Category: poetry

Less Head Time, More Streudel

Rachel Henry3 Comments

News flash for the week: my perceptions are not reality. Shocking, I know. Go ahead and sit down—that was probably a hard one to absorb since you thought I had this whole existence thing figured out.

For example, I tell myself a story about a group of people at work. It goes like this: they tolerate me because they have to, but I always get work to them late, I constantly tell them they can’t do things they want to do, and I don’t offer them as much support as they would like. So imagine my surprise when at a meeting last week they told me I was a joy to work with.

I don’t bring this up to brag (OK, maybe just a little) but because based on this headline in The Onion—Report: Today The Day They Find Out You’re A Fraud—other people might tell themselves these stories, too. People who are a joy to work with are walking around not knowing it, and these people might be you.

So of course we’re all going to implement a radical perception shift, and these thoughts will disappear by the time you finish reading this blog. If you figure out how to do that, let me know. In my experience, this type of shift doesn’t happen at warp speed, and if it does, there’s a lot of pain involved.

Pain is not up there with cream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels on my list of favorite things, so instead I’m going to practice remembering that the voice in my head lies. And I’m going to get some apple streudel and share it with the people who bring joy into my life and tell them that they do so that they have a little evidence to present to the voices in their heads.

Here’s a poem by C.K. Williams about a moment that broke through the cloud of misperception. One cool, nerdy thing about this poem—it is all one sentence.

The Dance
By C.K. Williams

A middle-aged woman, quite plain, to be polite about it, and
somewhat stout, to be more courteous still,
but when she and the rather good-looking, much younger man
she’s with get up to dance,
her forearm descends with such delicate lightness, such restrained
but confident ardor athwart his shoulder,
drawing him to her with such a firm, compelling warmth, and
moving him with effortless grace
into the union she’s instantly established with the not at all
rhythmically solid music in this second-rate café,

that something in the rest of us, some doubt about ourselves, some
sad conjecture, seems to be allayed,
nothing that we’d ever thought of as a real lack, nothing not to be
admired or be repentant for,
but something to which we’ve never adequately given credence,
which might have consoling implications about how we misbe-
lieve ourselves, and so the world,
that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which
sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.

–from Repair by C.K. Williams, reprinted in Good Poems, edited by Garrison Keillor

Fleas by Ogden Nash

Rachel Henry3 Comments

Adam
Had ’em.

A little levity for tax day eve when you discover you haven’t written down either your password or the answers to your security questions. Thanks to my uncle for reminding me of this fine function of poetry.

Note: This is one in a series of poems selected to demonstrate that poetry need not be complicated to be beautiful and meaningful–and funny. Happy National Poetry Month!

So Many Ways

Rachel Henry1 Comment

It’s National Poetry Month! I know you’ve been waiting all year for the return of the Everybody Can Love Poetry Series. It has arrived.

For those of you who started following the blog more recently, last April I posted a couple of poems each week in hopes of convincing people that there are wonderful, meaningful poems that you can understand without a degree in English. Welcome to round two.

One of the wonderful things about poems is that they are beautiful, the way a piece of music or a painting or a sunset is beautiful. I walked to my neighborhood grocery store this week right after it had rained. One of the neighboring houses was surrounded by poppies, which always display their most gorgeous side in profusion. Another house sported a few well-trimmed, carefully placed flowering bushes, and I thought, there are so many ways to be beautiful.

I think about this sometimes when I look at my cat, who is quite handsome. We think cats with all different types of coloring are cute. Black and white cats, like Tux, can have four white paws or only a couple; their faces can be all black or a little white or half white with a big freckle on the tip of their nose, and their owners think they’re adorable regardless.

But sometimes we don’t extend the same generosity to ourselves. We face ourselves in the mirror and wish this or that looked otherwise. We look at how we’ve lived our lives and how others have lived theirs and find ourselves wanting, yet if we expected a poppy to look like a rose, we’d miss its beauty.

Here’s a poem from Mary Oliver that I think speaks to how we might recognize our own beauty.

The Buddha’s Last Instruction

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal — a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire —
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

From: House of Light

 

 

 

Momma Told Me

Rachel Henry5 Comments

I don’t know why we’re designed to go two steps forward and one step back, but I’m convinced we are. Last week: Zen master. This week: whiner.

I exaggerate last week’s accomplishments, but I did have this miraculous moment of getting over myself. One of the software systems at work appears to have been designed to decrease productivity, and I generally spend a lot of time and energy hating it while using it.

This time a moment of spiritual brilliance flashed upon me. If I changed the goal from finishing the task to being present and paying attention, I could stop fighting the inefficient system because its inefficiency would no longer matter. So I changed the goal. My mind cleared up. My patience increased. My work probably improved, though I have no way to measure that.

