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

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...

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.

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.