Q.and A. come back, They "formed my mind." 
"Who is my neighbour?" "My neighbour is all mankind."
 

Seamus Heaney

  

And some time make the time to drive out west  
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore , 
In September or October, when the wind 
And the light are working off each other 
So that the ocean on one side is wild 
With foam and glitter, and inland among the stones  
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit  
By the earthed lightining of a flock of swans. 
There feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white, 
Their fully  grown headstrong-looking heads 
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater. 
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it  
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, 
A hurry through which known and strange things pass 
As big  soft buffetings come at the car sideways 
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
  

Seamus Heaney

 

Your songs, when you sing them with your two eyes closed  
As you always do, are like a local road 
We’ve known every turn of in the past- 
That midge-veiled, high-hedged side road where you stood 
Looking and listening until a car  
Would come and go and leave you lonelier  
Than you had been to begin with. So, sing on,  
Dear shut-eyed one, dear far-voiced veteran.
 

Sing yourself to where the singing comes from, 
Ardent and cut off like our blind neighbor 
Who played the piano all day in her bedroom. 
Her notes came out to us like hoisted water  
Ravelling off a bucket at the wellhead  
Where next thing we’d be listening , hushed and awkward.
 

That blind-from-birth, sweet-voiced, withdrawn musician  
Was like a silver vein in heavy clay. 
Night water glistening in the light of day. 
But also just our neighbor, Rosie Keenan. 
She touched our cheeks. She let us touch her braille 
In books like books wallpaper patterns came in . 
Her hands were active and her eyes were full  
Of open darkness and watery  shine.
 

She knew us by our voices. She’d say  she “saw” 
Wherever or what ever. Being with her 
Was intimate and helpful, like a cure 
You didn’t notice happening. When I read  
A poem with Keenan’s well in it , she said,  
“I can see the sky at the bottom of it now.”
 

Seamus Heaney

  So tender, I said, 'Remember this. 
It will be good for you to retrace this path
 

when you have grown away and stand at last 
at the very centre of the empty city.'

 Between my finger and my thumb 
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.
 

Under my window a clean rasping sound 
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: 
My father, digging. I look down
 

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds 
Bends low, comes up twenty years away 
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills 
Where he was digging.
 

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft 
Against the inside knee was levered firmly. 
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep 
To scatter new potatoes that we picked 
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
 

By God, the old man could handle a spade, 
Just like his old man.
 

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day 
Than any other man on Toner's bog. 
Once I carried him milk in a bottle 
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up 
To drink it, then fell to right away 
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods 
Over his shoulder, digging down and down 
For the good turf. Digging.
 

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap 
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge 
Through living roots awaken in my head. 
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
 

<pre?Between my finger and my thumb 
The squat pen rests. 
I'll dig with it. 
 

Seamus Heaney 
 

  "the squelch and slap of soggy peat".  Can't 
you just hear that!   

• recognition and credence that something believable should be accepted as true;
• the attitude and behavior of a social/cultural group that resolves political disputes by a force of arms;
• an attitude of arrogant superiority;
• a habitual and characteristic metal attitude that determines how you will interpret and respond to situations;
• an attitude of a government that subordinates should be controlled in a fatherly way;
• willingness or unwillingness to recognize and respect differences in opinions or beliefs;
• a reverent or irreverent mental attitude;
• an integrated set of attitudes about e.g. Religion, views, ideology, an orientation that characterizes the thinking of a group or nation.

• Gourd: A ripened reproductive body of a seed plant
• Prune: although a fruit also means to cut back the growth, weed out the unwanted or unnecessary. [hmmm prune-stones for teeth!]
• Hair: covering of the body to prevent heat loss – a projection of the body
• Coil: to move in a spiral course as in whorl
• Leathery: tough but pliable
• Pash: is an interesting word – it must be made up - however, Pasch is the Christian festival of Easter [the Easter Rebellion]
• Treasure: is anything valued that is owned, can be highly prized for its beauty, can be an accumulation of things and can be an accumulation of hoarded wealth.
• Clod: can be an awkward stupid person - it is also a ball of mud.
• Works: the internal mechanism
• Aha - Diodorus Siculus –- is a Greek Historian who lived in 90 to 30 BC and wrote 40 books of history – his big mistake is [from Encyclopedia Britannica] partly from the nature of the undertaking, and the awkward form of annals into which he has thrown the historical portion of his narrative. He shows none of the critical faculties of the historian, merely setting down a number of unconnected details. His narrative contains frequent repetitions and contradictions, is without coloring, and monotonous; and his simple diction, which stands intermediate between pure Attic and the colloquial Greek of his time, enables us to detect in the narrative the undigested fragments of the materials which he employed.
• Terrible: causing fear, dread or terror – extreme distress – intensely unpleasant
• Axe: and edge tool with a heavy blade and heavy handle – to terminate – split
• Outstaring: to overcome or cause to waver by staring

Personal Helicon

for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

 

That Sunday morning we had traveled far. 
We stood a  long time out in Tollund Moss : 
The low ground, the swart water, the thick grass 
Hallucinatory and familiar.
 

A path through the Jutland fields. Light traffic sound. 
Willow bushes: rushes; bog -fir grags 
In a swept and gated farmyard; dormant quags. 
And silage under wraps in its silent mound.
  

It could have been a still out of the bright 
“Townland of Peace”. that poem of dream farms 
Outside  all contention, The scarecrow’s arms 
Stood  open opposite the satellite
  

Dish in the paddock, where a standing stone 
Has been resituated and landscaped,  
With tourist signs in futhark runic script 
In Danish and in English. Things had moved on.
 

It could have been in Mulhollandstown or Scribe. 
The byroads has their names on them in black  
And white it was user-friendly outback, 
Where we stood footloose, at home beyond the tribe,
  

More scouts than strangers, ghosts who’d walked abroad 
Unfazed by light , to make a new beginning  
And make a go of it , alive and sinning , 
Ouselves again, free-willed again, not bad.
  

September 1994 

Seamus Heaney

I sat all morning in the college sick bay 
Counting bells knelling classes to a close, 
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.
 

In the porch I met my father crying-- 
He had always taken funerals in his stride-- 
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
 

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram 
When I came in, and I was embarrassed 
By old men standing up to shake my hand
 

And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble," 
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest, 
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
 

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs. 
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived 
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
 

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops 
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him 
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
 

Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple, 
He lay in the four foot box as in a cot. 
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
 

A four foot box, a foot for every year.
  

 - - - - - - -- - -  - 
 

On first reading I wasn't quite sure what this poem was  
doing.And when I came to the last line I thought - oh my, 
 it is the death of someone young.    
4year old-4foot box.
 

As I reread it I could see the trail of grief unfolding.   
 From the narrator's wait for a ride until he is able 
 to go to the roomand see this scene.
 

