Tag: flowers

A (sort of) original Florida poem

Poolside scene in a Florida community
In Florida

In Florida the flowers grow
Between the houses, row on row,
   While in the trees crows remonstrate
   As if to warn, "The time is late!"
And vex the tranquil scene below.

We are the Old. Short days ago
We sold and bought, we mastered fate, 
    Or so we thought, and now we wait
        In Florida.

Next-comers all, be sure you know
The doleful message of the crow.
    Be not deceived, there's no debate,
    Man does not know his hour nor date.
And so we wait, though flowers grow,
         In Florida.

(2024)

The other day, while pondering my complicated feelings about my new home state, I found myself muttering a scrap of what I thought was spontaneous verse: “In Florida the flowers grow, between the houses, row on row.”

Pleased with the sound of this line, I thought, “Hey, I might really have the start of something good here!” But soon I realized it was too good to be true. This snippet sounded much too familiar to be original.

It was, of course, a blatant rip-off of the well known World War I poem, “In Flanders Field,” written by John McCrae, a Canadian soldier who would later die in that conflict. That poem was included in my mother’s precious 1929 edition of “One Hundred and One Famous Poems,” so I must have heard it read aloud many times in my youth. Its words had been buried in my subconscious for decades only to emerge just last week.

Well, darn.

I was hoping that perhaps the muse had returned. I had been in an extended period of writer’s block since moving from Washington State three years ago. In addition to the aggravation of selling a house, packing up, moving across the country, and settling into a new home, I had become the sole caregiver for my wife. A bicycle crash and subsequent spine operation had landed her in a wheelchair. With all that going on I scarcely thought of writing.

But lately, the old itch flared up and I began to sense the need to start putting words on paper again. However, when I realized I was just copying somebody else’s poem, my first inclination was to shelve it and forget it.

Then the thought occurred: Why not take this on as an exercise? I’d rewrite “In Flanders Field” as a way to work through my feelings about our new home. A little poetry therapy, perhaps. And then, maybe, just maybe, other more original ideas would come.

Something about the tone of that poached first line captured the mood … the feelings I was experiencing about this place.

I couldn’t let it go.

Robert Frost once said that writing a poem is having an argument with yourself. I was certainly conflicted about leaving the beautiful Pacific Northwest. But I also love a lot about Florida. You don’t need to bundle up with layers of fleece and rain gear. You never have to scrape ice off your car or shovel the precipitation. The culture still has a decent natural immunity against communist insanity, possibly due to the influx of Cuban refugees who fled when Castro took over in 1959.

That’s all positive. But I still dearly miss our Seattle friends and neighbors, and walks through the changing seasons and cedar-scented hills.

And, once we moved here I began to understand why my wise, late father-in-law, described Florida as “God’s Waiting Room.”

There are sure a lot of old people here! The the most common topics of conversation at social events revolve around health, ailments, and operations. It seemed like we’d just barely settled in and we were already going to funerals of new friends and neighbors.

The whole place is sort of life-sized memento mori.

With all these ambivalent feelings swirling about, I sat down to see what I could lift from McCrae’s poem for my purposes. Somewhere in the process I justified my thievery by likening it to modern recording artists who sample an earlier song and combine it with original material to create something new. Hey, if Snoop Dogg and Beyonce can do it, why can’t I?

But first I had a lot to learn about the poem I was about to rework. I discovered that McCrae wrote it after presiding over the funeral of a fallen friend on May 3, 1915. Legend has it that he was so dissatisfied with his verse that he threw it away only to have it retrieved by his fellow soldiers.

(In a weird bit of synchronicity, I’m pretty sure it was May 3 of this year when I first got the idea for my version. And I, too, initially decided to scrap the idea.)

“In Flanders Field” is a 15-line rondeau with a precise rhyme scheme. This form was popular in medieval and Renaissance French poetry, and later adopted by English poets. I’d never tried to write anything like this before, and took it as a challenge.

I believe my attempt was faithful to the structure of the original, except for the addition of internal rhymes in the last two verses. (A little twist just for fun.)

Time will tell if this warm-up exercise will lead to more inspiration.

 

Anniversary Poem

Flowers and love in bloom

That Day We Lay Upon the Grass

That day we lay upon the grass,
+++A luminescent green.
The sparks that arced from arm to arm
+++Across the space between.

Our bodies quickened by the sun,
+++The willow leaves aflush,
The sunlight sparkling on the lake,
+++Our blood bestirred to rush.

