Poetry Friday: Stained Glass Windows

Photo Source 

When I visited Chartres Cathedral, our guide told us about a blue pigment that was used during the Middle Ages for stained glass and to which the secret is now lost. Chartres blue is well-known for its clarity and, well, blue-ness.  (You can see it in the photo above.)  I remembered that story about Chartres blue when I wrote this poem almost a year ago. I thought about the poem this week when I was ruminating on people who help me write.

Reader

Writer, you have a single need: a reader.
Someone who can see into your mind
As though your words were stained glass windows.
Someone who can see the whole picture
But also the details:
The red, the green, the yellow
And sometimes, that lost Chartres blue.
Someone who thinks your window
Belongs in a cathedral.
Someone who is willing to use a little Windex
When the windows are smudged.
You don't need to be on the New York Times bestseller list.
You just need one person who pays attention,
Someone who reads with love.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

 Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

And don't forget to check out the latest line in the Progressive Poem.  Heidi has given us a wonderful post, explaining her thought processes and introducing her daughter, who sounds like she would get along great with mine.  You can see all of that here.

Line Nineteen

Here's the nineteenth line!

Line Eighteen

Hooray! The progressive poem is visiting Amy on the farm!

Writing in Community

I used to think that writing was an entirely solitary occupation. I wrote alone, and nobody could see what I wrote before it was finished; often, I didn't even share it when I was done. I journaled obsessively. For a while as a child I even used a secret code. And it wasn't as though there were deep secrets I was keeping, either; writing was just intensely private to me. School made me competitive about any public writing I did. I entered contests. I wrote essays and tried to be the best.

A few years ago, I became involved with a public health project. I had to do a lot of research on a subject almost entirely new to me, write a summary of the current state of thought and the major studies that had been done, and present all of this succinctly. I worked online with someone living in the United States. Both of us read articles, which went zipping back and forth between countries. Later, the drafts of my talk did the same, back and forth, changing a word here and there, refocusing, arguing, collaborating.

I was amazed how much I enjoyed this whole process. Far from being solitary, this writing project was a joint effort. I found it exciting. I was being stretched and growing. Partly this was due to the new information I was learning, but part of it was the fun of writing with someone else.

This was a different kind of writing from what I was used to doing, and yet I have come to see that there is room for all kinds of writing relationships, in all kinds of writing. While much of what I do is still solitary when I write, I find myself being much less secretive, competitive, and -- yes -- stingy about it.

I'm much more aware than I used to be of the Great Conversation. I'm never creating ex nihilo; only God does that. (Here are some of Robbie's thoughts on that.) I'm inspired by conversations, stories others tell, photos, other writers' work.

I'm also more aware of audience than I used to be, and, I think, in a much healthier way. I don't care as much as I used to about whether anybody publishes what I write, or whether everyone in the world loves it. Last week I was invited to read some of my poems to a ninth grade class. I enjoyed reading so much, and felt such a rush from it. Afterward the teacher thanked me and said she'd enjoyed what I'd shared. My daughter said she liked it, too. But in general, I didn't get a bunch of accolades. And I was fine with that. I felt a satisfaction in my work that didn't depend on whether anybody else liked it or not. At the same time, I want it to communicate, and I'm blessed to have certain Ideal Readers who can tell me whether I've succeeded, criticizing me and yet reading with love.

I've been interested to read lately about the Civil Wars, the two-person band. Joy Williams and John Paul White write and sing together. People often assume they are romantically involved, but both are happily married to other people. Here's a quote from an article on their website.

"White and Williams met in 2008 on what he describes as a 'blind date, getting stuck in a room together, not knowing anything about each other.' This was a strictly professional blind date. As Williams recalls, 'I got a call for what's called a writing camp, where several writers were called together to work on trying to write several radio singles for a particular country band. Though I live in Nashville, I worked mostly in L.A. and came more out of the pop world, so I was like, why did they call me? John Paul definitely wasn't bringing a Music Row sensibility in when he was coming into the write, either, but neither of us knew that about each other. In that room, it was almost 20 writers, basically drawing straws and getting to know each other a little bit. And when he started singing, I somehow knew where he was heading musically and could follow him, without ever having met him before. And that had never happened to me.'

'I've done lots of co-writes and collaborative situations, but I'd never felt that weird spark,' agrees White —'that weird familiarity like we'd been in a family band or something most of our lives. The beautiful part of it was that neither one of us would let on, so we both played it cool for a while, saying "That went well, we should write another," and so on. I worked up enough nerve to—so to speak—ask her out. But there was a lot of scuffing my heel on the floor and 'I don't know what you're doing for a while, but I've got this guitar, and you sing pretty good, but you probably don't want to. You're so much better than I am. Never mind. I'm just gonna go." Luckily she felt the same way.'"

I am fascinated by the descriptions I've read of the way White and Williams work together. They are true collaborators. The introduction to their book reads, in part: "We don't pretend to know what brought us to this place, but we're thankful to have found a musical comrade to help us chase the Muse."

