James Crews is a poet who teaches Poetry at the University at Albany and lives on a organic farm with his husband in Shaftsbury, Vermont. Each Friday he posts a poem, sometimes one of his own that serves as more than just some mere Poetry Prompt. He recently posted this: I’ve been sitting with this very short but very powerful poem by Jane Hirshfield ever since a dear friend passed it along to me earlier in the week. It speaks to the season so many of us might find ourselves inhabiting, not only that of autumn, but a moment of loss and transition during which we’re asked to accept such changes as necessary, and perhaps even sacred. In this poem, she invites us to see each shedding tree as an icon, “thinned/back to bare wood,/without diminishment.” And there is almost a haiku-like quality to those final three lines that urges us toward deeper contemplation of the richness inherent in these wooden beings. Perhaps what we see as loss and a kind of death each year as fall comes is really just wind and weather having worshipped the trees so much they are returned to their basic essence. In this way, we might reframe any difficult season when we are worn back to our essential selves as holy, worthy of worship for the way such trying times allow us to become something new.
Autumn
by Jane Hirshfield
Again the wind
flakes gold-leaf from the trees
and the painting darkens—
as if a thousand penitents
kissed an icon
till it thinned
back to bare wood,
without diminishment.Invitation for Writing & Reflection: How might you reframe a difficult season in your own life as sacred or holy, seeing how you were worn back to the truest version of yourself even while in pain?
It prompted me to write in kind:
FALLING
And just like that
Summer fell
into a colorfully crisp confetti
of blazenous colors
that never reached the ground
Flutterings
into what can’t always be planted
but never fails to be garnered in
whatsoeversthat find us all
softly soaringly sheltered
in a cooling uplifting Breath
A heavenly satisfied SighMay this Fall Season bring you lots of
Oooooh and A W E
SOME WORDS NOT OUR OWN
THERE ARE SOME WORDS
NOT MY OWN
THAT SAY SO MUCH MORE
THAN I COULD EVER WRITE
OR SAY
B U T
need to read or hear
than any that could bounce around in my head
or spill out of my pen
L I K E:
my brain and
heart divorceda decade agoover who was
to blame about
how big of a mess
I have becomeeventually,
they couldn’t be
in the same room
with each othernow my head and heart
share custody of meI stay with my brain
during the weekand my heart
gets me on weekendsthey never speak to one another
– instead, they give me
– the same note to pass
– to each other every week
and their notes they
send to one another always
says the same thing:“This is all your fault”
on Sundays
my heart complains
about how my
head has let me down
in the pastand on Wednesday
my head lists all
of the times my
heart has screwed
things up for me
in the futurethey blame each
other for the
state of my lifethere’s been a lot
of yelling – and cryingso,
lately, I’ve been
spending a lot of
time with my gut
who serves as my
unofficial therapistmost nights, I sneak out of the
window in my ribcageand slide down my spine
and collapse on my
gut’s plush leather chair
that’s always open for me~ and I just sit sit sit sit
until the sun comes uplast evening,
my gut asked me
if I was having a hard
time being caught
between my heart
and my headI nodded
I said I didn’t know
if I could live with
either of them anymore“my heart is always sad about
something that happened yesterday
while my head is always worried
about something that may happen tomorrow,”
I lamentedmy gut squeezed my hand
“I just can’t live with
my mistakes of the past
or my anxiety about the future,”
I sighedmy gut smiled and said:
“in that case,
you should
go stay with your
lungs for a while,”I was confused
– the look on my face gave it away
“if you are exhausted about
your heart’s obsession with
the fixed past and your mind’s focus
on the uncertain futureyour lungs are the perfect place for you
there is no yesterday in your lungs
there is no tomorrow there eitherthere is only now
there is only inhale
there is only exhale
there is only this momentthere is only breath
and in that breath
you can rest while your
heart and head work
their relationship out.”this morning,
while my brain
was busy reading
tea leavesand while my
heart was staring
at old photographsI packed a little
bag and walked
to the door of
my lungsbefore I could even knock
she opened the door
with a smile and as
a gust of air embraced me
she said“what took you so long?”
~ John Roedel (johnroedel.com)
were spoken first by
Someone Else
and echoing intimately within us
For An Ever. . .
ALL DAY SUCKERS
that deliver more flavor
that can be promised
. . .only enjoyed
The Amnesiac Poet
He stares
at his hand
and the pen
as it levitates
over a blank page
not just waiting for a word
but a rare polished gem
that’ll never be mined
only to be replaced
by some fool’s gold
d r o s s
unrefined
never to hold any value
meaning
sense
And he smiles
w i d e l y
as he sighs
without a breath
‘This is Poetry at its best’
In the End, TWO WORDS:
I didn’t hear she had been sick
and hearing the news of her death
. . .it made me sick. . .
Her web site
unpoetically
put out the following announcement:
Mary Oliver, beloved poet and bard of the natural world, died on January 17 at home in Hobe Sound, Florida. She was 83.
Oliver published her first book, No Voyage, in London in 1963, at the age of twenty-eight. The author of more than 20 collections, she was cherished by readers, and was the recipient of numerous awards, including the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive, and the 1992 National Book Award for New and Selected Poems, Volume One. She led workshops and held residencies at various colleges and universities, including Bennington College, where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching until 2001. It was her work as an educator that encouraged her to write the guide to verse, A Poetry Handbook (1994), and she went on to publish many works of prose, including the New York Times bestselling essay collection, Upstream (2016). For her final work, Oliver created a personal lifetime collection, selecting poems from throughout her more than fifty-year career. Devotions was published by Penguin Press in 2017.
Her poetry developed in close communion with the landscapes she knew best, the rivers and creeks of her native Ohio, and, after 1964, the ponds, beech forests, and coastline of her chosen hometown, Provincetown. She spent her final years in Florida, a relocation that brought with it the appearance of mangroves. “I could not be a poet without the natural world,” she wrote. “Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.” In the words of the late Lucille Clifton, “She uses the natural world to illuminate the whole world.”
In her attention to the smallest of creatures, and the most fleeting of moments, Oliver’s work reveals the human experience at its most expansive and eternal. She lived poetry as a faith and her singular, clear-eyed understanding of verse’s vitality of purpose began in childhood, and continued all her life. “For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”
When Death Comes
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
A Mary Oliver book
is by my bed,
in my study,
in the trunk of my car,
a back pack
an unpacked bag from my last vacation. . .
she’s always been a
go-to
for quick bits of inspiration
and now that words
will no longer flow from her pen
they will continue to float to one lucky person
to another blessed one
who treats themselves to peruse. . .
Maybe the greatest
poetic justice
of all
is not feeling the need to say
GOOD-BYE
so much as
sincerely
everlastingly
whisper
not-so-softly
THANK
YOU
u n l i m i t e d l y
TWO WORDS. . .
j u s t t w o :
T H A N K Y O U