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.

Poetry Friday - Repelling Skunk

I missed a whole month of Poetry Fridays!  I am back home now, ready to enjoy the last few days of summer before I go back to work.  The summer did not go exactly as I had imagined.  For one thing, I had a rather unpleasant experience about which I wrote two poems.  The first one was called "Biopsy," but thankfully the second was called "I Don't Have Cancer Day."

I'm not going to share those poems today, but I did want to share an original one.  I wrote this one several years ago, but the friend who had told me the story felt shy about me posting it.  This summer the same friend had an encounter with a raccoon, and that got us talking about the earlier encounter and the poem, and I ended up getting his permission to make the poem public.  I'm glad, because I very much enjoyed writing this one, and I hope my PF buddies like it too.

(By the way, writers, how do you deal with this?  A lot of my poems are written for someone.  In cases like that, I always feel I need the person's permission to share the piece, even if it's a less, well, intimate subject than this one.  Do you feel the same?  Or are you more of the Anne Lamott persuasion, that whatever you experience or hear about is fair game for your writing?   Anne says, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”  Well, this one isn't about bad behavior, and it didn't exactly happen to me, but I am still curious to know your experiences with this aspect of writing, if you'd like to share in the comments.)

 Image source

Repelling Skunk

The black and white unwelcome visitor
Poked around on the back porch,
And got up on hind legs to peer in the door.

Internet research turned up some useful information:
Pee repels skunks.
So Paul, early morning groggy,
Staggered out back
To do the necessary.

At first he felt self-conscious;
What if neighbors were watching?
But when he started to pee with a purpose,
He couldn't help enjoying it,
Outside, in the morning,
In the chilly September air.

He had plenty of pee,
So he kept on going and going,
Feeling free and like a kid again.
The word "whizzing" came to mind
And he wondered when he'd last used that one.
He thought about traveling as a boy,
A twelve-hour trip with no rest stops except bushes.
He thought about camping trips in the woods.
He thought about winter and yellow snow.

He felt briefly invincible
Summoning the mighty powers of pee,
Considered making the rounds of the neighborhood,
Ensuring a skunk-free environment for all.
But then he remembered his age and
Position in the community
And went back indoors instead.

The black and white unwelcome visitor
Only stayed briefly the next time
Before ambling off;
Was it the pee that repelled the skunk?
Paul likes to think so.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

(By the way, as though to remind me that I am home in Haiti, there was a long time between the beginning of this post and the end.  Our backup batteries died, and I had to wait to get the generator going.  It's going now, and I'm going to publish...)

Two Missed Weeks of Poetry Friday!

This has turned out to be a more eventful summer than anticipated.  Here are the links to the last two Poetry Friday roundups.  I'll be back posting regularly soon. 

July 10th

July 17th

Hope you're having a good summer!

Poetry Saturday

I completely missed that yesterday was Friday.  Such is a teacher's summer.  Here is yesterday's roundup, since apparently some people knew what day it was.

Poetry Friday: Adlestrop

I shared this poem once before back in 2008. I love how specific it is, and how it places us in one unrepeatable moment.


Adlestrop 

Edward Thomas

Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
The name because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Here's today's roundup.

Reading Update

Book #35 was Handle with Care and #36 was Plain Truth, both by Jodi Picoult.  These aren't great literature, but they are absorbing stories with courtroom dramas at the heart of them.

Book #37 was Flora, by Gail Godwin, a story set at the end of World War Two and involving regret and remorse.

Book #38 was The King's Curse, by Philippa Gregory.  This is the unremittingly awful story of Margaret Pole, who lived in the time of Henry VIII and managed, like so many others, to fall afoul of him.  Pole was from the Plantagenet family, rivals to the Tudors.  She spent years as the governess of Henry's daughter Mary (later called Bloody Mary). 

After these four rather dark books, I really need to find something more cheerful to read!

Poetry Friday: The Art of Losing

I guess this must be one of my favorite poems, since this is the third time I have posted it on my blog.  I shared it in May 2010 and again in May 2013.  The art of losing and the art of living are almost synonymous.  When I posted this in 2013, Mary Lee (who is hosting today's roundup - check it out!) commented: "So why do we need to PRACTICE loss, Ms. Bishop? Why can't we focus on shoring ourselves up for loss with loves (both large and small)?"  She's right.  Love is what shores us up.  But it's also why loss hurts so much.