Here's to writing in community, whether it's in games like the progressive poem (here it is today), or with those people around me who are inspirations, readers (whether Ideal or not), collaborators, chasers of the Muse. Writing isn't nearly as solitary as I used to think.

Line Seventeen

The poem continues here.

Line Sixteen

The poem continues its journey, and here's line sixteen, at Wading Through Words. I love it.

Progressive Poem - Day 15

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

Look at the company I'm joining as I add my line today to the progressive poem! I'm honored to be included. I've enjoyed watching the poem develop, and anticipated my day with excitement but also fear. I asked my family for advice, and they weren't much help. My daughter's suggestion was "Suddenly, Ninjas!" The conversation deteriorated from there.

As I read and reread what is in the poem so far, I see a theme of togetherness, a group. Maybe it's because the poem is a collaborative effort that I'm thinking that way, but look: "Sit with us." "Let's riddle it together." The drying of tears and sharing of wine (filling, then pouring) are not done in solitude. We're figuring out secrets in a little huddle, not by ourselves. And the frozen fingers are those of the band, playing together, not a soloist. So my line continues in that vein. I added a question to the riddle, going back to Morocco and the spices. A tagine, I learned, is both the cookware and the stew. (It's two syllables, and the g is soft.) You can read more about it here.

But I'm talking too much. I do that when I'm nervous. Here's the poem. (Hope you like it hope you like it hope you like it!)


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

A hanky, here, now dry your tears
And fill your glass with wine
Now, pour. The parchment has secrets
Smells of a Moroccan market spill out.

You have come to the right place, just breathe in.
Honey, mint, cinnamon, sorrow. Now, breathe out
last week’s dreams. Take a wish from the jar.
Inside, deep inside, is the answer…

Unfold it, and let us riddle it together,
...Strains of a waltz. How do frozen fingers play?
How do fennel, ginger, saffron blend in the tagine?

Photo source and link to recipe

Line Fourteen

Here's the fourteenth line. Tomorrow I add to the poem. I'll be pondering all day. Here it is so far:

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

A hanky, here, now dry your tears
And fill your glass with wine
Now, pour. The parchment has secrets
Smells of a Moroccan market spill out.

You have come to the right place, just breathe in.
Honey, mint, cinnamon, sorrow. Now, breathe out
last week’s dreams. Take a wish from the jar.
Inside, deep inside, is the answer…

Unfold it, and let us riddle it together,
...Strains of a waltz. How do frozen fingers play?

Poetry Friday: Yellow Dress

Photo Credit

I'm enjoying the Progressive Poem (here's today's line), and it's got me thinking about how I usually write a poem. It's so different to be working with many sensibilities instead of just one. Usually my poems come entirely from my own brain, my own digesting of what's going on around and in me. Nobody else could write exactly what I do, in exactly the way I do.

Those ruminations made me think of my yellow dress. This poem comes from a memory that nobody else shares (except maybe Michelle, whom you'll meet in the second line). I found a picture of a yellow dress to illustrate the post, but the point is really the dream quality of the dress and all it's come to represent to me in those many (ahem) years since that summer afternoon.


Yellow Dress

One July afternoon in Paris
Michelle and I went into a little shop
and I tried on a yellow dress.

(I had a backpack full of
my Carte Orange and
my book of All the French Verbs Ever and
probably some poetry.
And, of course, a bunch of cliches.
I put down my backpack
to try on that dress.)

What a silky, flattering dress it was
and Michelle encouraged me to buy it
but I didn't
because it cost too much.

Probably my life would have been different
if I'd bought that dress.
I would have been beautiful
and irresistible
and my boyfriend would never have left me.
I would have worn sweatpants a lot less often
and taken better care of my skin
and not cried so much.

If I had bought that yellow dress
I bet I would be taller
and more confident
and weigh twenty pounds less.
I would be a better cook
and not so emotional
and I would wear cooler shoes.
I would write clear, incisive, convincing prose.
I would never yell at my children.
I would be altogether smoother
and more polished.

I looked great in that dress
(of course I was nineteen and hadn't had any babies yet)
and if I had bought it
(of course by now it would be faded by the tropical sun)
I would be a goddess
(of course I would have given it away years ago).

Sometimes I think about the lovely me I left behind
when I walked out of the store,
saying goodbye to that dress.
That was a yellow dress from Paris.
That was a perfect summer afternoon.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Line Thirteen

Here's the thirteenth line, along with a bunch of other goodies. I will be back later with a Poetry Friday post. Happy Friday the 13th!

Line Twelve

Here's the twelfth line!

Line Eleven

Isn't it fun seeing all the blogs where the progressive poem is traveling? Here's the eleventh line, as the poem makes a stopover at the home of Book Aunt. Just a few more days before it visits me!

Line Ten

Ohhhh, I'm loving the tenth line of the progressive poem...

