Poetry Friday: Beannacht

This is a busy day, with a full day of teaching and planning, plus an Open House in the afternoon.  Still, I don't want to let this week pass by without posting for Poetry Friday, and I've chosen to share a poem I read on Monday, the day we dropped our daughter off at the airport for her flight - alone this time - to college for her sophomore year.  That day, at a most appropriate moment, this poem appeared.

Beannacht
by John O'Donohue

On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.

And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The grey window
And the ghost of loss
Gets into you,
May a flock of colours,
Indigo, red, green
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.

Here's the rest of it.

I hope this poem fills you with as much happiness as it gave me on a difficult day, and if not, you can maybe find something in the roundup that will.  I see Heidi has an Open House today, too! 

Poetry Friday: Color

I love the color poems in Hailstones and Halibut Bones: Adventures in Poetry and Color, because they talk about the smell of a color, the sound of it, the emotion of it.  I always share some of these with my seventh graders at the beginning of the year, as we talk about literal and figurative language. Here's one that I'll be sharing next week, since purple is one of our school colors.

What Is Purple?

Time is purple

Just before night

When most people

Turn on the light –

But if you don’t it’s

A beautiful sight.

Asters are purple,

There’s purple ink.

Purple’s more popular

Than you think….

It’s sort of a great

Grandmother to pink.

There are purple shadows

And purple veils,

Some ladies purple

Their fingernails.

There’s purple jam

And purple jell

And a purple bruise

Next day will tell

Where you landed

When you fell.

The purple feeling

Is rather put-out

The purple look is a

Definite pout.

But the purple sound

Is the loveliest thing

It’s a violet opening

In the spring.

Mary O’Neill

(from Hailstones and Halibut Bones)

Dori has the roundup today. 

Reading Update

I went back to work this week, and kids come back next week, so I expect my reading rate to slow down.  This has been the biggest reading year I have had in a while, and I've speculated before on this blog that that may have something to do with several events in my life that I've wanted to escape from.  I generally average about a book a week, and so far this year I have read 109.  Here's the latest nine books:

Book #101 of the year was What Comes Next and How to Like It: A Memoir, by Abigail Thomas.  The library didn't have the Kindle version, but only another funky format that I had to read on my laptop screen.  Even so, I liked it.  It's about a long friendship, a platonic male/female friendship that survives over thirty-five years in spite of all the things that life brings.

Book #102 was Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World, by Anthony Doerr.  This is Doerr's book about his time in Rome on a writing fellowship.  I recently read both of Doerr's novels, and I enjoyed this book, too.

Book #103 was The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are, by Brené Brown.  This is Brown's book on wholehearted living, and it covers a lot of the ground from her first Ted talk, though obviously in more detail.  Good stuff.

Source: leoniedawson.com

Book #104 was The Odyssey, which my daughter and I read aloud to each other in the Fagles translation.  We enjoyed it immensely.  I wrote some about it here.

Book #105 was Arcadia, by Lauren Groff.  It's about Bit, who grows up in a utopian commune in the 60s.  We get to follow the rest of his life, too, as a grownup.  I really loved this book; it was beautiful and I appreciated the portrayal of long-term relationships.  I didn't grow up in a commune, but I did grow up in a subculture that's different from the mainstream, and as such I could relate to some of the struggles the characters experienced.  (Thankfully, substance abuse isn't one of the struggles I can relate to.)

Book #106 was What She Knew, by Gilly Macmillan, a book about a woman whose eight year old son disappears.  This moves quickly and there's more going on than meets the eye.

Book #107 was No-Man's Lands: One Man's Odyssey Through The Odyssey, by Scott Huler.  I liked this very much, and wrote more about it here.

Book #108 was Eligible: A Modern Retelling of Pride and Prejudice, by Curtis Sittenfeld.  Lizzy and Jane behave in ways and use language that Jane Austen would not approve.  Reality TV is involved.  Why do I read so much Jane Austen fan fiction?  I have no idea, but I just can't resist it.  This was less disappointing than most, I have to say.

Book #109 was Present Over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living, by Shauna Niequist.  I had pre-ordered this in February, it came out on Tuesday, and I already read it.  I can relate to a lot of this, and there are things in it that I need to think more about, so I'll probably read it again.

Poetry Friday: My Husband's Hands

My Husband's Hands

Do you remember the first time you kissed me?
First you held my hand
And showed me yours.
You explained the scar,
How it came to be there,
Told me about the car accident
And going over the bridge.
I felt dizzy from holding your hand.

How could I have known then
How I would come to love those hands?
Those hands that cook and compute and write
That play chess and ping pong and basketball
Those hands that pack the car when we go on a trip
And unpack it when we get home,
That load the car with groceries
And unload them into the kitchen,
That make me tea again and again and again.
Sometimes they try to text, with clumsy thumbs.

Those hands always bring me pleasure and never pain.
I can trust those hands.
Those hands hold me, and held our babies,
Gently cupping their heads
As you carried them around proudly.

Do you remember the first time you kissed me?
I thought the kiss was the wonder -
That was what sent me floating back to my dorm.
But what really mattered was those hands.
You were showing me your history, scars and all;
You were giving me your hand
And taking mine as we walked into the future,
Which on that long-ago afternoon we knew not at all.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Here's the roundup.

Poetry Friday: The Odyssey Again

I've been reading this book:

It's the perfect book for someone who recently read The Odyssey.  Scott Huler recreates the trip Odysseus took, and so this is part reading the Odyssey, part travel narrative, part life lessons - but humorous and not taking himself too seriously.

Huler referred to this poem, and though I had read it before, I'd forgotten about it.

Ithaka
C.P. Cavafy

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Here's the rest.

And here's the roundup.