"Follow-worthy everlastingness" and "most everybody's got feet" - I love this, Chuck! As always, you have such a talent for saying big things with just a few punch-in-the-gut-powerful words.
"destine" caught my eye. Not an oft-used verb, but so well-used here. I like the question and I like that you've made even more questionable with the observation about most everyone having feet. And yes, a happy belated birthday to your wife.
Quite nice, Chuck! This reminds of a song on David Crosby's first album, "What are their Names?" Happy birthday to your beloved Karen! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9VjtSrKXDs
Lisa welcome back. And thank you for your shoreline poem. I love the ocean and collecting shells and rocks along the beach. I felt right at home in your poem. The prompt you gave us brought me to my grandmother. She passed years ago, and I still miss her deeply. I must admit I struggled with this poem. I am sure in part because I wanted it to match my deep love for her. Words just fail at times like this. But here it is anyways...
.
She was tall in stature, strong in might.
A self-made woman, not of our time.
Nurturing and raising five healthy youngins,
she grew a family while tilling the garden,
breeding chickens and milking the cow.
From her ardor, platters of vittles were forged.
I know for her appy pie was to die for!
Her husband was a preacher of the Word.
Yet she’s the one who imbibed and knew it!
A seamstress that sewed their lives together.
Vestments for their bodies, warmth for their hearts,
clothing for the many tables, windows, dolls and beds.
.
Then in full force her sixth pregnancy arrived.
Taking her robust nature hostage, hiding it away.
With her vitality fading, her might dwindling,
doctors were determined to terminate the gestation.
Yet she knew the seed wanted to draw its first breath.
Requesting a few more moments, even a possibility…
It was the faith of a mustard seed, an invincible will.
Along with tomatoes from her garden, harvested from
the substrate of life itself that fed and saved their lives.
Months later my mother was born into this world.
Amazing to consider, I am here because of her will,
Like others, I was struck by the beautiful descriptiveness of your grandmother being "a seamstress that sewed their lives together." I imagine some of her stitches show up in you, too, and in the generous way that you share yourself and your wisdom with others!
"A seamstress who sewed their lives together" - beautiful line. This is a heart-rending tribute, Julie, and your adoration for your grandmother shines through. The power of ancestors is real, and it strikes me that your grandmother's strength may have been (at least in part), drawn from her ancestral line, as well as from the substrate of life itself. Thanks for sharing this.
This is an epic poem, Julie. What a beautiful tribute to your grandmother. Your poem has a sweet lyrical cadence, and a rhyming flow without specifcially rhyming. I love the "faih of a mustard seed, an invincible will. Along with tomatoes from her garden, harvested from the substrate of life itself that fed and saved lives." And that this miracle birth was your mother, and that here we are, enjoying and inspired by your wisdom and poetry. What a gem.
I had to pause at "a seamstress that sewed their lives together" because it feels like this is so often true of our matriarchs, whether acknowledged or not. Just beautiful, Julie.
This is such a visceral poem -- you set us right out there in the country with the chickens and the tomatoes and the Word and the appy pie. I love it! I found this line so brilliant: "From her ardor, platters of vittles were forged." Only the strongest women *forge* plates of food! Your grandmother was a special soul.
Thank you for this beautiful poem, Lisa. It brought to my consciousness my last trip to Pine Ridge in South Dakota, a place of immense beauty, surivivors of deep trauma, stark contrasts and a deeply painful history. This is from a trip to Wounded Knee, where I have struggled all these years of describe the deep sense of sadness I felt on that day,
Wounded Knee
The blue sky, sun soaked day,
bathing the waves of grasslands and hills
in these sacred lands.
Gives way
To grey skies and cold winds as I
pulled into the parking lot
at Wounded Knee.
Dancing pleas for money to get to the next town,
dreamcatchers, medicine wheels, necklaces and rings
Necessities of survival in this land left behind.
Walking up the hill to the burial grounds, the abandoned church
where so much hope turned to ashes,
Reading the stones and markers of those who dared
to dance their way into peace,
to dream a new dream,
to remember a life,
before we came.
The piercing stab of a fierce wind caught me,
grabbed my heart and turned my face
directly into its fury.
In the deafening silence I heard the cries of elders,
Larry, this is such a searingly beautiful poem . . . the waves of grasslands flattened into a parking lot, the dancing for a peace that went denied, the hope turning to ashes, the cries of the elders, the silence and tears from deep within you . . . and now, a poem to help hold this . . . the tragedy and brutality but also the beauty and love inside the simple fact that you arrived in this place after all of the elders were gone, and yet you heard them, and you care what they had to say, and you let your tears water that sacred place.
Wow, Lisa. Thank you so much for this esquisitely beautiful comment. Your dear and insightful reflections always help me see things more clearly than I did before. Thank you.
