Old Growth (proverbs as prompts)
Old Growth
We say we stand on the shoulders of giants, then we dig about and find yet another one fallen, shoulders a poor perch when six feet below the crumbling ground. Here the ground is made of crumbled giants, western hemlock, sitka spruce stretching centuries into sky then falling in the shake of a second. They grow again. Grow rich with rot, decadent with decay, bellies a carpet of needles and cones, backs the soft soil from which the daughters grow, roots wrapping corpse in endless embrace. Maybe progress can’t be clean, can’t be up and up in a single line. Maybe we need the rot and need the holes the fallen ones leave behind, need their absence like the presence of light. Maybe it’s time to let old heroes loosen to loam. What might we grow from all the crumbling?
The Prompt
For today’s prompt, I wish I could take you by the hand and walk with you into the old growth coastal forest just a few hundred yards from where I sit. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet figured out how to use my mind powers to teleport people. So instead, how about playing with this . . . the poem I wrote above was inspired by the beauty of an old growth forest but also by the oft-repeated phrase “standing on the shoulders of giants,” which first fell from the quill of one Sir Isaac Newton. Listen closely for proverbs, sayings, or idioms as you go about your day. Or read through this list of common proverbs. Notice which one feels the zingiest, the truest, the most currently relevant, or the most patently ridiculous to you. Is there a poem that sits adjacent to those oft-repeated words, just waiting for you to pen it into being?
If you need a little motivation, just bear in mind that the pen is mightier than the sword. So don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today! Fortune favors the bold, and when the going gets tough, the tough get going! Okay, I need to stop before I throw up in my own mouth.
Thank you for being here with me! Birds of a feather, etc, etc.
Like mother, like daughter
I never felt much
like my mother
until I became one.
Now somewhere
past the softening of our jowls, I see
the same adoring smiles
as we look at our children,
the same tension
as we bite our tongues;
beneath the creases of our throats
the same echoed declarations of love,
the same echoed shouts of desperation;
in the webbed skin of our hands,
the same capacity for tenderness,
the same capacity for anger.
I think neither of us wanted
to be like our mothers
and both of us fear
our daughters feeling the same.
I wonder if it will take becoming
a mother for my daughter to see
the ache and beauty
in our sameness.
Wow Lisa, what a great picture to go along with your beautiful poem. I did read your poem first, and I was imaging trees growing out of trees. You took me right there before I even saw your picture!
So a poem using common proverbs... Well here is mine.
.
If all good things must come to an end
then all challenges must do as well.
How many times in the bible did it say,
“…and it came to pass…”
Never was it stated, “it came to stay.”
Impermanence is the DNA of life.
A code written into our existence,
declaring, all that is created must
at some point come to perish.
.
Life is not meant to be clutched onto
as much as I may endeavor.
Trying to make it a straight line,
of cast iron certainty.
No, even in life’s organized unfurling,
is this messy feral dishevelment.
A beautiful chaos,
a wild fecundity.
a holy and sacred impermanence.
.
I see it everywhere…
Seasons that continually cycle.
Growing, maturing and strengthening.
Only to weaken, wither and fade.
Day becomes night, night becomes day.
Reminding me each moment is precious.
A configuration that will never be known,
or felt quite the same way again!
So, attend to this exquisite point in time.
Let it enrapture and bewitch me,
this impermanent incarnate life!