Poetry Friday: "Looking at the Sky" by Anne Porter

I missed Poetry Friday last week. If you did too, check it out at Tanita Davis's {fiction, instead of lies}. The Poetry Pals used Jane Hirshfield's "Two Versions" as a mentor poem and crafted their own takes (inspired by Hirshfield's theme, structure, or lines). They created some stunners, so do hop over and read your way through those beauties. 

This week, Carol at The Apples in My Orchard is hosting. Carol has been caring for her aging father, spending 16½ hours on the road (in one day!) and dealing with a lot (I see you, Carol!) Send her some virtual hugs and love today and enjoy all the poetry she's rounded up for us here. 

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I missed PF last week because we spent Thursday and Friday out of town. My daughter and her husband hosted Thanksgiving. My middle daughter, whom I blog-named "Betsy Ray" (after our beloved Betsy in Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy books) was nine years old when I started this blog in late 2005. She was NINE. And now she and her husband are killing it as Thanksgiving hosts. We had a marvelous day and a marvelous meal. (I told her to marry a man who cooks, and she did. Yay!) The only parts of the meal we provided were the pumpkin pie (my mom's extra-spice recipe), gluten-free/dairy-free biscuits, and gf/df chocolate chip cookies. Anne-with-an-e (who was twelve when I started the blog — TWELVE!) and her fiance brought the dairy-free mashed potatoes, which Ramona (who was THREE when I started the blog) pronounced the best ever. When she was three, she didn't like "mashed-potatoes-with-the-skin-on, eww" but her culinary palate expanded over the years. Sadly for her, a few years back, just as she was perfecting the ultimate pepperjack grilled cheese sandwich with marinara dipping sauce, she needed to go gf/df, as Betsy had to a few years before. We're still working on perfecting the gf/df diet but overall we've made huge progress.

Aaaaaanyway...that's where I was last week. Enjoying the many pleasures of spending time with all my favorite people. Counting gifts and blessings. Giving thanks for beauty seen and unseen. "Looking at the Sky" and getting my thirst for a touch of heaven quenched. (Stealing the imagery of a thirst quenched from the last line of the poem. It's a short and perfect piece.) 

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
Although she is a world
Made all of stone.
....
(Read the second part here.) 

Photo courtesy of AdamNir, Pixabay.

Poetry Friday: Anne Porter, "Living Things"

I find Anne Porter utterly charming. 

Porter began seriously pursuing her poetry at the age of 64, after her husband, artist Fairfield Porter passed away in 1975. Her first collection of poetry was published 1994, when she was 83 years old. 

Read more about her here, at the Poetry Foundation. 

For a longer bio, go to Best American Poetry, where Porter, after being asked why she was still writing at her age, said that "art may be the only pursuit that old age can't wreck":

"You can't sing anymore, you can't dance anymore, you can't drive anymore — but you can still write." 

Here's to continuing to create living things in 2024. 

Living Things
by Anne Porter

(1911-2011) 

Our poems
Are like the wart-hogs
In the zoo
It's hard to say
Why there should be such creatures

But once our life gets into them
As sometimes happens
Our poems
Turn into living things
And there's no arguing
With living things

....

(Read the rest here.) 

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Tracey Kiff-Judson is hosting today. Join her as she ponders Monopoly pieces and pulls together the Poetry Friday round-up. 

Photo courtesy of Pixabay.

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.) 

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

Poetry Friday: a beautiful one by Anne Porter

I've shared Anne Porter's work before, but not for awhile. Here's a beautiful one: 

A Short Testament
by Anne Porter

Whatever harm I may have done
In all my life in all your wide creation
If I cannot repair it
I beg you to repair it,

And then there are all the wounded
The poor the deaf the lonely and the old
Whom I have roughly dismissed
As if I were not one of them.
Where I have wronged them by it....

(Read the rest here, at The Writer's Almanac.)

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The inimitable, incomparable Jama Rattigan has the round up this week.