the long days of God

Art by Steve Sanderson

On this eve of Thanksgiving, I am particularly focused on my teachers from all these many years ago.

More on that tomorrow.

 In the meantime, here's a poem from John Greenleaf Whittier:

 

My Triumph
John Greenleaf Whittier

The autumn-time has come;
On woods that dream of bloom,
And over purpling vines,
The low sun fainter shines.

The aster-flower is failing,
The hazel’s gold is paling;
Yet overhead more near
The eternal stars appear!

And present gratitude
Insures the future’s good,
And for the things I see
I trust the things to be;

That in the paths untrod,
And the long days of God,
My feet shall still be led,
My heart be comforted.

O living friends who love me!
O dear ones gone above me!
Careless of other fame,
I leave to you my name.

Hide it from idle praises,
Save it from evil phrases:
Why, when dear lips that spake it
Are dumb, should strangers wake it?

Let the thick curtain fall;
I better know than all
How little I have gained,
How vast the unattained.

Not by the page word-painted
Let life be banned or sainted:
Deeper than written scroll
The colors of the soul.

Sweeter than any sung
My songs that found no tongue;
Nobler than any fact
My wish that failed of act.

Others shall sing the song,
Others shall right the wrong,—
Finish what I begin,
And all I fail of win.

What matter, I or they?
Mine or another’s day,
So the right word be said
And life the sweeter made?

Hail to the coming singers!
Hail to the brave light-bringers!
Forward I reach and share
All that they sing and dare.

The airs of heaven blow o’er me;
A glory shines before me
Of what mankind shall be,—
Pure, generous, brave, and free.

A dream of man and woman
Diviner but still human,
Solving the riddle old,
Shaping the Age of Gold!

The love of God and neighbor;
An equal-handed labor;
The richer life, where beauty
Walks hand in hand with duty.

Ring, bells in unreared steeples,
The joy of unborn peoples!
Sound, trumpets far off blown,
Your triumph is my own!

Parcel and part of all,
I keep the festival,
Fore-reach the good to be,
And share the victory.

I feel the earth move sunward,
I join the great march onward,
And take, by faith, while living,
My freehold of thanksgiving.

 

Bee in the Morning Glory       photo by Julie Zickefoose

 

In today's sharp sparkle

 The temperature was 22 degrees here this morning.  Slowly I am dismantling the garden, now full of blackened and shrivelled branches.

But also full of white-throated sparrows and juncos, and , I hope, Evening Grosbeaks.

photo by Diane Porter

White-throated Sparrow.  photo by Bill Hubick

Here's a poem by Elizabeth Alexander:

Praise Song for the Day

A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration

 

Each day we go about our business,

walking past each other, catching each other’s

eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

 

All about us is noise. All about us is

noise and bramble, thorn and din, each

one of our ancestors on our tongues.

 

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning

a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,

repairing the things in need of repair.

 

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,

with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,

with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

 

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky.

A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

 

We encounter each other in words, words

spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,

words to consider, reconsider.

 

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark

the will of some one and then others, who said

I need to see what’s on the other side.

 

I know there’s something better down the road.

We need to find a place where we are safe.

We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

 

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.

Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,

who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

 

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built

brick by brick the glittering edifices

they would then keep clean and work inside of.

 

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.

Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,

the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

 

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,

others by first do no harm or take no more

than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

 

Love beyond marital, filial, national,

love that casts a widening pool of light,

love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

 

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,

any thing can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

 

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Copyright © 2009 by Elizabeth Alexander. All rights reserved. 

 

The Dances you've already had

 

Lately I've been remembering the dances I've already had - the romantic ones with boys/men a long time ago.  I now know that at least three of those boys/men have passed on. That's something else I've considered:  the synonyms for "died":   passed on,  passed away,  etc.  One of my sisters always says

"Gone to God."   The dogs and cats who have "crossed the Rainbow Bridge"  

I still have the image in my head from when my dad died. I visited him on a Wednesday, and on the following Friday I was at a meeting in Buffalo and got a call from the nursing home that he had died in his sleep in the middle of the afternoon.  I envisioned him on a small boat, moving away from the shore of the living on the sea of eternity, quietly moving on, his face toward the horizon.

art by D.D. McInnis

and this poem, from Joy Harjo:

REMEMBER

Remember the sky that you were born under,

know each of the star’s stories.

Remember the moon, know who she is.

Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the

strongest point of time. Remember sundown

and the giving away tonight.

Remember your birth, how your mother struggled

to give you form and breath. You are evidence of

her life, and her mother’s, and hers.

Remember your father. He is your life, also.

Remember the earth whose skin you are:

red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth

brown earth, we are earth.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their

tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,

listen to them. They are alive poems.

Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the

origin of this universe.

Remember you are all people and all people

are you.

Remember you are this universe and this

universe is you.

Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.

Remember language comes from this.

Remember the dance language is, that life is.

Remember.

by Joy Harjo *(Muscogee/Creek Nation, 3rd term US Poet Laureate).