Fast forward to this week. While working on another not favorite task, I said to myself, you could use this time as practice; where is your attention? I replied, somewhat snappishly, I don’t want to practice, I want to be miserable and complain. I clearly saw myself making that choice, but changing my approach still didn’t interest me. One step back—at least.

I kept this up most of the day and wore myself down sufficiently that, by the time I was chopping kale for dinner, I could consider the option of simply relaxing and accepting my sour disposition. Then this line from William Stafford’s poem “A Message from the Wanderer” came floating in: “Tell everyone just to remember/their names, and remind others, later, when we/ find each other.” Some days that’s all we can do, remember who we are, and that’s OK because that day is not eternal. The next day we’ll be capable of making different choices.

I’ll end with the rest of Stafford’s stanza because he sums it up so beautifully:

“…Tell the little ones
to cry and then go to sleep, curled up
where they can. And if any of us get lost,
if any of us cannot come all the way—
remember: there will come a time when
all we have said and all we have hoped
will be all right.”

Word Play

Rachel Henry1 Comment

Reading a lot of poetry reminds me how much fun language is.

Words get a bad rap sometimes: unable to express the ineffable, “apple” never quite getting at the crispness and juiciness of the real thing, inconsistent and illogical spellings—at least in English.

On the other hand, just consider how entertaining a thesaurus can be. I recently looked up the adjective “visionary,” and the synonyms ranged from “astral” to “noble.” I got a kick out of inserting some of the synonyms into my sentence: “His astral leadership moved the university in a completely new direction.” I bet it did.

I love how some words can’t be translated, like “douce” in French, which means soft, but also sweet and gentle at the same time. It means both the light after sunset on a perfect day and the way it feels at that moment, and we don’t have a word for that in English.

I love that the structure of a language reflects the way a culture thinks. You really can’t say, “When the rain began falling, Jane had been planning to go to the grocery store” in Chinese because the Chinese don’t see the point of obsessing about time in quite the same way Americans do.

I love that, aside from using it to tell jokes, language can be the joke: A mushroom walks into a bar. The bartender says, “We don’t serve mushrooms here.” The mushroom says, “Why not? I’m a fungi.”

And I love that words can be hung together so beautifully, with such poise and precision, that they can make us weep.

Like most things human, language won’t get us all the way to wherever we’re going, but it’s a wonderful companion along the way.

In keeping with the National Poetry Month theme, here’s one I’m sure the poet enjoyed writing. It is a little less straightforward than the others I’ve posted this month, but just skip the parts you don’t understand and dance with cummings through the rest of it.

i thank You God for most this amazing…
by e.e. cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Warning: There are a couple of poems I’d like to share that I didn’t get posted, so National Poetry Month may extend slightly into May.

Getting Un-Busy

Rachel Henry1 Comment

When someone asks us how we are, there are so many responses we never use: ecstatic, grieving, lonely, joyful, sad, afraid, pensive, loved, happy. The acceptable emotional range runs from pretty good to fine on the positive side and can’t complain to hanging in there on the negative side. But if we want to make it clear that we are suffering nobly we say, “Busy!”

I hear busy more often than any other answer at work. It is accurate. Most people wear more hats than comfortably fit on their heads and have been tasked with more than can be accomplished in forty hours a week, or fifty or sixty.

I sometimes feel myself competing to be busier than others because it equates to working harder and being a more responsible, valuable employee and therefore a clearly superior human being. Because that’s the point of life, really—to be better than everyone else. That will lead to fulfillment and a sense of profound peace every time.

A few months ago, I decided to stop focusing on the busy-ness, stop comparing overwhelmingly behind horror stories, and find some other way to describe my state of being. I was doing pretty well. Until last week.

Then I got really busy. Emails went unanswered. Projects fell off my plate, pushed off by more urgent projects. When people asked me how I was, I didn’t say overwhelmed or distracted or struggling to enjoy my accomplishments because the next task is always looming. I said busy. I’ve been saying it ever since.

The week before last, a hummingbird came and hovered in front of my window and commenced turning flips in the air. This is the kind of thing I don’t notice when I’m caught up in having too much to do. This is the kind of thing I think is most important to notice in this life.

In keeping with the National Poetry Month theme, here is another one from William Stafford that suggests a possible alternative to a constant focus on our ever-growing to-do list.

You Reading This, Be Ready
by William Stafford

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

Snow by George Bilgere

Rachel Henry1 Comment

A heavy snow, and men my age
all over the city
are having heart attacks in their driveways,

dropping their nice new shovels
with the ergonomic handles
that finally did them no good.

Gray-headed men who meant no harm,
who abided by the rules and worked hard
for modest rewards, are slipping

softly from their mortgages,
falling out of their marriages.
How gracefully they swoon—

that lovely, old-fashioned word—
from dinner parties, grandkids,
vacations in Florida.

