A thin rain fastens banks of last night's snow

 

art by Lisa Graa Johnson

Here's a poem by/from Caligulan:

artist: Shi Yi

Lenten Moon

 

art by Lizzie Spikes

Hunger Moon

BY JANE COOPER

The last full moon of February

stalks the fields; barbed wire casts a shadow.

Rising slowly, a beam moved toward the west

stealthily changing position

 

until now, in the small hours, across the snow

it advances on my pillow

to wake me, not rudely like the sun

but with the cocked gun of silence.

 

I am alone in a vast room

where a vain woman once slept.

The moon, in pale buckskins, crouches

on guard beside her bed.

 

Slowly the light wanes, the snow will melt

and all the fences thrum in the spring breeze

but not until that sleeper, trapped

in my body, turns and turns.

Jane Cooper, "Hunger Moon" from The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed. Copyright © 2000 by Jane Cooper.  Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

photo by Julie Goodblood

Bring the singer, bring the nester

 

Art by Kerry Buck

Here's a poem by Robert Frost:

To the Thawing Wind

 

Robert Frost - 1874-1963

 

Come with rain, O loud Southwester!

Bring the singer, bring the nester;

Give the buried flower a dream;

Make the settled snowbank steam;

Find the brown beneath the white;

But whate’er you do tonight,

Bathe my window, make it flow,

Melt it as the ice will go;

Melt the glass and leave the sticks

Like a hermit’s crucifix;

Burst into my narrow stall;

Swing the picture on the wall;

Run the rattling pages o’er;

Scatter poems on the floor;

Turn the poet out of door.

 

Now, in the dark of February Rains

 

Here's a heart-lifting poem from George MacDonald:

 

In February

 

Now in the dark of February rains,

Poor lovers of the sunshine, spring is born,

The earthy fields are full of hidden corn,

And March's violets bud along the lanes;

 

Therefore with joy believe in what remains.

And thou who dost not feel them, do not scorn

Our early songs for winter overworn,

And faith in God's handwriting on the plains.

 

“Hope” writes he, “Love” in the first violet,

“Joy,” even from Heaven, in songs and winds and trees;

And having caught the happy words in these

While Nature labours with the letters yet,

Spring cannot cheat us, though her hopes be broken,

Nor leave us, for we know what God hath spoken.

 

George Macdonald

Another February poem

 

Artist: Jo Grundy

 

February     James Schuyler

 

A chimney, breathing a little smoke.

The sun, I can’t see

making a bit of pink

I can’t quite see in the blue.

The pink of five tulips

at five p.m. on the day before March first.

The green of the tulip stems and leaves

like something I can’t remember,

finding a jack-in-the-pulpit

a long time ago and far away.

Why it was December then

and the sun was on the sea

by the temples we’d gone to see.

One green wave moved in the violet sea

like the UN Building on big evenings,

green and wet

while the sky turns violet.

A few almond trees

had a few flowers, like a few snowflakes

out of the blue looking pink in the light.

A gray hush

in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue

into the sky. They’re just

going over the hill.

The green leaves of the tulips on my desk

like grass light on flesh,

and a green-copper steeple

and streaks of cloud beginning to glow.

I can’t get over

how it all works in together

like a woman who just came to her window

and stands there filling it

jogging her baby in her arms.

She’s so far off. Is it the light

that makes the baby pink?

I can see the little fists

and the rocking-horse motion of her breasts.

It’s getting grayer and gold and chilly.

Two dog-size lions face each other

at the corners of a roof.

It’s the yellow dust inside the tulips.

It’s the shape of a tulip.

It’s the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in.

It’s a day like any other.

 

Through the heaviest drifts

Art by Amanda Clark
 

Here's a poem by Ted Kooser:

 

Late February 

BY TED KOOSER

The first warm day,

and by mid-afternoon

the snow is no more

than a washing

strewn over the yards,

the bedding rolled in knots

and leaking water,

the white shirts lying

under the evergreens.

Through the heaviest drifts

rise autumn’s fallen

bicycles, small carnivals

of paint and chrome,

the Octopus

and Tilt-A-Whirl

beginning to turn

in the sun. Now children,

stiffened by winter

and dressed, somehow,

like old men, mutter

and bend to the work

of building dams.

But such a spring is brief;

by five o’clock

the chill of sundown,

darkness, the blue TVs

flashing like storms

in the picture windows,

the yards gone gray,

the wet dogs barking

at nothing. Far off

across the cornfields

staked for streets and sewers,

the body of a farmer

missing since fall

will show up

in his garden tomorrow,

as unexpected

as a tulip.

 

 

 

Ted Kooser, “Late February” from Sure Signs. Copyright © 1980 by Ted Kooser. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, www.upress.pitt.edu. Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

 

snow has a history with this date

 

Artist: Brenda Dorsey

and it's snowing again. However, the forecast says it will only snow about an hour more, then things warm up.

