Thursday’s are for Poetry | 4.28.22

Thursday’s are for Poetry | 4.28.22

Today is one of my favorite days…it’s Poem In Your Pocket Day!

It’s a day to carry a poem with you… and perhaps you will even then invite poetry into the remaining days of the year.

I debated about what poem should I share this month. I contemplated Joyce Kilmer’s Tree’s or Carl Sandburg’s Fog… poems that my grandfather loved deeply. I also considered one of the many poems by Derek Walcott. So many choices. Really. There are literally hundreds of poems one could pick to put in your pocket today and not one a bad choice!

But earlier this month I heard a poem by Jane Kenyon and it has stayed with me. I have thought about her words almost daily, and have since printed it out and put in my journal. I have contemplated the words as I began my April chores in the garden – and especially when I saw those rhubarb leaves as they thought their way up through the soil… a certain sign of spring.

I think this poem will fit well in your pocket… enjoy!

April Chores

by Jane Kenyon

When I take the chilly tools
from the shed’s darkness, I come
out to a world made new
by heat and light.

The snake basks and dozes
on a large flat stone.
It reared and scolded me
for raking too close to its hole.

Like a mad red brain
the involute rhubarb leaf
thinks its way up
through loam.

Jane Kenyon, “April Chores” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by The Estate of Jane Kenyon.

Please make sure you stop and visit Kym, Bonny, and Sarah today to see what they have for you to tuck into your pocket as well. I cannot thing of a better thing to fill your pockets with than a handful of poems!

Thank you all so much for reading along with this month… and especially I’d like to thank Kym for including me!

See you all here tomorrow!

Thursday’s are for Poetry | 4.28.22

Thursday’s are for Poetry | 4.21.22

The theme for this week is Forgiveness. Hmmm. Okay. I vaguely remembered reading a poem about forgiveness… but could I find it? It turns out that was quite a challenge… but, thankfully, not one that was at all painful! I spent an afternoon perusing my poetry books, as well as looking online on the Poetry Foundation I had read from my library… with no luck at all in finding the poem I was thinking about.

I had three other poetry resources to check… poetry I listen to…The Slow Down, Poetry Unbound, and The Writer’s Almanac. Of course, it was Pádraig Ó Tuama who shared the poem on forgiveness that I am sharing today. I have printed it and placed in my journal so I can revisit it frequently. It is such a lovely reminder that forgiveness needs to start with yourself. I hope you enjoy this poem as well!

Phase One

by Dilruba Ahmed

For leaving the fridge open
last night, I forgive you.
For conjuring white curtains
instead of living your life.

For the seedlings that wilt, now,
in tiny pots, I forgive you.
For saying no first
but yes as an afterthought.

I forgive you for hideous visions
after childbirth, brought on by loss
of sleep. And when the baby woke
repeatedly, for your silent rebuke

in the dark, “What’s your beef?”
I forgive your letting vines
overtake the garden. For fearing
your own propensity to love.

For losing, again, your bag
en route from San Francisco;
for the equally heedless drive back
on the caffeine-fueled return.

I forgive you for leaving
windows open in rain
and soaking library books
again. For putting forth

only revisions of yourself,
with punctuation worked over,
instead of the disordered truth,
I forgive you. For singing mostly

when the shower drowns
your voice. For so admiring
the drummer you failed to hear
the drum. In forgotten tin cans,

may forgiveness gather. Pooling
in gutters. Gushing from pipes.
A great steady rain of olives
from branches, relieved

of cruelty and petty meanness.
With it, a flurry of wings, thirteen
gray pigeons. Ointment reserved
for healers and prophets. I forgive you.

I forgive you. For feeling awkward
and nervous without reason.
For bearing Keats’s empty vessel
with such calm you worried

you had, perhaps no moral
center at all. For treating your mother
with contempt when she deserved
compassion. I forgive you. I forgive

you. I forgive you. For growing
a capacity for love that is great
but matched only, perhaps,
by your loneliness. For being unable

to forgive yourself first so you
could then forgive others and
at last find a way to become
the love that you want in this world.

