My Poetic Ponderings
"Maybe if we reinvent whatever our lives give us we find poems." --Naomi Shihab Nye
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
Requiem for Trees
Monday, October 14, 2024
Song for Autumn
how comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of the air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees, especially those with
mossy hollows, are beginning to look for
the birds that will come—six, a dozen—to sleep
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
stiffens and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its long blue shadows. The wind wags
its many tails. And in the evening
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.
Friday, October 4, 2024
The Cloud
Tuesday, September 24, 2024
Autumn Equinox
Growing up in a little Vermont glen,
I used to dread how daytime waned each year,
a process that began gradually
at summer solstice as long afternoons
stretched past dinner, and you would have to strain
to notice a few moments missing
when twilight's pink hue finally arrived.
But then sunshine diminished rapidly
following the autumn equinox
nestled in our village between mountains,
and there was no way not to acknowledge
the increased territory of darkness,
encroaching as if an invader
over more than its share of the clock.
The expansion of shadow's boundaries
once disturbed me. I thought the realm between
dawn and night had permanently faded,
and along with it, carefree play outdoors
absent concern for school the next morning.
Even learning it didn't last, I still
felt dismay at what seemed an endless dusk.
Now in midlife, I welcome these months
which offer dark in place of light. They give
a refuge from the sun's persistent blaze,
that constant reminder of work to do.
The gloaming has a snug quality:
a companion's gentle embrace, someone
by my side ever since I can recall.
--Jason Harlow
[Photo taken in Wallingford, Vermont]
Saturday, September 14, 2024
Forty-Five Years Together
Forty-five years together.
Good times and bad.
In love and out.
Yet always persevering.
Tenacity and grit
are underrated.
Why not praise them, too?
Together to the end.
It is evening.
This is a love poem.
--David Budbill, from Happy Life
How it is with us, and how it is with them
We become religious,
then we turn from it,
then we are in need and maybe we turn back.
We turn to making money,
then we turn to the moral life,
then we think about money again.
We meet wonderful people, but lose them
in our busyness.
We're, as the saying goes, all over the place.
Steadfastness, it seems,
is more about dogs than about us.
One of the reasons we love them so much.
--Mary Oliver
[Photo of our daughter and her dog, Maui].
Tuesday, September 10, 2024
Angels
You might see an angel anytime and anywhere.
Of course, you have to open your eyes to a kind of
second level, but it’s not really hard.
The whole business of what’s reality and what isn’t has never been solved and probably never will be.
So I don’t care to be too definite about anything.
I have a lot of edges called Perhaps and almost nothing you can call Certainty.
For myself, but not for other people.
That’s a place you just can’t get into, not entirely anyway, other people’s heads.
I’ll just leave you with this.
I don’t care how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
It’s enough to know that for some people they exist, and that they dance.
--Mary Oliver
[Our sweet and sassy angel, Ella Lynn].
Requiem for Trees
i like to imagine the community of trees, passing along the news on autumn’s heavy breaths - We’ve lost anothe...
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Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night. A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze, And when I saw the silver glaze on the wind...
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Joy does not arrive with a fanfare on a red carpet strewn with the flowers of a perfect life joy sneaks in as you pour a cup of coffee wat...
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Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. -- C.S. Lewis It's not your absence I feel, but your presence, palpable, still sn...