The Random Act of (Finding) Poetry

My love for poetry developed in three critical times. First was discovering T.S. Eliot in high school, introduced by a wild and larger-than-life English teacher who wore turbans and proclaimed that Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann was the greatest work of American literature. Well, no, but she was right about T.S. Eliot.

 

The second critical period was through a friend in the early 1980s, who said I couldn’t be a “real speechwriter” unless I read Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. I don’t know whether he was right or wrong, but I took his advice to heart and started reading them.

 

Third was the year 2009. Idly searching on the web for something unrelated, I found The High Calling Blog, which mostly focused on the daily practice of faith in our work but also had a regular poetry feature, “Random Acts of Poetry.” 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Twenty-six Theses on Textual Technologies – Jeffrey Bilbro at Front Porch Republic.

 

A Popular Defense of Our Undemocratic Constitution – Pavlos Papadopoulos at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

To All the Books I Published Before – Ann Patty at The Millions.

 

The Melancholy Year is Dead with Rain – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

On the Same Page

We all have to be on the same page,

already full of words and charts and
even a tiny photograph, so we fold
the page just so to make a boat,
a small boat like a dinghy. It’s
crowded because it has to carry
all of us, such a flimsy little thing
for so much weight. We sit very still
in capsized fear as our little boat
glides across the placid surface.
There is no wind.

Dedicated to L.L. Barkat*

This poem is submitted for the Random Act of Poetry at The High Calling, which asked for poem that would take a dead metaphor and make it specific. One could argue that “being on the same page” is a metaphor very much alive and well, but it’s one that I personally think died years ago. To see the original article (“Guy Kawasaki Says Use Poetry in Business”), please visit The High Calling.

This poem is also submitted to One Shot Wednesday hosted by One Stop Poetry. To see more poems, please visit the site. The links will be like at 4 p.m. Central time today.

*The poem is dedicated to L.L. Barkat. If you make a donation to The High Calling during the month of May, I've committed to dedicate a poem to you. Just let me know via the comment box or an email that you made a donation (not the amount).

Photograph: Boat by Teodor Gruhl via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

A Mother's Song

She turns her head,
the slight curve of her neck
shimmering a slight movement
of her shoulders, just enough
to remind me of
my fingers tracing her back
as we dance
the embrace of oneness,
her arm clasped lightly
on mine, touching,
the low murmur of our voices
its own sweet music.

This poem is submitted for One Shot Wednesday, hosted by One Stop Poetry. To see other poems, please visit the site. The links will be live at 4 p.m. Central time today.

This poem is also submitted for The High Calling’s Random Act of Poetry, which is seeking poems about mothers, grandmothers, motherhood, or son- or daughter-hood, for Mother’s Day (deadline is April 29).

The violence of forgiveness

This thing so evil
required a violence,
a torturing of body
of spirit
of soul
a rending wail
tearing the fabric of time
no hand could tear,
no curtain or veil could hide.
A fine spring day until
the paroxysm
the convulsion
of the ninth hour
the upending of before
into the transforming of after,
the vinegary blackness
ripping the sky,
unleashed fury
de-plating tectonics,
slicing rocks open,
smashing open tombs
to shake the dead alive.
A child is born this day.
A man is killed this day.
A child is sacrificed this day
in the violence
and supremacy
of forgiveness.

This poem is submitted for The High Calling’s Random Act of Poetry, with the prompt word of forgiveness. To see other poems on forgiveness, please visit the site.

It’s also submitted for One Shot Wednesday, hosted by One Stop Poetry. To see other poems submitted, please visit the site. The links will be live at 4 p.m. Central time.

Photograph: Storm Clouds 1 by Mikaela Dunn via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Was with, is

A referential millennium,
the concordance reports,
of the word word in all
of its variations and shadings,
permutations and seeming
meanderings, not aimless though;
each reference its own poem
in the collected, edited volume,
a multitude on the hillside
to center on the one.

