Tag: poetry (Page 2 of 2)

disgraceful

November 13, 2010 / jeanne / 5 Comments

via marjory and julie daley

i hereby vow that god will not escape me ever again.

not a chance.

today’s aspiration

August 21, 2010 / jeanne / 1 Comment

when i grow into full bloom, it will be as a blue morning glory.

most definitely.

Blue Morning Glory

Voracious, yes. But when you see it,

shy blue flowers blaring like trumpets in spite of themselves,

center star shaped and yellow; when it startles you,

early in the morning, all over a white picket fence, say,

in Massachusetts, you might think “triumphal,” “prodigal,” “awake.”

Of course you don’t want it in your rose garden

among all the pruned, the decorous bushes. You don’t want it

in the vegetables, for it will romp through the tomatoes,

beans and peas, will leave no room on the ground, or even

in the air, for the leafy lettuces and cabbages soberly

queueing up in their furrows. It will hog all the sky it can get

knowing as it does what enormous thirst is satisfied by blue.

Father Michael says Follow the God of abundance

Says we hurry from the moment’s wealth

for fear it will be taken. Think of this:

the morning glory has been blossoming for so long

without permission that in some gardens it is no longer censored.

What does that tell you? See how it opens its tender throats

to a world that can sting it, how, without apology for its excess,

it blooms and blooms, though even yet

it seems surprised.

Anne Pitkin

a checklist to close out the day

July 3, 2010 / jeanne / 5 Comments

Questions Before Dark

Day ends, and before sleep

when the sky dies down, consider

your altered state: has this day

changed you? Are the corners

sharper or rounded off? Did you

live with death? make decisions

that quieted? Find one clear word

that fit? At the sun’s midpoint

did you notice a pitch of absence,

bewilderment that invites

the possible? What did you learn

from things you dropped and picked up

and dropped again? Did you set a straw

parallel to the river, let the flow

carry you downstream?

~ Jeanne Lohmann

(can we pretend that her last name is pronounced “hewell-chambers”, just for tonight?)

poetry by subtracting (and defacing)

May 3, 2010 / jeanne / 6 Comments

i think i have a new morning ritual.

(actually,
it was so fast and fun,
I think i could make this
an hourly ritual.)

the kindling comes from
a little something i picked up
while traipsing through the internet.
a fella who takes the NY Times
and does what he calls
newspaper blackout.

i was so intrigued,
i fetched a book right back out of
the trashcan,
let it fall open to a page,
then
quick as a blink,
i circled some words
that captured my
imagination,
took my green sharpie
and colored over all the
other words,
distilling the page down
to what i’m calling
a poem.

the first one
calls page 71 home
and it sounds like this:
Much wisdom
happening.
Stories and tales
illustrate
ask
change.
Questions
challenge
stimulate
help.

it was so much fun,
i skipped back to page 14
(my birthday is on the 14th
of one particular month)
and hatched this one:
Create
or
become
soggy.

he may have found
a revenue stream.
i’ve found a new way
to recycle books.

contagion

January 10, 2010 / jeanne / 42 Comments

last week, three people i hold dear (though i’ve only know them for a scant few weeks) wrote posts that opened doors in my heart that have been long closed. their conviction and courage, their honesty, their willingness to outright own vulnerability because silence is no longer an option is nothing short of inspiring. these women have enkindled conversations that are long overdue, conversations i hope will continue and spread and take on a life of their own – a full, rich life that will change the world.

though this poem was written by a man who wrote of political and social upheavals, it is the one that has kept me company the past several days, and it is the one that i am sending – in spite of the near-oppressive notion that i’ll get red ink comments from my english teachers noting my usual erroneous interpretation – as a salute to my three guests of honor, women i am proud to call friend . . .

bonnie of windshieldthinking.com

emily of pleasurenotes.com

julie of unabashedlyfemale.com

p.s. yes, i changed the two masculine pronouns to feminine, so sharpen your red pencils and deduct points at will.

Emerging

A woman says yes without knowing
how to decide even what the question is,
and is caught up, and then is carried along
and never again escapes from her own cocoon;
and that’s how we are, forever falling
into the deep well of other beings;
and one thread wraps itself around our necks,
another entwines a foot, and then it is impossible,
impossible to move except in the well –
nobody can rescue us from other people.

It seems as if we don’t know how to speak;
it seems as if there are words which escape,
which are missing, which have gone away and left us
to ourselves, tangled up in snares and threads.

And all at once, that’s it; we no longer know
what it’s all about, but we are deep inside it,
and now we will never see with the same eyes
as once we did when we were children playing.
Now these eyes are closed to us,
Now our hands emerge from different arms.

And therefore when you sleep, you are alone in your dreaming,
and running freely through the corridors
of one dream only, which belongs to you.
Oh never let them come to steal our dreams,
never let them entwine us in our bed.
Let us hold on to the shadows
to see if, from our own obscurity,
we emerge and grope along the walls,
lie in wait for the light, to capture it,
till, once and for all time,
it becomes our own, the sun of every day.