Thought of the day

His Holiness said his experience was that the American people in general tend to react quickly to developments, being very joyous when something good happened or feeling depressed when something bad took place. He suggested that they needed to take time to think over the development.

— The Dalai Lama’s Web site, reporting on his visit to New York last week

Comment: I read this great quote in John Kenney's hilarious Op-Ed in the NY Times. I'm just so sick of this endless cycle of conflict and bickering. If you listen, read or watch the news we do come across as a nation's of chickens without heads. Squawk! Squawk! Squawk! All over the place. We never stop and think. We just judge and then judge some more. There needs to be more gestation and less pontificating. Can't we come together on the important matters and stop tearing each other apart?

Waterwings

by Cathy Song

The mornings are his,

blue and white

like the tablecloth at breakfast.

He’s happy in the house,

a sweep of the spoon

brings the birds under his chair.

He sings and the dishes disappear.

Or holding a crayon like a candle,

he draws a circle.

It is his hundredth dragonfly.

Calling for more paper,

this one is red-winged

and like the others,

he wills it to fly, simply

by the unformed curve of his signature.

Waterwings he calls them,

the floats I strap to his arms.

I wear an apron of concern,

sweep the morning of birds.

To the water he returns,

plunging where it’s cold,

moving and squealing into sunlight.

The water from here seems flecked with gold.

I watch the circles

his small body makes

fan and ripple,

disperse like an echo

into the sum of water, light and air.

His imprint on the water

has but a brief lifespan,

the flicker of a dragonfly’s delicate wing.

This is sadness, I tell myself,

the morning he chooses to leave his wings behind,

because he will not remember

that he and beauty were aligned,

skimming across the water, nearly airborne,

on his first solo flight.

I’ll write “how he could not

contain his delight.”

At the other end,

in another time frame,

he waits for me—

having already outdistanced this body,

the one that slipped from me like a fish,

floating, free of itself.

Comment: Happy Mother's Day from the Poetry Foundation. This poem made me tear up. There is so much love and beauty in the details of watching your child grow up. But there is always an underlying tenderness because we know all of those little moments are ephemeral. Time marches mercilessly on. It is as Nabokov's poet wrote in Pale Fire, "The melancholy and the tenderness/Of mortal life; the passion and the pain."

Sentimental Education

by Tony Hoagland

And when we were eight, or nine,
our father took us back into the Alabama woods,
found a rotten log, and with his hunting knife

pried off a slab of bark
to show the hundred kinds of bugs and grubs
that we would have to eat in a time of war.

"The ones who will survive," he told us,
looking at us hard,
"are the ones who are willing to do anything."
Then he popped one of those pale slugs
into his mouth and started chewing.

And that was Lesson Number 4
in The Green Beret Book of Childrearing.

I looked at my pale, scrawny, knock-kneed, bug-eyed brother,
who was identical to me,
and saw that, in a world that ate the weak,
we didn't have a prayer,

and next thing I remember, I'm working for a living
at a boring job
that I'm afraid of losing,

with a wife whose lack of love for me
is like a lack of oxygen,
and this dead thing in my chest
that used to be my heart.

Oh, if he were alive, I would tell him, "Dad,
you were right! I ate a lot of stuff
far worse than bugs."

And I was eaten, I was eaten,
I was picked up
and chewed
and swallowed

down into the belly of the world.

"Sentimental Education" by Tony Hoagland, from Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty. © Graywolf Press, 2010 . Reprinted with permission of the author.

Comment: Another poem I snagged from The Writer's Almanac. Sudeep took classes from Tony Hoagland and got to know him quite well in college. I never took a class with him in college, but I have read a bunch of his poetry and even saw him read here in Dallas. When I got him to sign my book, I told him about our G.W. and Sudeep connection and he said, "You're a long way from D.C." I don't know. It made me feel sad. He was right. It's odd where you find yourself 10 years later. It made me feel old and far way from those carefree days. At the time he was teaching at a university in Houston. I wonder if he is still there. I'm sure poets, especially ones who teach live a nomadic life. Anyway, I thought this poem was a good example of his work. He's so effortlessly funny and sympathetic as a narrator. His poems are always tinged with sadness and contradiction, but they feel honest. I love too the title of the book!

