hopkins here, at the Poetry Foundation website.)

I am thankful that Good Friday's sadness gives way to Easter's rejoicing, and also that poetry expresses both.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Line Six

Here it is, at A Reading Year.

Line Five

Susan Taylor Brown has the fifth line! Go check it out! (The plot thickens...)

Line Four

Shhh, I'm sneaking in here while eighth graders do silent reading to post the fourth line! Robyn at Read, Write, Howl contributed today's addition. The poem now reads:


If you are reading this
you must be hungry
Kick off your silver slippers
Come sit with us a spell...


OK, off to patrol the silent readers!

Line Three

Here's the third line of the progressive poem.

Now it goes like this:

If you are reading this
you must be hungry
Kick off your silver slippers...

Tuesday Morning

Line three isn't there yet. While you wait, Author Amok is posting 30+ Habits of Highly Effective Poets this month. What are people's strange writing rituals? Find out!

I'll be back later to link you to line three. Just in case you're anywhere near as excited about it as I am.

Line Two

Dori has added line two to the Progressive Poem. Go take a look!

It's April!

"April is the cruelest month, mixing memory and desire," wrote T.S. Eliot. Maybe that's why April was chosen as National Poetry Month, since one of the best ways I know of to deal with memory and desire, and the havoc they can wreak on me, is by reading poetry. Why else do you think a whole section of the Bible - including the longest book - is dedicated to poetry?

This year I'm getting three daily poems in my inbox, and I wanted to share them with you in case you'd like to sign up.

You can subscribe here to the Academy of American Poets' "Poem-A-Day" email. I get this one year-round.

Knopf Poetry is also sending out a daily poem during April, and you can sign up for that here.

You can also get a daily poem year-round from Your Daily Poem. Your Daily Poem tends to be by far the most accessible of these three, and today's email says:

"Welcome to Wordwoman's Parade of Scintillating Springtime Poetry, my annual tribute to National Poetry Month, in which I attempt to prove that there's poetry out there for everyone. If you think you hate poetry, you just haven't found the right kind. There are poems for fishermen, for people with ADD, for nurses, for athletes, for construction workers . . . if Beowulf and Browning aren't your cup of tea, try Budbill or Bierce instead! Poetry should be a source of pleasure--and it will be, once you've found the right fit."

Ah, a woman after my own heart.

This year I am stepping out on a limb and participating in a "Progressive Poem." Irene Latham invited fellow poets (including a lot of actual published ones) to contribute a line. My day is April 15th. Here's the whole schedule:

2012 KidLit Progressive Poem: watch a poem grow day-by-day as it travels across the Kidlitosphere! April 1-30

Schedule
1 Irene at Live Your Poem
2 Doraine at Dori Reads
3 Jeannine at View from a Window Seat
4 Robyn at Read, Write, Howl
5 Susan at Susan Taylor Brown
6 Mary Lee at A Year of Reading
7 Penny at A Penny and her Jots
8 Jone at Deo Writer
9 Gina at Swagger Writer's
10 Julie at The Drift Record
11 Kate at Book Aunt
12 Anastasia Suen at Booktalking
13 Tabatha at The Opposite of Indifference
14 Diane at Random Noodling
15 Ruth at There is No Such Thing as a Godforsaken Town
16 Natalie at Wading Through Words
17 Tara at A Teaching Life
18 Amy at The Poem Farm
19 Lori at Habitual Rhymer
20 Heidi at My Juicy Little Universe
21 Myra at Gathering Books
22 Pat at Writer on a Horse
23 Miranda at Miranda Paul Books
24 Linda at TeacherDance
25 Greg at Gotta Book
26 Renee at No Water River
27 Linda at Write Time
28 Caroline at Caroline by Line
29 Sheri at Sheri Doyle
30 Irene at Live Your Poem

This is going to be fun! Irene already started with this line, full of possibility:

"If you are reading this..."

There are many more poetic activities this month, too. Irene Latham has a whole list here (scroll down past the Progressive Poem schedule), and I just found out that my friend and colleague Robbie is posting a new poem each week this month, plus something from his archives every day. Check that out here.

I already read a poem every day with each of my classes, and was once happy to hear a student say, "Mrs. H. has a poem for everything!" But National Poetry Month is always welcome, since it's an extra opportunity to appreciate poetry. Nancie Atwell says that reading poetry is like eating chocolates, so you can't do too much of it at once. Here's to gorging on poetry, at least once a year!

Poetry Friday: Hope

In the spring, a teacher's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of finding other employment. I was moping about teaching to a friend, and he said, "This is exactly what you were saying last March." Ah, the gentle rhythm of the seasons...

The thing about teaching, though, is that you get a new chance every day. I guess that's true of life in general, but there's something about the way teaching is divided up into finite class periods. And my middle schoolers are forgiving. I may have been impatient yesterday, but today they bound in, crowing, "Hello, Mrs. H!" as though nothing happened. They may have whined about the assignment I gave them, but most of them did it anyway.

This week the outgoing Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets wrote a goodbye email; she's leaving the position and moving back to Seattle. She quoted this poem, and when I read it, I felt hopeful. Hope is important; it's what keeps you coming back day after day. It's what keeps you reading student writing. It's what prevents you from giving up. There's a reason why every third organization working in Haiti has the word "Hope" in its name.

Here's the poem:

Horses At Midnight Without A Moon

by Jack Gilbert

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there's music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.

Click here to read the rest.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: Billy Collins

"Bugs Bunny is my Muse." - Billy Collins

For more great lines like this, plus Billy Collins reading six of his poems, five of them set to animation, check out this video:

Just what the doctor ordered after an afternoon of conferences. I'm ready for the weekend.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Bird Watching at Lunchtime

I have lunch duty this week. And about 50% of the time. I've made no secret of my lack of love for lunch duty. In addition to writing Lunch Duty Haiku, I have taken to photography at lunchtime to help pass the time away. That's why today I had my camera handy when I saw a Hispaniolan lizard cuckoo. Much good did having my camera do me, though. Most of the photos ended up being of attractive but birdless tree branches. I did get this photo, but this was my best effort:



See the tail? Kind of? I know, it's a rotten photo. So here's one by someone who knows how to take pictures of birds:


Photo Source

What a beautiful bird! And especially, what a beautiful sight for the middle of an ordinary day, in the center of Port-au-Prince, a city of two million people not known for its bird life. The students gathered to watch me snapping photos madly. "What are you looking at, Miss?" They were not impressed when I told them it was a bird. But this bird lifted my spirits and filled me with gratitude.

Not only that, but today is Bird Day.

More Links

Lately I have been just gathering links and not taking the time or energy it would require to synthesize my thoughts. I haven't been writing much, either - mostly reading my students' writing. I hope to get back to my own writing soon, but meanwhile here are some links.

Two Ways To Think About Nothing. An excerpt:

"We are surrounded by Nothing. Everywhere we go, we have no idea what we're not seeing.... [I]f we lean in, and pay very close attention, sometimes what looks like Nothing is the best place to find the most interesting...somethings."

