Poetry Friday: Big Weather, Continued

Yesterday I posted a photo of a terrifying but beautiful scene, thinking at the time, "Isn't it remarkable that something can be built of such seemingly contradictory elements - beauty and terror?" The photo shows a storm cloud/tornado over a peaceful landscape, and it seemed to me that this photo produced what a good novel or a good poem can produce - thoughts of lives lived under (or changed quickly by) the special circumstances evoked.  Literature does this - conjures up stories where human lives intersect with mysterious, uncontrollable forces.  Here's the photo again, in case you missed it.

Today, for Poetry Friday, I hunted up a poem titled "A Hermit Thrush" by Amy Clampitt which I remembered from a few years back - I first read it after a big wind storm in Seattle. It's the final four stanzas of the poem which stuck with me:

Watching
the longest day take cover under
a monk's-cowl overcast,

with thunder, rain and wind, then waiting,
we drop everything to listen as a
hermit thrush distills its fragmentary,
hesitant, in the end

unbroken music. From what source (beyond us, or
the wells within?) such links perceived arrive--
diminished sequences so uninsistingly
not even human--there's

hardly a vocabulary left to wonder, uncertain
as we are of so much in this existence, this
botched, cumbersome, much-mended,
not unsatisfactory thing.
 
I love those adjectives at the end, especially the surprise of the very last one: botched, cumbersome, much-mended, not unsatisfactory.  Despite the flaws, we love life. Despite that storm cloud, a hermit thrush's unbroken song.

The whole poem can be read here. Notice the first line, too - "Nothing's certain." I'd like my creative writing students at Vermont College of Fine Arts to think about that a  bit, because writing for children, which is what I teach, can be a little pedantic - a little too certain of the rightness of the message.  Maybe I'll lecture on the value of uncertainty (negative capability = living in uncertainty) next July.

Poetry Friday today is being hosted today by Toby Speed (oops, I mean by her cat, Kashi) over at The Writer's Armchair.You'll find there what other people are posting around the Web!

Big Weather

This strikes me as remarkably beautiful. Terrifying, yes. But beautiful, too. Look at the small objects under the cloud - are they just trees? Maybe a house in the distance, a barn? For me, this is what great fiction or great poetry can do -help us visualize the huge forces at work in the world, whether they are physical or emotional, and add particular lives. Take a look at the whole scene again. I think THAT is what storytelling can do. Conjure up forces that are mysterious, beautiful, terrifying, and uncontrollable, and then say, "Into this picture, insert a life...."

"Fracture of the tibia at the medial plateau....."

Right there, at the medial tibial plateau - that's where my husband's leg was broken in a car accident a few hours after I posted my last Poetry Friday poem. Two operations later, he's home now and I'm trying to be a good nurse. Our month-long trip to Spain, scheduled to start a few days after the accident, was canceled. And Nando's retirement, which was to be celebrated by our trip, is not off to a great start. Life goes upside down fast, but we're looking for the positive - we know we're lucky it was only a broken leg. And we're in recovery mode. And I'm looking for a word that rhymes with tibia (amphibia? inhibia? Nambibia?)

Will be back to drift around here soon - after "aggressive range of motion therapy."

POETRY FRIDAY: TRA LA LA

This poem was the result of a poetry challenge that involved drawing a picture (I drew a woman singing "La La") and passing it around a circle with a new person drawing it after only seeing it for a few seconds. Kind of a "Cranium" (the board game) challenge, or a written game of "Telephone."  My drawing went around the circle  without changing too much, except that the original words "La la" which I had written next to the woman's mouth had morphed into "Blah blah." Assignment: Write a poem about what changed. So here is what I wrote, taking a few liberties with one La and and one Blah:

FROM LA TO BLAH

By the time La turned into Blah

she had left Woo-Woo so far behind

it had become Woe.  

It's so easy, we all know, 

for La to get lost, 

at least for awhile. 

And adding Tra to the La

only goes so far. About as far

as she could throw it on a gray day. 

Now she knows in her own way

it's a mood, and she wants to shake it

the way she shook a rattle and cooed

for her first born. 

But the urge to mourn is winning.
La, she has decided,

belongs at the beginning.

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Karen Edmisten is in charge of the Poetry Friday round-up today. Head over to her blog to see what's up.

Poetry Friday - Time for Recess!

Girls on the Playground, Pittsburgh PA, 1950

Tricia over at The Miss Rumphius Effect continues to be my muse, via her Poetry Stretches. When she asked this week for a poem made entirely of questions, I fell into the rhythms of the playground - counting games, jump rope rhymes - and tried to capture them, with a dash of adult heartache, which is what a question mark does to me now.

Jump Rope Rhyme

Why go fast?
Why go slow?
Why say I know
when I just don't know?
Is it really why,
or is it why not?
And who is the how
and when is the what?
Clock doesn't tick?
Tick untocked?
Who will make a key
for a heart that's locked?
Is it you, is it me?
One potato, two potato,
what do I see?
Do I see a baby?
Do I see a hearse?
Do I see a lady
with an alligator purse?

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The wonderful Elaine Magliaro is handling this week's Poetry Friday roundup. Head over to her blog, The Wild Rose Reader, to see what people have posted.