Photo by Christina Sawitz.  Art in the Garden

But I remember a blizzard around this date in 1977, when the snow filled our courtyard up to the windowsills.

I also remember a bad snowstorm in 1972, when two friends and I were almost killed on Rt. 95 in Delaware. We were on our way to Connecticut, but never made it past West Chester.

So this is not unusual weather. 

A Wintry beginning to Lent

 

Sunny and blue sky morning, but lots of snow on the ground.  25 degrees.  I like knowing that in six weeks it will be Easter, and Spring.

Here's a poem by Scott Cairns:

Possible Answers to Prayer

by Scott Cairns

Your petitions—though they continue to bear

just the one signature—have been duly recorded.

Your anxieties—despite their constant,

relatively narrow scope and inadvertent

entertainment value—nonetheless serve

to bring your person vividly to mind.

Your repentance—all but obscured beneath

a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more

conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.

Your intermittent concern for the sick,

the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes

recognizable to me, if not to them.

Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly

righteous indignation toward the many

whose habits and sympathies offend you—

these must burn away before you’ll apprehend

how near I am, with what fervor I adore

precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.

Source: “Possible Answers to Prayer” from Philokalia: New and Selected

Poems, by Scott Cairns. Lincoln, Nebraska: Zoo Press, 2002.

Vaccination Day 2

 In this, the Saturday of the Fiftieth week of the Quarantine, I'm due to get my second shot of the Moderna Vaccine at noon.  I have been looking forward to this since I had the first one on January 23.   

From what I hear from various friends, it can come with just a sore arm, or with a very strong reaction of fever, chills etc. for days after, as one's immune system kicks into gear.  I hope it's just the sore arm.

Here's a painting from the wonderful artist Andrea Kowch. She has become a favorite of mine.

 

Art by Gary Bunt

 Here's a poem by Boris Pasternak

February

By Boris Pasternak

Translated by A.Z. Foreman

 

February. Get ink. Weep.

Write the heart out about it. Sing

Another song of February

While raucous slush burns black with spring.

 

Six grivnas* for a buggy ride

Past booming bells, on screaming gears,

Out to a place where rain pours down

Louder than any ink or tears

 

Where like a flock of charcoal pears,

A thousand blackbirds, ripped awry

From trees to puddles, knock dry grief

Into the deep end of the eye.

 

A thaw patch blackens underfoot.

The wind is gutted with a scream.

True verses are the most haphazard,

Rhyming the heart out on a theme.

 

*Grivna: a unit of currency.

Another snowy day

 

Art by Lucy Grossmith

Here's a poem by Hayden Carruth

 

"February Morning"

 

The old man takes a nap

too soon in the morning.

His coffee cup grows cold.

Outside the snow falls fast.

He'll not go out today.

Others must clear the way

 

to the car and the shed.

Open upon his lap

lie the poems of Mr. Frost.

 

Somehow his eyes get lost

in the words and the snow,

somehow they go

 

backward against the words,

upward among the flakes

to the blankness of air,

 

the busy abundance there.

Should he take warning?

Mr. Frost went off, they say,

 

in bitterness and despair.

The old man stirs and wakes,

hearing the hungry birds,

 

nuthatch, sparrow, and jay

that clamor outside, unfed,

and words stir from his past

 

like this irritable sorrow

of jay, nuthatch, and sparrow,

wrath which no longer takes

 

shape of sentence or song.

He climbs the stairs to bed.

The snow falls all day long.

 

 

© Hayden Carruth

 

Two more poems for February

 

Poems by Sara Teasdale and Denise Levertov

February Evening in New York

BY DENISE LEVERTOV

As the stores close, a winter light

    opens air to iris blue,

    glint of frost through the smoke

    grains of mica, salt of the sidewalk.

As the buildings close, released autonomous   

    feet pattern the streets

    in hurry and stroll; balloon heads

    drift and dive above them; the bodies   

    aren't really there.

As the lights brighten, as the sky darkens,

    a woman with crooked heels says to another woman   

    while they step along at a fair pace,

    "You know, I'm telling you, what I love best   

    is life. I love life! Even if I ever get

    to be old and wheezy—or limp! You know?   

    Limping along?—I'd still ... " Out of hearing.   

To the multiple disordered tones

    of gears changing, a dance

    to the compass points, out, four-way river.   

    Prospect of sky

    wedged into avenues, left at the ends of streets,   

    west sky, east sky: more life tonight! A range   

    of open time at winter's outskirts.

 

Denise Levertov, “February Evening in New York” from Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960. Copyright © 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1979 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, www.wwnorton.com/nd/welcome.htm.

Spring stands at the gate

 

Art by Yvegeney Mukovinin

Here's a poem by Emily Dickinson:

 

"There’s a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
’T is the seal, despair,—
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, ’t is like the distance
On the look of death."

-  Emily Dickenson, #82