Grief Finds Its Good Way Home

Elizabeth Jennings (1926 – 2001)

“For me, poetry is always a search for order.”

Elizabeth Jennings

Catch As Catch Can

by Jonathon Price (1931 – 1985)

Catch as catch can what’s asking to be caught
Or else be beaten to it by the bell.
Hardly a day passes without that thought.

Trammelled in tenses, snagged by could and ought,
The careful trekker cannot very well
Catch as catch can what’s asking to be caught,

For what comes gratis, and what must be bought,
And what the long-term cost is, who can tell?
Hardly a day passes without that thought.

Old knots defy untying: guy-ropes, taut,
Stay one securely. Anglers up the fell
Catch as catch can what’s asking to be caught:

To make a killing from an artful sport
They cast fine long lines like a subtle spell.
Hardly a day passes without that thought

As good scouts plod to their prosaic hell.
So can the weaver of a villanelle
Catch as catch can what’s asking to be caught?
Hardly a day passes without that thought.

Into the Hour

by Elizabeth Jennings

I have come into the hour of a white healing.
Grief’s surgery is over and I wear
The scar of my remorse and of my feeling.

I have come into a sudden sunlit hour
When ghosts are scared to corners. I have come
Into the time when grief begins to flower

Into a new love. It had filled my room
Long before I recognised it. Now
I speak its name. Grief finds its good way home.

The apple-blossom’s handsome on the bough
And Paradise spreads round. I touch its grass.
I want to celebrate but don’t know how.

I need not speak though everyone I pass
Stares at me kindly. I would put my hand
Into their hands. Now I have lost my loss

In some way I may later understand.
I hear the singing of the Summer grass
And love, I find, has no considered end,

Nor is it subject to the wilderness
Which follows death. I am not traitor to
A person or a memory. I trace

Behind that love another which is running
Around, ahead. I need not ask its meaning.

To Construct Peace

Muriel Rukeyser

What three things can never be done; forget, keep silent, stand alone.

Muriel Rukeyser

Now It Is Time That Gods Came Walking

by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Now it is time that gods came walking out
of lived-in Things …
Time that they came and knocked down every wall
inside my house. New page. Only the wind
from such a turning could be strong enough
to toss the air as a shovel tosses dirt:
A fresh-turned field of breath. O gods, gods!
who used to come so often and are still
asleep in the Things around us, who serenely
rise and at wells that we can only guess at
splash icy water on your necks and faces,
and lightly add your restedness to what seems
already filled to bursting: our full lives.
Once again let it be your morning, gods.
We keep repeating. You alone are source.
With you the world arises, and your dawn
gleams on each crack and crevice of our failure …”


Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)

By Muriel Rukeyser (1913 – 1980)
 
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
 
I lived in the first century of these wars.

The Waiting Does Not Let Up

Jack Gilbert (1925 – 2012)

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

Jack Gilbert

Meanwhile

by Jack Gilbert

It waits. While I am walking through the pine trees
along the river, it is waiting. It has waited a long time.
In southern France, in Belgium, and even Alabama.
Now it waits in New England while I say grace over
almost everything: for a possum dead on someone’s lawn,
the single light on a levee while Northampton sleeps,
and because the lanes between houses in Greek hamlets
are exactly the width of a donkey loaded on each side
with barley. Loneliness is the mother’s milk of America.
The heart is a foreign country whose language none
of us is good at. Winter lingers on in the woods,
but already it looks discarded as the birds return
and sing carelessly; as though there never was the power
or size of December. For nine years in me it has waited.
My life is pleasant, as usual. My body is a blessing
and my spirit clear. But the waiting does not let up.

 


A Brief For The Defense

by Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

And Here I Bloom

Replacing an 8 foot frost free hydrant for the stock tank

Running water never grows stale.

Bruce Lee

Sic Vita

by Henry David Thoreau

 

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.

A bunch of violets without their roots,
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I’m fixed.

A nosegay which Time clutched from out
Those fair Elysian fields,
With weeds and broken stems, in haste,
Doth make the rabble rout
That waste
The day he yields.

And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,
Drinking my juices up,
With no root in the land
To keep my branches green,
But stand
In a bare cup.

Some tender buds were left upon my stem
In mimicry of life,
But ah! the children will not know,
Till time has withered them,
The woe
With which they’re rife.

But now I see I was not plucked for naught,
And after in life’s vase
Of glass set while I might survive,
But by a kind hand brought
Alive
To a strange place.

That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,
And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
More fruits and fairer flowers
Will bear,
While I droop here.


It has been my experience that a plumber requires every bit the ingenuity and dedication of an artist to complete whatever masterpiece is required of them that day.  After a week of living with scanty access to fresh water because of a plumbing emergency I can attest to the artistry that is water that comes out of a tap on demand.  