This is a great mystery,
this hovering over the deep,
the formless, this shaping
of creation, a speaking or
the speaking of the hidden
into the light, the non-existent
into the real. A word
once thought, once uttered,
once written and thus codified
becomes eternal.

This word was with;
this word is.

This poem is submitted for The High Calling’s Random Act of Poetry. To see other submitted poems on “what’s in a word,” please visit the site.

Photograph: Bible Text by Petr Kratochvil via Public Doman Pictures. Used with permission.

The arms of the fatherless

Always in the eyes:

violence, done;
innocence, pillaged;
oppression, afflicted;
spirit, separated;
hope, abandoned.

The arms of the fatherless
are broken.

Seen in the heart:
to deliver, defend;
to help, share a portion;
to take up, relieve;
to show mercy, find;
among us always.

The arms of the fatherless
are broken
until bound up.

This poem is submitted for The High Calling’s Random Act of Poetry. The prompt was to write a poem to or in honor of an orphan, someone who has adopted an orphan, or your own adopter. Check the comments in the post to see links already submitted; they will all be collected for an article this Friday.

Photograph: Sole Provider, sculpture by Joe Mutasa, presented by the artists of Zimbabwe and Chapangu Sculpture Park in memory of those who died Sept. 11, 2001, a gift to the people of the United States for the Missouri Botanical Garden.

A robin's egg, blue

Born without skin
no protective membrane
no myelin sheath
for exposed nerve endings
any, all stimulation
is surfeit;
becomes withdrawn,
quietness.

A single word
careless, unintended
spoken easily
wounds mortally;
offenses, perceptions
of offenses, overwhelm,
no defense for self or
against self.

Fragility:
hidden, nestled,
nurtured
within a solitude
of shyness;
a robin’s egg heart
chipped easily
broken blue.

For the High Calling’s Random Act of Poetry, the prompt was to write a poem about one of your struggles, but to be gentle with yourself. (Read the entire post for the prompt; the idea is the concept of “gentle leadership.”)

Photograph: Robin’s Nest, Charlotte North Carolina, by Daniel Marquand, via Wikipedia.

Chopping Wood

Finds release in work,
   each slicing of wood
   a cracking open of hurt;
   brokenness.

Finds rest in exertion,
   each movement of
   the body a comfort;
   assurance.

Finds redemption in repetition,
   each swing backward,
   then forward, a liberation;
   forgiveness.

Finds regeneration in sweat,
   each drop salting, cleansing
   brow, face, back, chest, heart;
   baptism.


This poem is part of the Random Act of Poetry hosted by The High Calling.

Photograph: Stacked Wood by Brunhilde Reining via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

An Addendum to the RAP

On Friday at the High Calling Blogs, I had a post for the Random Acts of Poetry about “The Poems We Come From.” The prompt for the poems submitted was to name a poem that you had first read or experienced in high school or school (or anywhere else) that had had an impact on you, and then to write a poem about it.

And the poems came in. We had poems representing Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Langston Hughes, Anne Sexton, Luci Shaw – and even Johnny Cash. One poet even did a YouTube video of his poem, and another submitted the video of the Johnny Cash song that had inspired her. It was amazing.

We had to establish a deadline for the submissions, but another one came in (and yet another may still come in), and I offered to note it here.

Monica Sharman at Know-Love-Obey God wrote a moving story about the poem she selected. She was not the first of her family to go to college, but she was the first to live on campus, and the reason was that her parents had separated and sold the home she had lived in since kindergarten. She became part of a Bible study, and that led her to write a poem. And that is the poem she came from.

And this is from the new poem, entitled “Nothing,” she submitted:

He began the poem with a question,
“Who shall?”
and so I questioned, I wondered:
Indeed, who shall?
I began to read a list
of potential separators
and wondered,
which of these is the thing
that shall separate me,
that shall tear me
from God’s love?
Which of these?
The list continued
and, unsure, I worried.
The answer did not come
and did not come.
It was a long list…

Visit Monica’s place to read the whole story and the rest of the poem. And visit the High Calling Blogs to see all of the poems submitted.

Photograph: Tree in Fog at Night by Petr Kratochvil via Public Doman Pictures.

