Poetry Friday: Judgment of Paris

I love teaching Greek mythology to my eighth graders.  Every year we read a retelling of the Iliad together, and every year I am reminded of what a great story it is.  We just finished this year's reading, and I shared some poems with the kids based on the stories we'd read, including part of "The Judgment of Paris," by W.S. Merwin.  As we read it, the students identified each of the three finalists in the beauty contest that poor hapless Paris is required by the gods to judge.  Each offers Paris a bribe to choose her, but wisdom and power are a bit too abstract for him.  Not so the third offer: the most beautiful woman in the world.  I love how the poem ends, showing how Paris' decision has set in motion a whole series of events which nothing will be able to change.

it was only when he reached out to the voice
as though he could take the speaker
herself
that his hand filled with
something to give
but to give to only one of the three
an apple as it is told
discord itself in a single fruit its skin
already carved
To the fairest

then a mason working above the gates of Troy
in the sunlight thought he felt the stone
shiver

in the quiver on Paris’s back the head
of the arrow for Achilles’ heel
smiled in its sleep

and Helen stepped from the palace to gather
as she would do every day in that season
from the grove the yellow ray flowers tall
as herself

whose roots are said to dispel pain

Here's the whole poem.

What choices that we'll make today will affect the course of our lives?  Or maybe even the lives of future generations?  We don't know, of course.  Chances are, they won't be as obviously unusual as a trio of goddesses to choose among.

Irene at Live Your Poem has the roundup today.

Reading Update

Book #24 of the year was Fairest: Lunar Chronicles: Levana's Story, by Marissa Meyer.  Although I've enjoyed this whole series, I found this one hard to read.  We're in the head of such a very unappealing character, both horribly insecure and chronically manipulative.  I could hardly finish it, but I did.

Book #25 was An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, by Barbara Brown Taylor.  This is about how connected our bodies and souls are, and how we can find God in the details of our everyday life.  I enjoyed it and found it thought-provoking.

Book #26 was Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline, by Lauren Winner.  Famously, Winner converted from Judaism to Christianity, and this book is about the aspects of Judaism that she misses in her adopted faith.  I've read several of Winner's books - my favorite is her newest, which I read in December - and liked them all.

Book #27 was Picture Bride, by Yoshiko Uchida.  This was a gift from my husband.  It's the story of a woman who travels from Japan to California in 1917 to marry a man she has never met.  There were many Japanese women who made this journey, and subsequently got caught up in the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two.  This was an intimate and heartbreaking story.

Book #28 was We'll Always Have Summer and book #33 was It's Not Summer Without You, by Jenny Han (yes, I read them in the wrong order - these are books three and two of the trilogy that began with The Summer I Turned Pretty).

Book #29 was Every Living Thing, by Cynthia Rylant, a book of short stories about animals.

Book #30 was The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, by John Boyne.  I'm reading this with my seventh graders right now.  The story is told from the point of view of a naive 9-year-old whose father runs the concentration camp at Auschwitz.  Bruno lives next door to the camp, and befriends a prisoner who is the same age.  Though the book is childishly simple in its style, it packs a wallop.  It's quietly devastating.

Book #31 was A Banquet of Consequences, by Elizabeth George.  I love these novels about Lynley and Havers, mostly because of the character development of the police protagonists.  This one was a particularly difficult case to read about.

Book #32 was Salt to the Sea, by Ruta Sepetys, the third dreadfully depressing book in a row.  This one is about a tragic event in World War Two.  If you read Sepetys' first book, Between Shades of Grey, be prepared for more of the same: doomed protagonists living through unbearable circumstances.  Almost too much, and I really needed the lighter fare of Jenny Han after this.

Book #34 was Rob Bell's new book, How to Be Here.  This was so good, and I am going to read it again immediately.

Book #35 was a devotional that I downloaded and started reading the day it came out, last March 10th.  So yesterday I finished reading it.  The book was Savor: Living Abundantly Where You Are, As You Are by Shauna Niequist.  Although I enjoyed the book, I hadn't realized it was a devotional, and that most of the material was from her previously published books, all of which I had read.  Still, it was presented in a nice format, and I liked reading a bit of it each day through the year. 

Poetry Friday: Enough

This is one of my favorite songs on Sara Groves' latest album, "Floodplain."  I wish I could link you to a video, but I can't find one.  You can go to iTunes and listen to a sample of the song.  It's beautiful.

Enough
by Sara Groves

Late nights, long hours
Questions are drawn like a thin red line
No comfort left over
No safe harbor in sight

Really we don’t need much
Just strength to believe
There’s honey in the rock,
There’s more than we see
In these patches of joy
These stretches of sorrow
There’s enough for today
There will be enough tomorrow

Upstairs a child is sleeping
What a light in our strain and stress
We pray without speaking
Lord help us wait in kindness

Really we don’t need much
Just strength to believe
There’s honey in the rock,
There’s more than we see
In these patches of joy
These stretches of sorrow
There’s enough for today
There will be enough tomorrow

Here's today's roundup. 

Poetry Friday: What You Have To Get Over

I was looking up poems on aging yesterday, since this is my birthday week, in preparation for today's post.  As I scrolled, my husband walked into my classroom and gave me some life-changing news.  After that I don't really remember what happened. 

(Everybody is alive and well, and the news is about my husband's job.  So it's not life or death.  Don't worry.  We will be OK.)

This poem is included by the Poetry Foundation website under the category of "Growing Old," and that's pretty appropriate, since what is growing old other than getting over a whole series of things?

