Three on Thursday | Haiku.

Joining in with Carole and friends today to share a three-line poem.

creamy blooms spread wide

atop glossy green, spreading

the scent of summer

Thanks to our 90+ degree stretch last weekend, the magnolias are starting to open. This tree is in the common area where Holly takes her evening walks. It smells wonderful!

Hope your week is going well ... here's to almost-Friday!

A Tuesday Haiku.

speeding through errands

when I pause for a moment

compelled to look up.

I see sun filtered

through a canopy of red.

nature's beauty in

sharp contrast with the asphalt

beneath my feet. in my head.

I don't think there is any haiku tradition with this 3 verse style - but the 5-7-5 x 2 + 7-7 rhythm seems like the right fit ... so I'm calling it good. and done!

Happy Tuesday!

and p.s. to my gardener friends - these leaves look like oak leaves - are they supposed to be red this time of year?

Inexhaustible Supply.

Today is Poem in Your Pocket Day (thank you, Kym, for the reminder!)

Here's the one I'm carrying with me today.

Inexhaustible Supply

There is no distance,
after all, between the
heart and the object
of its longing, no gap
between theory and
experience. It's all
here in easy reach.

This isn't a secret
teaching, locked away
from the uninitiated.
Ask, and All That Is
responds. Knock, and
in some corner, a door
opens. Pray and the
day is different.

Like fruit at harvest
time, love is mine
for the gathering and
giving, always an
inexhaustible supply.

The only proof of
this is in living as
if the source of love
will not run dry. To
fear that I might prime
the pump and find
nothing in my cupped
and eating hands is to
doubt the One who
authors everything.
Why go there?

- Danna Faulds, from One Soul

A Tuesday Haiku.

another day home

quiet, but not alone with

Holly by my side

Thank you for all your get better wishes (more than once!)  I have high hopes to leave the house tomorrow for a dinner out with Katie and Sara and I'm even hoping I can wear makeup! It doesn't hurt to dream big 😉.

A Tuesday Haiku.

pink blossoms, blue skies

then rain and wind leave the ground

covered ... March roars on

Tuesdays are for Poetry.

yep, still...

I'd planned a different topic for today, but then on Sunday morning, I heard a few lines from this poem and just had to share it with y'all. For context, here's a photo from Katie's wedding that Sara shared on Instagram

with the caption "Who says they don't dance..."

Obvious evidence to the contrary 😉, we don't dance; I've often wished we did.

Every Day We Are Dancers 

It begins with the lewd macarena
each of us performs in the shower,
then the modified twist we are hip to
with that ever-absorbent partner, the towel,

and on to the funky chicken of stepping into underwear,
the shimmy of stretching into hose.
There is no music, none that anyone
can hear, yet no one can escape the boogie.

Outside beneath the disco ball of the Sun
no one is a wallflower, not even the two lugs
in the crosswalk lugging a huge mirror,
one at either end pressing his cheek

into the cheek of his own reflection, arm
extended, hand clasping his own hand in a tango
more about control than passion, one couple
leading himself forward, the other slide-stepping

backwards across the intersection made double
by the infinite burden they shoulder together.
At the entrances of buildings even those afflicted
with two left feet find grace with a stranger

in a revolving door, where, regardless of gender,
we share a pause and glance to communicate
who will lead, who will follow,
close to each other but never quite touching.

- Mitch Roberson | Poetry Magazine (via poetryfoundation.org)

...and now I realize, we (all!!) do!

Happy Tuesday!

Tuesdays are for Poetry.

Today

Today I'm flying low and I'm
not saying a word.
I'm letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.

But I'm taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I'm traveling
a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.

- Mary Oliver (from A Thousand Mornings)

Tuesdays are (still) for Poetry.

early morning with

E.B. White and twinkle lights

stillness, peace and joy

For years, I've started my day with coffee and the computer ... and not much peace and joy. Heading into 2018, I'm going to change that!

Tuesdays are for Poetry.

Such Silence

As deep as I ever went into the forest
I came upon an old stone bench, very, very old,
and around it a clearing, and beyond that
trees taller and older than I had ever seen.

Such silence!
It really wasn't so far from a town, but it seemed
all the clocks in the world had stopped counting.
So it was hard to suppose the usual rules applied.

