When I Am Among the Trees

When I am among the trees,

especially the willows and the honey locust,

equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,

they give off such hints of gladness.

I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

 

I am so distant from the hope of myself,

in which I have goodness, and discernment,

and never hurry through the world

but walk slowly, and bow often.

 

Around me the trees stir in their leaves

and call out, “Stay awhile.”

The light flows from their branches.

 

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,

“and you too have come

into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled

with light, and to shine.”

 

Mary Oliver, medium.com February 14, 2017

For When People Ask

I want a word that means
okay and not okay,
more than that: a word that means
devastated and stunned with joy.
I want the word that says
I feel it all all at once.
The heart is not like a songbird
singing only one note at a time,
more like a Tuvan throat singer
able to sing both a drone
and simultaneously
two or three harmonics high above it—
a sound, the Tuvans say,
that gives the impression
of wind swirling among rocks.
The heart understands swirl,
how the churning of opposite feelings
weaves through us like an insistent breeze
leads us wordlessly deeper into ourselves,
blesses us with paradox
so we might walk more openly
into this world so rife with devastation,
this world so ripe with joy.

 

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, gratefulness.org, accessed on January 28, 2023

Grecian Temples

Because I'm getting pretty gray at the temples,
which negatively impacts my earning potential
and does not necessarily attract vibrant young women
with their perfumed bosoms to dally with me
on the green hillside,
I go out and buy some Grecian Hair Formula.

And after the whole process, which involves
rubber gloves, a tiny chemistry set,
and perfect timing, I look great.
I look very fresh and virile, full of earning potential.
But when I take my fifteen-year-old beagle
out for his evening walk, the contrast is unfortunate.
Next to me he doesn't look all that great,
with his graying snout, his sort of faded,
worn-out-dog look. It makes me feel old,
walking around with a dog like that.

It's not something a potential employer,
much less a vibrant young woman with a perfumed bosom
would necessarily go for. So I go out
and get some more Grecian Hair Formula—
Light Brown, my beagle's original color.
And after all the rigmarole he looks terrific.
I mean, he's not going to win any friskiness contests,
not at fifteen. But there's a definite visual improvement.
The two of us walk virilely around the block.

The next day a striking young woman at the bookstore
happens to ask me about my parents,
who are, in fact, long dead, due to the effects of age.
They were very old, which causes death.
But having dead old parents does not go
with my virile, intensely fresh new look.

So I say to the woman, my parents are fine.
They love their active lifestyle in San Diego.
You know, windsurfing, jai alai, a still-vibrant sex life.
And while this does not necessarily cause her
to come dally with me on the green hillside, I can tell
it doesn't hurt my chances.

I can see her imagining dinner
with my sparkly, young-seeming mom and dad
at some beachside restaurant
where we would announce our engagement.

Your son has great earning potential,
she'd say to dad, who would take
a gander at her perfumed bosom
and give me a wink, like he used to do
back when he was alive, and vibrant.

 

George Bilgere, The White Museum (Autumn House Press, 2010) 

Learning Animals and Insects in 3rd Grade

I could hear the horse neigh in that
    third-grade class,
its big head poked over the picture's
    white picket fence
while Sister told us the old, useless
    ones were sent to Alpo
or Zweiger's Glue Factory on Cherry Road,
each of us looking around to see if it was true,
seeing all kinds of snakes sloughing their skins
and bats hanging by their claws in the dark
    caves underground,
a giant turtle on its back, gasping for breath
as we sat straight at our desks
and yelled out which ones lay eggs,
which ones bore their young, listening
to the whales as they circled the globe,
listening to Ray Martineau's asthmatic breathing
that fell like the falling snow, shhhh, shhhh,
    against the dripping window,
one of every kind of beast circling us,
all their eyes mirroring our eyes back
except for the ants who never stopped tunneling
busy from the second our lights went on
with their tunnels that went sideways and up
    and down,
sudden small pockets of silence in which they
    passed
along the shadowed, erratic trails that dead-ended
    against invisible walls
and then doubled back, again and again, in that
    late, upstate New York winter day.

