Poetry Friday, Good Friday

We met in Kampala to remember the cross. A series of readers read the story aloud in a series of accents. Gray Parrots flew overhead, their red tails flashing; back and forth they flew. At the part about the cock crowing after Peter’s denial of Jesus, it wasn’t a rooster that called, but a group of Eastern Plaintain-Eaters, with their mocking laughter.

Many people stayed with Jesus that day; we heard about the women following, wailing and sobbing. We heard about His friends at the foot of the cross. And His mother. When Mary took her eight day old baby to the temple, she had been told by the old man, Simeon, that a sword would pierce her heart, but I’m sure she never imagined this particular piercing pain she felt as she looked up at her dying child.

We walked home in the dark after taking Communion with pieces of white Ugandan bread dipped in Ribena. Body and blood. Grief in a tropical evening.

She stayed til the end
then held the dead body close,
her crucified son

 

©Ruth Bowen Hersey

Tricia has the roundup here.

Poetry Friday: Bird Heart

 

I was looking at an Antillean Mango in my yard on Delmas 83 in Port-au-Prince one day four years ago, right at the moment when the news came that the streets were on fire (again) and we needed to stay home. 

 

What grief could that bird's heart know? None, I imagined; the bird looked so happy, dancing up there on the wire as we rushed worriedly back into the house. I felt jealous of its obliviousness, even while reminding myself that it had plenty of its own problems. 

Now I'm seven thousand miles away from that yard where the hummingbird danced. My little bird heart can't hold all the emotions I feel about Haiti. The love and sadness and guilt and fear fly all around me like feathers in a hurricane. Why am I not there, looking up at a hummingbird and smelling the burning?  

©Ruth Bowen Hersey

Rose has this week's roundup.

Reading Update

Book #13 of the year was Stone Blind, by Natalie Haynes. It's the story of Medusa, and it's weird and great.

 

Book #14 was Life is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age, by Bruce Feiler. The main thing I got from this book is that life isn't linear. There are no predictable stages that everyone goes through. At all. The book is made up of an enormous series of interviews with people who have gone through every imaginable life change. Check out his website here. This is a truly fascinating book about how people navigate change.

Book #15 was The Leftover Woman, by Jean Kwok. It's a story of cross-cultural adoption and it's just all-around sad. Nobody comes out very well.

Book #16 was The Frozen River, by Ariel Lawhon. I read this with my book club, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. The main character is a midwife, so that's always a plus, and the historical setting was fascinating and well-handled. It was a mystery, and there were lots of characters, and it's based on true events (plus there's a detailed author's note at the end explaining what's real and what's not). I recommend this one!

Book #17 was The Rachel Incident, by Caroline O'Donoghue. The incident referred to in the title is just awful, messing up several lives in permanent ways. The reviews make it sound light-hearted and sparkling, but I didn't really find it either. Plus there's so...much...drinking.

Book #18 was Momentous Events in the Life of a Cactus, by Dusti Bowling. I read the first one in this series last year. The protagonist has no arms, and in this book she starts high school. It's painful. 

Book #19 was Jhumpa Lahiri's Roman Stories. Lahiri wrote this book of short stories in Italian (her third language, I believe), and then translated the stories back into English with a translator. I mean - that's just so amazing. The characters in these stories all live in Rome, but they are all from other places. Living in Rome is beautiful but also difficult. The writing is wonderful, but I feel like I should read the stories again, because they all ran together a bit. Here's a taste:

"Regardless, she thinks that it's good to live in a place that's both familiar and full of secrets, with discoveries that reveal themselves only slowly and by chance."

And another:

"It's strange that maternal anxiety grows with time, that you get worse with the years. I'd have thought the opposite, but how can we bear the distances, the absences, the silences our own children generate?"

Book #20 was You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Maggie Smith's memoir about poetry, divorce, and recovery. I liked this, because it's so much the way we - or at least I - process trauma. It's very recursive and she tries on one metaphor after another. I enjoyed reading it, and it made me want to write.

SJT and Poetry Friday: Praise What Comes

Parker Palmer posted a poem this week that resonated with me and I'm going to share it today. I decided that it can do double duty for SJT (Spiritual Journey Thursday) and PF (Poetry Friday). The SJT theme for March is Gathering Goodness. (You can find the roundup here at Ramona's place.) And Laura's hosting this week's Poetry Friday roundup.

