Friday Poetry: Song for Autumn

photo by Xavier Fargas

Song for Autumn

Mary Oliver

In the deep fall
don’t you imagine the leaves think how
comfortable it will be to touch
 the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,
warm caves, begin to think

of the birds that will come — six, a dozen — to sleep
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially,
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.

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Happy Friday, everyone! I hope you enjoy your weekend, and that some hints of Fall have started appearing where you live.

Friday Poetry: Wonder

Today’s Friday Poetry is one of my own.

As I mentioned in a previous post, this sharing of poetry is still vulnerable, risky territory for me.

It’s easy to shy away from it, but I’d rather not.   This poem in particular is one that I waffled on publishing here.  It has a special place in my heart, which is the reason it is both scary and important for me to share with you.

Happy Friday, and may you find small wonders everywhere this weekend.

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Untitled

‘wonder’ is sometimes called
a blue heron,
‘miraculous’, a sunrise.
there is an excess of words
and still too few names for beauty.
yet every day somewhere there is rain,
a change of tide,
a shifting
upriver.
every day we go on moving,
like so many flocks of birds.

- juliana finch

Thursday Poetry: Mending Wall

Thursday Poetry is on Friday, again!

I really need to spend some quality time with my Google calendar again so we can re-establish our relationship.

Anyway, coming out of yesterday’s post, I thought I should share Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” with you today, in case you’ve never read it, or you haven’t read it since 8th grade English class.

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Mending Wall

ROBERT FROST

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Shine

The last two days have been hot here.  I mean, hot.   Yesterday I had to give my new gardenia plant some serious medical attention because when I got home, its leaves had all curled up in submission and the buds were threatening to drop.   This morning it was faring better, so I hope the cooler weather coming next week will revive it.

Aside from the damage done to my plants, I’ve been thrilled about the heat.  We had a long, wet Winter in Atlanta, and it has seemed like forever since I needed to remember to put on sunscreen or had to open up my box of sleeveless shirts.

I love to take my shoes off and walk along the path outside the house, still warm from the afternoon sun.   I love to go up on the roof of the office building and do a sun salutation, greeting the light with every muscle.

In honor of the sun, and my replenishing Vitamin D supply, here’s a short poem.

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JULIANA FINCH

this city is too bright today, I think and
reach for my sunglasses one-
handed while driving and suddenly on the radio
comes a song about new love and so I leave the shades
and let the buildings shine.

Thursday Poetry: Affirmation

This week I’ve needed a lot of affirming.  Even the most confident soul occasionally needs bolstering when things seem to fall apart.    Many people swear by affirmations – short, positive phrases used to center and encourage and help you focus on the changes you want to see in your life.   I think affirmations are great, but being more of a lyrically-minded person, I like to find small collections of beautiful words and use those instead.

One of my favorites is the last stanza from Li-Young Lee’s poem “From Blossoms”:

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

When I am stressed out and forgetting to notice all of the beauty around me, I will repeat the last line to myself:  “from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom…”

For whatever reason, that line reminds me to notice the little things, to have gratitude, and to take time to be delighted.

Are there any poems that serve as a kind of affirmation for you?

New Feature: Thursday Poetry

Following up on last week’s post, where I did something scary and posted a poem, I’ve decided to start my first weekly feature on the blog. From now on, Thursdays will be for poetry. Sometimes that means I’ll post a poem, other times it means I will talk about poetry I like or discuss the actual writing of poetry. Please let me know in the comments what topics surrounding poems you are most interested in!

Today, I’m sharing another one of my poems. I mentioned in my post on ways to spur creativity that giving yourself constraints is a fun way to try to get things going.    This poem came out of an exercise I gave myself that had a couple of different constraints.   One was to take two seemingly unrelated words and relate them, and the other was a metric constraint.

 

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Saturday Night In Buenos Aires

JULIANA FINCH

“The tango is the direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.” – Borges

Being a natural blond,
you shine like a golden pennant
in this Argentine dance hall.

Though you are but a novice,
you will attract the attention
of Raul, tango master.

(If you lived here you would know never to look a man in the eye unless you mean to challenge him to a dance, but you don’t live here. You are from Wisconsin and thought it would be quaint to take an authentic dance class on your vacation between collecting local crafts and complaining about the hotel.)

He will march across the room
with the other men falling in
behind him on the dance floor

and you will find you have been
pushed up to the female frontlines
to face off without armor.

It is expected that you
will try to resist, so he will
meet your stare, press his large palm

across your back, and as the
violins start up you will learn
the beauty in surrender.

Do One Thing Every Day That Scares You

That directive is attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, and lately, I’ve been trying to do it.
I’m not talking about things that make me fear for my personal safety (I will not, for example, be trying any of the activities currently being aired on the Winter Olympics any time soon) but rather things that make my stomach flutter when I think about them, things that feel just a little bit risky.

I have a feeling that just outside the border of my comfort zone is a whole lot of opportunity for growth. If I can edge past my safe bubbles even a little bit, I think I might discover some things about myself.

One of the first “scary things” I’m going to do is publicly post some of my poetry.
I’ve put poems up for others to see in the past (in workshops, classes, and on Livejournal when I used it) but those were always closely filtered environments where I still felt pretty safe. By posting some of it here, I’ll definitely be stretching out of my bubble.

So, without further ado…(but possibly with some nailbiting and nervous twitching)…

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I May Not Be A Real Poet

JULIANA FINCH

 

It has been brought to my attention
that I may not be a real poet.
Most of the poets I know would
describe themselves as night-owls, working
full menial days and then
burning the proverbial oil
well past dark.

Why then, my morning ritual of
coffee and a banana
and most importantly, a pen?

Certainly I am no ‘morning person’.
I would never be allowed back into smoky
poetry readings if I said out loud that
I felt my art was fueled by weeding the garden
and sunlight coming through the damp leaves
instead of vicious midnight heartbreak,
and swilling bourbon, and the stubble
on frustrated male chins.

Surely I am not so simple
as to write from my own desire
to smell the pages of a journal
at the start of each day.
What fraud!

Let me rail against injustices,
rage with the worst of nighttime rhapsodists.
Let me drink only espresso, black
and ingest only the smoke from my own
cigarettes and crawl to bed on the low mattress
in the disastrous studio
of the truly inspired.

On the other hand,
the sun has yet to stop rising
each day, the cardinals have yet
to stop hopping along the bird feeders.
Looking through the kitchen window,
I with my single morning cup
still find it worth noting.