I'm the type who looks at a little one's drawing and says,
"What a cool elephant!" only to be told,
"It's a truck."
So I wasn't sure what to make of this chalk
drawing left on a rock on the beach.
A witch ambling by on a flowered broomstick?
A woman walking along in a jaunty, pointy hat, happily
traveling with a lollipop and a balloon?

Whatever it was, it cheered me.

The curtains danced in the warm afternoon wind,

the windows open at last. 

Start!
An invitation if there ever was one. 

On Earth Day

Each day  a new color makes its way into the sky, a deeper blue, a paler pink,
a lavender I'm sure I've never quite seen before. The water too, sometimes it's grey
or grey-green or translucent or bright blue and shimmering. Nearly still one morning
and fierce, rushed and unrelenting the next.

On the sand a collage of spiraled shells, soft sand, straw and tiny white rocks or a deep brown piece of driftwood or a piece of seaweed arranged on the sand by the tides and the wind so it looks just like a flower.

The gulls are there, swooping and chattering or flying by hushed, the families of ducks, the geese and sometimes the elegant white egrets.

Every day it happens all over again, this rush of song and beauty and color.





http://eachdaynewgrace.tumblr.com/

Poem in Your Pocket Day, 2013


I love this day, a day to fill a pocket up with a little promise in the form of a poem.
Someone thought it up, said, hey, along with those keys and that phone and those coins,
the stick of gum - how about a poem or two for your pocket?

To take out later, over a tuna sandwich or a cup of coffee or a ride on the swings,
a poem to read out loud, mull over
and watch the words dance.

~ ~ ~

I was listening to Krista Tippett’s “On Being” one Sunday morning and she was interviewing Elizabeth Alexander about reading her poem at President Obama’s first inaugural. She spoke about her sound check, when she stood at the lectern, practicing. She couldn’t unveil her own poem just yet so she decided to read “Kitchenette Building,” a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks.

People were walking around the Capitol as she started to read and they stopped. A hush fell over the area as Alexander read the words. She said they recognized the way these words fell together, the cadence, the tone. This was something other than a speech;  this was a poem.  In their quiet they seemed to be saying this piece of art mattered and they wanted to hold on to it a minute before they walked off, along into the day.  It’s a perfect poem for  Poem in Your Pocket Day.

http://www.onbeing.org/program/words-shimmer/feature/kitchenette-building/319

http://www.onbeing.org/program/words-shimmer/246


A few poems for a pocket:

Five haiku by Matsuo Basho, just tiny enough and grand enough for any pocket:

a peasant’s child
husking rice, pauses
to look at the moon

The clouds come and go,
providing a rest for all
the moon viewers

Wrapping dumplings in
bamboo leaves, with one finger
she tidies her hair

I like to wash,
the dust of this world
In the droplets of dew.

The voices of plovers
Invite me to stare into the darkness
Of the Starlit Promontory.

http://thegreenleaf.co.uk/hp/basho/00bashohaiku.htm

http://www.poemhunter.com/matsuo-basho/


And:

“Kitchenette Building” by Gwendolyn Brooks – Can’t get enough of Brooks’ poems.
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/kitchenette-building/

“Clary” by Atsuro Riley  - He dares with words and paints such a portrait.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/182107

“Living in Numbers” by Claire Lee – a sly reworking of numbers  to talk about life.
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/23457


From “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman – Whitman, a walking celebration of a human being who was wowed routinely by a spider, a grain of sand, his own self, the people trundling by, all of it.
http://www.favoritepoem.org/videos.html

“The Diameter of a Bomb” by Yehuda Amichai –  a poem so sadly fitting this week. The destructive force in the poem could be a word or a few sentences or an action that harms or the actual metal force that caused such havoc and hurt there on Boylston Street.
http://allpoetry.com/poem/8513183-The_Diameter_Of_The_Bomb-by-Yehuda_Amichai


 “Hope is a Thing with Feathers” (254) by Emily Dickinson. I seem to go back to it again and again, leaning on it.  “Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words/And never stops at all.”
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19729

Finish lines are joyful places.

I’ve stood near many. At road races, half marathons and marathons, cheering, chatting, waiting for family members to round that last corner. Just a couple weeks back we walked around near the end of a race course in Danbury and marveled at all that it stood for, this place where triumph, sweat and sheer will coalesce, where community is created.