Easter Eggs

Last year I posted on Facebook about my Easter egg fail. I didn't have any vinegar, and then I couldn't find the egg dye or any food coloring. A friend in the States went straight to the store on Easter Monday and bought up a stack of Easter egg dye left on the shelves. It took a while to get here, but it didn't matter, because there was a whole year before I'd need it. Now I'm set for the next five years, at least, unless I take up dyeing twelve dozen, like my Salvation Army officer friend, V., did this year.

So we colored eggs. See how imperfect they are? When you peel the shell off to eat them, the dye has seeped through the cracks in lovely patterns. For a mom like me, who can't even get organized enough to have the supplies on hand, and isn't dyeing eggs for hordes of orphans like saintly V. is, these eggs speak of grace and mercy. Friends who help me out, color that makes life beautiful in spite of the messes I make. A God who entered history, died on a cross, rose from the grave. Resurrection, an Easter morning when friends trudged to a garden to prepare the brutalized body of their loved master, only to find that everything that had seemed irretrievably lost and broken and destroyed suddenly was dazzlingly new and strange and incomprehensibly glorious. Not comfortable, necessarily; change never is. I imagine it's not comfortable for the caterpillar to become a butterfly.

There are still many cracks in Haiti, many broken places - and not just here. Creation groans, everywhere. But the resurrection is real. Thank God for that.

Line Nine

Hooray! Here's the ninth line of the progressive poem!

Line Eight

Here's the eighth line. Can't wait for the ninth!

Leaving Haiti, Leaving Japan

On my computer I keep a file called "Blog Ideas." For two years now there's been a question in that file. "Was it right to leave Haiti?" Even now, twenty-six months after the earthquake, I still feel deeply conflicted about our family's decision (really, my husband's decision) for the children and me to go to the States on the Saturday after that Tuesday, January 12th, 2010. I agonized about it here on this blog many times, and in private many more times. My friends and family got tired of hearing about it, I'm sure. And everyone has moved on, including, most of the time, me. I don't think as much as I used to about the way I abandoned my post, jumped ship, hopped in a plane and flew to safety.

Nobody ever criticized me for leaving Haiti; most people told me I had been right to do it. The woman who works in my home cried, and later when I spoke to her on the phone from the US, she told me that someone had asked her why I had left, and she had told them that I was afraid. That hurt a lot, but she didn't mean it to; she didn't think it was foolish to be afraid, although she never seemed to be.

My family and I have been in Haiti a long time, and there have been other occasions when many foreigners have been evacuated; each time, we stayed. I didn't realize until after the earthquake how much pride I took in staying. I didn't fault others for leaving; usually it wasn't even their decision, since organizations they worked for made the call. But I felt that I was somehow steadfast, trustworthy. During the political unrest in 2004 when the country erupted in chaos, a friend was robbed at gunpoint and the police didn't even answer the phone, and we spent days listening to the radio as people called in and described the destruction of their homes and property, I wondered whether staying had been the right thing to do. But that week our relationships with those in our neighborhood strengthened, as we stood on the street in little groups discussing what we should do, offering help, exchanging phone numbers.

After the earthquake it was different. But also not so different. Those who stayed gained stronger relationships and many great stories to tell in exchange for the fear, lack of sleep, and shortages. Those of us who left will never fully understand all that the steadfast experienced, no matter how much we try. And in some ways I still regret leaving. I wish I could have been here in solidarity with my Haitian friends and colleagues. In other ways, I know that leaving was the right thing to do. I won't go into all the reasons why, to justify myself, make myself feel better. We did what we thought was right at the time. I gained stronger relationships too, and became a different person in many ways. I came to a greater awareness of God's love for me. All of those things I have written about many times.

Today I read this article by American Anna Kunnecke, who lived in Japan most of her life and who left it after the earthquake of 2011. So many of her words ring true to me.

"There’s a strange thing that happens when you feel connected to a place that doesn’t love you back. It takes on a kind of hold over you, like the haunting presence of an unrequited love. ... Right after the earthquake, people posted on Facebook about ‘standing strong’ with Japan, differentiating themselves from flighty folk like me who jumped ship. I admire their fortitude. They are beautifully living up to the Japanese ideal of ‘gambare,’ which is an untranslatable concept that includes doing your best but also means gritting your teeth quietly no matter what, even if they are operating on you without anesthesia. Nothing the WSJ could call me, and nothing my friends could post on Facebook, was worse than the words in my own mind: Traitor. Coward. Deserter. ... But when I began to mourn, when the silent keening started up inside, another voice hissed in rebuke. How dare I feel bereft? I didn’t lose my house in the tsunami, and my loved ones were all alive and safe. Everything I lost, I walked away from."

I came back to Haiti, after only six months away. Anna Kunnecke has chosen to remain in the United States and seems to have made peace with leaving her home in Japan. But I think both of us will always think about those days, those decisions, and how our lives were changed.

Line Seven

Penny has the seventh line of the progressive poem here. Mysterious! I'm wondering what's next!

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.