What You Have to Get Over 

by Dick Allen

Stumps. Railroad tracks. Early sicknesses,

the blue one, especially.

Your first love rounding a corner,

that snowy minefield.

 

Whether you step lightly or heavily,

you have to get over to that tree line a hundred yards in the distance

before evening falls,

letting no one see you wend your way,

 

that wonderful, old-fashioned word, wend,

meaning “to proceed, to journey,

to travel from one place to another,”

as from bed to breakfast, breakfast to imbecile work.

 

Here's the rest of the poem. 

 

Wend your way over to today's roundup here.

Reading Update

Book #13 of 2016 was The Sleeper and the Spindle, by Neil Gaiman.  My daughter called it "slight," and she was right.  In fact, it's really more of a picture book, but I didn't realize that when I downloaded it onto my Kindle for my trip.

Book #14 was What You Left Behind, by Jessica Verdi.  This is YA fare, the story of Ryden, whose girlfriend Meg died of cancer because she stopped her chemo treatment when she got pregnant with Ryden's baby.  Now Ryden is raising Hope with no help from Meg's parents (I found this a little hard to believe), and trying to figure out how to move on with his life, which he is managing to complicate in various ways.

Book #15 was A Travelogue of the Interior: Finding Your Voice and God's Heart in the Psalms, by Karen Dabaghian.  This is one woman's story of reading the Psalms and writing her own, in the process learning more about God and about herself.

Book #16 was Magonia, by Maria Dahvana Headley.  Aza Ray is a teenager who struggles with living on the earth, and she finds out why when she starts to hallucinate a ship in the sky that turns out not to be a hallucination.  Aza is from somewhere else, and she has to adjust to that idea and decide how she's going to negotiate her two worlds.  This has been compared to Laini Taylor's books, and I think that comparison is very apt.  The sequel to this comes out this year, and I'll definitely read it.

Book #17 was The Summer I Turned Pretty, by Jenny Han.  The title says it all.  Belly (Isabelle) turns pretty.  She does it in a beautiful setting, a beach house with boys she's grown up with.  This would have been completely irresistible to me when I was a teenager.  It's fairly forgettable, but there are some nice portrayals of relationships.

Book #18 was Secrets in the Dark, by Frederick Buechner, a collection of many of his sermons.  I love Buechner and the way he turns a phrase.

Book #19 was Learning to Walk in the Dark, by Barbara Brown Taylor.  I thought this was a beautiful book, and I downloaded another of hers right away.  It's about navigating darkness, not being afraid of it, and trusting that God's presence is there just as much as it is in the light.

Book #20 was If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino.  I read this because one of my daughter's classes was going to be discussing it on the night I visited.  I found it a combination of brilliant and "too clever by half."

Book #21 was P.S. I Still Love You, by Jenny Han.  This was the sequel to To All the Boys I've Loved Before, which was my seventh book this year.  More YA stuff about boys and love, with Korean protagonists.  My students will love it.

Book #22 was The Thing About Jellyfish, by Ali Benjamin.  This book is about loss, and it just aches all the way through.  The main character is so miserable that I could hardly stand it, but I also couldn't put the book down until the end.  A beautiful book.

Book #23 was Someday, Someday, Maybe, by Lauren Graham, the star of "Gilmore Girls."  It's about trying to be an actress in 1995, something Graham may just know something about.

Poetry Friday: The Sun in Bemidji, Minnesota

I had a brief visit to the US last week to visit my daughter, and with it a brief reminder of what winter feels like.  I found this poem saved in my "Poems" folder in my email.  I got it in the Poem-a-Day email from Poets.org back in July, but it's much more appropriate for February.

People in Bemidji, Minnesota, or Chicago, Illinois, hold on!  The sun will be back!


The Sun in Bemidji, Minnesota
Sean Hill

The sun isn’t even a pearl today—
its light diffused, strained gray
by winter haze—this the grayest
day so far, so when I enter the Wells
Fargo parking lot the last thing I expect
is to see the sun in the car next to mine.
I watch a woman make out with the sun,
and I’m jealous of the sun. Beautiful
beyond her desire—wanting the sun
so—she almost glows as she tugs
sweetness from his whiskers with
her teeth, and his drool runs down
her chin. I think the sun is a man,
but it’s hard to tell in this light. No,
it’s a mango, and I’m jealous of her.


(If you go to this link at Poets.org and click on "More" in the top left hand corner of the white space, you can read what Sean Hill wrote about this poem and how he came to write it.)

Here's today's roundup.

How I Learned that Love Can Make You Brave

My OLW for the year is LOVED.  Here's a post about how knowing we are loved makes us brave.

Poetry Friday: Snow on the Desert

I've spent the week with my daughter, going to her classes, hanging out in her dorm room while she did homework, going to an Ash Wednesday service, and, always, freezing.  Although I've loved being with her, I'm dreaming of warmth and longing to return to my tropical island.

I was looking for a poem about snow, and found this one.  It is so very specific, one of my criteria for good writing.  It takes place in New York City and and Tucson and New Delhi.  It involves Serge and Sameetah and Papagos and cacti and Begum Akhtar.  But even though it refers to these intensely personal memories, I could see the snow in the desert, the "dried seas," the silent audience in the darkened nightclub during an air raid in the Bangladesh War, though I have experienced none of them.  I could relate to the themes of loss and elegy and saying goodbye at the airport and the fear of being forgotten. Twice the poet uses the expression "hurting into memory," and yet there's also the sacred wine made from the sap of the saguaros, something beautiful (and presumably delicious) distilled from the sun and the past.