Religion for Atheists: God, What is He Good For? I watched de Botton's talk a while ago here. His smugness annoys me a lot. However, many of the qualities he points out about religion are things I value. But I think that without the truth of God and His love for us, they would be pretty empty.

The Parent Interview #5: Irrational Love. This is beautiful.

So there you go - more Stuff Ruth Thinks is Interesting. Enjoy.

Poetry Friday: Time

Photo Source

In last week's Poetry Friday post, I shared a James Taylor song. A line from that song has been going through my head all week: "The thing about time is that time isn't really real."

This week time felt very real, an entity that was out to get me rather than help me. My grades were due, including narrative evaluations and conduct grades, so I was wrapping up the third quarter while starting my units for the fourth quarter. And as I was doing all that work, I was contending with Daylight Savings Time.

You have to understand, I live in the tropics. The length of the day varies very little where I live. My husband asked Mr. Google and found out that on June 21st we have 13 H 14 M 40 S of daylight, and on December 21st we have 11 H 1 M 05 S. (For comparison purposes, in Chicago the longest day is 15 H 13 M 31 S and the shortest day is 9 H 7 M 54 S.) There's really no need for Daylight Savings Time in Haiti. And most of the time we don't change time. But every once in a while we have a government that decides to be in line with our Great Neighbor to the North, and then that year we do change. I've speculated if it has something to do with an inability to get much accomplished, and the sense of achievement it must bring to be able to control the time (even though, of course, it isn't really real).

So this past weekend, when you folks in the United States changed time, we did too. Now we are getting up in the dark. Ugh! One reason for living in the tropics is not having to get up in the dark! My son began sharing melancholy memories of living in the States after the earthquake, getting up for school in winter darkness, shivering at the bus stop.

You wouldn't think that extra hour would make much of a difference. You lose an hour of sleep, and then you make up for it Sunday afternoon and you're set. But it does; I remember when my children were babies, it seemed it took them weeks to get back in any kind of rhythm. (I certainly couldn't use the word "schedule" about the babyhood of either of my children.) And this week as I've been rushing about, trying to accomplish all my tasks, I've felt like that missing hour could have made all the difference. My 9-year-old asked me, "Mom, in the fall are we going to go back to having 24 hours in every day?" I hope so, Buddy, I hope so.

One of the daily emails this week from Your Daily Poem was a poem about time.

Analog Time
by
Tamara Madison

Your new watch can tell
what time it is right down
to the second, the split second.
Your new watch has no face;
instead there’s a blinking grill
where the numbers change
constantly. I would like to say
that in this rapid split-second
parade we can see the flow
of time — always changing,
never changing, a river slipping
over rocks and sand – but it’s
only time, a human concept
after all, not a real river.

Follow this link to read the rest of the poem.

I especially love the end of the poem, where Madison writes:

the real tellers of time
are the sun, the sky,
the wrinkles on our faces,
the bruises on our souls.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Some Links for Sunday

I tend to gather up links for days and days until I have way too many windows open, so I'll just post a bunch of them today.

First of all, this is the one year anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Many words and photos have been shared, but here's a post that especially resonated with me. I'm praying for the people in Japan as they relive the memories and the terrible grief. We in Haiti stand with you in the fellowship of earthquake survivors.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: an ad campaign for diapers featured mockery of dads. These diapers are so good, the ads told us, that even foolish, clueless dads can use them. A backlash from dads who are neither foolish nor clueless led to the cancelling of the ads. Hooray for involved fathers!

I loved Sarah Bessey's post about what a Biblical woman looks like. I spend so much time feeling inadequate and comparing myself to others, and I needed her reminder that

"when your heart, mind and soul is deep within the reality of living loved, we discover that those 'rules' are really just characteristics, the natural fruit to be borne out of a meaningful life changing relationship. And there are many expressions and ways to live out love, joy, kindness, patience, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control, peace and goodness - as men, as women, as mothers, as fathers, as friends.

After all, if we one believes that Jesus is a relationship then there must be room for each of us having a unique relationship, vocation, season or calling."

I just read P.D. James' latest novel, Death Comes to Pemberley. My daughter laughed at me for reading "fan fiction" (since I laugh at her for the same thing). At some point I'll post a review, but meanwhile a friend sent me this one, which I thought was wonderful.

And here's another NPR link, this one to an interview with Alan Shapiro about a book I haven't read. I just liked his quote about how art works on the artist:

"But, you know, writing is a way of being happy even if what you're writing about is how unhappy you are, because - and not in a therapeutic sense, but in the sense that you get to convert things that you have to in life perhaps passively suffer into something that you can actively make on the page. And so it can give you some sense of agency and power. You know, I'm an easily distracted person. I've been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. One of my children had it and so the doctor had us tested as well. It's the only test I've ever aced. Elizabeth Bishop has a wonderful line. She says that the thing we want from great art is the same necessary for its creation, and that is a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. And that's that kind of deep Zen-entranced experience that I have when I'm writing. You know, I sit down at the desk at 9 o'clock, I look up and it's 4 o'clock suddenly and all those hours have gone by as in a single moment. And, to me, that's paradise. That's heaven."

So there you go: a lot of unrelated links that won't all matter to anyone but me. Hope you, reader, found at least one you liked!

Poetry Friday: Secret o' Life

It's been a bit of a rough week, and one proof of that is that I'm doing my Poetry Friday post at 6 PM. I just staggered home from work. There's plenty still to do, and I'll be going in again tomorrow, but I've had enough for today. I started out the week sick, and finally started kicking my killer sore throat on Wednesday, after ten days of sucking down lozenges, when I went on antibiotics. I fell twice this week; once I missed a stair and once I just lost my balance because the pole I thought was behind me turned out not to be there (who moved it?). I have a skinned knee and a nasty bruise on my arm. I have so much grading that I wonder if I'll ever get it done. Oh yeah, and Wednesday night we had an earthquake.

It's time for some James Taylor to mellow me out. Here he is sharing his secrets.



Secret o' Life
James Taylor

The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time
Any fool can do it
There ain't nothing to it
Nobody knows how we got to
The top of the hill
But since we're on our way down
We might as well enjoy the ride

The secret of love is in opening up your heart
It's okay to feel afraid
But don't let that stand in your way
'cause anyone knows that love is the only road
And since we're only here for a while
Might as well show some style
Give us a smile
Isn't it a lovely ride
Sliding down
Gliding down
Try not to try too hard
It's just a lovely ride

Now the thing about time is that time
Isn't really real
It's just your point of view
How does it feel for you
Einstein said he could never understand it all
Planets spinning through space
The smile upon your face
Welcome to the human race

Some kind of lovely ride
I'll be sliding down
I'll be gliding down
Try not to try too hard
It's just a lovely ride

Isn't it a lovely ride
Sliding down
Gliding down
Try not to try too hard
It's just a lovely ride

Now the secret of life is enjoying the passage of time...