Phase One from Bring Now the Angels by Dilruba Ahmed, © 2020.

Please visit Kym, Bonny, and Sarah and see what Forgiveness Poem they are sharing today.

I will see you all back here next Monday! Have a great weekend everyone!

Thursday’s are for Poetry | 4.28.22

Thursday’s are for Poetry | 4.14.22

In this week’s poetry installment we are all sharing a poem by Sharon Olds. She is a prolific poet and you could get lost for days and days in her poetry books. The poem I have selected is from Stag’s Leap…poetry that shares her journey from from grief to healing after her divorce. A book of poetry that I wish I had read after my own divorce.

All of the poems are so beautiful, but one poem very much hit home for me… and I wonder if my poor children share these feelings because, like Sharon, they were all very planned babies. I did not use shirt cardboards (my ex liked his shirts starched and hanging) but I did have a “conception journal” where I graphed my temperature. (FYI, I looked for it, but could not find it but perhaps that is a good thing, lol) But I really hope that my kids realize, as Sharon does, that my world was infinitely so much better because they were in it!

I hope you enjoy this poem!

The Planned Child

by Sharon Olds

I always hated the way they planned me, she
took the cardboards out of his shirts as if
pulling the backbone up out of his body and
made a chart of the month and put her
temperature on it, rising and falling, to
know the day to make me—I always
wanted to have been conceived in heat,
in haste, by mistake, in love, in sex,
not on cardboard, the little X on the
rising line that did not fall again.

But then you were pouring the wine red as the
gritty clay of this earth, or the blood,
grainy with tiny clots, that rides us
into this life, and you said you could tell I had
been a child who was wanted. I took the
wine into my mouth like my mother’s blood, as I had
ridden down toward the light with my lips
pressed against the sides of that valve in her body, she was
bearing down and then breaking in the mask and then
bearing down, pressing me out into the
world that was not enough for her without me in it,
not the moon, the sun, the stars, Orion
cartwheeling easily across the dark, not the
earth, the sea, none of it was
enough for her, without me.

The Planned Child by Sharon Olds, Stag’s Leap © 2012

Make sure you visit Kym, Bonny, and Sarah today to see what Sharon Olds poem they are sharing today!

I won’t be here tomorrow, but I will be back next week I am not certain about Monday but I will absolutely be here for  Unraveled Wednesday. Have a great weekend everyone!

Thursday’s are for Poetry | 4.28.22

Thursday’s are for Poetry | 4.7.22

This week’s theme is hope. Whew. What a week for hope, huh?

He that lives upon hope will die fasting. — Benjamin Franklin

I have always thought that hope was a singular thing… something you had inside you… or had to find inside you. Or if you could not find it inside you… then “Look UP and find hope” seemed to me to be the usual answer.

But what if it’s not?

The poem I am sharing today speaks differently of hope. And this is the kind of hope that I am looking for… the hope that has been left for me to find along my journey.

Hope

by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer

Hope has holes
in its pockets.
It leaves little
crumb trails
so that we,
when anxious,
can follow it.
Hope’s secret:
it doesn’t know
the destination—
it knows only
that all roads
begin with one
foot in front
of the other.

Hope by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer from How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. Published by Story Publishing.

Please visit Kym, Bonny, and Sarah today to see what hope they have to share.

Happy Thursday, Everyone!

Friday Finds | 2.18.22

Friday Finds | 2.18.22

these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips — Lucille Clifton (homage to my hips)

This week I want to share some poetry that, I think, is one of the best ways to celebrate Black History Month.

Poetry has become part of my daily life… I cannot imagine a day without poetry.  It opens my eyes… it opens my mind… it opens my heart. This month, I have been focused on reading a poem or two a day from Amanda Gorman’s new book of poetry – Call Us What We Carry (and it is so very good!)

