A Few Poems For my Mother
Greetings dear people:
Today, July 1st, is Canada Day in this country and it is Poetry day on my blog. This post is dedicated to my Mother who is in the hospital recovering from a fractured hip. My love of poetry is thanks to her so I chose a few (well, 8, and a few are a teeny bit long) that make me think of my Mother and a few where I can hear my Mother’s voice reading them to me. If you don’t care for poetry feel free to skip to the end and find a couple of things in the notes that you may enjoy.
Some Poems
Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe Me.”Look what happens with
a love like that,
It lights the whole Sky.From The Gift by Hafiz-Version by D. Ladinsky
I Confess
I stalked her
in the grocery store: her crown
of snowy braids held in place by a great silver clip,
her erect bearing, radiating tenderness,
watching
the way she placed yogurt and avocados in her basket,
beaming peace like the North Star.
I wanted to ask, “What aisle did you find
your serenity in, do you know
how to be married for fifty years or how to live alone,
excuse me for interrupting, but you seem to possess
some knowledge that makes the earth turn and burn on its axis—“
But we don’t request such things from strangers
nowadays. So I said, “I love your hair.”
By Alison Luterman
I wandered lonely as a Cloud
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
by Wendell Berry
The Lanyard by Billy Collins
The other day as I was ricocheting slowly
off the pale blue walls of this room,
bouncing from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past—-
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white one for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sickroom,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then let me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard,
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is your clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a camp counsellor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
Is a smaller gift-not the archaic truth
that you can never repay your mother.
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy girl could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
Billy Collins (former US Poet Laureate) from The Trouble with Poetry
The Place I Want To Get Back To
the place I want to get back to is where
in the pinewoods
in the moments between
the darkness
and first light
two deer
came walking down the hill
and when they saw me
they said to each other, okay,
this one is okay,
let’s see who she is
and why she is sitting
on the ground like that,
so quiet, as if
asleep, or in a dream,
but, anyway, harmless;
and so they came
on their slender legs
and gazed upon me
not unlike the way
I go out to the dunes and look
and look and look
into the faces of the flowers;
and then one of them leaned forward
and nuzzled my hand, and what can my life
bring to me that could exceed
that brief moment?
For twenty years
I have gone every day to the same woods,
not waiting, exactly, just lingering.
Such gifts, bestowed,
can’t be repeated.
If you want to talk about this
come to visit. I live in the house
near the corner, which I have named
Gratitude.
IF
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
by Rudyard Kipling
Gusty and Warm
I saw the season’s first bluebird
this morning, one month ahead
of it’s scheduled arrival.
Lucky I am
to go off to my cancer appointment
having been given a bluebird, and,
for a lifetime, having been given
this world.
By Ted Hooser – former US Poet Laureate
Notes
Note 1:) Claudia Zoe Bedrick , the founder of Enchanted Lion Books in the US, is an immense poetry-lover. She became besotted with poetry early and has remained bewitched for life. She tells her story like this. For my 8th birthday, my dad gave me a book called Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle: a book that now sits on my teenage son’s shelf. His inscription: Stories are a meal. But poetry is a glass of water, perhaps even a single drop that will save your life. At the age of eight, I didn’t fully understand what he meant, but I came to, and have ever since thought of poetry as water: essential, calm, churning, a vortex of light and shadow, refreshingly cool, pleasingly warm, and sometimes just hot enough or cold enough to jolt, charge, render slightly uncomfortable, and bring one fully, deeply to life once again.
Note 2:) Here is a beautiful Ted Talk on Nature Beauty and Gratitude I posted it over a year ago but it is always inspiring to watch.
Note 3:) I truly enjoyed this classic French song, by the Laval Youth Choir in Quebec. The song is about friendship, and how we need each other to help see us through our difficulties. And how we can warm each other’s hearts with our tender caring of each other.
Note 4:) Thank you for your good wishes for My Mother. I pass on every one. Everyday, her emails arrive bearing some good news, along with the reality of life with a broken hip at 100. Thank you once again for stopping by here to read this blog. Stay safe and enjoy everyday. Warmest wishes, trudy