Larry, thank you for sharing the imprint of the pain you carry from your visit to Wounded knee. It's a powerful example of poetry's alchemy. While poetry doesn't take the pain away, in metabolizing it, a beautiful expression of even the most gut-wrenching experiences miraculously emerges. I feel the dept of this pain - of the terrible injustice and betrayal, "buried deep in the ground and left to linger in the wind" and of your own in witnessing the legacy of it "tears from deep within." The beautiful, bleak landscape of a hillside under gray skies and piercing winds underscores it all.
Thank you Keith for your insightful comment and your always incisive reading and perception of what we write. I grew up in a time when so much of what we were taught was filtered and had the impact of propaganda, and so much of the atrocities commited by ancestors simply left out. I never heard about Wounded Knee, Residential boarding schools, the true horror of enslavement, the brutality often committed in God's name, and even about the rich history of native people's in Virginia and where they went and why they seemed to disappear. Thank you for reading with heart and mind and as the native poet, songwriter and activist John Trudell was fond of saying, with "clear and coherent thinking."
Thanks for sharing about the impact of growing up with sanitized history, Larry - I relate to your experience. Growing up in the 70's and 80's, the truth was still being papered over. It distresses me no end that there are so many efforts afoot even now to continue to do that, what with book bans and curriculum controls. That all makes poems like this beautiful one you have shared here so very important.. Thank you for telling the truth while also processing some of your pain around it.
Keith, this is so well said. It breaks my heart to watch this rolling through again, as if somehow exposure to the truth weakens rather than strengthens us. What a cynical and hopeless view of humanity these book banners and truth hiders seem to have. May the resistance continue.
Larry this is poem quite impactful. I am feeling it with you. This line..."The piercing stab of a fierce wind caught me, grabbed my heart and turned my face directly into its fury. In the deafening silence I heard the cries of elders, women and children with nowhere to run." My heart cracked upon in sadness. The genocide is so unspeakable, yet here you did it justice.
Thank you Julie. Genocides are the worst of humanity, in all of their myriad forms. Thankfully, even in genocide we see the best of who we can be as well.
Oh boy, I'm with Chuck on "decades of hate and faith blessed genocide." I read that one out loud to myself a few times. This is so heartbreaking and beautiful, Larry. I just read on Britannica's website that Wounded Knee "broke any organized resistance to reservation life and assimilation to white American culture." Because of current events, I had just been wondering the other day what marked that turning point for Native Americans. This is the kind of poem I am hungry for right now. Thank you.
Lisa, this is haunted in the most exquisitely delicious kind of way. I love/love/love the idea of you walking with the spirits of the Bayocean women, collecting yourselves together as you walk the edge of everything. I am positively bewitched.
Here is my contribution, inspired by your prompt and by my grandfather, who I never knew (he died when I was 2).
Were you French or
were you German?
It was never very clear
for very long.
What with Alsace
snatched back and forth
like a fumbled football
four times in less than a century.
Born in German occupied France,
a boy too soon pressed
into service on the Russian Front
alongside the Kaiser’s other
Alsatian conscripts.
Far enough away from France to
Ensure you wouldn’t run away home.
[every thief knows to keep one hand on his own wallet]
Keith, this is so beautiful! I loved getting to know your grandfather in this way, even though it's clear that his life included a more-than-reasonable dose of trauma and difficulty. The way you bring it back to yourself and your own experiences at the end is so beautiful. It left me wondering if there's a gene for being at home with not being at home and if so, hoping that perhaps you and your grandfather share a bit of that.
Ahh you did an ancestral piece too! Odes to our grandparents. Amazing how the past rams right into the present. The connection to our ancestors in DNA and in spirit. I appreciated "it wasn’t my choice to be neither nor, but somewhere in between. Never quite this nor that. Never really at home." We carry our ancestral strengths, love as well as the traumas. Again connection is beyond blood and bone. We are tied together in unimaginable ways.
Keith, I love the way you bring us through the back and forth of your grandfather's life before drawing the connection to your own. There is so much in that last stanza, and it's a beautiful illustration of our shared humanity and how feelings are universal even if experiences are not.
Thank you, A. Thank you for getting what was implied by that last stanza. You're absolutely right - soooo many ways in which my grandfather's life and mine have been different, but deeply kindred in others, shared DNA aside.
This is so dear, Keith. What a journey your grandfather moved on, and the depth and richness of a life lived fully. Your poem brings us along in theback and forth, the peaks and valleys, the pain and joy to your life, and a wonderful connection to your grandfather. I love your ending: "it wasn’t my choice, to be neither nor, but somewhere in between. Never quite this nor that.
Never really at home." Truly words of wisdom from the heart.
Thank you, Larry. I think of my grandfather often. He must have lived with some very intense trauma, being a medic in WWI. He then also had a very traumatic injury, breaking his back from stepping into an empty elevator shaft in a department store where he was a night baker in the 1930s. Like so many of his generation who fought in WWI, I think he rarely spoke of his experiences.