The Wreck of the Hesperus

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It was the schooner Hesperus,

That sailed the wintry sea;

And the skipper had taken his little daughtèr,

To bear him company.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,

Her cheeks like the dawn of day,

And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,

That ope in the month of May.

The skipper he stood beside the helm,

His pipe was in his mouth,

And he watched how the veering flaw did blow

The smoke now West, now South.

Then up and spake an old Sailòr,

Had sailed to the Spanish Main,

"I pray thee, put into yonder port,

For I fear a hurricane.

"Last night, the moon had a golden ring,

And to-night no moon we see!"

The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,

And a scornful laugh laughed he.

Colder and louder blew the wind,

A gale from the Northeast,

The snow fell hissing in the brine,

And the billows frothed like yeast.

Down came the storm, and smote amain

The vessel in its strength;

She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,

Then leaped her cable's length.

"Come hither! come hither! my little daughtèr,

And do not tremble so;

For I can weather the roughest gale

That ever wind did blow."

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat

Against the stinging blast;

He cut a rope from a broken spar,

And bound her to the mast.

"O father! I hear the church-bells ring,

Oh say, what may it be?"

"'T is a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!" —

And he steered for the open sea.

"O father! I hear the sound of guns,

Oh say, what may it be?"

"Some ship in distress, that cannot live

In such an angry sea!"

"O father! I see a gleaming light,

Oh say, what may it be?"

But the father answered never a word,

A frozen corpse was he.

Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,

With his face turned to the skies,

The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow

On his fixed and glassy eyes.

Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed

That savèd she might be;

And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave

On the Lake of Galilee.

And fast through the midnight dark and drear,

Through the whistling sleet and snow,

Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept

Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe.

And ever the fitful gusts between

A sound came from the land;

It was the sound of the trampling surf

On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.

The breakers were right beneath her bows,

She drifted a dreary wreck,

And a whooping billow swept the crew

Like icicles from her deck.

She struck where the white and fleecy waves

Looked soft as carded wool,

But the cruel rocks, they gored her side

Like the horns of an angry bull.

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,

With the masts went by the board;

Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,

Ho! ho! the breakers roared!

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,

A fisherman stood aghast,

To see the form of a maiden fair,

Lashed close to a drifting mast.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast,

The salt tears in her eyes;

And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,

On the billows fall and rise.

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,

In the midnight and the snow!

Christ save us all from a death like this,

On the reef of Norman's Woe!

Comment: I had to include this gem of a poem. The blog's namesake just keeps showing up in poem after poem. I love it! And another serendipitous discovery was I have known this poem practically my entire life. I just never knew the title. And do you know why I knew this poem? Alright, anyone who doesn't have a high tolerance for dorkiness better shut down their computers...this poem is featured in the Canadian cinema classic "Anne of Avonlea". For all of you lame asses, "Anne of Avonlea" is the sequel to the much beloved film adaptation of "Anne of Green Gables." Anne herself did not recite this poem. She has the great misfortune of having to read Alfred Noyes's "The Highwayman" after an accomplished and much older actress recites "The Wreck of the Hesperus" at a poetry recital at the White Sands Hotel. Are there any other "Anne of Green Gables" fans out there? Are you feelin' me on this one? No? Okay, just forget I ever disclosed this about myself. Now I want to recite this poem and clutch my breast at the end. Get the smelling salts!

Breakage

by Mary Oliver

I go down to the edge of the sea.

How everything shines in the morning light!

The cusp of the whelk,

the broken cupboard of the clam,

the opened, blue mussels,

moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—

and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,

dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.

It's like a schoolhouse

of little words,

thousands of words.

First you figure out what each one means by itself,

the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop

full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

*whelk: a common sea snail

Comment: Mary Oliver is a really extraordinary nature poet. She's not as flowery as lthe transcendentalists, but of course, she is influenced by them. She's not quite as dark (at least the little I've read of her) as Elizabeth Bishop, but nature holds the answers for her. She's a supreme observer like William Carlos Williams. When she writes, it's as if all the mysteries of life are in that "scallop full of moonlight". I wonder if I could ever look at nature in that way. I think about nature a lot because of K. He thinks about it all the time and stops to looks at the birds and insects and asks me questions about things I take for granted like eggs and nests. I wonder if I'll ever look at nature again like a child or Oliver does. What can I learn from observing the scene just outside my window?