reveries - poetry

13.26. The Great American Poem

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

vacation with pay. Want more

of everything ready-made. Be afraid

to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery

any more. Your mind will be punched in a card

and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something

that won’t compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace

the flag. Hope to live in that free

republic for which it stands.

Give your approval to all you cannot

understand. Praise ignorance, for what man

has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

Listen to carrion – put your ear

close, and hear the faint chattering

of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheap

for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy

a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep

of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie down in the shade. Rest your head

in her lap. Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

→ 12:44 PM, Mar 3

13.12. Poem of the day

Psalm for the January Thaw

By Luci Shaw

Blessed be God for thaw, for the clear drops
that fall, one by one, like clocks ticking, from
the icicles along the eaves. For shift and shrinkage,
including the soggy gray mess on the deck
like an abandoned mattress that has
lost its inner spring. For the gurgle
of gutters, for snow melting underfoot when I
step off the porch. For slush. For the glisten
on the sidewalk that only wets the foot sole
and doesn’t send me slithering. Everything
is alert to this melting, the slow flow of it,
the declaration of intent, the liquidation.

Glory be to God for changes. For bulbs
breaking the darkness with their green beaks.
For moles and moths and velvet green moss
waiting to fill the driveway cracks. For the way
the sun pierces the window minutes earlier each day.
For earthquakes and tectonic plates—earth’s bump
and grind—and new mountains pushing up
like teeth in a one-year-old. For melodrama—
lightning on the sky stage, and the burst of applause
that follows. Praise him for day and night, and light
switches by the door. For seasons, for cycles
and bicycles, for whales and waterspouts,
for watersheds and waterfalls and waking
and the letter W, for the waxing and waning
of weather so that we never get complacent. For all
the world, and for the way it twirls on its axis
like an exotic dancer. For the north pole and the
south pole and the equator and everything between.

→ 11:43 AM, Jan 28

73. bad poetry

trees hang limp in the sultry August mid-morn
damp from last night’s showers
and I feel like they look

→ 10:11 AM, Aug 27

58. Poem of the day: "When I Am Among the Trees" by Mary Oliver

When I Am Among the Trees

by Mary Oliver

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

"When I Am Among the Trees" by Mary Oliver, from Thirst. © Beacon Press, 2006.

→ 8:05 PM, Jun 23

57. Poem of the day: "Silence" by Billy Collins

Silence

By Billy Collins b. 1941 Billy Collins

There is the sudden silence of the crowd

above a player not moving on the field,

and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase

before it strikes the ﬂoor,

the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.

The stillness of the cup and the water in it,

the silence of the moon

and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.

The silence when I hold you to my chest,

the silence of the window above us,

and the silence when you rise and turn away.

And there is the silence of this morning

which I have broken with my pen,

a silence that had piled up all night

like snow falling in the darkness of the house—

the silence before I wrote a word

and the poorer silence now.

Source: Poetry (April 2005).

→ 11:17 AM, Jun 20

32. For D.S.

A Meeting
by Wendell Berry

In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: “How you been?"
He grins and looks at me.
“I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.”

→ 11:14 PM, Feb 4

9. On Psalm 6

She knocks at my office door, enters. She is the student who shows up far too infrequently to class, and in what little writing she has submitted, she gives just a glimpse of a life teetering on the brink of chaos.

“I wanted to recite psalm,” she says.

It is an assignment–memorize and recite ten psalms over the course of the semester. This is her first–somewhere at the midpoint of the semester, and considering her lack of work and attendance thus far, and our recent interventions to encourage her to come to class and to do the homework, I take this as a positive sign that she is making an effort to turn her semester around.

“Which one?"

“Psalm 6.” She is pretty and extremely bright. But her eyes have an omnipresent, weary sadness about them.

I flip to Psalm 6 in our textbook–The Message–so I can follow along as she recites.

^1-2 Please, God, no more yelling, no more trips to the woodshed.
Treat me nice for a change;
I’m so starved for affection.

^2-3 Can’t you see I’m black-and-blue,
beat up badly in bones and soul?
God, how long will it take
for you to let up?

^4-5 Break in, God, and break up this fight;
if you love me at all, get me out of here.
I’m no good to you dead, am I?
I can’t sing in your choir if I’m buried in some tomb!

^6-7 I’m tired of all this—so tired. My bed
has been floating forty days and nights
On the flood of my tears.
My mattress is soaked, soggy with tears.
The sockets of my eyes are black holes;
nearly blind, I squint and grope.

^8-9 Get out of here, you Devil’s crew:
at last God has heard my sobs.
My requests have all been granted,
my prayers are answered.

¹⁰ Cowards, my enemies disappear.

Disgraced, they turn tail and run.

She does not stumble. She does not pause awkwardly searching for the right word. She recites flawlessly, as if she has written the words on her soul, and allowed me for just a moment to peer into it. It is beautiful.

“Wonderful!” I say, and she manages a half smile. I pause. “I like this psalm. Why did you choose it."

The sad eyes mist over, she glances at the floor, and then quickly back up.

“Because it’s exactly how I feel."

I take it she means especially the first seven verses. Now I fight back tears. “You keep praying that prayer,” I say. Then, as if to set her free from what must feel like confinement–the office of her professor–I say, “Thank you, for this. I needed to hear this psalm.” And she’s gone.

She does not make it to the end of the semester at my college, and I do not know where she is now. It wouldn’t be all that hard to find out, for we live in a world with Facebook, a world where virtually no one disappears forever anymore. I have thought of that day from time to time since then, but I had forgotten the psalm until this morning when I read it again and remembered and wanted to say to the sad eyed one, “I remember you, I have thought of you, I will pray for you."

And “Thank you.”

→ 9:15 AM, Jan 9

7. On “The Road Not Taken”

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;	5

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,	10

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.	15

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.	20

Some of my students want to read this poem as if it is titled "The Road Less Traveled By," and interpret it as a poem mainly about choices, emphasizing especially the last line as an expression of triumph. They see it as a call to non-conformity, and misread the poem as a call to the reader to take roads that are less traveled.

But it seemt to me that such an interpretation ignores the "sigh" in line 16—the one we should make when we read the "—" in line 18. It also ignores an even better interpretation of the whole poem, one that suggests the poem is more about the stories we tell about ourselves than it is about the choices we make.

The poem contains two versions of the same event. The first version takes up the first three stanzas; it is the story the speaker tells of the event (probably) shortly after it happened. Of note, in this version of the story, the speaker goes to some lengths to make it clear the two roads are "really about the same." Both haven't been walked upon that much, for that morning they "equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black" (11-12). The second version of the story takes of the last stanza, and is told "ages and ages hence." In it, the speaker has revised the story and states (attempts to convince himself?) that he took "the one less traveled by" (19).

Time has a way of changing the stories we tell about ourselves. Perhaps our memories are self-serving, and we tell the story about ourselves that we want to believe. But if we're self-aware, we'll make note of that "sigh" we make when we tell that version of the story, ages and ages hence.

And maybe be a little more human.

selecting a reader

My perfect reader of this blog…
his name is my name, too.
Whenever he logs out,
you will likely hear me shout;
“There goes an artist without peer.”

http://www.xanga.com/robbyprenkert

→ 2:41 PM, Sep 21

When I Am Among the Trees