I cannot even imaging the trauma he experienced and how that truly becomes unspeakable. Your are giving his experiences life with your words and your stories. What a blessing.
I love how this functions as a study of and tribute to your grandfather on the one hand, and a realization of the “legacy lottery” that connects you to him on the other. I like your addressing it directly to him, and the simplicity of calling him by his two (or two of three?) grandpa names at the end, as you tell him your piece of the story. Lovely poem, Keith!
I have always wanted to run away to the ocean. My poem today is less of a poem and more like a *very* slight rewrite of a well-known song, and it's just something I decided to play around with because I completely blanked on today's prompt, and all I could think of was Outlander, and how much time I've spent daydreaming of being swept away to other places😅
I really fancy this idea of being swept away to other places on billow and breeze (and I got a good chuckle out of you saying all you could think of was Outlander, which is one of my favorite smutty period dramas...how brilliant was it that it was more than a single period drama). This was very fun, A. Thank you for playing :)
It's so good! I got a little stuck in the second season and have been waiting for a time I can pick it back up. I'm glad you enjoyed my goofy experiment!
Nice work, A. I am an Outlander fan, and all the twists and turns of the book and series. The show had me constantly wondering if I would want to go to another time,or how it would be to vanish and not be sure you could get back to where you came from. I love the opening song, and like your adaptation. This prompt connected me to Lisa's thin places prompt, and those places that can take us away and bring us above the world. You are always welcome here at our cold northern atlantic ocean!
I think about all of that when I'm watching, too (I still have to finish the series, and I haven't gotten to the books yet)! I'm honestly relieved that anyone was familiar enough with it to at least find this entertaining 😅
I visited Maine in September and am hoping to plan another trip to the ocean this year, but I'm not sure exactly where yet! Ogunquit was just so wonderful.
Yes, Ogonquit is beauitful and cool, and the Maine cfoast is spectacular. We live in Durham a short piece south from Ogonquit, so lety us know if you all find youir way here again! And for Outlander, I never finished the TV series as our cable package changed and we lost it! Someday!
I remembered you saying you were in NH but hadn't even thought to look up Durham on a map before and didn't realize just how close you were to Maine! We were only about a half hour from you in September! It was one of the most wonderful trips I've taken, so we will absolutely be back when we can, even if we don't make it there this year. I told Jon I wanted to move there, I loved it so much. 😅
I was needing a quieter experience, and we were all needing to not drive more than 7 hours (plus stops, of course!) so I just barely got Jon to agree to Ogunquit, but Acadia is on my bucket list!
I've been feeling kinda non-poetic the last couple of days and am only now making my way over to see my friends in the comment pages. This one showed up for me pretty quickly today, while walking and thinking that it's only 3.5 months before my favorite songbird arrives.
I love your poem, sis! It's beautiful how you began with that one oh-so-special Swainson's thrush and then, through him, found your way back through the entire history of the land you share and all its stewards (and abusers). I like to think that since time apparently isn't actually a line, all of the predecessor animals and big-hearted lovers of the land are still there walking alongside you.
"his fluted crescendo" lit up my insides, such a delightful pairing of words. I love the whole poem. Like others have said, it struck me as poignant that you imagined a thrush oral history that gave the real history of what happened on that land, and how it impacted the habitat of the thrushes...and I too thrilled at your ending with the "high whistling pinball machine of song...preemptively breaking every human heart." Lastly, I love knowing that this was a poem midwifed by your walk today :))
What a sweet journey you take us on, Rebekah! The wonderful story you paint, seeing from he viewpoint of the thrush, and all he humans who ahve intruded, invaded, nurtured and sustained the habitat of this marvelous species. Your poem has humor, delight, seriousness and acred wiosdom. From the delightful "the guy before the slumlord who played electric guitar for the whole watershed to hear, not well." I love that! To the "Before that, brown bodies that passed through on hunts for 10,000 years without flushing a thrush" And you end so splendidly: "But he’d also have been told, and rightly so, that even earlier, before everything,
there was that high whistling pinball machine of song, just in from Venezuela, preemptively breaking every human heart." Wow!
It takes a very remarkable and person and wisdom keeper to be able to feel so deeply the world around us and all of the sacrd beings, particles and aspects of it. I am so grateful you are out there sharing with us.
I love this, Rebekah. The way you highlighted how "his world is just 75 feet wide" and about all that lead to that, too back before when there were good stewards of the land and his habitat is really wonderful. I love "but if thrushes have an oral tradition -- and why shouldn't they?" and the various ways you describe their song.
Also, Lisa - I just watched the little documentary on Bayocean that you linked to and was utterly bewitched again...wow, what a story (what stories), and what a breathtakingly beautiful spit of land. Is Blithe Jensen any relation to you??
It's such a great little documentary, isn't it!? I don't think Blithe and I are related . . . I looked up her ancestry at some point and can't recall the details now, but it didn't seem likely to connect.
