Writer's Block

I liked the following poem, but I couldn't really figure it out at first. Then my sister was talking about having writer's block (she blogs, too) and I realized that sometimes I have a story to tell, but I have to search for a relevant poem, and sometimes I have a poem to share, but I have trouble relating it to a story. Some days I don't have either a story or a poem. So those days I don't blog.

Bad Day

by Kay Ryan


Not every day
is a good day
for the elfin tailor.
Some days
the stolen cloth
reveals what it
was made for:
a handsome weskit
or the jerkin
of an elfin sailor.
Other days
the tailor
sees a jacket
in his mind
and sets about
to find the fabric.
But some days
neither the idea
nor the material
presents itself;
and these are
the hard days
for the tailor elf.


My sister's blog.

The Day After Thanksgiving

For my family, Thanksgiving was all about the food. My mother was not a spectacular cook, but she could do turkey. She found a recipe once for cooking a turkey in a greased paper bag, and that was her method of choice. She used the Pepperidge Farm stuffing mix, adding onions and celery. She made mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans and peas. She put two packages of brown and serve rolls in the oven after the turkey came out, then usually forgot about them until they started to smoke. We always called them black and serve rolls, but we ate them anyway. Desert was pumpkin pie, apple pie and home make fruit cake. We started dinner in the early afternoon and it basically last all day. Desert was followed by several rounds of leftovers.

I have finally learned to practice a little restraint for Thanksgiving. We had a lovely meal yesterday, without overdoing it. My son helped me cook, which was wonderful, and my husband helped clean up, always appreciated. I talked to my daughter and my Dad, and both sounded happy, so my day of thanks was complete.

Here is a poem for those who were perhaps less restrained.

The Hymn of a Fat Woman

by Joyce Huff

All of the saints starved themselves.
Not a single fat one.
The words “deity” and “diet” must have come from the same
Latin root.

Those saints must have been thin as knucklebones
or shards of stained
glass or Christ carved
on his cross.

Hard
as pew seats. Brittle
as hair shirts. Women
made from bone, like the ribs that protrude from his wasted
wooden chest. Women consumed
by fervor.

They must have been able to walk three or four abreast
down that straight and oh-so-narrow path.
They must have slipped with ease through the eye
of the needle, leaving the weighty
camels stranded at the city gate.

Within that spare city’s walls,
I do not think I would find anyone like me.

I imagine I will find my kind outside
lolling in the garden
munching on the apples.

Sometimes Stuff Just Happens

We spend a lot of time in America trying to fix the blame. A madman shoots up Fort Hood and committees are formed right and left to try to blame it on Islam. The economy tanks and Congress wants to blame the Secretary of the the Treasury. There is a flu epidemic and people want to blame the president because the needed vaccine isn't growing fast enough. And if anything is not the president's fault, let's blame undocumented immigrants.

The two poems I am sharing today are only vaguely related, but I saw a connection.


by Emily Dickinson

Apparently with no surprise
To any happy flower,
The frost beheads it at its play
In accidental power.

The blond assassin passes on,
The sun proceeds unmoved
To measure off another day
For an approving God.



A Brief for the Defense

by Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music, despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Fireflies

Are fireflies disappearing like the honey bees? I haven't seen one in a long time. When we were kids we used to go outside after supper on summer evenings and try to catch them in jars, then let them go again.

My father worked the evening shift at the plant, so we had our main meal of the day, dinner, at noon. Supper was a smaller meal, usually at 5 o'clock, leaving time in the evenings to chase fireflies or play hide and seek while my mother watched from the front steps.

The following poem is wonderful, even the title.

Slow Children at Play

by Cecilia Woloch

All the quick children have gone inside, called
by their mothers to hurry-up-wash-your-hands
honey-dinner’s-getting-cold, just-wait-till-your-father-gets-home-
and only the slow children out on the lawns, marking off
paths between fireflies, making soft little sounds with their mouths, ohs, that glow and go out and glow. And their slow mothers flickering,
pale in the dusk, watching them turn in the gentle air, watching them
twirling, their arms spread wide, thinking, These are my children,
thinking, Where is their dinner? Where has their father gone?


And, on the same subject, only different, a poem by Robert Frost.

Fireflies in the Garden

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can’t sustain the part.

For Veteran's Day

My father is a veteran. He enlisted shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when he was 28 years old. The Army put him in the Signal Corp, taught him Morse Code, and sent him to fight for 39 months in the Pacific.

Like many World War II veterans he didn't talk much about his war experiences, only sharing a few details. He said he was afraid on the landing boats because his brother had drowned as a young man and that event left him with a fear of the water. He said the Signal Corp wasn't usually in the first boats to come ashore so that wasn't as bad as being part of the initial wave of Infantry.

