Vigeland Park, Oslo, Norway

think no more of what will come to pass 

BLUE GIRLS

Twirling your blue skirts, travelling the sward
Under the towers of your seminary,
Go listen to your teachers old and contrary
Without believing a word.

Tie the white fillets then about your hair
And think no more of what will come to pass
Than bluebirds that go walking on the grass
And chattering on the air.

Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;
And I will cry with my loud lips and publish
Beauty which all our power shall never establish,
It is so frail.

For I could tell you a story which is true;
I know a woman with a terrible tongue,
Blear eyes fallen from blue,
All her perfections tarnished—yet it is not so long
Since she was lovelier than all of you.

--John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974)

Welcoming the dawn confabulation
Of birds

Not to Sleep

Not to sleep all night long, for pure joy,
Counting no sheep and careless of chimes,
Welcoming the dawn confabulation
Of birds, her children, who discuss idly
Fanciful details of the promised coming--
Will she be wearing red, or russet, or blue,
Or pure white?--whatever she wears, glorious;
Not to sleep all the night long, for pure joy,
This is given to few but at last to me,
So that when I laugh and stretch and leap from bed
I shall glide downstairs, my feet brushing the carpet
In courtesy to civilized progression,
Though, did I wish, I could soar through the open window
And perch on a branch above, acceptable ally
Of the birds still alert, grumbling gently together.

by Robert Graves
from Man Does, Woman Is. Doubleday, 1964.

great-grands 

from KINDNESS

...Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes
any sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

by Naomi Shihab Nye
from Ten Poems to Open Your Heart,
ed. Roger Housden

gratitude

thankfulness, appreciation.

Middle English, from Old French, probably from Late Latin grātitūdō, from Latin grātus, pleasing.]

Family tree, c. 1995

UNLEARNING

Unlearning is the choice, conscious or unconscious, of any real artist…The ability to see things fresh and new and in eternity, rather than in time, can be lost—and for the writer to lose it and not find it again is fatal. It is our unlearning we share in our writing whether for children or grownups, that unlearning which gives us the courage to open ourselves to the sinister as well as the dexterous part of our creativity. Thus we will be able to work to our fullest, to allow the characters that people our stories to lead us in directions we never anticipated. We don’t need to settle for the limited selves we can control and manipulate.

From Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life. Compiled by Carole F. Chase. Colorado Springs: WaterBook Press, 2001.

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul's immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,--
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

From Intimations of Immortality
by William Wordsworth, 1770-1850

Mowzer, summer 2005 

POEM WITH TWO ENDINGS

Say “death” and the whole room freezes—
even the couches stop moving,
even the lamps.
Like a squirrel suddenly aware it is being looked at.

Say the word continuously,
and things begin to go forward.
Your life takes on
the jerky texture of an old film strip.

Continue saying it,
hold it moment after moment inside the mouth,
it becomes another syllable.
A shopping mall swirls around the corpse of a beetle.

Death is voracious, it swallows all the living
Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead.
Neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled,
each swallows and swallows the world.

The grip of life is as strong as the grip of death.


(but the vanished, the vanished beloved, o where?)


By Jane Hirshfield
From Given Sugar, Given Salt. New York: Harper Collins, 2002.

VMEC, Italy, March 2005 

And I Think It Yours

That place
where a fold of hillside
scoops sun and shelter
from a mountain wind

or that
where a clear spring
pours out refreshment
never holding back

or that
where a steep track
veers unexpectedly
then opens on a crest
from where a traveller may see
far out beyond
and know his way
which road is his to take--

all these
and all such places
have their names
but in the language of the heart
only one name


And I Think It Yours
by Gael Turnbull
---from From the Language of the Heart, Mariscat Press 1983