Thinking about Mary Lee's question, I came to this conclusion: having experienced many losses in the past teaches us that life does go on.  It teaches us that we can survive losses we didn't think were survivable.  In that sense, maybe we make a little progress towards the art of losing.

But I think Elizabeth Bishop is trying to convince herself here.  She is facing a loss that feels like disaster to her.  She is facing it, bravely, not turning away.  She isn't numbing it or pretending it isn't there.  "Write it!" she urges herself.  In saying the art of losing isn't too hard to master, she's saying that it is terribly hard, the hardest.  Frankly, I often want to stop the loving because the losing hurts so much.  I don't want to reach out and attach and care.  But if I didn't, I wouldn't be mastering the art of living.

It's all one.


One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like a disaster.

Poetry Friday: Hafiz

Even though school's been out for a couple of weeks now, I was on campus yesterday looking for a particular book.  I found it, and then on my way home I found a whole stack of books that looked as though someone was throwing them away.  One of them was a book of Hafiz's poetry, and I grabbed that and brought it home for safekeeping.

Here are some poems from the book that I especially liked:

Here's another Hafiz poem I posted back in 2013.

The amazing Jama has the roundup today, and the results are sure to be delicious!

Reading Update

Book #22 of 2015 was Love at the Speed of Email: A Memoir, by Lisa McKay.  I found this author when a Facebook friend posted an update from her blog after the recent cyclone in Vanuatu.  McKay's husband had just moved there, and she was waiting in Australia to get the all-clear to bring their two sons and join him.  This book is the story of how she and that husband got together, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I could relate to McKay's international background and struggles with identifying home. 

Book #23 was Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church, the long-awaited new book by Rachel Held Evans.  Articles about the book have presented it as Evans' less-than-fond farewell to evangelicalism, but it's not really that.  It's more a love letter to the Church and all that is beautiful in it.  With anyone we love and know very well, we can also find plenty of flaws, and Evans does that too.  This book is so wonderfully written - she's getting better and better.  It's organized around the seven sacraments identified by the Catholic church.  I'd love to discuss this with a group; there's so much in it.

Book #24 was Gap Creek, by Robert Morgan.  It was like "Little House on the Prairie" (the TV show) on steroids.  Remember how in every episode there was some kind of horrible crisis?  It's the same in this book, except it all takes place in one year.  A note tells us that it's based on the first year of his grandparents' marriage.  Oh my word.  It's amazing anybody survived Appalachia right after the Civil War.  This book is harrowing but brilliant.  I recommend it, but I had to follow it with some lighter fare.

Book #25 was Greetings from Nowhere, by Barbara O'Connor.  I read this YA book with my seventh graders to finish out the year.  It was maybe a little young for them, but we all enjoyed it, nonetheless.  The book is written in several voices, which we'd encountered before in Seedfolks, and we liked the way it didn't wrap up too neatly.

Book #26 was As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth, by Lynne Rae Perkins.  I finished the year with this in eighth grade, and found it moved a little slowly for that class, who prefer their books a bit more action-packed.  I really liked it, though.  It was very quirky and fun, with characters who were oddly believable in spite of being so bizarre.

Book #27 was I Kill the Mockingbird, by Paul Acampora.  This one was a lot of fun, another YA title, centered around summer reading and some kids who decide to start a campaign to convince people to read To Kill a Mockingbird, using reverse psychology, social media, and ingenuity.

Book #28 was Orchards, by Holly Thompson, the same author who wrote The Language Inside, which I read last year but don't seem to have added to my list or blogged about, so I'm going to count that one for this year as #29.  Both books are verse novels and both have a Japanese setting.  I chose The Language Inside because it was about the 2011 earthquake in Japan and an American girl displaced to the US by the illness of her mother.  I've used it with students for a couple of years now, and while the kids don't love it quite as much as I do, it does go down well with them, and there's a lot to talk about in it.  Orchards also has cross-cultural themes, as it concerns a girl who is half-Japanese and is sent to Japan to spend time with her family there after a girl in her class commits suicide.  I'm considering this one for a read-aloud next year.

Book #30 was Cruel Beauty, by Rosamund Hodge.  This one is sort of a Psyche and Cupid/Beauty and the Beast/Bluebeard retelling, but with many interesting quirks.  I found the exact plot details a bit confusing at times, but the overall story was very evocative and satisfying.

Book #31 was Why I am an Atheist who Believes in God: How to Give Love, Create Beauty, and Find Peace, by Frank Schaeffer.  Schaeffer has a compelling voice, and that's what kept me reading.  I enjoyed his ruminations on growing up evangelical, and while I don't agree with all of his conclusions, I did find his rather curmudgeonly persona quite appealing.

