Poetry Friday: Green Garden

My daughter sent me this song this week, saying she thought I'd like it.  I do.  People up north are longing for green because the ground is covered in snow; here, we're longing for green because it hasn't rained since who remembers when, and the ground is covered in dust.  So as we all dream of green, here's Laura Mvula.



Here are the lyrics:

Take me outside, sit in the green garden
Nobody out there, but it’s okay now
Bathe in the sunlight, don't mind if rain falls
Take me outside, sit in the green garden
Oh ah, oh ah oh
Oh ah, oh ah oh

And I’ll fly on the wings of a butterfly
High as a tree top and down again
Putting my bag down, taking my shoes off
Walk on the carpet of green velvet

Dance in my garden like we used to
Oh ah, oh ah oh
Dance in my garden like we used to
Oh ah, oh ah oh

Take me outside, sit in the green garden
Nobody out there, but it’s okay now
Bathe in the sunlight, don't mind if rain falls
Take me outside, sit in the green garden

I’ll go wherever you go
Wherever you take me, I’ll go
I’ll go wherever you go
Wherever you take me, I’ll go

Take me outside, sit in the green garden
Take me outside, sit in the green garden

And I’ll fly on the wings of a butterfly
High as a tree top and down again
Putting my bag down, taking my shoes off
Walk on the carpet of green velvet

Dance in my garden like we used to
Oh ah, oh ah oh
Dance in my garden like we used to

Take me outside, take me outside
Take me outside, sit in the green garden

I'll go wherever you go
Wherever you take me, I'll go


Here's today's roundup. 

Poetry Friday: The Snowman

I'm thinking about gardens this year, but I decided it's time to acknowledge, on behalf of my northern friends who keep posting snow photos, that many gardens are dormant right now.  I don't have the mind of winter; I'm a tropical girl all the way.  But when I read this poem, and imagine having been cold a long time, I think I start to see what Wallace Stevens means.  At least a little bit.
 
The Snowman

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens

Here's today's roundup.

Reading Update

Book #1 of the year was The Kingmaker's Daughter, by Philippa Gregory.  I don't get into these Wars of the Roses books as much as I do the Tudor ones, mostly because I am far more familiar with the Tudor history.  But this was worth reading.

Book #2 was a book I've been wanting to read ever since I saw that it had come out: Amy Wilentz's Farewell, Fred Voodoo.  I enjoy Wilentz's writing about Haiti; she loves this country, and her writing style is colorful and evocative, full of telling details.  Her most famous book is The Rainy Season, which came out in 1990.  I read it before I came to Haiti for the first time.  She has written countless articles on this country.  Her blog is always worth reading.  In this book she is less confident; she seems to be floundering, trying, like all of us, to come up with ways to live with the fact of the earthquake and its aftermath.  She questions everyone's motives (her own too, in powerful passages), and sometimes this got to be too much for me.  I found myself alternately sad, angry, and defensive.  She spends a lot of time trying to figure out what draws outsiders to Haiti and what holds them here.  I think all of us foreigners who live here do the same.  I can't argue with lots of her conclusions, but I couldn't stomach her suggestion that aid workers were gleeful to find out about cholera, because they could stay longer in their fancy Port-au-Prince digs: "it sounded breathless, almost eager: beyond the sadness of 'tragedy upon tragedy' is the possibility of more funding for aid organizations, more jobs, longer stays in this fascinating, troubled place - in nice new apartments, driving those big, air-conditioned Land Rovers.  It's not as if humanitarian workers are in the business for the big cars and nice apartments, but the sweet stuff comes with the territory, and the crisis caravan is used to it."  She seems obsessed with Sean Penn, and keeps coming back to him and what he's actually doing in Haiti.  She admits (rather grudgingly) that he has achieved a lot.  It's typical for journalists to be critical of those they write about, but I kept wondering, as she almost mockingly described one effort after another: what are they supposed to do, then?  (She doesn't know, she admits in a couple of places.  And honestly, nobody does.)  She says that people who complain about the corruption of the Haitian government are at least partly motivated by racism, but then in the next breath, gives examples of the corruption.  She is absolutely right that change has to come from within, not imposed by outsiders.  I found this book pretty painful to read, but probably much of that was the state I am in rather than anything wrong with the book itself.  The fourth anniversary of the quake rolled around last week, and I am less capable than ever of summing it all up, figuring it all out.  Wilentz feels the same, to a certain degree, and I think the best writing in this book is in the sections where she admits just how overwhelming it all is. 

