blurg.

I guess it'll be after we get home from the cabin that I get back to it. Maybe.

Look for me in August. :)

Oregon!

One Home

William E. Stafford (from Kansas, former Poet Laureate of Oregon)

Mine was a Midwest home—you can keep your world.
Plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code.
We sang hymns in the house; the roof was near God.

The light bulb that hung in the pantry made a wan light,
but we could read by it the names of preserves—
outside, the buffalo grass, and the wind in the night.

A wildcat sprang at Grandpa on the Fourth of July
when he was cutting plum bushes for fuel,
before Indians pulled the West over the edge of the sky.

To anyone who looked at us we said, “My friend”;
liking the cut of a thought, we could say “Hello.”
(But plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code.)

The sun was over our town; it was like a blade.
Kicking cottonwood leaves we ran toward storms.
Wherever we looked the land would hold us up.

*****

Anna and I are off to Oregon today for camping and family and coffee and fun. I should be back on the 19th to tell you all about it. Hope you liked poetry week. It was fun for me! :)

Kansas Poet Laureate

Door of the Grass

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

for Beth

Where to go now that all roads dissolve?

How to follow deer paths or sudden partings of

big bluestem, little bluestem, switchgrass

into the field so deep that you can no longer see the edges?

No need to answer, says the wind. Just walk.

Just stop in this surprise of clearing

where some other has stopped before you.

Listen to the careful tremble, the heavier rushing

tumbling upward and out from the tops of

bordering cottonwoods. Let it sweep back

over you. Your mind only blossom and stubble,

breaking against what you thought you knew

until it too blows free or roots deeper

into something like bedrock turning under us.

Here in the house of the grass,

wind tells the sea in you, the old stars in you too,

welcome home.

Our new U.S. Poet Laureate

One of the Lives

W. S. Merwin

If I had not met the red-haired boy whose father
had broken a leg parachuting into Provence
to join the resistance in the final stage of the war
and so had been killed there as the Germans were moving north
out of Italy and if the friend who was with him
as he was dying had not had an elder brother
who also died young quite differently in peacetime
leaving two children one of them with bad health
who had been kept out of school for a whole year by an illness
and if I had written anything else at the top
of the examination form where it said college
of your choice or if the questions that day had been
put differently and if a young woman in Kittanning
had not taught my father to drive at the age of twenty
so that he got the job with the pastor of the big church
in Pittsburgh where my mother was working and if
my mother had not lost both parents when she was a child
so that she had to go to her grandmother’s in Pittsburgh
I would not have found myself on an iron cot
with my head by the fireplace of a stone farmhouse
that had stood empty since some time before I was born
I would not have travelled so far to lie shivering
with fever though I was wrapped in everything in the house
nor have watched the unctuous doctor hold up his needle
at the window in the rain light of October
I would not have seen through the cracked pane the darkening
valley with its river sliding past the amber mountains
nor have wakened hearing plums fall in the small hour
thinking I knew where I was as I heard them fall.

Anna's Fourth Year

written for her fifth birthday May 19, 2010

She still doesn't like to drink

anything unless you

count answers

because she'll drink

you dry asking--

abstract words

will be dripping

with meaning

you've wrung into her

bucket of thoughts.

She asks to make dessert,

maybe cinnamon toast.

She tells you she's

used too much sugar

(force yourself to swallow

with a smile).

She creates and crafts

construction paper hair

for her doll, a

picture of LOST's island

for Daddy, a pillow

for Mommy imprinted

with her small hand. She

goes to pre-school and becomes

older, talking about kids you

don't know, her world bigger

than what you contain, her body

nearly too big to hold

when she sleeps,

her ingredients and ideas

beyond what you supply

(more than the love

of one person.)

She poses just how

she wants to stand

no matter what you think.

She digs her

own thoughts

in Poppa's garden,

piling up questions

like a bucket of potatoes.

--Aunt Linda

Antidote

We had to write another poem this year for the Summer Reading Program.

Antidote

One, two , three,

Four, five, six.

One, two, three,

Four, five, six.

Kick,

and pull,

and move,

and breathe,

and leave

the brain

on land.

Silly Sisters

I got up, picked out my clothes for church-jean skirt, white shirt, ooh! I'll wear my pink shoes. Fun.

Then I went to town to pick up Abby and laughed and laughed when she stepped into the car.

Luckily she thought it was funny too.

Skee-ball