Friday, April 29, 2011

announcing your place


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 love.
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.

Wild Geese from Dream Work
Mary Oliver


Saint Meg's ready for a belated Earth Day celebration.


Cupcakes for last night's choir baby shower.

the honored guest, Samuel Richard.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011


Give me the splendid silent sun, 
with all his beams full-dazzling;
Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard;
Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows;
Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape;
Give me fresh corn and wheat—give me serene-moving animals, teaching content;         5
Give me nights perfectly quiet, as on high plateaus west of the Mississippi, 
and I looking up at the stars;
Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers, where I can walk undisturbed....

from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass


These are the lyrics for the anthem which we're singing for our Earth Day celebration next weekend.  This is the second time I've conducted this piece and it's going to be in my repertoire forever.  (here's a very bad recording to give you an idea of it's brilliance as a song.)

 

Friday, April 22, 2011

poem for the earth

 Most of you know how fond I am of cool weather and temperatures, so I haven't minded the coolish spring we've been having in Seattle.  Love that this poem celebrates silvery coolness.


 This is how you live when you have a cold heart.
As I do: in shadows, trailing over cool rock,
under the great maple trees.

The sun hardly touches me.
Sometimes I see it in early spring, rising very far away.
Then leaves grow over it, completely hiding it. I feel it
glinting through the leaves, erratic,
like someone hitting the side of a glass with a metal spoon.

Living things don't all require
light in the same degree. Some of us
make our own light: a silver leaf
like a path no one can use, a shallow
lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.

But you know this already.
You and the others who think
you live for truth and, by extension, love
all that is cold.
 
"Lamium" by Louise Glück, from The Wild Iris.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

redux


I try to not repeat poets, but this one just fit so perfectly with my current ponderings.  I'd love a magic button.  Or two or three.

magic buttons
maya stein

The new phone arrived today and I have been lost
among its blips and beeps, the bright colors of its touch pad,
the endless applications and downloads and a host
of tools to keep my life in check. Just like that, the world
comes barreling forward, with news and directions and movie clips,
heart rate monitors and calorie counters, the weather in Tokyo.
If I want, I can buy a new couch on Craigslist, and a troll of my fingertips
brings me to the balance of my bank account. But where do I go
to find my real way, that compass pointing how and where and when.
There are no shortcuts, no magic buttons, for the work of looking in.


Sunday, April 17, 2011

Sweetcakes, yes!


 

God Says Yes To Me

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes


"God Says Yes To Me" by Kaylin Haught, from The Palm of Your Hand.


Thursday, April 7, 2011

peace full change

it's been a week of bleck on all levels:  a cold/flu that has invited itself in and is having such a good time that it refuses to leave; weighing all kinds of future options and having 0 wisdom as to which way to turn; Easter is coming down upon my head with an avalanche of notes and the weather has supported all of this with wild thunder and hail and snow and brief showers of sunbursts. 

Chaotic.  Jumbled.  And oh so weary.  I was going to post new poets every time I post a poem in April, but this one arrived in my email on Tuesday and fit so perfectly, that I am sharing.


it's not change I'm after

The way a haircut can reframe a face. The move
to a zip code that gets less fog. More or this
or less of that – I can think of a thousand ways to prove
my eagerness to trade the current reality for its
fresh and scrubbed alternative. It’s so tempting to believe
a transformation of even minor proportions will be epic,
felt somewhere in my deepest deep. But in the interim, we grieve
for what we don’t or can’t have, and that ache
is paralyzing. I see it’s not change I’m after, but peace.
Tranquility and rootedness for everything that craves release.

-Maya Stein