Poetry Friday - Sharon Olds and Afternoon Thoughts

I have not grown 
up yet, I have lived as my daughter's mother
the way I had lived as my mother's daughter,
inside her life. I have not been born yet.
- from Physics by Sharon Olds

Looking for a poem to celebrate my daughter's birthday, I find this. Strike Sparks, Old's Selected Poems, sits on the bookshelf, mostly. I love and loathe Old's brashness in equal measure. I read her poems and wonder how she could write them - how she could step out from behind the shelter of metaphor and claim and declaim and brag - as a mother.

When poetry was the centre for me, a spine of text that held me upright through first love, first despair, first disillusionment, I knew how to be open with words. They tumbled onto the page, between dusk and midnight, stolen words, broken words, words translated in a dream, words remembered, words used as a weapon, as a scalpel, as a dare, as a cry, as laughter. Words used as a puppeteer takes up the strings and makes his puppet dance.

After children I grew careful of words. Words shape and wound the living child. Words are for weighing, for being exact, for restraint, for hiding, for creating a new self. A self who is watched, endlessly. A self who carries the burden of the child's gaze. A self who thinks before she thinks, who edits the thought before it becomes a thought. A mother, a living puppet from whose mouth comes the words of others, written in books, in picture books. A mother who speaks love-words, being the words she feels and the words she knows she should feel.

A child is ill. The dark words call a poem-path that lead straight to the heart, the dark centre of the heart, the fear of the child's death. The child recovers and the poem dies; the poem can never be brought to light; words can shape and wound the living child.

How can she write the poems she writes ?
How can I write ?
How is the poet born from her life,
the love-words and the dark-words,
how does she write them under the child's gaze ?

The Poetry Friday round up is here.

Poetry ( And Prose ) Friday

From Mary Oliver's poem Yes! No! comes this line:

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

All week that line has been chanting itself inside my skull.

My sister dropped by to bring me some books; I was in bed with a cold when I picked up The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, she of the wondrous Moomintrolls.

Written later in life, after the death of her sculptor-mother, The Summer Book is set over a period of several summers on a tiny and remote Finnish island. Sophia, a young child whose mother has also only recently died, and Sophia's grandmother, wise and unsentimental, are the main characters in a episodic book that relies not on plot but on a deep observation.

Oliver would recognise Jansson's 'proper work' as she creates for us a world where grief is observed and described and we see how the novel's natural world echoes, amplifies, mirrors and transforms that grief and how it ultimately insists on the right of the living to go on living and to pay attention.

To pay attention is to do more than notice. Paying attention is active, a tax we pay on life, a work we shape.

Mary Oliver's poem can be found here.

For more Poetry Friday links, visit The Drift Record.

Poetry Friday

A new book of poems for my birthday; Mary Oliver's New and Selected Poems Volume Two.

Here's a title - The Real Prayers are Not the Words, but the Attention that Comes First.
You can listen to the poem here.

Blessed are the word-shapers!

Poetry Friday - Two Poems

Autumn
There has  been no change
but I am no longer young.
Autumn wind blows and
I am disturbed as before.
- Princess Shikishi


All That Summer

All that summer I read German novels
and wrote letters that were never sent,
drank tea in cafes he had not discovered.
Somewhere on George Street, my Steppenwolf
lost its cover; I wept all afternoon
and most of the evening. I tried quoting Hesse
to a German tourist in Martin's Bar:
every created thing, even the simplest,
is already guilty, already multiple.
But he told me his English was not so good,
and in any case, he was an engineer.
December drove me mad. On alternate Sundays
I went to Mass, armed with an elderly bible.
When no-one was looking, I stole the candles.

All that summer I waged war against mosquitoes.
Once, he rang, and I invented a lover -
relieved, he told me about his. One lonely night
I crawled in through her bathroom window:
it's her or me, I said to him, and he chose her.
It was difficult to make a dignified retreat.

That summer I dyed my hair red
And ate nothing but maps of foreign cities,
covered Steppenwolf in pages ripped from Rilke.
That summer, I began to crave obscure Japanese poets.
One night, I dreamt Shikishi came to me.
"Autumn wind blows," she said,
And I am disturbed as before."

- mine, from The Long Drowning. And it isn't autobiographical!

Poetry Friday

Forget tedious poetry exercises - if you'd like to share the wonder of poetry with a child of any age, read this to them. Randall Jarrell - author of one of my favourite poems, Seele Im Raum - wrote The Bat-Poet,  a treasure of a book.

It concerns a young bat - an 'outsider' bat - who likes to think and listen and keep his eyes open past dawn. When he hears the mockingbird sing, he begins to make songs of his own, finally realising that "If you get the words right you don't need a tune." 

