Poetry Friday: Looking at the Sky by Anne Porter

Anne Porter helps me redeem time. 

Time, of late, has been zooming past me at a frightening speed ("It's mid-October? What?! It's Friday again? Already? No!") We're still living in the midst of a pandemic and I'm still staying home most of the time, but there's so much to do at home when you work from home. 

But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near .... 

And yet. 

Anne Porter, who lived to be 100 years old, offers respite. 

Her life was busy, too (from The Poetry Foundation): 

Married to the painter Fairfield Porter, she raised five children in a busy, artistic household, frequently forced to pursue writing on the side. When her husband died in 1975, she began to write poetry much more seriously. As she told the Wall Street Journal: “I remember realizing that I was alone, and I'd have to be more organized. I had these poems, and I thought that it would be worthwhile working on them. I started to write.” Her first collection, An Altogether Different Language (1994), published when she was 83, was named a finalist for the National Book Award. 

Her first collection of poetry was published when she was 83. So, maybe I have a few years left, too. 

Time. It seems I never have enough time. And yet, perhaps, I do have time enough.  

Looking at the Sky 

by Anne Porter 

I never will have time 

I never will have time enough 

To say 

How beautiful it is 

The way the moon 

Floats in the air 

As easily 

And lightly as a bird

....

(Read the rest here.) 

~~~~~~~~~~

Janice Scully is hosting the Poetry Friday round-up this week at Salt City Verse. 

Poetry Friday: It's time for "The Writer"

Next week is the anniversary of the death of poet extraordinaire, Richard Wilbur. I miss him. I've shared his poem "The Writer" (one of my all-time-I-will-never-stop-loving-this-poem favorites) more times than I can remember (and you can find all of my Richard Wilbur posts here) but it's time to share it again. (If it's been more than ten minutes, it's time.) 

The Writer

by Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house

Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,

My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing

From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys

Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff

Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:

....

Read the whole poem here, at Poets.org, or do yourself a genuine favor and listen to Wilbur read it here, at The Internet Poetry Archive.

~~~~~

The Poetry Friday round up today is at Wee Words for Wee Ones. Thanks for hosting, Bridget! 

Poetry Friday: As Imperceptibly as Grief, Emily Dickinson

Yowza, I missed two Poetry Fridays in a row! Where have I been? What have I been doing!? Let's see. Living (with caveats ... pandemic, you know), teaching, writing, baking (sans flour), prepping for the Catholic Moms' Summit, and trying to retrain my mind to really read a book. (Reading in the time of Covid ... whoosh, it's been a whole thing for me. Or rather, the lack of the thing. I have read far fewer books in the last six months than at any other time I can think of. I. Don't. Like. That.) 

Time to get back to my favorite thing to do on a Friday: share some poetry. 

And autumn is here! Autumn is here! Though we still have to deal with the torpor of a pandemic, at least the torpor of summer is folding in on itself. Yes, it's been hot here this week, but, hey, hot? Your days are numbered. 

"What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?" cried Daisy, "and the day after that, and the next thirty years?" 

 "Don't be morbid," Jordan said. "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall." 

 ~~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

I don't think another Poetry Friday should pass without my sharing this one from Emily Dickinson. I've loved it for forty years. Or something like that. (The years tend to lapse away, imperceptibly, and it's hard to keep track anymore.) 

As imperceptibly as grief 

by Emily Dickinson 

As imperceptibly as grief

The summer lapsed away, —

Too imperceptible, at last,

To seem like perfidy.

A quietness distilled,

As twilight long begun,

Or Nature, spending with herself

Sequestered afternoon.

The dusk drew earlier in,

The morning foreign shone, —

A courteous, yet harrowing grace,

As guest who would be gone.

And thus, without a wing,

Or service of a keel,

Our summer made her light escape

Into the beautiful.

~~~~~~~~~~

Jone Rush MacCulloch has the Poetry Friday round-up this week. 

Poetry Friday: "Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Interruption"

The "interruptions" are different these days. 

My two oldest daughters have moved out. Only Ramona is at home, taking a well-earned gap year (which makes immense sense during a pandemic) after graduating from Green Gables Homeschool in May. 

I wrote this poem (or rather, stole some lines from Wallace Stevens and worked around them) ten years ago. Anne-with-an-e and Betsy were in their teens, but Ramona was only eight years old, so I was still sometimes up in the night with a child who was sick, or scared, or needed me in some unspoken way. 

But even with teens, a mother is up in the night: worrying while they're driving home after midnight ... talking to them on the couch, in quiet whispers at 2 a.m. ... tending to tears or heartbreak; other times sharing in laughter and giddy discovery. These days, those talks might start in a text, or a Marco Polo. That's a gift, too. 

When I was twenty years old, when I met Atticus and we started dating, neither of us wanted children. We knew it. We were firm. We would never change our minds. We would not countenance such an interruption to our lives. 

Thank God for crumbling paradigms and fresh and frightening starts that shake us to our core. 

Thank God for interruptions. 

 

Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Interruption 
by Karen Edmisten

(With apologies to Wallace Stevens. Original lines from his poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird are in italics. Obviously, all the good lines are his. The children, however, are mine.)


I
In the stillness of night,
The only moving thing
is a child.

II
I was of three minds:
sleep, motherhood, sleep.

III
I pretended not to care that I was awakened.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
There is my "to do" list, and then there is God's.
These are not the same thing.

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a child
Are one.
Add, mix and stir: my daughters' "to do" lists are mine.


V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The life with the child
or the thought of that life.

VI
Chatter filled the long day
The company of children
Transformed a mood. Sometimes
for better. Sometimes ... not.


VII
O, dear control-freak-self,
Why do you imagine a different life?
Do you not see how the life
you've been given is unspeakable gift?

VIII
I know of a tidy life,
of elegance, rhythm and control.
But I know, too, That a child is involved
In what I know.

IX
When my children have grown,
They will mark the edge
Of one of many circles.
I will be grateful for their imprint.

X
At the sight of children
I used to say, "Not for me, please.
An unwelcome interruption."
But something shifted. I gave myself
Over to motherhood, and held on tight.

XI
Once, a fear pierced me,
that I would never rise to this task,
would not die to self.


XII
3:20 a.m.: A nightmare. She needs me more
than I need this sleep. 
I rise. I go.
A child will not wait for morning.


XIII
It was nighttime all day.
I loved her and I was going to love her.
The child sat entwined in my limbs.
The interruption sweetly complete.

