Ordinary April

Cherry blossoms burst
Just like every year in spring,
Delighting me still.

Oceanfront

Sound and sight of surf,
Ceaseless motion, pulsing beat
Urge beach walkers on.

Unquiet morning

Unquiet morning,
Hammers, traffic, woodpecker,
Mild sun on my face.

Late cherry blossoms

Pale petals drop, as
directed by a wind chime:
ding, release, float, fall

Special starlight

"Starlight Over the Rhone," Vincent van Gogh
Musee d'Orsay, Paris


...Shall we look up now at stars in Winter
And call them always sweeter friends
Because this story of a Mother and a Child
Never is told with the stars left out?

Is it a Holy Night now when a child issues
Out of the dark and the unknown
Into the starlight?

...Shall all wanderers over the earth, all homeless ones,
All against whom doors are shut and words spoken --
Shall these find the earth less strange tonight?
Shall they hear news, a whisper on the night wind?
"A Child is born." "The meek shall inherit the earth."

...Shall a quiet dome of stars high over
Make signs and a friendly language
Among all nations?

Shall they yet gather with no clenched fists at all,
And look into each other's faces and see eye to eye,
And find ever new testaments of man as a sojourner
And a toiler and a brother of fresh understandings?

-- From "Special Starlight," by Carl Sandburg, American poet, 1878-1967
The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, c. 2003

Shaping these images to make them stay

Muir Woods National Monument, California

An Event

As if a cast of grain leapt back to the hand,
A landscapeful of small black birds, intent
On the far south, convene at some command
At once in the middle of the air, at once are gone
With headlong and unanimous consent
From the pale trees and fields they settled on.

What is an individual thing? They roll
Like a drunken fingerprint across the sky!
Or so I give their image to my soul
Until, as if refusing to be caught
In any singular vision of my eye
Or in the nets and cages of my thought,

They tower up, shatter, and madden space
With their divergences, are each alone
Swallowed from sight, and leave me in this place
Shaping these images to make them stay:
Meanwhile, in some formation of their own,
They fly me still, and steal my thoughts away.

Delighted with myself and with the birds,
I set them down and give them leave to be.
It is by words and the defeat of words,
Down sudden vistas of the vain attempt,
That for a flying moment one may see
By what cross-purposes the world is dreamt.

- Richard Wilbur, American poet, 1921-
from New and Collected Poems, © 1988 by Richard Wilbur

I was delighted when I found this poem because it states so eloquently some of the reasons why I've kept a journal since seventh grade, and why I began this blog. Capturing an experience in words makes it more real, somehow. At the same time, writing about the event shapes it subtly. Inevitably choices are made, one description where another might have done. Sometimes all I know when I start is that there is something important that I want to remember, to better understand. Often, the act of choosing the words and reading them over reveals what the meaning of the story really is for me.

A favorite poem for Friday

Bay Area Discovery Museum, Sausalito, CA

Having evolved from grass

our eyes seesaw green,
go chartreuse into hazel, umber
edged by saffron and dun.

At home our kids
guzzle cloudbursts of milk,
thicken in spurts, at school

wave their arms to become
fields of windblown wheat,
trusting they have the answer,

something of the fluid plant
that enables each of us
to yield, acquiesce without

indignation, be it clippers,
pesticides, the implacable herd...
Most of who we are

does not blaze or spangle,
rarely scatters a redolent brume.
From grass it's understood

what matters most is not
showing off but showing up,
breaching what we can--

asphalt, gravel, brick,
one among so many, this
our constant work and harder.

--Thom Ward, from "Various Orbits," c. 2004