Black Birds

 

  Black Birds

When the crows come

black against the darkening sky

their wings obscure the sun

and small sounds drown

in their strident caws. 

 

They storm the walnut tree

snatch the green fruit

drop it from great heights

retrieve the cracked kernels.

 

Again and again they dive

From tree to ground

feathers gleaming

where stray sunrays touch.

 

And when the mountains turn blue

with the haze of evening

the crows lift off in ebony formation

head toward some secret roost

where they blend into the night.

Lisl auf der Heide

The Hill We Climb

                         

I thought that the inauguration hit all the right notes, and none more so than this amazing poem, beautifully delivered by Amanda Gorman. Watch it HERE.

“The Hill We Climb”

Amanda Gorman

When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast, we’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace and the norms and notions of what just is, isn’t always justice. And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it, somehow we do it, somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished.

We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one. And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect, we are striving to forge a union with purpose, to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.

So we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another, we seek harm to none and harmony for all.

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: that even as we grieved, we grew, even as we hurt, we hoped, that even as we tired, we tried, that we’ll forever be tied together victorious, not because we will never again know defeat but because we will never again sow division.

Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one should make them afraid. If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in in all of the bridges we’ve made.

That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare it because being American is more than a pride we inherit, it’s the past we step into and how we repair it. We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it. That would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy, and this effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can periodically be delayed, but it can never be permanently defeated.

In this truth, in this faith, we trust, for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us, this is the era of just redemption we feared in its inception we did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour but within it we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves, so while once we asked how can we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us.

We will not march back to what was but move to what shall be, a country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free, we will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation, our blunders become their burden. But one thing is certain: if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.

So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left, with every breath from my bronze, pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one, we will rise from the golden hills of the West, we will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution, we will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states, we will rise from the sunbaked South, we will rebuild, reconcile, and recover in every known nook of our nation in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful, when the day comes we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid, the new dawn blooms as we free it, for there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.

A Poem by Tu Fu

The days grow long, the mountains

Beautiful. The south wind blows

Over blossoming meadows.

Newly arrivedswallows dart

Over the steaming marshes.

Ducks in pairs drowse on the warm sand.

  Tu Fu, 713-779

                                                                ( translation by Kenneth Rexroth)

The Afterlife by Billy Collins

While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
The dead of the day are setting out on their journey.

They're moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out,
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air-conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.

There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals--eagles and leopards--and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading or the ultimate elsewhere.

There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld 
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.

(And some just smile, forever on.)

For Someone Out There?

Last Sunday I posted a Mary Oliver poem about death. I'm not sure why I chose it--probably something about the bleakness of the season. But then a lovely thing happened.  A few days later I was out doing errands and as I was getting in my car, a neighbor came hurrying across the parking lot. I'd seen on Facebook that her invalid mother had died quite recently and I began to say the things one says. Then my neighbor told me that the poem about death had come at the perfect time -- her mother had died that same day and, the neighbor said, "It felt like you were talking right to me."

Dang! I loved that. Though it briefly made me feel a little like one of those televangelists who close their eyes and are aware of someone in Duluth who is suffering from cancer and then rebukes and casts out the cancer over the airwaves.

Or maybe not.

But when I chose another Mary Oliver poem to post today, I did wonder if it might speak to someone in particular--especially now as we enter the holiday season which mandates joy and is, therefore, so tricky for many, whether from personal griefs or from generalized despair at the sad state of the world today.

Of course, that's the function of good poetry: to speak to us in particular.

"Don't Hesitate" by Mary Oliver

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
Don't hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often 
kind. And much can never be redeemed.

Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes 
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that's often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

When Death Comes by Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades;
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look at time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence.
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Song of Autumn by Mary Oliver

In the deep fall

don't you imagine the leaves think how

comfortable it will be to touch

the earth instead of the 

nothingness of air and the endless

freshets of wind? And don't you think

the trees themselves, especially those with mossy

warm caves, begin to think

of the birds that will come--six, a dozen--to sleep

inside their bodies? And don't you hear

the goldenrod whispering goodbye,

the everlasting being crowned with the first

tuffets of snow? The pond

vanishes, and the white field over which

the fox runs so quickly brings out

its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its

bellows. And at evening especially, 

the piled firewood shifts a little

longing to be on its way.

Red Moon

Last night's moon made me think of a favorite poem by Garcia Lorca. . . sorry I can't manage the diacritical marks for the Spanish.

Cancion de Jinete

Song of the Rider

Cordoba. Lejana y sola.

Cordona. Far and alone.

Jaca negra, luna grande,

Black pony, big moon,

Y aceitunas en mi alforja.

and olives in my saddlebag.

Aunque sepa los caminos

Although I know the roads

yo nunca llegare a Cordoba.

I will never get to Cordoba.

Por el llano, por el viento,

Through the wind, across the plain,

jaca negra, luna roja.

black pony, red moon.

La muerte me esta mirando

Death is looking at me

desde las torres de Cordoba.

from the towers of Cordoba.

Ay que camino tan largo!

Oh, how long the road!

Ay me jaca valerosa!

Oh, my brave pony!

Ay, que la muerte me espera,

Oh, for death awaits me,

antes de llegar a Cordoba!

before I get to Cordoba!

Cordoba. Lejana y sola.

Cordoba. Far and alone.

How It Happens by W.S. Merwin

The sky said I am watching

to see what you

can make out of nothing

I was looking up and I said

I thought you

were supposed to be doing that

the sky said Many

are clinging to that

I am giving you a chance

I was looking up and I said

I am the only chance I have

then the sky did not answer

and here we are

with our names for the days

the vast days that do not listen to us

W. S. Merwin, like most poets, knew a thing or two. Here's a good quote of his, suitable for these times: 

We are asleep with compasses in our hands.

Hymn to Time

HYMN TO TIME

                                               by Ursula K. Le Guin

                               Time says “Let there be”
                               every moment and instantly
                               there is space and the radiance
                               of each bright galaxy.

                

                                And eyes beholding radiance.
                                And the gnats’ flickering dance.
                                And the seas’ expanse.
                                And death, and chance.

                                                 

                                   Time makes room
                                   for going and coming home
                                   and in time’s womb
                                   begins all ending.

                                  Time is being and being
                                   time, it is all one thing,
                                   the shining, the seeing,
                                   the dark abounding.

                 

pictures from the Hubble telescope -- nope, not mine. Nor John's.

Remembering Kay in the Spring . . .. . .

All this green beauty has me remembering Kay Byer, NC's first female poet laureate. She and I shared a love of Garcia Lorca's poem Verde, Que Te Quiero, Verde and the Carolina mountains and their seasons. Kay is gone now, but her words are fresh as ever.

Big Tease

Little by little, the earth sheds

 her veils. Lets her white blossoms 

tremble. The river shakes out her blue

shimmy and scrubs it to smithereens

over the singing rocks, leaving her

sunny side up, such a tease

that I sway to her music

as if I were Salome's sister

and not an old woman who knows

that the inkblot of sky on this page

of my daybook will soon begin fading,

because how can anyone, even Great

Grandaddy Death stay asleep

amid so much awakening?

                                                    Kathryn Stripling Byer