Birdwings

Eagle at Greenlake this spring

Birdwings

Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
up to where you're bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birdwings.

--Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

Poem It Out

This month I've been lucky enough to take a wonderful online class, Poem It Out, led by Liz Lamoreux. It's a stress-free introduction (or re-introduction) to reading and writing poetry. I don't know how I missed connecting with poetry during high school and college (liberal arts FAIL?), but I'm making up for lost time. (Oh dear, you should see the new Moleskines and fancypancy pens that I now have the excuse to buy.)

I'm loving how poetry can hold the non-linear, illogical parts of life. It's been a way for me to process the big events and emotions of the past year. And of course I love to play with words. I feel a little like I'm revisiting my junior-high angst-y self when I'm writing my own poems, but I figure I need to pass through that developmental stage that I missed.

I'll share a less serious little ditty I wrote on the theme of "eavesdropping."

I don't think the toddler could open
his bird-mouth any wider
He calls upon
every
single 
finger 
to stuff in the bran muffin.
"Hold the milk down here, so it
doesn't spill," warns the mama.
And I think,
lady,
your two-year-old is eating a whole
bran muffin;
I think
spilled milk
will be the least of your
worries.

I'm really loving the poets Tony Hoagland, Christian Wiman, and Naomi Shihab Nye. You can find a bunch of their examples on the Poetry Foundation and Writer's Almanac websites. Here's one of my favorites from Naomi Shihab Nye:

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. 
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

I'd love to hear what poets and poems you love.

I'm pretty sure this poem was written just for me. Don't tell me otherwise, okay?

The Peace of Wild Things

BY WENDELL BERRY

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.