 

There have been lots of hard things lately. I won't go into them except to mention that watching Haiti deteriorate still further has been painful. I feel helpless and a bit guilty for not being there and suffering along with everyone else. 

 

There's more tough stuff too, but I'm trying hard to gather goodness, focusing on positive things like our lakeside Sports Day yesterday (see photo), our day off today for International Women's Day, the fact that I got in to see a dentist right away without an appointment and am now pain-free, our poetry month celebrations at school (March here, not April) for which I'm writing daily, and the lifer Red-headed Lovebirds that I saw last weekend (see photo from eBird).

Photo Source: eBird.com

 

This link has three lovely poems from Jeanne Lohmann, all three of which speak to my current condition, but the one that Parker Palmer posted (and he probably picked a peck of pickled peppers, too) was the second at the link, "Praise What Comes." Here's part of it:

 

Surprising as unplanned kisses, all you haven't deserved

of days and solitude, your body's immoderate good health

that lets you work in many kinds of weather. Praise

talk with just about anyone. And quiet intervals, books

that are your food and your hunger; nightfall and walks

before sleep.

 

from "Praise What Comes," by Jeanne Lohmann

 

 

 

Poetry Friday: Holy

I've been doing a writing project during Lent, using daily prompts, and today's word, Holy, made me think of this poem that I've posted twice before here, once in 2012 and once in 2016. (Here's the more recent one, and it has a link to the other.) I love this poem because it's about nature in an urban context, and the way it can dazzle and rearrange our brains to be exposed to natural beauty.

Flowers

Dennis Craig

I have never learnt the names of flowers.

From beginning, my world has been a place

Of pot-holed streets where thick, sluggish gutters race

In slow time, away from garbage heaps and sewers

Past blanched old houses around which cowers

Stagnant earth.  There, scarce green thing grew to chase

The dull-gray squalor of sick dust; no trace

Of plant save few sparse weeds; just these, no flowers.

One day, they cleared a space and made a park

There in the city’s slums; and suddenly

Came stark glory like lightning in the dark,

While perfume and bright petals thundered slowly.

I learnt no names, but hue, shape and scent mark

My mind, even now, with symbols holy.

 

 

You can find today's roundup here, at Linda's place. And below, please enjoy some recent flower photos taken here in Kampala, Uganda.

 

 

Poetry Friday: New QWP

I have a birthday coming up, which means that it's almost time to start the next year of my QWP, or Quinquagenarian Writing Project. I started it the year I turned 50, and since then, from birthday to birthday, I've kept a little file of my writing for that year. This year's file is the smallest yet. Apart from my Birdtober poems (daily bird poems in October, following prompts), I've hardly written anything this year. I've already failed at my New Year's writing goals.

I know several reasons I'm not writing a lot, but I think the biggest reason is just that I'm still learning a new job. It's my second year in a new place, with new textbooks and new curriculum and a whole new educational system. I don't have the bandwidth for much beyond work. It's not a bad thing, exactly, but it's a different season creatively. And maybe I just need to accept it and be glad when I do write something, no matter how small.

Meanwhile, since I have no wise birthday poem for myself, here's one I found called Icarus Turns Fifty.

 

Tabatha has this week's roundup.

Poetry Friday: In Morning

I knew Naomi Shihab Nye would have something to say appropriate to these days, and I was right. I just found this poem she published in December.

In Morning

by Naomi Shihab Nye

 

The Palestinian child
does not think about being Palestinian,
but only of how his kitten
slept last night
and why is it not
in its basket.
Before he walks to school,
he will find it playing
with neighbor kittens
outside his house
and make sure it has breakfast.

 

You can read the rest of the poem, and hear her read it, here. 

I used one of her lines as a strike line (you'll have to click through to see the bit it came from) for this golden shovel:

Reveille

When the new day wakes me, each
worry rises too, greets the morning,
rubbing its eyes and joining the others that crowd around as we
all, the whole battalion of us, put
on our work boots and dress ourselves
and prepare to pretend we’ve got it all together.

Each morning we put ourselves together.

©Ruth Bowen Hersey

Margaret has this week's roundup.

