photograph by Kim Stafford

 

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

 

March 2, 2023

 

I invited some friends to…

…please send me one of your favorite poems and say a little bit about why you like it. Here’s what people sent:

 

Vernal Sentiment

 

Though the crocuses poke up their heads in the usual places,
The frog scum appear on the pond with the same froth of green,
And boys moon at girls with last year’s fatuous faces,
I never am bored, however familiar the scene.

 

When from under the barn the cat brings a similar litter,—
Two yellow and black, and one that looks in between,—
Though it all happened before, I cannot grow bitter:
I rejoice in the spring, as though no spring ever had been.

 

—Theodore Roethke

 

I think why I am so fond of this poem and tend to read it every spring, often many times, is that it captures perfectly my delight and joy as the subtle and sometimes not so subtle signs of spring emerge. And yes, “I (truly) rejoice in the spring, as though no spring ever had been.” This short poem seems almost perfect to me and brings me joy just as witnessing the first signs of the pussy willows, the first call of the returning robins, the glorious scent of daphne wafting over the damp air, enlivens me and gets my pulse slightly elevated. Roethke masterfully captures the delight that is so available in the ordinary!!. I believe that we all need to pay more attention to these ordinary miracles that reveal themselves if we pay attention.

 

Cheers my friend!

 

—Jeffrey Sher

*

 

After an Illness, Walking the Dog

 

Wet things smell stronger,
and I suppose his main regret is that
he can sniff just one at a time.
In a frenzy of delight
he runs way up the sandy road—
scored by freshets after five days
of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf.

 

When I whistle he halts abruptly
and steps in a circle,
swings his extravagant tail.
The he rolls and rubs his muzzle
in a particular place, while the drizzle
falls without cease, and Queen Anne’s lace

and Goldenrod bend low.

 

The top of the logging road stands open
and light. Another day, before
hunting starts, we’ll see how far it goes,
leaving word first at home.
The footing is ambiguous.

 

Soaked and muddy, the dog drops,
panting, and looks up with what amounts
to a grin. It’s so good to be uphill with him,
nicely winded, and looking down on the pond.

 

A sound commences in my left ear
like the sound of the sea in a shell;
a downward, vertiginous drag comes with it.
Time to head home. I wait
until we’re nearly out to the main road
to put him back on the leash, and he
—the designated optimist—

 

imagines to the end that he is free.

 

—Jane Kenyon

 

I like the designated optimist and think of him or her often.

 

—Elizabeth Domike

*

 

My favorite poems….of the moment!

And I’m cheating a bit as I am sending in two short ones, from two extremely different writers and I list the books they are from as the books are quite spectacular.

 

First:

Untitled. From Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo. Really the entire book is an intact work but here is a current favorite small poem. Harjo is Creek/Muskogee, writes intimately from within a native community, is a former US Poet Laureate and a jazz saxophonist.

 

I thought of all the doors that had opened and closed.

I thought of how so many I loved were no longer on

This earth. I thought of all my mother’s songs looking

For a place to live. I thought of all the Saturdays in the 

World. I started with G and rounded the bend at B-flat.

I followed my soul.

 

—Joy Harjo

 

Second:

“A Meadow” from Facing the River by Czeslaw Milosz. Again the book is really a unit, written after returning to his native village after being in exile for fifty years. He grew up in then-Lithuania, now Poland, survived the Nazi invasion, the Soviet invasion and then Occupation. He first served with the Communist government but soon left. He won the Nobel prize for Literature.

 

It was a riverside meadow, lush, from before the hay harvest,

On an immaculate day in the sun of June.

I searched for it, found it, recognized it.

Grasses and flowers grew there familiar in my childhood.

With half-closed eyelids I absorbed luminescence.

And the scent garnered me, all knowing ceased.

Suddenly I felt I was disappearing and weeping with joy. 

 

—Czeslaw Milosz

 

—Deborah Buchanan

*

 

The Waking

 

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.

 

We think by feeling. What is there to know?

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

 

Of those so close beside me, which are you?

God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,

And learn by going where I have to go.

 

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. 

 

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know. 

What falls away is always. And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

 

—Theodore Roethke

 

Hands down my favorite poem. Every morning when I wake up, I try to not be in a rush, or have a plan, but let life take me slowly into the day, and learn from where it takes me.

 

—Dave Duncan

*

 

Here’s my submission to your beautiful request, and I will say it might not be my “favorite” poem but it is an artifact in my younger life when I somehow imparted the power of poetry to my two now grown daughters.

 

Easter, 1916

 

I have met them at close of day   

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey   

Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head   

Or polite meaningless words,   

Or have lingered awhile and said   

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done   

Of a mocking tale or a gibe   

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,   

Being certain that they and I   

But lived where motley is worn:   

All changed, changed utterly:   

A terrible beauty is born.