Up and down the parkway, flowers
+++Enticing with their blooms,
Our loveless winter ended there,
+++Emerging from our tombs

For we had slept as sleepers sleep,
+++Unmindful of the world,
Astonishingly we awoke,
+++Much like a rose unfurled.

(2015)

Some 38 years ago two wanderers, unlucky at love, stumbled upon each other. Magic ensued.

It took me three years, but I finally persuaded her to marry me. I’m now a lucky guy, blessed beyond measure.

Love in the time of corona

Spring blossoms on our well-worn path

Familiar Ways

I choose to walk the old familiar ways,
To wend ways where I’ve put my foot before,
To gaze anew on views seen other days,
Which, though familiar, never seem to bore.

The changing light and seasons have their ways
Of making old things new: The light-laced hoar,
The first-flush, green-glow, bursting-forth spring days,
The growing tinge of gold we can’t ignore.

Each day, my dear, I choose afresh our trail,
The one we blazed so many years ago,
Eschewing other routes that might avail,
And hewing to the well-worn way we know.
Forsaking novelty need be no jail
With your face bathed in sunset’s golden glow.

(2016)

NOTES: March is arguable the most beautiful time in the Pacific Northwest. The days are growing longer. Yellow daffodils are rampant. And the ornamental plum and pear and cherry trees are exploding with pink blossoms.

In normal times, my only quibble with March is that it also brings on the dusting of alder pollen, which makes me sneeze. (Has anyone ever established a good reason for alder trees to have been created? I am skeptical.)

But these are not normal times. As with the rest of America and most of the world, we are in the grip of the global coronavirus pandemic. As a result, most of us have been largely confined to our homes, venturing out on only the most urgent matters. We are taking shelter in our homes like characters in some post-apocalyptic movie, waiting for the worst to pass.

We can still get out and take walks (as long as we observe the proper “social distancing” by moving 10 feet away when we meet passers-by.) Given our current semi-quarantined status, I don’t care how high the pollen count. I’m going for a walk to look at the scenery!

As I walk, I almost always take the same routes through our semi-rural suburban neighborhood making sure to include as many hills as possible. I’ve been walking it for years but it never gets boring.

In times like this, you take stock of what’s really important.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

 

January Lament

The path gives way to stone

Winter Walk

The Yuletide lights are packed away,
+++++Grey leaves creep down the street.
The trees at dusk are shades of grey,
+++++Grey sky makes grey complete.

The old man mutters as he scrapes
+++++His trash can to the curb.
The trees complain and sway their shapes
+++++As gusts their peace disturb.

A solitary sparrow picks
+++++A solitary seed
Out from the desiccated sticks
+++++To slake its piercing need.

Thin clouds scud past the frozen moon,
+++++The distant highway drones,
Debris from windy storms lies strewn,
+++++The path gives way to stones.

We’ve reached the nadir of the year,
+++++The time when flowers sleep.
No wish can make them reappear
+++++From their repose so deep.

(2019)

NOTES: We had one of those exciting winter storms last week in the Pacific Northwest, complete with snow and strong winds. The lights flickered, but thankfully, this time the power did not go off. The walking paths were littered with the branches and boughs of many an evergreen. A few weaker trees in the woods were blown completely over. The consolation was that for a few days afterwards, my walks were suffused with the most pleasant fragrance of cedar and pine.

Daisy Time Poem

I married you in daisy time

Flower Time

I saw you first in jonquil time,
When you were bathed in grace.
You sat aglow with fire sublime,
And golden shone your face.

I loved you first in lilac time.
A bloom I plucked for you.
I wrote you verse with song and rhyme.
I hoped you loved me too.

I kissed you first in tulip time,
It must have been a sign.
The buds and we were in our prime
When your two lips met mine.

I married you in daisy time
On summer’s longest day.
We traded rings and heard bells chime.
We pledged always to stay.

Too soon we’ve come to aster time.
The days are shorter now.
Would stealing some be such a crime?
We’ll make it right somehow.

Should we endure ’til wintertime,
The time when flowers sleep,
Dreams we’ll share of a gentler clime
Where we no more shall weep.

(2016)

NOTES: I’ve been meaning to repost this one since spring. But on a recent walk I noticed daisies beginning to peak. Before daisy season slips completely away, I thought I’d better get on it.

