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The Way Home

Posted in family, music, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on May 3, 2024| 10 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Joy Harjo]
 . 
And the blessing began a graceful moving through the grasses of time, from the beginning, to the circling around place of time, always moving, always
++++++++ from Bless This Land, Joy Harjo
 . 
❦
 . 
The Story Wheel
 . 
I leave you to your ceremony of grieving
Which is also of celebration
Given when an honored humble one
Leaves behind a trail of happiness
In the dark of human tribulation.
None of us is above the other
In this story of forever.
Though we follow that red road home,
one behind another.
There is a light breaking through the storm
And it is buffalo hunting weather.
There you can see your mother.
She is bus as she was ever –
She holds up a new jingle dress, for her youngest beloved daughter.
And fo her special son, a set of finely beaded gear.
All for that welcome home dance,
The most favorite of all –
when everyone finds their way back together
to dance, eat and celebrate.
And tell story after story
of how they fought and played
in the story wheel
and how no one
was every really lost at all.
 . 
Joy Harjo
from An American Sunrise, W. W. Norton, New York NY, © 2019
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Last night I sat silent on stage waiting as a few early arrivals took their seats in the audience. We singers had a few more selections to rehearse before filing out to prepare our official entrance, and for now we waited. Shouldn’t I have been anxious in anticipation of the harmonies we would soon raise together? Shouldn’t I have been thrilled as the strings took their places and began to tune their instruments? Shouldn’t joy live here?
 . 
No, something dark nagged me. My heart was stone. I felt suspicious of these watchers, listeners. I was afraid of their grand and thriving church. I distrusted what they would think of me if they in turn suspected I didn’t think or believe precisely as they did. I told myself I was already rejected, on the outside. I didn’t belong here.
 . 
Joy Harjo writes, The old Mvskoke laws outlawed the Christian religion / Because it divided the people. / . . . But Mvskoke ways are to make relatives. Where is the religion that makes relatives? People, plants, creatures, everything together as family? A religion that turns all people to face each other within the circle rather than turning them out? Linda and I had been thrashing with recent revelations that people were leaving our son’s church because one of the ministers has come out as gay. These people leaving – we thought we knew them, we considered them neighbors. We don’t understand the rejection, the turning apart. How can we understand?
 . 
When our chorus returns to our places before a full house, I don’t recognize many faces. But I do know a few, some from years in the past, and I remember I love them. Now lift our voices together and sing of a Creator who is always with us. We sing longing and loss, humor and fullness, songs like rivers that course and meander a long journey, that carry all the weight of time and earth. I sing. And at the end of the singing we have become one family.
 . 
The heart of stone has only hardened itself. Everything that lives wants to soften that heart. Everything that lives wants to open each heart to beauty and truth.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
from Exile of Memory
.    .    .
In the complex here there is a singing tree.
It sings of the history of the trees here.
It sings of Monahwee who stood with his warrior friends
On the overlook staring into the new town erected
By illegal residents.
It sings of the Civil War camp, the bloodied
The self-righteous, and the forsaken.
It sings of atomic power and the rise
Of banks whose spires mark
The worship places.
The final verse is always the trees.
They will remain.
.    .    .
When it is time to leave this place of return,
What will I say that I found here?
 . 
From out of the mist, a form wrestled to come forth –
It was many legged, of many arms, and sent forth thoughts of many colors.
There were deer standing near us under the parted, misted sky
As we watched, the smelled for water
Green light entered their bodies
From all leaved things they ate –
.    .    .
The Mvskoke laws outlawed the Christian religion
Because it divided the people.
We who are relatives of Panther, Racoon, Deer, and the other animals and winds were soon divided.
But Mvskoke ways are to make relatives.
We made a relative of Jesus, gave him a Mvskoke name
.    .    .
We could not see our ancestors as we climbed up
To the edge of destruction
But from the dark we felt their soft presences at the edge of our mind
And we hear their singing.
 . 
There is no word in this trade language, no words with enough power to hold all this we have become –
 . 
