Archive for the 'Poetry' Category
August 5, 2008 @ 7:51 am | Filed under: Poetry, Uncategorized
Having some fun in the comments…
February 27, 2008 @ 8:33 am | Filed under: Family, Poetry
I have eaten
the toast
that you left on
the counter
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
it was delicious
so buttery
and so warm
(with apologies to William Carlos Williams)
(but not to my husband)
October 12, 2007 @ 9:17 am | Filed under: Poetry
No surprise there, right? If you clicked through to the "Tollund Man" link on my last post, perhaps you listened to Seamus Heaney read some of his poems. If you didn’t, oh, do!
These, from his 8-sonnet suite about his mother, are particularly poignant: Clearances 3 and Clearances 5. For copyright reasons, I cannot post them here, of course, but here’s a taste.
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron…
This week’s Poetry Friday roundup is at Two Writing Teachers.
October 8, 2007 @ 11:24 pm | Filed under: California landmarks, Connections, Family Adventures, Outings, Poetry
This time last year, I was driving through Kansas. It was our fifth day on the road en route from Virginia to California: the five kids and me. If you’d like to read about our trip, I’ve pulled all the posts together into one big page, here.
It’s hard to believe it has been a year. Hard to believe we are West Coasters now, decorating for autumn by plopping pumpkins alongside our rainbow of moss roses. (This year I’ll know to keep watch against pumpkin mush.) We’re planting sunflowers in the back yard at the same time that we’re planning Halloween and All Saints’ Day costumes. It’s a bit surreal.
We went to Balboa Park again today. This time we visited the Museum of Man, lingering particularly long in the Egyptian wing. The kids were fascinated by the mummies, but I was a little bothered by the sad remains of the Lemon Grove Mummy, the body of what seems to have been a girl around fifteen years of age, possibly pregnant, curled into a fetal position. Her skin sags loosely around her old, old bones. She was found in a cave near Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1966 by two teenagers, who stole her and smuggled her home to Lemon Grove, California. Apparently she sat in a garage for 14 years because the boys didn’t want their parents to find out what they’d done. Eventually she was discovered and donated to the Museum of Man. She’s a special part of the mummy display, but I felt uncomfortable gawking at her in her glass case: it seems like a violation of her humanity for her to be cached there in public view next to the interactive media display about how scientists determined her age and origin. She’s one of several mummies there, and all the others had struck me as simply fascinating until we got to the Lemon Grove girl. Maybe it’s because she wasn’t wrapped up in linens like the Egyptian mummies. She reminded me of the Irish Bog People, and Seamus Heaney’s poems about them.
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.
In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach…
(—from “Tollund Man” by Seamus Heaney.)
And that made me think of grad school, where I first read Heaney’s poems, back in the early ’90s when I had no inkling that one day I would stand in a Southern California museum, recalling those lines while watching four blonde heads peer at a long Mexican teenager in a glass case, another golden-haired child perched on my hip in a sling. I didn’t see today coming even two years ago, even 18 months ago.
Rilla was born in April of ‘06 and Scott got the job offer in June. I planted a cherry tree in our yard that spring, a gift from my mother. I wonder if the new homeowners got cherries this summer?
This day last year we rolled into Kansas, where the prairie “slices the big sun at evening,” to quote Heaney’s “Bogland.” Today we watched the frothy spray of the big Balboa Park fountain paint a rainbow on the blue canvas of the sky. We counted koi in the long lily pond outside the Botanical Building, their splotched orange-and-cream bodies undulating beneath spiky, ladylike blossoms and the notched round leaves that reminded us of Thumbelina’s prison and Mr. Jeremy Fisher’s raft. We peered inside the deep wells of pitcher-plant blossoms, angling to see if any hapless insects lay dissolving inside. How surreal, this eager scrutiny of death, the children chattering and lively in the moist green air of this palatial greenhouse, just as they had been in the domed, echoing hush of the museum.
How surreal to be pondering corpses while the children are laughing. Pondering the human bodies, preserved; the insects, acid-eaten, their final resting place the polar opposite of Heaney’s peat bog, where hastily buried bodies remained clothed and well-manicured for centuries, and
Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
Sometimes I think about how life is like the very DNA it’s made of, a set of intertwined spirals full of small stories. A girl dies in Mexico and centuries later is brought to another country, where a woman stares at her empty skin and remembers an Irishman with a rope round his neck, preserved through the long march of years by the tannic acid in the peat and the ripe syllables of a bristle-browed poet. A child leans out over a reflecting pool and joyously points at a fish the same color as the pumpkins she begged her mother to buy that morning. A man in Virginia wanders, perhaps, out into his yard, and plucks a withered, mummified cherry he missed during the summer harvest, while the hands that planted the tree are pushing sunflower seeds into gritty soil a continent away.
September 14, 2007 @ 7:34 am | Filed under: Little House, Poetry
One of the books I read during my research for the Martha Books was Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland in A.D. 1803. The time period was just about right; Little House in the Highlands is set in 1795, and change came slowly to those remote glens.
Dorothy traveled with her brother, William, and their friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Ooh! Now there’s an idea for a novel!) In her journal she wrote,
"It was harvest-time, and the fields were quietly (might I be allowed to say pensively?) enlivened by small companies of reapers. It is not uncommon in the more lonely parts of the Highlands to see a single person so employed. The following poem was suggested to Wm. by a beautiful sentence in Thomas Wilkinson’s Tour in Scotland."
And then she copied out William’s poem (written two years later), "The Solitary Reaper."
