THE RED WHEELBARROW
by William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Illustration by GFA51, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Archives for category: Poetry
DECEMBER NOTES
By Nancy McCleery
The backyard is one white sheet
Where we read in the bird tracks
The songs we hear. Delicate
Sparrow, heavier cardinal,
Filigree threads of chickadee.
And wing patterns where one flew
Low, then up and away, gone
To the woods but calling out
Clearly its bright epigrams.
More snow promised for tonight.
The postal van is stalled
In the road again, the mail
Will be late and any good news
Will reach us by hand.
***
“December Notes” appears in Nancy McCleery‘s collection Girl Talk (The Backwaters Press, 2002).
Photo: “Bird tracks in the snow” by Willie, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
WHAT MY HOUSE WOULD BE LIKE IF IT WERE A PERSON
by Denise Levertov
This person would be an animal.
This animal would be large, at least as large
as a workhorse. It would chew cud, like cows,
having several stomachs.
No one could follow it
into the dense brush to witness
its mating habits. Hidden by fur,
its sex would be hard to determine.
Definitely it would discourage
investigation. But it would be, if not teased,
a kind, amiable animal,
confiding as a chickadee. Its intelligence
would be of a high order,
neither human nor animal, elvish.
And it would purr, though of course,
it being a house, you would sit in its lap,
not it in yours.
***
“What My House Would Be Like If It Were A Person” appears in Denise Levertov’s collection Poems 1972-1982 (New Directions, 2002)
PAINTING: “Hills, South Truro (Massachusetts)” by Edward Hopper (1930)
THE CARDINAL
by Henry Carlile
Not to conform to any other color
is the secret of being colorful.
He shocks us when he flies
like a red verb over the snow.
He sifts through the blue evenings
to his roost.
He is turning purple.
Soon he’ll be black.
In the bar’s dark I think of him.
There are no cardinals here.
Only a woman in a red dress.
***
“The Cardinal” appears in Henry Carlile’s collection Running Lights by Henry Carlile (Dragon Gate, 1981).
Photo: Wendy Kavener, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This photo was a winner in the 2004 National Wildlife Photo Contest.
CANYON DE CHELLY
by Simon J. Ortiz
Lie on your back on stone
the stone carved to fit
the shape of yourself.
Who made it like this,
knowing that I would be along
in a million years and look
at the sky being blue forever?
My son is near me. He sits
and turns on his butt
and crawls over to stones,
picks one up and holds it,
and then puts it in his mouth.
The taste of stone.
What is it but stone,
the earth in your mouth.
You, son, are tasting forever.
We walk to the edge of a cliff
and look down into the canyon.
On this side, we cannot see
the bottom cliffedge but looking
further out, we see fields,
sand furrows, cottonwoods.
In winter, they are softly gray,
The cliffs’ shadows are distant,
hundreds of feet below;
we cannot see our own shadows,
The wind moves softly into us,
My son laughs with the wind;
he gasps and laughs.
We find gray root, old wood,
so old, with curious twists
in it, curving back into curves,
juniper, pinon, or something
with hard, red berries in spring.
You taste them, and they are sweet
and bitter, the berries a delicacy
for bluejays. The plant rooted
fragilely in a sandy place
by a canyon wall, the sun bathing
shiny, pointed leaves.
My son touches the root carefully,
aware of its ancient quality.
He lays his soft, small fingers on it
and looks at me for information.
I tell him: wood, an old root,
and around it, the earth, ourselves.
NOTE: Canyon de Chelly National Monument was established on April 1, 1931 as a unit of the National Park Service. It is located in northeastern Arizona within the boundaries of the Navajo Nation. Reflecting one of the longest continuously inhabited landscapes of North America, it preserves ruins of the early indigenous tribes that lived in the area, including the Ancient Pueblo Peoples (also called Anasazi) and Navajo. The monument covers 83,840 acres and encompasses the floors and rims of the three major canyons: de Chelly, del Muerto, and Monument. These canyons were cut by streams with headwaters in the Chuska mountains just to the east of the monument. None of the land is federally owned. In 2009, Canyon de Chelly National Monument was recognized as one of the most-visited national monuments in the United States. (SOURCE: wikipedia.org.)
