Poetry

This is a hymn sung every Christmas Eve during midnight mass at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral, Renee Fleming sings it with Rufus Wainwright on her recent Christmas album, and it reinforces my assertion that December 21st is the middle, not the beginning, of winter.

In the Bleak Midwinter

Christina Rossetti

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,

With our national holiday of praise and thanksgiving for the Native Americans, who welcomed us to this new world, nearly upon us, I choose this poem by Mary Oliver, one of us, who wrote in honest tribute to one of them.

Tecumseh

I went down not long ago
to the Mad River, under the willows
I knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call it
what madness you will, there's a sickness
worse than the risk of death and that's

A child looking at ruins grows younger
but cold
and wants to wake to a new name
I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring
walnut and may leaves the color
of shoulders at the end of summer
a month that has been to the mountain
and become light there
the long grass lies pointing uphill
even in death for a reason
that none of us knows
and the wren laughs in the early shade now
come again shining glance in your good time
naked air late morning
my love is for lightness
of touch foot feather
the day is yet one more yellow leaf

It's hard, sometimes, to find a reason to be happy. Happiness can seem so trivial, so selfish. How can we be happy, we ask, when the world is what the world is? How can we laugh, while the Nigerian girls are still captive? How can we forgive golf in the face of a beheading? Where is the activism in a smile?

I try to take my cue from Mary Oliver, who cites

Mozart, For Example Read more about Smile for Peace

I heard Paul Hunter read at R.A.S.P. last winter. He writes poems about farming the way it used to be.

Hold Your Horses

First he taught me how to hold
come carrot or apple
fingers together palm up
because they can't see down past
that velvety nose to their mouth

so the treat even offered
by a harmless eight year old
might still cost a stray nip

Recently, my daily walks were accompanied by this series of lectures, 24 in all, from The Learning Company on Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey, and I was inspired to add them to my Morning Yoga Poetry list. I start next week.

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus

On the Pulse of Morning

A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon.
The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my Read more about Good Morning

For the past ten years or so, I've been trying to catch a glimpse of the world through the eyes of the poets, particularly American poets of the 19th century. I'm interested in what they make of their world. This month, I dug back into Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, picking up where I had left off, with Poems 1859-63. Read more about Back to Longfellow

Ralph Waldo Emerson's poetry is a bit too didactic for my taste - I wouldn't call most of it poetry. Generally speaking, Emerson seems to think a poem is an essay with shorter lines. Read more about A Moment in Time

They Feed They Lion
Philip Levine

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.

Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,