What imagery.
 

This was in SH's first collection of poetry.   
There fore written about '66 or earlier.
    

From an online website:   
"The poem is about the death of Heaney's infant brother 
 (Christopher) and how people (including himself) 
 reacted to this. The poem's title suggests a holiday but  
this “break” does not happen for pleasant reasons.  
For most of the poem Heaney writes of people's  
unnatural reactions; at  
the end he is able to grieve honestly. "
 

Great poem!  Can bear much rereading.

 

Below, the patchwork earth, dark hems of hedge, 
The long grey tapes of road that bind and loose  
Villages and fields in casual marriage ; 
We bank about the small lough and farmhouse
 

And the sure green world gone topsy-turvy 
As we climb out of our familiar landscape. 
The engine noises change, You look at me. 
The coastline slips away beneath the wing -tip.
 

And launched right off the earth by force of fire 
We hang, miraculous, above the water, 
Dependent on the invisible air 
To keep us airborne and it bring us further.
 

Ahead of us the sky’s a geyser now,  
A calm voice talks of cloud yet we feel lost. 
Air-pockets jolt our fears and down we go. 
Travellers, at this point, can only trust.
  

Seamus Heaney

(Hats...oh, please please forgive me for using your poignant earlier thoughts to us again here as my example.)

 

Lady with the frilled blouse 
And simple tartan skirt, 
Since you have left the house 
Its emptiness has hurt 
All thought. In your presence  
Time rode easy, anchored  
On a smile; but absence  
Rocked love's balance, unmoored 
The days. They buck and bound 
Across the calendar 
Pitched from the quiet sound  
Of your flower-tender  
Voice, Need breaks on my strand; 
You're gone, I am at sea. 
Until you resume command 
Self is in mutiny, 
 

Seanus Heaney

Thigh deep in sedge and marigolds 
a neighbor laid his shadow 
on the stream, vouching
 

"It's poor as Lazarus, that gound, 
and brushed away 
among the shaken leafage.
 

I lay where his lea sloped 
to meet our fallow, 
nested on moss and rushes, 
 

my ear swallowing, 
his fabulous biblical dismisisal, 
that tongue of chosen epople.
 

When he would stand like that 
on the other side, white-haired 
swinging his blackthorn
 

at thte marsh weeds, 
he prophesied above our scraggy acres, 
then turned away
 

towards his promised furrows 
on the hill, a weak of pollen 
drifting to our bank, nexgt season's tares.
 

- - - - - 

What a description of a man on his land, making divisive 
comments.   I felt right inside that scene. 

From 1972 collection  "Wintering Out" 
Tomorrow I'll post part 2. 

The division of the Protestant & Catholic families is 
symbolised there in addition to the literal division. 

And let's see, I assume the use of Lazarus refers to the diseased 
beggar in the New Testament, Luke 16.

 

My ”place of clear water”. 
the first hill in the world  
where springs washed into  
the shiny grass
 

and darkened  cobbles  
on the bed of the lane, 
ANAHORISH, soft gradient  
of , consonant,  vowel -meadow,
 

after-image of lamps  
swung through the yards  
on winter evenings. 
With pail and barrows 
 

those mound -dwellers 
go waist-deep in mist  
to break the light ice  
at wells and dunghills.
 

Seamus Heaney

 

Not because the light  sifting through   
the new born  leaves is softer 
Not because my daffodils bloomed  
last week and now are gone  
Not  because my plum tree in its lacy gown  
dropped its buds like snow upon the greening lawn  
Not because the lilacs await their turn  
and the iris green swards  heralds  
the coming of the Empress in her royal gown  
Not because the birds are searching   
for just the place to build their nests  
Always it seems in some tree I had  
Hoped to remove or vines that need tearing down  
Not because the world looks cleaner  
washed by warmer rains instead of snow 
Not because the earth smells new and robins  
pull  worms from newly turned sod  
No all these things tell me it is  here  
BUT still …
 
it is the sound this  Saturday morning  
Of my neighbors gasoline mower  
Being pushed in precision across his lawn  
The first  of many Saturday forays  
Until once again Autumn sings her song. 
 

anna  alexander  
4/9/05©

 

Her scarf al la Bardot, 
In suede flats for the walk, 
She came with me one evening  
For air and friendly talk. 
We crossed the quiet river, 
Took the embankment walk.
 

Traffic holding its breath , 
Sky a tense diaphragm: 
Dusk hung like a backcloth 
That shook where a swan swam, 
Tremulous as a hawk 
Hanging deadly , calm.
  

A vacuum of need  
Collapsed each hunting heart  
But tremulously we held  
As hawk and prey apart, 
Preserved classic decorum. 
Deployed our talk with art.
 

Our juvenilia  
Had taught us both to wait, 
Not to publish feeling  
And regret it all too late- 
Mushroom loves already  
Had puffed and burst in hate, 
 

So, chary and excited 
As a  thrush linked on a hawk, 
We thrilled to the March twilight 
With nervous childish talk: 
Still waters running deep 
Along the embankment walk. 
 

Seamus Heaney

 

Late August, given heavy rain and sun 
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen. 
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot. 
Among others,  red, green, hard as a knot. 
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet 
Like thickened wine; summer’s blood was in it 
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for 
Picking. Then red ones  inked  up and that hunger 
Sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots 
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots. 
Round hayfields,  cornfields and potato-drills  
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,  
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered 
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned 
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered  
With thorn  pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.
 

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre. 
But when the bath  was filled we found a fur, 
Of rat-grey fungus , glutting on our cache. 
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush 
The fruit fermented , the sweet flesh turned  sour. 
I always felt like crying, It wasn’t fair  
That all the lovely canfuls  smelt of rot. 
Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.
 

Seamus Heaney

 

Cut from the green hedge a forked hazel stick 
That he held tight by the arms of the V: 
Circling the terrain, hunting the pluck 
Of water, nervous, but professionally
 

Unfussed. The pluck came sharp as a sting. 
The rod jerked with precise convulsions, 
Spring water suddenly broadcasting  
Through a green hazel its secret stations.
 

The bystanders would ask to have a try. 
He handed them the rod without a word. 
It lay dead in their grasp till nonchalantly 
He gripped expectant wrists, The hazel stirred.
 

Seamus Heaney

	 

Jaws puff round and solid as a turnip, 
Dead eyes are statue’s and the upper lip 
Bullies the heavy mouth down to a droop. 
A bowler suggests the stage Irishman 
Whose look was two parts scorn, two parts dead pan. 
His silver watch chain girds him like a hoop.
 

My father’s uncle, from whom he learnt the trade, 
Long fixed in sepia tints, begins to fade 
And must come down. Now on the bedroom wall  
There is a faded patch where he has been- 
As if a bandage had been ripped from skin- 
Empty plaque to a house’s rise and fall.
  

