Category: Poems

poems

Poems: Haiku 7 and Work of the Hands

Poems:  November 26, 2017

Haiku 7 and Work of the Hands

7.

November 24, 2017

Penny at fifteen

Will puppy plan and snuggle

Gift lessons for me

 

It’s a rainy day.

I’m working on the Bonnie Hunter 2017 mystery quilt—alongsides friends near and far—and listening to a Jo Nesbo book (downloaded from the Maine state library system).

 

More pics of finished clue to follow later.

Turkey Tracks: Walking Haikus, Haiku 6

Turkey Tracks:  November 25, 2017

Walking Haikus

6.

November 23, 2017

Walking haikus make

Themselves with no distractions

Soul rhythms emerge

 

Thanksgiving day No No Penny and I walked our “lake” walk.  It’s one of the areas where she can be off-leash, which pleases us both.

The following pictures illustrate what happens when one just sees, hears, and feels on a walk…

…because then an attachment to nature emerges.

The lake is still low from the summer and early fall drought:

The wind over the water is cold so I don a hat and gloves and tighten my neck scarf and zip up my coat.  The cold wind is bracing though and clears out one’s head.

I am reminded of friend Giovanna McCarthy when I feel the warmth of the scarf she made me around my neck.

Penny sets a good pace for us.  But she wanders, too, and that’s what a walk is about for her.  If she gets too far behind, two whistles bring her running to touch my palm.  It’s a game she likes.

The leaves are all gone now.  Look at the color of the sky.  It’s so blue.  It’s not unusual to see rock climbers scaling that cliff.

A view of the lake in the bend of the road.  the white speck at the left edge of the road is Penny.

A small group of mallards comes close enough to get a picture.  The blue sky’s reflections dance across the water.

When I get back into the car, my head is full of haikus.

 

Poems: “Almost June in New England”

Poems:  June 1, 2015

And now it IS JUNE.

Here is a poem Jeanne Gervais sent me the other day–before I got home and could post it.

Almost June in New England

Barefoot on dirt

and warm porch floorboards.

Indoor plants are outside

breathing air, soaking sun.

I saw an ant, a Robin with red breast

all in a morning.

Look at all the light green buds in the trees!

When did that happen? Wasn’t it yesterday we had snow.

Jeanine Gervais

May 26, 2015

Poem: “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost

Poem:  May 2015

Jeanine Gervais sent me this Robert Frost poem the other day.

I thought you might enjoy it too.

We in Maine are busy with spring clean-up, which involves fixing walls and picking up brush, so the poem is timely.

MENDING WALL

Robert Frost

 

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun,

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it

Where there are cows?

But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me~

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”