Poem 65 (Pandemic Day 68)

Time is

Time is...

Too slow for those who wait,

Too swift for those who fear,

Too long for those who grieve,

Too short for those who rejoice; 

But for those who love,

Time is not.

--Henry van Dyke

For Your Retirement: Writings About This Rewarding Time of Life. Hallmark Editions, 1977.

Yes, a sweet little gift-sized Hallmark book from more than 30 years ago...I was in graduate school then, hardly contemplating retirement!  How did this find its way to my shelf and manage to stick around?  Maybe I found it at a garage sale much more recently?  But it is syrupy and trite at best and will be going into a very final retirement after this; but with hope of rebirth as something useful.  A cardboard box that a retiree will pack their stuff on their last day perhaps?  

Amid all the cheery verses (Life is good, and we're content...) Henry van Dyke's brief words carry a lot of meaning.  Time is our companion, but not always a welcome or treasured one.  As in most things, love makes all the difference.

Check out the links to learn more about van Dyke, recycling paper and hear a performance artist read his poem.

Poem 64  (Pandemic 67)

How To Be An Artist

Stay loose. Learn to watch snails.

Plant impossible gardens.  Invite

someone dangerous to tea.  Make

little signs that say yes! and post 

them all over your house.  Make friends

with freedom & uncertainty.  Look

forward to dreams.  Cry during movies.

Swing as high as you can a a 

swingset, by moonlight.  Cultivate

moods.  Refuse to "be responsible."

Do it for love.  Take lots of naps.

Give money away.  Do it now.

The money will follow. Believe in magic.

Laugh a lot. Celebrate every gorgeous

moment.  Take moonbaths.  Have 

wild imaginings, transformative 

dreams, and perfect calm.  Draw on the

walls.  Read everyday.  Imagine yourself

magic.  Giggle with children.  Listen to old

people.  Open up.  Dive in.  Be free.

Bless yourself.  Drive away fear.  Play

with everything.  Entertain your inner

child.  You are innocent.  Build a fort

with blankets.  Get wet.  Hug trees.

Write love letters.

SARK, (Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy), A Creative Companion: How to Free Your Creative Spirit, Celestial Arts, 1991.

Do you know this irrepressible spirit known as SARK?  She makes a great creative companion--it is not idle musing that this book will help you free your creative spirit.  The poem above, in poster form, which I discovered about 30 years ago inspired me like nothing had before.  I hand-lettered my own copy and then set about creating "impossible gardens", inviting "dangerous people to tea", and embracing more willingly and openly the things I already found easy to do--crying at movies, looking forward to dreams and reading everyday.
I'm so glad to revisit this poem today.  I already found myself getting wet by staying out gardening in the light rain that was falling this afternoon; and taking lots of naps is more appealing now than ever and also much easier to get by with.
What better way to drive away fear and bless yourself than with a healthy dose of creativity?  Take SARK's advice and be bodacious and succulent--celebrate each gorgeous moment!

Poems 62 and 63 (Pandemic Day 66)

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a House

A house covers up everybody's problems.

A person walking by can't see 

two people fighting in the kitchen.

A lot of people have lived in every house

What happened in that house

Forty years before?

--A murder committed in the kitchen,

A robbery in the basement.

When people built my house,

Did they mess up and maybe my house 

Will fall from under me tonight?

There are parts of my house 

That are not quite normal, like my bathroom, 

Right by the dining room, used to be for the maid.

--I wonder if anybody ever died in my house.

I wonder if they died in my room?

Outside my house, 

The tree is the biggest thing there.

The leaves die every fall.

And in the backyard,

Our rotting swing set lifts off the ground

Whenever you do.

My house is almost 100 years old.

It could have been a century ago 

When someone was sleeping in my room.

Out the back door and down the stairs,

The old garage sits,

Falling apart, day by day.

--And in the garage, there is an attic

Where no one ever goes.

It's possible that a dead body

Is up there, but we may

Never find out.

The garage is old and dying

Like the rest of this old house,

And slowly, the people who live in it, as well.

--Nick Day

Writing from Student Author Night, Barton Open School, Minneapolis, MN, 2005.

This is definitely a limited edition volume--available for one night only in 2005.  As I glance through it, I see names I remember of the students who passed through my doors, my face is full of smiles and my mind is full of questions.  Where are these students now, fifteen years later?  

Sadly, as I page through again, I see Samantha Hastings's name--one of our brightest and best who died in a car accident that also killed her father and seriously injured her younger sister.  I believe the poem in this booklet might have been the one that was included in her funeral handout.  I must include that poem too.  

Wow.  I thought this was going to be a quick and light-hearted posting for a Friday and now....

