Welcome to the Poetry Friday Roundup and another Poetry Peeps Adventure!
Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to our challenge for the month of December! Here’s the scoop: we’re composing haibun, beautifully brief melanges of a prose poem + haiku, as created by Matsuo Bashō. Are you in? Good! You have a month to craft your creation and share it on December 27th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals. We hope you’ll join the fun!
Hello! Welcome to the roundup this post-Thanksgiving/Friendsgiving Friday! I hope today finds you reasonably comfortable (READ: not still really, really full), content, and ready to take on the world in whichever way you prefer – whether that means with matching T-shirts, walkie-talkies and Black Friday sales with friends, frantic napping before the onslaught of holiday rehearsals, or snuggled down in silence with a laptop and plans to do the housecleaning much, much later. However today finds you, may you be safe and well.
Jane Hirshfield has many poems more familiar than “Two Versions,” included in her 2024 poetry collection, “The Asking.” As a matter of fact, her “Poem With Two Endings” is so much better known that I kept mixing it up with our actual mentor poem this month. But, when the dust settled, I was glad we chose her lesser known work.
From Process…
The poem begins as a description of two similar dreams, one of camping by a watering hole, with an arm outstretched, and the parade of little bodies which tromp across it. Hirshfield, a practicing Buddhist, wonders if her sleeping body is trying to interact with the insects and animals of the natural world, though she also wonders why she dreamed of her hand outstretched to them. The second dream is of lying in the way of a herd of sleeping animals who are greatly thirsty, and wishing she could beg their pardon for being in their way, forty years later. On the surface, these are the sorts of weird, innocuous dreamscapes our minds often throw out for us, but spending more time with the text and gives access to deeper and deeper reflections. Sleeping and wakefulness – or even ‘woke’-ness. Injury and pardon. Action and passivity. The forty years past the poet mentions calculates, this year, anyway, to 1984, which provides its own odd dreamscapes. All in all, we had quite a healthy smörgåsbord of ideas from which to take a line or a theme to give foundation to our own poem…
…this still doesn’t mean it was easy, though Sara’s poem is here. Mary Lee’s poem is is here. Liz’s poem is here, and Laura’s can be found here. Tricia’s poem is found here. Michelle’s post is here. Linda B. poem is shared here. More Peeps may tune in throughout this holiday weekend, so stay tuned and check back for the full roundup.
…To Poetry
Meanwhile, I took a rare road for me – a climate poem. It seemed inescapable from the tenor of Hirshfield’s words – dreaming of being in the way, of needing to beg pardon, of having misjudged the needs of the animals passing by, around, and over her. That’s …if that’s not a description of how we’ve not-so-loved the world, I don’t know what is. We’re definitely going to reap what we’ve sown – or not sown, as the case may be – but in some small ways, we’ve been given an unanticipated grace. We’ve been given a breath of time. How are we doing to use it? And I say ‘we’ in the way which means all of us. I recognize fully that much of what people take personal responsibility for is the combined responsibility of individuals plus elected lawmakers and corporations, and many of us beat our heads against an unyielding wall trying to move the dial alone. But – not alone, but collectively, braided together, what action can we undertake?
(Climate) Anxiety Dreams
How can we sleep? This foreboding
With shrill sirens splinters the air.
Inchoate nightmares come swarming,
As we mutter weak “thoughts and prayers,”
Forty years past, we begged pardon.
Knew someday that “progress” would come
Hands outstretched for pay, face hardened,
We promised the piper this sum.
And who can sleep while swindling
The future of what it is due?
We chopped our planet for kindling.
It smolders… now what do we do?
If nightmare loosens and retracts
Can you awake, sit up and act?
The various images in the poem seemed to me to need corralling and so I relied, as I often do, on a form to put gather them in their place. I tried to make this poem somewhat positive – though Hirshfield’s interrupted sleep has some disturbing images, it’s not nightmarish, exactly. These are animals who need… something. Perhaps the reader can supply this without making the poem wholly about themselves…
I’ll be so interested to see how others tackled this challenge, as well as revel in the myriad poems that come in this week. I hope you take some time this weekend, in a slow, quiet moment, to indulge yourself in poetry as well. Meanwhile, happy autumn, as we savor its last twenty plus days, and happy beginning of the holiday whirl. Get your vaccinations while you can, sleep deeply, rest well, and feel your feelings which are neither right nor wrong, but simply are. You are well-loved.