Sometimes there's only a hint, a possibility.
What's magical, sometimes, has deeper roots
  than reason.
I hope everyone knows that.

I sat on the bench, waiting for something.
An angel, perhaps.
Or dancers with the legs of goats.

No, I didn't see either. But only, I think, because
  I didn't stay long enough.

- Mary Oliver (from Blue Horses)

Tuesdays are for Poetry.

from this morning's walk - couldn't resist the tumble of colors

Memory

You can't stop turning it round and round,

stained glass shaken and fallen

thought the kaleidoscope of years --

every twist a patterned whorl, story

of petalled flowers or shattered world --

and if you keep turning, another tale unfolds,

kind or cruel, same facts mirrored

through other minds, other times --

and every refracted look is another life,

this handful of ruby and emerald shards.

- Robin Chapman (from Six True Things)

Tuesdays are for Poetry.

Today's poem is from a slim volume I bought in Sitka. The author owns the Sitka Rose Gallery, our first stop on the artist walking tour. It's always a treat to buy a book directly from the author (and I'm thinking this one, which doesn't even have a Goodreads entry, is going to be my micro press selection for the 2017 Read Harder Challenge).

From the author biography in the back of the book:

Eugene Solokov was born in Russin in 1964. He immigrated to the US when he was thirteen. He spent his teenage years in New York City, and received his BA in History from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He spent five years traveling around the world. In 1993, he opened, and continues to operate, the Sitka Rose Gallery.

I think I remember Eugene telling me that he wrote many of these poems while his marriage was breaking up. It's a bittersweet collection for sure.

The poem "I hate you more and love you always" repeats these two lines "My love for you is always, do not fear." and "I hate you more with every day, my dear." And the shortest piece in the book, "Divorce" is three simple lines:

It's only divorce,
it could have been worse: a flu
or an aneurysm.

There are 27 poems in all, including a collection of haikus. One of my favorites, though, is the title poem.

How to Frame a Landscape

It's easy. Point and shoot. Then, cut out
the unsmiling man in the left corner
or the one picking his nose in the right
or the dog urinating on a fire hydrant
or the boy blowing chewing gum over his face
or the wife wandering off with her lover.

You can also add details which aren't there:
a screaming eagle with a salmon in his claws
or a happily married couple holding hands
or your grandma strolling in her peculiar
yellow, polka-dot dress, both long departed.

Use Photoshop. Enhance, manipulate colors.
Add, subtract, multiply. Move the borders.
Lobotomize the photograph. It's easy to learn
how to frame a landscape properly,
to your liking. It's almost as easy as framing
a person, a friend perhaps, or a husband.

It's made me think about the photographs I share here. What I crop out. How I edit the colors or paint over them with Waterlogue. (I'm not good enough with Photoshop to do much else.) The ones I decide not to share. (the photos I don't take.) and as Marc and I approach our 34th anniversary, that last bit certainly gives me pause.

Thank you, Eugene, for giving me a different perspective, so beautifully described. I am enjoying it!

oops, we were in Sitka on the 22nd! but I decided that was a bit of landscape I didn't need to re-frame 😊

Tuesdays are for Poetry.

I picked up this lovely collection at a bookshop on Monroe Street when I visited Sara in Madison last February.

I was looking for a book published by a micro press for the 2017 Read Harder challenge. The shop owner thought this book, published by Tebot Bach, might work.

Robin Chapman is a poet like no other I've encountered. Maybe because she's (also)

a developmental psycholinguist (she retired from "teaching and research in children's language development and disorders" at UW-Madison),

with a strong appreciation for mathematics (she mentions prime and perfect numbers and ancient Greek mathematicians in her poems),

who paints (that's her work on the cover)?

I'm thoroughly enjoying this collection and thought y'all might, too.


Known Unknowns

Garden, I call it, our beautiful volunteers -- faces of phlox,
waving arms of goldenrod, monarda's tight fists --
still here after the hottest, driest two months on record,
all their lower leaves withered, sere, height lowered,
many young ones dead; and now at last the rain,
perfume rising up of soil, leaf, flower -- if gratitude
had a scent, my skin itself would join in calling the bees.
And who is to say that this is not the scent of gratitude?
That exchange that might bring rain back again.