Agha Shahid Ali was from Kashmir, and I had run across him before, while looking for examples of ghazals.  He was a well-known writer of them.  There are some more of his poems at the Poetry Foundation's site, and I put a couple of his books on my wish list, too.  

I was looking for something simple and descriptive that I could post with a snow photo, and this complex, multi-layered meditation on memory and separation was not at all what I had in mind.  And yet, what could be more perfect, as I head to the airport myself this weekend, after a week of making new memories, and say goodbye once more?

Snow on the Desert

By Agha Shahid Ali

“Each ray of sunshine is seven minutes old,”   

Serge told me in New York one December night.

“So when I look at the sky, I see the past?”   

“Yes, Yes," he said. “especially on a clear day.”

On January 19, 1987,

as I very early in the morning

drove my sister to Tucson International,

suddenly on Alvernon and 22nd Street   

the sliding doors of the fog were opened,

and the snow, which had fallen all night, now   

sun-dazzled, blinded us, the earth whitened

out, as if by cocaine, the desert’s plants,   

its mineral-hard colors extinguished,   

wine frozen in the veins of the cactus. 

Here's the rest of the poem.

 And here's today's roundup. 

Poetry Friday: Travel

I'm leaving on a trip today (going to visit my daughter, hurray!), so I have been thinking about travel.  Here's Elizabeth Bishop on the subject.


Questions of Travel
Elizabeth Bishop

...

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.


Here's the rest of the poem.

I'm not anticipating wishing I had stayed at home, though I am expecting to get quite cold.  It's a little more usual to head south for Carnival than north, but I'm dreaming of a white Mardi Gras.

Miss Rumphius has today's roundup.

Reading Update

Book #8 of the year was a recommendation I received in a blog comment.  I had explained that my OLW for this year is LOVED, and a reader mentioned Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World, by Henri Nouwen.  This is one of those books that is going to be important to me.  I read it quickly but I keep going back to it.  "How different," Nouwen writes, "would our life be were we truly able to trust that it multiplied in being given away!  How different would our life be if we could but believe that every little act of faithfulness, every gesture of love, every word of forgiveness, every little bit of joy and peace will multiply and multiply as long as there are people to receive it...and that - even then - there will be leftovers! . . . You and I would dance for joy were we to know truly that we, little people, are chosen, blessed, and broken to become the bread that will multiply itself in the giving."  What a beautiful book.  I will reread it many times, I am sure.

Book #9 was The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean my Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun, by Gretchen Rubin.  I've been reading Rubin's blog and listening to her podcast for a little while, so I decided it was time to read her book.  I enjoyed it very much.  It's quirky, sensible, and full of little ideas that are easy to implement for a happier life.

Book #10 was Jilting the Duke, written by a friend from graduate school under the pseudonym Rachael Miles.  Look at this fun article about how she decided what words she could use in this historical romance.  I enjoyed the book, and have pre-ordered the next one, coming out in May. 

Book #11 was Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba, a verse novel by Margarita Engle.  Many of my students are enjoying reading verse novels - there are so many coming out these days!  This one is about our part of the world, and I think they'll be interested to learn about the journeys of refugees fleeing the Holocaust.  Haiti took in refugees, too, by the way.

Book #12 was For the Love: Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards, by Jen Hatmaker.  I'm discussing it with a group of friends.  Parts of it were a little lite, but it was a quick, entertaining read, and I'm sure the discussion will be fun. 

Poetry Friday: Bougainvillea and Razor Wire

I took this photo in the courtyard of my house, and then I started thinking about the mixed messages sent by the flowers and the barbed wire.

Bougainvillea and Razor wire

The pink flowers say, “Welcome.”

The razor wire says, “Not so fast.”

The razor wire says, “It’s protected here.”

The flowers say, “It’s friendly here.”

The flowers say, “We’re beautiful.”

The razor wire says, “Come close and you’ll regret it.”

The razor wire says, “You might as well just go away.”

The bougainvillea adds, “I have thorns.”

The flowers say, “You belong here.”

The razor wire says, “No you don’t.”

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

The roundup is here today. 

On This Day Six Years Ago

I recently read this article about Facebook's relatively new "On This Day" feature that reminds us of what we were doing on this day last year, two years ago, five years ago, seven years ago.  "We generally think of social media as a tool to make grand announcements and to document important times, but just as often – if not more – it’s just a tin can phone, an avenue by which to toss banal witterings into an uncaring universe. Rather, it’s a form of thinking out loud, of asserting a moment for ourselves on to the noisy face of the world," writes Leigh Alexander.

I get that.  Most of my updates are pretty predictable.  In January, lots of them are smug commentaries on how cozy and warm I am on my tropical island while Stateside friends freeze.  But this year, I've been paying special attention to the updates I wrote six years ago, the year of the earthquake.  Pardon me if I call it "the earthquake," as though there's only one.  For us in Haiti there's only one that is etched in our brains.

Etched in our brains, yes, but it's amazing how many of the little daily details I had forgotten.  This year is the first year that the anniversary falls on a Tuesday, just like the original quake.  Weirdly, it has felt as though this year is an echo of that one.  And the updates on "On This Day" have reinforced that sensation.