Yes, I really enjoyed watching it...what a fascinating history. It makes me even more excited to witness the unfolding of your telling of the Bayocean story!
I love this poem, Lisa. It gets more captivating with each reading, brings me deeper into its rich complexity and beautiful imagery and lyrical flow. I love how you connect with the women who walked before, and how you sense their energy and spirit and use it to inform your own. Each of your stanzas are intact poems all their own. The ending is just magical:
"What greater treasure
could I wish for
than to be here,
to walk the edge
of everything, my tide
still coming in. "
What a stunningly beautiful lyric, an integration of all you are and are taking in. Thank you for this lovely gem.
Thank you so much, Larry! It felt like an interesting synchronicity to me that your poem takes place in the grasslands of the Plains states. Blanche, one of the women I referenced in the poem, lived in South Dakota and fled with her family during the depression and dust storms of the 1930s, so I've been doing some research on the history of that area, too, and feeling struck over and over again how our history is the story of one displacement after another. My novel is going to center on displacements in the 1930s-1950s, but I can feel the unacknowledged displacement and genocide of indigenous people running through these more modern stories. I'm grappling with how to bring the absence of Native people into my story as a presence.
What a wonderful synchronicity! I am reading a wonderful book right now called: "The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and an American Inheritance," by Rebecca Clarren, reflecting on her family's heritage as displaced jews from eastern Europe who settled on land once the home of the Lakota. An honest grappling with a displaced people coming to "own" land once belonging to another displaced people. I grew up on the atlantic coast of Virginia in an area once richly populated by native peoples, whose only history we were given was a ficticious account of Pochantas and her father, Chief Powhatan. We were never told where they had gone, nor told of the reservations in Virginia and elsewhere, not the forced marches, broken treaties and outright theft of lands owned not by people, but the earth and the universe. Since College, I have spent as much time as I can learning these histories long buried.
One of the ironies and twists I have come to realize is that all of the places I have lived and many I have traveled to and through all had place names from Indigenousd languages and people. The people had been displaced but we kept some of their names and replaced others with the names of people, aka men.
Best to you in your research and your writing. I look forward to reading your novel!
Thank you, Larry! I am only just beginning to come to terms with all of this myself. The book you’re reading sounds wonderful and timely - I’ll check it out!
I am sure they are ecstatic to have Mom home! I understgand that space between glad to be home but still feeling the pull of the place(s) you had been!
so who calls the shots.
To destine the few lucky footprints into follow-worthy everlastingness
while so many other
noble contenders
simply get washed away
by the next wave.
most everybody's got feet.
(happy birthday today to my excellent wife karen and her everlasting footprints)
"Follow-worthy everlastingness" and "most everybody's got feet" - I love this, Chuck! As always, you have such a talent for saying big things with just a few punch-in-the-gut-powerful words.
"destine" caught my eye. Not an oft-used verb, but so well-used here. I like the question and I like that you've made even more questionable with the observation about most everyone having feet. And yes, a happy belated birthday to your wife.
Ha ha
started out with a stale "chooses"
all hail the mighty google
"Most everybody's got feet" really struck me. It seems so simple, put this way.
Happy belated birthday to Karen!
Quite nice, Chuck! This reminds of a song on David Crosby's first album, "What are their Names?" Happy birthday to your beloved Karen! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9VjtSrKXDs
I agree! And happy birthday to you wife's everlasting footprints!
Lisa welcome back. And thank you for your shoreline poem. I love the ocean and collecting shells and rocks along the beach. I felt right at home in your poem. The prompt you gave us brought me to my grandmother. She passed years ago, and I still miss her deeply. I must admit I struggled with this poem. I am sure in part because I wanted it to match my deep love for her. Words just fail at times like this. But here it is anyways...
.
She was tall in stature, strong in might.
A self-made woman, not of our time.
Nurturing and raising five healthy youngins,
she grew a family while tilling the garden,
breeding chickens and milking the cow.
From her ardor, platters of vittles were forged.
I know for her appy pie was to die for!
Her husband was a preacher of the Word.
Yet she’s the one who imbibed and knew it!
A seamstress that sewed their lives together.
Vestments for their bodies, warmth for their hearts,
clothing for the many tables, windows, dolls and beds.
.
Then in full force her sixth pregnancy arrived.
Taking her robust nature hostage, hiding it away.
With her vitality fading, her might dwindling,
doctors were determined to terminate the gestation.
Yet she knew the seed wanted to draw its first breath.
Requesting a few more moments, even a possibility…
It was the faith of a mustard seed, an invincible will.
Along with tomatoes from her garden, harvested from
the substrate of life itself that fed and saved their lives.
Months later my mother was born into this world.
Amazing to consider, I am here because of her will,
and a few red tomatoes….
Like others, I was struck by the beautiful descriptiveness of your grandmother being "a seamstress that sewed their lives together." I imagine some of her stitches show up in you, too, and in the generous way that you share yourself and your wisdom with others!