Random Acts of Poetry

Over at the High Calling Blogs today, I have a post for the Random Act of Poetry -- The Poems We Come From. Last week, we provided a writing prompt to consider a poem from high school or college that had an impact on you, and write a poem about it. The result was 13 poems that represented infleunces ranging from Walt Whitman to Johnny Cash. There were also some fascinating stories about the poems. So stop by the High Calling Blogs and take a look.

I Hear America Singing, Still

When I attended high school, the English curriculum was rather fixed. Ninth grade was introduction to British and American literature. Tenth grade was introduction to world literature, although we studied Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that year. Junior year was American literature in depth. And senior year was British literature in depth, although the administration got rather daring that year and required that one six-week period be devoted to a masterpiece of non-English literature, which is how I met Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes.

My junior English class was taught by a wild woman. She was tall, flamboyant, and given to theatrical gestures and outbursts. Everything about her was an exaggeration. She made no secret of what she believed to be the greatest work of American literature ever published – Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. (No one in the class took that seriously, not even the people who hated to read.)

One good thing (there were others) that she did was to introduce us to American poetry. I can still remember her standing in front of the class, wearing lots of large, colorful, flowing scarf-like dresses, and reading poetry, especially that of Walt Whitman, whose work often seemed to fit her flamboyance. (She often wore turbans, too, that matched her flowing clothes.) She’d read – and often act – poems like this one:

I Hear America Singing

By Walt Whitman

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand
singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as
he stands,
The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning,
or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work,
or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day--at night the party of young
fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

With a nod to Whitman, and for the sheer creativity and inventiveness he brought to poetry, I would submit this (I should probably offer apologies, too):

I Hear America Singing, Still

I hear America singing still, songs
both shallow and deep; not the
songs by Whitman sung, less bursting
with manifest confidence, more a
timidity of tentativeness, as if we have
walked into a room of no lights, no windows,
no mirrors to reflect, only darkness, darkness
to experience, darkness to feel our way forward.

I hear the songs of the Greek choir, as they beckon
us to Odysseus’s rocks; the songs of the preacher
preaching a revival of prosperity, as if naming gave
you a claiming right. Those songs, too, join the exodus 
of the deafening songs, the roaring songs, the songs of 
steam and noise and bellows and gears and furnaces
and fires as they escape into a silence
made in China.

Only two songs heard now, only two: the distant yet
approaching, small but consuming song of the prairie
fire, the song of destructive lament; and the light trill of
the sailing, soaring dove, the song of undeserved hope.

A bit dark, perhaps; I’ve been paying to much attention to government and politics lately.

This poem about a poem I know is connected to today’s Random Act of Poetry (RAP) over at the High Calling Blogs. I have a short article and prompt posted, for next week’s RAP (I’m subbing for our usual RAPster, L.L. Barkat). The prompt is based on a recent experience I had after tweeting a Poem of the Day, “Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats. Take a look and join in.

Picture Frames, Page Views and RAP

Time for another exciting edition of Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, led by the famous traveler and beach aficionado Duane Scott.

For my birthday, my son and daughter-in-law (parents of Cameron!) gave me one of those Kodak digitial picture frames, with a preloaded disk of 200+ photographs. About half of them are photos of Cameron; the rest are photos of their wedding, pictures of my son as a baby and little boy, and family. And there’s one of me dancing with my daughter-in-law at the wedding. We call it the “Dad rocks out” photo, which will not be making an appearance on this blog. The digital frame is totally distracting. I love it.

I stumbled upon Stumble Upon Tuesday. I was vaguely interested in it and knew something about this post-sharing application. But then someone inserted a link to my poem “The brother who loves him” and page visits skyrocketed. When I last checked, it had received almost 500 visits, making it the most visited blog post I’ve ever done. I don’t know who did it or exactly how they linked it – but my thanks to them. (It’s also the most commented-upon post I’ve ever done.)

