Category: songs/poetry

Really desperate for ocean poetry today.  Here’s another one from a friend that’s feeding my soul (oh, and fueling my hunger for some salty sea air), while remembering a night not too long ago, spent on the edge of bitumen cliffs, hearing the ocean call my name…

Breakage

I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light.
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred —
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the
moisture gone.
It’s like a schoolhouse
of little words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

~ Mary Oliver ~

getting my feet wet, originally uploaded by pilgrimgirl.

From a kind friend…

Caminante, son tus huellas el camino y nada mas;
Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino, y al volver la vista atras
se ve la senda que nunca se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino sino estelas en la mar.
~Antonio Machado

Translation:
Pilgrim, the path is your tracks
And nothing more.
Pilgrim, there is no path
The path is made by walking.
By walking you make a path
And turning, you look back
At a way you will never tread again
Pilgrim, there is no road
Only wakes in the sea.

Just what I needed to hear right now….

With Kit, Age Seven, At the Beach

We would climb the highest dune,
from there to gaze and come down:
the ocean was performing;
we contributed our climb.

Waves leapfrogged and came
straight out of the storm.
What should our gaze mean?
Kit waited for me to decide.

Standing on such a hill,
what would you tell your child?
That was an absolute vista.
Those waves raced far, and cold.

“How far could you swim, Daddy,
in such a storm?”
“As far as was needed,” I said,
and as I talked, I swam.

~William Stafford

I encountered “The Raised Fist: A Cyborgian Tale” while attending the virtual HASTAC conference this morning.  Embedded in the video were the words of Allison J. Harrington, speaking at the 1999 Berkeley Ethnic Studies Strike:

orange art, outside of AdHoc gallery, originally uploaded by pilgrimgirl.

In the last few days I’ve been smelling blossoms on breezes–magnolia blossoms, mostly, but also just a hint of citrus. It’s a little early yet for orange blossoms, but my anticipation is building, nonetheless.

So this morning I read a thin book of poetry called The Orangery by Gilbert Sorrentino. Each poem in the volume is about orange or oranges. Just what I needed today. It’s full of delicious ironies about the impossibilities of orange (and it doesn’t rhyme, of course).

An excerpt from “Variations 1”

Poetry must not be poured into molds
the man said, fighting an old battle
filled with wild alarums.

No one eats oranges
in anybody’s poems

The image above is from a jaunt to Brooklyn in winter where outside an art gallery there was a bare tree hung with oranges. It delighted me–I am a fan of the ridiculous and unexpected.

This seemed an appropriate poem for the 80-degree days that we’ve been having here in Southern California. My rosebushes are putting on so much new growth!

From “Hum” by Mary Oliver

it’s love almost too fierce to endure, the bee
nuzzling like that into the blouse
of the rose. and the fragrance, and the honey, and of course
the sun, the purely pure sun, shining, all the while, over
all of us

This seemed an appropriate poem for the 80-degree days that we’ve been having here in Southern California. My rosebushes are putting on so much new growth!

From “Hum” by Mary Oliver

it’s love almost too fierce to endure, the bee
nuzzling like that into the blouse
of the rose. and the fragrance, and the honey, and of course
the sun, the purely pure sun, shining, all the while, over
all of us

This morning I am creating space with the poetry of Margaret Hasse.

Being Still

She’s a quiet clapper in the bell of the prairie,
a girl who likes to be alone.
Today, she’s hiked four miles down
ravines’ low cool blueness.
Bending under a barbed wire, she’s in grass fields.
She’s at the edge of the great plains.
Wise to the openness, she finds it a familiar place.
Her clothes swell like wheat bread.

When she returns to her parents house,
the foxtails and burrs have come home, too.
The plants seem intent on living in new ground.
[…]
The stiller she is, the more everything moves
in the immense vocabulary of being.