Joy Harjo
from An American Sunrise, W. W. Norton, New York NY, © 2019
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❦ ❦ ❦
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IMG_0262

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❦ ❦ ❦
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An American Sunrise opens with a map of a trail of tears, that of the Muscogee Creek Nation’s forced displacement to Oklahoma from their native homelands near Talladega, Georgia in the 1830’s. One of many trails of tears. In Joy Harjo’s preface she includes this plea and blessing: May we all find the way home.
 . 
Toward the close of the book, Joy Harjo describes how her Great-Grandfather Monahwee could bend time. The entire book is an experience of time and place bending, fluid, circular, all connected. We hear the voices of ancestors and offspring. We hear the voices of creatures on earth and of Earth herself. We are torn by hatred and injustice – we bleed. We smell the smoke of cook fires at dawn and feel the sun on our face – we are fed. We are challenged and re-challenged to connect ourselves to the thread of life that weaves through all people and all creation and leaves nothing out. As the poet says, Nobody goes anywhere / though we are always leaving and returning. And her experiences are, as for all of us . . . the giving away to history which in no means meant giving up. For a warrior it is not possible to give up. 
 . 
For any of us to find home, we must all find home. We must all witness cruelty and kindness in this land. From the book’s final poem, Bless This Land: Bless us, these lands, said the rememberer. These land aren’t our / lands. These lands aren’t your lands. We are this land. May the poems and the songs bring all things into our memory and show us the way.
 . 
❦
 . 
An American Sunrise, Joy Harjo; W. W. Norton & Company, New York NY © 2019. Joy Harjo served as Poet Laureate of the United States for three terms, 2019 through 2021.
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Beyond
 . 
Beyond sunrise, there is a song we follow
Beyond clouds traveling with rain humped
On their backs, lightning in their fists
Beyond the blue horizon where our ancestors
Appear bearing gifts, wrapped in blankets woven
With sun and strands of scarlet time
 . 
Beyond the footpaths we walk every day
From sunrise to kitchen, to work, to garden, to play
To sunset, to dark, and back
 . 
Beyond where the baby sleeps, her breath
A light mist of happiness making
A fine rainbow of becoming knowledgeable around us.
 . 
Beyond the children learning alphabets
And numbers, bent over their sticks and dolls
As they play war and family, grow human paths
 . 
Beyond the grandmothers and grand fathers
Their mothers and fathers, and in the marrow of their bones
To when that song was furs sung we traveled on
 . 
Beyond sunset, can you hear it?
The shaking of shells, the drumming of feet, the singers
Singing, all of us, all at once?
 . 
In the song of beyond, how deep we are –
 . 
Joy Harjo
from An American Sunrise, W. W. Norton, New York NY, © 2019
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Doughton Park Tree 2020-06-11a
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Earth Day – Afterword

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 26, 2024| 8 Comments »

 . 
April 26, 2024
 . 
In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.
++++++ Robert Lynd (1879-1949) – naturalist
 . 
To see a wren in a bush, call it a wren and go on walking is to have seen nothing. To see a bird and stop, watch, feel, forget yourself for a moment, to be in the bushy shadows, maybe then feel wren – that is to have joined in a larger moment with the world.
++++++ Gary Snyder
 . 
Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a song bird will come.
++++++ Chinese proverb
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
November
 . 
It is an old drama
this disappearance of the leaves,
this seeming death
of the landscape.
In a later scene,
or earlier,
the trees like gnarled magicians
produce handkerchiefs
of leaves
out of empty branches.
 . 
And we watch.
We are like children
at this spectacle
of leaves,
as if one day we too
will open the wooden doors
of our coffins
and come out smiling
and bowing
all over again.
 . 
Linda Pastan (1932-2023)
from Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968–1998, W W Norton & Co, © 1999
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Shared by Bradley Samore, Plano TX, who writes:
 . 
This poem by Linda Pastan reminds me of our hushed wonder toward the non-human and our tendency to imagine ourselves in relation to what we see. Perhaps there is no objective way to view something as each species, each person, has their own limitations and reference point. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall”, Pastan makes the connection between the leaves falling and our own human death but also hints at the possibility/impossibility of our rebirth, another budding.
