Still True

 No man is an island, 

Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thine own

Or of thine friend's were.

Each man's death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know 

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee.

                     John Donne, 1572-1631

Tu Fu Is My Go To

Dawn Over the Mountains

The city is silent,

Sound drains away,

Buildings vanish in the light of dawn,

Cold sunlight comes on the highest peak,

The thick dust of night

Clings to the hills,

The earth opens,

The river boats are vague,

The still sky--

The sound of falling leaves.

A huge doe comes to the garden gate,

Lost from the herd,

Seeking its fellows.

                        Tu Fu (translation Kenneth Rexroth) 

Tu Fu lived in the T'ang Dynasty (713-770) but his poems, as translated by Rexroth, still speak to me. I've had the little paperback  One Hundred Poems from the Chinese of Rexroth's translations since a student loaned me a copy about fifty years ago, when I was teaching at Berkeley Prep and wearing heels and pantyhose everyday. Those are gone, thank goodness, but the poems stay at my bedside.

Peonies by Mary Oliver

 This morning the green fists of the peonies

are getting ready to break my heart

as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open —
pools of lace,
white and pink —
and all day the black ants climb over them,

boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls,
craving the sweet sap,
taking it away

to their dark, underground cities —
and all day
under the shifty wind,
as in a dance to the great wedding,

the flowers bend their bright bodies,
and tip their fragrance to the air,
and rise,
their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness
gladly and lightly,
and there it is again —
beauty the brave, the exemplary,

blazing open.
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever? 

Early Morning

Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety
best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light
good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

Missing Kay

 Kathryn Stripling Byer (NC Poet Laureate 2005- 2009) has been gone since last June but her poetry is as powerfully present as ever.  She and I shared a love for the strong women of these mountains.

Wildwood Flower

I hoe thawed ground
with a vengeance. Winter has left
my house empty of dried beans
and meat. I am hungry

and now that a few buds appear
on the sycamore, I watch the road
winding down this dark mountain
not even the mule can climb
without a struggle. Long daylight

and nobody comes while my husband
traps rabbits, chops firewood, or
walks away into the thicket. Abandoned
to hoot owls and copperheads,

I begin to fear sickness. I wait
for pneumonia and lockjaw. Each month
I brew squaw tea for pain.
In the stream where I scrub my own blood
from rags, I see all things flow
down from me into the valley.

Once I climbed the ridge
to the place where the sky
comes. Beyond me the mountains continued
like God. Is there no place to hide
from His silence? A woman must work

else she thinks too much. I hoe
this earth until I think of nothing
but the beans I will string,
the sweet corn I will grind into meal.

We must eat. I will learn
to be grateful for whatever comes to me.

Kathryn Stripling Byer

There Is Only One Question

Spring

by Mary Oliver

Somewhere

a black bear

has just risen from sleep

and is staring

down the mountain.

All night

in the brisk and shallow restlessness

of early spring

I think of her,

her four black fists

flicking the gravel,

her tongue

like a red fire

touching the grass, 

the cold water.

There is only one question:

how to love this world.

I think of her

rising

like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against

the silence

of the trees.

Whatever else

my life is

with its poems

and its music

and its glass cities,

It is also this dazzling darkness

coming

down the mountain,

breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her --

her white teeth,

her wordlessness,

her perfect love.

From  New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver

• 
  

At Year's End

WILD GEESE

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

from DREAM WORK by Mary Oliver

DESCENT -- Kathryn Stripling Byer

The latest collection of poems from North Carolina's past Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer is a delight to savor.  Rather than go on at length about the luminosity and emotional impact of her verse, not to mention its sly wit, I'm going to give you a sample (with Kay's kind permission.) 

These two excerpts hint at the struggle some of us Southerners of a certain age still have in coming to terms with our beautiful/terrible/flawed heritage.

from Gone Again

. . . 

after sixty-two years, Scarlett makes me feel

tired -- all those hours I wasted, enraptured

by someone whose skin was sheer

celluloid, whose voice, when the reel came

loose, gibbered like mine when I tried

to pretend I lived just down the road

from that movie set, cotton fields painted

on canvas, the loyal slaves hoisting

up sacks full of nothing

but chaff for the wind, that old

Hollywood hack, to keep blowing away.

from Shadow Sister

. . .

Sometimes I still want what you want,

The keys to a red-hot convertible,

top down, and who the hell cares

if a hard rain comes,

we're headed north, east,

west, we are out of here, girl.

. . . 

I had the devil of a time deciding which complete poem to share here, but this one is just perfect for mid-May.

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 am 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?

 If you want more, look for Descent HERE.

(I think that the lovely picture of KSB was taken by her daughter.)

meti

Wendell Berry's Questionnaire

I ran across this poem on another blog (ruminations from the distant hills) and couldn't resist reprinting it.

Questionnaire (Wendell Berry)

December 1, 2009

1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

_____________   __________   ________

2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

______________  ___________    ___________

3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.

______________ ____________  ______________

4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

__________    __________________         ____________________

*

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

____________ _________ _______________

How Can We Know the Dancer from the Dance?

GRITS FLASH!!! For all you grits fans, here's a LINK to some great recipes, as well as an explanation of the difference between hominy grits and stone ground.

(Vagabonde has pointed out that these recipes are full of typos -- here's ANOTHER LINK
to the place the grits came from and some more recipes -- maybe more usable.)

Now, back to the post of the day.

I have this second picture as the 'wallpaper' on my computer screen and every time I see it, I think of dancing figures.

And some lines of poetry start running through my head.

Here they are, in the final stanza of William Butler Yeats' "Among School Children."

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

The Last Day of Poetry Month

Carl Sandburg's ten definitions of poetry -- and each one is a poem in itself.

1. Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break the silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllable, wave lengths.

2.Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.

3. Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.

4. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

5. Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.

6. Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

7. Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.

8. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

9.Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

10. Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen in a moment.

As I read these, trying to decide which was my favorite (2, or maybe 5, or possibly 6, oh, wait, 9), it seemed to me that each of these would work equally well as a definition for Life itself.

NOTICE! Today is the last day to leave a comment and ask to be entered in the drawing for the quilt book. Contest closes at 9 pm EST -- winner announced tomorrow.