A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).
This week: trusting the unsaid, questions for trees, beautiful birds of thought, hearing singing through the walls at night, and much more. Enjoy!
A scattering of airborne seeds, like baby dandelion fluffs, float over me when I’m coming home and walk back up the drive. And early in the evening Vega is still right overhead, still presiding. Yes. This remains my favorite month. I don’t hate the summer any more, and I look forward to the cold and the rain less than I used to, but it’s still, to me, the month of promise. It’s the month I used to look over my new school books, and anticipate understanding new things and meeting new people (living and dead: new to me.) Mysterious names will fill with meaning; eyes will fill with light.
Dale Favier, September
[I]t was the last day of the Butterfly House being open, so we snuck in a quick visit. The snow leopard cubs were hiding while we were there, but we got to visit with their beautiful mother.
Going to the zoo is one of the summer rituals I didn’t want to skip, even though the weather is getting cooler, and the timing was hard. It’s important to squeeze in the things that matter to us—even if it’s just watching butterflies—in between paying bills, doctor appointments, work, and the busy work that is too big a part of our lives. To be a writer is sometimes to prioritize the butterfly watching.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Fall is Here, Sign Up for a Spooky Season Zoom Class with me and Kelli Russell Agodon, Zoo Visits and More
i will never make real peace with
Robin Gow, for sale
the fact that we live in a world where
the soil is cut up like a tray of brownies.
here is your citadel. here is my porch
& the dead spearmint bush in a row.
once a week or so i see them. the deer.
they peer into my apartment
the way i gazed into their house.
always startle me with those reflective eyes.
the mirror keepers. i open the front door
to try to tell them they can come
live with me. i am desperate for anyone else
to talk to about the house i did not get.
they are not there. just ribbons
of early autumn wind.
This morning there is a tang of wood in the cool air. It is the kind of scent that might come from opening a little used cupboard door or how I imagine the very centre of a conker smells. […]
Even though I knew the sun was a star,
Sue Finch, ANGEL OF THE NORTH AS DANCER
that the shine had something
to do with immense pressure
changing hydrogen to helium,
even though I could have told you
that there were hundreds of billions of them out there
I didn’t.
All I was actually sure of was that
I needed to stand in the darkness
with you.
Will you lift your eyes and look with me?
On the TV, images of British wildlife appear and disappear: blackbird, goldfinch, roe deer, hedgehog. I’m glad of it. I’d rather have random images of animals and birds than some awful gossipy morning television show. On the walls, two long distorted images of the Yorkshire moors add a sense of peace and expanse to what is in fact, I notice, a windowless, hot room.
Two and a half hours. I’m quashing my panic. I tell myself if there was something wrong they’d let me know. But all the time my mind jumps back to the time around my daughter’s death, when we made assumptions it can’t be an emergency if they are still treating us as a non emergency. It can’t be that bad if no one is calling for an ambulance. I pick up the book again and highlight a quote with my highlighter:
We do not have to choose one story and run with it.
My stories are converging here in the blue-sea-storm room, the too hot room. The past story that I keep retelling, keep putting to bed, only for it to rise again and keep circling me is running into the story of today, the story of a capable, intelligent woman taking her mother to a routine hospital appointment. I am trying too hard not to feel the stories of myself. I remind myself that all stories change the landscape of self, that I am a a landscape that has been changed, but that I am still here, still working, still habitable.
Wendy Pratt, The story resurfaces and I let it flow through me
Let us gather our words.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Ugliness does not become verse
Pretend is no longer a game. It is a meadow
where the sun is shining, where nothing is amiss.
Look, there is Van Gogh painting the ripening
wheat, golden under the green Cypress trees.
Does it really matter if he has one ear missing?
Unsaid: The dreams that follow me into the kitchen, the ghosts that grab my chin and force me to look at them, the way the world whirls away mid-conversation when unsaid things run their goosebumps over my arms, my legs, the whorl of their Listen.
“Continue to speak this dialect, now that the house is burning,” Giorgio Agamben says of poetry in When the House Burns Down.
And there is something lucid hewn from the possibility preserved by the unsaid. The best way to describe it is by looking at how much is said, how much is spoken and communicated across alienating mediums and disguises.
Agamben urges us to trust that moment when we look at one another without posing words, screens, and Beauty between us.