 

Leo Roberts, Counting the Black Angels (University of Illinois Press, 1994) 

I Am an Onion

I am an onion

I have several layers

Each one different

The outermost layer is what everyone sees

That I am always loud and happy every day

Full of energy and can make anyone smile

The next layer is my judgment

What I do not say about people since I’m polite

My opinions on people of jealously and dislike

The next layer is the layer of hate

My hate can come out at any time with a foul smell

But I control it as best as I can

The layer under that is sorrow

My sadness of what I really am behind closed doors – sad.

Life isn’t always the best it is, many days of sadness

I hold back my tears so others don’t see them, so they don’t get tears themselves

But through all of these layers of emotion there is me,

While I am just an onion, I am a unique onion since there is only one me

While I have a family of where I came from with people similar

There is one type of me and that’s it

 

Graffiti008, powerpoetry.org December 15, 2014

The Long Marriage

 

Perhaps I know you best in the dark—
that nightly shrine
where my belly meets your spine,
where the bend of my knees
meets the bend of your knees,
where my warmth meets your warmth,
the night a vase
in which we place
the stems of our bodies,
in which I know myself
through touch.
And nothing must be said
and nothing must be done
except to meet the long familiar flesh,
this honoring of nakedness.

Perhaps I know you best in the dark—
these lightless hours when
we sit in the midst of brokenness
and my hand finds your hand,
and my silence finds your silence,
my loss finds your loss,
and together, somehow,
we find peace.
And nothing can be said.
And nothing can be done
to change the past.
We meet in the these darkened hours,
with nothing but our willingness
to meet these darkened hours,
these hours we would have pushed away,
these hours that bring us closer to each other.

 

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, ahundredfallingveils.com, December 6, 2022

Prague

The day I learned my wife was dying
I told myself if anyone said, Well, she had
a good life, I’d punch him in the nose.
How much life represents a good life?

Maybe a hundred years, which would
give us nearly forty more to visit Oslo
and take the train to Vladivostok,
learn German to read Thomas Mann

in the original. Even more baseball games,
more days at the beach and the baking
of more walnut cakes for family birthdays.
How much time is enough time? How much

is needed for all those unspent kisses,
those slow walks along cobbled streets?

 

Stephen Dobyns, The Day’s Last Light Reddens the Leaves on the Copper Beach (BOA Editions, 2016)

Hold Out Your Hand

Let’s forget the world for a while
fall back and back
into the hush and holy
of now

are you listening? This breath
invites you
to write the first word
of your new story

your new story begins with this:
You matter

you are needed—empty
and naked
willing to say yes
and yes and yes

Do you see
the sun shines, day after day
whether you have faith
or not
the sparrows continue
to sing their song
even when you forget to sing
yours

stop asking: Am I good enough?
Ask only
Am I showing up
with love?

Life is not a straight line
it’s a downpour of gifts, please—
hold out your hand

 

Julia Fehrenbacher, janicefalls.wordpress.com December 17, 2018

Hitchhikers

Walker Evans Photograph, 1930’s

Hitchhikers

(based on Evans’ photograph)

Hard times brought them out early
On this dreary stretch of road
Carrying a suitcase and a bedroll
With a frying pan tied to it,
The kind you use over a campfire
When a moss-covered log is your pillow.

He's hopeful and she's ashamed
To be asking a stranger to take them
Away from here in a cloud of flying
Gravel and dust, past leafless trees
With their snarled and pointy little twigs.
A man and a woman catching a ride
To where water tastes like cherry wine.

She'll work as a maid or a waitress,
He'll pump gas or rob banks.
They'll buy a car as big as a hearse
To make their fast getaway,
Not forgetting to stop for you, mister,
If you are down on your luck yourself.