Our internet went out when the quake hit, and it wasn't until Thursday the 14th that we were back online.  I had idly checked, not expecting a connection, and when I logged into Facebook I saw that many of our friends had written to us as soon as they heard the news.  Were we OK?  Then when they heard we were alive, through a phone message we were able to get out that night (the phones didn't work either, but someone with us had a US cellphone), people wrote that they were praying for us, that they were with us, that they were waiting to hear from us.  I remember reading those messages on that Thursday.  I remember typing back as fast as I could, sure that the link to the outside world would flicker out, fueled by adrenaline and hardly any sleep.  (The lack of punctuation in my writing testifies to how I was feeling.)  I described sitting in my room and hearing voices outside tell their story again and again, and the words "kraze net," destroyed completely, being repeated.  I wrote about praying outside with our friends who were sleeping there, still too afraid of collapsing concrete to venture back inside.  (I was too afraid too, but I was attempting to sleep inside anyway.)  I wrote about our family decision that the children and I would go to the States for a while, and how torn and guilty and conflicted I felt.  My friends wrote kind messages back.  I know I read them all at the time, but as I read my wall from those days again, it feels as though they are new.  You're doing the right thing, they reassure me.  Were we?  I still don't know.  Telling my counselor about it this year still brought floods of tears.

After we got to the States, six years ago last week, my updates are about putting my children in public school, talking to fellow earthquake refugees on the phone while watching my son play in the snow, and today, translating adoption documents for friends whose tenuous situation with their Haitian children was looking hopeful - perhaps something good was about to come out of the earthquake (it did - many adoptions were sped up in those days).

It's difficult to read "On This Day," because it transports me right back to those terrible moments.  Leigh Alexander's article mentions others feeling the same: "At best there’s some comedy in the idea that you’d appreciate a tender, wistful reflection on the time you took a picture of a snack. At worst, announcements of job loss, photos of happy days with your now-ex, a pet that has died, or a family illness are suddenly unearthed without warning, served into your day along with Facebook’s chirpy, intimate good-day wishes."

But at the same time, I'm glad those memories are there, because in addition to the pain and fear and sadness (and always, the survivor's guilt), there are memories of new friendships, support, God's care and protection of me.  This morning I read a student's post on my wall.  "Hey miss," she had written on this day six years ago, "hope you guys are doing okay."  We weren't, and yet, strangely, we were.  I wrote back to her in the laconic Haitian way: "Nou la."  We're here.  "How about you?"  She didn't answer, then, but I've talked to her many times since, and I'll drop her a note today.  Nou la.  We're still here.  Just like we were On This Day Six Years Ago.

Reading Update

Book #1 of 2016 was Gary D. Schmidt's book Straw into Gold.  I didn't love it like his newer books, but it wasn't bad. 

Late last year I figured out how to borrow library books from the States on my Kindle.  Books #2, #4 and #5 were acquired that way.  I really love having this option.  The books were The Truth and Other Lies, by Sascha Arango; Stella by Starlight, by Sharon M. Draper; and Did You Ever Have a Family, by Bill Clegg.

Book #3 was Depression: Looking up from the Stubborn Darkness, by Edward T. Welch.  This was a useful read.

Book #6 The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.  My daughter's reading this in her Adolescent Lit class, so I decided to read it, too.  It's sad but also entertaining, and my first read by Alexie.

Book #7 was another YA title, To All the Boys I've Loved Before, by Jenny Han.  My students are going to like this one a lot, and it didn't end the way I thought it would.

Bougainvillea Carpet

How could I ever feel less than LOVED when my seventh grade son makes me a carpet of bougainvillea to follow to my breakfast? 

Poetry Friday: Raymond Carver

With the OLW that I chose this year, LOVED, this Raymond Carver poem is a must:

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.


I found other Raymond Carver I liked, too.  Here's his poem "Happiness," and here's "Grief."  Both describe little moments.  And here's "Another Mystery," about death and becoming the oldest generation of your family. 

I think I like that little short one the best, though.  "To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved."

The roundup is here today.

Poetry Friday: Women's Christmas, Belatedly

Yes, I know that by anybody's calendar, the Christmas season is over.  But I was reading about an Irish tradition called "Women's Christmas."  The idea is that women didn't really get to relax over the Christmas season because they did most of the work, so when Epiphany arrives on January 6th, the women take a break and celebrate together.  In my case, I do not work extra hard over Christmas, as my husband and kids decorate the tree and cook and all of that, and our celebrations were extra low-key this year anyway.  So I don't deserve the relaxing part, but I found this poem that Jan Richardson wrote for Women's Christmas this year and it fits very well with the way I am thinking these days.  Jan focused on the Magi being warned in a dream to return home by a different way, and the poem is called "The Map You Make Yourself."  You can see the whole poem, and Jan's reflections on Women's Christmas, here.

Here's the end of the poem:

Do not expect
to return
by the same road.
Home is always
by another way,
and you will know it
not by the light
that waits for you

but by the star
that blazes inside you,
telling you
where you are
is holy
and you are welcome
here.
—Jan Richardson

"Where you are is holy and you are welcome here."  I'm holding on to those words today.

Here's today's roundup.

Happy New Year!

Now that the earthquake anniversary is over, I feel as though the new year has really begun.  There's something about making it past that ominous date of the 12th.  I've written here before that the last thing I did that day before I left my classroom was to write "January 13th, 2010" on the board.  When I came back to my classroom in July, that date was still posted.  In the six months I had been gone, my room had been used to store medical supplies and nobody had touched my white board. 

This morning, when I wrote "January 13th, 2016" on my board, I remembered that.  I felt gratitude for this ordinary day, when I get to work in my classroom, teach my students, and feel the ground solid beneath my feet.