 

Autumn charms my melancholy mind

 

Art by Dee Nickerson

Here's a poem by Elizabeth Stoddard:

November

Much have I spoken of the faded leaf;

Long have I listened to the wailing wind,

And watched it ploughing through the heavy clouds;

For autumn charms my melancholy mind.

When autumn comes, the poets sing a dirge:

The year must perish; all the flowers are dead;

The sheaves are gathered; and the mottled quail

Runs in the stubble, but the lark has fled!

Still, autumn ushers in the Christmas cheer,

The holly-berries and the ivy-tree:

They weave a chaplet for the Old Year's heir;

These waiting mourners do not sing for me!

I find sweet peace in depths of autumn woods,

Where grow the ragged ferns and roughened moss;

The naked, silent trees have taught me this,—

The loss of beauty is not always loss!

 

Art by Lucy Grossmith

Full moon nights

 Jane Madgwick   Chalk Line, Moonlight, 2016

Rob Gonsalves    Over the Moon

Here's a poem by Maggie Dietz:

November

Show's over, folks. And didn't October do

A bang-up job? Crisp breezes, full-throated cries

Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon.

 

Nothing left but fool's gold in the trees.

Did I love it enough, the full-throttle foliage,

While it lasted? Was I dazzled? The bees

 

Have up and quit their last-ditch flights of forage

And gone to shiver in their winter clusters.

Field mice hit the barns, big squirrels gorge

 

On busted chestnuts. A sky like hardened plaster

Hovers. The pasty river, its next of kin,

Coughs up reed grass fat as feather dusters.

 

Even the swarms of kids have given in

To winter's big excuse, boxed-in allure:

TVs ricochet light behind pulled curtains.

 

The days throw up a closed sign around four.

The hapless customer who'd wanted something

Arrives to find lights out, a bolted door.

Maggie Dietz, "November" from That Kind of Happy.  Copyright © 2016 by The University of Chicago.  Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.

 

 

 

The future is a faded song

 

Tara Turner,  The Souls of Leaves

"I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant -
Among other things - or one way of putting the same
    thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal rose or a lavender
    spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been
    opened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the
    way back."

-   T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages, III

Brings many a loved friend to our sight

 

art by Janie Olsen

NOVEMBER SONG

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To the great archer--not to him

To meet whom flies the sun,

And who is wont his features dim

With clouds to overrun--

But to the boy be vow'd these rhymes,

Who 'mongst the roses plays,

Who hear us, and at proper times

To pierce fair hearts essays.

Through him the gloomy winter night,

Of yore so cold and drear,

Brings many a loved friend to our sight,

And many a woman dear.

Henceforward shall his image fair

Stand in yon starry skies,

And, ever mild and gracious there,

Alternate set and rise.

 

Everhart Park in the Fall

"To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it is necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air.  What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet.  Some of these apples might be labeled, “To be eaten in the wind.” It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit. . . The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past.  It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England.  I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples.  Ah, poor soul, there are many pleasures which you will not know! . . . the end of it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a barrel."

-   Henry David Thoreau

The night is darkening round me

 

Spellbound      by Emily Bronte

The night is darkening round me

The wild winds coldly blow;

But a tyrant spell has bound me

And I cannot, cannot go.

 

The giant trees are bending

Their bare boughs weighed with snow.

And the storm is fast descending

And yet I cannot go.

 

Clouds beyond clouds above me

Wastes beyond wastes below;

But nothing drear can move me;

I will not, cannot go.

 

Some of the days in November carry the whole memory of summer as a fire opal carries the color of moonrise. These are the days I especially love, when the air lies soft and quiet over the dreaming earth; it is a reflective and thoughtful time.

~ Gladys Taber

 

"Let confusion be the design
and all my thoughts go,
swallowed by desire: recess
from promises in
the November of your arms.
Release from the rose: broken
reeds, strawpale,
through which, from easy
branches that mock the blood
a few leaves fall. There
the mind is cradled,
stripped also and returned
to the ground, a trivial
and momentary clatter. Sleep
and be brought down, and so
condone the world, eased of
the jagged sky and all
its petty imageries, flying
birds, its fogs and windy
phalanxes . . ."
-   William Carlos Williams, Design for November

 

leftover creepy pictures and poems from Halloween

All Souls Day

 

Here's a poem by Frances Bellerby:

All Souls' Day

Let's go our old way
by the stream, and kick the leaves
as we always did, to make
the rhythm of breaking waves.

This day draws no breath –
shows no colour anywhere
except for the leaves - in their death
brilliant as never before.

Yellow of Brimstone Butterfly,
brown of Oak Eggar Moth –
you'd say. And I'd be wondering why
a summer never seems lost

if two have been together
witnessing the variousness of light,
and the same two in lustreless November
enter the year's night…

The slow-worm stream - how still!
Above that spider's unguarded door,
look – dull pearls…Time's full,
brimming, can hold no more.

Next moment (we well know,
my darling, you and I)
what the small day cannot hold
must spill into eternity.

