Tag: poetry

  • Corona Diary: Mary Monday

    SIP Day 38, wearing a navy blue cotton sundress, writing from my home office; 80 degrees outside today

    Many years ago, when I was an avid blogger, I would share or link to poetry on Mondays. I can’t remember exactly how this began, but it came from my love of Mary Oliver’s poetry and so I called this weekly feature “Mary Monday.”

    Since I began blogging two decades ago, I have all-but-lapsed the past few years, posting only once or twice per year, when I used to post twice per day (generally one text post, one photo post). It feels right to pick up this practice again now, if only in some small effort to document my daily tasks/thoughts/work/reveries. Also, in the past 10 years WordPress has changed significantly, and it seems a worthy project to teach myself how to use the new editor.

    Previous Mary Monday posts

    So true to the roots of Mary Monday, you might consider spending some time with poet Mary Oliver today, being interviewed about her craft, and specifically, about her mornings:

    And below is a bit of a Mary Oliver poem that resonates specifically with me, as she seems to be imagining herself becoming a fish or a mermaid, or remembering some past primordial self where she was a creature of the water:

    An excerpt from The Sea, by Mary Oliver

    Stroke by
    stroke my
    body remembers that life and cries for
    the lost parts of itself–
    fins, gills
    opening like flowers into
    the flesh–my legs
    want to lock and become
    one muscle, I swear I know
    just what the blue-gray scales
    shingling
    the rest of me would
    feel like!

  • close as two pages…

    Because I do like me some book-ish poetry…

    Untitled
    by Elizabeth Bishop

    Close close all night
    the lovers keep.
    They turn together
    in their sleep,

    close as two pages
    in a book
    that read each other
    in the dark.

    Each knows all
    the other knows,
    learned by heart
    from head to toes.

     

    books on my desk
    A few of the books that are regularly stacked on my desk at home…

  • resolved #2, 2015

    This photo has nothing whatsoever to do with poetry. It's a snap of the kids sitting on the back porch in the sunshine over the holidays.
    This photo has nothing whatsoever to do with poetry. It’s a snap of the kids sitting on the back porch in the sunshine over the holidays.   :)

    For those of you who are longtime readers of my blog, you know that I have a certain fascination with poetry.  At times I’ve penned a bit of poetry for this space and have often linked to, or included poetry in my posts.

    Why poetry?  I’m not sure, but I think it has something to do with the chewiness and brevity of a poem.  It does so much work in so little space.  This appeals to the minimalist in me.

    So as a way to include my poetry in my year, I resolved to listen to The Writer’s Almanac podcast each morning as I sit down to breakfast.  I must say that it’s great to start the day with beautiful words.

  • Mary Monday: an interview about prayer and other morning rituals

    Getting Monday off to a great start with “A Thousand Mornings” by Mary Oliver:

    How are you starting your week?

  • making a fist

    making a fist

    Perhaps one hard lesson of the last few years of my life has been to learn to express uncomfortable feelings–the coping mechanism of so many years of suppressing sadness is hard to undo.  But what I’ve realized is that I can tell when there’s something I need to express…because my left hand will be balled into a tight fist. Generally I don’t even know that I’m doing it, but I will look down and see the knuckles white and fingers tight and know that something is awry.

    (It’s been interesting to peruse my photos from the last few years and to see how many of them include that tight fist in the frame.)

    Today, I am finding my hand in a fist because of that hug that I gave my college-bound son at the side of my car just before he walked away with two suitcases in hand.*   That moment recalled many similar hugs that I’ve given in the past.  Hugs meant to hold on to someone who was leaving.  To keep them close and safe, despite distance.  To offer a memory for me to grasp on days when my hands are empty.

    Making a Fist
    by Naomi Shihab Nye

    For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
    I felt the life sliding out of me,
    a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
    I was seven, I lay in the car
    watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
    My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

    “How do you know if you are going to die?”
    I begged my mother.
    We had been traveling for days.
    With strange confidence she answered,
    “When you can no longer make a fist.”

    Years later I smile to think of that journey,
    the borders we must cross separately,
    stamped with our unanswerable woes.
    I who did not die, who am still living,
    still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
    clenching and opening one small hand.

    *He’s not gone to college quite yet, but will be with his Dad for a few days until he leaves