If you haven’t had a chance to check out One Stop Poetry, you should. Each Wednesday, there’s a “One Shot Wednesday” for linking a poem you’ve posted on your own blog. There’s some remarkable poetry to check out in all the links.

Friday, for the High Calling Blogs, I’m subbing for L.L. Barkat for coordinating the next installment of the Random Act of Poetry (RAP). What happens is that you provide a prompt, people write poems and send you the links, and then you pull together an article that features one or two of them. My prompt is based on something that happened to me last week on Twitter – I tweeted someone’s Poem of the Day (“Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats) and someone whom I never heard of before took me to the tweeting woodshed for publicizing the poems of dead people. I am not making this up. So stop by HCB tomorrow afternoon and check it out.

Finally, I have a new nap partner. At least until he starts walking.

Photograph by Janet Young. Used with permission.

The Stone of Summer

There were no trees when
the hole was dug and filled and
covered, when the stone of
summer was put in place,
granite remembrance of
what had been a summer
love.

There were no intertwinings of
leaves and branches to filter
summer light, no canopy to
shield the letters and numbers
from sun and wind and rain
and snow, no birds to screech and
caw.

There was no closeness of a
summer place to protect a
mourning heart, to wrap its
arms of forest mist around heaving
shoulders, to mute and hide the
pain of a summer
loss.

There was only a rise upon a
field and grass and light and
darkness to sit with a
young farmer whose heart was
rendered dull with the
absence of a summer
smile.

He sits with her still, singing a
song of lilacs and daisies and
roses, whispering a love,
uttering a silence, as
the roots of the trees
summon the stone of
summer.


Over at The High Calling Blogs, L.L. Barkat has issued a call for a Random Act of Poetry on “a tablespoonful of summer.” This particular poem was inspired by a photograph posted this past weekend by Nancy Rosback at Poems and Prayers.

Dionysus

Yet another day in this ancient place, this Romanized sepulcher,
this urbanized temple to worship what never was, this sacrifice
of marbled skin and stone life-blood, paleness of what was.

Yet another span of hours, sameness and tedium; another day
of listening to the new ideas that are neither new nor ideas,
because of the baneful and prideful duty of an archon.

Today a respite from legalities – a babbler commending us for
our gods, known and unknown. What an impudent fellow, as if
our gods known and unknown actually cared for him and for us.

Although he speaks socratically, with both passion and calm,
like a voice of iron in the forge, does he know the fate of Socrates?
We kill our prophets; assassinate our heroes; poison our truthsayers.

I half-listen until I see Damaris, seated at the front of the crowd in
rapt attention, hearing the babbler’s siren song. Damaris, my soul
mate, my consolation and affirmation that I am not wholly mad.

She is transfixed. The others murmur, laugh and snicker. I turn to
face the babbler, with his thorned flesh. And in that flash of time I
first listen, my soul is seared, torn, shattered like smashed stone.

My heart is pierced; my heart so dead in sameness and tedium, is
stabbed, consumed with the same words that force the crowd’s
laugh and sneer to rise in an illusion of levitation and levity.

The babbler’s piercing look silences the crowd. He leaves with his
few close behind him. I stand to see my white robes now stained
with spilled red from my fingernailed palms, an archon’s stigmata.

Silence gives way to sardonic sneers of those who cultivate minds
of emptiness, the intellectualism of the void. I run to catch the
babbler with the thorn and piercing look, Damaris at my side.

I am broken, she says.
I am not mad, I say,
and run faster.

Painting: St. Paul preaching at the Areopagus by Raphael (1515-1516).

Over at the High Calling Blogs, the prompt for the Random Act of Poetry (RAP) was to go to an ancient place – Egypt, China, India, Greece, Rome, wherever, as long as it was ancient. I chose the account of St. Paul in Athens, speaking at the Areopagus on Mars Hill (Acts 17).

Monsters, Too (Two)

L.L. Barkat posed a monstrous challenge for this week's Random Act of Poetry at the High Calling Blogs -- write a poem from a monster's point-of-view.

I couldn't write one poem from a monster's perspective. But I could write two.