Twenty years ago I herded cattle  
Into pens or held them against a wall 
Until my father won at arguing 
His own price on a crowd of cattelmen 
Who handled rumps, groped teats, stood, paused and then  
Bought a round of drinks to clinch the bargains.
 

Uncle and nephew , fifty years ago, 
Heckled and herded through the fair days too. 
This barrel of a men penned in the frame: 
I see him with the jaunty hat pushed back 
Draw thumbs out of his waistcoat, curtly smack 
Hand and sell. Father, I’ve watch you do the same.
 

And watched you sadden, when the fairs were stopped. 
No room for dealers  if the farmers shopped 
Like housewives at an auction ring. Your stick  
Was parked behind he door and stands there still. 
Closing this chapter of our chronicle  
I take your uncle’s portrait to the attic.
 

Seamus Heaney

Undine

He slashed the briars, shovelled up grey silk
To give me right-of-way in my own drains
And I ran quick for him, cleaned out my rust.

He halted, saw me finally disrobed,
Running clear, with apparent unconcern.
Then he walked by me. I rippled and I churned.

Where ditches intersected near the river
Until he dug a spade deep in my flank
And took me to him, I swallowed his trench

Gratefully, dispersing myself for love
Down in his roots, climbing his brassy grain--
But once he knew my welcome, I alone

Could give him subtle increase and reflection.
He explored me so completely, each limb
Lost its cold freedom. Human, warmed to him.

OK, it was too puzzling for me to like at first. I tried out its meaning ever-which-way...including having the speaker be his horse.

But now I think I've got it right. I looked up the definition of "undine": In Teutonic folklore, undines are female water-spirits who like to associate with humans. They often join villagers in their dances and merry-making.

Now somewhat more enlightened, I did enjoy Heaney's semi-bawdy(?) poem. It invokes one memory. This kid just entering puberty stumbled onto a 1950s B/W TV film-showing of Debussy's "Prelude in the Afternoon of a Faun," danced (in 1930s?) by the great male ballet dancer Nijinsky. Heaney, it seems, has harmones similar to mine.

I ought to sign off now using that old mneumonic, GD&R (Grinning, ducking & running). However, I'll just sign: Sincerely, Jim in Jeff.

And between the jamb-wall and bedroom door
Our speed and distance were inestimable
First we shunted , the we whistled, then

Somebody collected the invisible
For tickets and very gravely punched it
At carriage after carriage under us

Moved faster, chooka-chook , the sofa legs
Went giddy and the unreachable ones
Far out on the kitchen floor began to wave

Ghost-train ? Death -gondola? The carved, curled ends
Black leatherette and ornate gauntness of it
Made it seemed the sofa had achieved

Floatation. Its castors on tiptoe,
Its braid and fluent backboard gave it airs
Of superannuated pageantry :

When visitors endured it , straight- backed,
When it stood off on its own remoteness,
When the insufficient toys appeared on it

On Christmas mornings , it held out as itself,
Potentially heaven bound , earthbound for sure,
Among things that might add up or let you down.

Seamus Heaney .

My teeth are gone ,
The ones that came with my birth
The first ones that left were attached
To a piece of string

In the mirror my mother handed me
I watched its wiggly dance
A ballet in slow motion
Directed by me.

Soon it fell exhausted in my hand
To be placed beneath my pillow
For the tooth fairy to
Pay me a dime in exchange for

The small pearl that once was mine
Somewhere there is a photo
Taken on Easter morn
Me in an organdy dress

My face alight with
A toothless grin.
Now the time has come
When age and medicine

Took a toll and in a little while
The last four of mine will go
Removed and in another day or so
New ones will replace these ancient ones

And put a smile back on my face
True they are not what I had before
At night they will have their resting place
In a glass on the bathroom shelf

But in the next picture taken of me
They will peer from between my lips
In a grateful smile …!


anna Alexander ©March 17, 2006

We entered history and ignorance
Under the wireless shelf Yippee-I-ay,
Sang “The Riders of the Range”. HERE IS THE NEWS:


Said the absolute speaker. Between him and us
A great gulf was fixed where pronunciation
Reigned tyrannically. The aerial wire


Swept from a treetop down through a hole
Bored into the window frame. When it moved in wind,
The sway of language and its furthering


Swept and swayed in us like nets in water
Or the abstract , lonely curve of distant trains
As entered history and ignorance.


We occupied our seats with all our might,
Fit for the uncomfortable ness,
Constancy was its own reward already.


Out in front, on the big upholstered arm,
Somebody craned to the side, driver or
Fireman, wiping his dry brow with the air


Of one who had run the gauntlet. We were
The last thing on his mind, it seemed; we sensed
A tunnel coming up where we’d pour through


Like unlit carriages through the fields at night,
Our only job to sit, eyes straight ahead ,
And be transported and make engine noise.


Seamus Heaney

is gone just like that, but your stick
is kept salmon-silver.

Seasoned and bendy,
it convinces the hand

that what you have you hold
to play with and pose with

and lay about with.
But then too it points back to cattle

and spatter and beating
the bars of a gate--

the very stick we might cut
from your family tree.

The living cobalt of an afternoon
dragonfly drew my eye to it first

and the evening I trimmed it for you
you saw your first glow-worm--

all of us stood round in silence, even you
gigantic enough to darken the sky

for a glow-worm.
And when I poked open the grass

a tiny brightening den lit the eye
in the blunt cut end of your stick.

Seamus Heaney

Are glow-worms lightening bugs? I remember catching lightening bugs on long summer nights. We would put the lightening bugs in jars with a little grass at the bottom. Then, watch the lightening bugs twinkle their yellow light.

I also remember dragonflies landing on my father's fishing pole. A dragonfly landing on your pole meant you would have luck that day.

Glow little glow-worm, fly of fire.
Glow like an incandescent wire.
Glow for the female of the species.
Turn on the AC and the DC.
This night could use a little brightnin'.
Light up you little ol' bug of lightnin'
. When you gotta glow, you gotta glow.

Glow little glow-worm, glow.
Glow little glow-worm, glow and glimmer.
Swim through the sea of night, little swimmer.
Thou aeronautical boll weevil.
Illuminate yon woods primeval.
See how the shadows deepen, darken.
You and your chick should get to sparkin'.
I got a gal that I love so.

Glow little glow-worm, glow.
Glow little glow-worm, turn the key on.
You are equipped with taillight neon.
You got a cute vest-pocket mazda.
Which you can make both slow and faster.
I don't know who you took a shine to.
Or who you're out to make a sign to.
I got a gal that I love so.
Glow little glow-worm, glow.

RAY CHARLES - "Glow Worm" lyrics

the very stick we might cut 
from your family tree.
 