Trust the unsaid that doesn’t fear being read in simultaneity, amid the absurdity of dailiness—- the demands of those roses.
Trust a stone to keep the whole story carved into it.
Trust the bark of a tree in Tuscaloosa.
Alina Stefanescu, Unsaids.
what is it like to grow from the ground up into the air
why do we break dawn what about
dawn deserves breaking and whyon the white branch of the birch tree a crow
Romana Iorga, questions for trees
Earlier this year, a group of artists in The Netherlands set up the Ongelezen Boeken Club (Unread Books Club). It is a sad fact that many library books are never borrowed. Currently, there is an exhibition in a public library in Amsterdam featuring some of their unread books. […]
The artists have declared Thursday 19 September as the first Nationale Ongelezen Boekendag (National Unread Books Day).
There is the concept of the anti-library: a collection of unread books as a research tool, as an ode to everything one wants to explore. Related to that is Tsundoku, acquiring reading materials and letting them pile up. Many poets I know feel somewhat guilty about new poetry books piling up.
Fokkina McDonnell, The unread book
A little over a week ago, we were in Ireland, and my husband and I visited The Old Library at Dublin’s Trinity College, one of the oldest and most impressive libraries in the world. The main gallery of the Old Library is the Long Room, which is approx. 213 feet long. The Long Room normally houses over 200,000 of the libraries oldest books, but at the time of our visit, a huge restoration project was underway on these precious books. […]
One of the biggest draws now, while the restoration is in progress, is an enormous, illuminated artwork, titled Gaia, by artist Luke Jerram, that has been installed in the Old Library. The installation features NASA imagery of the Earth’s surface, showcasing the planet floating in three dimensions as it might be viewed from space. It’s a stunning thing to behold.
In lieu of the books in the stacks, visitors can watch large format film loops of the book restoration process, from the handling and packing of the books, to rebinding and cleaning. […]
Katharine Whitcomb, Letter from The Old Library at Trinity College, Dublin
A visit to the Old Library is included when you buy a ticket to the “Book of Kells Experience,” which you also do not want to miss. At the end of the Book of Kells Experience, illuminated on the wall is the Jorge Luis Borges quotation: “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library” in English and in Gaelic.
Herbert’s ‘Aethiopissa’, which is so different from any of his famous English religious lyrics — and has surprising elements even if you know his Latin verse well — was written for Francis Bacon, and sent to him, with a dedicatory English poem, as a kind of thank-you in return for a book (described as ‘a diamond to me you sent’), probably part of Bacon’s grand project, the Instauratio Magna, the first portion of which (the Novum Organum) was published in 1620, but which Bacon had been working on for many years.7 All of the early manuscript copies of ‘Aethiopissa’ contain the English and the Latin poems together. Bacon was a family friend of Herbert’s, they had known each other for more than a decade, and several of his other Latin poems in praise of Bacon’s work also had a wide manuscript circulation.
Since English literature written from the perspective of a black person is very rare in this period, the poem has attracted a fair degree of scholarly attention and speculation, not all of it, however, displaying much sense of its cultural context. (Sometimes the fact it was written for Bacon isn’t even mentioned.) Other scholars have interpreted the poem as a kind of formal ‘courtship’ of Bacon by Herbert — in a social or patronage-related way, rather than a romantic one. This doesn’t seem quite right, given their well-established friendship, but there does seem to be something distinctly personal and playful about the combination of the English and Latin pieces. The conceit of the Latin poem is probably inspired by Song of Songs 1:5 (‘I am black, but comely’), a very fashionable text for Latin verse imitation and response at just this period. In addition, though it has not to my knowledge been remarked upon, several of Bacon’s scientific works address the question of why some people have darker skin than others, pointing particularly to the heat of the sun (as mentioned in the Latin poem); since Herbert knew Bacon well, it is likely that he was aware of his interest in this question and they might even have discussed it. Overall, though, Herbert seems to be using the girl’s ‘blackness’ and her characterisation as a shadow to comment on the relationship between public office (as held by Bacon) and the relative obscurity of Herbert’s life of scholarship. Indeed, many of Herbert’s Latin poems are concerned with the choice between a public and a more private career (whether of scholarship or, later, of ministry).
Victoria Moul, Stay lovely boy! Why fly’st thou me?