Here's today's roundup, at Gathering Books.

Tremor

Last night I was in bed when there was that horrible sound, a grinding, groaning noise, and the house shook. I was online, chatting with a friend, and I immediately typed "earthquake."

Earthquake. It turned out to be 4.6 on the Richter scale - not a huge earthquake but plenty big enough to set the adrenaline pumping and the brain wondering what comes next.

We were able to sleep, and no more tremors came. But it is terribly unsettling to feel this familiar sensation, after all these months.

Poetry Friday: Snow Globe

Last weekend I was traveling, and I saw a sign I hadn't seen before. Apparently it's been around a while, in the airports of the United States. I did take a picture of it, but it's still on my cellphone, so here's a picture someone else took.



Source: this blog post, from all the way back in November 2010.

I wrote this poem about snow globes:


Snow Globe

As soon as I read the sign in the airport forbidding snow globes
I longed for one.

I didn't have one in my bag,
And in fact I don't own one at all.
But suddenly I imagined miniature towns
Shaken into winter wonderlands,
Delicate cottages covered in white.

I imagined the whole building shaken by some divine hand,
And the Fort Lauderdale airport giving way
To fluttering white feathers
Frosting
The hair of travelers,
The laptops in their grey plastic bins,
The matching t-shirts of mission groups.
The official yelling about people with water bottles in their carry-ons
Mellowed as he gazed about at the Christmas card scene,
The lovely snow-globalization of his workspace.
There was much ooh-ing and ah-ing
And the restaurant on Concourse E sold out of hot chocolate.

But no, snow globes are not allowed.
There will be no wintry vistas,
No sleigh rides,
No jingle bells
No cool wind except what comes out of air conditioners.
Instead the TSA will continue to remove our shampoo and toothpaste from us
(Our safety is their priority),
And the X-ray machine will continue to scan passengers,
Each one unique,
Like a snowflake.

2/27/12


I also thought about this song when I saw the snow globe sign:


Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: Fixed Interval

My daughter and I have spent this week with my parents in Florida, since we had some time off of school for Carnival. My husband and son stayed in Haiti and did manly things. Thinking of their relationship reminded me of this bittersweet poem, which I got in my Poem-A-Day email earlier this month.

Fixed Interval
by Devin Johnston

When he turns fifteen, you'll be fifty-four.
When he turns thirty, you'll be sixty-nine.
This plain arithmetic amazes more
than miracle, the constant difference more
than mere recursion of father in son.
If you reach eighty, he'll be forty-one!

Here's the rest of it.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: Love, Valentine's Day, Shakespeare, and So On

I read a lot this year about anti-Valentine sentiment, or AntiValentinism, as this blog post calls it. Although I am happily married and enjoyed the roses and candy and delicious fish dinner my husband got me, I'm in sympathy with a lot of what this post says. Here's an excerpt:

"Valentine’s Day morphs otherwise proud and confident singles, into pathetic creatures that wallow in misery because Hallmark says they require a mate to find true happiness. For those satisfied with their single status, Valentine’s Day compels them to justify why. As for the coupled men; Valentine’s Day torments these masculine souls who frantically speculate, purchase, and overextend themselves in an effort to exceed their sweethearts’ {and their sweethearts’ friends} expectations. While Valentine’s Day is sold to us as a day to celebrate those we love, in reality Valentine’s Day has turned into a day where men publicly prove their undying love. Meanwhile, women in a relationship are embroiled in a bitter competition against, well, other women; posting pictures of ornate bouquets and elaborate dinner plans on Facebook prompting self-doubt in their friends who now question whether their own partner loves them. It’s really quite incredible how a holiday created to promote feelings of love and genuine caring, is actually a loaded weapon filled with unrealistic expectations, sexism, and obligation."

In addition to any of these arguments, I have another reason to loathe Valentine's Day. I teach middle school. The combination of candy, hormones, and flowers and serenades being delivered while I'm trying to teach almost sends me over the edge every year.

On the other hand, "what the world needs now is love, sweet love," don't you think so?
All kinds of love: romantic love, friendship, the love we have for our children. All of this is a gift that is definitely worth celebrating, not just on Valentine's Day, but every day. We never know how long we will have this love.

I was looking through an old textbook on my shelf, the kind you pick up in a second hand store or on someone's "Free Book" table in the halls of your graduate school. It has lots of notes in it, summing up in the margins with comments like "metaphor" or, under Samuel Coleridge's name, the dismissive "opium addict." It also has Shakespeare in it. I read Sonnet 18 with my students this week and talked about the last couplet where he says:

"So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."

I asked the kids if they ever looked at something they had written, and thought People will be reading this as long as men can breathe or eyes can see. Yeah, me neither. But turns out, Shakespeare was right; we really are still reading his work, and there are some things that nobody has said better.

So here's a sonnet from the book, reminding me today that "Time will come and take my love away," and even though there will always be Shakespeare for consolation, I need to enjoy all the love God has given me, every single day. "Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate."

Sonnet 64

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Be Kind to the Muse

A Facebook friend introduced me recently to Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience. She particularly pointed out this letter from John Steinbeck to his son, on the occasion of his son's first romantic interest in a girl.

This week I found this post. I love Cage's awareness of what it takes for him to create. Perhaps praise and adulation may not be the best thing for him. His muse, after all, is not a horse.

Poetry Friday: The Joy of Writing

I read this week about the death of Wislawa Szymborska. Even though Szymborska won the Nobel Prize in 1996, when I was old enough to be paying attention, I'm embarrassed to say that I had never heard of her until the end of last month, when Maria Horvath posted about her here. I loved this poem so much that I read it aloud to my daughter, and later to my husband. I must read more of this poet, I thought, and then the next time I saw her name, it was to find out that she had died.

Here's the poem that Maria posted:


THE JOY OF WRITING

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence — this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word “woods.”

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they’ll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what’s here isn’t life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof’s full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

It's true that when you're writing you can feel all-powerful. And when you're reading, that written world, "borrowed from the truth," can seem every bit as real as the actual world, all around you. Those "clutches of clauses" that Szymborska manipulated will continue to give pleasure, as long as her words are read.

The Poetry Friday roundup is here. Since Laura has it up already, I'm going to go ahead and post my Poetry Friday offering on Thursday night.

Thursday Chaos

I messed up so many details today. I flaked out on paperwork I had promised to have finished, got days wrong on my schedule and caused problems with another teacher's plans as a result, and flubbed the organizing of an upcoming activity with my homeroom. As if all that wasn't enough to make me feel incompetent, a student fainted - twice. At least I had an excellent nurse nearby, and all was well.

I needed what Jess had to say today.

Poetry Friday: Flowers

February seems a good time to think about flowers. Where I live, they grow all the time, but in the north you can now only find them at the florist's. Browning, missing England from India, wrote about delicate, polite buttercups, calling them "Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!" But I kind of have a thing for gaudy, at least when it comes to flowers.


