Sunday, April 24, 2011

Happy Easter!


My favorite Easter hymn:

Now the green blade rises
from the buried grain,
wheat that in dark earth
many days has lain;
love lives again,
that with the dead has been:
Love is come again like wheat that springs up green.

In the grave they laid him,
Love whom hate had slain,
thinking that never
he would wake again,
laid in the earth
like grain that sleeps unseen:
Love is come again like wheat that springs up green.

Forth he came in quiet,
like the risen grain,
he that for three days
in the grave had lain,
quick from the dead
the risen Christ is seen:
Love is come again like wheat that springs up green.

When our hearts are wintry,
grieving, or in pain,
Christ's touch can call us
back to life again,
fields of our hearts
that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again like wheat that springs up green.

Words: John Macleod Campbell Crum (20thC)
Music: Noel nouvelet, medieval French carol

Monday, April 11, 2011

more NaPoWriMo



( these are still shabby, and definitely first drafts, but here they are)

9
Available
Birdseed is, on my windowsill.
A car is, in the parking lot.
My dream of the bullying Sister Cromwell is,
Returning night after night
To tell me I must dispose of all my books.
Travail prevails
I avail myself of a veil
The vale of tears
The veil that rain makes on her loom of light.
Travail makes
Travelling trials and tempest.
Bridal veil,
Bush denuded by my cousin and I
Who scattered white blossoms over the green lawn
Like snow
Like torn up paper
Like litter glitters on green.




10
My parents' wedding day-
April 10 -
Cold and blustery in 1944
Outside the rectory of Saint Agnes Parish
In the brittle afternoon sun.
My mother holding her hat on her head,
Shivering in her new suit.
No wedding gown for the non-Catholic ceremony
Of thirtysomethings in the rectory.
My father dapper happy in a new dark suit
So glad she said yes.



11
The inner life of a paper clip.
To what does it long
To be attached?
What is its memory
Of being twisted into shape?
Does it resent not being
A staple?

Garden Update




Virginia Bluebells,
Tulips,
Violets,
Lilies of the Valley coming up...

Saturday, April 9, 2011

more NaPoWriMo

#8

Phoebe , nestmaking


Slatey grey on the tilted head,
brown dark shiney eye thoughtful
facing camera
absorbed expression on her face
fiber filament of last summer bindweed
clutched in beak
ready to add to cushion
the mudspattered floor
on the edge of the ceiling.

NaPoWriMo


stands for National Poetry Writing Month... I'm still trying to catch up. Should have 9 poems by now, but this is only the 7th, and it's a revision of one I started several years ago, about the grounds at our Provincial House in Los Altos Hills California:

What the Angel Saw
God planted a garden in the high hills west,
and there placed the black tailed deer
in the cool of morning to stroll by the lake,
arch their necks in the breeze
where the fountain shines a spray of water
on their fine fur.
Out of the coyote ground
grew trees for a throne,
their months each one twelve
fruit produces,
grapefruit, apricot, lemon, orange,
leaves for medicine,
eucalyptus oil to light
my lamps.
Underground hoses rise to quench the garden
with crystal clear as water.
Beyond there, the brown hills divide
and become the abode of millionaires.
There shall curse a deserving nothing.
The middle of dawn flowed,
light growing
down the steepness,
giving life to the river in me,
thanks to the Angel who opened the blinds.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

National Poetry Month


I should have written six poems by now; however, the first five days were so busy that I couldn't . Now I am fighting inertia.

So I will post five poems "from before" and add a sixth one, hot off the press:

#1
Typo
One slip of the finger and
Divine becomes Diving
Deep in my dream to the floor of the flooded cellar
Through a window to the green sheen
Of chlorine depths of the swimming pool
At Lenape Park
Where I opened my eyes to stinging wonder
Of watching my white wrinkled feet
Flutter like flippers
And back to Harry Potter somersaulting into
The lake and down to the lair of the grindylow
And back to myself,
Sprinting off a cliff into Crater Lake,
Turquoise and freezing
Gritty grey crumbled lava clouding my eyes
As I plunge further, further,
To the center of breath.

#2
The Stone Dog
My father and I
Wander the Protestant cemetery
Oaklands
Examining the tombstones
And a flat stone
With a life size stone dog
A Labrador
Keeping watch
Over the bones of his owner.
I’m small enough to ride him,
And I do, while the brown leaves flag me
While my father smokes and waits.

#3

Peripheral Vision
My mother can see me this way
Seam ripper stole her center
Partly curly hair weather
Perennial Thyme
Capricious Apocrypha,
burning aura of clementines.

#4
Saving Stamps
candy for later
the cerulean warbler
money
my soul


#5

The Meaning of Radiance
Radiation still cooking my colon
Years after the machine
Delivered its killing light
Waves in defenseless air
Through the tissue in the wrong place
At the wrong time.
Light of sun distilled, forced
Through tunnels into funnels
Glowing the teeth of the smile of the
Child in Hiroshima.
The Meaning of Radiance

#6

Corot Blue

puckered with clouds,
Damask wards off rain
Father Hopkins, lick ink into my pen
shake blue over paper.