Up late – or at least late for me –
Jason Crane, POEM: Up Late Reading Galway Kinnell
I lie on my stomach reading Galway Kinnell,
wondering at the lives I could have lived
if only I’d run away at 14, or
gotten on that plane, or been more
comfortable alone, or finished that degree,
or kept any one of a number of jobs, or
done the thing people thought I should do,
rather than what I did which was often
weird – you have to admit – and which
finds me up late, reading Galway Kinnell,
wondering at the lives I could have lived.
I’ve taken to making of my first cup of coffee a little be-here-now meditation, to try to ground myself for the day not in plans and lists of tasks, but in a few minutes of taking notice. I’m not sure how long it lasts, the effects of this practice, as I pretty quickly end up flapping around in body and mind in my usual barnyard way. But still. For a moment I’m still. I’m giving the day’s world my attention. I hope that’s enough for the world, for the day. As Rilke wrote, “Maybe we are here only to say: house, bridge, well, gate…”
This poem by Betsy Sholl, called “Poem in which Emily Dickinson Scolds Me,” struck me not because of the Emily Dickinson nod — I confess, I rarely understand what the hell Emily Dickinson is talking about. Don’t judge me. — but because of this couplet: ” What are you but two weak eyes/and too many shadows inside your head?”
Marilyn McCabe, A little terror can see a long way
The interweaving of memory and art, the poet’s art, is typical of [John] Levy’s work and what’s striking here, as elsewhere, is the careful construction of what might at first glance seem almost careless form. Look, for example, at the use of line and stanza breaks, with words and phrases isolated so that they look backwards and forwards at the same time:
I remembered. What it was
I was going to do
doesn’t matterThe pivot here between second and third line slows us down; life is full of us doing things that don’t particularly matter other than we intend to do them. What matters is the sense of coherence that memory brings, and from that, for the poet, a shape of words to express the extraordinary ordinary.
Which is why, for a poet like Levy, the accidental or coincidental has such weight; a dog barks as the poet types, or a typo is integrated, again via an enjambment, as a means of expressing love:
what fills my life with with worth. Ah, a
typo, the doubled with, as if one with isn’t enoughwhen I’m thinking of you.
Reading these two reminds me yet again why I love the pamphlet as a vehicle for poetry.
Billy Mills, Recent Reading September 2024: Part One
There is an irresistible vibrancy and immediacy about the poems in the first section of All About the Surface that draws the reader into [Karen] Macfarlane’s world. Take for example, her description of open water swimming in When you need courage for the year ahead (A swimmer’s perspective). It begins with the lines: ‘It’s going to be cold./ Bloody cold./ Squeal when it reaches your oxters cold./ Fecking freezing./ The cold will take your breath away;/ you will take it back/ and exhale, slow and loud/ like an old seal.’ The syntax and line breaks convey the speaker’s hesitance and her anticipation of the imminent pain. The use of the vernacular creates an intimacy with the reader, as if it is a friend talking to a friend. The humorous, self-deprecating image of the ‘old seal’ suggests someone who doesn’t take herself too seriously, yet it is cleverly and originally appropriate for its context. As a consequence, we share the moment, as if we are alongside her. We see the same qualities particularly in Tightrope ridge and Flying down the hill at Clachtoll. In the latter poem she writes: ‘I run, dodging thistles,/ and sheep’s purlies, (but not them all), / lowping fast, down and down/ breath bumped out of me/ streaming hair, more and more/ air between each step’. This time she skilfully imparts the jolting rhythm of her run, the breathlessness, the sense of speed and the lack of control so that we feel we are running with her.
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘All About the Surface’ by Karen Macfarlane
There’s a note from the poet, “Seeking joy”, which starts, “I was in my late teens when I was assaulted, but I’ve only started talking about what happened to me in the last two years.” It goes on to talk about “Following my joy is now my habit.” However, it’s a joy that allows acknowledgement of how women’s bodies are treated through sexual assault and childbirth. There are contact details for PANDAS Foundation (for new mothers needing mental health support), Rape Crisis, SARSAS who support victims of sexual assault, Samaritans and resources that helped the poet. The sexual violence is not explicit, but it’s a welcome acknowledgement that reading this collection may not be easy for some. The collection’s focus is on the aftermath and living with that aftermath as the assaulted teen grows into a woman and later becomes a mother to daughters. Healing is not easy but possible.