Here's part of Mona Van Duyn's poem "A Bouquet of Zinnias."

A "high prole" flower, says Fussell's book on American
class, the aristocrat wouldn't touch them, says Cooper
on class in England. So unguardedly, unthriftily,
do they open up and show themselves that subtlety,
rarity, nuance, are almost put to shame.

...

In any careless combination they delight.
Pure peach-cheek beside the red of a boiled beet
by the perky scarlet of a cardinal by flamingo pink
by sunsink orange by yellow from a hundred buttercups
by bleached linen white. Any random armful
of the world, one comes to feel, would fit together.


You can read the whole poem here. It has lots more about how great zinnias are, how "tough" and "stubborn" they are, and about the poet's grandmother, who had "big, clumsy-looking hands."

I wrote a poem myself about daffodils and their lack of subtlety. Here it is:


Daffodils

The daffodils take a risk each year
As they burst out in all their gaudy glory.
It would make much more sense
To wait underground a little longer.
After all, it's probably going to snow again.
And even if it doesn't
They aren't going to be around more than a few weeks.

Still, the daffodils don't seem to mind.
They are yellow but fearless.
They don't try to tone themselves down,
To dress in brown or some more practical color,
To camouflage their joy just in case,
To kill time until they are sure the weather will be favorable.
Instead, they are simply beautiful while they can be.

If daffodils think of the future at all
It's a long-term one,
The resurrection of next spring
When the dead bulbs,
Rooted and established in the earth,
Will come to life again
And again, freely,
Careless of their own safety or dignity,
They will give themselves away.

by Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com



Here's to unsubtle, "high prole" flowers. I love them all. I love how bright and happy they are, the splashes of color they provide. I love the way they can get away with wild combinations that I'd never dare to wear. They inspire me to be who I am, without worrying so much about what people think.

And speaking of flowers, today's Poetry Friday roundup is at The Iris Chronicles.




Photo credit: Matsu

February Already!

Today's Daily Photo Blog theme (the first of each month is their Theme Day) is Animals. You can see thumbnails of participants' photos here.

Sunday Night

I'm home from the beach, where I went for a retreat this weekend with the people I work with. We had a wonderful time. The ocean was beautiful and the time away was relaxing.

This morning I sat in our worship service and cried. A lot. If you've been reading my blog for long, you know that this isn't exactly an unusual thing for me to do. We had a time of sharing and I was afraid I was going to stand up and blubber a lot, because that's something else I frequently do.

I didn't stand up and blubber, but here's what I was thinking: God loves me and takes care of me. I know it's so very unsophisticated, and lacking in deep theological insight, and it sounds like I'm a child, but I don't care. It's wonderful to know this. It took me more than forty years to learn it, but I know it now. I know it.

I am more fragile since the earthquake, and less flexible. I think less and feel more. I read less and write more. I don't think all these changes are positive, necessarily; this is just the way I am, for now. But I am so glad I know, with all my heart, that God loves me.

I hesitate to hit Publish Post for this one. There's nothing smart about it, nothing deep; it's something you'd think I wouldn't have had to learn. After all, I was raised to know that God loved me. I prayed when I was four years old to ask Jesus into my heart. People told me all my life that He loved me. I told other people that He loved them. But somehow it was always about my performance. Was I good enough? Were my grades perfect? Was I trying my hardest, all the time?

This weekend our theme was from the first chapter of Joshua, where God says, "Be strong and courageous." The speaker talked about how people responded to the earthquake, how strong and courageous they were. You know what? I wasn't strong and courageous. I'm not writing this so that I'll get comments telling me I was; I know I wasn't. I did the best I could, but I wouldn't describe the results as strong and courageous, at all.

I was more illustrating a different verse, the one about Christ's strength being made perfect in my weakness. I was so very weak, and He was so very strong.

When I was a child I went to the altar all the time, every time a preacher suggested it. One time a dear old lady said to me, as I staggered to my feet after crying at the altar, "Jesus loves you very much." I think in my mind that translated to: "Jesus loves you when you come forward and weep, racked with guilt." I don't know if she meant that or not, but that's what I thought, that Jesus loved me when I repented, constantly, never feeling I had repented enough or that I could rest. Now I know that Jesus loves me when I go forward, and when I sit sulking in my seat, and when I listen and when I don't, and when I'm strong and courageous and when I'm weak and pitiful. Just the way I love my children when they do and are all those things. He loves me because I'm His.

I know, I know; there are a million qualifications I should make about how I still have to obey and how God loving me isn't a license to do whatever I want. I know all that. But I also know that God loves me, plain and simple. He does. He really does.

So that's what I was crying about in the worship service this morning.

Poetry Friday!

I really don't think I'm going to get a moment to post anything today for Poetry Friday. Just in case I don't, go here and read what everybody else posted.

Poetry Friday: A Mother to her Waking Infant

I found a poem today that was new to me, but the ideas and feelings in it are not new at all. I love finding evidence that some things don't change much. Joanna Baillie lived from 1762 to 1851, and she wrote these lines about her baby:

A Mother to Her Waking Infant
BY JOANNA BAILLIE

Now in thy dazzling half-oped eye,
Thy curled nose and lip awry,
Uphoisted arms and noddling head,
And little chin with crystal spread,
Poor helpless thing! what do I see,
That I should sing of thee?

From thy poor tongue no accents come,
Which can but rub thy toothless gum:
Small understanding boasts thy face,
Thy shapeless limbs nor step nor grace:
A few short words thy feats may tell,
And yet I love thee well.

You can read the rest of the poem here. I love the way Baillie describes her baby, who can't do much yet, and ignores his mother's poem, and laughs when everyone is sad, and yet is adored.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Katie's Earthquake Memories

Katie has started sharing the notes she took the night of the earthquake and for a few subsequent days. You can read that here and here. It was painful reading for me. It brought back those days very vividly. And yet it was also fascinating, because Katie included some details about me that I don't remember at all, but that my husband confirms are right. (I knew they were right anyway, since these were notes Katie took at the time.)

It's interesting to me how the story you tell becomes the story that happened. I have told my earthquake story so many times. It's completely accurate; I started writing it down a week later. But there are details I didn't write down or speak, and so they were forgotten. For example, I didn't remember that after the woman died on the soccer field on the morning of the 13th, I went and woke up our school nurse to come and look at her and see if there as anything she could do. She ended up just confirming that the woman was dead. I remember the screaming, and the praying, and I remember another staff member sitting with the bereaved family for hours, and I remember how I cried, and felt that this was the saddest thing I had ever heard of in my life. But in my memory, I was completely passive. It's silly, but I feel a tiny bit better knowing that at least I tried to do something.

I also don't remember Katie being there when we started picking up our books and righting our bookcase. That is somehow comforting, knowing that we immediately started cleaning up. I thought we had waited longer, because I remember thinking that everything was just going to fall down again. And it is also wonderful to know, or be reminded, that we had people around us, going through it all.

