Tag Archives: National Poetry Month

A Little Sustenance–Poems for the Weekend

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I can’t remember not loving poems.

A little girl, I loved reciting rhymes, delighted with the rhythm and cadence and sheer joy in taking words in, memorizing them, and speaking them back into the world.

Poems have a shape, a form, even when they don’t follow any formal scheme. They are containers for memory, experience, grief, joy, story, or the lack of story.

Poems can thrum with electricity, crackle with surprise, or list with unease. Poems do everything prose does in a modicum of the space.

Poems meet you where you are. That’s what I love about them. Most folks believe that a poem must mean what the poet meant when she wrote it.

I don’t.

I believe the poet releases the poem to the world and it begins to breathe on its own. It finds a reader where she lives and it weaves its magic into her experience.

National Poetry Month will be over this weekend, so I thought I would link here to a few more of my favorite poems. I hope they feed you the way they feed me.

The Envoy by Jane Hirshfield

One day in that room, a small rat.
Two days later, a snake.
Who, seeing me enter,
whipped the long stripe of his
body under the bed,
then curled like a docile house-pet.
************************************
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise.
*************************************
Listen to Mary Oliver read Wild Geese
“You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.”
*************************************
Each of these links will take you to a treasure trough of poetry.
I’d love it if you shared the names of or links to poems you find, poems that move you to read them over and over again.
Happy Poetry weekend!!!

A Bold Thursday–Lucille Clifton

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“I do not feel inhibited or bound by what I am. That does not mean that I have never had bad scenes relating to being Black and/or a woman, it means that other people’s craziness has not managed to make me crazy.”
― Lucille Clifton

Sometimes I need a little swagger.

There are days (too many) when I get caught in front of the mirror staring down a minor blemish or hair gone wild with frizz or that rib fat that sprouted the night of my 40th birthday.

It is too damned easy to see lack. Especially when I’m tired, or the sunny spring days have turned gray and rainy and the sidewalks are littered with debris from yesterday’s storms that ripped through town.

It’s too damned easy to hunker down, to moan as president trump says the newest dumbest thing–how about dismantling the courts or pulling the insurance rug out from under those who have preexisting conditions. Sometimes the world is overwhelming.

On days like this one, Lucille Clifton is what I need. Clifton’s poems remind me to be bold.  Clifton reminds me that I cannot let “other people’s craziness” (or my own) tell me who I am.

Here are a few lines from homage to my hips. Follow the link to read the rest of the poem and then let’s all put on a little swagger for a day or two.

these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
***

Briefly it enters . . . Jane Kenyon

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It’s Friday. Much cooler today than it was yesterday. I’m inside, but my feet are cool in my flip-flop slippers. Does anyone use the word thongs anymore for flip-flops? I first typed “my feet are cool in my thongs” and realized that folks would wonder why my feet were slipped into my underpants. Does anyone ever say underpants? Is a thong considered underpants?

Even if the above questions are appropriate for a woman my age–born after the underwear/thong revolution, I’m getting off track here. Another time, perhaps.

***

With Easter only a few days in the past, I’ve been thinking a lot about love and church and religion and spirituality. There is so much I do not like about organized religion/Catholicism, and yet in church on Sunday morning all the perceived separation I feel on a regular basis (perhaps more regular after the November election) slipped away. It dissolved in the choir’s one-voice. I don’t always feel that way in church. Sometimes I feel it when I’m out walking–suddenly I am the birds singing, or the tree budding out, or the dandelions growing up between the sidewalk cracks.

Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks, a poem by the late Jane Kenyon reminds me that the heart of love is this very oneness. I am sharing a couple of lines here, and  hope you will follow this link to read the rest of the poem:

I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years. . . .
I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper….
**

Clear-Eyed and Joyful: On Spring

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I’ve pretty much been a grump this winter. And it’s been a fairly mild winter–so what’s up? We’ve experienced nice, warm, sunny days in January, February and March, and you know how I felt about those days? I felt mean and dissatisfied and glum.

If someone said to me, as lots of people did on one of those delightfully moderate days:

“What a beautiful day, huh!”

or

“We sure are lucky this year with weather!”

or

“It feels like spring!”

