There was a little game going around Facebook recently in which you determine the name of your craft beer by using your grandfather’s profession and a word that you don’t quite understand. I think mine might be Harnessmaker’s Redux. I know redux means remix or retry or rework, sort of, but it always feels like there’s some edgy mystery meaning in there. Today’s prompt is to remix a poem from earlier in the month. I’ve rewritten my poem about wooing the muse. I think I may prefer the original, but this month is about the way the daily deadlines push me to play with words and sounds in new ways. If I don’t get any “good” poems out of this month, I have already expanded my voice, pushed myself out of some ruts. But I really hope I can glean at least one or two good ones from November’s hoard.
how to woo the muse
woo her with muchness
or nothing at all
woo her with wise
nonsensical prattle
with the way sound crashes
upon sound upon sound
upon sound upon sound
ringing from line to line
singing a fine tune
say her name often, say
i would have written, but my muse. . .
say, the muse is a harsh moon
a mysterious mistress, sing odes
to the moon but mean muse
pretend not to care
write a masterpiece
of utter garbage
pretend not to care
but as they say the best way
is simply to put your butt
in the chair
Gratitude List:
1. Commiseration
2. I am pretty sure that was Raven rowing through the sky above me on my way to Hershey this morning
3. Today’s Literacy Conference in Hershey–lots of great ideas to enliven my teaching
4. My colleagues
5. Free books! So many books!
May we walk in Beauty!
“Never laugh at live dragons.” —J.R.R. Tolkien
“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” —Aristotle
“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.” —Mark Twain
“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” —Aristotle
“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.” —Anais Nin
“Changing the big picture takes time.. and the best thing to do is focus on the things that we can make in our lives if we’re doing all that. That becomes the collage of real change.” —Michelle Obama
“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.” —Amelia Earhart
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” —Lucille Ball
“Learn how to take criticism seriously but not personally.” —Hillary Clinton
“Like a great starving beast, my body is quivering, fixed on the scent of light.” —Hafiz
“Identity is a story carried in the body.” —Sophia Samatar
“Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine … and that deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and pools, almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon, were not less divine …”
—W.B. Yeats
“The heart is your student, for love is the only way we learn.”
—Rumi
Poet Joy Harjo, from 2012:
“Visited with my cousin George Coser, Jr yesterday at the kitchen table. He’s a gift. Always something profound among the stories. The sacred lies at the root of the mundane. And every word is a power element. Each word or sound, whether thought, written or spoken grows our path, the path of our generation, the children, grandchildren, the Earth. . . . We become the ancestors. A sense of play gives a lightness of being. So get out there and play—and be kind while you’re at it. To yourself, too.”
Help me to journey beyond the familiar
and into the unknown.
Give me the faith to leave old ways
and break fresh ground with You.
Christ of the mysteries, I trust You
to be stronger than each storm within me.
I will trust in the darkness and know
that my times, even now, are in Your hand.
Tune my spirit to the music of heaven,
and somehow, make my obedience count for You.
—The Prayer of St. Brendan (attributed to Brendan)
The Wild Geese
by Wendell Berry
Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer’s end. In time’s maze
over fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed’s marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.
Mockingbird Chronicles 