Happy New Year! 

Six Years

Today marks six years since the earthquake that shook Haiti and changed my life.  I wrote about it extensively in 2010, sharing what happened that day and in the months that followed when my children and I went to the United States.  You can find those posts in my archives.

At first, I thought about the earthquake every minute, and then there were brief periods of respite.  For a long time, Tuesdays were "earthquake days" (and this year is the first anniversary to be on a Tuesday, like the original day in 2010).  For a long time, the 12th of every month was a painful reminder.  Now, I sometimes go a few weeks without consciously remembering the earthquake, but there are still moments that jolt me back into those hours; road work that shakes the house, a glimpse of an unfamiliar name on my husband's Facebook page ("Who is that?" "Oh, we met in the earthquake time."), passing some rubble when we drive through an area that we don't visit often. But in other ways, the earthquake is with me every day.  The way I see the world is fundamentally changed.  Relationships are changed.  I live with the awareness that everything can be different in an instant.

This is a sad, sad anniversary every year.  I will never understand it, never be able to wrap up the lessons in a bow.  It was a horrible tragedy.  We don't even know how many people died, but probably at least 230,000.  Everyone lost someone.

Good things came out of it too, and on other days I will think of those.  But today I grieve.

Poetry Friday - First Lesson

It has been wonderful having my daughter home over the Christmas vacation, and today's poem is in honor of her as she heads back to college tomorrow.  We send her with so much love and pride.

First Lesson
Philip Booth

Lie back, daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you.  Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls.  A dead-
man's-float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea.  Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
like gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

Tabatha has today's roundup here.

Beginning with Beloved

Here is an illustration of what it is like to be LOVED, focusing on the words heard when Jesus came out of the water after His baptism, "You are my Son, the beloved." 

What if we knew we were beloved?  How would it change us?  How would it change me?

OLW 2016

In 2010, I chose the One Little Word LOVED.  I wrote here about how I chose it and what it meant to me.  In the aftermath of the earthquake on January 12th, 2010, I spent the year realizing how much I was loved, by God and by the people in my life.  I was loved without doing anything to earn love, in the midst of my terrible weakness, in the midst of my shame over leaving Haiti, in the midst of my grief and general uselessness to do anything about what was going on there.

It's time to revisit the word LOVED this year.  The circumstances are different from those in 2010, but I've struggled mightily this past year with changes in my life.  One of these changes was my eldest leaving for college.  It seemed as though, after dealing with loss and endless goodbyes pretty much constantly my whole life, and the comings and goings of an international lifestyle, I suddenly lost the ability to do it any more.  I've been going to counseling and working through many of these past and current losses.  It's been brutally hard, and then I've berated myself for calling emotional pain "brutally hard" in a world where people are tortured and persecuted and driven from their homes by war, a world where people have lives that really are brutally hard.  Oddly, this self-criticism hasn't made me feel any better.

I need to allow myself to be reminded that in spite of my weakness, in spite of my struggles, I am LOVED.  Life is about loss - how well I know it - but there's still more love out there for me, and I am not abandoned even when it feels as though I am.  I am already so loved, even when I panic and cling and fall apart.  Even when I'm broken-hearted.  Maybe especially then.

Poetry Friday: The Hours

The year of the earthquake, a friend sent me this book, A Flame of Faith, by Hazel Littlefield, published in 1972, for my birthday.  It's signed by the author for a friend called Amy, and Hazel wishes for Amy "that all her days may be filled with loyal friendships of loyal friends, happy work, good health, courage."  These seem excellent wishes for the new year. 

Here is one of the poems from the book.

The Hours

Shout with assurance to the morning skies,
"The Lord of all creation made me too,
And all my need abundantly supplies;
This day is mine and I shall live it through
Delighting in the gift of every hour;
Not doomed with dullness nor with fear of death,
But life unfolding like a sun-drenched flower
Suffused with the Divine, the Living Breath."

The hours bloom and wither and are tossed,
Uncounted, into swirling centuries,
Like myriad stars in mighty galaxies,
Merged in a brighter whole but never lost.
Time, unrelenting, plucks them one by one;
Breathe while you may their sweetness in the sun.

Hazel Littlefield

Mary Lee has the first roundup of 2016.

What I Read in 2015

Here are links to my posts about the books I read this year.  I didn't write many reviews this year, so mostly this is just a list of titles.

Books 1-4
Books 5-11 (post includes reviews)
Books 12-21
Books 22-34 (post includes reviews)
Books 35-38 (post includes reviews)
Books 39-45 (post includes reviews)
Books 46-62
Books 63-68

I don't think I'll be finishing any more books this year.  Here's the last Reading Update:

Book #69 of the year was Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal
Book #70 was Comfort Ye My People: The Real World Meets Handel's Messiah, 26 Readings for Advent, by Kay Bruner
Book #71 was The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain
Book #72 was Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God, by Lauren Winner
Book #73 was Rising Strong, by Brene Brown
Book #74 was Eat Pray Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert
Book #75 was Room, by Emma Donoghue

I usually aim to finish about one book a week, so I was a bit over that this year.  I'm enjoying reading other people's end of the year book lists and collecting suggestions for next year.

Speaking of booklists, this post is linked to the January 2nd 2016 Saturday Review of Books.  Lots of bloggers are linking their lists for 2015.  Check it out here.

Poetry Friday

My daughter posted this Tweet on my Facebook wall yesterday.