I smiled buoyantly, nodded my head, and said something like, “Sure thing!” But what I was thinking was more like this:

“Have you ever heard of global warming? It’s February, for God’s sake. We should be trudging through snow, or running to the IGA for supplies to get us through an ice-storm! This isn’t normal, people. I know it’s pretty and all that, but we are like those damn frogs boiling to death in a cup of water heated so slowly we forget to jump out!”**

I looked like a chipper little spring worshipper, but I was muttering and mumbling and not enjoying a minute of the beautiful weather. Hmmm…what would we call this sort of behavior? We could call it clear-eyed and unsentimental. Or we could call it indignant, judgy, self-righteous, and joyless. I’m okay with clear-eyed, but I hate the last four.

I’ve been posting poems here in celebration of National Poetry Month. In looking for poems to post, I’ve read a lot of older poems, poems that have been out in the world for so long, they belong to everyone. The other day I did a search for “spring” poems on Poets.org, and this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) popped up.

Spring

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

 

Wow! I’ve got something in common with Edna St. Vincent Millay, I thought. Instead of enjoying the lovely weather, I’ve been pissed off that it is only disguising our ultimate demise, death, and destruction. (of course, Edna wrote a kick-ass poem about it, while I walked around with a fake smile)

 

I read the poem over and over. I knew it was speaking directly to me, and finally I got what it was saying.

 

Don’t be such an asshole, Bridgett! 
You can enjoy beauty.
It’s always a gift, even when it’s a sign of global warming.
 You can smile and mean it.
You can raise your face to the sun.
Don’t take yourself so fucking seriously.
You can be clear-eyed and joyful–holding two truths at the same time.

 

I get so caught up, folks. I get so caught up in worry and fear.

 

Yes, I’m terrified about the multitude of ways we are destroying our planet and the new administration’s seeming determination to speed that process up, but it’s just silly not to enjoy a beautiful day.

 

So the next time someone says to me–“Beautiful day, huh,” I’ll answer, “It is.”

And mean it.

**According to Wikipedia, the whole frog scenario is false. A frog will indeed jump out of water as it heats up.

Another War Poet: Siegfried Sassoon

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While the press gushes over President trump and the “decisive” action he took against Syria without questioning why it’s better to bomb than to accept refugees, I have been reading some poems by soldiers who refused to  gloss over the ugly facts of war. Here is a poem by Siegfried Sassoon.
Attack
SIEGFRIED SASSOON
At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun
In the wild purple of the glow’ring sun,
Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud
The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,
Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.
The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed
With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,
Men jostle and climb to, meet the bristling fire.
Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,
They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

Wilfred Owen and “the old lie”

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Yesterday, the United States launched 59 cruise missiles on a Syrian airbase. The airbase is where the US believes the Syrian planes that carried out the horrific chemical attack originated. It is nearly impossible to watch footage of the aftermath of that chemical attack and not be filled with shock, disgust, and a desire to retaliate. I do not have answers; none of us do, but it is wise to remember our history and to revisit poets like Wilfred Owen.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Wilfred Owen, 1893 – 1918

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Emily Dickinson and Miss AKR

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It’s National Poetry Month, and in celebration of poems, I am going to attempt (yes attempt–no promises) to post a poem a day–only poems in the public domain unless I get permission of the author to post.

But before I post a poem, I want to announce the winners of the Amy Krouse Rosenthal drawing. I did say WINNERS because I drew twice. I couldn’t help myself. I not only love to buy books for myself, but apparently I love to buy them for others. I think I just like to buy, read, mark in, carry-around, sleep with, spill coffee on, take a bath with (you get the picture) books. So I decided to hold two drawings–one for Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life and Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal and one for Little Pea and The OK Book. So we have two lucky winners.

Karen Zuber is the winner of Encyclopedia and Textbook

Lauren McClain is the winner of Little Pea and The OK Book

The books are on the way ladies, I will message you when I have them in my hot little hands, and we can arrange a drop off or a pick up!

*******

And here’s your poem for today–a great reminder for me today to not take myself so damned seriously!

I’m Nobody! Who are you? (260)
Emily Dickinson

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!