Unsuprisingly then, the first poem, “Venus de Milo speaks”, takes on the male gaze, observing that,
“Either way, I define
the ‘classical woman’ for you.A quiet one’s air
of aloofness. Tried,
now passive, with this
hairstyle and marbling of flesh;it evokes the very kind of woman
likely to stand before a kitchen sink”and concludes,
“Just don’t reach for my hands,
never seen or touched.
A touch of mine, never felt.”The Venus de Milo statue shows a woman, assumed to be Aphrodite, with a bare torso, but her lower body covered in drapes, standing. Her arms have been lost although a fragment found near the statue when it was discovered in 1820, shows a hand holding an apple. In the poem she’s not just a classical woman but also one cast into the classical role of a woman: to serve, provide a family and provide for and nuture the family. But she has no arms so cannot respond to the gaze which puts her in those roles. Men project their wishes onto her but she cannot comply or rebel.
Emma Lee, “Feeling All the Kills” Helen Calcutt (Pavilion) – book review
In workshops I often see writers try to write about a feeling, but then back away from it. They say “I feel this sometimes, but I know I’m being melodramatic,” or “I feel this sometimes but not always.”
But one of the tasks of poetry is to help us express a feeling completely, without backing away from it, without reasoning our way out of them, or overanalyzing them, or dampening them down with qualifications, . What I love about this poem is that it takes a feeling and amplifies it to the nth degree.
Another job of poetry, to quote Shakespeare, is to “give to Airy Nothings a local home and a dwelling place.” (Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, scene i. Oberon). This poem takes the emotion, which has no form, and ties that emotion to the physicality of the speaker’s own body. This is appropriate because sometimes feelings are so intense it seems like they take over your entire body.
Tresha Faye Haefner, “Blatant Blister” Analyzing Kim Malinowski’s Poem, Inspired by Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Rajinderpal S. Pal is a critically acclaimed writer and stage performer. He is the author of two collections of award-winning poetry, pappaji wrote poetry in a language i cannot read and pulse. Born in India and raised in Great Britain, Pal has lived in many cities across North America and now resides in Toronto. However Far Away is his first novel.
1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, pappaji wrote poetry in a language i cannot read, was released in 1998 by TSAR. The attention that this poetry collection received completely exceeded my expectations. As well as winning the Writers Guild of Alberta award for Best First Book, the publication received a couple of mentions in the Globe and Mail and allowed me to do readings across the country. I have been working on a New, Unpublished and Selected collection, working title The Lesser Shame. I really wish I knew then, at the time of writing my earlier poems, what I know now about craft and structure. Writing and editing my debut novel, However Far Away, I have gained a discipline and rigour which has previously eluded me. In some ways, I am covering similar ground to what I covered in my two published poetry collections (themes of family and tradition, love and commitment) but the novel feels very different in terms of scope and reach.
2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My father was a published and much-admired poet, and poetry readings were a regular occurrence in my childhood home. He wrote in Punjabi and Urdu, both languages that I do not read or write. My father was only in my life for a short time before he died of a heart attack. I was ten at the time. In my late twenties I was desperate to understand my father: his life as a soldier, a headmaster, a poet, what led him to move our family across continents, why he wrote, and what he wrote. Poetry seemed to be the natural medium to examine this man and try to understand my relationship to him.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rajinderpal S. Pal
I don’t know if poems are conversations
Luisa A. Igloria, Conversations
with God, though I tell my students to think
of poetry as a way to enter a conversation
that has been going on through the centuries,
but one in which they can add their voices.
At this point, I try to think of a party
analogy, but I have never been very good
at parties. I would likely be among
those who sit on the edge of a couch pretending
to nibble thoughtfully on an hors d’oeuvre,
one among a rapt circle listening to the life of any
party pulling out one brilliant silk square
after another from inside his sleeve as beautiful
birds of thought flutter in the air.
Students on Creative Writing courses, and other writers too, are sometimes invited to events at which they will meet ‘industry experts’ – literary agents advising on how to pitch your work, and editors advising on what kind of writing they are looking for, and marketing people advising on how to use social media to promote your work. Few literary agents, in my experience, know anything about how books are actually sold, and few editors in mainstream publishing: that’s for the guys down the corridor or the IT crowd in the basement. Few editors of literary magazines, few reviewers, few authors, few journalists covering the ‘arts’. Books simply appear – by magic – in bookshops or on online retail platforms. I don’t claim expertise here myself, but I have a little more understanding than I used to and a lot more confusion.