 

Sonnet for May

And balmy blossoms like a banquet spread

When May Bursts Forth

When May bursts forth all moisture and mirth,
And birds bestir while you are still abed,
With everything bent on fostering birth,
And balmy blossoms like a banquet spread
Call to the wanderer weary and wan,
“Close your eyes and breathe and remember nights
When you lay upon the redolent lawn,
And took your bashful taste of love’s delights.”
For though that time is but a glimmer now,
And keenness of the night is now subdued,
A fragrant echo still awakes somehow,
And stirs again a near forgotten mood.
One kiss with wonder could the world endow.
In one embrace you found all you pursued.

(2017)

NOTES: I couldn’t let the month slip away without posting this May-inspired poem.

Love when you are young and young love at any age share a common quality.  My favorite month of May reminds me of that.

When I was very young and in love for the first time, I ran across a short little Robert Browning poem called Summum Bonum, which spoke to me quite vividly at the time.  Many years  and many miles later, I discovered — thankfully — that you did not have to be young to fall in love again.

There just may be a whisper of an echo from that poem in here.

Poem for Mother’s Day, in Defiance of Alzheimer’s

Mother holding me in 1952

She Knew the Names of Things

She knew the names of things, knew them by heart.
Not just the farmwife flowers of the yard,
But the wild ones in the hidden woods.
And in the woods, she knew the names of trees.
She knew quaint sayings about country ways.
“That’s no sign of a duck’s nest,” she would say,
Defying explanation even then.

She knew the names of birds, common and rare:
The Red Wing, Meadow Lark and Mourning Dove,
Brown Thrush and Gold Finch and sad Whippoorwill.
She knew them by their call as well as sight.

She knew the names of lonely widowed aunts,
And she knew dates and anniversaries,
And surely, she recalled that doleful day
When the son who called her “Mother” was fished
By divers out of San Diego Bay.
For grief, she never spoke of it again.

And though she’d barely gone to school, she
Had sense enough to hang a dishrag up,
She knew her Whitman and her Bible well.
And when the door-yard Lilacs bloomed she paused
Amidst the sweet perfume, breathed, and recalled
The poem and soft fragrance that she loved,
Sweet messenger of spring—but not too sweet,
Not like the syrupy Petunias
That she also loved, but differently.
She always favored the modest flowers
That had a tinge of tragedy and loss
Like Lilacs and Lillies of the Valley,
Named for the suffering Savior of mankind.
She knew the things she loved, and she could name them.

But winter of the mind came drifting in
And names of things were slowly covered up,
As when the snow erases hue and shape
And leaves the garden white, formless and blank.

The soaring Hollyhocks were overcome,
Begonias, Honeysuckle, Marigolds,
The Morning Glories high atop the gate
Were covered, as was Aunt Minerva, too,
(Whom she loved like the mother she had lost),
And cousin Gene undone at Normandy,
And buried there amidst a cross-white field.

Peonies bowed their heavy heads beneath
The heavy snow and disappeared away.
So too, the old folks’ graves that she adorned
With their bouquets each Decoration Day.

Wild Lady Slipper too did not escape,
Entombed beneath its own soft shroud of white
With Buttercup, Catalpa, Trumpet Vine,
With Thistle, Jimsonweed and Columbine.
And covered too were Maples, Elms and Oaks,
The Willow tree we started from a branch,
The stately Cottonwood that soared above
The old farm woods, completely covered up.

And covered too were barefoot childhood days
On Clear Creek growing up carefree, before
Her still-young mother died of Spanish Flu,
And left five other kids for her to raise.
Those days she loved them, and she knew their names:
Hayward, Walden (though others called him Joe)
Jesse, Vivian, and the youngest Bill.
All these names buried and forgotten now.

Gone was her motto written out longhand
Held by a magnet to the old icebox
With wise and frugal counsel: “Use it up
Wear it out. Make it do, or do without.”

Old photographs stuck in a musty book
Assembled even as the blizzard blew,
A vain attempt to thwart the mounting snow,
The names obliterated anyway
By endless pitiless nameless white.

I walk now through the fiery leaves of fall
And ponder piles of faded photographs,
Repeating names I learned so long ago,
Recalling things and places I have loved

In hopes this recitation will forestall
My own impending blanketing of snow.
Perhaps my winter will be mild—or not.
Perhaps I will become snowbound as well.

But I shall say the names of things ’til then
And recall her who taught them first to me.
Remembering, turn my face to winter’s blast,
Defying it to dare to land a blow.
For I shall sing the names of things until
I lie here frozen stiff beneath the snow.