It has, indeed, been a tough year.  One of the things that helped a lot was poetry, reading and writing it.  I don't have a poem to share today, but I hope after Christmas dinner to have time to come back and read some of the poems posted in today's roundup.  And then there's the traditional post-Christmas beach trip to continue the cheer.  See you in 2016!

OLW 2015

In 2015, my One Little Word was "unafraid."  I didn't do very well with being unafraid.  In fact, I was frequently afraid.  In May, I updated relatively positively on my progress in this post.  After that, things got worse.  I feared loss and grief, and then it happened, and I muddled through as best I could.  Now I'm hoping 2016 is better, and considering what my OLW will be.

Reading Update

Book #63 of the year was Because We Are, by Ted Oswald
Book #64 was Saint Anything, by Sarah Dessen
Book #65 was Armada, by Ernest Cline
Book #66 was Winter, by Marissa Meyer
Book #67 was Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith, by Sarah Bessey
Book #68 was Lila, by Marilynne Robinson

Poetry Friday: Real?

I love this poem and how it plays with what is "real" and what is "invented" in poetry, and writing in general.  The emotion, yeah, it's all real.  The details might be changed a bit, here and there.

Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?  

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

 

If by real you mean as real as a shark tooth stuck

in your heel, the wetness of a finished lollipop stick,

the surprise of a thumbtack in your purse—

then Yes, every last page is true, every nuance,

bit, and bite. Wait. I have made them up—all of them—

and when I say I am married, it means I married

all of them, a whole neighborhood of past loves. 

Here's the rest. 

And here's today's roundup. 

Poetry Friday: Odes

It's that time of year again: at Thanksgiving, I always read Pablo Neruda odes with my eighth graders, encouraging them to think about ordinary things they are thankful for, and to write their own odes.  I'm working on mine, but in the meantime, here's the master himself.  (I won't be reading this one with my eighth graders, in case you're wondering.)

Ode to Life
Pablo Neruda
(translated into English by George D. Schade)

All night long
the pain kept hitting me
with an axe,
but sleep
like dark water washed away
the bloody stones.
Today I'm alive again.
Again
I lift you up,
life,
on my shoulders.

Oh life,
clear cup,
suddenly
you get full
of dirty water,
of lifeless wine,
of agony, losses,
appalling spiderwebs,
and many think
you'll keep forever
that color of hell.

Not true.

A lingering night passes,
just one minute passes
and everything changes.
The cup of life
fills up
with transparency.

Spacious work
awaits us.
Pigeons are born at one stroke.
Light reigns again over the earth.

Life, the poor
poets
thought you were bitter.
They didn't get out of bed like you
and face the wind of the world.

They received the blows
without seeking you,
they drilled themselves
a black hole
and became submerged
in the mourning
of a solitary pit.

It's not true, life,
you are
lovely
as the one I love
and between your breasts you
have a smell of mint.

Life,
you are
a full machine,
happiness, sounds
of storm, tenderness
of delicate oil.

Life,
you are like a vineyard:
you treasure and dole out light,
transforming it into a grape cluster.

Whoever disowns you
should wait
a minute, a night,
a long or short year,
to emerge
from his mistaken solitude,
to question and fight, to join
hands with other hands,
not to adopt or flatter
unhappiness,
but reject it, shaping
it like a wall,
like the stonecutter with the stone,
should snip out unhappiness
and make pants
out of it.
Life waits for us
all of us
who love
the savage smell
of sea and mint
nestled between its breasts.

 (Here's last year's ode post, containing a link to others I've written. )

And here's today's roundup.

Poetry Friday: Love and Loss

In Mary Oliver's poem "In Blackwater Woods," she says that there are three things we have to learn in life.  One is "to love what is mortal."  The second is "to hold it/ against your bones knowing/ your own life depends on it."  The third is "when the time comes to let it/ go,/ to let it go."  You can read that whole poem here.

I am very good at the first two things Oliver says I must learn, but very bad at the third one.  This is a time of letting go in my life, not because of death (not this time), but because of people moving on in life to new situations.  Relationships aren't ending, exactly, but they are changing.

So much poetry is about loss.  I had a professor once who said that all poetry is about death, because everything we write about, we will lose.  That's part of being human.  Change is a form of loss, and change is a constant.

I posted this poem for Valentine's Day in 2012.  It's appropriate again now as I think of letting go.  "Time will come and take my Love away."  Whatever or whoever our Love is, that's the truth. 

Sonnet 64
William Shakespeare

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, at Wee Words for Wee Ones.

WILD!

When Irene Latham invited me to join in her celebration of ten years of blogging by contributing a post on the theme of WILD, I remembered a quote by Czeslaw Milosz that I read a few years ago, as well as the poem I wrote in response.  The quote came from Milosz's poem, Ars Poetica.

Happy tenth anniversary, Irene!  Thanks for all you do to inspire and encourage poetry online and in our lives!


Tiger?

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.  - Czeslaw Milosz


Is there a tiger in me?
Ready to spring out and stand in the light, blinking,
Lashing its tail?

More like a groundhog, maybe,
Peering for its shadow,
Trying to forecast the weather
To figure out what to do next,
What contingency plans to make.

Or a sheep,
Wondering what everyone else is doing,
Baaing in wooly conformity.

At the most scandalous,
A house cat in search of supper.
Ferocity, but domesticated,
Hunting instincts lost several generations back.

But a tiger?
Too large, too loud,
Its lashing tail too apt to knock china cups off the table,
Its stripes designed for Asian forests,
And here, in my living room, serving as advertisement
rather than camouflage.
A tiger?
Never.