One thing that made me cringe a little was Katie's remark "Ruth and the kids going." I thought I had gotten over feeling badly about leaving Haiti, but those feelings came back when I read that, even though Katie didn't comment on how it made her feel. She didn't write, "Ruth, that coward and abandoner of duty," but that's how I saw myself.

It's such a waste of energy to keep brooding over that all these months later. We did what we thought was best at the time, and my husband was able to be useful in ways he wouldn't have if we had been there, and good things came out of our months in the States. I know all those arguments, but still, when I think about leaving on the Saturday after the quake, I feel guilty. When I hear people talking about the time after the quake, as I did on Thursday when a group of us got together to pray and sing, I think, I should have been there.

I remember it so clearly. My husband said to me, "You're going."

I said, "Shouldn't we talk about it some more?"

He said, "No, you're going."

I could tell it was very important to him, because he doesn't usually make decisions like that and tell me how it's going to be. I knew it wasn't a time to dilly-dally and argue. It was a time to pack my bag and do as I was told. And then to spend six months in the US second-guessing the decision.

I am glad Katie shared this. Thank you, Katie, for being there that night and all the days since. There's just something about earthquake friends.

Poetry Friday: Winter

Two years ago in the wake of the earthquake, I moved suddenly to the United States. I went from tropical weather to a cold, leafless January. I hadn't experienced winter in ten years and the transition wasn't an easy one. But winter is beautiful, too. I never used to miss winter weather, and I still don't want to go live in it, or anything, but I do sometimes think about how beautiful it is.

On Wednesday night my friend Matsu sent me this photo of the moon in the trees. It really looks like "a liquid moon," as the poem says.



Winter Trees

By William Carlos Williams

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.


Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Anniversary

I'll be honest: I've hardly read any of the links in the post I sent you to this morning. I did read the one about how Haiti can be rich again; that seemed cheerful enough that I could risk it. It's not at all like me to hide from the news. Before the earthquake I was a news junkie. In the six months I spent in the States after the quake, I read everything anyone in the world wrote about Haiti and posted on the internet. But now, I protect myself more; I don't read nearly as much news as I used to, whether about Haiti or elsewhere in the world.

I was glad Lexi wrote a post with links in it so that I could share articles with you, my readers, but I can't bring myself to go looking for them or even to read many of them when I see them. Yes, I'm grateful for my life and that my family was spared and for all the many blessings that God gave me in the aftermath of that night in 2010. But mostly all I can do in these days leading up to the anniversary is feel a deep sadness.

Here's what happened that night to us, two years ago tomorrow.

Links About the Two-Year Anniversary

Lexi has been reading about the anniversary and here's her post.

Back to School

"Why," sighed an exasperated middle schooler this morning, "do they always have to mess up the schedule every quarter?"

By mess up the student meant change, and I am very much in sympathy with that view. I don't like change. I want everything to stay the same forever and ever. Even when details are far from perfect, I seem to derive security from sameness and predictability. It's hard for me to picture how things could be better.

I live in a country where everything changes constantly, and obviously this causes me some problems from time to time. In a recent professional development exercise, all the teachers were sorted into groups based on personality type. I ended up in a group of others like me, people who wanted to be in control. How did we manage in Haiti, we asked each other? We figured out that we find one small area we can control: our classrooms. While we work on being flexible, we feel that in our classrooms, our kingdoms, nothing must ever go wrong. Our word must be law. Structure must reign supreme.

And...I teach middle schoolers. Again, not a real recipe for stability.

The fact is, as I'm learning more and more the older I get, I am not in control. Of anything. Any idea that I am is purely an illusion, and that illusion can be shattered in seconds, by riots, or the issues of a middle schooler, or, perhaps an earthquake.

We started back to school today, and I am back in my classroom, my kingdom. Already this morning I've dealt with two schedule changes, talked to kids who lost a much loved brother and cousin over the break, and confronted a room full of eighth graders who were happy to see each other again and not so much interested in me taking attendance. And it's only 10 AM.

Here's something C. S. Lewis wrote that I need to read often:

“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life — the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it’s hard to remember it all the time.”

Indeed. This semester, I'll try again to remember it. I'm not in control; God is. Sometimes my schedule will be messed up by someone's need, or someone's joy, or Haiti's unpredictability. And that's OK. That is my schedule for that day.

Poetry Friday: Heartbreak and Such

My daughter is currently obsessed with Les Misérables, the book and the musical. The first time she watched the musical, she described it as "like someone took my heart out and stomped on it."

Why do we seek that feeling in literature? Why don't we just read happy stories to escape from the sadness in our real lives? I don't know, but there's something about January that makes me want to read sad poems. Christmas is over, it's cold (OK, where I live, cold is seventy degrees, but work with me here), it's time to go back to work, weeks stretching out ahead with nothing much to look forward to. Plus there's next Thursday looming large, the two-year anniversary of the Haitian earthquake. In that mood, nothing's better than Japanese poetry. It's all that all that heartache, all that longing, all that awareness of transience, all that Sehnsucht. Perhaps some of that sensibility comes from living with earthquakes.

I can't read Japanese poetry in the original, but I have two books of it, One Hundred Poems from the Japanese and One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese. The translations are done by Kenneth Rexroth, who explains in his introduction to the first book,

Japanese poetry does what poetry does everywhere: it intensifies and exalts experience. ... Many...editors and translators have been embarrassed by this intensity and concentration and have labored to explain each poem until it has been explained away. Often the explanation has obtruded into the poem itself, which has been expanded with concealed commentary and interpretation.

So I'm not going to include any commentary, but here are a couple of heartbreaking and beautiful Japanese poems for this cold (OK, just not boiling hot) January day.


A strange old man
Stops me,
Looking out of my deep mirror.

Hitomaro


May those who are born after me
Never travel such roads of love.

Hitomaro


I go out of the darkness
Onto a road of darkness
Lit only by the far off
Moon on the edge of the mountains.

Izumi


The cricket cries
In the frost.
On my narrow bed,
In a folded quilt,
I sleep alone.

The Regent Fujiwara No Go-Kyogoku


The plovers cry
Over the evening waves
Of Lake Omi.
In my withering heart
I remember the past.

Kakinomoto No Hitomaro


In the dusk the path
You used to come to me
Is overgrown and indistinguishable,
Except for the spider webs
That hang across it
Like threads of sorrow.

Izumi Shikibu


This world of ours,
To what shall I compare it?
To the white wake of a boat
That rows away in the early dawn.

Shami Mansei



Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

One Little Word for 2012

For the past few years, since 2009, I have chosen One Little Word for each year. In 2009 the word was "LOOK." In 2010 the word was "LOVED." And last year's word was "TRUST."

This year, my One Little Word is "HEAL." A friend told me after the earthquake that it takes three years to get over a major trauma like that. The first year is the year of grieving. The second is the year of remembrance. And the third is the year of healing. So far, this has been accurate. In 2010 I reeled. In 2011 I was in "a year ago today" mode. And this year, I'm ready to heal.

