Riding the bus

I don’t want to ride the bus – removed in perfect air-conditioned equilibrium

No hint of wind, no outdoor smells.

I want to feel the dirt road under my feet, the pungent smell of cows.

The bus drives through the landscape, not part of it, not in and of it

It leaves no room to pause, absorb

The oak leaf curled crisp upon the road

The rotting wood of this lonely bench

Or the creek splashing over its horde of stones.

Some old favourites

Acquainted With The Night

by Robert Frost
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain – and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
O luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Dreams

by Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

maybe, just once in a while . . .

these things are possible.

more than we know – or try to discover

it falls in front of us, just a dangling leaf

midair, invisibly attached to spider thread

it spins, but not at a speed the word implies, it twists gently

in quiet air, asking us questions we don’t often answer.

Journals, Literature and Merton

I’ve been going through my old journals today, indulging in a bout of nostalgia. One notebook is full of starts of stories – I can tell which books or movies I must have been reading when I started writing these. My handwriting is still from elementary school – maybe early junior high. It makes me laugh to see how formal I was – how the heavy British influence started so young with Enid Blyton, Frances Hodgson Burnett etc. In some ways, I feel like my love of British literature makes it harder for me to be a writer today – what I want to write and how I want to write is in no way modern or North American.

A cut out of one of Thomas Merton’s poems – I’m forgetting which right now. Forgive the formatting, I’m copying this out of a journal I had copied it into.

I will try like them

To be my own silence.

And this is difficult. The whole

World is secretly on fire. The stones

Burn even the stones

They burn me. How can a man be still or

listen to all things burning? How can he dare

to sit with them when

all their silence

is on fire?

Scrap of something

Something I started working on today – fairly rough still but hey, I’m dusting off my poetry skills which have lain dormant since high school. Actually, I banished them for awhile, but I’ve been thinking lately, probably influenced by Jess’s blog that I should give it a whirl again sometime. The rhythm for this was in my head but it doesn’t quite all fit and I’m not sure it’s really done where it ends. Oh well – as one of my favourite quotes says, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned” or Oscar Wilde who commented that he knew a poem was done when he spent the whole morning inserting a comma, and the rest of the afternoon removing it.

Lament.

This gap yawns vast in me

A lack of curiosity

That sits so idly at home

Content to know the things we know

No need to waste the energy

On learning more than necessary

The watered seeds of apathy

Grow in our inactivity

We have no stamina of thought

For complicated word and pattern

We cannot rise to the occasion

Incapable of concentration

And so a river thick with ignorance

Floods our minds with empty business

Truth no longer is imparted

Through the avenue of artists

The Day is Done

This is one of my favourite poems to read aloud. I love it because I can hear my Grandpa’s voice when I read it. He quoted the whole thing for us once and his voice has that perfect story-teller quality to it. When we were little and couldn’t see Grandpa and Grandma very often, they would send us tapes with them reading or telling us stories. I can remember Grandpa’s voice reading “The Large and Growly Bear” and Grandma reading us “Yip and Yap.” I’m sure those tapes are somewhere at home – it would be fun to listen to them again.

Anyway, here is “The Day is Done” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The Day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of Night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in his flight.
I see the lights of the village	5
Gleam through the rain and the mist,
And a feeling of sadness comes o’er me
That my soul cannot resist:
A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,	10
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain.
Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and heartfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,	15
And banish the thoughts of day.
Not from the grand old masters,
Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time.	20
For, like strains of martial music,
Their mighty thoughts suggest
Life’s endless toil and endeavor;
And to-night I long for rest.
Read from some humbler poet,	25
Whose songs gushed from his heart,
As showers from the clouds of summer,
Or tears from the eyelids start;
Who, through long days of labor,
And nights devoid of ease,	30
Still heard in his soul the music
Of wonderful melodies.
Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,
And come like the benediction	35
That follows after prayer.
Then read from the treasured volume
The poem of thy choice,
And lend to the rhyme of the poet
The beauty of thy voice.	40
And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares, that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.

Excerpt from T.S. Eliot

Excerpt from “East Coker” in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

V

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres-
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate – but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Powerful Imagery

“They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted – twice dead. They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame.“

This is from Jude (v. 12b-13a).