And yet…
Sometimes a whisper of fur,
A flash of brown and orange,
A gleam of golden eyes.
Something I didn't know I had in me.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Check out Irene's post and the roundup of other WILD! entries.

I Used to Think

I wrote this post for Sarah Bessey's synchroblog.

I used to think that by the time I was the age I am now, I’d have life figured out.  I’d be able to shave my legs without cutting myself, every time.  I’d be able to make Christmas cookies without all the dough sticking together.  I’d know how to respond to criticism gracefully.  I wouldn’t be insecure.

Turns out, I don’t have anything figured out.  And especially that last one.  I think I’m almost as insecure as I ever was, almost as insecure as my middle school students, except that now my insecurities are over different things.  I don’t have problems talking to boys any more, and I rarely worry about the condition of my skin.  Instead, I wonder if I’m communicating at all with kids who think I am so very very old.  I feel irrelevant sometimes.  I worry about whether I’ve accomplished anything worthwhile, and whether I ever will. 

I still get competitive, still feel that I’m not enough, that other people have got it together in a way I never will.  Other people are better friends, better moms, better teachers.  Other people are cooler and more fun.  Other people are aging more gracefully.  I’m mortified to admit that I still get jealous, just like I did when I was fourteen.  Instead of thanking God for what He’s given me, I brood about what I don’t have.  I fight against changes, kicking and screaming and demanding to have the past back again. 

Oh, some things are better.  I’m not the first year graduate student who used to obsess for hours over the mistakes I made teaching, for example.  Now I can shrug and say, “I was wrong.  Here’s what I should have said.”  Sometimes I have moments of awareness that I’ve made some progress, that I reacted maturely to a situation, that I trusted God instead of worrying, that I behaved like the person I want to be.  But sadly such moments are not as frequent as I’d like.

I’m starting to think that I’ll never have life figured out.  I hope I’ll keep caring less and less about what others think of me, and that I’ll learn more and more not to worry about the future, but the fact is that every age I reach has its own challenges.  I’ve got lots of experience being a person, but none living this particular day.  I’ve got years of experience being a mom, but none with these particular kids at these particular ages.  As Sara Groves writes, “The path is worn, but for us it’s new.”  It’s not about figuring it all out and then resting peacefully until death.  It’s about living each day, following Jesus.  It’s about trusting God for this day, for this moment.  I’m learning that not having life figured out is just synonymous with being alive.

Reading Update

Book #46 of 2015 was All the Light we Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
Book #47 was Wild, by Cheryl Strayed
Book #48 was Listen, Slowly, by Thanhha Lai
Book #49 was As Soon as I Fell: A Memoir, by Kay Bruner
Book #50 was Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life, by Kathleen Norris
Book #51 was Feeling Sorry for Celia, by Jaclyn Moriarty
Book #52 was The Taming of the Queen, by Philippa Gregory
Book #53 was The Ghosts of Ashbury High, by Jaclyn Moriarty
Book #54 was Euphoria, by Lily King
Book #55 was Untwine, by Edwidge Danticat
Book #56 was In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers who Tried to Build a Perfect Language, by Arika Okrent
Book #57 was Orbiting Jupiter, by Gary D. Schmidt
Book #58 was Holy the Firm, by Annie Dillard
Book #59 was The Longing for Home: Reflections at Midlife, by Frederick Buechner
Book #60 was The Signature of All Things, by Elizabeth Gilbert
Book #61 was Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
Book #62 was Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine

Poetry Saturday

Here's yesterday's roundup.

Poetry Friday: Leaf

We don't have seasons where I live, except hot and a bit less hot, so I always enjoy watching the seasons change from afar.  A friend sent me this photo a couple of weeks ago, and I wrote some haiku to go with it.  

After rough summer,
Bug-chewed, brown spot, scarred by life,
Tough old lady leaf.

Dressed all in yellow,

A beauty in October,

In spite of life's scars.


Which one do you like better?


Here's today's roundup.

Poetry Friday: My Own Heart

Several Poetry Fridays have gone by without a post.  I still seem to be working on getting back my equilibrium and adjusting to the changes in my life.  I wish it would happen faster.  Meanwhile, my daughter texted me this photo of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem.

Click on the photo to enlarge it, and you may have to enlarge your screen even further after that.  Or just read the text below:

My Own Heart let me more have Pity on

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather - as skies
Betweenpie mountains - lights a lovely mile.


Amy has today's roundup at The Poem Farm.

Poetry Friday: Turtles

I posted here and here about our Open Mic events that we had here at school last year for National Poetry Month.  This school year we've decided to try monthly events, and then more frequent ones in April.  Yesterday was our first Open Mic of the semester, and though attendance was sparse at the beginning, by the end we had a nice little crowd.  I shared the following poem, written in 2013 about an experience I had with a friend.  I'm hoping that by our October gathering, I'll have some more recent offerings.  I've been writing a lot, but not much that I feel like sharing with a group. 

Meanwhile, this poem is non-fiction, and I've even illustrated it with portraits of the turtles.    



Turtles

On the way to the store, we saw a turtle in the road.
You stopped the car and said I should move it
So I did, lifting it gently
By the sides of its yellow-splotched shell
And placing it in the grass.

I wouldn't say it seemed grateful, exactly,
But it ambled off into the trees,
No doubt to a happy future,
A sweet, docile turtle,
Rescued from the dangerous road.
We drove on,
Pleased by our neighborliness.
Today we saved a life, we said.