Book #32 was So, Anyway..., a memoir by hilarious British comedian John Cleese.  It moved along pretty well, with interesting anecdotes, until suddenly Cleese seemed to lose interest and summed up thirty years in one chapter.  So anyway, is there going to be a sequel?

Book #33 was Good Harbor, by Anita Diamant.  This was a bit slight, but entertaining.

Book #34 was Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloan.  I read this with a tech-y friend, and we both enjoyed it.  It starts out being about books, and ends up being about the internet, and in between is a lot of fun. 

Poetry Friday: Deep Enough to Dream

This song is pure summer to me; it expresses the feeling of dozing on a hot afternoon, having deep dreams, hearing the buzzing fly, waking up, and dozing again. Chris Rice is dreaming of heaven; what better way to spend a summer afternoon?

Deep Enough to Dream

Lazy summer afternoon
Screened in porch and nothin' to do
I just kicked off my tennis shoes
Slouchin' in a plastic chair
Rakin' my fingers through my hair
I close my eyes and I leave them there
And I yawn, and sigh, and slowly fade away

Deep enough to dream in brilliant colors
I have never seen
Deep enough to join a billion people
For a wedding feast
Deep enough to reach out and touch
The face of the One who made me
And oh, the love I feel, and oh the peace
Do I ever have to wake up

Awakened by a familiar sound
A clumsy fly is buzzin' around
He bumps the screen and he tumbles down
He gathers about his wits and pride
And tries again for the hundredth time
'Cause freedom calls from the other side
And I smile and nod, and slowly drift away

Deep enough to dream in brilliant colors
I have never seen
Deep enough to join a billion people
For a wedding feast
Deep enough to reach out and touch
The face of the One who made me
And oh, the love I feel, and oh the peace
Do I ever have to wake up

'Cause peace is pouring over my soul
See the lambs and the lions playin'
I join in and I drink the music
Holiness is the air I'm breathin'
My faithful heroes break the bread
And answer all of my questions
Not to mention what the streets are made of
My heart's held hostage by this love
And these brilliant colors I have never seen
I join a billion people for a wedding feast
And I reach out and touch the face of the One who made me

And oh, the love I feel, and oh the peace
Do I ever have to wake up
Do I ever have to wake up
Do I ever have to wake up
Do I really have to wake up now

Chris Rice 

Here's today's roundup.

Poetry Friday

I finished cleaning my classroom today and covering all my shelves for the summer.  Tomorrow my daughter is graduating.  I'm not up to posting today, but maybe next week.  Meanwhile, here's what everyone else posted.

OLW 2015 Check-in

I saw a post on this blog encouraging people to report on how they are doing with their OLW (One Little Word).  Mine this year is "Unafraid."  How am I doing with it?  I have good days and bad days.  There are days when I really am unafraid, trusting, living in the moment.  There are other days when I dwell on the goodbyes to be said at the end of the summer, all that could go wrong, how we will all adjust next year with my daughter gone, in college, and how she will adjust.  Who will she be, living without us in a different country?  (How exciting/terrifying to think about!)  Who will I be without her?  (Not as high a percentage of exciting in that one.)

I've written on this blog before about how I actually worry less since the earthquake than I used to.  This transition so far has been more about grief than worry or fear.  But there is, I confess, a certain amount of fear of the unknown.  It has helped me to focus on this word, and on the kind of person I want to be, that completely unafraid person who is now mostly a figment of my imagination, but who may become more of a reality as I go along. 

Poetry Friday, The Fear Factor

Yesterday I read Sara Holbrook's poem "The Fear Factor," from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School, with my seventh graders.  In the poem she addresses Courage, who always whispers, "Okay.  Okay.  It's going to be okay."

My favorite part is where the persona lists many things to fear, and then confesses (speaking to Courage) that the greatest one is: "I fear you will abandon me, / evaporate / and not return."

You can read the whole poem here, on Sara's own blog.

Today is my daughter's last regular day of high school.  Next week she has finals, leading up to graduation on Saturday.  I'm clinging to my own Courage, knowing (and yet sometimes doubting) that it's all going to be okay.  She's ready, we're ready (or faking it as well as we can), it's going to be okay. 

Here's today's roundup.

Poetry Friday

Another post-less week.  It's just that time of year.  But look at all the other great Poetry Friday offerings!