 

That woman’s days were spent   

In ignorant good-will,

Her nights in argument

Until her voice grew shrill.

What voice more sweet than hers   

When, young and beautiful,   

She rode to harriers?

This man had kept a school   

And rode our wingèd horse;   

This other his helper and friend   

Was coming into his force;

He might have won fame in the end,   

So sensitive his nature seemed,   

So daring and sweet his thought.

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vainglorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart,   

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,   

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

 

Hearts with one purpose alone   

Through summer and winter seem   

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

The horse that comes from the road,   

The rider, the birds that range   

From cloud to tumbling cloud,   

Minute by minute they change;   

A shadow of cloud on the stream   

Changes minute by minute;   

A horse-hoof slides on the brim,   

And a horse plashes within it;   

The long-legged moor-hens dive,   

And hens to moor-cocks call;   

Minute by minute they live:   

The stone’s in the midst of all.

 

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.   

O when may it suffice?

That is Heaven’s part, our part   

To murmur name upon name,   

As a mother names her child   

When sleep at last has come   

On limbs that had run wild.   

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death;   

Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith   

For all that is done and said.   

We know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead;   

And what if excess of love   

Bewildered them till they died?   

I write it out in a verse—

MacDonagh and MacBride   

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:   

A terrible beauty is born.

 

—William Butler Yeats

 

—Mark Danley

*

 

My favorite poem has often been one by T’ao Ch’ien (365-427 A.D. ), translated by David Hinton. Here is this one:

 

Together, We all go out Under the Cypress Trees in the Chou Family Burial-Grounds

 

Today’s skies are perfect for a clear 

flute and singing koto. And touched 

this deeply by those laid under these

cypress trees, how could we neglect joy?

Clear songs drift away anew. Emerald wine

starts pious faces smiling. No knowing

what tomorrow brings, it’s exquisite 

exhausting whatever i feel here and now.

 

—T’ao Ch’ien

 

I feel T’ao Ch’ien as present as my Great Aunt Emma, who knew much deprivation but was so joyful that we would arrive for a visit to the Farm. We would sit out in the grass looking for four leaf clovers for hours, and she would bake us blackberry pies.

 

I like to write back to T’ao Ch’ien—over many years now. He has inspired me to stop, be in the wild, appreciate the moment as beauty at the same time, feeling all that’s been lost and is gone. And he led me to the Buddhist sutras!! 

 

I also love to find another poet respond to him, like Billy Collins does, below. Though it may not be for T’ao Ch’ien himself,  it’s across time and distance, enchanted still in the twentieth century by what they wrote in the the fifth.    

 

Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of their Titles

 

It seems these poets have nothing

up their ample sleeves

they turn over so many cards so early,

telling us before the first line

whether it is wet or dry,

night or day, the season the man is standing in,

even how much he has had to drink.

 

Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow.

Maybe it is snowing on a town with a beautiful name.

 

“Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune

on a Cloudy Afternoon” is one of Sun Tung Po’s.

“Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea”

is another one, or just

“On a Boat, Awake at Night.”

 

And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with

“In a Boat on a Summer Evening

I Heard the Cry of a Waterbird.

It Was Very Sad and Seemed To Be Saying

My Woman Is Cruel—Moved, I Wrote This Poem.”

 

There is no iron turnstile to push against here

as with headings like “Vortex on a String,”

“The Horn of Neurosis,” or whatever.

No confusingly inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over.

 

Instead, “I Walk Out on a Summer Morning

to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall”

is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders.

 

And “Ten Days of Spring Rain Have Kept Me Indoors”

is a servant who shows me into the room

where a poet with a thin beard

is sitting on a mat with a jug of wine

whispering something about clouds and cold wind,

about sickness and the loss of friends.

 

How easy he has made it for me to enter here,

to sit down in a corner,

cross my legs like his, and listen.

 

—Billy Collins

 

 —Katie Radditz

*

 

May I never be complete

May I never be content

May I never be perfect

 

From Fight Club! I remember reading that over 10 years ago and being inspired by the hidden beauty of a concept like willing ones self to never want completeness… I’m going to always be learning growing struggling to figure out what the hell I am on this Giant beautiful rock… It’s not easy to accept flaws… growing… Being content as in settled in, not striving to learn… it’s a beautiful sentiment… That’s my fav poem… That I’ll prolly get tattooed someday.

 

—Jeff Kuehner

*

 

Max Ritvo is one of my favorite poets, and “Afternoon” is my favorite poem by him. He died young, of cancer, and he produced a great deal of work during his final years, while he was very sick. I find much to admire in this poem, but perhaps what stays with me the most, and will always stay with me, is the fountain. I won’t spoil it. Just read the poem and see for yourself.