Thanks Lisa, appreciate that.
"A seamstress who sewed their lives together" - beautiful line. This is a heart-rending tribute, Julie, and your adoration for your grandmother shines through. The power of ancestors is real, and it strikes me that your grandmother's strength may have been (at least in part), drawn from her ancestral line, as well as from the substrate of life itself. Thanks for sharing this.
This is an epic poem, Julie. What a beautiful tribute to your grandmother. Your poem has a sweet lyrical cadence, and a rhyming flow without specifcially rhyming. I love the "faih of a mustard seed, an invincible will. Along with tomatoes from her garden, harvested from the substrate of life itself that fed and saved lives." And that this miracle birth was your mother, and that here we are, enjoying and inspired by your wisdom and poetry. What a gem.
I had to pause at "a seamstress that sewed their lives together" because it feels like this is so often true of our matriarchs, whether acknowledged or not. Just beautiful, Julie.
This is such a visceral poem -- you set us right out there in the country with the chickens and the tomatoes and the Word and the appy pie. I love it! I found this line so brilliant: "From her ardor, platters of vittles were forged." Only the strongest women *forge* plates of food! Your grandmother was a special soul.
Thanks Rebekah yes she was. She passed years ago, but I feel here with me every day.
Thank you for this beautiful poem, Lisa. It brought to my consciousness my last trip to Pine Ridge in South Dakota, a place of immense beauty, surivivors of deep trauma, stark contrasts and a deeply painful history. This is from a trip to Wounded Knee, where I have struggled all these years of describe the deep sense of sadness I felt on that day,
Wounded Knee
The blue sky, sun soaked day,
bathing the waves of grasslands and hills
in these sacred lands.
Gives way
To grey skies and cold winds as I
pulled into the parking lot
at Wounded Knee.
Dancing pleas for money to get to the next town,
dreamcatchers, medicine wheels, necklaces and rings
Necessities of survival in this land left behind.
Walking up the hill to the burial grounds, the abandoned church
where so much hope turned to ashes,
Reading the stones and markers of those who dared
to dance their way into peace,
to dream a new dream,
to remember a life,
before we came.
The piercing stab of a fierce wind caught me,
grabbed my heart and turned my face
directly into its fury.
In the deafening silence I heard the cries of elders,
women and children with nowhere to run.
Decades of hate and faith blessed genocide,
buried deep in the ground and left to linger
In the wind, laced with sadness and pain.
No words came to me that day,
just silence and the tears from deep within.
All these years later,
those cries of guilt and shame
become this poem.
Larry, this is such a searingly beautiful poem . . . the waves of grasslands flattened into a parking lot, the dancing for a peace that went denied, the hope turning to ashes, the cries of the elders, the silence and tears from deep within you . . . and now, a poem to help hold this . . . the tragedy and brutality but also the beauty and love inside the simple fact that you arrived in this place after all of the elders were gone, and yet you heard them, and you care what they had to say, and you let your tears water that sacred place.
Wow, Lisa. Thank you so much for this esquisitely beautiful comment. Your dear and insightful reflections always help me see things more clearly than I did before. Thank you.
Larry, thank you for sharing the imprint of the pain you carry from your visit to Wounded knee. It's a powerful example of poetry's alchemy. While poetry doesn't take the pain away, in metabolizing it, a beautiful expression of even the most gut-wrenching experiences miraculously emerges. I feel the dept of this pain - of the terrible injustice and betrayal, "buried deep in the ground and left to linger in the wind" and of your own in witnessing the legacy of it "tears from deep within." The beautiful, bleak landscape of a hillside under gray skies and piercing winds underscores it all.
Thank you Keith for your insightful comment and your always incisive reading and perception of what we write. I grew up in a time when so much of what we were taught was filtered and had the impact of propaganda, and so much of the atrocities commited by ancestors simply left out. I never heard about Wounded Knee, Residential boarding schools, the true horror of enslavement, the brutality often committed in God's name, and even about the rich history of native people's in Virginia and where they went and why they seemed to disappear. Thank you for reading with heart and mind and as the native poet, songwriter and activist John Trudell was fond of saying, with "clear and coherent thinking."
Thanks for sharing about the impact of growing up with sanitized history, Larry - I relate to your experience. Growing up in the 70's and 80's, the truth was still being papered over. It distresses me no end that there are so many efforts afoot even now to continue to do that, what with book bans and curriculum controls. That all makes poems like this beautiful one you have shared here so very important.. Thank you for telling the truth while also processing some of your pain around it.
Keith, this is so well said. It breaks my heart to watch this rolling through again, as if somehow exposure to the truth weakens rather than strengthens us. What a cynical and hopeless view of humanity these book banners and truth hiders seem to have. May the resistance continue.