PHOTO: “Canyon de Chelly” by Ansel Adams (1941)
FARM NOTES (Excerpt)
by Simon J. Ortiz
…”What would you say that the main theme
of your poetry is?”
“To put it as simply as possible,
I say it this way: to recognize
the relationships I share with everything.”
I would like to know well the path
from just east of Black Mountain
to the gray outcropping of Roof Butte
without having to worry
about the shortest way possible.
NOTE: With an elevation of nearly 10,000 feet, Roof Butte is the highest peak of the Chuska Mountains, which run in a north-northwest direction across the Arizona-New Mexico border.
PHOTO: “Roof Butte” found at surgent.net.
BLIND CURSE
by Simon J. Ortiz
You could drive blind
for those two seconds
and they would be forever.
I think that as a diesel truck
passes us eight miles east of Mission.
Churning through the storm, heedless
of the hill sliding away.
There isn’t much use to curse but I do.
Words fly away, tumbling invisibly
toward the unseen point where
the prairie and sky meet.
The road is like that in those seconds,
nothing but the blind white side
of creation.
You’re there somewhere,
a tiny struggling cell.
You just might be significant
but you might not be anything.
Forever is a space of split time
from which to recover after the mass passes.
My curse flies out there somewhere,
and then I send my prayer into the wake
of the diesel truck headed for Sioux Falls
one hundred and eighty miles through the storm.
***
“Blind Curse” appears in Simon J. Ortiz’s collection After and Before the Lightning (The University of Arizona Press, 1994).
PHOTO: “Slippery When Wet” by Brian L. Romig, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
THREE STINGS
by Shel Silverstein
George got stung by a bee and said,
“I wouldn’t have got stung if I’d stayed in bed.”
Fred got stung and we heard him roar,
“What am I being punished for?”
Lew got stung and we heard him say,
“I learned somethin’ about bees today.”
Photo: John Covey, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Find “Three Stings” in Falling Up, a 176-page collection of poetry and illustrations by Shel Silverstein, available at Amazon.com.
JOY
by Julie Cadwallader-Staub
Who could need more proof than honey–
How the bees with such skill and purpose
enter flower after flower
sing their way home
to create and cap the new honey
just to get through the flowerless winter.
And how the bear with intention and cunning
raids the hive
shovels pawful after pawful into his happy mouth
bats away indignant bees
stumbles off in a stupor of satiation and stickiness.
And how we humans can’t resist its viscosity
its taste of clover and wind
its metaphorical power:
don’t we yearn for a land of milk and honey?
don’t we call our loved ones “honey?”
all because bees just do, over and over again, what they were made to do.
Oh, who could need more proof than honey
to know that our world
was meant to be
and
was meant to be
sweet?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Julie Cadawallader-Staub lives near Burlington, Vermont. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Her first collection of poems, Face to Face, was published in 2010. “Joy” and” Guinea Pig,” which Garrison Keillor read on The Writer’s Almanac, are in this collection, in addition to sixty other poems. Julie’s poemReverence has been anthologized in Garrison Keillor’s book Good Poems: American Places. Her poetry also appears in the Silver Birch Press Summer Anthology. Visit her at juliecspoetry.com.
SKYTONES (Section X)
Poem by Pablo Neruda
I invite you to topaz,
to the yellow
hive in the stone,
the bees,
and the lump of honey
in the topaz
to the gold day
and the familial
drone of tranquility:
here is a minimal
church, built in a flower
as the bee builds, as
the planes of the sun or the leaf
in autumn’s yellowest profundity,
a tree, incandescently
rising, beam over beam, a sunburst corolla,
insect and honey and autumn, all
transformed by the salts of the sun:
essence of honey, the tremulous world
and the wheat of the sky
that labored to accomplish
this sun-change, at rest in the pallor of topaz.
Painting: “Wheatfield with Reaper” (1889) by Vincent van Gogh
Silver Birch Press 