I read those lines early this morning, when the scent of gratitude was that first cup of hot coffee. But then, on the trail at the park, the air crisp and clean after a light rain, I smelled the freshly fallen leaves.

What do you call the scent of gratitude?

A Tuesday Haiku.

before and after

cleaning out, then Home Depot

for mums and pumpkins. 

Those planters on the front porch have been nagging me since we got back from Connecticut (17 days if you're counting). They weren't in great shape after Alaska, but at least they were alive. The two weeks both of us were gone in September really did them in. And then it was rainy. and humid. and hot. but this week .... ahhhh....

While I was at Home Depot, I pulled up my favorite photo from last year's "after" to check the sizes of the mums and pumpkins ... and was reminded that this year's fall transformation wasn't nearly as much fun

and oh my goodness - pointing!!

but it was a lot quicker. which is ok. I have a blanket to knit!

Hope your week is off to a great start!

Words on Wednesday | The Sun.

Sharing something special from my Monday with y'all today.

Lauren and I attended a class (on chakras - more to come on that!) at Mary and Martha's Place. It was our first - and hopefully not our last - experience with this community. The director opened by lighting a candle, reading this poem and then we all shared a moment of silence. It was the perfect way to begin. I hope it provides a lovely beginning for your day, too.

The Sun 

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon 

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone--
and how it slides again 

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower 

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance--
and have you ever felt for anything 

such wild love--
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you 

as you stand there,
empty-handed--
or have you too
turned from this world-- 

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things? 

- Mary Oliver (from New Poems)

My next post will be from Vancouver, assuming I can remember how to post from my iPad.

Happy Wednesday!

A Thursday Haiku.

dark early today

making lists, drinking coffee,

and shortly, knitting.

Hope you've enjoyed a productive day ... or maybe I should say productive week. How did it get to be almost Friday already?!

Morning Run Haiku.

ruffled blue sky blooms,

birdsongs greet the day; press on,

a warm welcome home

In Celebration of Summer.

from this morning's (almost dark) early morning walk

While I Am Writing a Poem to Celebrate Summer, the Meadowlark Begins to Sing 

Sixty-seven years, oh Lord, to look at the clouds,
the trees in deep, moist summer,  

daisies and morning glories
opening every morning 

their small, ecstatic faces -
Or maybe I should just say 

how I wish I had a voice
like the meadowlark's,  

sweet, clear, and reliably
slurring all day long  

from the fencepost, or the long grass
where it lives  

in a tiny but adequate grass hut
beside the mullein and the everlasting,  

the faint-pink roses
that have never been improved, but come to bud  

then open like little soft sighs
under the meadowlark's whistle, its breath-praise,

its thrill-song, its anthem, its thanks, its
alleluia. Alleluia, oh Lord.

~Mary Oliver

Hope your longest day of the year is a good one!

Found in Translation.

Back in March, as part of this year's Read Harder challenge (specifically, a collection of poetry in translation on a theme other than love), I found Osip Mandelstam. Along the way, not only did I develop a love and deep appreciation for his poems, I discovered how important a role the translator plays...in something other than the Bible. In my Bible study, I am continually struck by the subtleties of meaning among the different translations, but I hadn't considered it in other literature. After recently re-reading and completely loving One Hundred Years of Solitude, another translation, I decided to revisit those Mandelstam poems and share some of my discoveries with you.

My local library has a decent collection of Mandelstam's poems in translation. The Brown & Merwin (B&W) translation came highly recommended and I chose Wiman's Stolen Air because it was new (published in 2012). I honestly don't remember why I chose the McDuff, but it turned out that having all three volumes to compare and contrast was helpful. (but Goodreads makes it hard - the B&W and McDuff volumes are both listed as "different editions" of the same book. hummmm)

Both the B&W and McDuff start with the "same" poem:

The shy speechless sound
of a fruit falling from its tree,
and around it the silent music
of the forest, unbroken . . . 

The careful and hollow sound
of a fruit snapped from a tree
amidst the neverending song
of the deep forest silence . . .

I was captivated! There wasn't as much overlap across the three volumes as that first poem led me to believe. But two more examples - these both from B&W and Stolen Air - made me wish there were.