Larry this is poem quite impactful. I am feeling it with you. This line..."The piercing stab of a fierce wind caught me, grabbed my heart and turned my face directly into its fury. In the deafening silence I heard the cries of elders, women and children with nowhere to run." My heart cracked upon in sadness. The genocide is so unspeakable, yet here you did it justice.
Thank you Julie. Genocides are the worst of humanity, in all of their myriad forms. Thankfully, even in genocide we see the best of who we can be as well.
...Faith blessed genocide.....
....woof....
That line got me right in the gut, too!
Thank you Chuck!
Thank you for sharing this, Larry. I think you've portrayed that deep sadness here beautifully. Sometimes it takes a while for the words to find us.
I definitely hear that, A. And sometimes there simply are no words.
Oh boy, I'm with Chuck on "decades of hate and faith blessed genocide." I read that one out loud to myself a few times. This is so heartbreaking and beautiful, Larry. I just read on Britannica's website that Wounded Knee "broke any organized resistance to reservation life and assimilation to white American culture." Because of current events, I had just been wondering the other day what marked that turning point for Native Americans. This is the kind of poem I am hungry for right now. Thank you.
Thank you Rebekah. An Indigenous People's History of the United States is a wonderful resource for more awareness of the topic.
Lisa, this is haunted in the most exquisitely delicious kind of way. I love/love/love the idea of you walking with the spirits of the Bayocean women, collecting yourselves together as you walk the edge of everything. I am positively bewitched.
Here is my contribution, inspired by your prompt and by my grandfather, who I never knew (he died when I was 2).
Were you French or
were you German?
It was never very clear
for very long.
What with Alsace
snatched back and forth
like a fumbled football
four times in less than a century.
Born in German occupied France,
a boy too soon pressed
into service on the Russian Front
alongside the Kaiser’s other
Alsatian conscripts.
Far enough away from France to
Ensure you wouldn’t run away home.
[every thief knows to keep one hand on his own wallet]
You survived somehow, despite
starvation
dysentery
frostbite
lice
Spanish influenza
mustard gas
trenches
more trenches
endless trenches.
And then it was over, and
you were French again, until
you arrived in Ellis Island
where technically you became
American.
But still you were a Kraut,
which wasn’t your choice either.
Nor was war going viral a second time,
when you found no haven at home,
because you were
never this nor that
never here nor there.
Two generations later,
I drew the winning ticket
in the legacy lottery.
Like you, grandpère, groꟖvater,
it wasn’t my choice
to be neither nor, but
somewhere in between.
Never quite this nor that.
Never really at home.
Keith, this is so beautiful! I loved getting to know your grandfather in this way, even though it's clear that his life included a more-than-reasonable dose of trauma and difficulty. The way you bring it back to yourself and your own experiences at the end is so beautiful. It left me wondering if there's a gene for being at home with not being at home and if so, hoping that perhaps you and your grandfather share a bit of that.
Thanks, friend. I love your lovely wish for the at-home-with-not-at-home gene <3
Ahh you did an ancestral piece too! Odes to our grandparents. Amazing how the past rams right into the present. The connection to our ancestors in DNA and in spirit. I appreciated "it wasn’t my choice to be neither nor, but somewhere in between. Never quite this nor that. Never really at home." We carry our ancestral strengths, love as well as the traumas. Again connection is beyond blood and bone. We are tied together in unimaginable ways.
We are indeed tied together in unimaginable ways. The power of ancestral ties is sacred, regardless of how relationships manifest in a lifetime.
Your last setence is a gem--"We are tied together in unimaginable ways."
Keith, I love the way you bring us through the back and forth of your grandfather's life before drawing the connection to your own. There is so much in that last stanza, and it's a beautiful illustration of our shared humanity and how feelings are universal even if experiences are not.
Thank you, A. Thank you for getting what was implied by that last stanza. You're absolutely right - soooo many ways in which my grandfather's life and mine have been different, but deeply kindred in others, shared DNA aside.
It's beautifully done. And it's an honour to be able to get to know you and your story through your writing.
This is so dear, Keith. What a journey your grandfather moved on, and the depth and richness of a life lived fully. Your poem brings us along in theback and forth, the peaks and valleys, the pain and joy to your life, and a wonderful connection to your grandfather. I love your ending: "it wasn’t my choice, to be neither nor, but somewhere in between. Never quite this nor that.
Never really at home." Truly words of wisdom from the heart.
.
Thank you, Larry. I think of my grandfather often. He must have lived with some very intense trauma, being a medic in WWI. He then also had a very traumatic injury, breaking his back from stepping into an empty elevator shaft in a department store where he was a night baker in the 1930s. Like so many of his generation who fought in WWI, I think he rarely spoke of his experiences.
I cannot even imaging the trauma he experienced and how that truly becomes unspeakable. Your are giving his experiences life with your words and your stories. What a blessing.
snatched like a fumbled football.
unintentional nod to the superbowl, apparently
I loved this line, too!