They should have known better
than to shovel snow at their age.
If only they’d heeded

the sensible advice of their wives
and hired a snow-removal service.
But there’s more to life

than merely being sensible. Sometimes
a man must take up his shovel
and head out alone into the snow.

This poem helped me understand men and accept that if my dad insists on living alone in Colorado when he’s old and slips on the ice and is run over by his snowblower, for some reason that I will never comprehend, he needed to do that more than he needed to live another few years.

My apologies to the author as I can’t get the line justification to render correctly. The Writer’s Almanac has the poem with correct spacing.

Note: This is one in a series of poems selected to help those who may have been intimidated by poetry see that it need not be complicated to be beautiful and meaningful. Happy National Poetry Month!

In Praise of Flowers

Rachel Henry4 Comments

An incredible row of bearded irises in more than the colors of the rainbow is blooming along the path between the van drop off and my office. Every day my vanmates and I walk by them, we comment on their beauty. Every day, there’s a new facet to notice, a new color opening up to the world. It must be the best way to start the day.

purple irises

A few amazing things about flowers:

Amazing thing number one: irises come in more than one color—burgundy, a purple so deep you can almost taste it, combination packs of dusty red or violet with yellow, a bloom that starts off the palest purple and turns white as it unfurls.

Amazing thing number two: the whole furling business. These large petals start out all folded up in a neat little package. How do they do that?

Amazing thing number three: this is only one kind of flower! We have yet to celebrate the bright orange poppies along the side of the road or the jasmine whose scent is filling my patio with honeyed air or the delicate cherry blossoms that look just as beautiful falling off the tree as in full bloom.

Amazing thing number four: you don’t have to do anything except plant and water them. You don’t have to cajole them or pay them or promise them fame. It’s just what they do.

Amazing thing number five: flowers use their beauty to help support all land-dwelling life. Without flowers, we would be in big trouble.

The richness of these fifty feet of ruffled, life-giving color is too great to comprehend.

In keeping with the National Poetry Month theme, here is a poem about what comes after the flowers.

From Blossoms
By Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Blue Man Wow

Rachel Henry3 Comments

You know how if someone asks you what a strawberry tastes like you can’t say because it only tastes like itself? The performance team Blue Man Group is equally unique.

After watching their show, I left the theater feeling anything was possible. So often we think that our creative ideas are impractical, uninteresting to others, or simply not that good. In the spirit of Bob Newhart’s tobacco sketch, here’s a possible description that Blue Man Group gave when first trying to sell their act:

“We’ll shave our heads and put solid blue makeup all over them. We’ll play drums covered with paint and put strange things in our mouths, chew them up, and spit them out. And it will be funny. Oh, and we won’t talk.”

They may have bankrolled the first few shows themselves.

I once heard a talk by a psychologist who explained how, because of the way our brains work, we can’t picture something we haven’t built any neural pathways for. After saying the word “apple” and asking everyone in the room to get a mental picture of it, she flashed up a slide showing a red apple, a green apple, and the current Apple logo and asked how many people had pictured each one. A third to half of the room raised their hands for the Apple logo. She pointed out that in 1980, that result wasn’t possible because the current apple logo didn’t exist.

Yet that’s what we do when we create—we picture things that have never been before. They might take flight from past events and experiences—certainly apples preceded Apple—or other people’s creations, but that doesn’t mean they’re not new. And they can transform the way we see things, even change what our language means.

As someone who sometimes doubts her own ability to change, I find that tremendously exciting, and I’m grateful to Blue Man Group for the brilliant reminder and for the laughs.

In keeping with the National Poetry Month theme, here is a poem by the fourteenth-century Sufi master Hafiz that I think speaks to the same topic.

We Have Not Come to Take Prisoners
By Hafiz

We have not come here to take prisoners
But to surrender ever more deeply
To freedom and joy.

We have not come into this exquisite world
To hold ourselves hostage from love.

Run my dear,
From anything
That may not strengthen
Your precious budding wings.

Run like hell my dear,
From anyone likely
To put a sharp knife
Into the sacred, tender vision
Of your beautiful heart.

We have a duty to befriend
Those aspects of obedience
That stand outside of our house
And shout to our reason
“O please, O please,
Come out and play.”

For we have not come here to take prisoners
Or to confine our wondrous spirits,

But to experience ever and ever more deeply
Our divine courage, freedom, and
Light!

From The Gift, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Yes by William Stafford

Rachel Henry3 Comments

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That’s why we wake
and look out—no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

Stafford is one of my favorites. He admits the existence of dark times while insisting on the reality of the light. You will most likely see more of him this month.

Note: This is one in a series of poems selected to help those who may have been intimidated by poetry see that it need not be complicated to be beautiful and meaningful. Happy National Poetry Month!