{how is it the end of may, and other queries}
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
~ Anais Nin
So ends the merry, merry month of May, which brought to my circle, weather extremes, dishwashers blowing up, Achilles’s tendon surgery, mental health break, court dates, new, difficult medications, sudden sibling deaths, broken-into cars, suicide, lost jobs, lost illustrators, and plenty of book rejections, as always. May presented my larger circle the writer’s strike, persistent book censorship, a disappointing buy-in on the part of the industry (especially side-eying you, Scholastic) who want to appear in virtuous support of diversity and inclusivity, but who in truth bow to the loudest shareholder monies, and corporations moving hesitantly towards ethical behavior without ever embracing or wholeheartedly championing it. And further out from that, nationally, globally, May has continued to reveal to us ugly social divisions, war and its proxies, the high incidences of violence globally against immigrants, violence against trans persons, Asian, and Black communities in the US that goes on, and on, and on, a rising shriek in our collective ears. I’m thinking we’ve somehow cosmically agreed to delay the “merry” from this month until another day.
And yet, May has also been what it always is, a season of growth, a season of renewal, and a season of change. Yesterday I found the first morning glory blossom, peeking shyly from beneath a broad leaf. The hollyhocks are hip high and the dahlias buds grow fatter every day. The chard and lettuce are tiny, tender shoots, the walking onions stand tall in lines, and all the hard squashes and watermelon have more than six leaves. The last of the corn goes in this week, and the potatoes, ahead of a fall harvest. And there are tomato flowers.
In this grim place, there is still life affirmed. Even in an endless night, there are stars.
This month of shifting tides finds me once again reevaluating issues of religion/faith/denomination, re-examining my abilities to write, and contemplating my reasons for publishing. It is, in many ways, something I used to do more nebulously, a sort of anxious, “should I be quiet now? Do I any longer have anything to say?” angst that rattled in my mental background, but I feel it adds value to be deliberate in these thoughts, to let them come and be spoken aloud, instead of merely haunting me from shadowed corners. Who am I? What is my role? Why should I take up space? Each round of this kind of thinking moves me… some direction.
How about you? What questions are you asking, as the seasons blend and flowers move towards fruiting?
We learn things, through these revelatory moments in our lives. Trees age in circles, tides push us out, and draw us in again, moment by moment, step by step, always moving somewhere both familiar and new. I feel like I am moving both closer to my real self, and further out to sea. My closest relationships are becoming more genuine, and the ones which are …less, are fading. The refining continues to cycle things closer to the heart of the flame, and move what is mere dross further away. The Byrds echoed Ecclesiastes, “to everything there is a season.” All things will be revealed – finished and refined – in due time. So much of life and art is about our process, about waiting and being. About, in the wise words of the late Robin Smith, being here NOW. The seeds have been planted, the water is in place, and from this moment on, it’s about being present to take in each new unfolding, each new direction, each reset and rekindling of our purpose.
This is, admittedly, not my favorite part. I hate these treading water bits of life, this sense of standing in a boat while it’s being sloshed from stem to stern, while the tide is drawing in or running out, and we’re just trying to keep our balance. And yet – it’s been a month of unpacking some things, in between bouts of flailing about and wondering if I’m doing anything right at all. I sense an answer may be just around the corner…
…but, until then, we wait. We listen.
Here. Ready, though hesitant. Willing, though uneasy. Open to the next move.
{pf: poetry peeps drink deep of the ghazel}
Greetings! Welcome to another Poetry Peeps adventure on Poetry Friday!
Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to our challenge in the month of June! Here’s the scoop: we’re writing in response to a quotation. Ours is an excerpt from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 359, in the chapter “People of Corn, People of Light:” “If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.” How does that strike you? This time, the form and way you use this quotation – or another one which strikes your fancy – is totally up to you, but the Poetry Sisters are continuing with our 2023 theme of TRANSFORMATION. You have a month to craft your creation and share it on June 30th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals.
I feel like a dropped mirror – seven years of indifferent luck and little shards of self reflecting any number of different realities. This revision has just wrung me out – but in a better way than I had any right to expect of a novel outline done in a fit of pique that took me deeper than I expected. Himself sat patiently with me the times I completely wigged out and moaned aloud that I was never going to finish this on time. (I did. I always do. I always have. What is work, if you can’t be really dramatic about it, though?)
Oddly, all of this feels like really good prep for doing a ghazel.
No, seriously.
The #1 hardest thing for me to …embody in this couplet form is a sense of disjointedness. No, you’re not telling a story. No, you’re not pulling together the unified theory of anything. No, you’re not supposed to create an ensemble performance. Agha Shahid Ali, the poet who edited Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English, in his foreword compared each ghazal couplet to “a stone from a necklace,” which should continue to “shine in that vivid isolation.” Sara had a great idea when she suggested we think of it as a new “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,”, by Wallace Stevens. That’s the level of splintered we’re going for – and while I’ve been working the past several months on being able to be … loose with words and wordplay, this was still quite a challenge. Dabbling in Neruda last month helped create a feeling of voluptuous abandon with words. This month, I wanted less to luxuriate, and more to make clockwork, ticking along with a limited pas de deux, each couplet touched and spinning perfectly for just a moment…
Well, that was the idea, anyway.