So perhaps we should move cat-soft
meanwhile, and leave everything unsaid,
until no shadow of risk can be left
of disturbing the scatheless dead.

Ah, but you were always leaf-light.
And you so seldom talk
as we go. But there at my side
through the bright leaves you walk.

And yet – touch my hand
that I may be quite without fear,
for it seems as if a mist descends,
and the leaves where you walk do not stir.

Frances Bellerby

 

And this one, from Alberto Rios"

November 2: Día de los muertos

Alberto Ríos - 1952-

·       

1

It is not simply the Day of the Dead—loud, and parties.
More quietly, it is the day of my dead. The day of your dead.

These days, the neon of it all, the big-teeth, laughing skulls,
The posed calacas and Catrinas and happy dead people doing funny things—

It’s all in good humor, and sometimes I can’t help myself: I laugh out loud, too.
But I miss my father. My grandmother has been gone

Almost so long I can’t grab hold of her voice with my ears anymore,
Not easily. My mother-in-law, she’s still here, still in things packed

In boxes, her laughter on videotape, and in conversations.
Our dog died several years ago and I try to say his name

Whenever I leave the house—You take care of this house now,
I say to him, the way I always have, the way he knows.

I grew up with the trips to the cemetery and pan de muerto,
The prayers and the favorite foods, the carne asada, the beer.

But that was in the small town where my memory still lives.
Today, I’m in the big city, and that small town feels far away.

 

2

The Day of the Dead—it’s really the days of the dead. All Saints’ Day,
The first of November, also called the día de los angelitos—

Everybody thinks it’s Day of the Dead—but it’s not, not exactly.
This first day is for those who have died a saint

And for the small innocents—the criaturas­—the tender creatures
Who have been taken from us all, sometimes without a name.

To die a saint deserves its day, to die a child. The following day,
The second of November, this is for everybody else who has died

And there are so many,
A grandmother, a father, a distant uncle or lost cousin.

It is hard enough to keep track even within one’s own family.
But the day belongs to everyone, so many home altars,

So many parents gone, so many husbands, so many
Aunt Normas, so many Connies and Matildes. Countless friends.

Still, by the end of the day, we all ask ourselves the same thing:
Isn’t this all over yet?

 

3

All these dead coming after—and so close to—Halloween,
The days all start to blend,

The goblins and princesses of the miniature world
Not so different from the ways in which we imagine

Those who are gone, their memories smaller, their clothes brighter.
We want to feed them only candy, too—so much candy

That our own mouths will get hypnotized by the sweetness,
Our own eyes dazzled by the color, our noses by the smells

The first cool breath of fall makes, a fire always burning
Somewhere out there. We feed our memories

And then, humans that we are, we just want to move quickly away
From it all, happy for the richness of everything

If unsettled by the cut pumpkins and gourds,
The howling decorations. The marigolds—cempasúchiles—

If it rains, they stink, these fussy flowers of the dead.
Bread of the dead, day of the dead—it’s hard to keep saying the word.

 

4

The dead:
They take over the town like beach vacationers, returning tourists getting into everything:

I had my honeymoon here, they say, and are always full of contagious nostalgia.
But it’s all right. They go away, after a while.

They go, and you miss them all over again.
The papel picado, the cut blue and red and green paper decorations,

The empanadas and coconut candy, the boxes of cajeta, saladitos,
Which make your tongue white like a ghost’s—

You miss all of it soon enough,
Pictures of people smiling, news stories, all the fiestas, all this exhaustion.

The coming night, the sweet breads, the bone tiredness of too much—
Loud noise, loud colors, loud food, mariachis, even just talking.

It’s all a lot of noise, but it belongs here. The loud is to help us not think,
To make us confuse the day and our feelings with happiness.

Because, you know, if we do think about our dead,
Wherever they are, we’ll get sad, and begin to look across at each other.

 

 

 

 

 

Turning to November

 I still have poems from October that I want to share.

Here's one from W.S. Merwin:

"A child looking at ruins grows younger

but cold

and wants to wake to a new name

I have been younger in October

than in all the months of spring

walnut and may leaves the color

of shoulders at the end of summer

a month that has been to the mountain

and become light there

the long grass lies pointing uphill

even in death for a reason

that none of us knows

and the wren laughs in the early shade now

come again shining glance in your good time

naked air late morning

my love is for lightness

of touch foot feather

the day is yet one more yellow leaf

and without turning I kiss the light

by an old well on the last of the month

gathering wild rose hips

in the sun."

-   W. S. Merwin,  The Love of October

 

American Kestrel  at Hawk Mountain

and from Thoreau:

"To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it is necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air.  What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet.  Some of these apples might be labeled, “To be eaten in the wind.” It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit. . . The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past.  It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England.  I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples.  Ah, poor soul, there are many pleasures which you will not know! . . . the end of it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a barrel."

-   Henry David Thoreau

and it's All Saints Day.  Here are four favorites: Jane Frances de Chantal, Francis de Sales, Vincent de Paul, and Louise de Marillac.    

Art by Mickey O'Neill McGrath