The Practice

 

Remember, says my friend, to look

for beauty every day. And immediately

 

I think of the blue heron I saw this afternoon

as it flew upriver, its elegant neck tucked

 

into its body in flight, its deep, slow wing beats

guiding it through the curves of the wide canyon.

 

In my chest, I felt it, the rising urge to fly,

the pulsing, the thrill of blue heron.

 

In that instant, I did not wonder

if a moment of beauty is enough

 

to sustain us through difficult times.

I knew only that I had to remind my eyes

 

to watch the highway instead of following

the great blue weight as it wove

 

through the empty cottonwood tops,

its silhouette charged with improbable grace,

 

its long legs dangling behind,

a reminder we all must land sometime.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, ahundredfallingveils.com March 26, 2017

"Do You Have Any Advice for Those of Us Just Starting Out?"

 

Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave

your house or apartment. Go out into the world.

 

It's all right to carry a notebook but a cheap

one is best, with pages the color of weak tea

and on the front a kitten or a space ship.

 

Avoid any enclosed space where more than

three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware

any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks

across the muffled tennis courts.

 

Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.

And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle

where a child a year or two old is playing as his

mother browses the ranks of the dead.

 

Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.

The title, the author's name, the brooding photo

on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray

book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher

it gets, the wider he grins.

 

You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower

falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody

in the world frowns and says, "Shhhh."

 

Then start again.

Ron Koertge, Fever (Red Hen Press, 2006)

The Constellation Orion

 

I'm delighted to see you.

old friend.

lying there in your hammock

over the next town.

You were the first person

my son was to meet in the heavens.

He's sleeping now.

his head like a small sun in my lap.

Our car whizzes along in the night.

If he were awake, he'd say.

"Look, Daddy, there's Old Ryan!"

but I won't wake him.

He's mine for the weekend,

Old Ryan, not yours.

Ted Kooser, Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems (Pitt Poetry Series, 1980)

How I Go to the Woods Alone

 Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not

a single
friend, for they are all smilers and talkers
and therefore unsuitable.

I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to
the catbirds
or hugging the old black oak tree. I have
my way of
praying, as you no doubt have yours.

Besides, when I am alone I can become
invisible, I can sit
on the top of a dune as motionless as an
uprise of weeds,
until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can
hear the almost
unhearable sound of the roses singing.

If you have ever gone to the woods with me,
I must love
you very much.

Mary Oliver, shoreacres.wordpress.com, March 22, 2020

Almanac Birds: April 23

 

How do they do it,

the broad-tailed hummingbirds,

arriving at my window

the same day every year,

welcome as spring,

reliable as moon.

 

And what part of me

thrills in their predictability?

And what part says,

a tad too triumphantly,

See, here’s proof,

things come back.

 

I hear the small birds

before I see them,

their wingtips trilling,

I’ve read how the feathers

that make the sound wear down

from use. By midwinter,

 

you can barely hear

their bright hum at all until,

preparing to breed,

they grow new feathers again.

How do they do it,

grow feathers at just the right time?

 

I want to linger in the small

miracle of it, these ears still learning

how to hear and this heart still

astonished at the timing

of the world, how life just knows

when to return, when to grow.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, ahundredfallingveils.com April 23, 2018

Questions to Ask When Waking

 

What would you do if you really knew
that life was wanting to sing through you?

What would you say if your words could convey
prayers that the world was waiting to pray?

What would you be if your being could free
some piece of the world’s un-whispered beauty?

What would you stop to bless and caress
if you believed that blessing could address
our painful illusions of brokenness?

What would you harvest from heartache and pain
if you understood loss as a way to regain
the never-forsaken terrain of belonging?

What would you love if your love could ignite
a sea full of stars on the darkest night?

Bernadette Miller, janicefalls.wordpress.com/blog April 2, 2021

a girl named jack

 

Good enough name for me, my father said

the day I was born.

Don't see why

she can't have it, too.

 

But the women said no.

My mother first.

Then each aunt, pulling my pink blanket back

patting the crop of thick curls

tugging at my new toes

touching my cheeks.

 

We won't have a girl named Jack, my mother said.

 

And my father's sisters whispered,

A boy named Jack was bad enough.

But only so my mother could hear.

Name a girl Jack, my father said,

and she can't help but

grow up strong.

Raise her right, my father said,

and she'll make that name her own.

Name a girl Jack

and people will look at her twice, my father said.

 

For no good reason but to ask if her parents

were crazy, my mother said.

 

And back and forth it went until I was Jackie

and my father left the hospital mad.

 

My mother said to my aunts,

Hand me that pen, wrote

Jacqueline where it asked for a name.

