I’ve been avoiding the news as much as I can lately but it’s hard to avoid it all (RIP, John Prine). This was in the Pome newsletter last week and it feels appropriate.

In The Morning, Before Anything Bad Happens

The sky is open
all the way.

Workers upright on the line
like spokes.

I know there is a river somewhere,
lit, fragrant, golden mist, all that,

whose irrepressible birds
can’t believe their luck this morning
and every morning.

I let them riot
in my mind a few minutes more
before the news comes.

Molly Brodak (2017)

My friend shared this yesterday in our group chat; Neruda wrote it in the 1950s but it’s perfect for right now. That second-to-last stanza…

Keeping Quiet
Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death. Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

I don’t usually put a poem up at the beginning of the week, but this came in from Matthew Ogle yesterday and it’s just a delight. So maybe it can set the tone for the week.

I hadn’t thought of this one in a long time (as in, nine years ago when I was going to memorize six poems and didn’t know anything “of grief, and of getting past it”) but it’s so great. “I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing.” Well said, Mary.

Starlings in Winter
by Mary Oliver

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

I fee this one lately:

In Praise of My Bed
by Meredith Holmes

This is another from Matthew Ogle’s Pome newsletter. After talking about the hard work of living and growing this week, it seemed appropriate.

This one is from A Poem A Day and it’s just nice.

The Orange
by Wendy Cope

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all my jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

Happy New Year, friends. I never want another year like 2019 but, you know, we made it through it somehow.

Even Cleveland posted an excerpt from good old Thomas Stearns’ long poem Little Gidding for the new year. I haven’t been reading a lot of Eliot lately but this seems appropriate:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right […]
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.

That is where we start, indeed. Here’s to starting at the beginning, after the end of everything.

This will be the first Christmas without Mom. We got through the first Thanksgiving without her, but both she and I loved Christmas. I keep coming back to this Robert Bly poem I first found in 2012. I just like the…doubt, I guess, that runs through all of it, and the acknowledgement that “so much was lost.”

A Christmas Poem
by Robert Bly

Christmas is a place, like Jackson Hole, where all
agree
To meet once a year. It has water, and grass for
horses;
All the fur traders can come in. We visited the place
As children, but we never heard the good stories.

Those stories only get told in the big tents, late
At night, when a trapper who has been caught
In his own trap, held down in icy water, talks; and a
man
With a ponytail and a limp comes in from the edge of
the fire.

As children we knew there was more to it—
Why some men got drunk on Christmas Eve
Wasn’t explained, nor why we were so often
Near tears nor why the stars came down so close,
Why so much was lost. Those men and women
Who had died in wars started by others,
Did they come that night? Is that why the Christmas
tree
Trembled just before we opened the presents?

There was something about angels. Angels we
Have heard on high Sweetly singing o’er
The plain. The angels were certain. But we could not
Be certain whether our family was worthy tonight.