The living cobalt of an afternoon 
dragonfly drew my eye to it first
 

and the evening I trimmed it for you 
you saw your first glow-worm
 

- - - - -- -  

What a loving picture it makes.   If you have ever seen a dragongly
 
of the blue type in the sun you will know exactly what
 it refers to.And just think- the stick was cut from the family tree 
which leads me to think it was a family tradition.

How easily it lights up, 
How easily it goes out - 
The firefly
 

Chora

But still he was glad, I know, when I stood my ground,
Putting it up to him
With a smile that trumped his smile and his fool's errand,
Waiting for the next move in the game.

~ Seamus Heaney

Does anyone know what "bubble for the spirit level" means?

My 'place of clear water',
the first hill in the world
where springs washed into
the shiny grass

and darkened cobbles
in the bed of the lane.
"Anahorish," soft gradient
of consonant, vowel-meadow,

after-image of lamps
swung through the yards
on winter evenings.
With pails and barrows

those mound-dwellers
go waist-deep in mist
to break the light ice
as wells and dunghills

~Seamus Heaney

I liked this poem not only for its imagery, but also for its language - "of constant, vowel-meadow" makes you not only see what Heaney was trying to say, but also hear the words as if they are ringing from the page.

While travelling through New Mexico, we came across some Indian sites and our guide told us that the Indians who lived in the area were called "mound-dwellers" but for some unexplainable reason they just disappeared and only a few pieces of broken pottery was all that was left of them - it really makes me see the Indians - "go waist deep in mist" - and than vanish!

The garden mould
buruised easily, the shower
gathering in your heelmark
was the blank O

in "Broagh,"
its low tattoo
among the windy boortrees
and rhubarb-blades

ended almost
suddenly, like the last
"gh" the strangers found
difficult to manage

~ Seamus Heaney

What a wonderful "sounding" poem. Can't you just feel the words rolling off your tongue and I agree with Joan there's something about the Irish language that makes you "tingle" inside the same way you feel when you hear an Irishman laugh or sing.

It rained when it should have snowed.
When we went to gather holly


The ditches were swimming, we were wet
to the knees, our hands were all jags

and water ran up our sleeves.
There should have been berries

but the sprigs we brought into the house
gleamed like smashed bottle-glass.

Now here I am, in a room that is decked
with the red-berried, waxy-leafed stuff,

and I almost forget what it's like
to be wet to the skin or longing for snow.

I reach for a book like a doubter
and want it to flare round my hand,


a black-letter bush, a glittering shield-wall,
cutting as holly and ice.

Seamus Heaney

I love holly. I had a wreath of fake holly on my door during the winter months. I think Seamus Heaney is at some fancy cocktail party with all the beautiful artificial trimmings around him. Somehow his mind flies back to the days when he went out in the rain and snow to gather fresh or "real" holly. These are the days, the ones of cold, rain, snow, that will never leave his memory.

My favorite lines are

but the sprigs we brought into the house
gleamed like smashed bottle-glass.

What a pretty way to describe holly.

One morning early I met armoured cars
In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres,
All camouflaged with broken alder branches
And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets.
How long were they approaching down my roads
As if they owned them? The whole country was sleeping
I had rights-of-way, fields, cattle in my keeping,
Tractors hitched to buckrakes in open sheds,
Silos, chill gates, wet slates, the greens and reds
Of outhouse roofs. Whom should I run to tell
Among all of those with their back doors on the latch
For the bringer of bad news, that small-hours visitant
Who, by being expected, might be kept distant?
Sowers of seed, erectors of headstones...
O charioteers, above your dormant guns,
It stands here still, stands vibrant as you pass,
The invisible, untoppled omphalos.

~ Seamus Heaney

I had been reading "Newsweek" dated March 27, 2006 and in it was an article on Iraq about "improvised explosive devices (IEDs)" and how this army captain and his bomb squad would go looking for them on the streets of Bagdad - they call it "running the gaulet." We just recently had the three year anniversary of the Iraq invasion and as fate would have it after I finished the artcle I opened "Opened Ground" by Seamus Heaney and the book fell open to the above poem - "The Toome Road." Incidently, "omphalos" is defined as: a central point: Hub, focal point.

We see ourselves together going home,
When truth declares we go alone.


Anna Alexander 2/14/99 all rights reserved

Strange noises were heard
By others who followed, bits of a tune
Coming in on loud weather

Though nothing like melody.
He blamed their fingers and ear
As unpractised, their fiddling easy

For he had gone alone into the island
And brought back the whole thing.
The house throbbed like his full violin.

So whether he calls it spirit music
Or not, I don't care. He took it
Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.

Still he maintains, from nowhere
It comes off the bow gravely
Rephrases itself into the air.

~Seamus Heaney

Thanks for all those wonderful posts. Yes, Bob Hope - that's who it was and Marj thanks for the information on omphalos. As for all those wonderful poems - words can hardly express my feelings especially yours, Anna.

I liked this poem, "The Given Note" not only for what it says, but also for what I can feel from the poem. Everyone in my family has been a musician at one time or another. Because of my hearing dificulties I can't hear words or music sometimes, but I can feel the vibrations of the music by putting my ear or my hand on the instrument that is playing - like a radio or a TV set. That way I can truly "feel" the music.

Signposts whitened relentlessly.
Montreuil, Abbeville, Beauvais
Were promised, promised, came and went
Each place granting its name's fulfilment.

A combine groaning its way late
Bled seeds across its work-light.
A forest fire smouldered out.
One by one small cafés shut.

I thought of you continuously
A thousand miles south where Italy
Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.
Your ordinariness was renewed there.

~ Seamus Heaney

What an interesting poem. I've never thought of anyone I love as being "ordinary." Yet, I suppose that is true. We are all really ordinary in the truest sense. We are all a part of the puzzle - fitting together in the most ordinary of ways. If on the other hand we were all extraordinary it would probably led to chaos. Just as there is harmony and balance in nature so too our own lives must be in harmony and balance and in doing so we are "ordinary."

Billy Preston - 1974
Joe Cocker - 1974
Ray Stevens - 1976
Kenny Rankin - 1976
John Davidson - 1976
Tanya Tucker - 1977
Kenny Rogers - 1983
Also recorded by: Bonnie Tyler; Engelbert Humperdinck; Juanita Dailey; Wayne Newton; Sonny Criss; Nini Tempo; Capp/Pierce Orch; Little Eva; Karen Briggs; Greg Vail; David Syme; Phil Driscoll; Bob James; Lennon Sisters; Nohelani Cypriano; Charly; Steve Hall.

You are so beautiful
To me
You are so beautiful
To me
Can't you see

You're everything I hoped for
You're everything I need
You are so beautiful
To me

You are so wonderful
To me
You are so wonderful
To me
Can't you see

You're everything I hoped for
You're everything I need
You are so wonderful
To me

You are so beautiful
To me
You are so beautiful
To me
Can't you see

You're everything I hoped for
You're everything I need
You are so beautiful
To me

Not writen by Seamus Heaney. But I think it close to what he meant us to move our minds toward when he chose the term "ordinariness."

BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER - "The first stirrings toward this proverb appear to have come from the English dramatist John Lyly, who wrote in 'Euphues in England' (1580). 'As neere is Fancie to Beautie, as the pricke to the Rose,' and from William Shakespeare, who in 'Love's Labour's Lost' (c.1594) penned the line 'Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye.' Almost a century and a half later, Benjamin Franklin in his 'Poor Richard's Almanack' of 1741 included the lines, 'Beauty, like supreme dominion/ Is but supported by opinion,' and Scottish philosopher David Hume's 'Essays, Moral and Political' (1742) contained the perhaps too analytical 'Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.' It was not until 1878, however, that the modern wording of the proverb first appeared in 'Molly Brown,' by the Irish novelist Mr. Margaret Hungerford. The saying has been repeated frequently in the twentieth century." From "Wise Words and Wives' Tales: The Origins, Meanings and Time-Honored Wisdom of Proverbs and Folk Sayings Olde and New" by Stuart Flexner and Doris Flexner (Avon Books, New York, 1993).

So as we phrase it today, the phrase goes back to Ireland...possibly even to Seamus's kinfolk for all we know. So maybe he, like me, often quotes (or at least paraphrases) his own dear Grandmother. Yes?

Yes! I like that thought. Go, Seamus; go laddie go! (He's younger than me.)

I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal
On turf banks under blankets, with our faces
Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,
Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.
Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate.
Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found.
Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out
Like breathing effigies on a raised ground.
And in that dream I dreamt - how like you this? -
Our first night years ago in that hotel
When you came with your deliberate kiss
To raise us towards the lovely and painful
Covenants of flesh; our separateness;
The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.

I can add that Lorenzo and Jessica would be the lovers in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice." Diarmuid and Grainne (Grania) of Celtic legend are pictured in Yeats's "A Faery Song" sleeping their "bridal sleep (outdoors) in the long dew-dripping hours of the night."

The rest of SH's sonnet can be interpreted by each reader as we see it, I think.

~ Seamus Heaney

In years it was the "Forge" that was the center of the lives of the people outside of the house or home. For without a blacksmith you couldn't get your horses shoed or have your weapons forged. As I look outside my window I can't help wonder if there is a central place were we would go today. Could it be a gas-station? It seems silly but the way we are depended on gas and oil it might have some relevance

In the porch I met my father crying-
He had always taken funerals in stride-
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

~ Seamus Heaney

There is sadness here to be sure, but the poem also tells a story about how people handle death of their loved ones in their own way. I can remember as a child being made to kiss my great-grandmother in her coffin and than running away and after hiding, crying. I am not sure whether I was more afraid of my great-grandmother in the coffin or whether is was the fact that I was made to kiss her. That image of her laying there in her coffin has stayed with me for years.

~Seamus Heaney

Thanks for sharing Jim and Anna. When my husband and I went back to see his home in New Mexico in the 1960s, one of the towns he lived in was Madrid - it was virtually a ghost town except for the blacksmith where an old man sat out in front watching as the cars whizzed by. I remember my husband was disappointed because he remembered the town in the 40s and 50s when it was busy. What was amazing was that when we stopped and talked with the old man; he actually remembered my husband as a little boy.

Anna I have to say I like the dawn but I love the sunset. Living in San Francisco I've seen some spectacular sunsets especially over the ocean - which brings us to this to the poem. I love the lines: "You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass..." I used to sit for hours on the rocks and indeed I was neither here nor there, and [I would imagine] that strange things [passed by.] Even now as I listen to the cars whizzing by outside my window they can at times seem only like the crashing of waves upon the rocks and I feel that I am neither "here nor there."

And two more of FHLane's lovely seascapes: Ship Starlight and Boston Harbor.

In all these, a source of light seems to "emanate" from the painting toward us...the luminist-effect.

What happened to this lovely painting style? Well, a new generation of painters came along...and prefered to "do their own things." As do most youths, including you and me I think.

Oh, my! What tangents and ranges, SH's poems can evoke for us! But we here have been saying that in various ways all month now...Yes?

and into the windows of, even, the 
miserable and the crotchety –  
best preacher that ever was,
 

What a sense of humor she has, among all other things
 

 The morning light sure does hold us.   And my kittys -
 
they are usually up at the crack of dawn, excited about what
 
they will see.

The litter under the tree
Where the owl eats - shrapnel

Of rat bones, gull debris -
Sinks into the wet leaves

Where time stirs with her slow spoon
Where "we" becomes singular, and a quickening

From light-years away
Saves and maintains. O holy

Protein, o hallowed lime
O precious clay!

Tossed under the tree
The cracked bones

Of the owl's most recent feast
Lean like shipwreck, starting

The long fall back to teh center -
The seepage, teh flowing,

The equity: sooner or later
In the shimmering leaves

The rat will learn to fly, the owl
Will be devoured.

~ Mary Oliver (Twelve Moons)

I picked this poem for no other reason than my first poem with Seamus Heaney was "Bone Dreams" and to me this poem seems almost like a dream - a dream that if only in our imagination the rat will learn to fly and get away from the owl and in the end it is the owl who will be devoured. She uses "strange" words like - shrapnel, slow spoon or hallowed lime. There is also a reality about her poem as in "the equity: sooner or later/in the shimmering leaves."

Closing the book, I find I have left my head 
inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open 
their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound, 
words adjusting themselves to their meaning. 
Long passages open at successive pages. An echo, 
continuous from the title onward, hums 
behind me. From in here, the world looms, 
a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences 
carved out when an author traveled and a reader 
kept the way open. When this book ends 
I will pull it inside-out like a sock 
and throw it back in the library. But the rumor 
of it will haunt all that follows in my life. 
A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move 
 

~Mary Oliver

rising out of the rough weeds
listening and looking.
Beautiful girl,
where are you?

In the interview supplied by MarjV, Mary Oliver explains that that ending was HER in her little-girl years...and specifiying gender was for her a rare thing. She wants her poems to be felt equally by all readers, irrespective of gender.

As many here know, Mary Oliver is a lesbian. But privately; not an activist. Her poems seem to me of universal interest to us all.

Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.


Mary Oliver

Why is it so difficult to find a moment of solitude? It's so much easier to be busy, busy, busy: the car needs washing, the dress needs to go to the cleaner, the beds need making, etc. I think if we allow it, busyness can control us. Solitude seems quiet, subdued, as if content with itself. It doesn't beg for our attention or force its way in our faces. As I grow older, I find a need for the high mountains of stillness and quiet. It is an important part of my day. Without it I am discombobulated, all on edge. Solitude is an important gift. I must not forget to open it each day.