Poetry Friday: Evacuation

Four years ago yesterday, I left Haiti for the United States, five days after the earthquake.  I blogged back then about all the reasons we made the decision, and about my guilt over leaving Haiti when there was so much need for help.  But that was what happened: my husband stayed and did relief work, and I left with the children. 

A few weeks after arriving in the United States, I got a phone call from a doctor friend who had also left Haiti after the earthquake, after working around the clock for days and days with no rest.  He was going back, but meanwhile he wanted to see how I was.  He and his family were going through this for the second time; they had left Rwanda during the genocide, expecting to return to their home in a month.  They never went back.  He started talking about packing his bag to leave Rwanda, and how he had packed underwear and socks, and later wished so much he had packed things that mattered, instead. 

Later, my own experience and that conversation turned into this poem.


How to Pack an Evacuation Bag

So you're going to be evacuated in eight hours
And you can just take one small bag.

Don't worry about a toothbrush -
You can buy one of those on the other side.
But you'll need the bracelets you like to wear
And your kids' baby pictures.

Don't pack underwear and socks -
They have those where you're going.
Instead, take the vaccination records
And the birth certificates and passports
And all the proof that you exist.
Because believe me, you're going to feel as though you don't.

And let me tell you what you're really going to need during the months of exile:
The smell of garlic
The way the sun feels on your back
The sounds of generators and roosters and kompa music
The taste of sos pwa
And your husband's kiss.

But I forgot;
You can just take one small bag.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Here's today's roundup. 

Anniversary

Four years ago today, an earthquake changed my life, and the lives of millions of others.  It ended the lives of many thousands.  On this anniversary, the depth of the pain takes me a little bit by surprise, given how much we have all moved on.  I go days without thinking of the earthquake now.  But although the literal aftershocks stopped long ago, the metaphorical ones continue.

Dear Haiti, we will never forget. 

Poetry Friday: Paths

I love the particularity of this poem by John Montague, in which he remembers the two gardens of his childhood, gardens of which he was the "small guardian."  One was a flower garden, and the other a vegetable garden: "the front for beauty, the back for use."  This poem captures so many small details that I feel as though I can wander through these gardens with him in his memory.

Paths
John Montague

We had two gardens.

A real flower garden

overhanging the road

(our miniature Babylon).

Paths which I helped

to lay with Aunt Winifred,

riprapped with pebbles;

shards of painted delph;

an old potato boiler;

a blackened metal pot,

now bright with petals. 

 

You can read the rest here. And you can see today's roundup here.

My Garden

I have some free time on Tuesday mornings, which usually is great, but today, as I wait to see my kids for the first time since their Christmas break, I am at loose ends and strangely nervous.  I started thinking about this passage in The Wednesday Wars, by Gary Schmidt, a book I read with my seventh graders back in the fall.  A seventh grader is speaking about his teacher and their class:

"It was early spring and we were her garden, and she was starting to see the bulbs and seeds that she had planted in us last fall coming up.  She raked away our dead leaves, spaded new soil around us, and watered and fertilized.  And we grew fast and green, let me tell you."

I'm ready to get back to the gardening!

Poetry Friday: God's Garden

The fourth stanza of this poem is very familiar, since it appears on many garden signs. I found this one on Ebay.

I'm not sure, though, that I had ever read the rest of the poem.  I found out that Dorothy Frances Gurney wrote this originally in a guest book, after she had enjoyed a stay with a friend who had a beautiful garden.  In fact, it was this garden, Penshurst Place in Kent.  Having a garden like that requires rather a large staff!

This may seem a bit of an inappropriate poem for this time of year, but here in Haiti where I live it is still beautiful weather, though a bit chilly right now, at 75 degrees.  It is supposed to get up to 93 later today.  (Do I sound smug?  Sorry.  I just can't help it sometimes.)  I don't have to go back to work until Monday, so I'm savoring these last few days and a little more ease for the soul.

God's Garden

THE Lord God planted a garden

In the first white days of the world,

And He set there an angel warden

In a garment of light enfurled.



So near to the peace of Heaven,

That the hawk might nest with the wren,

For there in the cool of the even

God walked with the first of men.



And I dream that these garden-closes

With their shade and their sun-flecked sod

And their lilies and bowers of roses,

Were laid by the hand of God.



The kiss of the sun for pardon,

The song of the birds for mirth,--

One is nearer God's heart in a garden

Than anywhere else on earth.



For He broke it for us in a garden

Under the olive-trees

Where the angel of strength was the warden

And the soul of the world found ease.



Dorothy Frances Gurney

 

The roundup is here today. Enjoy the first Poetry Friday of the year!