The thing is, you never get to heal completely before other wounds come along. I remember having constantly skinned knees as a child; no sooner would I get some fresh skin back and lose the scab than I'd fall again. I'm still just as clumsy, too; last week I fell while walking down stairs and taking pictures at the same time. Yeah, I guess I'm not as good at multitasking as I like to think. My knees are a mess and I broke my camera.

But I digress. My point was that healing has to be an ongoing process; we're constantly being bombarded with new injury.

"Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something."

We lost a recent alumnus to a car accident on New Year's Eve and I hurt so much for his family, especially his mother, whose pain I can't even bring myself to imagine. She is healing from the earthquake still, just like I am, and she has other griefs in her life too, and now this. It's not like we can heal completely and then bask in glorious wholeness for the rest of our lives. It's all a process.

God is in the business of healing, though. He restores us, brings good out of what is nasty and awful and impossible in our lives, helps us slog through the nightmares and come out on the other side better. This year I want to celebrate the healing that God has already done in my life and in Haiti. And I want to watch for the signs of the ongoing process.

On New Year's Eve I sat at a party and listened to someone's earthquake story, one of the most amazing I've heard yet. I hope the teller will write a book. Here's something she said that resonated with me: the earthquake recalibrated us. We won't ever be entirely the same as we were before. Some of us have fears we didn't have before. Certain sounds and experiences are still not easy. Those are different for everyone, and I'm learning that I don't have to feel foolish, for example, for being freaked out by the rumble of an especially loud passing truck (that's exactly how the earthquake sounded when it began), even if nobody else is affected by it.

Hardest to accept is that some relationships were broken by the aftermath of the earthquake, and they will never be exactly the same again, even if healing happens. There are beautiful new relationships that have grown up, but I still grieve the lost ones, because people aren't interchangeable.

This year, I hope more of my wounds will turn into scars. Scars are there forever. As Dumbledore pointed out, they can even be useful, though I don't have one that's the shape of a map of the London underground, like he did. But over time the scars can be "less like scars and more like character."

One Little Word for 2012: HEAL. I can't do it myself, but God can do it.

Happy New Year!

The first day of every month is Theme Day at the City Daily Photo blogs. On the first of January, the DP bloggers post their best photo from the year before. Here's a link to thumbnails.

Books I Read This Year

I only read 40 books this year. That's not even one a week. I hope to make it to at least 52 next year. The links in the list below are to my reviews. (I messed up the numbering in my posts; I think the list below is accurate.)

1. Crazy Love, by Francis Chan
2. Night Over Water, by Ken Follett
3. The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway
4. Fire, by Kristin Cashore
5. Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way, by Shauna Niequist
6. The Dreamer, by Pam Muñoz Ryan
7. Confusion, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
8. Casting Off, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
9. Someone Like You, by Sarah Dessen
10. Walking, by Henry David Thoreau
11. Fire From Heaven, by Mary Renault
12. The Persian Boy, by Mary Renault
13. Funeral Games, by Mary Renault
14. My daughter's 2010 NaNoWriMo novel
15. The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding
16. Scat, by Carl Hiaasen
17. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, by Helen Simonson
18. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
19. Flies on the Butter, by Denise Hildreth
20. Birds Without Wings, by Louis de Bernières
21. Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer
22. The Red Queen, by Philippa Gregory
23. The Last Time They Met, by Anita Shreve
24. Time for Meaning: Crafting Literate Lives in Middle and High School, by Randy Bomer
25. Okay for Now, by Gary Schmidt
26. Shooting Kabul, by N.H. Senzai
27. Red Kayak, by Priscilla Cummings
28. Truth and Consequences, by Alison Lurie
29. Leo and the Lesser Lion, by Sandra Forrester
30. Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, by Lizzie Skurnick
31. The Glorious Ones, by Francine Prose
32. Private Practices, by Stephen White
33. A Theory of Relativity, by Jacquelyn Mitchard
34. The True History of Paradise, by Margaret Cezair-Thompson
35. Mothers and Other Liars, by Amy Bourret
36. Surviving the Applewhites, by Stephanie S. Tolan
37. The Nine Rights of Every Writer, by Vicki Spandel
38. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, by Edwidge Danticat
39. Love, by Marie Vieux-Chauvet
40. Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, by Rob Bell

As always, it was fun for me to go through this list and remember what was going on at the time when I read each of these books, as well as how each of the books affected me. But really, this was a bit of a lackluster reading year. Here's to more literary delight in 2012!

Reading Update

I'm getting ready to compile my list of everything I read this year, but there are several on my list that I've never blogged about.

Book #40 was The Nine Rights of Every Writer, by Vicki Spandel. I had read this one before and I think it is a wonderfully encouraging book for anyone who is using the Writer's Workshop method of teaching writing. Spandel reminds me why I do what I do.

"Our goal as teachers should not be to fill the world with perfect text, or even acceptable text. Our goal should be to take students to such a place of comfort with writing that they will persist through three pages of random thought to an emerging clarity on page four because they have not one shred of doubt they will get there. After all, only nonwriters fear failure. Writers know clutter and roadblocks and random thinking are all part of the process."

This is the kind of book I want to read every year, as long as I'm teaching.

Book #41 was Edwidge Danticat's Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. This is a series of essays about reading and writing as a Haitian. This is another book that needs to be read many times. Here's a piece that stuck with me particularly. Danticat is talking about where she gets material - like any artist, from her life. In this passage she's having a conversation with her aunt about a family scandal.

"'People talk,' Tante Zi went on. 'They say that everything they say to you ends up written down somewhere.'

Because she was my elder, my beloved aunt, I bowed my head in shame, wishing I could apologize for that, but the immigrant artist, like all other artists, is a leech and I needed to latch on. I wanted to quote the French poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé and tell her that everything in the world exists to end up in a book. I wanted to ask her forgiveness for the essay that in my mind I was already writing. The most I could do, however, was to promise her not to use her real name or Marius's."

One of the things Danticat does in Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work is to write about Haitian literature and how it has affected her. One of her recommendations is the three books contained in one volume called Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Trilogy, by Marie Vieux-Chauvet. Book #42 was the first of the trilogy, Love. I found it way too intense, and while I intend to go back and read the other two books, I need a break first. This scene from the first few pages of the book gives an idea of the kind of fevered atmosphere that pervades it:

"Jean Luze held my chin and looked into my eyes. I'm afraid he'll hear the disordered beating of my heart. He is tall and I barely reach his shoulder. I would like him to lean and take me in his arms to carry me very far away. Such is the incurable romantic that slumbers in all old maids!

We offer some cake to Augustine, the maid. The house is festive.

'Put on a record, Jean,' Annette proposes. 'The screaming just ruins everything.'

The screams waft from the jail. Horrible, unsexed droning.

'Calédu is having a bit of fun,' M. Long exclaims with a jowl-shaking chortle. (His accent adds a childish note to his cruel remark.)

