happy poem in your pocket day!

"This is just to say"

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

William Carlos Williams

--

Have a great day!  And in case you're wondering, this is the one in my pocket.

love is not all

A favorite poem that I first read in college.
--
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

they're here!

Took this picture the evening I wrote this post.

How far we've both come.

love after love

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here.  Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit.  Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

anyone want to celebrate?

This Thursday, April 30th, is "Poem in Your Pocket" Day.  I feel like I know a lot of weird celebratory "day"s, mostly food-related, but this one I'm actually more serious about.  Would anyone like to celebrate it with me, and possibly think of a bigger way to celebrate it?

Here are a couple links.

I've been really amazed lately by the strength poems lend me, and the impact they can carry.  They're just words, but when they express something I've always thought or felt or am just coming to know, I feel like a part of me has been completed in a way.  When someone else has known what I know-- not in the intellectual sense, but the experiential, emotional sense-- that makes me feel more known.  Poems make me feel less estranged from myself, and more aware of, and tender in, my relationships to others.  

A good poem can just get to truth-- not by making some big statement, but by being perfectly itself.  By stating the essence of something perfectly.  

I used to sing in choir, and this thing would happen sometimes when each part would harmonize perfectly-- it was like extra notes would suddenly appear all around the ones we were singing.  They were audible notes, but we weren't singing them.  They're called overtones, and apparently hearing them is a "psychoacoustic effect" (I just looked it up) caused by singers' (or instruments') natural resonances interacting in a particular way.  Is that not what happens in poetry, or fiction, when whatever life experiences you bring combine with whatever the writer has said, and the two begin to resonate?  Something strikes a chord, and something new appears in your life?  

I really think poetry does that.  Do you?

like this

it's

like 

listening

to a quiet stone

like smelling 

one 

small 

seed

like watching 

a  b rook

             w a s h i n g  m y  h a n d s

like learning a question

it's 

like  living an answer

irena sendler

You may not be much of a Hallmark movie fan, but I have to recommend this movie, which just aired tonight for the Hallmark Hall of Fame.  It starred Anna Paquin and Marcia Gay Harden, and depicted some of the amazing acts of kindness performed by Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker in WWII.  Unbelievably, her story wasn't that widely known until a few high school students in KS researched more about her and started a project in her name.  Now she's known by some as the "Female Schindler."  I'm in awe.  

As a Polish Catholic social worker in the early 1940s, Irena Sendler created and led a conspiracy of women who moved in and out of Warsaw's Jewish Ghetto disguised as nurses employed by Warsaw's Health Department. Though they worked under the guise of merely attempting to prevent and contain the spread of Typhus and Spotted Fever, Sendler and her brave cohorts emerged each time with the children of consenting Jewish parents. The children were sometimes sedated and hidden inside boxes, suitcases and coffins as a means of rescuing them from their imminent deportation to death camps. They were given new identities and placed with Polish families and in convents. Sendler kept a hidden record of their birth names and where they were placed with the hope that they would some day be reunited with their own families.

In 1943, the Nazis discovered Sendler's daring and dangerous ruse and arrested her. She was tortured by Gestapo agents and suffered broken feet. On the day of her scheduled execution she was rescued by "Zegota," the underground network with which she worked to save the Jewish children.

As a result of Sendler's efforts, approximately 2,500 children were smuggled to safety. Not a single child she rescued was ever betrayed or discovered by the Nazis.

Today, April 19th, is also the anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  It's amazing to think of the history each day holds.

couldn't have asked for anything more.

I truly couldn't.

This was one of my favorite sights.

I love Paris in the springtime - today's the day!

Getting nervous now...but also excited!!  Here's a final tidbit...a preview of what our time will hopefully look like.

Voilà mon passport!

À bientôt!

I love Paris in the springtime - 1.5

I knew I was going to do this countdown wrong! Even double-checking myself didn't help!

So I am leaving for France tomorrow, which makes tomorrow Day 0 or The Day You've All Been Waiting For.  Therefore today and tomorrow now count as 1.5 days each.  Otherwise I'd leave on Day 1 and...then there would be no update and no "today's the day!!" payoff.  Sad!

Anyway, the poem I'm posting below probably doesn't seem very related to France (especially because of the title), but I think it's related in a way that explains more about my desire to go there.  I love language, any language (not that I really know that many), thinking about how it shapes what we observe and express about the world around us.  People who speak multiple languages must find themselves at an impasse at times, because they want to share a common thought with people of one language, but they're unable to express it with all the cultural history or nuance of another.  I could talk forever about how interesting I think all that is, but it would probably be boring...and this poem is waiting to be read!  (Also, I know that I kind of went off on a tangent and the poem is also about power and history...all fascinating stuff.  To me. :))

"why we speak english," lynn pedersen

Because when you say cup and spoon
your mouth moves the same way as your grandfather's
and his grandfather's before him.
It's Newton's first law: A person in motion
tends to stay in motion with the same speed
and direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force—
scarcity or greed.
Is there a word for greed in every language?

Because the ear first heard
dyes furs pepper ginger tobacco cotton timber
silk freedom horizon
and the tongue wanted to taste
all these fine things.

And when my son asks why his father speaks Danish
and he and I speak English and Carlos—
at kindergarten—speaks Portuguese:

because Denmark is and has always been.
Our ancestors tracked north and Carlos'
tracked south. What's left in their wake
is language.

Because it comes down
to want, to latitude and longitude as ways to measure
desire, invisible mover of ships—
great clockwise gyre of water in the sea—
like some amusement park ride where boats seem to sail
but run on tracks under the water.

Because to change course now would be like diverting
the Arno, this centuries-long rut we've dug ourselves
into, and how would it be to wake up one morning
with bird oiseau or another word entirely?

"Why We Speak English" by Lynn Pedersen, from Theories of Rain. © Main Street Rag, 2009. 

is it so bad? & april fools

1.  Is it so bad to want to know what The Weepies are up to?  Kinda frequently?  

2.  Love this Gmail foolery.