My brain is letting go of things it was hiding from me.

A poem came back to me today. Wordsworth's Phantom of Delight. I told you that after the fire, I forgot everything that I had learned. Phantom was a poem that a boyfriend in high school gave to me and after I was married to a jealous future ex for a few months, I bought a short anthology of poetry and artwork. (It was purchased from Nordstrom with a gift certificate from my mom. It smelled of roses.) The anthology had Phantom in it with a pretty lady depicted next to it. I memorized it. When I married my ex, he convinced me that I was too pretentious and should abandon my love of art and poetry and getting the book was a rebellion of sorts. Memorizing the poem was another rebellion since a former boyfriend had given me a copy of it and I'd had to throw it away when we got married. Since the fire, I have looked the poem up and it just wasn't resonating with me. It came today to my brain while I was listening to Pachelbel's Canon, another song that I loved back in the day. I was really happy and relieved. I was told that it would all come back, but I didn't know when. I hope it returns in droves! But where did it all go? When my snowglobe of a life was shaken, that box was completely emptied. Fortunately, it was emptied, but not burnt up. The debris is being put back into the boxes and rendered useful to me once more!

I wonder if people who suffer from memory loss feel in any way like I have. Knowing that something that I loved was lost was very hard on me. There are other things that are still gone and I know what they are, but I know that God willing that I have no problems that they will come back.

Emily is coming back, too. I folded laundry and wore my favourite quilt over my shoulders as her bird poems rustled in my head this afternoon. God gave a loaf to every bird, Hope is the thing with feathers-- but my favorite of hers speaks of the hour of lead. That also came back. The hour of lead-- that was how I felt as my house was burning and it lasted perhaps until a couple of weeks ago. Part of me woke up when my house was burning-- I felt like Sleeping Beauty as my sh-- burned and I re-processed my life.

Is it OK that I am coming out of the hour of lead only two months later? I have thought at times that I was shaking it, but having something so special come back to me tells me that I really am shaking the numbness, but at the same time, what I woke up to is still there, so I know it is real. I just really wish I didn't have to go through a fire to get to where I am in the process of going.

Couldn't my destiny have greeted me at my favorite store or bakery, instead, and without the sirens and flashing lights?



Would I have recognized it any other way? I hope that there is good for the Crumpets in this and that it is an easy good, not something like, something terrible is destined to happen so the fire will teach them a resiliency to make them tougher. I've stated before, however, that the good will not come from acquiring things-- the intangibles even now make me feel happy, but nothing will replace the photographs!

You Come, Too

The Pasture
Robert Frost

I’M going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

~~~~

We are having spring weather. It will give way to freezing temperatures again soon and it will look like winter before too long, but this poem, memorized in 7th grade, is going through my mind.

Republic Windows and Doors By David Cheezem

Republic Windows and Doors
By David Cheezem

Silence is a locked up building with machines
Turned off. Prayer is a cleaned-up corner

of the mind. Silence is not prayer. Prayer
Is not silence. The difference, the difference.

Silence is imposed. Prayer is chosen.
A family must be fed, I know, I know.

Knowledge without power is frustration.
It’s hard to breath in this silence. It’s hard

To pray, to act, to shout, to download
God Save the Queen as a ringtone.

No future no future for you
Silence should be prayer, not despair.

But they ended the strike in a media flury
Fought back the insult, kept the injury.

© David Cheezem 2008

~~~~

My friend Davis wrote this poem and I like it. I read it out loud and a couple of the kids asked about it. Had I read the article to them, they'd have not cared.

The poem made me think of when I was pregnant with Starshine and my husband's company went under. My husband did not protest-- the memory is one of making me think of how lucky we were. I was two weeks away from the Mrs. Alaska pageant, six and a half months pregnant, and he called and said he just got laid off and that he was applying for two jobs with the state that were about to close and that he'd be home.

We got on to state health insurance-- we'd already been on it as his insurance didn't cover pregnancies. It was good because I needed a c-section. I couldn't get my money back from the pageant and so I just had fun. I got my dress second hand and it was the wrong color for me. The summer was very tight. I was literally foraging in the woods with the kids for edible things and my husband was going to the lake with the boys-- they'd walk and thought it was the greatest thing in the world! I had to go to the food bank because I didn't want my husband going. First, he was out looking for a job when they were open and second, when he was home, it was my excuse to get out of the house!