 

Afternoon

 

When I was about to die

my body lit up

like when I leave my house

without my wallet.

 

What am I missing? I ask

patting my chest

pocket.

and I am missing everything living

that won’t come with me

into this sunny afternoon

 

—my body lights up for life

like all the wishes being granted in a fountain

at the same instant—

all the coins burning the fountain dry—

 

and I give my breath

to a small bird-shaped pipe.

 

In the distance, behind several voices

haggling, I hear a sound like heads

clicking together. Like a game of pool,

 

played with people by machines.

 

—Max Ritvo

 

—Alex Tretbar

*

 

Valentine

 

On the eve of the apocalypse,
the wild turkeys are tuning up for their dance, flared
stately stepping upon the new fallen snow
I continue to ponder

 

Ruby Crowned Kinglet.
He is fixed in my mind because
unknown to him,
set upon a background of olive green feathers
embering with gold and
floating above his brain there glows
a fire ruby jewel.

 

Like the mandalas radiating from ancient bodhisattvas,
the feathered crown of hunter gatherer peoples, branched trees on
the halos of saints, the heads of shamans
that they say all together,
look how I see you.
See how you look through my open heart.

 

—Ken Hunt

 

Ken Hunt is an artist, saddle-maker, horse-trainer living in a remote canyon in NE Oregon, and he has a vibrant sense of his place and the creatures there. He lives close to all kinds of wild beings, and in this poem brings them close to us, so close they can see through our eyes and hearts.

 

—Kim Stafford

*

 

Deb thought another poem would not go amiss, so she invited me to join your party this once.

 

Among lots of favorite poems, Frost’s “Mending Wall” has grown in depth to me for my whole life. Frost’s simple example demonstrates how we sabotage unity by drawing thick lines between groups and positions, and then fighting over them. The poem details how we carefully resurrect these divisions, where they aren’t needed. The conflict is merely hinted at.

 

Once, after I had written about the poem in my weekly blog, a friend told me that the PM of Israel, don’t recall which, had recently cited the poem to justify their apartheid: “good fences make good neighbors.” Of course, this is the antithesis of the poem, but how many tumultuous patriots would have known this? On behalf of Frost’s dignity and immense compassion, I humbly offer perhaps his greatest poem, though it does have competitors in his oeuvre.

 

Mending Wall

 

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 offense.

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.’

 

—Robert Frost

 

—Scott Teitsworth

*

 

That Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is my all-time favorite poem is a well-known fact (among my friends), but I have many favorite poems. In the not-too-distant past (five years ago, maybe?) I had the great good fortune to come upon the writings of Thomas Traherne (1637-1674). His poems and meditations were first published in 1903, ten years after they were rediscovered in manuscript—229 years after his death. I often start the day by reading a poem and/or a meditation by him. His wild delight is contagious. He helps me to get the day off to a glorious start. The first four poems in The Collected Works of Thomas Traherne are all sublime: “The Salutation,” “Wonder,” “Eden,” and “Innocence.” Here’s the first:

 

The Salutation

 

         These little limbs,

    These eyes and hands which here I find,

These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins,

    Where have ye been? behind

What curtain were ye from me hid so long?

Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue?

 

         When silent I   

    So many thousand, thousand years

Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie,

    How could I smiles or tears,

Or lips or hands or eyes or ears perceive?

Welcome ye treasures which I now receive.

 

         I that so long

    Was nothing from eternity,

Did little think such joys as ear or tongue

    To celebrate or see:

Such sounds to hear, such hands to feel, such feet,

Beneath the skies on such a ground to meet.

 

         New burnished joys,

    Which yellow gold and pearls excel!

Such sacred treasures are the limbs in boys,

    In which a soul doth dwell;

Their organised joints and azure veins

More wealth include than all the world contains.

 

         From dust I rise,

    And out of nothing now awake;

These brighter regions which salute mine eyes,

    A gift from God I take.

The earth, the seas, the light, the day, the skies,

The sun and stars are mine, if those I prize.

 

         Long time before

    I in my mother’s womb was born,

A God preparing did this glorious store

    The world for me adorn.

Into this Eden so divine and fair,

So wide and bright, I come His son and heir.

 

         A stranger here

    Strange things doth meet, strange glories see;

Strange treasures lodged in this fair world appear,

    Strange all and new to me;

But that they mine should be, who nothing was,

That strangest is of all, yet brought to pass.

 

—Thomas Traherne

 

—Johnny Stallings

*

 

I Corinthians, Chapter 13, which ends:

 

Love never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tonguers, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part: but then shall I know even as also I am known.

And now abideth faith, hope, and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

 

—Ken Margolis