Nick's poem about ways of looking at a house has relevance for us now, as we spend more time homebound.  Is your home revealing secrets?  Are you hearing noises, uncovering mysteries or at least finding missing socks?  If your house has been talking to you in any ways, blatant or subtle, will you share that with me? 

And now...

Moonset 

I'll tell you how the moon set

     So silvery and white,

The Flowers waited tentatively

     For Sun's bright joyful light

The Stars put on a morning show

     Before they said Goodbye,

The Moon gave last its golden glow

     Then sank beneath the Sky.

I know my Moon is somewhere else

     She never really sets

Her beauty's there for all to see,

     For in your Heart she's kept. 

--Samantha Hastings

Poem 61 (Pandemic Day 65)

From: A Grateful Heart: 

Daily Blessings for the Evening Meal from Buddha to the Beatles

Empower me

              to be a bold participant,

              rather than a timid saint in waiting,

              in the difficult ordinariness of now;

              to exercise the authority of honesty,

              rather than to defer to power,

              or deceive to get it;

              to influence someone for justice,

              rather than impress anyone for gain;

              and, by grace, to find treasures

              of joy, or friendship, of peace

              hidden in the fields of the daily

              you give me to plow.

---Ted Loder

 A Grateful Heart: Daily Blessings for the Evening Meal from Buddha to the Beatles, Edited by M. J. Ryan, Conari Press, 1994.

For the last few years I have often woken up in the morning feeling troubled; an uneasy, uncertain feeling that gravity was disappearing, that pieces of the world that I thought were stable and sound were falling off into space... 

Throughout my life I have always leaned towards tolerance and acceptance of others; their personalities and actions were fascinating or enlightening or just merely different than my own, not alarming or threatening.  Quirks were fine with me; I have them, I liked and appreciated them in others.  But things had been changing in society for a while, it had still possible to ignore or overlook or step around those changes for years, but the last presidential election completely lifted the veil--some of the changes were ugly and unsettling, even dystopian. 

 1984 by George Orwell was meant to be an unnerving fiction, not a potential reality; the "Ministry of Truth" not meant to be an actual government functionary--but here we had "alternative facts" and "fake news" and vulgar tweets and uncouth insults and self-dealing, hyper-partisanship and nepotism and all the deadly sins of governance...and a substantial portion of the American public saying, "That's all OK with me."  And some of those people were people I loved and cared about.  How do we dance around these clashes of values and perspectives and definitions of truth and reality?  

Ted Loder's words are a blessing I have sought and a grace that I hope for; a restoration of gravity and peace at sunrise and sunset--I share that blessing with you.

Poem 60 (Pandemic Day 64)

IN BLACK EARTH, WISCONSIN

thistles take the hillside
a purple glory of furred spears
a fierce army of spiky weeds
we climb through them
your mother, two of her daughters, and me
a late walk in the long June light

in the barn the heart throb
of the milking machine continues
as your father and brother change
the iodide-dipped tubes
from one udder to the next
and the milk courses through the pipeline
to the cooling vat where it swirls
like a lost sea in a silver box

we are climbing to the grove of white birch trees
whose papery bark will shed
the heart-ringed initials of your sister
as the grief wears down

this farm bears milk and hay
and this mother woman walking beside us
has borne nine children
and one magic one is dead:

                                                        riding her bike
                                                        she was a glare of light
                                                        on the windshield of the car
                                                        that killed her

a year and a half has passed
and death is folded in among the dishtowels
hangs in the hall closet by the family photos
and like a ring of fine mist
above the dinner table

we stand on a hill looking at birch bark
poking among hundred-year-old graves
that have fallen into the grass
rubbing the moss off and feeling for the names
that the stone sheds
we are absorbing death like nitrates
fertilizing our growth

this can happen:

                                                    a glare of light
                                                    an empty place
                                                    wordlessly we finger her absence

already there are four grandchildren
the family grows thick as thistle

—Andrea Musher

Poems for Life: Famous People Select Their Favorite Poem and Say Why It Inspires Them, Compiled by the Grade V Classes of the Nightingale -Bamford School, Arcade Publishing, 1995.  (Proceeds from Poems for Life were donated to the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children, a division of the International Rescue Committee.)[Linked to written/audio text of the book]

This poem, the first in the book, was selected by Jane Alexander, (1939-) a remarkable author, Emmy and Tony award-winning actress and former director of the National Endowment for the Arts.  Her choice is an interesting one.  She selects a poem by Andrea Musher, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater (who a few years later became the poet laureate of the city of Madison.) Ms. Alexander's career had been on the east coast and the west coast, but this poem set in the heartland somehow reached her and grabbed her attention.