I remember the first marathon I ever saw. We stood on a corner about 12-14 miles in. A jazzy pop band played on the sidewalk behind us.  Everywhere people lined the streets, block, after block, after block.  I’d seen New York festive but this was New York festive cubed.

I wasn’t prepared for all that I saw that day, all that grit, all that hope, the faces set with determination and the ones who laughed, the runners going by on prosthetic legs, in wheelchairs, the elite runners seemingly gliding past. And then the waves upon waves of people who had made some sort of pact with themselves that they were going to take six months or a year or plenty of years and see this monumental challenge through.

Certainly there were family and friends in those huge crowds watching but there were also thousands who had no personal stake in it at all. But they were there to say `Hoorah, look at what you are pulling off!’ `Here’s to you!’

Like all of us, the runners seized on an idea, a dream and they went after it, for hours and days and weeks. They ran for a sister or a father or mother. They ran to raise money or a cause. They ran to see if they could.

Invariably what I see at each race’s end is that people who had been dueling each other off and on for miles and miles reach over after and shake hands or pat the other’s back, or run off down the road to cool down together. 

I see people who got to that place they were trying for.   

I don't understand why someone would want to take such a place and try to destroy it; to harm people who are gathered simply to cheer on something that's good. But on Monday we also saw so many others who ran, against time, toward danger, to help.

So much was broken in Boston Monday but there was also something fundamental that couldn't be.

Stopping in Bethel - with its happy collection of bookstores, a record
store and coffee shops - we spotted a statue of P.T. Barnum. We wondered what he was doing in these parts, not knowing he was born in the town in 1810.

The inscription under the statue explained, in Barnum's words, his early start:

"I was born and reared in an atmosphere of merriment. My natural bias
was developed and strengthened by the associations in my youth;
and I feel myself entitled to record the sayings and doings of 
the wags and eccentricities of Bethel because they partly explain
the causes which have made me what I am."

I love any sentence that has the words "wags and eccentricities" in
it and, even more, the notion of being "born and reared in an
atmosphere of merriment." 

No wonder he would go on to live one of the more colorful lives in American history, one even a fiction writer might have trouble conjuring up. A man invariably described as "an American showman," "a flim-flam man," "the Shakespeare of marketing,"   "an entertainer," "a politician," "a philanthropist,"  "a scam artist" and a founder of and "King of the circus" - sometimes all in one breath.


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/nyregion/for-ringling-brothers-a-homecoming-at-barclays-center.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Who doesn't love a parade?

At least a parade that celebrates 

a Connecticut treasure:

the UConn Huskies! 

The Old Barn

A couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon 
and a stretch of road, 
not knowing what might be around the next bend,
a certain kind of 
bliss. 

Even the sound of the words
"road trip" gets me. 

When the UConn women won their first national championship, thousands of people drove up to Storrs to welcome them back, to cheer and to say thanks. "Respect" boomed out of the sound system and Kara Wolters danced. 

Tonight after UConn won the Regional Final, thousands of fans stood and cheered, as Geno Auriemma spoke about all that this team had become - together. 

The Webster Bank Arena had the same kind of feel; the unfettered joy  was palpable, dancing about up there in the rafters, as Stephanie Dolson and her teammates danced on the court. 

The crowd lingered. 
Again, they wanted to say thanks. 

http://www.courant.com/sports/uconn-women/hc-bridgeport-ncaa-women-uconn-0402-20130401,0,4433187.story

We were in New York once a few years ago and saw a sign outside a library
celebrating National Poetry Month and so we wandered in. The place
was packed, full  of people and books upon books of poetry.

They said "hooray for poems" with sparkling cider and cheese and crackers.

I like a month where you can toast an art form with cider, that has a day
(April 18) where you are encouraged to tuck a poem in your pocket or
three or four and pass them around. A month when a poet says start each
morning reading a poem and see what you might wonder.
I'd like to give it a try.

Some poems for a pocket or for a week.

1." Ode to Bird Watching"  by Pablo Neruda
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ode-to-bird-watching/

2. "Moles" by Mary Oliver
http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Mary_Oliver/3109

3. "The Writer" by Richard Wilbur
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15487

4. "Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Return to Vienna"
by Rita Dove
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20618

5.  “The End and the Beginning” by Wislawa Szymborska
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/237694

6. "Song" by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15238

7. "A Noiseless Patient Spider" by Walt Whitman
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16158