Today's poetry post is an opportunity. The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Program is offering an online poetry program that will run from 4/14-20. Check it out with the link below! It is free. I have registered. I am hoping I will be able to share some of what I learn.

http://www.dodgepoetry.org/schools/sfonline/

Oh, man! This poem has a line in it that epitomizes for me what makes a poem a poem - words that tear right into me and strike like a blow.

Elegy, Surrounded by Seven Trees

Rachel Eliza Griffiths
for Michele Antoinette Pray-Griffiths


Ordinary days deliver joy easily
again & I can’t take it. If I could tell you
how her eyes laughed or describe
the rage of her suffering, I must
admit that lately my memories
are sometimes like a color
warping in my blue mind.
Metal abandoned in rain.

My mother will not move.

Which is to say that
sometimes the true color of
her casket jumps from my head
like something burnt down
in the genesis of a struck flame.
Which is to say that I miss
the mind I had when I had
my mother. I own what is yet.
Which means I am already
holding my own absence
in faith. I still carry a faded slip of paper
where she once wrote a word
with a pencil & crossed it out.

From tree to tree, around her grave
I have walked, & turned back
if only to remind myself
that there are some kinds of
peace, which will not be
moved. How awful to have such
wonder. The final way wonder itself
opened beneath my mother’s face
at the last moment. As if she was
a small girl kneeling in a puddle
& looking at her face for the first time,
her fingers gripping the loud,
wet rim of the universe.


The line that grabbed me:

Which is to say that I miss
the mind I had when I had
my mother.

This line captures in such a deep way the multifaceted loss of a parent.

Today's installment is one of my all time favorite poems by one of my favorite poets, Robert Frost. I love this poem in ways I cannot put into words. It strikes me at my emotional core. Something about what is me resonates with this these words.

Tree At My Window

Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.

Vague dream head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.

But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.

That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.

I think every person in the USA needs to read and think deeply about this poem.

[the] north[ern] [of] ireland
Pádraig Ó Tuama


Listen
It is both a dignity and
a difficulty
to live between these
names,

perceiving politics
in the syntax of
the state.

And at the end of the day,
the reality is
that whether we
change
or whether we stay
the same

these questions will
remain.

Who are we
to be
with one
another?

and

How are we
to be
with one
another?

and

What to do
with all those memories
of all of those funerals?

and

What about those present
whose past was blasted
far beyond their
future?

I wake.
You wake.
She wakes.
He wakes.
They wake.

We Wake
and take
this troubled beauty forward.

Don’t Go Into the Library

Thanks, Saffron, for posting these. I really like this one poem though, especially the title.

"Window Tree" might be my favorite of Frost's, too. Imagine all the stitching and unstitching that went into that one. But a close second is "Into My Own." Despite its somewhat fusty diction, it gets me, especially at the end.

A friend posted this poem online this Gerard Manley Hopkins poem morning. 2 or 3 of his poems rank among my most favorite poems. A big YES to wildness and wet. I now need to go investigate to see if this is the whole poem or just a part of a larger. I will report back.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
--Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1899)

So, it is only part of a larger work. Here is the whole.

33. Inversnaid


This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Ok, so the first 3 stanzas need some explaining or rather some of the words need defining. I will that a go too.

So happy to have found this thread. Going to leave some Mary Oliver here. She is my absolute favourite.

for forty years
the sheets of white paper have
passed under my hands and I have tried
    to improve their peaceful

emptiness putting down
little curls little shafts
of letters words
    little flames leaping

not one page
was less to me than fascinating
discursive full of cadence
    its pale nerves hiding

in the curves of the Qs
behind the soldierly Hs
in the webbed feet of the Ws
    forty years

and again this morning as always
I am stopped as the world comes back
wet and beautiful I am thinking
    that language

is not even a river
is not a tree is not a green field
is not even a black ant traveling
    briskly modestly

from day to day from one
golden page to another.

Mary Oliver is a favorite of mine. I had not read that poem before, Thank you, ellisacoy!