Tagged: poetrythursday

I’ve wanted to go to Scotland ever since I can remember. I’ve read book after book after book about it and its history and its famous people, and it draws me thither like a call from home. Sometimes I wonder if I lived there once or more, in another lifetime, or in a dream; that frisson of recognition in the descriptions and photographs of a place I’ve never been. Now that I’m soon to be going there, I worry somewhat that it won’t live up to my expectations, the anticipation of so many decades. However, deep down, I know I...

I won’t stop writing. I know that I would miss it terribly, it would carve a hole in my heart. And I won’t stop writing here either, because the hole in my heart if I did would be you-shaped. Writing is a comforter, warm and dovey. It’s a shock to the system. It’s an electric wire snapping and hissing in the rain. Writing wakes me up, it shakes me up, it quivers and leaps to life before me. It brings me unspeakable satisfaction. It makes me want to tear my hair out. It makes me feel like God. To Poem...

Joshilyn Jackson had an interesting post and subsequent comments discussion not too long ago about people who were good at one thing versus people who were good at several. It was fascinating to hear how people described themselves as one or the other, and why. She based the post on a television commercial featuring a crab (good at one thing: pinching) and a Honda Element (good at everything). As I have not seen the ad, I can’t comment on its veracity, but I, too, think that people generally tend to fall into the one vs. the many when it comes...

Weddings and marriages and relationships have been on my mind a lot lately, understandably so, since my brother got married a few weeks ago and Anders and I celebrated our 10-year anniversary. What makes it work? A strong sense of commitment through ups and downs and good and bad. An understanding that loving someone is not necessarily the same as BEING in love all the time and that that’s okay. The sense of your world righting itself when your loved one returns home from a week away. The deep, knitted-tight feeling that permeates everything about your life together. For What...

First, I listened, twining hair about my hand, perhaps sucking on my thumb, my legs stuck out straight in front of me, my head resting in the crook of my mother’s arm. Then I pored over the pictures, turning pages slowly, matching up images on each leaf with the images the words raised in my mind. There, Georgie Porgie with the weeping girls running from him, and there a cow jumping over the moon. I learned the ways of rhyme and tone, I sang them back with a singsong voice, repeating them until they were a part of me. The...

A great many of my favorite authors are also poets, and if they’re not poets, then they’re as wordsmithy AS poets, and often they use snippets and quotations and poetry in their books, to head chapters or reference or set a mood. This one is in the endpiece of Sheri S. Tepper’s Sideshow. She’s a favorite because her books are NEVER predictable. I like predictability in my real life (to a certain extent, and even to a CERTAIN extent, if you know what I mean) but I don’t like it in my reading.* Anyway, this poem struck me like a...

I have rain on the brain. This is not an unusual state of affairs in southern Sweden, where it rains a LOT. The Pacific Northwest ain’t got nothing on us. The saying, “April showers bring May flowers” was actually invented in Sweden, but the original goes more like this: “January, February, March, April, May and sometimes June showers…” It rains an average of 164 days a year in Sweden. More in the south, I’m pretty sure. My fingertips are permanently raisined and we won’t even talk about my hair. So without further ado, I present 3 excellent poems about rain....

There are buds in my garden, peeking out from under the blackened blankets of moldy leaves. The ground is completely sodden, spongey with rain, and the grass is still last year’s yellow leftovers. Puddles reflect the sound of running water; through the ditches, into the drains, it teases the ear. There is a lightness to the days now, beyond the cloud cover and shining through it. Every year, this miracle. Every year, this return to green and light and renewal. I’m watching the trees with a sharpened eye, hoping to see spring burst, from brown to green. When I went...

I ripped this poem out of the Sept/Oct 1993 issue of Ms. magazine, a jagged-edged heavyweight linen-feeling page with a black and white photograph of a woman facing away, her long hair blowing in the wind. Above her is a tall sky filled with white and fluffy, but somehow oppressive, cumulus clouds. Ahead of her is the twisty slingbacked road along the ridge of a highland, shining in the lowering sun. In the fall of 1993 I felt utterly alone. I wasn’t dating anyone, and I wasn’t in the mood to date anyone. I had been single for a very...

This is one of the first poems I ever copied down in a journal. It made me see the world differently. It made me start paying attention to and looking for the beauty in the details. It changed the way I wrote and the way I thought about the world. Read it slowly. The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of its mouth. He didn’t fight. He hadn’t fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and...