 

In April
 
the ponds open 
like black blossoms, 
the moon 
swims in every one; 
there’s fire 
everywhere: frogs shouting 
their desire,  
their satisfaction. What 
we know: that time 
chops at us all like an iron 
hoe, that death 
is a state of paralysis. What 
we long for: joy 
before death, nights  
in the swale - everything else 
can wait but not 
this thrust 
from the root 
of the body. What 
we know: we are more 
than blood - we are more 
than our hunger and yet 
we belong 
to the moon and when the ponds 
open, when the burning 
begins the most 
thoughtful among us dreams 
of hurrying down 
into the black petals 
into the fire, 
into the night where time lies shattered 
into the body of another.
 

Mary Oliver

Some are ponderous, pressed
To the earth, the length of bones
Good-bye, they say. Good riddance.

A few are ornate, piled
And coniced,like little houses
For rich men sleeping.

Here and there a lamb
Of granite lifts its granite
Eyes above the grass.

~ Mary Oliver

Okay! Maybe I spoke to soon. I'll take a crack at this one although I might have to dive further than I thought. I think Mary is comparing poems to stones. There are lots of stones and poems to be found and we like them for many reasons, but only a few are truly "great" and those are the ones [poems and stones] that "lifts granite eyes above the grass".

I found them at last, on a hillside
Of laurel and pine, nobbing
From the brown earth with white bowls,
Tender: so wild, so close to home.


The longer I live the more I sense
Wilderness approaching; I used to walk
miles to find wild things; now they find me,
Blossom under the very windows where
I am busy being grown up and tame.


I think it is more than chance, I think
It is a new kind of vision I have,
That a child, who must put wild things
In a mile by itself, could not bear.
I wake, wrapped in the town, knowing


The edges were only in my mind: all's one.
Indian pipes glisten, inches away.
While patience, charity rub at the cold frontier,
The seeds to everything drive through the air.

Mary Oliver

I am not sure of ever seeing an Indian Pipe. I love flowers. So, I just wondered about the colors of an Indian Pipe.

In April the Morgan was bred. I was chased away,
I heard the cries of the horses where I waited,
and the laughter of the men.

Later the farmer who owned the stallion
Found me and said, "She's done."
You tell your daddy he owes me fifty dollars."

I rode her home at her leisure
And let her, wherever she wanted,
Tear with her huge teeth, roughly,

Blades from the fields of spring.

~Mary Oliver [Twelve Moons]

Being a city girl I never witnessed the "birthing." But my husband who was raised on a ranch [his father bred horses for the rodeo] would make my husband help with the "birthing." He wasn't much of a farmer; he preferred to draw the landscape rather than people and the animals.

1.

Don't bother me.
I've just
been born.

2.

The butterfly's loping flight
carries it through the country of the leaves
delicately, and well enough to get it
where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping
here and there to fuzzle the damp throats
of flowers and the black mud; up
and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes

for long delicious moments it is perfectly
lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk
of some ordinary flower.

3.

The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now,

and never once mentioned forever,

4.

which has nevertheless always been,
like a sharp iron hoof,
at the center of my mind.

5.

One or two things are all you need
to travel over the blue pond, over the deep
roughage of the trees and through the stiff
flowers of lightning--some deep
memory of pleasure, some cutting
knowledge of pain.

6.

But to lift the hoof!
For that you need
an idea.

7.

For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then

the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
"Don't love your life
too much," it said,

and vanished
into the world.

Maybe others here have helpful thoughts about this poem's several meanings too...I hope.

On a summer morning
I sat down
on a hillside
to think about God

a worthy pastime.
Near me , I saw
a single cricket:
it was moving the grains of the hillside

this way and that way
How great was its energy,
how humble is effort.
Let us hope

it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.


Mary Oliver

Science
has shown how they capture
their prey -

moths, mosquitoes - in
the middle of flight
in the fold of a wing,<p. and how they hang
by the millions,
socially, in caves

But in the night
still comes
the unexplained figure

slipping in and out
of bedrooms, in and out
the soft throats of women.

For sience is only
the golden boat
on the dark river

such fur on the cheeks, such teeth
of blood, where women dream
behind the kiss.

~Mary Oliver (Twelve Moons)

I love vampires and bats! Ah! Where is Bela when you need him. I bet we'd all be sleeping if we'd been kissed by a vampire. Than again, maybe not. According to legend vampires sleep during the day and than wonder the dark streets at night looking for someone to bite. I love that one stanza:

and how they hang
by the millions,
socially, in caves

We humans should be so socialable.

Next time what I'd do is look at
the earth before saying anything. I'd stop
just before going into a house
and be an emperor for a minute
and listen better to the wind
or to the air being still.

When anyone talked to me, whether
blame or praise or just passing time,
I'd watch the face, how the mouth
has to work, and see any strain, any
sign of what lifted the voice.


And for all, I'd know more -- the earth
bracing itself and soaring, the air
finding every leaf and feather over
forest and water, and for every person
the body glowing inside the clothes
like a light.


Mary Oliver

Everything and everybody in life are worth appreciation. If I could wind back the time in my life, I would slow down, look around and observe. There are so many beautiful miracles to appreciate. Just looking at a baby uncurl his little fingers is so awesome. There is so much to appreciate and love. We have the chance at the Poetry Corner.

Aerialists know
doubt is the heavy thing. They know doubt is the stone, the flaw

named accident. The figure
whose body flows
over the rings of darkness

is the perfect believer.
He makes it look easy,
leaping from swing to swing,

shining - a white tendril
in the garden of blue air -
and safer than men on earth trudging,

fervent but irresolute,
their doubt always a dark itch,
over fields and roads.<p. ~ Mary Oliver

She's right you know "Aerialists" do make the perfect believer[s]! If only we could believe as if we were flying through the blue air with no safety net below.

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange


sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again


and fasten themselves to the high branches ---
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands


of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails


for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it


the thorn
that is heavier than lead ---
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging ---


there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted ---


each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,


whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.


Mary Oliver

Things are
changing; things are starting to
spin, snap, fly off into
the blue sleeve of the long
afternoon. Oh and ooh
come whistling out of the perished mouth
of the grass, as things
turn soft, boil back
into substance and hue. As everything,
forgetting its own enchantment, whispers:
I too love oblivion why not it is full
of second chances. Now,
hiss the bright curls of the leaves. Now!
booms the muscle of the wind.

~ Mary Oliver

Now! The times they are a "changing." I can't be sure what season it is - we seem to "spin" to temperatures in the 70s to temperatures in the 30s here in Oregon. Than we "snap" into bright sunny days than only a few minutes later have it pour rain. And finally we fly with the "muscle of the wind" when only a few minutes ago we were stiffling in the heat. I haven't figured out what to wear yet. Maybe a layered look: a bathing suit under a light T-shirt and jeans, under a heavier sweater, under a raincoat and hat. Oh! Yeah, how about bare feet in heavy winter boots! That should do the trick!