New Ambassador for Young People's Literature

I just read that the new Ambassador for Young People's Literature has been named.  It's Kate DiCamillo.  Here is some more information about her, and here you can see my post about attending a panel discussion including all three of the previous ambassadors. 

One Little Word for 2014

I didn't post much about last year's OLW (you can see the post here where I introduced it, and if you follow the links in that introduction, you can see the other OLWs I have chosen since 2009 and find more about the whole concept of choosing One Little Word), but in a way, everything this year was about shalom.  That word "flourishing," cited in the definition, kept coming up again and again in my life, in what I heard and read.  I saw examples of shalom, and felt its absence.  In the latter part of the year, our church began an in-depth study of the book of Genesis, and I learned a great deal about the literary aspects of the creation narrative, and how it compared to the creation narratives of surrounding Middle-Eastern cultures.  I began to think even more about shalom, and the picture of it in the garden, when all was as God had intended it to be.  Instead of separation and fear and suspicion, there was connection and rightness, shalom.  There was shalom between people and God, between people and nature, between the genders.  We seek that now, wishing and longing for the way things ought to be. 

The OLW I have chosen for 2014 is, then, continuing the theme from 2013.  But this year I was inspired by Irene Latham's choice for 2013.  Instead of picking an abstract concept, Irene, a true poet, chose the word "sky."  I loved watching her play with and enjoy her word all year long.

So this year, my OLW is garden.    I want to think about that original garden Paradise Lost, about the garden in myth and metaphor, and about flowers.  Quite honestly, I want to play, too, to take off my shoes and feel the grass between my toes. 

Here's to 2014!  I can't wait to see what's ahead!

Last Reading Update of 2013

Book #38 was Dr. Thorne, by Anthony Trollope.  I am loving these Victorian novels about clergymen.

Book #39 was the long-awaited Jesus Feminist, by Sarah Bessey.  I've been enjoying Sarah's blog for a long time, and I liked this book, too.  It isn't the last word, of course, on the subject, but I like her approach.  "People want black-and-white answers," she writes, "but Scripture is rainbow arch across a stormy sky.  Our sacred book is not an indexed answer book or life manual; it is also a grand story, mystery, invitation, truth and wisdom, and a passionate love letter.  I've abandoned the idea that my job is to get the absolute, 100 percent right answers on everything."

Books #40 and #43 were both by Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, both about Thomas Cromwell.  I am not sure what keeps drawing me back to the story of Henry VIII and his times, but somehow I can't look away from the fascinating, horrible tale.  Mantel does a fabulous job of showing Cromwell in all his complexity, but I do wish she would use quotation marks consistently and quit switching tenses.  Reading these was sort of a weird combination of breathless admiration of a brilliant writer and annoyance as I wanted to take my red pen to her prose.  Oh well, just call me pedantic, but also call me a Hilary Mantel fan.

Books #41 and #42 were both specifically Advent titles, Touching Wonder: Recapturing the Awe of Christmas, by John Blase, and Opening the Stable Door: An Advent Reader, by Dale and Jonalyn Fincher.  Both were quick, easy reads, and both helped me focus my scattered attention on Advent this year.

Book #43 was another quick read, but a helpful one from a writer I have loved for years, Philip Yancey.  This one, The Question that Never Goes Away, is his most recent response to the problem of evil, and it includes his visits to post-earthquake Japan; Newtown, Connecticut, and Sarajevo.  Highly recommended. 

Book #44 was another Trollope title, Framley Parsonage.  Only 43 Trollope novels to go!

Here are the other books I read this year:

Books #1 - #6.
Books #7 - #14.
Here's a link to my post about Bread and Wine, by Shauna Niequist, my eleventh book of the year.
Here's Book #15, Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions, by Dan Brennan.
Books #16 - #23.
Book #24, Middlemarch, by George Eliot. (Surely this one counts as several books, and can boost my total from 45 to closer to my unreached goal for this year, 52.)
Books #25 - #32.  (In this post I continued my annual tradition of getting the numbering wrong.)
Books #33 - #38.  (Yeah, the numbering in the post doesn't match.)

So I read 45 books this year.  This was a rewarding reading year, a satisfying mix of professional reading, reading about faith, and juicy novels, both YA and books written for people closer to my own age.  I didn't include all my re-reads, and I didn't include books of poetry.  I'm looking forward to another year of books in 2014!

Here's a link to some other people's reading lists for the year.

