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.
Oh, Tanita, this is devastating and also just right. These lines, especially, got me:
We chopped our planet for kindling.
It smolders… now what do we do?
WHAT do we do? What DO we do? What do WE do? What do we DO? (What do *I* do?)
Your process notes were so interesting — it makes sense, if initially seemed counter-intuitive, to corral the wild and varing thoughts into a prescribed form. This is so powerful.
Oh, this sonnet. I’m heartsick by these lines:
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?
I teach climate issues and it’s so hard not to focus on the “doom and gloom,” but that’s exactly where we are. You’ve captured this so powerfully.
@MissRumphius: Oh, I had no idea you taught climate issues… That is a grievous weight. I don’t have total despair because faith gives me the understanding that I don’t see all of the narrative, but what I know of the story sucks. Thank you for teaching your thinkers how to look to and love what remains.
Hands outstretched for pay, face hardened, — This line is the stunner for me. Though I love the swindling/kindling too. Wow. Sharp poem, Tanita–laser focus. You really pulled this off! Also, thanks for hosting :>)
@LauraSalas: Thank-you… It’s been awhile since I dug up a sonnet and I’m really pleased with how contained it made this feel.
Tanita, this month has brought another unknown allergen into the environment for me. Two sets of antibiotics and now hours of driving from VA to NY for a dear friend’s funeral. The world is mixed up and thus so am I. I have not had quiet time to create but I will give it a go.
We chopped our planet for kindling.
It smolders… now what do we do? -What a deep question to ask the world. Your words give me plenty of time to ponder before I take a deep dive into writing. Thanks for hosting today. Happy Belated Thanksgiving.
@CarolV: I’m sorry you’re unwell. I share your frustration with the “what is it now?” feeling – chronic illness often gives that “mixed up” vibe, and adding loss to that is worse. Condolences on your loss; may your memories truly be a blessing. May next month be better.
Thank you, Tanita. My husband and I are returning to VA from Long Island longing for our bed!
What a nightmare. Kudos for wrestling planet-wide angst into a sonnet….I only wish we could solve things with poetry.
@SaraHolmes: Solving things with poetry would be THE dream…
It’s surreal to be reading your poem while listening to the playlist of nature sounds REI provided for those stuck inside on the day of #optoutside. How to reconcile all we’ve lost and “chopped for kindling” with the incredible beauty and richness that remain? The equations definitely do not balance, but without a deep and desperate love for what we’re losing, we won’t have it in us to “braid our actions” together to make change big enough to matter.
Thanks for hosting the roundup!
@MaryLee: The part of the conversation about loving what we still have is often lost. A timely reminder.
“We chopped our planet for kindling.
It smolders… now what do we do?”
Oh Tanita… this poem asks the right and most painful questions. Those two lines in particular just wrecked me when I got there. And the container of the sonnet is remarkably subtle and… supportive here. I love this end to end, and it breaks my heart.
@Liz Garton Scanlon: I *really* didn’t think a sonnet would work so well. I felt like I had such wildly all-over-the-road feelings I wanted to process, that push-pull between the parts of the self, and it needed something to insist it stay coherent. I’ll have to take out sonnets for hard topics more often.
Thank you for showing us the worries I wish everyone had, Tanita, the dreams for change as you take us back to what has been, to what we know was secretly acknowledged yet didn’t stop. That tiny ‘piper’ reference fills me up as I think of my grandchildren and what they face. I am thinking of the old, very old, call for us: “If not now, then, when.” Thanks for hosting!
@LindaB: …when, indeed!!!
“We chopped our planet for kindling” — so powerful! Lots of anxiety dreams lately! Thank you for sharing and hosting!
@Marci Flinchum Atkins: Too many anxiety dreams! The best cure is going outside.
Yes, I agree there is no Planet B. The two version poem, with its dream parts made me think of Surrealism. Powerful poem you penned Tanita, Dark, yes, but then it is. Wonderful moving graphic too. My poem is on the dark side also, though, the situation is bleak, but I still feel we need to keep on going and maybe even try harder.
Thanks for rounding us up! Enjoy these last days of Fall!
@Michelle K: I think what struck me most strongly about the mentor poem is that, while she wrote of dreams, she took action on waking. If nothing else, we still have so much of this earth left to cherish. If we dream of better we can still wake and act to preserve *something.*