Tiger had a volunteer gig at a greenhouse for some friends who grew for the REALLY bad off. She got part of my yard in order and taught her brothers and sister Cloud to keep it in good order. She bladed over to a job at a bakery where she was always given unsold items which was how we survived-- the food bank stuff never seemed to go far. Peaches went to see her dad for part of the summer.

Driving into the City was a gas issue. We never missed a trip. Every trip was rationed. I baked bread in the late evening when we needed the heat so we'd not have a hot-hot house in the afternoon.

After a month I started seeing the bank come by to take pictures of our house. That was scary. We were also getting bulk post cards from real estate agents and I felt like I was in a leaky rubber raft with a dorsal fin beginning to circle it and vultures overhead!

I fought my doctor on bed rest-- I hated it. He found me silly and once said, "Do you hate bed rest or do you hate Mat-Su Regional Hospital more?" (Some people have good experiences there; I say that competing hospitals are needed!) I stayed on bed rest but he'd not call it that. The day I was taken off the bed rest that I was supposedly not on was the day my husband was hired by the state. Starshine would still be inside me had they not gotten her out three weeks later.

Anyway-- we had it bad but we knew we were fortunate. Darrin's parents helped us out with a mortgage payment and some bills, but his unemployment was only allowed for three dependents! I worry for the people who are getting laid off across the country because they don't have what we did. We are in a semi-rural area where so many are in cities where it is cold. It hurts to think of families losing their homes and what this does to the kids and the parents.

by Roethke: The Waking

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.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

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.

~~~~~~

I loved this poem in high school-- I just found it on the internet when one of my kids needed a poem. I still like it.

The Greatest Poem EVAR Written

I'm playing with the spelling of EVAR here-- it's ever, but a fan of a certain rock band wrote it this way and I thought it was great.

This is another poem that I fell in love with while reading Pinsky's book on America's Favorite Poems-- it's called The Windhover by Gerard Manly Hopkins. I read this many times and the more I read it, the better it sounded. At first it was just long to me, but I loved the words. The person who submitted this said that Hopkins was "drunk on words" and described himself as a New York Jew who somehow related to this Jesuit priest who was writing for Christ. I thought that was pretty cool-- you can relate to the grandness of it all, no matter what your faith, I think.

He's talking about a kestrel in flight and the colours in it's plumage.

I enjoy falconry, but I doubt I will ever be committed to be able to be sure I am able to care for a hawk or a falcon-- they become your master just as you become theirs. Still, I appreciate them-- as did Mr. Hopkins!



The Windhover

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