From the Voronezh notebooks, March 15, 1937

Maybe this is the beginning of madness.
Maybe it's your conscience:
a knot of life in which we are seized and known
and untied for existence. 

So in cathedrals of crystals not found on earth
the prudent spider of light
draws the ribs apart and gathers them again
into one bundle. 

And gathered together by one thin beam
the bundles of pure lines give thanks.
One day they will meet, they will assemble
like guests with the visors up, 

and her on earth, not in heaven,
as in a house filled with music,
if only we don't offend them, or frighten them away.
How good to live to see it! 

Forgive me for what I am saying.
Read it to me quietly, quietly.

Maybe madness too has making here.
Maybe conscience, knotted like a cyst,
Knowing and being known by sun and air --
Maybe life unties and we exist. 

Bring to mind the mindless spider, its care
For the pillared invisible, little crystal temple,
All air and otherness: 

As if a form could thank its maker,
As if every line of light back to one source were drawn,
As if, deep in wilderness
A raftered hall rose around the risen guests,
All pains purged from their faces . . . 

As it is on earth, Lord, not in heaven.
On earth, and in a house whose walls are song.
Even the birds, even the littlest, fearless.
O Lord, to live so long . . . 

Forgive me this, forgive what I am saying.
Whisper it, less than whisper, like someone praying.

The second example is from Tristia, one of Mandelstam's best known works; I'm not sure why McDuff didn't include it (or maybe he did and the translation is just so different, I couldn't see it!) It's four stanzas, but I'm only sharing part of the first; I think you'll get the gist:

I have studied the science of good-byes,
the bare-headed laments of night.
The waiting lengthens as the oxen chew.
In the town the last hour of the watch.

There is, I know, a science of separation
In night's disheveled elegies, stifled laments,
The clockwork oxen jaws, the tense anticipation
As the city's vigil nears its sun and end.

In their introduction, Brown & Merwin say "Reading literature in translation, in a different language, in a different culture, often means that one is reading a complete invention, distant from the original, a myth." (so true!)

and later, "By trying to bring something alien into English, we change English and broaden our own tradition. That is why reading works in translation is so important to us, why our language, since Geoffrey Chaucer, has thrived on translations, why ... every new great age of English poetry is also a great age of translation."

Wiman has included an end note, "Secret Hearing, on Translating Osip Mandelstam", in which he says "...I've been careful to call [these] versions and not translations, hoping to skip over the abyss of argument that opens underneath that distinction."

For myself, I have no desire to learn Russian in order to read the poems as Mandelstam intended. I am happy to have access to these beautiful words and images ... found in translation.

If you've read this far, thank you! Have you read Mandelstam (in translation)? is one a favorite? After today's revisit, can you guess with of the three books I intend to add to my collection?

Thursdays with Sam | A Love Poem.

Today's Think Write Thursday prompt is to write a love letter. I'm not so great with words, so I borrowed some. I'm thinking Sam didn't mind*.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you 

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart 

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
~e.e. cummings

*A little while back, Katie & Charlie gifted me a beautiful interpretation of this poem - yes it's a book!

 ...and it's perfect everyone. Highly recommend!

If you want to sign up for the Think Write Thursday prompts, click here. And thank you Carole and Kat for another inspiring week!

Watercolor Wednesday | A Poem.

Monday morning at the lake

Much of what I've been reading lately (including posts from several of you!) has talked slowing down, taking time to savor wonder of this season. This poem, while not specific to December at all, captures beautifully this idea and my favorite time of day. I hope you enjoy it.

The Rebirth of the World

A great blue heron
flies across the red
face of the rising sun,
its crook-necked, lanky
body unmistakable.

Nature has a way of
welcoming each new
day with singular grace;
no two mornings are the same. And I am not
a mere spectator here --

I am moved and changed,
struck dumb by loveliness,
so infused with awe and
wonder at the generosity
of mockingbirds and doves,
pine trees and high cirrus

clouds catching the first
rays of sun that I struggle
to find words. In the end
I give up and sit in silence,
cloaked in the glow of
morning, and the rebirth
        of the world.

~ Danna Faulds (from One Soul: More Poems from the Heart of Yoga)