'A peculiar way to have fun, don't you think?' Jean Luze asks him with a strange, almost hostile, smile.

'Oh, you know, I say to each his own. And anyway, you would have to be insane to try to change anything around here.'"

I will blog more about this trilogy after I finish reading the second and third books.

Book #43 was Rob Bell's controversial Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. I really like Bell's preaching but liked the book less. The warm, discursive way he speaks doesn't work as well in print, especially when he's trying to build an argument. I read this book with a friend, whom I shall call Reading Buddy (hereinafter, RB). We wanted to see if we agreed with what we were reading, that Bell was a heretic, in relation to traditional, orthodox (small o) Christianity. RB did use the H word more than once as we read. It turns out that I have a higher tolerance for heresy than RB does. I read lots of this aloud and there was much lively discussion, which is probably the way the book is best experienced. I found a great deal to love in the book, and RB, less so. I loved the poetic way Bell approaches scripture; RB didn't love the enormous leaps of logic and snorted frequently as I read certain passages. I read on my Kindle, but RB's paper copy was full of highlighting, large flocks of exclamation marks and question marks. Conclusion: I am not willing to call Bell a heretic. He's asking questions which many Christians have asked through the ages. RB is also not willing to call him a heretic, but feels that some of his statements border on heresy. And both of us liked the last chapter. Here's how it ends:

"Love is why I've written this book, and love is what I want to leave you with.

May you experience this vast, expansive, infinite, indestructible love that has been yours all along. May you discover that this love is as wide as the sky and as small as the cracks in your heart no one else knows about. And may you know, deep in your bones, that love wins."

Amen. Love really does win. Rob and I, and RB and I, might not agree on all the details, but love wins. Praise God for that.

Poetry Friday: Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks

I am joining Poetry Friday late today because we have been driving home from the beach (where, by the way, we had such a great time). In honor of the beach, and also because my daughter gave me a book of Pablo Neruda poetry for Christmas (I read some of these poems aloud while we were at the beach and we joked about how many of them contained the word "naked"), I offer this mermaid poem, followed by a video with Ethan Hawke reading the poem. The text and video have two different translations. I believe the one on the video is the same as what I have in my book, by Alastair Reid. I don't know who did the other translation.



Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks
by Pablo Neruda

All those men were there inside,
when she came in totally naked.
They had been drinking: they began to spit.
Newly come from the river, she knew nothing.
She was a mermaid who had lost her way.
The insults flowed down her gleaming flesh.
Obscenities drowned her golden breasts.
Not knowing tears, she did not weep tears.
Not knowing clothes, she did not have clothes.
They blackened her with burnt corks and cigarette stubs,
and rolled around laughing on the tavern floor.
She did not speak because she had no speech.
Her eyes were the colour of distant love,
her twin arms were made of white topaz.
Her lips moved, silent, in a coral light,
and suddenly she went out by that door.
Entering the river she was cleaned,
shining like a white stone in the rain,
and without looking back she swam again
swam towards emptiness, swam towards death.

Pablo Neruda




Mermaids in Haiti have vodou connections, but the one in this poem is simply a beautiful, ethereal being who is not understood by the boorish people around her. Like many of the poems in my new book, Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, this one is mysterious but lovely.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: Messiah (Christmas Portions)

A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I went to a performance of parts of the Messiah. The music was so beautiful and reminded me of how artists can show us realities of which we aren't normally aware. I loved the way this poem expressed that idea, and also how the music can transform the performers into something more than they were. Follow the link at the end of my excerpt to see how that happens.

Messiah (Christmas Portions)
By Mark Doty

A little heat caught
in gleaming rags,
in shrouds of veil,
torn and sun-shot swaddlings:

over the Methodist roof,
two clouds propose a Zion
of their own, blazing
(colors of tarnish on copper)

against the steely close
of a coastal afternoon, December,
while under the steeple
the Choral Society

prepares to perform
Messiah, pouring, in their best
blacks and whites, onto the raked stage.
Not steep, really,

but from here,
the first pew, they’re a looming
cloudbank of familiar angels:
that neighbor who

fights operatically
with her girlfriend, for one,
and the friendly bearded clerk
from the post office

—tenor trapped
in the body of a baritone? Altos
from the A&P, soprano
from the T-shirt shop:

today they’re all poise,
costume and purpose
conveying the right note
of distance and formality.

Here's the rest of the poem. And here's today's roundup.

Read This

I just read this beautiful post about the incarnation. An excerpt:

"The divinity of God is on display at Christmas in beautiful creche scenes. We sing songs of babies who don’t cry. We mistake quiet for peace. A properly antiseptic and church-y view of birth, arranged as high art to convey the seriousness and sacredness of the incarnation. It is as though the truth of birth is too secular for Emmanuel, it doesn’t look too holy in its real state. So the first days of the God-with-us requires the dignity afforded by our editing.

But this? This creating out of passion and love, the carrying, the seemingly-never-ending-waiting, the knitting-together-of-wonder-in-secret-places, the pain, the labour, the blurred line between joy and “someone please make it stop,” the “I can’t do it” even while you’re in the doing of it, the delivery of new life in blood and hope and humanity?"

Best YA Books of 2011

I always enjoy reading the best-of lists that come out at the end of the year. Here's one from NPR, the best YA books of the year. I haven't read any of them, and only one has shown up in my classroom during self-selected reading time. I'll have to look into these...

Christmas is Coming...

Here's what Shauna says here:

"The irony, of course, must not be lost on us: a season that is, at its heart, a love story, a story about faith and fragility, angels, a baby, a star--that sweet, simply beautiful story gets lost so easily in a jarring, toxic tangle of sugar and shopping bags and rushing and parking lots and expectations."

This is really not something I have trouble with; this is why I love Christmas in Haiti. There's no pressure. It's a time to relax, to hang out with friends and family, to go to the beach. And tomorrow is the first day of vacation!

This is Absolutely None of my Business...But Here's What I Think

No, it's not my business that Michelle Duggar had a miscarriage. But I always feel a pang of sadness when I hear about a woman miscarrying, however early or late in pregnancy. I lost a baby to miscarriage very early in my second pregnancy, and was shaken by it in a way that surprised me with its intensity.

You could say that the Duggars have made their business our business by conducting their lives on television. I have never watched their show, spent any time on their website, or paid much attention to them. I have a friend who watches the show and she informs me that Michelle is a very patient and calm mother who never yells at her kids, even though she has nineteen of them. I have two kids and I highly doubt anyone would describe me that way, so I have to respect Michelle's character for that reason alone. All of this to say that I don't have any opinion on the Duggars or their lifestyle.

I read this blog post first, in which Rachel Stone writes:

The Duggars will always have their critics. But they are people—not a circus, not a freak show, not an ideology. So while I may work out my understanding of Christianity very differently from them, I refuse to believe that there’s nothing I can learn from them; that their concerns and griefs and joys—their stories—are so very different from mine.

I very much agree with this.