I love how this functions as a study of and tribute to your grandfather on the one hand, and a realization of the “legacy lottery” that connects you to him on the other. I like your addressing it directly to him, and the simplicity of calling him by his two (or two of three?) grandpa names at the end, as you tell him your piece of the story. Lovely poem, Keith!
Thanks, Rebekah - I appreciate you reflecting back the layering of all those aspects of the poem :)
I have always wanted to run away to the ocean. My poem today is less of a poem and more like a *very* slight rewrite of a well-known song, and it's just something I decided to play around with because I completely blanked on today's prompt, and all I could think of was Outlander, and how much time I've spent daydreaming of being swept away to other places😅
"Sing me a song of a lass that is gone.
Say, could that lass be I?"
Sometimes I dream of sailing away
"over the sea to Skye."
"Billow and breeze, islands and seas,
mountains of rain and sun"
could set me free, carry me there,
until "all that was me is gone."
I love this, A! It's so whimsical and fun, and I confess I've had the thought more than once of wanting to be swept up and scattered by water or wind.
Thanks, Lisa! I didn't expect much from it, and it was fun to just play a bit.
I really fancy this idea of being swept away to other places on billow and breeze (and I got a good chuckle out of you saying all you could think of was Outlander, which is one of my favorite smutty period dramas...how brilliant was it that it was more than a single period drama). This was very fun, A. Thank you for playing :)
It's so good! I got a little stuck in the second season and have been waiting for a time I can pick it back up. I'm glad you enjoyed my goofy experiment!
You make goofy great! 😌
Also an Outlander fan. Ahh to be swept away, to be set free.
Nice work, A. I am an Outlander fan, and all the twists and turns of the book and series. The show had me constantly wondering if I would want to go to another time,or how it would be to vanish and not be sure you could get back to where you came from. I love the opening song, and like your adaptation. This prompt connected me to Lisa's thin places prompt, and those places that can take us away and bring us above the world. You are always welcome here at our cold northern atlantic ocean!
I think about all of that when I'm watching, too (I still have to finish the series, and I haven't gotten to the books yet)! I'm honestly relieved that anyone was familiar enough with it to at least find this entertaining 😅
I visited Maine in September and am hoping to plan another trip to the ocean this year, but I'm not sure exactly where yet! Ogunquit was just so wonderful.
Yes, Ogonquit is beauitful and cool, and the Maine cfoast is spectacular. We live in Durham a short piece south from Ogonquit, so lety us know if you all find youir way here again! And for Outlander, I never finished the TV series as our cable package changed and we lost it! Someday!
I remembered you saying you were in NH but hadn't even thought to look up Durham on a map before and didn't realize just how close you were to Maine! We were only about a half hour from you in September! It was one of the most wonderful trips I've taken, so we will absolutely be back when we can, even if we don't make it there this year. I told Jon I wanted to move there, I loved it so much. 😅
One of my very favorite places is a bit north at Acadia National Park and the surrounding Island, and the small city of Portland is wonderful!
I was needing a quieter experience, and we were all needing to not drive more than 7 hours (plus stops, of course!) so I just barely got Jon to agree to Ogunquit, but Acadia is on my bucket list!
I haven’t seen Outlander but this dreamy lilting song-poem makes me want to give it a watch!
There are some necessary content warnings before diving in (which is part of why I've taken a break) but it really does have such a dreamy quality.
I've been feeling kinda non-poetic the last couple of days and am only now making my way over to see my friends in the comment pages. This one showed up for me pretty quickly today, while walking and thinking that it's only 3.5 months before my favorite songbird arrives.
.
Best Bird
.
Before me in this forest
came a very particular
Swainson’s thrush,
the one who signaled
with his fluted crescendo
that I was to make an offer.
He had known my predecessor,
the slumlord, and thought
I might do a better job.
.
Being only a few years old,
he couldn’t have known
that way back in the 90s
the slumlord high-graded
all the trees, a big fuck you
to thrushes, and that is why
his world is just 75 feet wide:
the shaded creek and
requisite riparian buffer,
and why he sings always with
those trickling backup vocals.
.
But if thrushes have
an oral tradition -- and why
shouldn't they? -- he’d have been
told about the harvest, and about
the guy before the slumlord
who played electric guitar
for the whole watershed to hear,
not well. And about Jim
before that, who was a
proper steward,
and a handful of other white
people dating back to before
a hammer had been swung
up here. Before that,
brown bodies that
passed through on hunts
for 10,000 years without
flushing a thrush.
.
But he’d also have been told,
and rightly so, that even earlier,
before everything,
there was that high whistling
pinball machine of song,
just in from Venezuela,
preemptively breaking
every human heart.
I love your poem, sis! It's beautiful how you began with that one oh-so-special Swainson's thrush and then, through him, found your way back through the entire history of the land you share and all its stewards (and abusers). I like to think that since time apparently isn't actually a line, all of the predecessor animals and big-hearted lovers of the land are still there walking alongside you.
