Nice reply, Penny! We are under our normal rainfall around here (Mid-Atlantic states).

I've been reading a book titled, Bread Body Spirit: Finding the Sacred in Food, ed. by Alice Peck. It is a collection of contemplations on food and what it means to us. I am enjoying the book very much, as food had always been an interest, really a passion, of mine for as long as I can remember. The stanza that begins "I don't want you to..." appears in the book, after reading it I felt inspired to share the whole poem.


Rice
By Mary Oliver

It grew in the black mud.
It grew under the tiger's orange paws.
Its stems thicker than candles, and as straight.
Its leaves like the feathers of egrets,
but green.

The grains cresting, wanting to burst.
Oh, blood of the tiger.

I don't want you to just sit at the table.
I don't want you just to eat, and be content.
I want you to walk into the fields
Where the water is shining, and the rice has risen.
I want you to stand there,
far from the white tablecloth.
I want you to fill your hands with mud,
like a blessing.

I think the day will be too hot to be out, so, inside I will be with poetry. I like the last stanza ---

Back with the Quakers
by Betsy Sholl

You think you can handle these things:
sunlight glinting off a red Jaguar
honking at the old woman who has snagged

her shopping cart on a snow rut,
or the swaggering three-piece suit who steps
outside the bank, earless to the mossy voice

at his feet asking for spare change,
but then the crunch of something, nothing really,
under your shoe--a dirty comb, a pen cap--

completely undoes you, and it's too much,
too much, being balanced, considering
the complexity of all sides in one

syntactically correct sentence.
All the driver has to say is "Move it,
Lady," and you're back with the Quakers

who trained you to lie still and limp in the street.
Three days they stepped on your hair,
ground cigarettes half an inch from your nose,

while you lay there, trying to be against
violence, your fists tight as grenades
and a payload of curses between your teeth,

O woman, with a mind Picasso
could have painted, giving you many cheeks,
each one turned a different way.

William Carlos Williams has taken over the moment!
Note: I am sorry the poem will not appear in its intended format. The lines are indented in a pattern. The lines are in sets of three, the first at the margin, the second indented and the third set even further in.

from "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"
William Carlos Williams

Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
like a buttercup
upon its branching stem-
save that it's green and wooden-
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you.
We lived long together
a life filled,
if you will,
with flowers. So that
I was cheered
when I came first to know
that there were flowers also
in hell.
Today
I'm filled with the fading memory of those flowers
that we both loved,
even to this poor
colorless thing-
I saw it
when I was a child-
little prized among the living
but the dead see,
asking among themselves:
What do I remember
that was shaped
as this thing is shaped?
while our eyes fill
with tears.
Of love, abiding love
it will be telling
though too weak a wash of crimson
colors it
to make it wholly credible.
There is something
something urgent
I have to say to you
and you alone
but it must wait
while I drink in
the joy of your approach,
perhaps for the last time.
And so
with fear in my heart
I drag it out
and keep on talking
for I dare not stop.
Listen while I talk on
against time.
It will not be
for long.
I have forgot
and yet I see clearly enough
something
central to the sky
which ranges round it.
An odor
springs from it!
A sweetest odor!
Honeysuckle! And now
there comes the buzzing of a bee!
and a whole flood
of sister memories!
Only give me time,
time to recall them
before I shall speak out.
Give me time,
time.
When I was a boy
I kept a book
to which, from time
to time,
I added pressed flowers
until, after a time,
I had a good collection.
The asphodel,
forebodingly,
among them.
I bring you,
reawakened,
a memory of those flowers.
They were sweet
when I pressed them
and retained
something of their sweetness
a long time.
It is a curious odor,
a moral odor,
that brings me
near to you.
The color
was the first to go.
There had come to me
a challenge,
your dear self,
mortal as I was,
the lily's throat
to the hummingbird!
Endless wealth,
I thought,
held out its arms to me.
A thousand tropics
in an apple blossom.
The generous earth itself
gave us lief.
The whole world
became my garden!
But the sea
which no one tends
is also a garden
when the sun strikes it
and the waves
are wakened.
I have seen it
and so have you
when it puts all flowers
to shame.
Too, there are the starfish
stiffened by the sun
and other sea wrack
and weeds. We knew that
along with the rest of it
for we were born by the sea,
knew its rose hedges
to the very water's brink.
There the pink mallow grows
and in their season
strawberries
and there, later,
we went to gather
the wild plum.
I cannot say
that I have gone to hell
for your love
but often
found myself there
in your pursuit.
I do not like it
and wanted to be
in heaven. Hear me out.
Do not turn away.
I have learned much in my life
from books
and out of them
about love.
Death
is not the end of it.
There is a hierarchy
which can be attained,
I think,
in its service.
Its guerdon
is a fairy flower;
a cat of twenty lives.
If no one came to try it
the world
would be the loser.
It has been
for you and me
as one who watches a storm
come in over the water.
We have stood
from year to year
before the spectacle of our lives
with joined hands.
The storm unfolds.
Lightning
plays about the edges of the clouds.
The sky to the north
is placid,
blue in the afterglow
as the storm piles up.
It is a flower
that will soon reach
the apex of its bloom.
We danced,
in our minds,
and read a book together.
You remember?
It was a serious book.
And so books
entered our lives.
The sea! The sea!
Always
when I think of the sea
there comes to mind
the Iliad
and Helen's public fault
that bred it.
Were it not for that
there would have been
no poem but the world
if we had remembered,
those crimson petals
spilled among the stones,
would have called it simply
murder.
The sexual orchid that bloomed then
sending so many
disinterested
men to their graves
has left its memory
to a race of fools
or heroes
if silence is a virtue.
The sea alone
with its multiplicity
holds any hope.
The storm
has proven abortive
but we remain
after the thoughts it roused
to
re-cement our lives.
It is the mind
the mind
that must be cured
short of death's
intervention,
and the will becomes again
a garden. The poem
is complex and the place made
in our lives
for the poem.
Silence can be complex too,
but you do not get far
with silence.
Begin again.
It is like Homer's
catalogue of ships:
it fills up the time.
I speak in figures,
well enough, the dresses
you wear are figures also,
we could not meet
otherwise. When I speak
of flowers
it is to recall
that at one time
we were young.
All women are not Helen,
I know that,
but have Helen in their hearts.
My sweet,
you have it also, therefore
I love you
and could not love you otherwise.
Imagine you saw
a field made up of women
all silver-white.
What should you do
but love them?
The storm bursts
or fades! it is not
the end of the world.
Love is something else,
or so I thought it,
a garden which expands,
though I knew you as a woman
and never thought otherwise,
until the whole sea
has been taken up
and all its gardens.
It was the love of love,
the love that swallows up all else,
a grateful love,
a love of nature, of people,
of animals,
a love engendering
gentleness and goodness
that moved me
and that I saw in you.
I should have known,
though I did not,
that the lily-of-the-valley
is a flower makes many ill
who whiff it.
We had our children,
rivals in the general onslaught.
I put them aside
though I cared for them.
as well as any man
could care for his children
according to my lights.
You understand
I had to meet you
after the event
and have still to meet you.
Love
to which you too shall bow
along with me-
a flower
a weakest flower
shall be our trust
and not because
we are too feeble
to do otherwise
but because
at the height of my power
I risked what I had to do,
therefore to prove
that we love each other
while my very bones sweated
that I could not cry to you
in the act.
Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you!
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hear me out
for I too am concerned
and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides.


I will also offer an informative essay on the poem.
www.english.illinois.edu/MAPS/poets/s_z/williams/asphodel.htm

HI, Everyone,

I hope you are all well and happy. This poem comes to mind as the poem of this moment, today. It's an often-excerpted chorus from a longer ballad poem with many verses by an anonymous poet of the 1600's. It's titled "Tom O' Bedlam" :



(Nobody worry. It's just a mood thing. I'm well. Just coming through a period of a lot of intense stuff going on around me.)

I write some poetry myself but I usually have to wait until it comes to me. I have not written one in years but I will share one of my old ones with you. I really like The Day Is Done.

This one remains untitled. It was originally the introduction of my book but I changed it. This is one that I got tattooed on my arm while I was doing time in a federal prison in Waseca, Minnesota.

That is what I missed.
Scraped knees and runny noses
playing in the snow until your toes were frozen.
That is what I missed.
The reassurance of a paternal embrace
like a smile amidst strangers from a loved ones face.
That is what I missed.
Cartoon filled days and prom nights.
Those three words that make painful things feel better
and the things that are wrong feel right.
That is what i missed.

