A Tanka
Heads bent to our work
Setting stakes, planting new seed
A sound above us
chittering, chirping like mice:
The tree swallows have returned!
Yes, that’s a chunk of chickweed on my head.
Gratitude List:
1. The swallows are back!
2. Blooming
3. Talking Story
4. Clear water with slices of lime
5. Good, healthy sleep
Namaste
First, a Poem, sort of tossed out of my brooding heart, out of this boat of me. Perhaps I’ll breathe more freely if I can set this story free, and the poem may start to bend those bars. After the poem, a Photo. Then a Gratitude List.
Life in the Fairy Tale
It would help me to know
what my name is in this story.
Was I ever one of the innocent children
following the flowers
into the darkness of the forest?
I remember the day we came to that crossing,
the place where the paths diverged.
Isn’t the goddess supposed to sit there
wrapped in her robes, upon a stone?
Aren’t her dogs supposed to bark a warning?
I keep forgetting what happened next.
When did you hand me the impossible choice?
I would have been content to wait,
to sit on the stone and watch,
to see dark Hecate emerge
from between the two oak trees in the west,
to ask her a boon, to beg direction.
Instead I forged ahead into the wood,
taking neither path, the only way I knew.
This is the way. This is the way I must go onward.
But I can no longer hear your footsteps
on the pathway to my left.
I will not simply let the story fade
into the shredded mists of morning.
Not until I know my name.
When Ellis saw these sprouts this morning, raising their
heads above the soil, he said, “They’re like dragons! Breathing
their fire!” Oh, my Boy. By this evening, they’re all an inch taller.
What a wonder and a tenderness for him to take in.
Gratitude List:
1. Fire-Breathing Bean Sprouts
2. Khalil Gibran and the tenderness of letting go, saying goodbye, remembering.
3. The opening bud
4. Choosing, even when the choices seem impossible
5. Silk
May we walk in beauty. And wonder. And hope.
A week or so ago I posted a collage-style poem, “The Song of the Toad and the Little Birds.” Toads seem to be lurking their way into my work of late. Here’s a sequel, or perhaps a Part II:
The toad squats
behind the poem
of the little birds
Underneath its tongue
is a red jasper
and its name is Patience
It is listening for the sound
of the sound of your name
in the falling rain
in the sound of a car
turning the corner
It is listening for your heartbeat
as you wait to be born
If you look closely enough
you will see the thin golden chain
around its left wrist
If you wait
you will hear a sigh
like the settling
of a leaf
in the grass.
Gratitude List:
1. Feeling energized by the work of the day
2. Toads
3. Dragonstone
4. Balance and paradox
5. Layers of meaning
May we walk in beauty.
Toad visiting the Faerie house, Summer 2009
I am playing around with throwing some random pieces together to see how they fit. This is a collage I will likely cut apart again and re-formulate at another time. Perhaps. Unless it seems to live as I live with it a little.
This is the blank page, the tabula rasa
the cloudless blue sky waiting to see
how the weather will fill it.
Sleep shrouding sense
muted and whispering.
This is the field in the springtime
ready for planting.
I cannot tell you everything.
I cannot tell you anything.
How can I be more explicit?
You disturbed the bee at her labor.
Your dreams broke the silence
of my garden.
We do not come this day bearing flowers.
We do not come this day singing songs of victory.
Weaving our silence
Bearing our candles
These are the gates we will enter
Bearing the weight of the war in our eyes.
What is the job of this poem?
So many things conspire to keep me asleep.
The heart is the vessel of response
not the information-gatherer.
There it is.
There it is again.
Coming back to the story
–always–
of the toad and the little birds.
Glittering. Hard and cold.
Be watchful. Be bold.
Gratitude List:
1. There was a dairy farmer “who loved the land and his animals, and took very good care of them. . . . He was a loving person with a very kind heart.” For his kind heart and the gentle daughter he raised.
2. For the beautiful Pequea Valley and a fierce wind to scour the worries away.
3. For the silent and tricksy activism of my husband. I cannot tell you what it is, for then it would no longer be his silent revolution. Just know that behind the scenes he is making the world a better place for us all. (No, he is not the real Banksy.)