Tha's a beautiful thought, Lisa!
"his fluted crescendo" lit up my insides, such a delightful pairing of words. I love the whole poem. Like others have said, it struck me as poignant that you imagined a thrush oral history that gave the real history of what happened on that land, and how it impacted the habitat of the thrushes...and I too thrilled at your ending with the "high whistling pinball machine of song...preemptively breaking every human heart." Lastly, I love knowing that this was a poem midwifed by your walk today :))
What a sweet journey you take us on, Rebekah! The wonderful story you paint, seeing from he viewpoint of the thrush, and all he humans who ahve intruded, invaded, nurtured and sustained the habitat of this marvelous species. Your poem has humor, delight, seriousness and acred wiosdom. From the delightful "the guy before the slumlord who played electric guitar for the whole watershed to hear, not well." I love that! To the "Before that, brown bodies that passed through on hunts for 10,000 years without flushing a thrush" And you end so splendidly: "But he’d also have been told, and rightly so, that even earlier, before everything,
there was that high whistling pinball machine of song, just in from Venezuela, preemptively breaking every human heart." Wow!
It takes a very remarkable and person and wisdom keeper to be able to feel so deeply the world around us and all of the sacrd beings, particles and aspects of it. I am so grateful you are out there sharing with us.
I love this, Rebekah. The way you highlighted how "his world is just 75 feet wide" and about all that lead to that, too back before when there were good stewards of the land and his habitat is really wonderful. I love "but if thrushes have an oral tradition -- and why shouldn't they?" and the various ways you describe their song.
.....to walk the edge of everything.....
what a nice path to take.
Also, Lisa - I just watched the little documentary on Bayocean that you linked to and was utterly bewitched again...wow, what a story (what stories), and what a breathtakingly beautiful spit of land. Is Blithe Jensen any relation to you??
It's such a great little documentary, isn't it!? I don't think Blithe and I are related . . . I looked up her ancestry at some point and can't recall the details now, but it didn't seem likely to connect.
Yes, I really enjoyed watching it...what a fascinating history. It makes me even more excited to witness the unfolding of your telling of the Bayocean story!
I love this poem, Lisa. It gets more captivating with each reading, brings me deeper into its rich complexity and beautiful imagery and lyrical flow. I love how you connect with the women who walked before, and how you sense their energy and spirit and use it to inform your own. Each of your stanzas are intact poems all their own. The ending is just magical:
"What greater treasure
could I wish for
than to be here,
to walk the edge
of everything, my tide
still coming in. "
What a stunningly beautiful lyric, an integration of all you are and are taking in. Thank you for this lovely gem.
Thank you so much, Larry! It felt like an interesting synchronicity to me that your poem takes place in the grasslands of the Plains states. Blanche, one of the women I referenced in the poem, lived in South Dakota and fled with her family during the depression and dust storms of the 1930s, so I've been doing some research on the history of that area, too, and feeling struck over and over again how our history is the story of one displacement after another. My novel is going to center on displacements in the 1930s-1950s, but I can feel the unacknowledged displacement and genocide of indigenous people running through these more modern stories. I'm grappling with how to bring the absence of Native people into my story as a presence.
What a wonderful synchronicity! I am reading a wonderful book right now called: "The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and an American Inheritance," by Rebecca Clarren, reflecting on her family's heritage as displaced jews from eastern Europe who settled on land once the home of the Lakota. An honest grappling with a displaced people coming to "own" land once belonging to another displaced people. I grew up on the atlantic coast of Virginia in an area once richly populated by native peoples, whose only history we were given was a ficticious account of Pochantas and her father, Chief Powhatan. We were never told where they had gone, nor told of the reservations in Virginia and elsewhere, not the forced marches, broken treaties and outright theft of lands owned not by people, but the earth and the universe. Since College, I have spent as much time as I can learning these histories long buried.
One of the ironies and twists I have come to realize is that all of the places I have lived and many I have traveled to and through all had place names from Indigenousd languages and people. The people had been displaced but we kept some of their names and replaced others with the names of people, aka men.
Best to you in your research and your writing. I look forward to reading your novel!
Thank you, Larry! I am only just beginning to come to terms with all of this myself. The book you’re reading sounds wonderful and timely - I’ll check it out!
Lisa, I just love "They gathered themselves, which is what I am doing, one pebble at a time." That's how I feel when I'm near the ocean.
Thanks, A! I hope you make it to the ocean soon, then.
Beautiful!! Love this poem so much. Thanks for the prompt ideas.
Thank you, Anna!
Welcome home, Lisa, and thank you for bringing your poem back with you!
Thank you, Larry! I’m missing the ocean but happy to be back with my kids!
I am sure they are ecstatic to have Mom home! I understgand that space between glad to be home but still feeling the pull of the place(s) you had been!