After writing THREE of the bloody things, each one more hated than the last, I took Marilyn Hacker’s “Dark Times” as my mentor text, and tried again… I only lightly kept to our transformation theme, but I tried to order the couplets from darkness into light, or at least from skies of gray to deeper shades of blue.
“Bad Times”
Did thriftiness (or hoarding) got them THROUGH the bad times?
“Use it up, wear it out, make up, or make do” the bad times.
Expansive “destiny,” proud wagons Westward believed
Sepia-tinted lies: this past previewed the bad times.
Did colonialism urge dominion, so might made right?
Post-planet Earth, what’s our next berth, as we accrue the bad times?
Sixteen-nineteen, heartwood filled hell’s incinerator
Nineteen-thirty-three new genocide renewed the bad times.
Prayers on Angel Island’s walls, grief observed in stone.
Regardless of race, the spirit debut in the bad times.
No “time of trouble” singular – disasters, naturally,
Buffet with waves a weary world in view of the bad times.
Sing out for voices silenced, lift memorials, and rise,
For those war-broken who remain black and blue from the bad times.
What generation will survive? A remnant, not a nation
For thick-heads still persist and MISCONSTRUE the bad times.
What metals alloyed, intertwined strengthen weak to strong?
Fired copper, iron, gold sings TRUE in the bad times.
There’s always more poetry. Sara brought this to the table. And here’s Laura’s. Tricia’s poem is here, and Liz’s poem is here. Mary Lee’s lakeside ghazel is here, while Michelle K. joined the challenge here. Heidi’s ghazal is right here. More Poetry Peeps will be checking in throughout the weekend, so don’t forget to come back and read the whole roundup. Meanwhile, Poetry Friday is hosted today by Patricia at Reverie. Thanks, Patricia!
A Buddhist koan about life after enlightenment says that “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.” Well, I’ll respectfully disagree – of course a broken mirror still works! It merely reflects different pieces of the same sky, which is both a kind of clarity and a kind of distance I think I can live with. And if you’re feeling a little broken, a little blurry, taped-together, and wonky, don’t worry, friends. You’re not alone. ♥
Pax.
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It’s so weird to end a month on a Sunday – and it always feels a little sad to end the daily practice of NPM poems. I’ve had fun playing with cinquain. I don’t feel like I’m any better at them, but I do love how the five-line poem can be both so concise and full, depending on syllable count. I found I preferred the Crapsey; ten syllables for an end line feels simply too long – and too hurried, everything all at the end.
Today’s poem is a bit of a cheat; this isn’t news from the world, but from the microcosm of my garden. My alyssum sprouted and immediately burst jubilantly into teensy-tiny (I’m quite squatted down for this shot), scented flowers, so I figured that was the best news of the world I could get. Happy May, friends – fresh breezes, sunny days, more rain soon, and plenty of flowers. The best of the season to you.
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FYI
(Princes
On white horses
Aren’t saving anyone –
Even monarchists who wish them well
Know that.)
The coronation of Charles III and his wife, Camilla, as king and queen of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms is scheduled to take place on Saturday, 6 May 2023, at Westminster Abbey.
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Well. Two hundred acres ablaze in Southern California already. No single season of rain refills aquifers, and with high heat comes high fire risk… and we live on a warming planet. Here we go again.
{pf: poetry peeps appreciate Pablo (Neruda)}
Greetings! Welcome to another Poetry Peeps adventure on Poetry Friday!
Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to our challenge in the month of May! Here’s the scoop: we’re writing a ghazal. The ghazal (tripping correctly from the tongue as “guzzle” – with apologies to those of you giving it a French flair as I used to) is the oldest poetic form still in use, with roots in Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, and Hebrew traditions. A ghazal is made to be sung, and is a couplet-based form with internal rhyme. (Find out more about it at Poets.org.) As always, the topic is totally up to you, but the Poetry Sisters are continuing with our 2023 theme of TRANSFORMATION. You have a month to craft your creation and share it on May 26th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals.
I feel like I need to set up a camera in the garden, so I can capture the milometers-per-hour growth of my seedlings. We have hit the 80°F mark this week in my part of the world for the first time in 2023, and the acceleration of — everything green is just gobsmacking. We’re happily stashing windbreakers and pulling out our short sleeves. …For the most part, anyway.
Last week at my Sunday gig (choir #2), a friend stepped behind the pulpit and slipped off her cardigan to put on her robe. She saw me watching her and winced. “I don’t usually wear sleeveless dresses,” she explained hurriedly. “My arms just look so bad…so crepey.”