 . 
++++++ Bradley
 . 
❦
 . 
Revelation
 . 
Nothing compares to exploring the land
++++++ but what of becoming part of it
 . 
to sit so still that lizards
++++++ mate by my sandaled feet
 . 
to kneel at the grave where from shadows
++++++ a fox approaches unafraid
 . 
to lie on the grass as daylight fades
++++++ and birds feather the branches above
 . 
Bradley Samore
first appeared in Hoot
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The charm which Henry [David Thoreau] uses for bird and frog and mink, is patience. They will not come to him, or show him aright, until he becomes a log among logs, sitting still for hours in the same place; then they come around him and to him, and show themselves at home.
++++++ Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his journal, May 11, 1858.
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I hope you love birds, too.  It is economical.  It saves going to Heaven.
++++++ Emily Dickinson
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Kinship
Rootless and restless and
warmblooded, we
blaze in the flare that
blinds us to that slow,
tall, fraternal fire of life
as strong
now as in the seedling
two centuries ago.
 . 
Ursula K LeGuin
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The cockroach and the birds were both here long before we were. Both could get along very well without us, although it is perhaps significant that of the two the cockroach would miss us more.
++++++ Joseph Wood Krutch, from The Twelve Seasons (1949)
 . 
More than at any other time, we feel the strangeness of birds when we stop and pick up a feather in our path. There is nothing on Earth to compare it to; there is no material like it, no form, nothing that functions quite the same way.
++++++ Bruce Brooks, from On the Wing
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Landscape with Jeffers and the Connecticut River
 . 
Oat stalks hang their oat-heavy heads.
Panic grass shakes in the wind
off a goldfinch’s wing. Cause,
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ effect, and cause.
 . 
Drone, like the bee, of goldenrod and aster,
tool of the stick-tight and cockleburr,
I park and wade into high riverside grasses.
 . 
A dog gnaws on a box turtle, a spider rides
a floating log, straining the air of its midges and leafbits.
A fisherman lazy as late summer current,
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ casts, reels, and casts.
 . 
It occurs to me I am alive, which is to say
I won’t be soon. Robinson Jeffers
from Carmel Point, in “an unbroken field of poppy and lupin”
 . 
ashamed of us all (of himself ), took solace in time,
in salt, water, and rock, in knowing
all things human “will ebb, and all/
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ Their works dissolve.”
 . 
Me, too. And I’m not always so patient. I’ve caught myself
wishing our spoiler species gone, just swept away,
returned to rust and compost for more deserving earthly forms.
 . 
Meanwhile, flint arrowheads turn up among the plastic
picnic sporks, the glacial crags and bottom silt.
Hawks roost across the river on the now defunct
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ nuclear power plant cooling tower,
 . 
flotsam left at the human high water mark.
Like mussel shells, like driftwood or seedpod,
like the current’s corrugations in the sand.
 . 
Here, on this side, a woodchuck sits up, lustrous,
fat on her chestnut haunches, (she thinks herself
queen of her narrow realm) and munches
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ the fisherman’s crust.
 . 
Who wouldn’t smile? Who doesn’t pity—and love—
the woodchuck not only despite but for her like-human smugness?
How can I not through her intercession forgive
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ for now a few things human.
 . 
Jennifer Atkinson
from The Thinking Eye, Parlor Press, © 2016
 . 
Jennifer Atkinson writes in Poems.com:
 . 
But how do we live with our knowledge and the emotional cloud of fear, guilt, anger, grief, and helplessness, a cloud that surrounds us, each of us alone, and all of us together? That cloud has become intrinsic to my ecopoetical work. Burdened with the beauty and loss and malicious awfulness ahead, weighted with the anxiety that hits whenever a winter day dawns without frost on the ground or another ‘unprecedented’ downpour rings in the gutter, how do I live?
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
++++++ Henry David Thoreau
 . 
We lose our souls if we lose the experience of the forest, the butterflies, the song of the birds, if we can’t see the stars at night.
++++++ Thomas Berry
 . 