Reading Update

Book #7 of 2024 was The Summer Place, by Jennifer Weiner. This may be the first Covid novel I've read, but it won't be the last. (Book #11, in this post, is another.) I find it stressful to read books where absolutely everyone is hiding something from absolutely everyone else, and that's the case with this one. This is my second Jennifer Weiner book. I liked it better than the first, but I didn't love it.

Book #8 was The Heartbreaker, by Susan Howatch. This is the third in a trilogy, and I'm not sure I had ever read it before. I know I had started it, but I don't think I'd finished it. It's about prostitution, and in many places it was hard to read. Towards the end of the book, Gavin remarks, "All you 'religious' people out there who have been looking down your noses at me and wincing at my filthy language and filthy lifestyle should remember that The Bloke himself never flinched or turned away." "The Bloke" is Gavin's name for Jesus.

Book #9 was The Gift of Forgiveness, by Katherine Schwarzenegger Pratt. I said in the last Reading Update that I'm looking for books on forgiveness this year. (This was the second I've read since the beginning of 2024. Does anyone have any other suggestions?) I really liked this one, as Pratt had interviewed many people with huge things to forgive. They all had different ways of approaching the idea, and every one was worth reading.

Book #10 was Yours Truly, by Abby Jimenez. While rather unbelievable, it was a fun read.

Book #11, also a Covid story, was Ann Patchett's latest book Tom Lake. The pandemic has forced the Nelson family's three grown daughters to come back together to the family's orchard. While they do all the required tasks, their mother Lara tells them a story they've never fully heard before, the summer that she acted for a regional theater in Tom Lake, Michigan. People so rarely understand each other, and I enjoyed this story of a time when some understanding, while imperfect, was achieved.

Book #12 was Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones, by James Clear. This was a good, readable, and practical book.

Poetry Friday: Halcyon

 

(Click on the photo to enlarge it. I took the screenshot here.)

 

Alcman was a Greek poet who wrote in the seventh century BC. This is a translation of one of his poems by A.E. Stallings. (I have a book of hers, somewhere, in a box, in another country.) 

Halcyon as an adjective means idyllically happy, but as a noun it means a kingfisher. The scientific name of many kingfishers includes the word halcyon, including one of our dear friends where I live, the Woodland Kingfisher (Halcyon senegalensis). This bird is so full of energy, so persistent in diving to catch its prey, and so lovely in its song. This is the one I picture when I read this poem. Or maybe the Malachite Kingfisher, which doesn't have halcyon in its name (Corythornis cristatus), but has the purple coloring mentioned in Alcman's description. See below for pictures of both these beautiful birds, plus a haiku.

 

Woodland Kingfisher (Halcyon senegalensis)

 Photo Source: eBird.com

Malachite Kingfisher (Corythornis cristatus)

Photo Source: eBird.com

 

 

Kingfisher spies lunch:
swoops down, splashes, shoots back up,
halcyon blue flash

 

©Ruth Bowen Hersey

More about kingfishers here. And Carol has today's roundup here.

Poetry Friday: Herons

Last Poetry Friday, as I mentioned in my post last week, was a holiday. I didn't really take the day off -- I worked almost all day -- but that meant that I had time on Saturday to read all the Poetry Friday posts. I tried to comment on all of them, too, but an inordinate number of my comments disappeared into the ether. Maybe some of them were just awaiting comment moderation. I hope so. In any case, if your post didn't get a comment from me, please don't be offended. I tried.

I recently discovered this poem about the Great Blue Heron, "Great Blue Heron," by T. Alan Broughton.

Here's a bit from the middle: 

Today the bird stays with me, as if I am moving through

the heron’s dream to share his sky or water—places

he will rise into on slow flapping wings or where

his long bill darts to catch unwary frogs.

 

 

And here's another line I love:

 

 

I only know this bird by a name we’ve wrapped him in,

 

 

(Click through to read the whole poem - it's worth it!)

 

After reading the poem, I went through my life list to see how many different kinds of herons I've seen. Fifteen! That's just amazing and makes me feel wealthy beyond imagining! (eBird lists 45 heron species in the world. Further research reveals that egrets and bitterns are also herons and if you include all of those, there are 72 species. But I'm sticking with my original 45, which is just the ones with heron in their common name. And out of that bunch, I've seen a third of them!) 

 

I'll share my list of the herons I've seen at the end of this post. But before that, here are some heron poems about some of my sightings. After all, as Broughton says, we only know these birds by the names we've wrapped them in.