I also spent some time Googling Poetry for Black History Month and I found some of the most wonderful rabbit holes that exist on the internet!

Of course The Poetry Foundation has a wonderful resource that includes poems, articles, and podcasts… there is just so much to read here! I have been happily working my way through every bit of it. Some poems were familiar to me and some were not. There was one that I knew as a song but I did not know that it was written by one brother and set to music by another brother! And speaking of that song… was it just me or did anyone else find it more than disconcerting that this song was performed outside the stadium (versus being inside? watf…)

If you’d like to start with a less daunting list… Read Poetry has 10 Poems to Celebrate Black History Month

Finally, if you want to add a book to your Poetry Library (because don’t we all have a Poetry Library?? And if you don’t, you should!!) I am excited to get Tracy K. Smith’s book, Such Color. (And I am loving Call Us What We Carry!)

I am going to close with one of the poems from Amanda’s new book:

& So

by Amanda Gorman

It is easy to harp,
Harder to hope.

This truth, like the white-blown sky,
Can only be felt in its entirety or not at all.
The glorious was not made to be piecemeal.
Despite being drenched with dread,
This dark girl still dreams.
We smile like a sun that is never shunted.

Grief, when it goes, does so softly,
Like the exit of that breath
We just realized we clutched.

Since the world is round,
There is no way to walk away
From each other, for even then
We are coming back together.

Some distances, if allowed to grow,
Are merely the greatest proximities.

Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman, published by Viking Press. Copyright © 1921 by Amanda Gorman

Have a great weekend everyone… see you all back here on Monday!

Monday Poetry | 12.27.21

Monday Poetry | 12.27.21

Happy Birthday to me! Today begins my 61st year! 61 years brings lots of retrospection and thinking about birthdays of long ago. When I was a child, it almost always seemed to snow on my birthday and I loved it so much! I have also been thinking about Christmas Vacation birthdays. That’s right…one of the benefits of having your birthday 2 days after Christmas is that you never have school… but that is one of the detriments as well. Sometimes it would have been nice to be in school on my birthday… and even better, it would have been so fun having a snow day!

I won’t see any snow today (it’s pouring down rain…sigh) but thankfully Billy Collins can conjure up a Snow Day for me!

I hope you all enjoy a bit of a Snow Day today (even if there is no physical snow!) I will see you back here tomorrow with an update on my word!


Snow Day

BY BILLY COLLINS

Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,
its white flag waving over everything,
the landscape vanished,
not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,
and beyond these windows

the government buildings smothered,
schools and libraries buried, the post office lost
under the noiseless drift,
the paths of trains softly blocked,
the world fallen under this falling.

In a while, I will put on some boots
and step out like someone walking in water,
and the dog will porpoise through the drifts,
and I will shake a laden branch
sending a cold shower down on us both.

But for now I am a willing prisoner in this house,
a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow.
I will make a pot of tea
and listen to the plastic radio on the counter,
as glad as anyone to hear the news

that the Kiddie Corner School is closed,
the Ding-Dong School, closed.
the All Aboard Children’s School, closed,
the Hi-Ho Nursery School, closed,
along with—some will be delighted to hear—

the Toadstool School, the Little School,
Little Sparrows Nursery School,
Little Stars Pre-School, Peas-and-Carrots Day School
the Tom Thumb Child Center, all closed,
and—clap your hands—the Peanuts Play School.

So this is where the children hide all day,
These are the nests where they letter and draw,
where they put on their bright miniature jackets,
all darting and climbing and sliding,
all but the few girls whispering by the fence.

And now I am listening hard
in the grandiose silence of the snow,
trying to hear what those three girls are plotting,
what riot is afoot,
which small queen is about to be brought down.

Billy Collins, “Snow Day” from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (New York: Random House, 2001). Copyright © 2001 by Billy Collins. Reprinted with the permission of Sll/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.

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