4. For the serious and earnest nature of my people, for their singing, their love of conversation, their care of the bereaved. You sit in a Mennonite funeral and you can smell the food cooking downstairs and you know that everyone will be taken care of.
5. For love, because we can love each other even when we don’t agree. Because when it comes down to it, love is really what we need.
Much love. So much love.
“Oh look!” said Joss. “Roxanne [the car] has a mustache!”
Feeling unsettled and out of sorts
I asked the chickens what they have to offer me.
All they could give me was their hunger
and insatiable curiosity
and small tender clucks of comfort.
And eggs.
Of course eggs.
And maybe that’s all quite a lot to give
as an answer after all.
Gratitude List:
1. Driving through Lancaster County in the late afternoon with my parents. There is a reason people travel from all over the world to visit this farmland.
2. An Amishman digging a grave with a shovel. Why does this move me so much–that the church/funeral home/whoever did not use power equipment, but instead hired people to do the work by hand? I personalizes it, keeps it from being about the noise and the mechanization, brings it back down to the human scale.
3. Hearing my parents talk about their own church’s process with end-of-life issues, taking back the role of preparing bodies for burial from the funeral homes, not embalming, creating community responses around the experience of death, not prolonging dying with medicine and out-of-context care. This is powerful community work.
4. I feel a shift a-coming. Big shifts, cosmic shifts?
5. My new tiger eye ring. (I had to rip it back into the mundane a moment–though perhaps there’s nothing mundane about this ring. . .)
May we walk the path of compassion.
My assignment for myself was to try to break the sense, break the sentence. I was going to use the half-hour sessions of writing during the last three days to create fodder for this poem. I stumbled a bit on that, and I never really broke out of the sentence. But I have a little something interesting, I think.
Green is the toad word the
song of the morning the
hush of a wee slamander
crouching beneath stars
I would be indigo
arcing through waterfall
I would be waterfall
dripping and gushing
I wonder when singing
reflects the rainbow
or whether my wandering greenness
displays a museum of dreams
Now that’s the brown metaphor
I was hunting
the hitching of zing to aha
There we go
Here we go
Falling beneath the wheel of the moment
And here’s a sunbeam
or off to the races we dance
but the moonlight is ticklish
and you’ve been in tangles
so when do we settle
like spiders in corners
to ponder the morning?
Gratitude List:
1. “I love my snow day!” says Joss. I concur. Making snow people and eating snow and sledding.
2. The beautiful necklace Ellis made for himself. Focused work for hours. And no self-consciousness about what is “gender appropriate.”
3. That scrappy little wren who is threatening to make a nest in my garage.
4. Finding the inner discipline to plan out my extremely busy week. Planning ahead has actually become something that I have a great deal of resistance to, inwardly. Pushing through whatever that is makes me feel like I have really accomplished something.
5. Making the pizza myself, crust and all. Why don’t we do that more often?
May we walk in beauty.
A poem from 2006, to celebrate the turning of the year-wheel into Spring.
Day Turns
The way maple swings its wings spiraling down shafts of dawn wind,
The way chickadee whistles on bitter March mornings,
The way lichen spreads grey-green lace upon the patient rocks,
The way the egg falls from jay’s beak to lie silent, cold, and whole upon the moss,
The way the wren defends her nest,
The way rabbit hints at her home and scratches the packed earth,
The way squirrel scolds her wayward cousin’s child.
The way heron stands more still than thought,
The way the pond reflects the orange air at sunset,
The way snake stalks the field mouse through gathering dusk,
The way the fields are washed in the milk of the moon,
The way dark midnight covers the farm like a blanket.
Gratitude List:
1. Those little trees in the understory of the woods, the ones that don’t lose their leaves until spring, whose leaves are wisps of yellowed paper against the mottled floor of the wood.
2. Finding a nearly-empty (but not quite!) jar of Chocolat in the back of the fridge
3. The many colors of potatoes
4. Reading books with the whole family
5. Writing it down
May we walk in beauty.
Not sure why it scanned so blue, nor why I had the impulse to post it here tonight. This is my Great-Aunt Lizzie (Elizabeth Weaver–I am named for her) and my Grandma Weaver (Marian Weaver, Lizzie’s sister-in-law). Quilting.