A note in my Wm. Wordsworth collection tells me that the line from Thomas Wilkinson is this:
"Passed a female who was reaping alone; she sung in Erse, as she bended over her sickle; the sweetest human voice I ever heard: her strains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious, long after they were heard no more."
I love to know the story behind a poem, a novel, a painting. Here is William’s poem, all the lovelier to me for knowing what sparked it in his mind.
The Solitary Reaper
by William Wordsworth
Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so shrilling ne’er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
Will no one tell me what she sings?—
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?
Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o’er the sickle bending;—
I listen’d, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
This week’s Poetry Friday round-up can be found at Hip Writer Mama.
What’s Poetry Friday? Susan Thomsen explains at PoetryFoundation.org.
August 24, 2007 @ 7:17 am | Filed under: Poetry
The Little Rose Tree
by Rachel Field
Every rose on the little tree
Is making a different face at me!
Some look surprised when I pass by,
And others droop—but they are shy.
These two whose heads together press
Tell secrets could never guess.
Some have their heaads thrown back to sing,
And all the buds are listening.
I wonder if the gardener knows,
Or if he calls each just a rose?
Rachel Field was the author of the charming novel Hitty, Her First Hundred Years. Her book, Prayer for a Child, illustrated by Elizabeth Orton Jones, won the Caldecott Award in 1945.
July 19, 2007 @ 8:27 pm | Filed under: Poetry, Scottish folksongs
Of all the haunting, achingly beautiful Scottish ballads, this one may be the most aching and the most beautiful. The melody is gorgeously poignant in its own right, but add the words, the raw, profoundly moving outcry of a sailor spurned by his nighean ruadh—his red-haired girl—and your heart just might break along with his. Oh I cannot live without her…for my heart’s a boat in tow…This is one of the loveliest bits of poetry ever uttered.
Loch Tay Boat Song
When I’ve done my work of day,
And I row my boat away,
Doon the waters of Loch Tay,
As the evening light is fading
And I look upon Ben Lawers
Where the afterglory glows;
And I think on two bright eyes
And the melting mouth below.
She’s my beauteous nighean ruadh,
She’s my joy and sorrow too;
And although she is untrue,
Well I cannot live without her,
For my heart’s a boat in tow,
And I’d give the world to know
Why she means to let me go,
As I sing horee horo.
Nighean ruadh, your lovely hair
Has more glamour I declare
Than all the tresses rare
‘tween Killin and Aberfeldy.
Be they lint white, brown or gold,
Be they blacker than the sloe,
They are worth no more to me
Than the melting flake of snow.
Her eyes are like the gleam
O’ the sunlight on the stream;
And the songs the fairies sing
Seem like songs she sings at milking.
But my heart is full of woe,
For last night she bade me go
And the tears begin to flow,
As I sing horee, horo.
Today’s Poetry Friday roundup can be found at Mentor Texts & More.
July 6, 2007 @ 9:24 pm | Filed under: Poetry
Poetry Friday was at Farm School this week, and I’m squeaking in with just a few hours of Friday left. And I’m wracking my brain, because earlier in the week I had a poem all picked out for today, and now I can’t remember it. Whitman, I think it was Whitman. Hang on, it’s coming to me. The girls and I were reading—OH THAT’S RIGHT! The grass.
The older my children get, the more children I have, the more Whitman means to me. He understands about wonder.
Leaves of Grass, Section 14, Poem 6
A child said, *What is the grass?* fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is, any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer, designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say, *Whose?*
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic;
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white;
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you, curling grass;
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men;
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people, and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps;
And here you are the mothers’ laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers;
Darker than the colorless beards of old men;
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death;
And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward—nothing collapses;
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
June 29, 2007 @ 2:31 pm | Filed under: Poetry
Although this tender ballad is a Scottish staple, it was written around 1850 by a couple of Englishmen: Charles Jeffreys (lyrics) and Sidney Nelson (music).
I have heard the mavis singing
His love song to the morn
I have seen the dew drop clinging
To the rose just newly born
But a sweeter song has cheered me
At the evening’s gentle close
And I’ve seen an eye still brighter
Than the dew drop on the rose
‘Twas thy voice my gentle Mary
And thine artless, winning smile
That made this world an Eden
Bonnie Mary of Argyle.
Tho’ thy voice may lose its sweetness
And thine eye its brightness too
Tho’ thy step may lack its fleetness
And thy hair its sunny hue
Still to me wilt thou be dearer
Than all the world shall own
I have loved thee for thy beauty
But not for that alone
I have sought thy heart, dear Mary
And its goodness was the wile
That has made thee mine forever
Bonnie Mary of Argyle.
You can hear the melody here, and this site has an image of a broadside with the words, published between 1860-1880.
This week’s Poetry Friday roundup can be found at Shaken & Stirred.
June 15, 2007 @ 6:52 pm | Filed under: Poetry
We’ve had a very briny week. Yesterday we went to the aquarium; today it was the beach. Naturally I had to reach for Whitman this afternoon; he understands so well the magic of the bluegreen underworld that so fascinates my children.
The World Below the Brine
by Walt Whitman
The world below the brine,
Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves,
Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick tangle openings,
and pink turf,
Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold, the play of
light through the water,
Dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass, rushes, and the
aliment of the swimmers,
Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling close to the
bottom,
The sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting with his
flukes,
The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard, and the
sting-ray,
Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths, breathing
that thick-breathing air, as so many do,
The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by beings
like us who walk this sphere,
The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.
This week’s Poetry Friday roundup can be found at The Simple and the Ordinary.
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