~ Mary Oliver

I miss my raccoons that I used to watch over at my last complex. I hope they all found good homes, since they made my complex a parking garage. They used to come to the back window and look in at me and my cat. They would put their hands together as if they were praying or begging. But they were great to watch especially in the early evenings when mom used to bring the kids down to the duck pond for supper.

I have been thinking
about living
like the lilies
that blow in the fields.


They rise and fall
in the wedge of the wind,
and have no shelter
from the tongues of the cattle,


and have no closets or cupboards,
and have no legs.
Still I would like to be
as wonderful


as that old idea.
But if I were a lily
I think I would wait all day
for the green face


of the hummingbird
to touch me.
What I mean is,
could I forget myself


even in those feathery fields?
When van Gogh
preached to the poor
of course he wanted to save someone--
most of all himself.
He wasn't a lily,
and wandering through the bright fields
only gave him more ideas


It would take his life to solve.
I think I will always be lonely
in this world, where the cattle
graze like a black and white river--


where the ravishing lilies
melt, without protest, on their tongues--
where the hummingbird, whenever there is a fuss,
just rises and floats away.


Mary Oliver

I love flowers. I love Lilies too. I love the gentle spirit of flowers. Lilies and other flowers have a sense of freedom and a sense of security. The hummingbird also goes about so freely just sipping a drink from whatever is beautiful, never leaving an explanation behind.

Van Gogh's mind was so great, his life span and his illness didn't allow him to paint all the colors and sunflowers around him. This is what's hard about life, I guess. There is never enough time to fulfill all dreams. The worry about getting it all done causes the fragile petals of our life to fall away much quicker. It's better, for me, to strive to be a lily or a hummingbird. Maybe my life will last a bit longer. In the process, I will hold on to my sanity.

She moves only by night and on a south wind.
The wild ducks are her envoys,

flying ahead,
scouting the ponds, summoning

turtles and dragonflies out of the beds
of roots and mud.

The wagon she hauls with her
is full of new leaves

which she sprinkles over the trees as she passes, crying out
the words necessary to birth;

and small fish
she shakes into ditches and streams;

and once I saw her
lift from her wagon the Flower Moon,

round full and milk-white
as a woman's breast,

and she kissed it,
she sang to it,

she tossed it high above the trees, then gave
another to the shining river.

~ Mary Oliver ["Twelve Moons"]

I liked this poem because of its free-flowing style. I can almost see the Flower Moon as "she" tosses it high above the trees, and then gave another to the shining river." The only part that I'm confused on is who is "she"? Is it the Flower Moon or could be nature?

I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

~ Mary Oliver

For the most part I like this poem - for its simplicity and because it reminds me of a slower, softer time when I lay on the grass and looked up at the stars. I suppose you might say that my "thoughts" floated like moths among the branches. But it is the last part of the poem that puzzles me: "By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better." Anyone have any suggestions as to what this might mean?

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

-- MARY OLIVER, "DREAM WORK"

Isn't this just...lovely?

And yes, wild geese do honk overhead to us in seasonal migrations today. Good memories. Another memory of mine is an old movie seen when I was maybe ten: "Call of the Wild Goose." Theme-song by Frankie Laine was a top-ten hit then.

I touch the crosses by her name:
I fold the pages as I rise,
And tip the envelope, from which
Drift scraps of borage, woodbine, rue.

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver's poems have been like wonderful letters this month. I am reminded of all the beauty around me. Even in this one about a letter written with care and love mentions bluejays, stars and melons. I love the part about the shreds of bark falling from the pages of the letter. I think it is a special gift to remember to encourage someone else. Someone feeling that life is "hard and strange."

This poem reminds me to stop prograstinating and try to grow an herb garden. Is it herb or herb? Martha Stewart says herb like you would pronounce the name of a boy or man.

The dream of my life
Is to lie down by a slow river
And stare at the light in the trees-
To learn something by being nothing
A little while but the rich
Lens of attention.

But the crows puff their feathers and cry
Between me and the sun,
And I should go now.
They know me for what I am.
No dreamer,
No eater of leaves.

~ Mary Oliver

I love this poem. It has both a sweetness and sadness about it. I too would like to lie by a "slow river and do nothing." But than I am sure the animals including the birds and especially the crows would remind me of who I really am - no dreamer and no eater of leaves. In other words not one of them. [Incidently, the crows around here are really BIG. I had one on the top of my car the other day that wouldn't get off even after I started the car and backed it out of the over-hanging. It hung on until I turned the corner and than flew off crying. I can't imagine what my neighbors think of me!]

There's a bear in the Truro woods.
People have seen it - three or four,
or two, or one. I think
of the thickness of the serious woods
around the dark bowls of the Truro ponds;
I think of the blueberry fields, the blackberry tangles,
the cranberry bogs. And the sky
with its new moon, its familiar star-trails
burns down like a brand-new heaven,
while everywhere I look on the scratchy hillsides
shadows seem to grow shoulders. Surely
a beast might be clever, be lucky, move quietly
through the woods for years, learning to stay away
from roads and houses. Common sense mutters:
it can't be true, it must be somebody's
runaway dog. But the seed
has been planted, and when has happiness ever
required much evidence to begin
its left-green breathing?

Mary Oliver

I'm not sure about the last part of this poem. I got it as far as the "runaway dog", but after that the explanation is up for grabs. I used to love to sit out in my back yard in my old apartment and watch the animals come down off the mountain behind me to feed in the duck pond. I can't help but wonder how long it will be before "human-kind" infringes on the animal life and there is none left. It would be really sad if the only way our children's children were to see any wild animals if they were in the zoo or a circus.

By morning 
I had vanished at least a dozen times 
into something better.

Like Magellan, let us find our islands
To die in, far from home, from anywhere
Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places,
Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.


For years we have labored over common roads,
Dreaming of ships that sail into the night.
Let us be heroes, or, if that's not in us,
Let us find men to follow, honor-bright.


For what is life but reaching for an answer?
And what is death but a refusal to grow?
Magellan had a dream he had to follow.
The sea was big, his ships were awkward, slow.


And when the fever would not set him free,
To his thin crew, "Sail on, sail on!" he cried.
And so they did, carried the frail dream homeward.
And thus Magellan lives, although he died.


Mary Oliver

I think this poem is about dreams, having goals. It's also about taking a leap when my heart is pumping fast. I feel so afraid. It's a reminder my comfort zone is deceptive. If all of this is too much for me to do in this life, to make my dreams come true, I must tell my dream to others, my children and friends. Perhaps, they will carry out my dream when I am gone.

Breathe in 

Breathe out 

Breathe in 

Breathe out 

Breathe in 

Smile

It waits, gray nightmare,
To rise up with every turbulence.