Nice to see you posting again!

I just read "Back with the Quakers", and I have to say, it is a brilliant piece. It gave me all sorts of shivers. Thanks for posting it, Saffron.

The September/October issue of The American Poetry Review greeted me upon my arrival home this evening. To my great delight the opening article is about Gerard Manley Hopkins. There is a sense of pent up passion, longing and terrible sadness in the body of Hopkins work. The past few weeks have been heavy ones for me. The poem included with the article is of deep despair, mine is not so great.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.

45. ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’


I Wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say 5
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me; 10
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Just thought I'd post the link to The American Poetry Review. In a day or so the Sept/Oct issue will be posted and with any luck the article on Gerard Manley Hopkins will be accessible.

I think another Gerard Manley Hopkins for tonight.

Peace
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I'll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.

I am all about food these days; the life consuming life miracle of being alive. Twenty-first century western culture is still suffering from the mind body split. If you look at pop culture (TV, movies, ads, etc.) it is all about perfect bodies and sex, but not from the perspective of actual living thinking bodies. It is a plastic, unobtainable ideal; which puts it all squarely back in the mind. American's especially are all in there heads. We might as well be plugged like in the Matrix. So, here's to Key Lime Pie! Eat up!

Key Lime Pie
(for Katie Guthrie)

by Mary Rose O'Reilley

Commas of lime in sugar and milk,
suspension, mild on the tongue
as memory of being filled,
or if you never were full before,
now is the moment--
be born again,
trailing, for all I care,
Augustine, Ambrose, all of those guys--

Aquinas, sit here, eat this pie.
Each one's longing to feel
a belly round with surfeit,
figuring out at last
one of the why's we came for:
key lime pie.

Tumble with me, Augustine,
out of the pear tree of self-hate.
Here is a Buddha-pie your African grin
can barely take in. Here is a radical
homecoming pie. Aquinas,
it runs down your chin.
you will never again
have to be clever or even good.

Taste the green skin of logos
wanting to kiss your tongue.
You are undone, like a child
gone feral to smell grass,
murmuring here it is,
all I have longed for
at last, at last.

It’s cold,
Ice,
Brrr.

It’s cold,
Ice,
Wind blowing
Brrr.

It’s cold,
Ice,
Wind blowing
Snow falling
Brrr.

It’s cold,
Ice,
Wind blowing,
Snow falling,
Car stalling,
Brrr.

It’s cold,
Ice,
Wind blowing,
Snow falling,
Night coming,
Brrr.

It’s cold,
Ice,
Wind blowing,
Snow coating,
All dark,
Brrr.

It’s
cold,

Ice


Wind …,


….. Coating
……
Br…..

All of these guys begin with 'A' -

How wonderful if this poem went on to the end of the alphabet.

Ambrosia -yummy!!!

Thankyou Saff.

I have a new favorite radio show; Radio Netherlands The State We're In. Today they aired an interview with a poet I'd never heard of, Sian (Shawn) Hughes. Her poem, The Send-off is beautiful. It is about a pregnancy she decided to terminate. In talking about her own poem, she mentioned another poet that I'd never heard of, Thomas Lynch. I went looking for examples of Lynch's poetry. It would seem he does not want his poetry published on the web, as the only examples I could find were audio or the page prevented copy & paste. The poem I did find is one entitled, Iambs for the Day of Burial. Both poems are powerful examples of the complexity of human emotion and the precariousness of human existence.

Here is a link to the interview with Sian Hughes:
A Lifetime of Regret
(You will need to scroll down the page until you see the title)
Sian Hughes terminated her pregnancy after her foetus tested positive for Down’s Syndrome. She immediately regretted it and later wrote a prize-winning poem about her regret.

excerpt of the poem:

…My darling, sleep well in your bed.
Don’t come out on the landing where it’s cold

because, you see, I won’t come home
in my long dress and necklace

and blow you kisses up the stairs.
I won’t carry you back to bed

to rub your blue feet better
or fetch blankets from the box.

No, you don’t need a bottle, cuddle,
special rabbit, teddy, bit of cloth.

You don’t even need to close your eyes.
They were born that way, sealed shut…

Now, the link to Thomas Lynch's Iambs for the Day of Burial