Of course, I fussed at her about it, as we do with friends. She looked gorgeous in her spiffy dress, which I’d complimented the moment I’d seen it and I reiterated. I told her it was a gorgeous day and she had a gorgeous set of arms that needed to feel the sun on them. And then we settled down to warm up and rehearse.
But, I kept thinking about it.
Poets, my friend is eighty years old. She is a size six, maybe a seven. She swims one hundred laps in an Olympic pool three times a week, and walks two miles the other two days. She sings in the choir with me, and she’s louder and has a longer range. She sports a perfect layered cinnamon-brown bob with nary a silver strand twinkling, as well as perfect manicure at all times. More, she’s kind and funny. And she’s still worried that her upper arms look bad.
As I said to the Poetry Sisters when I mentioned this, good Lord, at some point we HAVE to be enough.
I mean, I get it. I don’t display my upper arms. Having been various sizes of fat my whole life, even when I was really lifting weights and playing sports, they were still… squishy in a way that was socially unacceptable. Bigger than other girls. I never wear sleeveless things outside of the house. But, I will not be eighty years old and still worrying about this crud. I. Will. NOT.
And so I wrote a lovely sonnet to my upper arms. The style of Pablo Neruda to me is layered and rich, loquacious and bountiful — just like my arms. He writes a lot of love poems, heady and redolent with beautiful language with which he woos the reader. I choose to attribute that to his Argentine heritage, a beautiful country filled with beautiful people speaking a lilting and glorious (and gloriously complicated, I say from the perspective of sixteen hundred days on Duolingo) language. Using the mentor poem “One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII (I don’t love you as if you were a rose)” I speak of my arms – and your arms. And all of our arms. May we embrace ourselves, and our flaws, not like something about which poets sing – some romanticized, perfect thing. Rather, may we embrace ourselves as if we’re children who may or may not be sweaty, muddy, covered in pet hair, widdle, puke, snot, or tears and still – cherished, and worthy of love.
I Do Not Love You ‘As If’
I don’t love you as if you were a summer fruit, warm,
Firm, perfumed and toothsome:
I love you as an auntie loves a defiant toddler,
Exasperation woven from skeins of amusement and resignation.
I love you as the corner of the yard the cats favor,
Dense blooming bush beneath which they lie concealed, tails twitching,
Keen to pounce and leap and rend, replacing peace with panic,
Forcing conflict and change, challenge and confrontation.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or for what,
I love you austerely, without expectation or prediction,
I love you like this because I know no way but this, to embrace
The flawed and the fleshy, the crepey, creased, amd changed,
Complete in this moment as the sweet-fleshed perfection of a ripened peach,
Complete in this broad-shouldered, wide-bellied work of cradling a wailing world.
There’s always more poetry. You should see what Liz wrote. And here’s Mary Lee’s. Tricia’s poem is here. Michelle K’s poem is here. Heidi is “Neruda-ing” (yes, that IS a word) here. More Poetry Peeps will be checking in throughout the weekend, so don’t forget to come back and read the whole roundup. Meanwhile, Poetry Friday today is hosted by Ruth at There Is Not Such Thing As A Godforsaken Town. Thanks, Ruth, and Happy Seventeenth Blog Birthday!
Well, back to the garden, poets. I’m sending you out with a hug, from my arms to yours. Happy Weekend, you are loved. ♥
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Years ago political conservatives complained that California offered too cushy of an experience for the unhoused. Giving people money to live on just encouraged more indigence, they argued. And so, parties changed, and funds dropped, and… still people came. Temperate weather, cuts in social services for the mentally ill, and higher and higher costs of living have created a perfect storm. And yet – housing set aside or the unhoused in SF, the cushiest of all cities, according to some remains empty. 990 units – or 10% of the total housing – isn’t being used. Why? Because some of it is little better than a cardboard box. In a tent you at least have your choice of neighbors, in a manner of speaking. Violence and drug use and theft run rampant, and for those trying to get better, or house children – it must be terrifyingly unsafe feeling. The housing situation – the unhoused situation – is a shame and a rebuke to right-thinking people. How are we going to get out of this mess? And more importantly, get our fellow humans out of this mess?
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This past winter my little brother’s girlfriend was riding her bike to the store in Brooklyn and was hit by a car. Three weeks ago in a city closer to home another cyclist was struck, and this time didn’t make it. As the sunny days continue, cyclists are taking advantage, but those touched by tragedy are being more mindful, thinking more about safety – I know I am. I hope drivers are, too.
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Monday, the Supreme Court ruled state governments (specifically five counties in my state) may seek damages from fossil fuel companies worsening the climate crisis, and lying about it. That is kind of shocking – and while still being hotly debated, that the Supreme Court took this step openly admits that we have a problem and not all of us are engaged in being part of the solution. I wonder where this will take us.