 

I've only seen Black Herons once, on a boat ride in December. They're not as common as the other kinds we have here in Uganda. They are known for their umbrella style of hunting, which you can see in the video, where it's speculated that hunching their wings in an umbrella shape reduces the reflections and helps them see what could be on the menu for them.

 

 

Black Heron

 

Rainy morning.
Abandoned black umbrella
hunts menacingly in the hallway.
Sorry - no fish here.

 

©Ruth Bowen Hersey

 

I have Rufescent Tiger-Herons on seven checklists.  They live throughout much of South America. It's the juveniles that are the stripiest (see the picture), though the adults do have some stripes also.

 

Juvenile Rufescent Tiger-Heron

Photo Source: Wikipedia

Rufescent Tiger-Heron

Tiger-Heron so Rufescent,
I find your diet far from pleasant.
Your dragonflies I won’t be stealing:
To me they sound quite unappealing.

But I do like your stripy feathers,
The way you hunt in all the weathers,
Your strident bullfrog voice so loud,
Your reddish coloring so proud,
Tiger-Heron so Rufescent
I find you immensely pleasant.

©Ruth Bowen Hersey

 

I have Great Blue Herons on twenty-seven checklists. Birders talk about "spark birds," the ones that make you start being interested in birding, and the Great Blue Heron is one of mine. I found out in 2018 about a GBH fitted with a transmitter that informed scientists she was wintering in Haiti. I wrote two poems about her: Nokomis, the Great Blue Heron, Winters in Haiti in 2018 and Requiem for Nokomis when she stopped transmitting in 2021. I also wrote this poem about a GBH my son watched in Massachusetts.

Cellphone photo of GBH I saw in Georgia last summer

Here's my life list of herons, from the most recent to the longest ago:

Black Heron

Purple Heron

Squacco Heron

Black-headed Heron

Gray Heron

Cocoi Heron

Rufescent Tiger-Heron

Green Heron

Yellow-crowned Night Heron

Black-crowned Night Heron

Tricolored Heron

Little Blue Heron

Striated Heron

Whistling Heron

Great Blue Heron

 

 

Mary Lee has this week's roundup.

 

 

SJT: Love is...

When I saw this month's subject, "Love is...," I thought of two poems, and I'll share them below. Both are poems I've shared before on this blog. Be sure to visit our host to see what everyone else shared today.

Love's as Warm as Tears

by C. S. Lewis

Love's as warm as tears,
Love is tears:
Pressure within the brain,
Tension at the throat,
Deluge, weeks of rain,
Haystacks afloat,
Featureless seas between
Hedges, where once was green.

Love's as fierce as fire,
Love is fire:
All sorts - infernal heat
Clinkered with greed and pride,
Lyric desire, sharp-sweet,
Laughing, even when denied,
And that empyreal flame
Whence all loves came.

Love's as fresh as spring,
Love is spring:
Bird-song hung in the air,
Cool smells in a wood,
Whispering, "Dare! Dare!"
To sap, to blood,
Telling "Ease, safety, rest,
Are good; not best."

Love's as hard as nails,
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (with all that is)
Our cross, and His.

 

You can see the second poem here and also read more by this poet, Kimberly Johnson. 

 

Foley Catheter

by Kimberly Johnson

 

I clean its latex length three times a day
                      With kindliest touch,
           Swipe an alcohol swatch

From the tender skin at the tip of him
                      Down the lumen
            To the drainage bag I change

Each day and flush with vinegar.
                       When I vowed for worse
            Unwitting did I wed this

Something-other-than-a-husband, jumble
                       Of exposed plumbing
            And euphemism. Fumble

I through my nurse’s functions, upended
                        From the spare bed
            By his every midnight sound.

Unsought inside our grand romantic
                       Intimacy
           Another intimacy

Opens—ruthless and indecent, consuming
                        All our hiddenmosts.
            In a body, immodest

Such hunger we sometimes call tumor;
                       In a marriage
           It’s cherish.  From the Latin for cost.

Books about Immigration, Acculturation, and Identity

Recently a friend asked me for a list of book recommendations. She specified: "novels or memoirs focusing on the experience of immigration, acculturation and identity." This is one of my favorite themes, so I was able to come up with a list fairly quickly. Of course there are so many more. Add your ideas in the comments.