He composes poems about the world and the creatures around him and, at last, about his own kind. Maurice Sendak illustrates the tale with delicate, involved black and white pictures. Yes, the story introduces rhyme, metre, metaphor and rhyme scheme. If you wanted to turn this book into a lesson, you could.

Its real value lies elsewhere; in Jarrell's evocation of the poetic process and of how observation and memory, emotion and love of language create a poet and a poet's work.

Seele Im Raum - go read it!

Poetry Friday

The Old Year

The Old Year's gone away
To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark or place
In either shade or sun:
The last year he'd a neighbour's face,
In this he's known by none.

All nothing everywhere:
Mists we on mornings see
Have more of substance when they're here
And more of form than he.
He was a friend by every fire,
In every cot and hall -
A guest to every heart's desire,
And now he's nought at all.

Old papers thrown away,
Old garments cast aside,
The talk of yesterday,
All things identified;
But times once torn away
No voices can recall:
The eve of New Year's Day
Left the Old Year lost to all.

- John Clare

Poetry Friday

Cold reflections in a warm climate.

Carol

What is Christmas without
snow ? We need it
as bread of a cold
climate, ermine to trim

our sins with, a brief
sleeve for charity's
scarecrow to wear its heart
on, bold as a robin.

- R.S. Thomas

I love the line breaks in this poem, and the metaphors for snow - bread of a cold climate, ermine to trim our sins, a brief sleeve for charity's scarecrow.

Poetry Friday

COLLOQUY ( for Emily )

In the circle of your small illness
The words come together, syllable by syllable.
You move against my wakefulness,
Kept separate by your illness and,
For the first time, knowing it.
39 degrees and the night unnavigable.
I am extinguished for you, Emily,
Adrift where language begins,
Five stars falling
Towards your ocean.
Silence now is for the drowning;
This night and all others
I will sing your boat in to shore.

Yes, a bit sentimental. I've just sent the girls off to their dance recital and eyes were rolled when I mentioned putting a photo of them on the blog. I wasn't exactly banned, but I figured posting a poem was safer :)

Visit the wonderfully named Miss Rumphius Effect to see the whole Poetry Friday round-up.

It Isn't Friday

But I felt like sharing these stanzas from Wendell Berry's Sabbaths 1998 VI.

By expenditure of hope,
Intelligence, and work,
You think you have it fixed.
It is unfixed by rule.
Within the darkness, all
Is being changed, and you
Also will be changed...

For every year is costly,
As you well know. Nothing
Is given that is not 
Taken, and nothing taken
That was not first a gift.

Lines to muse on as the year draws to its close.

Poetry Friday

Crow

Scavenger. Unmelodic and
jagged with lost sleep.
Suburb dweller. Crow
perched on top of the pine.

Calling, the intervals random,
only the tone predictable -
its broken yearning -
calling the prodigals,
the wanderers,

Eyes on the children
who play on the morning-wet lawn.

Heart in flight. Kin.


Visit  RandomNoodling for more of Poetry Friday!

Poetry Friday

Because, suddenly, the weather is warm and humid and I'm thinking of the sea...

 Santorin

Stoop if you can to the dark sea forgetting
The sound of a flute to naked feet
That trod in your sleep in the other the sunken life
Write if you can on your last shell
The day the name the place
And cast it to sink in the sea.

From 'Gymnopaedia'
Giorgos Seferis

Poetry Friday

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.
      - Louise Gluck

Poetry Friday

Raleigh Was Right

We cannot go into the country
for the country will bring us no peace
What can the small violets tell us
that grow on furry stems in
the long grass among lance shaped leaves?

Though you praise us
and call to mind the poets
who sung of our loveliness
it was long ago!
long ago! when country people
would plow and sow
with flowering minds and pockets at ease —
if ever this were true.
Not now.  Love itself a flower
with roots in a parched ground.
Empty pockets make empty heads.
Cure it if you can but
do not believe that we can live
today in the country
for the country will bring us no peace
— William Carlos Williams

Poetry Friday - selected by Lucy

The Moon and a Cloud by W.H.Davies


Sometimes I watch the moon at night,
No matter be she near or far;
Up high, or in a leafy tree
Caught laughing like a bigger star.

Tonight the west if full of clouds;
The east is full of stars that fly
Into the cloud's dark foliage,
And the moon will follow by and by.

I see a dark brown shabby cloud -
The moon has gone behind its back;
I looked to see her turn it white-
She turned it to a lovely black.

A lovely cloud, a jet-black cloud;
It shines with such a glorious light,
That I am glad with all my heart
She turned it black instead of white.