Poetry Friday on Monday

We just got back from a few days at the beach with very limited internet, so I missed Poetry Friday last week.  Here's the roundup.  I'll be back soon with links to the last few books I completed in 2013.

Poetry Friday: Difference

I was looking for a poem about peace, a poem appropriate for this day, the first morning waking up with no grading to do, with hours to fill as I wish.  I didn't exactly find it, but I did find this one, which I hadn't read before.  I love its portrayal of two minds, his and (I imagine) a woman's.  It makes me want to write a poem about my own mind, and sets me thinking about how I would do it.  And after all, what better thing to do with this first day of my Christmas break, my first day of peace after days of frantic work? 

Difference

by Stephen Vincent Benét

 

My mind’s a map. A mad sea-captain drew it   

Under a flowing moon until he knew it;

Winds with brass trumpets, puffy-cheeked as jugs,   

And states bright-patterned like Arabian rugs.   

“Here there be tygers.” “Here we buried Jim.”   

Here is the strait where eyeless fishes swim   

About their buried idol, drowned so cold   

He weeps away his eyes in salt and gold.   

A country like the dark side of the moon,   

A cider-apple country, harsh and boon,   

A country savage as a chestnut-rind,

A land of hungry sorcerers.

                                              Your mind?

—Your mind is water through an April night,

A cherry-branch, plume-feathery with its white,   

A lavender as fragrant as your words,   

A room where Peace and Honor talk like birds,   

Sewing bright coins upon the tragic cloth   

Of heavy Fate, and Mockery, like a moth,   

Flutters and beats about those lovely things.   

You are the soul, enchanted with its wings,   

The single voice that raises up the dead   

To shake the pride of angels.

                                                 I have said.

 

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup. 

Poetry Friday

Today was the last day of classes, and I have giant piles of grading to do, so that they will be out of the way and I can focus on grading finals next week.  All that to say, no poems today, but you can go to the roundup here, at The Opposite of Indifference, to see what everyone else has posted. 

Poetry Friday: Sounds from this House

I am knee deep in grading, final exams to write, and assorted other end of the semester tasks.  But I'm popping in to link you to a poem I contributed to our school's online literary journal (first issue just out this week).  The poem is called "Sounds from this House."  I wrote down the idea a long time ago, because I had noticed that the sounds out of every window of our house are different.  I decided to catalog them.  I didn't intend for the poem to be about the earthquake, but somehow it got in there; at the time, everything I wrote was about the earthquake in one way or another. 

Sounds from this House, Delmas 83, Haiti

Listen:
There is a different sound from each bedroom in this house.
Upstairs, you can hear the conversations next door,
Loud voices speaking Kreyol,
Cajoling, joking, insulting,
Sometimes shouts, and a few times, even a gunshot.
There are parties and vodou ceremonies,
Music and drumming through the night.
From the other window, church wafts in;
Singing, preaching, microphone-amplified.

You can read the rest here.

And Robyn Hood Black has today's roundup here.

Poetry Friday: Ode to the Onion

 Van Gogh, Still Life with a Plate of Onions

I always do odes with my eighth graders around Thanksgiving.  This one seems fitting, since several of the delicious dishes today contained onions.  I love Neruda's focus on ordinary things, and the way he sees the extraordinary in them.  Perfect for Thanksgiving, when we look at our blessings with more grateful eyes than we do on other days. 


Ode to the Onion
Pablo Neruda, tr. George Schade

Onion
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grey round with dew.
Under the earth
the miracle
happened
and when your clumsy
green stem appeared.
and your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden.
the earth heaped up her power
showing your naked transparency.
and as the remote sea
in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite
duplicated the magnolia.
So did the earth
make you,
onion,
clear as a planet,
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation
round case of water.
upon
the table
of the poor.
Generously
you undo
your globe of freshness
in the fervent consummation
of the cooking pot
and the crystal shred
in the flaming heat of the oil
is transformed into a curled golden feather.

Then, too, I will recall how fertile
is your influence
on the love of the salad,
and it seems that the sky contributes
by giving you the shape of hailstones
to celebrate our chopped brightness
on the hemispheres of a tomato.
But within reach
of the hands if the common people,
sprinkled with oil.
dusted
with bit of salt,
you kill the hunger
of the day laborer on his hard path.

Star of the poor,
fairy godmother
wrapped
in delicate
paper, you rise from the ground
eternal, whole, pure
like an astral seed.
and when the kitchen knife
cuts you, here arises
the only tear
without sorrow.

You make us cry without hurting us.
I have praised everything that exists,
but to me, onion, you are
more beautiful than a bird
of dazzling feathers,
you are to my eyes
a heavenly globe, a platinum goblet,
an unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone.

and the fragrance of the earth lives
in your crystalline nature.