Next I read about the Duggars having a funeral for their baby and distributing photos that they had taken. A headline suggested that there was some criticism of them, and Google helped me find a nasty article, which perhaps is only what one could expect from a website called Gawker. (I was going to include the link, but decided not to, because it's unnecessarily rude and uses abusive language. If you want to read it, Google can help you find it, too.) It says that it is not normal to take pictures of a miscarried child (it uses the word "fetus," of course), and recommends retroactively that the Duggars should have stopped having children a long time ago. You can't miss the difference between the horrible tone of the Gawker article and the tender love expressed here, in a letter Michelle wrote to her baby and read aloud on her website.

But the real impetus for this post was reading Katie Allison Granju's take on the story here. Katie herself lost a child recently; her eighteen year old son died of complications from a drug-related assault. Katie has been criticized too, like Michelle, for dealing with her grief in her own way. Her post talks about the way Victorians grieved and about how our culture doesn't have rituals for grieving a lost child. The whole post is very much worth reading. Here's one little snippet:

The fact that those photos of Jubilee Duggar’s little foot and hand might make other people uncomfortable – people who didn’t just have their child die – isn’t the point. Memorial rituals and grief traditions are about helping the parents whose child has just died feel comforted and supported. They’re not about pleasing the rest of us, or about conforming to how we would do it, or about conforming to funerary rites that we would prefer. In fact, expressing our own preferences or tastes in criticizing the way another parent chooses to memorialize her recently dead child strikes me as being in far worse taste than anything the bereaved parent might have done.

I wrote in the first paragraph about how I lost a baby to miscarriage very early in pregnancy. I chose to tell people about it. Many women and even some men shared with me about their own experiences. My brother-in-law wrote me an email saying that he imagined their miscarried children playing in heaven with mine. (Michelle expresses a similar idea in her letter, linked above.) Do you find that creepy? It comforted me. I felt supported by people who had been through miscarriage and come out on the other side. I also chose to name my baby, though I haven't shared the name with very many people. I didn't know the sex of the baby but I thought of her as a girl. I had seen her beating heart on an ultrasound and she was very real to me, a child who was already part of our family. I grieved for my baby for a long time. A few weeks after her due date I started to come out of the fog but thinking about that experience still makes me sad.

Of course, not every woman grieves as intensely as I did for an early miscarriage. That's fine, too. Everyone is different. After the earthquake, I felt a lot of impatience with myself and even shame for the way I grieved, and I have come to accept that it's not wrong or weak to feel what you feel (can you tell I went to counseling?). Grief is not predictable, and it's very personal.

I'm very sorry for Michelle Duggar's loss. I find it completely normal to want to take a picture of her baby. I don't think the pictures are in bad taste. (Tweeting them probably was, but that's another issue. Katie's post says that after a teenaged relative Tweeted the pictures, the Duggars chose to post them on their own site. Apparently they were intended just for the family and for those at the funeral.) And I think both Rachel Stone and Katie Granju are right, that we all just need to be a whole lot kinder. Surely everyone can agree with that.

Planning for Next Year

I'm writing lesson plans for next year, and feeling unexpectedly weepy, and then realizing that it shouldn't be unexpected. Here's what I wrote this time last year as I struggled to plan for January, one year after the earthquake. I'm looking at last year's plans, and I see how I followed my friend's advice; instead of writing the dates, I wrote "Week 1" and "Week 2." This year is much easier than last, but perhaps those first weeks of January will continue for a long time to have special, terrifying significance for me, and for all of us here in Haiti.

Poetry Friday: Madeleine L'Engle

Christmas is coming. I'm not ready, but as Madeleine L'Engle reminds us, neither was the world.

First Coming

He did not wait till the world was ready,
till men and nations were at peace
He came when the Heavens were unsteady
and prisoners cried out for release.

He did not wait for the perfect time.
He came when the need was deep and great.
He died with sinners in all their grime,
turned water into wine. He did not wait

till hearts were pure. In joy he came
to a tarnished world of sin and doubt.
To a world like ours, of anguished shame
He came, and his Light would not go out.

He came to a world which did not mesh,
to heal its tangles, shield its scorn.
In the mystery of the Word made Flesh
the Maker of the stars was born.

We cannot wait till the world is sane
to raise our songs with joyful voice,
for to share our grief, to touch our pain,
He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!

Here's today's roundup.

Poetry Friday: Keats and Me

Yesterday's Poem of the Day from the Academy of American Poets was Keats' "In Drear Nighted December." (You can subscribe to the Poem of the Day email here.) Thankfully I don't live in a cold climate. I have been cold enough with our temperatures dipping down into the lower seventies the last few nights. Brr. But what interested me most about this poem was the last stanza.


In drear nighted December
by John Keats

In drear nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity—
The north cannot undo them
With a sleety whistle through them
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.

In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne'er remember
Apollo's summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting
About the frozen time.

Ah! would 'twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy—
But were there ever any
Writh'd not of passed joy?
The feel of not to feel it,
When there is none to heal it
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.


I liked Keats' suggestion that this feeling - the idea of forgetting and simply not missing times of happiness in the past, the way nature seems to do - is one that hasn't ever been expressed in poetry. He says that's because human beings are always missing the past. "The feel of not to feel it." What a great line. That made me think about other feelings that poetry may not chronicle.

I have often had experiences that felt as though they were unique to me, something that nobody could ever express in writing. One of the delights of reading, whether prose or poetry, is finding kindred spirits who have expressed those thoughts and feelings I thought were mine alone.

Not much has been expressed by me in writing lately, since I'm knee-deep in grading. Yesterday, though, I wrote this poem:


Sometimes

Sometimes you're trying to sleep
And there's a poem buzzing around the room,
Whining in your ear,
"Get up and write me,
You know I won't be here any more if you wait until morning."

And sometimes you're trying to read your students' papers
And there's a poem jumping up and down
Shouting, "Write me now,
Put that down and pay attention!"

And sometimes you're trying to wash dishes
And a poem bubbles up from the water,
Splashes your face,
Giggles.

And sometimes, you sit down to write a poem,
And those poems that have been bugging you
All night and all day,
Whining, shouting, giggling,
Are quiet.

They have nothing to say now
That you have turned your attention to them.
But - quick! Look out the corner of your eye
And sometimes you can see one
Playing hide and seek.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com


I'm looking forward to the Christmas vacation for many reasons, and one of those reasons is that I'll have the chance to do some writing. Meanwhile, I soldier on, grading and grading and grading.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: Heart to Heart

I love how Rita Dove plays with cliches in this poem, and how the heart is in some ways altogether tougher than we thought, and in others just as vulnerable as we supposed.



Heart to Heart
By Rita Dove

It's neither red
nor sweet.
It doesn't melt
or turn over,
break or harden,
so it can't feel
pain,
yearning,
regret.

It doesn't have
a tip to spin on,
it isn't even
shapely—
just a thick clutch
of muscle,
lopsided,
mute.

Here's the rest.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.