It is the ancient wisdom of birds that battles are best fought with song.
++++++Richard Nelson
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Rain Light
 . 
All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning.
 . 
W.S. Merwin (1927-2019)
from The Shadow of Sirius, Copper Canyon Press, © 2009
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
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My favorite weather is bird-chirping weather.
++++++ Terri Guillemets
 . 
You can observe a lot by just watching.
++++++ Yogi Berra
 . 
Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.
++++++ Betty Smith, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 
Special thanks throughout these Earth Day celebrations to my hiking buddy and nature guide Mike Barnett, who has let me into the wilderness and won’t let me leave. Most of the quotations included in these sections are compiled in Mike’s Medicine Bag, which he carries with him into every new adventure
 . 
And EXTRA SPECIAL THANKS to my companion in the universe, Linda, who allows the cosmos to flow through her pen onto paper. She has given permission for me to use a few of her drawings throughout these Earth Day celebrations.
 . 
++++++  Bill
 . 
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Signature

Posted in ecology, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on April 12, 2024| 6 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems from Visions International]
 . 
The Tending
 . 
Each day made a play for eternity then,
just as now each day shrinks
to a blurry moment’s recall. But still
there is the flat porch roof where a child
would lie down to watch
the clouds slowly changing shape,
 . 
or the blue, unfathomable sky
opening over, and puzzle where he was
before birth, before conception,
or if the world of sensation
had wiped his angel memory.
Cypress-tree shadow reached, as they
 . 
still do, across the lawn at evening,
and again I twist backwards
through a wooden sash window
into the long unoccupied bedroom
of my parents. Old clothes,
a straw-hat clinging to a wall, a stopped
 . 
alarm clock on the mantel.
And here, a navy-striped bolster,
the dent left by their sleeping heads
imagined as touchable still,
the love between us arguing against loss,
the tending they brought
 . 
to each sadness and terror of thought,
but more to an obvious wound –
the skinned knee dabbed
with Dettol; a beaker of oatmeal tipped
into a cold bath as a salve
for sunburn; a sewing needle squeezed
 . 
from a pin cushion bristling
with needles, the small hand held
forward into light, the gentle, tortuous
teasing out of a thistle thorn
and this placed – a charm,
frail tiny, golden – on the child’ palm
 . 
Patrick Deeley – Dublin, Ireland
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Foamflower
 . 
The last day of March – at the edge of the woods red maple, always impatient, always profligate, spreads its arms to offer a jillion winged seeds, the fire at its twigtips cooled to pale smolder. Deeper beneath the canopy leafbuds are swelling on oak and hickory, tangible pressured suspense, not yet quite to bursting. Ephemerals race to make sugar from thin sunlight before the overstory closes and their beds grow dark. Trout lily and hepatica already bloomed out; bloodroot roaring full throat; rue anemone flinging itself in galaxies up the ridge.
 . 
And what’s this? Foamflower has poked its first slender finger up between last year’s coppered leaves. A pale nubbin, a lifting spike, two or three then tomorrow a full maypole of tiny florets to comprise the rising inflorescence. Tiarella cordifolia, little crowns with heart-shaped leaves. What is its occupation in this temperate glade? What does it promise me other than its beauty?
 . 
Has it promised me anything? Should it? Perhaps I can tell you a story about the company foamflower keeps in this beech-dominated neighborhood: pussytoes, star chickweed, the throng of early blooming companions. Perhaps I’ll kneel to discover its native bee pollinators or wonder how its minute seeds disperse themselves. I might even recognize these felsic outcroppings and recall its family name, Saxifrage, Stone-breaker. But Lord of creation, save me from asking, “What good is it to me?” Expect a poultice of its leaves to heal my burns and scalds? Brew a tea to soothe my mouth and brighten my eye? Shall I read in its signature only whatever good use I can make of it?
 . 
