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.

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!