A Good Year to be a Zombie

Appearances deceive.
And it hurts.
Yes, I lurch a little when
I walk. A bit ungainly.
It’s the arthritis, common
to the undead,
especially the long undead.
My skin, well, yes, there’s
that I suppose. Yes, I
know it has a greenish-purplish
tinge and a few splotches, and
some pieces fall off now and
then (shaking hands is always
problematic: “let me give you
a hand”). Then, the clothes.
Sure, I could be more stylish,
a kind of Coffin Chic,
but even if I didn’t
scare the clerks at Brooks Brothers
just by walking in the door, I’d have
trouble with my stiff
arms (arthritis again).
And no Visa card.
The undead can’t get credit cards
but they do let us vote
in Chicago.
But I hear there’s this guy
In Texas,
who’s good for a cup
of coffee,
and maybe he’ll buy me a
venti non-fat latte; if I find him,
it will be a good year for a zombie.
And no iced latte, please;
I can’t shake the chill.



(Photo by someone obviously not Marcus Goodyear; used with impunity.)

It’s a Long Time Between Gigs

Hey! Another pina colada, and don’t
forget the umbrella!
So it may look cool, hanging here by
the pool, but it’s work. You have to
be seen, baby, and it can be a long
time between gigs. I was huge, man,
back then, big time. Walk down the
street, show up at the Brown Derby,
no reservation, people noticed, man.

It was 30 years, three decades, from
Fay to those Japanese send-ups. I
parodied myself in a language I
couldn’t speak; pitiful but you have to
eat. But Fay, ah, now there was a real
sweetheart, always watching out for her
leading man. The planes buzzing the
Empire scared her more than me, but
I knew it was OK, man.

All that fame; I loved it. They asked me
to concrete my prints at Graumann’s,
you know. But we had to do it out back
in the parking lot. That’s a joke, son.
Yeah, I know the Japanese movies
were embarrassing but look, I needed
the money and all I had to do was knock
down a few buildings and power lines and
beat up Godzilla. And it paid good.

But those Japanese, no romance. No Fay.
And sure I wanted to do Othello or Hamlet
but even Olivier had trouble getting work.
I really thought the remake in ’76 would be
my meal ticket. I even wrote a book, you
know, the old movie-book tie-in. It even
sold OK. And then what? Nothing. My
publicist blew it and I had to fire that
thieving no-good wastrel but don’t quote me.

So I keep up appearances, hang around
Beverly Hills, loiter on Rodeo, do the
premieres and some charity stuff. Tried
out for a few movies, too, do you know that?
Costner got Dances with Wolves after I
stepped on the wolf pack. Accidents happen,
man. That role was written for me. They wanted
me to be an orc in Lord of the Rings but I said no,
I like characters with empathy, know what I mean?

And I miss Fay. She was the best. One of a
kind. Real people, she was.
Hey! Where’s that pina colada?

My Western City, Dreaming

“How many times I saw my western city/Dream by her river.”
--Sara Teasdale, “Sunset: St. Louis” from Flame and Shadow

"A mourning figure walks, and will not rest..."
--Vachel Lindsay, "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight"


That’s what old river towns do,
dream by their rivers, dream of the
days of glory and wealth and triumphs,
when the making of things was important
and the shipping of things was vital and the
banking of things was critical and the litigating
of things made and shipped and banked was lifeblood;
and now old river towns doze and occasionally half-wake,
with ears closed and one eye open, dreaming by their rivers,
and with ears open and one eye closed, dreaming of the
mourning figure walking
the prairie streets.


This is a poem for the Random Act of Poetry sponsored by the High Calling Blogs. L.L. Barkat provided the prompt: Begin with a sentence with a picture in it, like from a poem, and then write from a memory or event or simply what comes to mind. I chose the lines above from the Sara Teasdale and Vachel Lindsay poems, both of which are featured today at TweetSpeak Poetry for National Poetry Month.

And Louise Gallagher at Recover Your Joy got inspired by all of this and wrote "River Deep."

The Repair Job

A toilet handle needs
replacing, sporting a crack
that will become a
break.
My dark hour of
despair.