~~~

Minion means "subject" as in the king's subject.
Sillion means breaking of the soil.

~~~~~~

I enjoy reading poetry like this to the kids. It puts the toddlers to sleep and the 
older ones under the age of 18 don't like it but I read to them anyway. Sometimes 
I volunteer at an animal rescue place that takes care of bigger animals and I sit at the
edge of the pasture and read to them just to get them used to people.

Let us then be up and doing with a heart for any fate. . .

NOTE: STRESS REDUCER-- I cannot post at your site! The security code doesn't seem to want to let me through! I have typed it in and it just doesn't work!

One of my favourite poems is by Longfellow and it is called A Psalm of Life. I first read this when I picked up a discounted America's Favorite Poems by Robert Pinsky. I never really understood poetry and this book with people's stories made me love poems because I was able to make them a part of me as I remembered the stories.

What moved me first about this poem was that a minister, the Rev. Michael Haynes liked it. He was/is an older minister whose family hailes from Barbados. It was mentioned in the book how this poem reached out to him and was part of the essence of Christianity. I quickly memorized this because while I doubt my faith all the time, the need to reach out and improve myself for the sake of others keeps me going. I recited this at my dad's funeral and at any other event that I could. Tonight I was surfing for something else and ended up at the poem project and got to hear this minister recite it. It was amazing. I got very teary eyed and I don't know why-- maybe that a Black East Coast minister who I will never meet had such an impact on me, and on my dad because I had read his story. I read this many times to my dad while he was dying-- he loved it and asked me to read it to him or I'd have not read it. He liked the whole thing but especially loved this verse:

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate ;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

He told me that he accomplished the most when he was busy and thinking that he was doing nothing, "Learn to labor and to wait."

But this isn't about my dad--- this is about some poetry that I love. Actually, it is about poetry that other people love. I had to sit and listen to every one of the poems that are online being read. Stephen Murphy's nephew was dying and the poem called The Emigrant Irish by Eavan Boland moved him. For a small period of time, a few minutes, it made everything all right. He carries the poem around in his wallet, and thinks of his niece with the same affliction that her big brother had.

My former massage teacher read The Road Not Taken (not on this project-- he read it in our class.) It's by Robert Frost. My former massage teacher, convinced that the medical model was killing people and based on the expectation of illness, and he is right, but he left it three weeks into his residency and became a massage teacher. He recited this and I don't think that it's ever been read by anyone as well. Dear Robert Frost couldn't have done it justice like my teacher did, and I was glad to have heard him recite it. Now the poem is part of my life and I will tell the story of what I liked of him. (I don't need the negative to be carried with this!)

I will write more, but I am tired. Because of this book, I got turned on to poetry.

Oh-- one of the finest professors to ever teach English was Dr. Arlene Kuhner. She died many years ago, but I will never forget her reciting anything we asked of her. She was Canadian by birth, as well as very talented. If I can ever do justice to poetry and read one tenth of one percent as well as she did, I will be very blessed and more skilled than most people at reading it!

I can't believe what I just did.

I wrote an e-mail to my Russian prof and asked her for some poetry of the Russian masters. I asked for something simple so that I can learn to speak it better. I did not tell her this, but the dialogs that we recite in class mean nothing to me. She gives us poetry that children recite which is just little rhymes. They mean nothing to me. Chances are, I will not go to Russia in this lifetime. I am a mother with nine children and it's just amazing that I am even competing my degree. I used to want to travel, but now it seems as likely as me traveling to Mars. I don't give a rat's ass about the dialogs. I care about the poetry.

When I was younger, I had a bad stutter. I joined the debate team in high school because I wanted to get over it. My coach, for whom I named my first child, would later tell me that she went home and cried. I was so excited to be on the team, but my stutter was a huge hump in public speaking. It was painful to listen to me, but I so badly wanted to join the team. Debate teams over here do more than debate. They have drama events and she got me into mime so I could compete while she gave me poetry to practice for dramatic and humorous interpretation events. I read Shakespeare and Wordsworth and modern humorists and everything that she gave me. I overcame my stutter by learning the rhythm. I would stand in the hall after school and practice my works while kids ran indoors for the running team. I know I seemed weird but the same athletes who I was in class with noticed that when I read even when they good naturedly teased me and ran circles around me or tried to mess me up, I wasn't stuttering!

Once in a class another teacher called on me and asked me a question and I tried several times to answer him, but my stutter was bad that day and I stopped and asked to go see the school nurse because I had started to cry. One of the runners said, "Tea, you don't stutter when you read. Pretend you are reciting Shakespeare in the hall after school!" After that, I started getting better. Three years later, I was impossible to beat when I did my speaking events-- and I lost my stutter.

I hope the professor doesn't tell me that I have to memorize only the children's rhymes and dialogs and then get the poetry later.

In my German classes in high school, we only learned dialogs and I think that if she had taught us some poetry from the great German writers, I'd still speak it. Poetry is Art. Dialogs are lame and only useful if you get to travel and if the speaker deviates, you get confused. I read poetry for fun in English. I think that I would still speak German had I been introduced to it. Poetry has rhythm and there is a cadence to it. Poetry can be historical. You don't do poetry for a grade-- you do it for the sake of doing it.

Poetry teaches the structure of the language; it is like practicing katas in martial arts or doing compulsory figures in ice skating. Children's rhymes don't do it for me and dialogs depress me as I will most likely not travel to Russia.

I am not making any sense. She is going to laugh at me for even asking for something simple from the great writers, but that is what is relevant to me.