The first lines began with a military air: thistles taking the hillside--a fierce army of spiky weeds...What battle awaits the women mounting the hill and why are the men carrying on with the normal tasks of the farm?  We learn soon enough that the battle is with grief, the unspeakable grief of the loss of a child.  That one will never be won, but life will continue--already there are four grandchildren.  The last word is the same as the first word--"thistle"--the prickly truth about life.

Poem 59 (Pandemic Day 63)

When I was teaching, we planned in 9-week blocks.  Teacher work days were scheduled for the end of the quarter, when all the assignments were (supposed to be) completed and the grades were tabulated.

In our global community, we have now completed 9 weeks of a declared pandemic; and yes, grades are being given, but there is no sense of conclusion or completeness...the possibilities of sickness and death and disruption stretch out before us. We know there will be new assignments, new lessons to learn and tests--many tests ahead of us; as individuals, communities and nations.  There are no clear guidelines or rubrics, no certainly about when we will be dismissed from this school of hard knocks and tough lessons.

I remember being in a school where our students faced significant obstacles to learning and we took the challenges day by day.  At the end of a particularly challenging week, after our students had left, our principal would get on the intercom and say, "you did a good job, the roof is still on and the building is still standing--go home and have a well-deserved break."  At the end of this pandemic, can we still say our roof is still on and our country is still standing?  Let's take it day by day, but remember why we are here.

Map

by J. Patrick Lewis

Brash canvas,

Bleeding borders,

Jasper Johns (1930-), Map, 1961,
In the collection of the  Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Kindled calm,

This is oxymoronicamerica,

Forged out of iron and lace

By people strapping and raw

Who wrestled and pinned history

To the map.

Happy as a circus boy,

Spirited as an outlaw,

Rough as a gandy dance,

This continent of tinted steel
Spread an easel of colors
On fifty pieces of scissored history--
And painted itself a self.

Heart to Heart: New Poems Inspired by Twentieth-Century American Art, Edited by Jan Greenberg, Harry N. Abrams, 2001.

One commonality of the books on my poetry shelves seems to be that a number of them capture the connection between poetry and the visual arts, such as this small volume.  Certainly poetry can be painting with words and art can be poetry on canvas. 

The editor invited distinguished American poets to choose a piece of American artwork to write about.  Forty-three poets accepted her request.  I liked this pairing of poem and painting, because they both ask us to look at something familiar and iconic, but not often closely examined.  The wall label of the painting reads thusly:

"Reflecting his choice of easily recognizable images, Johns said that he was interested in "the idea of knowing an image rather than just seeing it out of the corner of your eye." The map of the United States, in its ubiquity and iconicity is "seen and not looked at, not examined." Preserving the overall proportions of the country and the shape of its states, John's energetic application of paint subverts the conventions of cartography, as do the stenciled names of states, such as Colorado, which is repeated in several locations. Map invites close inspections because its content is both familiar and imaginary."
Text from the MoMA wall label.

I think back on 1961, when this painting was created and we were striving and lurching towards both peace and war;  towards civil liberties through civil unrest; our country was definitely scissored and yet we stayed connected.  I've lived through tumultuous times before but now I am more uncertain about the glue that holds us together.

Poem 58 (Pandemic Day 62)

And My Heart Soars

By Chief Dan George

The beauty of the trees,

the softness of the air,

the fragrance of the grass,

     speaks to me.

From a kayak in the Silver River,
Silver Springs, FL. Jan 9, 2019; J. Doolittle

The summit of the mountain,

the thunder of the sky,

the rhythm of the sea,

     speaks to me.

The faintness of the stars,

the freshness of the morning,

the dew drop on the flower,

     speaks to me.

The strength of fire,

the taste of salmon, 

the trail of the sun,

And the life that never goes away,

   They speak to me.

And my heart soars.

'Til All the Stars Have Fallen: A Collection of Poems for Children, Selected by David Booth, Viking, 1989.

When I saw that a poem by Chief Dan George was included in this beautiful volume of children's poetry, I knew that I had to chose it.  His performance in the 1970 epic movie, "Little Big Man" starring Dustin Hoffman left an indelible impression on me.  I just added that movie to my DVD queue in Netflix.   

I believe that Chief Dan actually could hear the mountains and the sea speak to him.  It is perhaps possible that the morning and the dew drops and the salmon will speak to us also; but that kind of patient attention and attunement to nature is not something that we are taught or often choose to practice. Their voices are muted and drowned out by the busyness of our lives. 

But now, as we approach the third month of sheltering, we still have the opportunity, perhaps even the duty to listen, really listen and allow our hearts to soar.