 

Charles Simic, My Noiseless Entourage (Harcourt, 2005)

For My People

 For my people everywhere singing their slave songs

       repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues

       and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an

       unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an

       unseen power;

 

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the

       gone years and the now years and the maybe years,

       washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending

       hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching

       dragging along never gaining never reaping never

       knowing and never understanding;

 

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama

       backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor

       and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking

       and playhouse and concert and store and hair and

       Miss Choomby and company;

 

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn

       to know the reasons why and the answers to and the

       people who and the places where and the days when, in

       memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we

       were black and poor and small and different and nobody

       cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

 

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to

       be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and

       play and drink their wine and religion and success, to

       marry their playmates and bear children and then die

       of consumption and anemia and lynching;

 

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox

       Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New

       Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy

       people filling the cabarets and taverns and other

       people's pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and

       land and money and something—something all our own;

 

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time

       being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when

       burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled

       and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures

       who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

 

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in

       the dark of churches and schools and clubs

       and societies, associations and councils and committees and

       conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and

       devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,

       preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by

       false prophet and holy believer;

 

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way

       from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,

       trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,

       all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

 

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a

       bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second

       generation full of courage issue forth; let a people

       loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of

       healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing

       in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs

       be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now

       rise and take control.

 

Margaret Walker, For My People (Yale University Press, 1942)

To Sara, 1969

Nearly sixteen years ago,
you made your way into this world,
calm and quiet, with none
of the fuss or emergency
of Sean and Nate.
Mom didn’t break a sweat.
When you started crawling,
you strutted, hands gaiting out
like a Tennessee Walker’s,
your head held high, eyes gleaming.
You swam at three, floating
to the pool’s surface in Fontana
and paddling away.
Tonight, fifteen, you’re boarding
a plane to Ireland by yourself
on your first flight, seven hours
in the dark across the Atlantic
to land in Shannon at dawn.
Backpack in place,
you walk the long corridor
beyond where Mom and I can go.
We stand there, grinning,
watching and waving,
as you pass through security
and emerge on the other side.

 

Bill Jones, At Sunset, Facing East (Apprentice House, 2016)

My Father Watched Westerns

He couldn’t get enough of them: those dusty
landscapes on the other side of the screen,
men on horses seeking justice or revenge.
All through my life if he was tired I would

find him in a dark room full of gunfire.
His movie titles included words like Lone
and Lonesome though mostly families
stuck together and young men learned

to risk their lives for whatever was noble
or right. I could not sit through them;
women were left behind in saloons
with hair and dresses as soft as pillows,

their possibilities perfumed by estrogen.
But it was the men my father was watching.
They had wide hats and leather boots,
masks made of betrayal. My father

remembered the dangerous people
he faced in courtrooms, his arguments
like bullets. His mind was full of places
that were not yet settled, places where

law was new. A man had a horse, a few
friends, some deep internal compass.
People relied on him; what he needed most
was courage. My father related to this.
He knew, after all, how the west was won.

 

Faith Shearin, Moving the Piano (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2011) 

A Short Panegyric

Now that the vegetarian nightmare is over and we are back to
our diet of meat and deep in the sway of our dark and beauty-
ful habits and able to speak with calm of having survived, let
the breeze of the future touch and retouch our large and hun-
gering bodies. Let us march to market to embrace the butcher
and put the year of the carrot, the month of the onion behind
us, let us worship the roast or the stew that takes its place once
again at the sacred center of the dining room table.

 

Mark Strand, Almost Invisible (Alfred A. Knopf, 2o12) 

Holding the Light

Gather up whatever is 
glittering in the gutter,
whatever has tumbled 
in the waves or fallen 
in flames out of the sky,

for it’s not only our
hearts that are broken, 
but the heart
of the world as well.
Stitch it back together. 

Make a place where
the day speaks to the night
and the earth speaks to the sky.
Whether we created God
or God created us

it all comes down to this:
In our imperfect world
we are meant to repair
and stitch together 
what beauty there is, stitch it 

with compassion and wire. 
See how everything 
we have made gathers 
the light inside itself
and overflows? A blessing.

 

Stuart Kestenbaum, Only Now (Deerbrook Editions, 2013)

For Those Who Have to Travel Far

If you could see the journey whole

you might never undertake it;

might never dare the first step

that propels you

from the place you have known

toward the place you know not.

 

Call it one of the mercies of the road:

that we see it only by stages

as it opens before us,

as it comes into our keeping

step by single step.