Jacqueline, just in case

someone thought to drop the ie.

 

Jacqueline,  just in case

I grew up and wanted something a little bit longer

and further away from

Jack.

Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming (Nancy Paulson Books, 2014)

Sleep Apnea

 

Night after night, when I was a child,
I woke to the guttering candle
of my father’s breath. It made a sound
like the starlings that sometimes
got caught in our chimney, a chirping
that would gradually, steadily build
to a desperate, flat slapping of wings,
then suddenly drop into silence,
into the thick soot at the bottom
of midnight. No silence was ever
so deep. And then, after maybe
a minute or two, I would hear
a twitter as he came to life again,
and could at last take a breath for myself,
a sip like a toast, lifting a chilled glass
of air, wishing us courage, those of us
lying awake through those hours,
my mother, my sister and I, who each night
listened to death kiss the fluttering lips
of my father, who slept through it all.

Ted Kooser, Splitting an Order (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)

Carrie

 

"There's never an end to dust
and dusting," my aunt would say
as her rag, like a thunderhead,
scudded across the yellow oak
of her little house. There she lived
seventy years with a ball
of compulsion closed in her fist,
and an elbow that creaked and popped
like a branch in a storm. Now dust
is her hands and dust her heart.
There's never an end to it.

Ted Kooser, Sure Signs (University of Pittsburg Press, 1980)

What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade

 

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark.

After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—

something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something.

Brad Aaron Modlin, otherpeoplespoems.blogspot.com, February 17, 2021

Red Stilts

 

Seventy years ago I made a pair of stilts

from six-foot two-by-twos, with blocks

to stand on nailed a foot from the bottom.

 

If I was to learn to walk on stilts I wanted

them red and I had to wait almost forever

for the paint to dry, laid over the arms

 

of a saggy, ancient Adirondack chair

no longer good for much but holding hoes

and rakes and stakes rolled up in twine,

 

and at last I couldn’t wait a minute longer

and took the stilts into my hands and stepped

between them, stepped up and stepped out,

 

tilted far forward, clopping fast and away

down the walk, a foot above my neighborhood,

the summer in my hair, my new red stilts

 

stuck to my fingers, not knowing how far

I’d be able to get, and now, in what seems

just a few yards down the block, I’m there.

Ted Kooser, Red Stilts (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

Splitting an Order

 

I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half,
maybe an ordinary cold roast beef on whole wheat bread,
no pickles or onion, keeping his shaky hands steady
by placing his forearms firm on the edge of the table
and using both hands, the left to hold the sandwich in place,
and the right to cut it surely, corner to corner,

observing his progress through glasses that moments before
he wiped with his napkin, and then to see him lift half
onto the extra plate that he asked the server to bring,
and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife
while she slowly unrolls her napkin and places her spoon,
her knife, and her fork in their proper places,
then smoothes the starched white napkin over her knees
and meets his eyes and holds out both old hands to him.

Ted Kooser, Splitting an Order (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)

It's Fine

 

A question to be answered, please:
Why do most men avoid M.D.s?
 
At thoughts of office calls we scoff
unless there’s something falling off.
 
And if our ankle’s had a twist
we hop around and then insist
 
that it’s improving very well
although, of course, it hurts like hell.
 
Sinus pressures, nasty fevers,
failures of most pain relievers,
 
bellies sad and oozing sores
propel us not through clinic doors.
 
The answer to this riddle, though,
is well concealed--although we know
 
that such recalcitrant displays
are just one part of manly ways.

Phil Huffy, first appeared in Light Poetry Magazine

My Old Aunts Played Canasta in a Snowstorm

 

I ride along in the backseat; the aunt who can drive
picks up each sister at her door, keeps the Pontiac
chugging in each driveway while one or the other
slips into her overshoes and steps out,
closing her door with a click, the wind

lifting the fringe of her white cotton scarf
as she comes down the sidewalk, still pulling on her
new polyester Christmas-stocking mittens.
We have no business to be out in such a storm,
she says, no business at all.

The wind takes her voice and swirls it
like snow across the windshield.
We're on to the next house, the next aunt,
the heater blowing to beat the band.

At the last house, we play canasta,
the deuces wild even as they were in childhood,
the wind blowing through the empty apple trees,
through the shadows of bumper crops. The cards

line up under my aunts' finger bones; eights and nines and aces
straggle and fall into place like well-behaved children.
My aunts shuffle and meld; they laugh like banshees,
as they did in that other kitchen in the 30's that
day Margaret draped a dishtowel over her face
to answer the door. We put her up to it, they say,
laughing; we pushed her. The man—whoever he was—
drove off in a huff while they laughed 'til they hiccupped,


laughing still—I'm one of the girls laughing him down the sidewalk
and into his car, we're rascals sure as farmyard dogs,
we're wild card-players; the snow thickens,
the coffee boils and perks, the wind is a red trey
because, as one or the other says,

We are getting up there in the years; we'll
have to quit sometime. But today,
today,
deal, sister, deal.