His favorite story was about a portable outhouse that he built. It was a three-sided affair with hinges and a drop-down seat. It could be collapsed flat to stash in the back of a truck and unfolded to stand over a hole in the ground.

Of course it was during R & R in New Zealand that he met my mother, and they were married after the war. He didn't talk much about their courtship, either, but I have the letters my mother wrote to him, carefully saved through all those years.

My mother was a veteran, too. She claimed she was an anti-aircraft gunner in Auckland, New Zealand, part of the homeland defense. New Zealanders were very worried about the possibility of a Japanese invasion, and many young women were trained to defend against an invasion. I have her payroll books from her time in service.

My brother is a veteran. He joined the Army at 17 after dropping out of school. This was during the Viet Nam War, but he was sent to Korea. I'm not sure what he did there.

There are a lot of good poems for Veterans. I'm going to share two of my favorites, for veterans everywhere.

The first is actually song lyrics, translated from Spanish, I believe.

Tremo E T'Amo

I love you and I'm trembling
Said the woman
To her soldier
Who wouldn't be coming back.
Her plaintive voice
Was carried by the wind
Across the chilling snow
To where her soldier fought.

I'm trembling and I love you
She whispered as she cried
And in the darkness of the room
Somebody laughed
In conquest of the fear
That this love was about to end.

But sweet memories can betray you
The soldier doesn't feel anything anymore.

Too late, his enemy strikes
Suddenly
From behind
Who, strangely, was speaking
Of roses, of wine, of life's other joys
That were promised him in another life.
Oh, how many brides
Will war take away
From that first night's warm embrace?

I'm trembling and I'm cold
Said the soldier
To his enemy, a man, just like himself.
His voice hung motionless in the wind
Heard by the silent audience of those that fell before him.


The second is a poem by Louis Untermeyer. My father could play reveille on the trumpet.

Reveille

What sudden bugle calls us in the night
And wakes us from a dream that we had shaped;
Flinging us sharply up against a fight
We thought we had escaped?

It is no easy waking, and we win
No final peace; our victories are few.
But still imperative forces pull us in
And sweep us somehow through.

Summoned by a supreme and confident power
That wakes our sleeping courage like a blow,
We rise, half shaken, to the challenging hour,
And answer it -- and go.......

The Music Room

In the house I grew up in, there was a room next to the living room that we called the music room. My father hung French doors to separate it, and built book shelves to line two walls.

My mother bought an old upright piano and had it tuned. She played the piano pretty well. I remember a metronome that my father bought at the Salvation Army Thrift Shop. There was a music stand and chair for practicing the clarinet or trumpet.

My father played a saxophone and sometimes a harmonica. He also had a ukulele that he must have brought back from Hawaii after the war. He only knew one song for the ukulele and every time he started to sing it my mother told him to hush up. I suspect the words weren’t suitable for young ears.

My older brother and I took piano lessons for years. He turned into a wonderful musician. I struggled through the basics, but have no natural sense of musical pitch or rhythm.

We had a record player in the music room, and my father would check out records from the public library to play for us. He loved jazz, but also loved J.S. Bach. I remember hearing the Goldberg Variations for the first time on that record player.

My mother would sit on the piano stool and read to us kids, while we all sat on the floor in front of her. She read stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne. I remember a story about a man getting bricked into a wall in the basement. (I’m still nervous in tight space - and basements.)

One day when I was about 11 or 12 years old, my brother was probably 13, and my two younger sisters were around 8 and 4, my mother called us kids into the music room to read a poem to us. She was taking a night class in poetry and studying T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, so she read us the whole poem – just read it – no explanations or discussions.

It was kind of a strange choice for children our age, but I loved it. My mother had a beautiful reading voice. (Later in life she read books on tape for the blind.) So I’m sure she did a beautiful reading of Prufrock, and maybe that’s why it impressed me so much. Or maybe it’s just a wonderful poem. I’ve read it to myself numerous times since and always taken something new out of it.

Prufrock wasn’t the first poem I’d read. I had a Mother Goose book, and A Child’s Garden of Verses. I had a book of English poems my mother had given me. I had even memorized Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which starts out:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

And goes on for 32 some verses.

But Prufrock was different, and I think that afternoon in the music room was the real start of my love affair with poetry.

Poetry should be read out loud, for the pure enjoyment of the words, without worrying too much about what it means.


Introduction to Poetry

By Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with a rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.


You thought I was going to give you Prufrock. No, not today. Discover it yourself.