I blame the public schools. Going back a bit, I blame the Greeks and the Romans, whose celebration of the life of the mind and disdain for manual labour – plenty of busts of emperors and philosophers, none of the engineers who designed the aqueducts (300 in the province of Gaul alone) or those that built them, mostly slaves – was incorporated into the English public schools. While claiming to instil self-reliance these schools turned out generations of men who couldn’t boil an egg or wash their own clothes, for which they too required slaves (women), including a succession of prime ministers whose ability to quote a Latin tag was perceived as intelligence. The class division enshrined here still prevails in much of UK life, publishing included. (So no, this paragraph is not irrelevant.) The media run interviews with authors and sometimes editors, people from the sexy side of publishing, but not with sales managers and printers.
The above is prompted by CBe’s problems with the listing of its titles on Amazon. Some CBe titles are not listed at all on Amazon; some are listed but don’t appear when you type the author’s name in the search box; some are listed inaccurately (the Francis Ponge book is not a ‘French edition’); some are listed but only available from third-party sellers (though the books are available to Amazon to stock if it chooses); some are listed but at vastly inflated prices: the Amazon mark-up on the cover price for 10 CBe titles is between 300 and 500%.
Most readers of this newsletter probably don’t buy CBe books from Amazon, but other potential buyers might. The authors would like to reach these people, as would I. I’ve been told that my problem is that I don’t have ‘control of the metadata’, and this is true. But even if I did have that control – transmitting data in a specific program standard to the various listing and selling parties – I’ve been told by ‘industry experts’ (them again, but here I do mean experts: people who know how this works or doesn’t) that there are interface problems between the several parties sending and taking the data (Nielsen, Gardners, distributors, Amazon and holders of vendor accounts with Amazon). If you are a bestselling author published by Penguin Random House then the Amazon will probably work for you, because they will make it work; if neither, not. You are cannon fodder.
Charles Boyle, Cheaper from Amazon: really?
(extracts from my most recent rejections)
Thank you for entering
Ama Bolton, Found Poem
what can I say
and thank you for your patience
we received 1,800 poems
Your entry has helped
After much deliberation
Unfortunately, we didn’t
We are sorry to say
we have not shortlisted
your poems did not make it
on this occasion
can be very disappointing
please don’t be discouraged
Please, don’t give up
keep going
hope you’ll trust us
again in the future
next time
Best wishes
How will you live like an artist today? This is the question I keep asking myself and I try to throw it out there into the wilderness too.
We all know the answers, but we need to hear them again and again. We need to listen to the work, our life’s work, most of all, because it tells us what we’re required to do.
I’ve written a few of these posts on living like an artist by now, but maybe this whole blog leans toward demonstrating how to live like an artist. The over and over of process. The repetitions, the ego, the lack of ego, the doubt, the joy, the humility, the humiliations! Living as a civilian, as I’ve pointed out in a book called The Flower Can Always Be Changing, is at some point no longer an option.
Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – The Work of Art
[Mary] Oliver was born in Ohio, so I like to claim her as a fellow Ohio poet. She lived in Provincetown, Mass., from the 1960s until the death of her partner, Molly Malone Cook, in 2005. She was living in southern Florida at the time of her death. Though the bulk of Oliver’s poems are set on the northwest tip of Cape Cod, I can’t help but see in them so much of our shared Ohio landscape: the deer, the birds, the grass, the water, the trees, the light, and the darkness.
“I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up,” Oliver said in a 2011 interview in O Magazine. “I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.”
I, too, spent much of my Ohio childhood walking among trees or with my nose in a book. Like Oliver, I started writing in my teens and published my first book at 28. And, yes, my work is concerned with place. It is full of deer, birds, fields, rivers, trees, light, and darkness.
In a sense, Mary Oliver, and another Ohio poet, James Wright, gave me permission to write about Ohio’s flora and fauna. It was only natural—no pun intended—for me to write about what I saw every day, and to build metaphors using my surroundings. It did not surprise me to learn that Whitman, Emerson, Keats, and Rumi were some of Oliver’s favorite poets. These are poets of big ideas, poets who used metaphor—often based in the natural world—to build a bridge or open a door.