 

There is nothing for it but to go

and by our going take the vows

the pilgrim takes:

    to be faithful to the next step;

    to rely on more than the map;

    to heed the signposts of intuition and dream;

    to follow the star that only you will recognize;

    to keep an open eye for the wonders that

    attend the path;

    to press on beyond distractions

      beyond fatigue

      beyond what would tempt you from the way.

 

There are vows that only you will know;

the secret promises for your particular path

and the new ones you will need to make

when the road is revealed by turns

you could not have foreseen.

 

Keep them, break them, make them again:

each promise becomes part of the path;

each choice creates the road

that will take you to the place

where at last you will kneel to offer the gift

most needed— the gift that only you can give—

before turning to go home by another way.

 

Jan Richardson, lakeviewunited.ca January 2, 2019

Epiphany Blessing

This poem is based on the traditional Epiphany chalk house blessing, used widely throughout the world though less known in the United States. Here is how it works. Using any piece of chalk, mark above the house entrance 20 + C + M + B + 23. The letters have two meanings. First, they are the initials of the three Wise Men – Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar – who came to visit Jesus in his first home. They also abbreviate the Latin phrase Christus, mansionem benedicat: “May Christ bless the house.”

The “+” signs represent the cross, and the “20” at the beginning and the “23” at the end mark the current year.

Taken together, the inscription is a request for Christ to bless the homes so marked and that he stay with those in the house throughout the year.

 

Epiphany Blessing

Think of the year as a house: door flung wide in welcome,

threshold swept and waiting, a graced spaciousness

opening and offering itself to you.

 

Let it be blessed in every room.

Let it be hallowed in every corner.

Let every nook be a refuge

and every object set to holy use.

 

Let it be here that safety will rest.

Let it be here that health will make its home.

Let it be here that peace will show its face.

Let it be here that love will find its way.

 

Here let the weary come

let the aching come

let the lost come

let the sorrowing come.

Here let them find their rest

and let them find their soothing

and let them find their place

and let them find their delight.

 

And may it be in this house of a year

that the seasons will spin in beauty,

and may it be in these turning days

that time will spiral with joy.

And may it be that its rooms will fill

with ordinary grace

and light spill from every window

to welcome the stranger home.

 

Jan Richardson, lakeviewunited.ca January 2, 2019

New Year Poem

Let us step outside for a moment
As the sun breaks through clouds
And shines on wet new fallen snow,
And breathe the new air.
So much has died that had to die this year.

We are dying away from things.
It is a necessity—we have to do it
Or we shall be buried under the magazines,
The too many clothes, the too much food.
We have dragged it all around
Like dung beetles
Who drag piles of dung
Behind them on which to feed,
In which to lay their eggs.

Let us step outside for a moment
Among ocean, clouds, a white field,
Islands floating in the distance.
They have always been there.
But we have not been there.

We are going to drive slowly
And see the small poor farms,
The lovely shapes of leafless trees
Their shadows blue on the snow.
We are going to learn the sharp edge
Of perception after a day’s fast.

There is nothing to fear.
About this revolution…
Though it will change our minds.
Aggression, violence, machismo
Are fading from us
Like old photographs
Faintly ridiculous
(Did a man actually step like a goose
To instill fear?
Does a boy have to kill
To become a man?)

Already there are signs.
Young people plant gardens.
Fathers change their babies’ diapers
And are learning to cook.

Let us step outside for a moment.
It is all there
Only we have been slow to arrive
At a way of seeing it.
Unless the gentle inherit the earth
There will be no earth.

                                                                             

May Sarton, Collected Poems (Norton, 1993)

Haiku for a New Year

      New Year's Day

reading another how-to book

      with broken glasses.

Jane Reichhold

The new year arrived

      in utter simplicity

and a deep blue sky.

Issa

fireworks 

salute new year

dogs howl.

Norman Crocker

      New Year's Day --

everything is in blossom!

      I feel about average.

Issa

      New Year's morning:

the ducks on the pond

      quack and quack.

Issa

      Year after year

on the monkey's face

      a monkey's face.

Basho

A new calendar

my unlived days

already numbered.

Jane Reichhold