The list poem for a March Monday. It will suffice for my gratitude list for today:
For glee
for giggle
for grin
for glow
for making snowmen in the snow
For dare
for desire
for delight
for dream
for things not always as they seem
For hilarity
for hope
for honor
for heart
for touch, and healing, and grace, and art
For breath
for blanket
for blessings
for birds
for building stories with our words
This is Ellis in 2009. Today’s snowman is much smaller than this one, and today’s brother looks exactly like the boy in this picture.
I wrote this one about a year ago, perhaps two. There is a moment in the morning when the sun suddenly hits the River with a flash of pure gold.
Susquehanna Alchemy Fragments of mist roll down the ridge above the River, peeling the veil from Pisgah’s grey shoulders. Pockets of fog cloak the farms in the folds of the valley. Susquehanna meanders, a twisting ribbon of lead in the dawn. Above, a blue heron plies a patient path through cold currents on its way to fishing. Wren, sparrow and finch send threads of brilliance into the bowl of sky: “Here. Here. Here. I am here.” Their voices spiral upward. A chilly breeze disturbs the fleecy tail of a squirrel who has paused halfway down a grey-brown trunk of oak. The wintry skeletons of maples wear the green auras of early spring. Sun touches the branches, tempers them with silver in the first light. One day you will remember to look and the fresh nests of birds will be hidden amid a riot of green. You turn off the spine of the mountain. You slide from the ridge of Mt. Pisgah, winding your way along a streamlet which hastens toward the river’s embrace. A stone schoolhouse with boarded windows sits amid a scholarship of dried ivy vines and last fall’s nettle stalks. Among the wrinkled hollows and hills you curve away from the river and back again. Now you turn onto the river road. Birdsong has lost the insistent shrill of dawn. The last mist of morning dissipates before you. The sun slides a glance off the surface of grey water, and sparkles of gold appear. Gold grows on the water, transforming lead, and in a moment you will avert your eyes from its blinding dazzle.Gratitude List:
1. Spring Tonic–the boys and I went wandering this morning, found several leaves of plantain, chickweed, nettles, henbit and ground ivy, stick-stalks of mint, sage and thyme. We made a tea-tonic out of it all.
2. Collaborative artwork with my children. This photo is one Josiah and I made this morning. It’s a cardinal family in a nest. The red blobs above the nest are daytime fireworks, according to one of the artists:
3. Flaky biscuits and hot soup
4. Being understood
5. A new poet to learn: Ada Limon
May we walk in beauty. So, so much beauty.
Today I have been sorting through some old poems, to see which ones I still want to consider viable and alive, and which ones just deserve to fade away in my computer files. Here is one from the late ’90s, when we lived in Slippery Rock. I still remember the cafe where I wrote it the morning after I dreamed it.
The Birth of Phoenix This is the story of the woman Who believed that happiness lay in the sound of Any-Man-At-All slipping through her open doorway, Who grew beyond bounds, Whose walls dissolved in a grey mist to let in a garden, a star, and a small silvery snake, Who discovered the spiraling staircase which led to the Aunt in the attic, Who plied that old woman with indecent questions and robed herself warmly in old woman’s laughter, Who carried the rage of the crone in her pocket like a sculpted soapstone jackal, Who suckled that fury–that ravenous infant, Who knew a canary from plaster pretenders, Who built her own cottage of clay, thatch, and brambles, Who walked through the market, unveiled by the eyebrows of merchants and gabblers, Who swam to deep waters alone like a manta, Who left the green waves for a road full of daughters, Who shaved off her hair, to step naked and newborn among glowing embers. Gratitude List:
1. Mid-day today, Ellis raced through the room (after 36 hours of intermittent up-chucking) and announced, “I feel so good!” And promptly made himself a sandwich and ate it. And kept it down.
2. This image, which stays with me: The bluebirds at my parents’ house know that my dad goes out the glass doors at the back of the house to feed them. On Sunday as we were sitting at the dining room table putting a puzzle together, one of them came and sat on the handle of the glass door, and peered around the door frame through the glass and watched us. Apparently he often sits there to watch his friend drinking coffee or eating or working a puzzle.
3. The release of a good stretch
4. Eager new customers, and long-term customers who have become friends
5. Planning and plotting
May we walk in beauty.