Take a look at the post-Thanksgiving roundup here.  

Poetry Friday: Merry Autumn

I am planning to read this one with my seventh graders next week.  I thought they'd like it because we read a whole slew of mournful November poems, and this one is way more cheerful.  In fact, Dunbar mocks the idea that autumn is sad.  The poem starts:

Merry Autumn
Paul Laurence Dunbar

It's all a farce,—these tales they tell 

About the breezes sighing,

And moans astir o'er field and dell,

Because the year is dying. 



And it ends like this:


Don't talk to me of solemn days

In autumn's time of splendor, 

Because the sun shows fewer rays, 

And these grow slant and slender. 



Why, it's the climax of the year,— 

The highest time of living!— 

Till naturally its bursting cheer 

Just melts into thanksgiving.



 You can read the whole poem here.

I'm really looking forward to next week just melting into Thanksgiving.  Over at Write. Sketch. Repeat., Katya is hosting a Thanksgiving feast and Poetry Friday roundup.  Head on over to see what she is serving here!

Poetry Friday: Today I am a Small Blue Thing

Today I am a small blue thing
Like a marble or an eye
With my knees against my mouth
I am perfectly round
I am watching you

I am cold against your skin
You are perfectly reflected
I am lost inside your pocket
I am lost against your fingers
I am falling down the stairs
I am skipping on the sidewalk
I am thrown against the sky
I am raining down in pieces
I am scattering like light
Scattering like light
Scattering like light

Today I am a small blue thing
Made of China, made of glass
I am cool and smooth and curious, I never blink
I am turning in your hand
Turning in your hand

I am cold against your skin
You are perfectly reflected
I am lost inside your pocket
I am lost against your fingers
I am falling down the stairs
I am skipping on the sidewalk
I am thrown against the sky
I am raining down in pieces
I am scattering like light
Scattering like light
Scattering like light

Today I am a small blue thing
Like a marble or an eye
I am cool and smooth and curious, I never blink
I am turning in your hand
Turning in your hand
Turning in your hand
Small blue thing
Turning in your hand
Turning in your hand

Suzanne Vega

Here's today's roundup, hosted by Jama.   

Poetry Friday: Thinking About Thoreau

I have been writing a poem every day for the month of November, and maybe at some point I'll share more of what I've written (on Monday I posted this in honor of Pajama Day), but for today, I want to show you the best poem I read this week, by my friend Jessica Stock.  She blogs at One Wild and Precious Life about art, reading, motherhood, homeschooling, and faith.  I am always so excited when I see that she has posted something; it's always worth reading.  This week she was thinking about Thoreau as she recovered from her daughter's sixth birthday party.  Thanks, Jess, for letting me share your poem!

thinking about Thoreau at the end of the sixth birthday party

I cannot take Thoreau seriously since I learned his mother did his laundry
simplify simplify: a nice thought but somebody or your mom must wash your underwear
Thoreau lived deliberately and did not ever
so far as I am aware
separate the whites or
deal with his child's civil disobedience or
hear his name called up his spine
so persistently that he might consider ducking into the coat closet

Did you, Thoreau, ever plan a six year old's birthday party
or contemplate food allergies
crafts
test the recipe for chocolate cake with chocolate frosting
or advance confidently in the direction of the store for maraschino cherries- a five year old's only request?
Details Details

Did you, Thoreau, ever see your daughter so drunk on delight and red40
at the end of her sixth birthday party?

Now watch as I take this glass of wine to the bath
And read the Atlantic and scrub my poor feet with sugar

No one, not even Thoreau, had such delicious solitude
Not even Thoreau had such smooth feet

Jessica Stock



Today's roundup is hosted by Diane at Random Noodling.  Happy Poetry Friday!

Pajama Day

I teach the word "infer" to the seventh graders,
who are dressed in their pajamas.
"If you look around today," I explain,
"You can infer from what people are wearing
That it's Pajama Day."

You can infer from what I am wearing, too,
That it is Pajama Day. 
My purple plaid drawstring pants
My oversized school T-shirt from two sports seasons ago
My socks and running shoes.

Dressed in my pajamas,
I attempt to keep order
Among children in bathrobes
Children with stuffed animals
Children in slippers,
And perhaps most difficult of all,
Those who forgot to dress up.

Not to worry - it's only Monday.
Four more days of costumed mayhem left in Spirit Week.
You can infer from my martyred sigh
Exactly how I feel about that.