Some birds with sharp wings fly over,
And schools of fish

Flash through the shallows, and stands
Of rusty cattails

Rattle like scrap metal. But it's not
These who set nervousness clanging in the blood-

It's the unseen
Creepers, the venomous crawlers, the lurkers, squirmers;

The mute, the heavy,
The slow.

~ Mary Oliver

I've never seen a swamp, but while I was researching my book I came across how "fighting men" would simply vanish when they tried to cross the various Southern swamps. Not only did the Union have to look out for the southern Rebels, but I think "nature's unseen" were the real danger - the venomous crawler, the lurkers and least we forget the squirmers. It makes my skin crawl just thinking about them.

its friendly persuasive warning
to the beach, and the swimmers come

hurriedly to shore, to lie hot and lazy
on the sharp sand,looking

all afternoon seaward for the steep
dark dorsal fin

that might or might not come pricking
like a needle through the small wind-waves.

If it does
they will rise and point excitedly and rush

to the water's edge, and then back.
And if it does not, still they will dream

of the sinuous explorers of the blue chambers
of coastal waters moving

easy as oil, without a wasted stroke,
in and out of the warm coves. But slowly

the heat eases, and the wind picks up,
and since nothing has happened

a few figures dare the water to their waists,
forgetting, as men have always forgotten,

that life's winners are not the rapacious but the patient;
what triumphs and takes new territory

has learned to lie for centuries in the shadows
like the shadows of the rocks.

~ Mary Oliver

I share this poem for no other reason than that my Hockey team [the San Jose Sharks] have made the playoffs. Than again I also liked the part: "forgetting, as men have always forgotten,/that life's winners are not the rapacious but the patient..." Perhaps it better to be more like the "turtle" than the "hare" even if it is close to Easter.

~ Mary Oliver [Dream Work]

I can't help think who she was talking about when she said: I wish you would walk with me out into the world and I love those lines:...like a country of dry women. Do you suppose she could be talking about "older" women?

Christo neste [which in Greek means Christ has risen!" May you all find peace and happiness this holiday season.

In the first darkness
I watch the two boys and their sister
Running under the warm stars,
With coiled muscles and the ardent
Certainty that their fingertips can graze
The sharp hoof of a light
An instant in the acme of a leap
Before their leaping feet come back to earth


And watching later
The night grass rise from the marks of their small shoes,
I remember, from my own time, this leaping game;
And I remember sitting in the dark
As now they sit,
By windows before sleep,
Increduous with themselves for failing
To accomplish impossible deeds.


Mary Oliver

I remember playing until dark in the summertime. My parents and other parents sat out on the porches just enjoying a restful end to the day. We played Hide and Go Seek, chased each other, racing, tag. Too soon my mom would call. It was time to go to bed. It was fun remembering the day. In my head, I won all the races and no one ever found my hiding place. In my head, I was the winner. When really, I had lost more games than I had won.

OK, that one has a surprise ending. So here's one that seems exactly what its title implies to me:

Just a couple of her (relatively few) darker poems...to maybe give a fairer balance to her mostly happier visions, metaphors, and thoughts.

spiritual patience? Isn't it clear
the black oaks along the path are standing
as though they were the most frgile of flowers?

Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking; if the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.

Every morning, so far, I'm alive. And now
the crows break off from the rest of the darkness
and burst up into the sky -as though

all night they had thought of what they would like
their lives to be, and imagined
their strong, thick wings.

~ Mary Oliver

I like this poem for its imagery. Can't you just see the "moss", the "black oaks" and the crows as they fly off!

I'm looking forward to reading Gwendolyn Brooks next month.

A hot day,
a clear heaven - then
clouds bulge
over the horizon

and the wind turns
like a hundred black swans
and the first faint noise
begins.

I think
of my good life,
I think
of other lives

being blown apart
in field after distant field.
All over the world -
I'm sure of it -

life is much the same
when it's going well-
resonant
and unremarkable.

But who,
not under disaster's seal,
can understand what life is like
when it begins to crumble?

Now the noise is bulbous,
dense, drumming
over the hills,
and approaching.

So safe,
so blank of imagination,
so deadly of heart,
I listen

to those dropped and rolling
rounds of thunder.
They only sound
like gunfire.

~ Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver has an interesting way of reflecting on "life" doesn't she. This way of taking nature and reflection into a single idea is one that I think was also in Marj's poem. The idea of death in that poem and than the idea of life going good or bad in this one - it does remind me of the storm we had here in Oregon on Sunday, but I also have to disagree that life is ever "unremarkable."

confusion; everything
we know -
the horizon,
for example,

and the distant
ridge of land -
has vanished,
the boat

glides without a sound
over a sea of curled
and luminous glass,
there are clouds,

in the sky wherever
that is, and clouds
in the water,
and maybe

we have entered heaven
already, the happy boat
sliding
like a bee

down the throat of a huge
damp flower.
Some birds,
like streamers of white silk,

approach crying.
Ah, yes,
how easy,
how familiar

it seems now,
that long
lovely thrusting up and down
of wings.

~ Mary Oliver

I'm not sure if we did this one or not. I liked the stanza: "we have entered heaven/already, the happy boat/ sliding/like a bee." I've never heard anything described as "sliding/like a bee."

White Night
 
All night 
   I float 
      in the shallow ponds 
         while the moon wanders 
burning, 
   bone white, 
      among the milky stems, 
         Once 
I saw her hand reach 
   to touch the muskrat's 
      small sleek head 
         and it was lovely, oh, 
I don't want to argue anymore 
   about all the things 
      I thought I could not 
         live without! Soon 
the muskrat 
   will glide with another 
      into their castle 
         of weeds, morning 
will rise from the east 
   tangled and brazen, 
      and before that 
         difficult 
and beautiful 
   hurricane of light 
      I want to flow out 
         across the mother 
of all waters, 
   I want to lose myself 
      on the black 
         and silky currents, 
Yawning, 
   gathering 
      the tall lilies 
         of sleep.
 
- Mary Oliver (from "American Primitive," 1983)

If I envy anyone it must be
My grandmother in a long ago
Green summer, who hurried
Between kitchen and orchard on small
Uneducated feet, and took easily
All shining fruits into her eager hands.


That summer I hurried too, wakened
To books and music and circling philosophies.
I sat in the kitchen sorting through volumes of answers
That could not solve the mystery of the trees.


My grandmother stood among her kettles and ladles.
Smiling, in faulty grammar,
She praised my fortune and urged my lofty career.
So to please her I studied--but I will remember always
How she poured confusion out, how she cooled and labeled
All the wild sauces of the brimming year.


Mary Oliver

When young, it's so easy to think our elders are left in a time gone past. Not true. Quietly, these elders walk around full of wisdom and knowledge. Smiling at the young who think they are moving faster and seeing more behind every page.

I am named after both my grandmothers. Now I am a grandmother myself. Oh my, how time and roles change.