You are probably wondering what Sic Vita (thus is life) has to do with plumbing?   In my case it was the experience of having to replace an 8 foot stand pipe hydrant that had sprung a leak at its very bottome, which required me to dig a trench 7 feet deep large enough for me to get all the way in on my hands and knees at the bottom of it and do the dirty work of getting the pipe fittings undone and a new one installed.  Like many things in life, if I had known how much work it was going to be I may not have had the courage to begin.   Instead I took up shovel and ax and fought my way through layer upon layer of roots and rock and clay, saturated clay, one shovel full, one trowel full at a time, thus is life….

As a soil scientist and agronomist I have dug many root pits, but always in the past with the aid of a back hoe.  Mature trees and fence posts prevented heavy machinery from accessing the site, (not to mention the cost), so I had plenty of time to reflect as I went deeper and deeper into my little trench with a shovel.   The great thing about a shovel is nothing has changed for thousands of years in how to operate it.   A shovel allows you to commune with your ancestors.  I felt very much like I was digging a hole for an out house, hence my ruminations on ancestral plumbers.  But the most vital connection was the requirement of persistence and resilience.  In my experience in working on worn out plumbing there is an element of knowledge, skill and the proper tools that are required, but the biggest pre-requisite for success is a stubborn tenaciousness to keep going in a dark, usually damp, foul, unpleasant confined space, long after most people would have given up.

What’s your personal test of fortitude these days?   Optimism in the face of constant negativity in the media on global warming, the supreme court going off the rails, the war in Ukraine, an unfolding global economic melt down?   Does poetry offer an antidote to any of these torments?   Only if you let it….


Rumors from an Aeolian Harp

by Henry David Thoreau

There is a vale which non hath seen,
Where foot of man has never been,
Such as here lives with toil and strife,
An anxious and a sinful life.

There every virtue has its birth,
Ere it descends upon the earth,
And thither every deed returns,
Which in the generous bosom burns.

There love is warm, and youth is young,
And poetry is yet unsung,
For Virtue still adventures there,
And freely breathes her native air.

And ever, if you hearken well,
You still may hear its vesper bell,
And tread of high-souled men go by,
Their thoughts conversing with the sky.

Some Remote And Quiet Stair

Charlotte Mew (1869 – 1928)

“before I die I want to see

The world that lies behind the strangeness of your eyes”

Charlotte Mew

Not for That City

By Charlotte Mew
 
Not for that city of the level sun,
     Its golden streets and glittering gates ablaze—
     The shadeless, sleepless city of white days,
White nights, or nights and days that are as one—
We weary, when all is said , all thought, all done.
     We strain our eyes beyond this dusk to see
     What, from the threshold of eternity
We shall step into. No, I think we shun
The splendour of that everlasting glare,
   The clamour of that never-ending song.
   And if for anything we greatly long,
It is for some remote and quiet stair
     Which winds to silence and a space for sleep
     Too sound for waking and for dreams too deep.
 
 
 

Rooms

By Charlotte Mew
 
I remember rooms that have had their part
     In the steady slowing down of the heart.
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell,
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide—
     Rooms where for good or for ill—things died.
But there is the room where we (two) lie dead,
Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem to sleep again
     As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed
     Out there in the sun—in the rain.

Tulips Make Me Want To See

“There are always flowers for those who want to see them.”

Henri Matisse

O Were My Love Yon Lilac Fair

by Robert Burns

O were my love yon Lilac fair,
Wi’ purple blossoms to the Spring,
And I, a bird to shelter there,
When wearied on my little wing!
How I wad mourn when it was torn
By Autumn wild, and Winter rude!
But I wad sing on wanton wing,
When youthfu’ May its bloom renew’d.

O gin my love were yonred rose,
That grows upon the castle wa’;
And I myself a drapo’ dew,
Into her bonie breast to fa’!
O there, beyond expression blest,
I’d feast on beauty a’ the night;
Seal’d on her silk-saft faulds to rest,
Till fley’d awaby Phoebus’ light


Tulips

By A. E. Stallings
 
The tulips make me want to paint,
Something about the way they drop
Their petals on the tabletop
And do not wilt so much as faint,
 
Something about their burnt-out hearts,
Something about their pallid stems
Wearing decay like diadems,
Parading finishes like starts,
 
Something about the way they twist
As if to catch the last applause,
And drink the moment through long straws,
And how, tomorrow, they’ll be missed.
 
The way they’re somehow getting clearer,
The tulips make me want to see
The tulips make the other me
(The backwards one who’s in the mirror,
 
The one who can’t tell left from right),
Glance now over the wrong shoulder
To watch them get a little older
And give themselves up to the light.

Love Minus The Awkward Lover

In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods, they have not forgotten this….

Terry Prachett

The Orange Cat

by Vikram Seth

The orange cat on the porch
Regards the tiny bird
Out on the pine-tree limb
And yawns without a word.

The mourning air is mild,
The tawny hillsides seem
Halfway from sleep to waking:
The cat appears to dream,

Which is of course illusion;
A harsh jay on the hill
Is answered by three quail
Clucks, and a warbler’s trill.

The cat who is not hungry
Can listen in repose
To birdcalls, with that pleasant
Touch of desire’s throes

We feel before a painting
Of nude or odalisque,
The lost without the pain,
Arousal without risk

Of failure, sweet frisson –
Like drink, and no hangover,,
Sex without friction, love
Minus the awkward lover.