What should be short, effortless
minutes will be long, toilsome
hours. Nothing goes as
planned.
Ever.
Handyman-impaired.

Perhaps the store will
not have the part, but
they do. Perhaps the
rapture will come before
I’m home, but
it doesn’t.

Despair. Resigned to
my fate, I
face the offending
part. I read, even,
the instructions.
(It’s that bad.)

I remove the
tank top, apply the
screwdriver, unscrew the
bolt, insert the new
handle, tighten the
bolt.

And it works.
Flushed. Grace.

Scout and Jem, That Night

That eve of the dead, the
white wind keened a
moaning song of
release, of words not
spoken before, of
guilty yet not.
Innocent was
not possible, not
then, not then.

A white demon, carried
on the white wind, the
white wind of white
shadows,
descended upon two
children, two young, who
did not know, who
did not understand
the meaning, but
simply were.

A white demon not
of their making but
part of their sin,
originally,
descended to seek its
retribution, its vengeance, the
annihilation of what was to come,
a demon stopped only by
the mute angel
named Boo.

For the Random Act of Poetry at the High Calling Blogs, we were asked to choose a character from a book – any kind of book – and write a poem to, from or just about that character. For details on the character(s) I selected, visit here.

Apple Pie, Late Harvest

She jumbled a measure of
Flour, a measure of
Water, a measure of
Salt, cutting
Lard into the mix;
Patiently pushing, fighting
Stickiness to create the
Base, the start.
Apples, cooked and sitting
Warm in brown sugar and
Cinnamon and spices,
Waited to the side.

Holding the bowl-shaped
Ceramic, only lightly
Pressing and
Pushing now,
She walked to the yard,
Ending where the
Fields began,
The fields of tall, brown now,
Scratchy noises in the wind,
The fields waiting patiently for
The combine to exhale
And move on.

Massaging the dough with
Her fingers,
She watched
Red-bronzed farmer
Move patiently
Through the fields, as
Patiently as the
Fields themselves waited,
Patiently despite the
Coming rain, which
Might snow make
Yet today.

She knew his mind, as
She shaped the floury mix.
She knew his calloused hands,
Young hands already
Farm-roughened,
Hands that had touched
Her skin like
Fire and rain.
She knew his unshaven face,
His sweat-smell,
His worry-smell to
Get the harvest home.

She knew his heart, the heart
That beat next to hers.
She knew the life, the life
Within,
The life moving near
Their hearts at night
And hers at day,
Its own heart, born of their oneness,
Waiting for its time, its time to push
And press and fight for life,
For its place, too,
In the fields.

She felt the silky
Smoothness of
The worked dough,
Now ready for apples and
Brown sugar and
Cinnamon spices.

David, Hillside

On my rock,
My rock on the
Hill,
I sit to watch
And tend
My father’s flock.

It’s lonely, this place.
Watching is
What I do, mostly,
Except to play
My stones and sling
Against the wayward wolf.
When I talk to the flock,
They baa-laugh
And move away from
The crazy boy.

On my rock,
I dream my Lord,
My Lord most
High,
Who drew me from
My father’s seed,
Knit me in
My mother’s womb,
Breathed spirit
Into my soul.

I feel his breath
In the wind,
His tears of joy
In the rain,
His heart in the warming
Of the summer sun.
He plays with me,
Sings to me,
Coaxes me from
My shyness
To talk with him,
A conversation of
Tender moments.
I hear his laughter
In the birds
Above me.

Then, his voice.
Even as he
Frolics with me,
His voice.

The time is coming,
My beloved.
I teach you, now,
So you will be, then.

He calls me beloved,
As he holds me
Like a lamb
In the palm of
His hand, kissing
My brow
With drops of
Morning mist,
Gently,
Like a lover.

(This week, for the Random Act of Poetry over at the High Calling Blogs, the subject is "Love in Character," a love poem written in character -- real or fictional. If you'd like your love poem in character included, you can leave a comment here at Seedlings in Stone.)