I learned from Mary Oliver how attention is a kind of love, how shining your mind’s light on a thing—a grasshopper, a bird, a tree—is a way of showing gratitude. I learned that poems do not need to be “difficult” to be intelligent, that poems can be both inspirational and investigative, that poems can be tender without being soft. I learned from her to own my wonder and to stay open to uncertainty.
Maggie Smith, On Your One Wild and Precious Life
I don’t really go through old rough drafts that often. I was surprised to find some polished poems hiding in that rough draft file. I started a new file so that I don’t have to dig through the rough draft file each time I want to polish a poem. I fought off the why should I even bother blues–and I put that line in the abandoned lines document.
As I was cutting and pasting, I remembered the poem I had planned to write. Back in early August, we had a professional development day, and one of our options was a stop the bleed workshop, where we learned how to tie a tourniquet and/or bandage a wound. I thought back to my Girl Scout days where we learned how to tie a tourniquet using only our bandannas and sticks found in the yard–while being severely cautioned that this technique was a last ditch effort only because it would lead to a lost limb. One of my colleagues remembers being taught to cauterize a wound with a lighter–not a technique recommended by the workshop leaders. Ah, the joys of growing up in the 70’s!
I’m still puzzling over the possibilities of that poem. But here’s an unexpected joy. As I was sorting, cutting, pasting, writing, I came up with a new poem, about living in seminary housing, seeing people cross the parking lot, hearing singing through the walls at night. It’s not finished, but I have enough that I’ll remember what I was doing when I come back to it.
I’m getting a lot of writing done these days, but I have to be intentional to get poetry writing done. I’d like to do more poetry writing. It’s good to remember that puttering can lead to poems.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Abandoned Lines and Poetry Puttering
Maybe I relate to wasps because I saw an exhibition at the museum with all the social wasps singled out under glass bell jars, each hovering over the earth on the blunt end of a stainless steel pin.
Sometimes I can’t eat at restaurants or other people’s houses because I can taste the metal of the fork’s tines, or of the edge of the spoon’s bowl when it’s rough from use. I always have to push away the thought that it’s some kind of hex.
It tastes like pain.
If I were to paint pain, it’d be a metallic silver. Like mercury. The astata species of wasps are sometimes silver. The males, at any rate.
I have no idea if this is some kind of synesthesia. Transference. Free association.
But this is a true thing in my life. Sometimes I think the truest things in my life are the experiences that strip down to nothings. I think that’s why I’m drawn to poetry. Its witches’ work: lashing the elements of the world together to create meaning—and motion. I don’t know if belief can move a mountain, but belief in a mountain can move an entire community.
Maybe belief can resurrect the dead in pieces and in portraits such that no one can dispute, defend, or deconstruct them. You can’t deconstruct an alignment of memories. You can only shuffle them around. Like the gems in a kaleidoscope.
Ren Powell, It Tastes Like Pain
The definition of a good day
PF Anderson, Want (#BlogElul 6)
keeps changing. In “Metamorphoses”
the monsters began as beautiful,
or sometimes the reverse. The sun fell
in love, and what it loved, who it loved,
leaked thick droplets of pain. There — the end.
At least, that was the end of something.
Today was a good day.
My long weekend is drawing to a close. It’s wet and moody out, bringing dusk earlier and earlier. The days are slowing down and I’m giving in to them. There’s never enough time, there’s still a sense of urgency different from what I get in the summer. To nest, to harvest, to prepare for what’s coming.
I’ve made banana bread, apple cake and applesauce cake for home and school, two types of chicken with apples and applesauce. All trying to use up my apples from my cinnamon apple tree. I’ve wrangled my reluctant daughter into dinner, homework and taking out the rubbish, but not a shower. Compromise.
And writing, I’ve managed a little. Sent out some submissions, one already declined. I’ve fought with a poem that I can see but can’t express. It’s coming, gradually.
Gerry Stewart, Moving into Autumn, Moving On
at the sadness of a falling leaf
we call the wind felicity
it’s agreed
the seance ends
a broken butterfly wing knocks oncethen silence
Jim Young, we call the wind felicity