Reading and writing poetry, and teaching children how to write it (with California Poets In The Schools) are huge delights in my life. I love to sit in the garden and scribble poetry, with a big teacup of Earl Grey, close at hand - well, I am English. The light plays in the walnut leaves, the hummingbirds dart from the ruby sage blossoms to the golden honeysuckle, it's quite heavenly. Then later, I head to the computer— where I won't be distracted by minute whirling miracles—for the serious work of metaphors, similes and stanzas.
While being treated for cancer I found immense comfort in the poetry of Mary Oliver, Jane Hirshfield, David Whyte and Rumi. I'm sure many poets and poetry lovers share Jane's thoughts:
“I have been helped by poetry so many times in my life. In the darkest of corners and on the most difficult roads, it is the companion that travels along with me, casting an inner lamplight that does not take away the unknown, but makes it somehow more navigable, if only because we walk less alone.”
– Jane Hirshfield
There are 46 poems on The Gift of Love CD. I have selected one from each of the poets to share with you on this website.
Wear Hope
Wear hope
like a red hula-hoop around your hips
and carry it like a weapon of whimsical thought.
Love hope
like you adore a field of daffodils.
Nourish hope
like you knead a loaf of bread upon rising.
Recognize hope
like you never forget the face
of your first grade teacher.
Hope wants to speak to you,
reach you like starlight
reigning down upon you
on a cold clear night
high up in the Sierras.
– Terri Glass
Transmutation
(after another bad break)
Damn!
Only April
and I have died again.
First, that virus;
then, the flood;
my dear friend’s death;
and now, these broken bones.
Tower of safety.
Tower of immortality.
Intolerable tower of self.
Numbskull, me,
how many of these illusions
must fall to the ground
before I understand?
Last night,
talking to you,
I almost got it:
the way disaster peels us,
pulls away skins
until we can kiss,
human to human,
heart to heart,
until there is nothing left
but trust.
– Linda Watanabe McFerrin
Survival
It’s called
Survival
It's about
Putting it back
Together again
With some of the
Pieces missing
– Tom Bowlin
Song
When the soul gets homesick
she goes back to when she was cut
from the hide of night, back
before the Word, when she hung
in utter silence on the moist roof
of the cave’s mouth.
She reassumes the otherworldly
shape, sleeps upside-down
and wakes with the disappearing light.
When the others have bowed their heads
and folded in their feathers,
she shakes herself and flies.
Leather-winged and blind, she cries out
until the landscape enters her like a song,
the sound of her own voice gathering
into points of light. And then she remembers
how the dark pelt from which she was taken
teemed with stars.
– Prartho Sereno
This Is Just To Say
(with a wave to William Carlos Williams)
Thank you for the peach pie
red gold, gooey, thick and crusty:
peaches carried heaped in a basket
up the hill from the tree we planted
seven years ago, watched over,
pruned, debugged, (harvested
one rock of a peach that first year)
and now its branches bent to the ground
on the uphill side, their burden of fuzzy
softening fruit almost more joy
than they can bear.
You rolled the dough
while I peeled fruit into a pail
my hands deep in the juice and pulp
my mouth smeared where I sucked
my fingers, my hair sticky on my forehead,
tiny fruit flies buzzing in the kitchen.
I helped you lift the flat crust with spatulas
and we laid it safely in the pan. You spiced
the golden bowl with cinnamon and other secrets,
crisscrossed the top with lattice crust,
and this morning, you gone off to school,
I cut a piece and served it on a small blue plate
with milk in a blue cup.
I ate it slowly,
noticing every bite, watching the grasses move
as the breeze swept across the distant hills.
I’ve left the rest for you, sweet baker girl.
I’ll be gone a few days,
but I’ll be thinking of you
eating peach pie.
– Gail Rudd Entrekin
For What Binds Us
There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can mend or tear.
– Jane Hirshfield