(2019)

NOTES: The poems I learned at my mother’s knee employed meter and rhyme. So it’s only natural that I’m most comfortable with forms like ballads and sonnets. They speak my heart language. I’ve long agreed with Robert Frost that writing in free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. It may do wonders for the self esteem, but it’s hardly sporting.

But lately, I’ve had the itch to write something longer than a sonnet, or something more ambitious than eight lines of rhyming couplets. After digging around, I settled on blank verse, which sticks with meter, but dispenses with the need for thyme. Sort of like playing tennis with the net lowered a couple of feet. I suppose if it was good enough for Marlowe and Shakespeare, it should be good enough for me.

My mother died several years ago after a protracted siege of some type of dementia. It may have been Alzheimer’s Disease, but it was likely some other variant because it dragged out longer than usual for that particular form of dementia. We never had a formal diagnosis.

I hope the poem speaks for itself and provides a fitting tribute for Mother’s Day.

P.S. Extra note for poetry nerds: The last 14 lines came the easiest for me. Only when they were completed did I realize that they were almost a sonnet. However, the lines were not rhyming, except for one rhyme at the end. I guess old habits are hard to break.

 

Winter Walk

Frozen moon through grey trees

The Yuletide lights are packed away,
+++++Grey leaves creep down the street.
The trees at dusk are shades of grey,
+++++Grey sky makes grey complete.

The old man mutters as he scrapes
+++++His trash can to the curb.
The trees complain and sway their shapes
+++++As gusts their peace disturb.

Thin clouds scud past the frozen moon,
+++++The distant highway drones,
Debris from windy storms lies strewn,
+++++The path gives way to stones.

A solitary sparrow picks
+++++A solitary seed
Out from the desiccated sticks
+++++To slake its piercing need.

We’ve reached the nadir of the year,
+++++The time when flowers sleep.
No wish can make them reappear
+++++From their repose so deep.

(2019)

NOTES: Winter can be dreary in the Northwest. The days are as short as they are long in summer. It rains incessantly. Storms roll in from the Pacific and wreak havoc with trees and electrical power grids.

I know. I know. This may sound wimpy when my friends back in Minnesota are staring at temperatures in the 20s below zero Fahrenheit this week. It’s true that we enjoy a Marine climate here on the Puget Sound. It doesn’t get that cold, and I’ve shoveled snow exactly one time since I moved here 25 years ago.

But winter is long, and  I’m eager for the page to turn and the return of the crocus and the robins.

I’ve noticed that walking without earphones or music stimulates the poetry center of the brain.  I think it’s because I hear what’s going on around me.  As I walked this past week on a windy evening, I noticed the tall evergreens making a perceptible swishing sound, back and forth, back and forth.

Read the second stanza aloud and see if you can hear it, too.

Winter Haiku

Hummingbird

Lone hummingbird comes

to poke our dying blossoms.

All the rest have gone.

NOTES:  This summer we were visited daily by dozens of hummingbirds. We have four species native to Western Washington: Anna’s, Rufous, Calliope, and Black-Chinned. At first I was quite concerned for our persistent cold-weather guest, but I have since learned that the Anna’s Hummingbird is the only one of the four that does not migrate south for the winter. So apparently he knows what he is doing.

I wish I could take its picture, but I have neither the camera nor the skill to catch it.  So an old print will have to do to illustrate today’s haiku.

Minneapolis Love Poem

Lake of the Isles, Minneapolis
Lake of the Isles, Minneapolis … long ago

That Day We Lay Upon the Grass

That day we lay upon the grass,
++++A luminescent green.
The sparks that arced from arm to arm
++++Across the space between.

Our bodies quickened by the sun,
++++The willow leaves aflush,
The sunlight sparkling on the lake,
++++Our blood bestirred to rush.

Up and down the parkway, flowers
++++Enticing with their blooms,
Our loveless winter ended there,
++++Emerging from our tombs.

For we had slept as sleepers sleep,
++++Unmindful of the world,
Astonishingly we awoke,
++++Much like a rose unfurled.

(2015)

Notes: July 3 is almost as big a holiday for me as July 4.

On July 3, 1982 I took a walk with a beautiful woman around that most beautiful of the Minneapolis lakes, Lake of the Isles. We had known each other less than two months. We sat down in the grass by the lagoon.

And then this happened.