Poetry Friday: Thankful, thankful, thankful (and Joy Harjo)

Thanksgiving is on the horizon and I'm feeling so grateful for my family and for all that has transpired around our kitchen table over the years. 

At our table we have eaten, of course, but our kitchen table has been the heart of so much more. We have laughed there, yes. We have wept. We've discussed books and writing. We've spent time with our babies, our toddlers, our teens, our grown and beautiful daughters. We've considered cancer treatments, health changes, chronic illness, new ways of eating. We've discussed politics and surrealism. We have shared stories of friends, faith, art, history. We have pondered jobs and job changes, school and not-school. We have lived in our kitchen; if our table could speak, it would be overflowing with stories from the lives of the Edmistens. 

I'm so grateful for our kitchen table.  

U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo captures the essence of this core, this beating heart of our shared lives, in "Perhaps the World Ends Here." 

Here's to the kitchen table, and to the happiest of Thanksgivings. May your gratitude be overflowing. 

Perhaps the World Ends Here
by Joy Harjo 

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been
    since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They 

    scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. 

    We make men at it, we make women.

(Read the rest here, at Poets.org.) 

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The Poetry Friday roundup is being hosted by the hostess with the mostest, Jama Rattigan. 

(Photo credit: Matthias Cooper, Pexels)

Poetry Friday: "The Shapes of Leaves" by Arthur Sze

One day soon I'll be ready to stop talking about autumn, golden leaves, and the bottomless supply of beauty that I find in this time of year. 

But today is not that day. 

In "The Shape of Leaves" Arthur Sze captures a relationship with nature that is either a simple but complex web or a complicatedly simple interdependence, a symbiotic relationship that helps us define who we are. Whichever way we look at it, "way leads on to way" and nature's depths and riches inform our lives until, as Sze says in the final line, "I am living at the edge of a new leaf." 

Enjoy this short but sublime piece: 

The Shapes of Leaves
by Arthur Sze

Ginkgo, cottonwood, pin oak, sweet gum, tulip tree:
our emotions resemble leaves and alive
to their shapes we are nourished.

Have you felt the expanse and contours of grief
along the edges of a big Norway maple?
Have you winced at the orange flare

searing the curves of a curling dogwood?

....

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

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The Poetry Friday round-up is being hosted today by Buffy Silverman. 

(Photo credit: Marta Wave, Pexels)

Poetry Friday: "November Night" by Adelaide Crapsey

I've shared this one before but it's always worth a re-share. 

Maisy thinks so too: 

"Adelaide Crapsey? Inventor of the cinquain?
Oh, yes, please, I'd love that." 

November Night 

by Adelaide Crapsey 

Listen. . .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.

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Heidi Mordhorst has the Poetry Friday round-up this week at My Juicy Little Universe.