Obviously I have to start with some Haitian titles. For many years I read Edwidge Danticat's YA book Behind the Mountains with my seventh graders. It's set in 1999-2000, and based on Danticat's own immigration story from the early eighties. My students (mostly Haitians, but not all) loved this book, with its triple settings of rural Haiti, urban Haiti, and ultra-urban New York. It sparked great discussions. An adult book from Danticat would be her memoir Brother I'm Dying. I've read nearly all of her books and this one is, in my opinion, the best. But any of her fiction or non-fiction is good for these themes.

 

This one is an oldie but a goodie: Jean Fritz's memoir Homesick: My Own Story, which received a Newbery Honor in 1983 but which is about Fritz's childhood in the 1920s when she was an American growing up in China.

 

Brick Lane, by Monica Ali, is a novel for adults about Bangladeshi immigrants in London. I liked this for its rejection of what Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche calls "the dangers of a single story." Every immigrant is unique and every immigrant's story is, too.

Emails from Scheherazad, by Moha Kahf, is a book of poetry about her own experience and the Arab-American experience. I loved this book, and also enjoyed her autobiographically-inspired novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf. I don't think I've read anything in which I've learned so much about Islam.

Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder, tells the true story of Deo, who fled the Burundi genocide (much less written about than, and related to, the Rwanda genocide). Already traumatized by his past, Deo is traumatized further by his immigration story. Everything I've read by Tracy Kidder is excellent.

People always ask me what my favorite book is. It's hard to answer that question, but this book is definitely on the shortlist: The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri, the story of an Indian family in America. 

Other Words for Home, by Jasmine Warga, is a verse novel for middle grade kids about Syrian refugees who relocate in Cincinnati. Kids often like verse novels because they are quick reads with short, unintimidating lines. But those lines communicate so much. Speaking of verse novels, another good one, which I read with my seventh graders, is Inside Out and Back Again, by Thanhha Lai. This is about Ha, a refugee with her family from the Vietnam War who settles in Alabama. And another, one I've read with eighth graders, is The Language Inside, by Holly Thompson, in which Emma, an American living in Japan, has to move to Massachusetts.

How My Parents Learned to Eat, by Ina R. Friedman, was a favorite in our home when our kids were growing up. It's a picture book about an intercultural marriage. The illustrations are by the amazing Allen Say, and part of Say's own family story is told in his picture book Grandfather's Journey, which won the Caldecott Medal in 1993. This one is great on the feeling of missing one place when you're in the other, no matter which place you're in. Relatable!

Ruth Van Reken's memoir Letters Never Sent: A Global Nomad's Journey from Hurt to Healing is a classic, especially among people with boarding school experiences. Someone just brought it up to me last week, and that happens quite a lot. And of course I have to mention my cyberfriend Marilyn Gardner, and her two wonderfully atmospheric books about growing up in Pakistan, Worlds Apart: A Third Culture Kid's Journey and Between Worlds: Essays on Culture and Belonging.

The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, is good on the differences between first generation immigrants and their children. The frame for this story is four Chinese women in San Francisco who get together to play Mah Jong. Each woman has a daughter. Tan's books are often about this kind of theme, and I have enjoyed all the ones I've read.

Americanah, by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, is about Nigerian immigrants, and one thing I really liked about this novel is that characters return to Nigeria and see it through emigrant/immigrant eyes. Another thing I really liked is the focus on hair! (An in to this author's work for younger readers would be her first novel Purple Hibiscus.)

The Leavers, by Lisa Ko, is about Chinese immigrants. Once one of my middle school students ended a book talk by warning his classmates about the reading experience, "You can cry!" You can definitely cry when you read this novel, but it's so worth it. In my review here on this blog, I quoted the opening lines:

"'Are you going to leave me again?'
'Never.' His mother took his hand and swung it up and down. 'I promise I'll never leave you.'
But one day, she did."

 

A fairly recent read for me was Solito: A Memoir, by Javier Zamora. This is about a little boy and his journey from El Salvador to the US. Such a good book, and so very vividly written!

I could go on much more, but these are a start for reading on this topic. You can find more information on many of these books on my blog - just do a search.

Poetry Friday: Golden-winged Warbler

It's early Friday afternoon in Uganda. It's a holiday here (Liberation Day), but I'm hard at work because we just got a new schedule and it's requiring a complete reworking of my thinking. I'm hoping to have a totally free Saturday as a result, though!