Marjorie Saiser, Lost in Seward County (University of Nebraska Press, 2001)

They Call Him Lucky

 The giant hound dog,

a centenarian
in human years,
a teenager in canine years,
 
lumbers through town
visiting old friends
and making new ones
when he digs under the fence.
 
He only barks at coyotes.
Doesn’t bite or fight.
But he isn’t on a leash.
So someone calls the cops.
 
When animal control
pulls up, he hops in
the front seat
and enjoys the scenery.
 
He poses for a mug shot
and leaves his paw prints
on his rap sheet
before he is bailed out.
 
But like a juvenile delinquent
he knows how to jimmy the locks
and sneaks out at night
and enjoys the ride again.

Sharon Waller Knutson, yourdailypoem.com, April 3, 2021

A List of Praises

 

Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing,
Give praise with Gospel choirs in storefront churches,
Mad with the joy of the Sabbath,
Give praise with the babble of infants, who wake with the sun,
Give praise with children chanting their skip-rope rhymes,
A poetry not in books, a vagrant mischievous poetry
living wild on the Streets through generations of children.

Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away
With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle
As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning,
Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh
Of the wind in the pinewoods,
At night give praise with starry silences. 

Give praise with the skirling of seagulls
And the rattle and flap of sails
And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell
Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor.
Give praise with the humpback whales,
Huge in the ocean they sing to one another.

Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids and cicadas,
Give praise with hum of bees,
Give praise with the little peepers who live near water.
When they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries
We know that the winter is over. 

Give praise with mockingbirds, day’s nightingales.
Hour by hour they sing in the crepe myrtle
And glossy tulip trees
On quiet side streets in southern towns.

Give praise with the rippling speech
Of the eider-duck and her ducklings
As they paddle their way downstream
In the red-gold morning
On Restiguche, their cold river,
Salmon river,
Wilderness river. 

Give praise with the whitethroat sparrow.
Far, far from the cities,
Far even from the towns,
With piercing innocence
He sings in the spruce-tree tops,
Always four notes
And four notes only. 

Give praise with water,
With storms of rain and thunder
And the small rains that sparkle as they dry,
And the faint floating ocean roar
That fills the seaside villages,
And the clear brooks that travel down the mountains 

And with this poem, a leaf on the vast flood,
And with the angels in that other country.

Anne Porter, journeywithjesus.net, April 4, 2021

At the Cross

I wait,
And time ticks past.

I gaze,
Made silent by the sight.

I watch,
As soldiers meticulously move
Executing each terrible, torturous task.

I gasp,
Still life lingers in His fragile, broken form.

I flinch,
As blow by blow,
Nails bite deep through flesh to find wood.

I stand
As He is lifted high,
Silhouetted 'gainst the sky which He has made.

I weep
As His cry echoes deep in my hardened, calloused heart.

I wail,
As He screams 'it is complete,
Finished, final, said and done.'

I fall,
As the sky turns inky black
And the sun and moon and stars forget to shine.

I kneel,
As worlds collide,
And time ticks by;
What once bound, no longer seems to hold.

I bow,
For part of me is gone,
Kept forever on Calvary's painful peak.

I wait,
At the foot of the cross, to begin my journey home.

Andy Stinson, 2011, engageworship.org 

I Return to the Night after My Grandfather's Funeral

 

My grandmother asked me that night
to sleep with her in her bed.
Though I was thirty-something,
I knew little of loss. I remember
the great weight of her as she slipped
into the soft white sheets—
a mountain inside a woman’s body.
I wore a long flannel gown with tiny violets
and she a thin flannel robe, slightly pilled and well worn,
with tiny embroidered roses.
We hardly spoke. She did not cry.
Any night stitched with that much sorrow
will linger in the heart for a lifetime.
I did not hold her—nor did she seem
to wish to be held. And when I return
to that night in my mind, I don’t try
to rewrite it. She sleeps on her side of the bed.
I sleep where my grandfather used to sleep.
I listen for the eventual slow tide of her breath.
But I am not the same version of myself
who shared a bed with her then.
Now, when I lay down beside her,
I know something more of how vast
an emptiness can be. How it can feel as if
a whole garden has been ripped up by its roots.
How sometimes in the dark, though we know
there are stars, we simply can’t open our eyes.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, wordwoman.com, October 10, 2020