On the seventh day the Lord looked out upon everything created and declared, “It is good!” And then rested. Never let me rest until I have looked around me, all around, water and stone, flower and tree, worm and beetle, turtle and bird, each of them good, in themselves and of themselves. Each one living usefulness that comprises its own being. What is my occupation in this temperate glade? What may I promise all these that surround me? To be a good companion in the community of all.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
O Doves
(Lima, Peru, 6 am)
and he saw the Spirit of God descent like a dove . . . Matthew 3:16
 . 
Shy ones, the shades of buttermilk
and cirrus cloud,
 . 
forgive the man and woman
cursing the scrabble of your bones on the
bedroom window ledge.
 . 
They are harried creatures
waking out of sleep’s egg
to the greasy clot of day.
 . 
They know only hunger,
which is the world’s stark treason,
 . 
and the mockery of iridescent necks
pecking the gray flagstones for crumbs.
 . 
How can they love the immaculate
cooing of your beaks so high in the blue air,
 . 
having forgotten the signs
of invisible things?
 . 
Maria Rouphail – Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
the gilded angel on the spire / draws the sun to its dewy face
 . 
landscapes advance / and dig their hooks in the elongated shadow/ you drag behind you
 . 
a child’s sleep soothed by rain’s ticking / on the other side of the earth
 . 
an accordion of hands fixing my hair
 . 
I smooth my quilt, where her dress scraps are stitched
 . 
a pair of wired gold rim glasses / like John Lennon’s
 . 
the water above the springs squeaks like pebbles
 . 
Here is the plain brown envelope with the hand-printed address and the Pete Seeger postal stamp. I slip out the slender booklet, cardstock cover illustrated by Malaika Favorite. Inside a listing of poems and their poets – Bulgaria, North Carolina, Wales, Macedonia, Texas, Ireland. And then the saddle-stapled pages, their lines wandering in the familiar, distinctive font, and the words . . . language . . . images.
 . 
After reading many issues of Visions International over many years, I still wonder how editor Bradley Strahan draws these voices to him. How he creates this international community of human soul. I wonder how he accomplishes it, but I may be learning a bit of what he is listening for, what he seeks and chooses as he compiles each collection. Even more compelling than the stories the poems tell are their images: elemental, bedrock, true. I read phrases that ring with harmonies I’ve never quite heard before and yet they strike as perfectly right and correct. The language is new and yet it enters me and becomes me. (And I have to confess, there is just something about those Irish poets.)
 . 
Here are old neighbors, like Maria Rouphail from Raleigh and Jessie Carty from Huntersville, but here are my new old neighbors from every corner of the earth, all drawn together through their poems. Drop Bradley a line and join the community.
 . 
Visions International / 309 Lakeside Drive / Garner, NC 27529 – 4 issues = $25
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Drive
. . . roll down the window, and let the wind blow back your hair.
+++ – Bruce Springsteen, Thunder Road
 . 
My first love and I would circle the Blue Ridge
listening to Thunder Road, caught in a spiral –
the song, the earth, and us – a springboard
for leaping. Ancient and settled,
those mountains, a silhouette absorbing music
from our high school parties at the VFW.
Moths and gnats reduced to a fever
clouding porchlights, while kissing was its own
stratosphere. Who needed to breathe anyway?
Not when you’re a new mythology
sharing sixpacks of beer and meadows jacked
in the sweet everlasting – a wildflower
native to the state from which we’d grown.
We kept the geographies of each other’s
bodies beneath our tongues, but the sky
was an impossible parallel. Never mind that
we craved nothing linear. He and I, divergent lines,
a palm reader would have said about the future,
lanterning us in, cloud-swept from the open road.
W didn’t we marry at eighteen, honeymoon
nearby at the Peaks of Otter like all the other
teenage brides? You never asked me if I wanted to
stop. The truth is, I didn’t. I needed to witness
the horizon unobstructed by mountains
where trees shook colors from their crowns,
their roots tangled in bedrock. It was
something of a dance, the way our feet flew
over tar and gravel, spun around blind turns.
The valley that had fevered and pushed us out,
lay spent and sprawled beneath the open windows.
Those nights we rumbled through, we left nothing
but music growing fainter until it was gone.
 . 
Laura Ross – Mount Dora, Florida, USA
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
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