Recently the American Birding Association named its Bird of the Year.  Last year was the first time I was even aware that there was such a thing as the ABA Bird of the Year, and I posted about their choice for 2023, the Belted Kingfisher, here.  Liz Clayton Fuller, the illustrator who did the official painting of the bird used on the cover of the ABA magazine, chose to paint the female Belted Kingfisher and she called the result Queenfisher. 

 

The 2024 bird hasn't caught my imagination yet in quite the same way. It's one I haven't seen before (unlike the Belted Kingfisher). It's lovely, sure, but it has Near Threatened status, so I'm not terribly likely to see it. I may have to be contented just with knowing it exists. (See the photo from eBird, below.) It's the Golden-winged Warbler. (You can read about the bird and see this year's painting, which incorporates both of its habitats, here.)

(Source, eBird.com)

You can see from the photo and tell from the name that the golden color of this bird's wings and head is one of its most striking features. Thinking of gold made me remember how I always used to do a week of color poems with my seventh graders in Haiti, using the classic book Hailstones and Halibut Bones: Adventures in Poetry and Color, by Mary O'Neill. This would always inspire a spate of color poems from my students. I'd start with purple and gold, our school colors. 

 

 

I got this photo of Mary O'Neill's gold poem from Amazon. My favorite lines are on the next page, which isn't pictured, and I don't have a copy of the book here with me in Uganda. But here's the rest of the poem:

 

Gold is the color of
Clover honey
Gold is a certain
Kind of money.
Gold is alive
In a flickering fish
That lives its life
In a crystal dish.
Gold is the answer
To many a wish.
Gold is feeling
Like a king
It’s like having the most
Of everything –
Long time ago
I was told
Yellow’s mother’s name
Is gold…

Mary O’Neill
(from Hailstones and Halibut Bones)

(My favorite lines are the ones about the "flickering fish.")

 

 

I'm so thankful to live in a world full of color! (Or colour, as we spell it here in Uganda, with its British-influenced style of English.) Although I won't see any Golden-winged Warblers here, I do often see another brightly colored bird, and you can see my Birdtober poem about Ross's Turaco here, along with glorious photos (obviously, not taken by me). 

You can see today's Poetry Friday roundup here, along with a great piñata poem and some wonderful piñata stamps. Thanks for hosting, Susan!

Poetry Friday: Fifty-Fifty

Happy Poetry Friday! You can see today's roundup here.

 

I found this wonderful poem by Patricia Clark here, and then I wrote my own Kampala version. I'm loving seeing everyone's snow photos -- both my kids sent them -- but I'm also loving being in this warm place that I describe in my poem.

Fifty-Fifty

by Patricia Clark

 

You can have the grackle whistling blackly 

        from the feeder as it tosses seed,

if I can have the red-tailed hawk perched

        imperious as an eagle on the high branch.

You can have the brown shed, the field mice

        hiding under the mower, the wasp’s nest on the door,

 

if I can have the house of the dead oak,

        its hollowed center and feather-lined cave.

You can have the deck at midnight, the possum

        vacuuming the yard in its white prowl,

if I can have the yard of wild dreaming, pesky

        raccoons, and the roaming, occasional bear.

You can have the whole house, window to window,

        roof to soffits to hardwood floors, 

if I can have the screened porch at dawn, 

        the Milky Way, any comets in our yard.

 

 

 

 

Fifty-Fifty in Kampala
after Patricia Clark


You can have the peace
of the dark living room,
the glow of your screen,

if I can have the back porch at sunrise
and the raucous alarm clock squawking
of the Hadada Ibis.

You can have all the coffee paraphernalia
in the kitchen

if I can have the sake jar full of feathers
that I’ve gathered from the ground outside.

You can have
the fecundity of the compost bucket,
rotting secretly, silently, endlessly,

if I can have
the last cookie in the cookie jar,
since you aren’t eating sugar these days.

You can have the Vervet monkeys on the roof
gathered in families in the afternoons
and looking down on us

if I can have
the sound of the African Wood-Owl at 2 AM
with you snoring softly beside me.