My Dog Practices Geometry

By Cathryn Essinger
 
I do not understand the poets who tell me
that I should not personify. Every morning
the willow auditions for a new role
 
outside my bedroom window—today she is
Clytemnestra; yesterday a Southern Belle,
lost in her own melodrama, sinking on her skirts.
 
Nor do I like the mathematicians who tell me
I cannot say, “The zinnias are counting on their
fingers,” or “The dog is practicing her geometry,”
 
even though every day I watch her using
the yard’s big maple as the apex of a triangle
from which she bisects the circumference
 
of the lawn until she finds the place where
the rabbit has escaped, or the squirrel upped
the ante by climbing into a new Euclidian plane.
 
She stumbles across the lawn, eyes pulling
her feet along, gaze fixed on a rodent working
the maze of the oak as if it were his own invention,
 
her feet tangling in the roots of trees, and tripping,
yes, even over themselves, until I go out to assist,
by pointing at the squirrel, and repeating, “There!
 
There!” But instead of following my outstretched
arm to the crown of the tree, where the animal is
now lounging under a canopy of leaves,
 
catching its breath, charting its next escape,
she looks to my mouth, eager to read my lips,
confident that I—who can bring her home
 
from across the field with a word, who
can speak for the willow and the zinnia—
can surely charm a squirrel down from a tree.

Which Is Like Love

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)

The sense of the world is short,—

Long and various the report,—

              To love and be beloved;

Men and gods have not outlearned it;

And, how oft soe’er they’ve turned it,

              ’Tis not to be improved

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Eros

Wedding

by Alice Oswald

From time to time our love is like a sail
and when the sail begins to alternate
from tack to tack, it’s like a swallowtail
and when the swallow flies it’s like a coat;
and if the coat is yours, it has a tear
like a wide mouth and when the mouth begins
to draw the wind, it’s like a trumpeter
and when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions …
and this, my love, when millions come and go
beyond the need of us, is like a trick;
and when the trick begins, it’s like a toe
tip-toeing on a rope, which is like luck;
and when the luck begins, it’s like a wedding,
which is like love, which is like everything.


A Great Need

by Hafiz

Out
Of a great need
We are all holding hands
And climbing.
Not loving is a letting go.
Listen,
The terrain around here
Is
Far too
Dangerous
For
That.

Between Heaven and Earth

Wang Ping

 

The River In Our Blood

A Sonnet Crown
For Lord Bruce
By Wang Ping

VII

The heart beats alone, keeping its own pace
Fear, rage, sorrow—storms beyond our range
The river bows and bends, birthing new space
To die and live again–this constant change

Veins of water across the delta wrist, opening
Cupped hands…fish, reeds, frogs mating in puddles
Home… where cranes stop for a drink, then rising
Back to their birthplace. The spirit shuttles

Between heaven and earth—how you follow
This primordial path? The brain, a wrinkled mass
Keeps us at bay, eyes on the black swallow
From distant sea…messenger through tall grass

Memory split from the Fountain of Youth
You hold us to the place– this beat, this truth

 


 

If you would like to read Wanda Ping’s entire crown of sonnets, click on the link below:

Wang Ping

 


Immigrant Can’t Write Poetry

Wang Ping 

 

“Oh no, not with your syntax,” said H.V. to her daughter-in-law, a Chinese writing poetry in English

She walk to table
She walks to a table

She walk to table now
She is walking to a table now

What difference it make
What difference does it make

In Nature, no completeness
No sentence really complete thought

Language, our birthright & curse
Pay no mind to immigrant syntax

Poetry, born as beast
Move best when free, undressed

 

 
 

It Was All Of That

Kathleen Norris

In spite of the cost of living, its still popular.

Kathleen Norris

Ascension

by Kathleen Norris

Why do you stand looking up at the skies?
.                                                        . Acts 1:11

It wasn’t just wind, chasing
thin gunmetal clouds
across the loud sky;
it wasn’t the feeling that one might ascend
on that excited air,
rising like a trumpet note.

And it wasn’t just my sister’s water breaking,
her crying out,
the downward draw of blood and bone…

It was all of that,
the mud and new grass
pushing up through melting snow,
the lilac in bud
by my front door, bent low
by last week’s ice storm.

Now the new mother, that leaky vessel,
begins to nurse her child,
beginning the long good-bye.


Mrs. Adam

By Kathleen Norris 
 

I have lately come to the conclusion that I am Eve,
alias Mrs. Adam. You know, there is no account
of her death in the Bible, and why am I not Eve?
Emily Dickinson in a letter,
12 January, 1846

Wake up,
you’ll need your wits about you.
This is not a dream,
but a woman who loves you, speaking.
 
She was there
when you cried out;
she brushed the terror away.
She knew
when it was time to sin.
You were wise
to let her handle it,
and leave that place.
 
We couldn’t speak at first
for the bitter knowledge,
the sweet taste of memory
on our tongues.
 
Listen, it’s time.
You were chosen too,
to put the world together.