On the way home, we saw another turtle in the road.
Another chance for a good deed!
This one looked older, more weatherbeaten.
Its cracked shell studded with snails,
Along for the ride.
It had a tail worthy of a very small dinosaur.
And apparently, it didn't want to be moved,
Since when I picked it up,
It clawed my hand, drawing blood.
Startled and in pain,
I dropped the turtle on its already battered shell. 
It flipped itself over onto its feet again,
A prehistoric acrobat, fueled by anger.

You said you'd try, and approached it,
While it glared at you,
alert to your every move.
You offered it a stick, which it attacked,
Breaking it in half. 

This turtle, dancing with rage,
We left behind us.
Clearly it did not wish for rescue,
And we decided it was on its own.

A visit to Google later taught us
The difference between a box turtle and a snapping turtle,
And which one is best left alone.

But you'd think, wouldn't you,
That we'd have learned by our age to be a bit more wary?
That we'd already know something about what to pick up
And what to leave lying there on the road?
But we don't.  Whatever turtle is there,
We always try to help, get involved, handle it, mess with it,
The ones that wander off amiably
And the ones that wave their fearsome dinosaur tails.

Even now, nursing my wound,
I know that the next time I see a turtle in the road,
I'll rush naively to its rescue.

by Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com


Here's today's roundup.

Poetry Friday: It's September

I'm not sure where August went.  I remember it was a really sad month, as I said goodbye to my firstborn and dropped her off at college.  I remember coming home and starting into the new reality.  I'm figuring it out day by day. 

This D.H. Lawrence poem was in the Poets.org Poem-a-Day email one day last week.  I love the way it captures those moments when you are aware of the existence of your perfect love - for your spouse, your child, your friend - and then the moment when you see the difference between the beautiful ideal and the day to day.  Seriously, why do we suffer when such perfect love exists?  Why can't we live on that plane all the time?  I suspect it has something to do with that line "gone to sleep."  The way your baby is an angel while sleeping, and a needy tyrant once awake.  I want to spend more time being aware of that perfect love.  Sure, the suffering is part of it, but so much gratitude, too, for the love, the love that is "almost bliss."

 

Bei Hennef

 

D. H. Lawrence

The little river twittering in the twilight,
The wan, wondering look of the pale sky,
             This is almost bliss.

 

And everything shut up and gone to sleep,
All the troubles and anxieties and pain
             Gone under the twilight.

 

Only the twilight now, and the soft “Sh!” of the river
             That will last forever.

 

And at last I know my love for you is here,
I can see it all, it is whole like the twilight,
It is large, so large, I could not see it before
Because of the little lights and flickers and interruptions,
             Troubles, anxieties, and pains.

 

             You are the call and I am the answer,
             You are the wish, and I the fulfillment,
             You are the night, and I the day.
                          What else—it is perfect enough,
                          It is perfectly complete,
                          You and I.
Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!

Linda is hosting the roundup here.

Poetry Friday

Here's today's roundup.

Reading Update

I seem to have read a lot of forgettable rubbish lately.  I'm embarrassed to include some of them in my list, but here they are:

Book #39 of the year was NOT forgettable rubbish.  It was a reread, Invitation to Tears: A Guide to Grieving Well, by Jonalyn Fincher and Aubrie Hills.  I am sure I will read it again at some point.  It is a quick and helpful book.

Book #40 was Parenting: Illustrated with Crappy Pictures, by Amber Dusick.  I really liked her book on marriage, which I thought was hilarious, but this one was just so-so.  This could be because I read a lot of it in waiting rooms and exam rooms during my whole summer biopsy scare.

Book #41 was Bossypants, by Tina Fey.  There was some good stuff in this book.  This blog post by Jonalyn Fincher on how Tina Fey taught her to love her body put the book on my radar, and I enjoyed that section of the book.  I also liked the parts where Fey talked about her stint playing Sarah Palin.  But most of this one didn't make much sense to me because I hadn't seen any of the movies or shows it talked about.

Book #42 was The Furious Longing of God, by Brennan Manning, another exception to the forgettable label, and another one that I'll read again.  I love Manning's focus on grace, grace, grace.  God loves us so much!

Book #43 was Harvesting the Heart, by Jodi Picoult.  Just OK.

Book #44 was Little Earthquakes, by Jennifer Weiner.  Not good.  Don't bother with it.

Book #45 was Dead Time, by Stephen White.  I enjoy this series of thrillers about a clinical psychologist and the messes he gets himself into.  What I like best about them is their ongoing character development.  This one was pretty good.

I'm reading All the Light We Cannot See right now, so things are looking up for my reading.

Poetry Friday: Shakespeare

It's Poetry Friday again!  I have been working in my classroom all week, getting ready for school to start next week.  We are going to start late, due to concerns about election aftermath (we have voting on Sunday).  It's a good thing, because I am not ready for school yet.  And a couple of days after school starts, I'm leaving to take my daughter to college.

There's been some beweeping going on.

And yet I am thankful for the people I have in my life, for my long-suffering husband, my children, my parents and brothers, my friends.  I was thinking of these words this morning: "thy sweet love remembered." When I think of all the human love in my life, both past and present, I really do "scorn to change my state with Kings."

It's hard to say goodbye to people because we love them.  If we didn't love them, how barren would our lives be?  Love and loss - Shakespeare understood.


Sonnet XXIX
William Shakespeare

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possest,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising -
Haply I think on thee: and then my state,
Like to the Lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at Heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with Kings.


Here's today's roundup.