 

 

 ©Ruth Bowen Hersey

 

Reading Update

Book #1 of 2024 was River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile, by Candice Millard. I live close to the source of the Nile found in these pages, and I've visited it, so that made this book even more interesting to me. This is well-written, deeply researched, and fascinating all the way around. It did make me wonder why things in Uganda are still named after Speke, who turns out not to have been such a hero.

Book #2 was Spare, by Prince Harry. I am glad I read this. I thought it was well-done, and I'm so curious about the process, since I know the Prince worked with a ghostwriter. (I just found this article about the ghostwriter and I'm going to read it as soon as I finish writing this post.)

Book #3 was Debunking the Myths of Forgive-and-Forget, by Kay Bruner. I have some people to forgive. I even put it on my list of goals for the year: "Forgive people." It's not a surprising admission; I can't imagine anyone could get to my age without having been seriously hurt. There are several folks that I keep thinking I've forgiven, and then I'll see their names on social media and feel a clenching in my stomach. I was encouraged while rereading Letters to Malcolm recently to find Lewis' description of realizing at one point that he had finally forgiven someone who had wronged him decades before. It's a process. I'm trying to read some books this year on forgiveness: what it is, how to do it. This was the first, which I'd read before, but which was worth reading again.

 

Book #4 was Watership Down, by Richard Adams. I've been wanting to reread this book, which I last read about forty years ago, and I enjoyed it so much. I've read most of Adams' books but I'm going to try to see if there are any I've missed. He's a good writer.

Book #5 was Nora Goes Off Script, by Annabel Monaghan. I really enjoyed this one. It's just the right combo of fluff and satisfying story. Surely there will be a movie.

Book #6 was This Time Tomorrow, by Emma Straub, another book that I enjoyed hugely. It's about time travel and growing old and why and how we love the people we love. And it's on deep discount for Kindle right now, as I just found out while looking for the link.

Poetry Friday: Earthquake

It's Friday, and you know what that means! You can find today's Poetry Friday roundup here. Tracey Kiff-Judson, our host, has done a deep dive into Monopoly tokens. Fascinating!

For me, January 12th will always have a deep significance because it's the anniversary of the 2010 earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince at 4:53 on that Tuesday afternoon fourteen years ago. I now live thousands of miles from Port-au-Prince, but those memories are still vivid. 

It has been a while since I wrote an earthquake poem. The last time I posted a collection of my earthquake poems for the anniversary was 2021. You can see that post, along with the new poem I wrote that year, here. I imagine I will write more earthquake poems some day, but I don't have a new one for this year. Today, I am invigilating (proctoring) exams in Uganda. How's that for unexpected? Certainly I would never have foreseen it on January 12th, 2010. 

SJT and Poetry Friday and OLW, 2024

Since I started this blog in 2006, I've never posted so little as I did in 2023, and fully half of the posts of the year were in October, when I wrote daily bird poems. Not only did I write very little in 2023, but I didn't read much poetry, either. I read novels and non-fiction. I don't have many of my poetry books here with me in Uganda, and there's not that much poetry to be found around me, either. I read some online, but I only posted in 21 Poetry Fridays last year, and on many of those days, I didn't find the time to make the rounds and read everyone else's contributions.

 

As always, I thought a lot about a word for the year. It's a time when newness has a big pull on us; we want to believe that things will be different with this new number on the calendar. But I just kept thinking that I wasn't done yet with last year's word, that I didn't want to pick a new one. In spite of my lack of reading and writing poetry last year, I loved my 2023 word, FEATHER. It's filled with the lightness and beauty I craved, and sometimes found, in 2023.  I wrote last January about my reasons for choosing this word, and they haven't changed. It's my second New Year's in the same country, and I'm happy about that; lack of change can be a good thing. 

 

So this year I'm not changing my word. I'm keeping FEATHER. Maybe I'll just keep it from now on; who knows? 

 

Today I'm sharing a feathery poem by Matthew Brenneman about three distinctive birds. (Really, once you start paying attention, there's no such thing as a generic bird, any more than there is a generic place or a generic person.)  I'll give you the first few lines of each bird, and then you can follow the links to read the rest. The first thing you learn when you start studying birding is not to anthropomorphize, but I can't help it. Which of these three birds is the most like you? I think at this time in my life, I'm maybe the most like the Barn Swallow of the middle stanza: "there's something to be said/For feathering a kind of heaven/On a few twigs and some frayed bits of thread,/From what she finds that she is given."

