Summer Projects

How is it that seven weeks of my summer holidays have gone by?  Well, I was out of town for two of them and sick for a third, but what of the other four?

In addition to naps and grocery shopping and listening to Ruth Rendell murder mysteries on tape,
I tended that courtyard garden, which is a source of joy for me every day.

And I worked on three summer projects.

1. Jessica Powers    I finished and presented the paper on Jessica before the summer actually began - at Fordham in late April.  Have talked about that in a previous post.

2. Stevie Smith      Finished my work on her poem and presented it at the West Chester Poetry Conference   June 8-11.

3. The Poetry Retreat      I finished this project today!  The poems are chosen and typed and all the materials duplicated.   I am giving this retreat to some of my sisters from July 10-18 in Albany New York.

Now I have ten days to work/play in the garden, act as driver for any of my sisters who need rides to the doctor, etc.,  and , hopefully, break through this long dry spell, and write.

In the meantime, here is a poem I am using in this  "Praying with Poetry" retreat:

Dag Hammarskjöld
Translated from the Swedish by Lennart and Gillian Nilsson

Is this a new land,
in a different reality
from today’s?
Or have I lived there.
before this day?

Woke up,
an ordinary day with grey light
reflected from the street,
woke up –
from a sombre blue night
above the tree line
moonlight on the moor
the mountain ridge in shadow.
Remembered
different dreams,
remembered
the same mountain landscape:
twice did I climb the ridges,
I lived by the inmost lake
and followed the river
towards its source.
The seasons have passed
and the light
and the weather
and the hour.
But it is the same land.
And I am beginning to know the map
and the points of the compass.