~~~~~

Find more posts about Wallace Stevens here. 

~~~~~~~~~~

 The Poetry Friday round-up is being hosted by Carol Varsalona at Beyond LiteracyLink. 

Poetry Friday: Galway Kinnell

Sometimes, no matter who you are, what your life circumstance is, or how many years you've trudged the planet, you just need a good cry.

Ray Bradbury knew it:

"And besides, I like to cry. After I cry hard it's like it's morning again and I'm starting the day over."  

"I heard everything now."  

"You just won't admit you like crying, too. You cry just so long and everything's fine. And there's your happy ending. And you're ready to go back out and walk around with folks again...." 

"That don't sound like no happy ending to me."  

"A good night's sleep, or a ten-minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine, Doug."  

                                          ~ Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury 

Galway Kinnell knew it, too:


Crying
by Galway Kinnell
(from Three Books)

Crying only a little bit
is no use. You must cry
until your pillow is soaked!
Then you can get up and laugh.
Then you can jump in the shower
and splash-splash-splash!
Then you can throw open your window
and, "Ha ha! ha ha!"
And if people say, "Hey
what's going on up there?"
"Ha ha!" sing back, "Happiness
was hiding in the last tear!
I wept it! Ha ha!"

Wishing you a good cry, the feeling that it's morning again, and happiness that's been hidden.

~~~~~~~~~~

The Poetry Friday round-up is being hosted by 

Heidi Mordhorst at My Juicy Little Universe. 

Poetry Friday: For Once, Then, Something

I love the questing and questioning nature of this one by Robert Frost.

For Once, Then, Something
Robert Frost

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

("For Once, Then, Something" is in the public domain.)

~~~~~~~~~~

Molly is exploring the monotetra, a new form created by Michael Walker. I love her results! 

Go check out her work — and all the other Poetry Friday contributions — at Nix the comfort zone. 

Poetry Friday: Spotted in the backyard

Our ever-charming Poetry Friday host, Laura Purdie Salas, is thinking and talking about anxiety today. I'm right there with you, Laura. With a teacher-husband and a teacher-daughter returning to work next week and a governor who not only refuses to mandate masks but actually threatens legal action against leaders who want to protect the public with said mandated mask-wearing (I'm stupefied by this), well, I'm ... distracting myself.

So.

Spotted in the backyard yesterday, thanks to Anne-with-an-e (who, in her 20s, still stops what she's doing to notice an astonishing little bit of beauty, and then share it with others):

Munching monarch,

overlord of the milkweed,

unstoppable force.

~ Karen Edmisten

~~~~~~~~

The round-up is at Laura Purdie Salas: Small Reads for Brighter Days.

Poetry Friday: Masks, and Fauci, and Coffee, Oh, My

Sooooo, I've posted a few times recently about masks on Facebook because, well, mask-wearing during a pandemic is just good scientific sense, and Anthony Fauci is my man.

Thanks, Jama Rattigan, for leading us to the bobblehead. 

(And no, I don't care how he throws a baseball.)

This mask is your basic, utilitarian pandemic gear:

However, my pal Tabatha (of The Opposite of Indifference fame) sent a link to a mask that she said made her think of me. (And with friends like Tabatha, one needn't worry about the friends on Facebook who have unfriended one for talking about masks.) 

Who could have imagined a mask that combines allusions to Gregorian chant, Psalm 130, and coffee? Someone did. And their "Out of the Depths I Have Cried for Coffee" mask reminded me of an ode to coffee that I wrote a few years ago. (My daughters mock me for calling 13-year chunks of time "a few years," but oh, just wait, daughters. Someday you'll understand the wibbly-wobbly that is time.) 

And so, with Poetry Friday just 45 minutes away as I type this, I give you my love song to coffee: 

How Do I Love Thee, Coffee? Let Me Count the Ways

(with my sincere apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning ....)

by Karen Edmisten 

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My cup can reach.