Three Birds

Matthew Brenneman

1. Albatross

A thousand miles of gale-lashed sea

Is nothing to this wingèd mariner.

Of all the birds, he would prefer

This emptiness to earth's solidity,

The gray abstraction of the waves

Rolling beneath great tapered wings, whose span

Would dwarf the stature of a man...

Here's the rest.

2. Barn Swallow

A hanging porch-light's broken bulbless cup

Will do as well as anything.

She fits it to her purpose, flying up

With spoils of tugs and rummaging...

Here's the continuation, and then click to the next page for the rest.

 

 

3. Snowy Egret

 

Light rain lifting. Pond like glass.

The shadblow's given way to dogwood and

Forsythia, which summons bees

Through stands of arrowwood and sassafras. 

He loves this marsh, its rich interstices,

This confluence of sea and sky and land.

 

Here's the rest. 

Check here for the SJT (Spiritual Journey Thursday) January roundup, and here for the Poetry Friday roundup for the week.

 

 

What I Read in 2023

The last two books I finished in 2023 were book #90, Savor, by Shauna Niequist, and book #91, You Are the Beloved, by Henri Nouwen.

Here's the complete list of the rest of what I read in 2023:

Books #1 - #4

Books #5 - #10 

Books #11 - #14

Books #15 - #20 

Books #22 - #25

Books #26 - #36 

Books #37 - #55

Books #56 - #66 

Books #67 - #73

Books #74 - #77 

Books #78 - #83

Books #84 - #89 

Reading Update

Book #84 of the year was Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, by C.S. Lewis. I'd read this several times before, and when I wanted to revisit it, I couldn't find a paper copy. My children introduced me to the Gutenberg Project, and the link is to their version, which I read on my screen. It's a good discussion of some aspects of prayer, framed as a series of letters to a friend, Malcolm.

Book #85 was After I Do, by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Lauren and Ryan have been married for nine years, and it's not going well. They decide to separate for a year and then figure out what to do. This book is more substantive than that summary makes it sound, and I enjoyed my third book by this author.

Book #86 was a title I've been seeing everywhere: Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, by Katherine May. I found it didn't fully live up to its hype, but as with Wintering, there were some bits I really loved. 

 

A taste: “One night I press the button on my electric toothbrush to find it with only the lowest burr of its battery left. The engine inside can barely shift the bristles. I see it clearly for the first time: this is me. I am out of charge. I’ve been leaking out energy for too long, and I don’t know how to get it back again.

Waking in the middle of that night, I remember something I used to do. I pad downstairs to greet the moon, and then sit in a garden chair and kick off my slippers. I let my bare feet make contact with the cold patio tiles, and I feel the tingle of exchange between the earth and me, the instant reciprocity. I close my eyes and let my mind sink downwards. I relieve myself of the duty to search for language. I let myself feel instead.”

Book #87 was If He Had Been With Me, by Laura Nowlin. This reminded me of something written in a hurry by a teenager, right down to the frequent lack of punctuation. But I kept reading, thinking there was going to be a big twist. There really wasn't. 

Book #88 was My Hands Came Away Red, by Lisa McKay. This is the story of a short-term mission trip gone unexpectedly traumatic. I found it very readable and compelling.

Book #89 was Jonathan Martin's The Book of Waiting: Reflections on Advent and Christmas. This is a quick read, at about 85 pages. I like Martin's writing, and while this one wasn't as intense as his others I have read, it was worth reading, and I'll probably revisit it next Christmas.

Poetry Friday: Last Day of School in 2023

I shared Mark Doty's poem twice before on this blog, once in 2011 and once in 2014. It seems perfect for this last day of school until January. 

Messiah (Christmas Portions)

 

By Mark Doty

 

A little heat caught

in gleaming rags,

in shrouds of veil,

   torn and sun-shot swaddlings:

   over the Methodist roof,

two clouds propose a Zion

of their own, blazing

   (colors of tarnish on copper)

   against the steely close

of a coastal afternoon, December,

while under the steeple

   the Choral Society

   prepares to perform

Messiah, pouring, in their best

blacks and whites, onto the raked stage.

   Not steep, really,

   but from here,

the first pew, they’re a looming

cloudbank of familiar angels: 

 

 

Here's the rest. 

 

 

Janice is hosting the roundup today. Head on over and see what everyone else is sharing!