I love thee to the level of every day's

most quiet need (which is to start the day with you.)

I love thee freely (as I strive to awaken.)

I love thee purely (as one who is addicted.)

I love thee with a passion (which is embarrassing.)

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

when I was pregnant

and had morning sickness,

but my love is so strong

it was reclaimed when all sickness had passed.

I love thee with the breath (though coffee breath be not pleasant)

with the Smiles, tears, of all my life!

and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death,

for surely there is coffee in Heaven.

~~~~~~~~~~

Join Margaret at Reflections on the Teche for the Poetry Friday round-up. 

Poetry Friday: It's a Party at Ruth's Place!

Ruth, at There is No Such Thing as a God-forsaken Town is hosting the Poetry Friday party today and she's focusing on — you guessed it — parties. 

I miss parties. 

Well, I didn't actually go to a lot of parties pre-COVID. My INFJ/Enneagram 4/Melancholic/Introverted self didn't exactly seek them out on a regular basis. But, hey. I miss having the option to go to a party. I miss having a few people over for dinner. And mostly, I'm sad that we didn't get to throw the big bash we'd planned for Ramona, who graduated from our homeschool this year.

It would have been the kind of party that John Brandi sums up in this haiku. I can imagine our most beloved friends and family: meaning to leave, but lingering, having one more beer, just another glass of wine, a few more minutes of talk and laughter, moments that stretch into a few more hours.

We'll have that party for Ramona someday.

In the meantime, friends, there's poetry.

Poetry Friday: "I, Too" by Langston Hughes

I, Too
by Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
....
(Read the rest here, at The Poetry Foundation.)

~~~~~~~~~~

Linda Mitchell has the round-up at A Word Edgewise. 

Poetry Friday: A Small Needful Fact, by Ross Gay

A Small Needful Fact
by Ross Gay


Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,...


(Karen here ... it's such a short poem that I can't share much without violating copyright, so let's jump to the final lines, which are heart-wrenchingly — again, and again, and again, and again, and again — relevant.) 

... like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

(Read the whole thing here.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tricia Stohr-Hunt is hosting the round-up today at The Miss Rumphius Effect. 

Poetry Friday: Lucille Clifton

As per usual, I couldn't decide what I wanted to post this week. (I guess I'm a mood-poster. I'm a mood reader, too, which is why I never do well with "book challenges" or other people's reading lists.)

Late last night, I picked up the Anne Lamott book Atticus gave me for my birthday. 2018's Almost Everything: Notes on Hope opens with Lucille Clifton's poem, "blessing the boats," followed by the words, "I am stockpiling antibiotics for the apocalypse, even as I await the blossoming of paperwhites on the windowsill in the kitchen."

And I knew I had my poem for this week. Thank you, Lucille Clifton; thank you, Anne Lamott.


blessing the boats 
by Lucille Clifton

(at St. Mary’s)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
....

(Read the whole short and perfect poem here, at Poets.org.)

~~~~~~~~~~

Margaret is hosting the round-up this week at Reflections on the Teche.

Poetry Friday: Billy Collins and John O'Donnell

I was in the mood for some Billy Collins so I went in search of my hero. 

I found him at the New York Times, talking to Cheryl Strayed. 

He mentioned a poem called "When," by John O'Donnell, 

so obviously I now have to share that with you. 

So, what was going to be a Billy Collins post is still 

a Billy Collins post, but now it's Billy+. 

Plus a little heart-wrenching, but that's Poetry Friday in a pandemic. 

(The transcript of the interview is here.)

When

by John O'Donnell

And when this ends we will emerge, shyly

and then all at once, dazed, longhaired as we embrace

loved ones the shadow spared, and weep for those

it gathered in its shroud. A kind of rapture, this longed-for 

....

(Read the rest here.) 

~~~~~~~~~~

Carol Varsalona is hosting the round-up at Beyond LiteracyLink. 

Poetry Friday: Instructions on Not Giving Up, by Ada Limón

I felt this way last week: the sudden greening of the trees, spring's sneaky way of springing itself on me. There's always a day, every year, when a sudden burst or bloom makes me catch my breath. 

A beautiful and needed promise. 

Instructions on Not Giving Up
by Ada Limón


More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
....

(Read the whole thing here, at Poets.org.)

~~~~~~~~~~

Michelle Heidenrich Barnes has the round-up this week at Today's Little Ditty. 

Poetry Friday: Time, by Janet Norris Bangs

I don't know about you, but — well, yes, actually, I do know about you. I suspect you're a lot like me regarding time these days. We're all in this together and we're all experiencing time in similar and discordant ways, yes?

My time, your time, the concept of time, the passing of time, the tyranny of time, the luxury of time, the burden and the gift of time.

And somehow Janet Norris Bangs' short poem, which appeared in the February, 1933 issue of Poetry magazine is a perfectly appointed reflection on the paradoxes of Time in the time of coronavirus.

~~~~~~~~~~

The fabulous Elizabeth Steinglass has the round-up this week.  

Photo credit: Jordan Benton