How to explain Dad?
Outstanding in his field, he
lived a simple life.
Tag: Poetry
Haiku for my father
Well over sixty,
Dad built a barn by himself.
Now it, too, molders.
Father Haiku
My dad always had
just the right tool for the job.
I’m just making do.
Love Sonnet
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.
Poet John Ciardi relates this story about Robert Frost, who at a lecture was asked by a woman in the audience: “Mr. Frost, surely when you write one of your beautiful poems, you are not thinking of technical tricks!”
Frost looked at the woman a while and replied, “I revel in them!”
Ciardi says Frost was like a horse trader who “would pick up an idea and whittle at it until he either wound up with a little whittled shape or a pile of shavings on the floor.”
I felt a little like a horse trader as I was writing this poem. It started with a simple, little idea. I can’t remember ever “whittling” more on a poem before. At first, this one seemed like it just never wanted to happen. I just kept whittling and whittling until something very different began to emerge from where I started.
After what seemed like an eternity, I began to see the tricks of the trade — namely rhythm, diction, image and form — coming together to embody the simple little idea.
This one did not plop, fully formed, into my lap. It was written, re-written, and re-written again. I wrote in on my phone. I copied it out by hand in a notebook. I typed it in Microsoft Word on my laptop. I read it aloud and even recorded a reading of it to hear how it sounded.
I found myself being keenly aware of assonance, alliteration and internal rhyme like never before.
I found myself unconsciously using the same sounds and rhymes over and over again as if I was consciously reinforcing the central idea. Then, I found myself breaking the pattern with lavish, flamboyant word choices in the middle of the poem to demonstrate the message.
I found myself coming around to embracing a metaphor in the final part of the poem. It was an idea that emerged only after the first part of the poem was written.
It may be a pile of shavings. Or it might be a little whittled shape.
You can be the judge.
Haiku for Memorial Day
Yankee ancestor,
Had Reb been a better shot
I wouldn’t be here.
I’ll pull out an old poem in honor of my last direct ancestor to be wounded fighting to defend our freedom.
In my case, we must go back a bit. All the way to the Civil War. My great grandfather, Frederick N. Ball, was serving in General Sheridan’s Army in the campaign to take the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. When the Battle of Cedar Creek broke out, Sheridan was several miles away in Winchester.
As Sheridan was riding furiously back to rally his troops to victory, my ancestor was crawling back to safety after having been shot through the side early in the campaign.
The family story relates that he stuffed a rag in the hole in his side and made it to safety.
Thankfully, he survived. Otherwise, this blog would be sadly empty today.
What good is poetry?
I stumbled upon a great find while wasting away time in a used bookstore recently.
America poet John Ciardi published a collection of essays on poetry back in 1989.
Finding this book coincided with a discussion I’ve been having with a colleague who has expressed a desire to better appreciate poetry. I had been coming up short with a simple and direct explanation for what I knew in my heart to be true.
This one passage was worth far more than the 4 bucks and change I spent on Ciardi’s book:
“Because it is an act of language, a good poem is deeply connected with everything are and do. For language is one of the most fundamental activities in which human beings engage. Take away language, and you take away most of our ability to think and to experience. Enrich language, and you cannot fail to enrich our experience. Whenever we have let great language into our heads, we have been richer for it.”
Poetry strikes a blow against tyranny
My favorite story of the week proves that poetry need not always be moping about over lost love, or waxing ecstatic about a new sweetheart.
Sometimes poetry can strike at the weak underbelly of tyrants, and expose them to well-deserved ridicule. It’s a story that should warm the hearts of freedom-loving people everywhere.
A few weeks ago, the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, blew a gasket over an offensive poem about him read on German TV by a German comedian.
Like tyrants everywhere, Erdogan just can’t take a joke.
He demanded Germany prosecute the comedian. As unbelievable as it sounds to us in America, where we enjoy the freedom of speech enshrined in the Bill of Rights, German Prime Minister Angel Merkel called for the German comedian to be charged under German law.
In response to the think-skinned Turkish dictator, and the weak-kneed German prime minister, the British publication, the Spectator, ran a poetry contest. The rules: basically, the best dirty limerick lampooning Erdogan wins.
There are a lot of political subtexts going on in this story, and you can read more about here. In short, Turkey had once shown promise of evolving into a free, western-style democracy, but Erdogan has been amassing power, and is turning the country into an Islamist dictatorship, where blasphemers are punished, and objective journalists are jailed.
This is especially relevant as Turkey lobbies to join the European Union, while at the same time becoming more like a sharia-governed caliphate everyday.
The colorful and wild-haired Johnson, while retired as mayor, is currently leading the fight to get Britain out of the EU, and could run a strong campaign to be the next Prime Minister. He reportedly dashed off his winning entry during and interview. The poem got entered, and subsequently was named the winner.
For posterity, and the historical record, here is the text of Johnson’s prize-winning poem
There was a young fellow from Ankara
Who was a terrific wankerer
Till he sowed his wild oats
With the help of a goat
But he didn’t even stop to thankera.
Now, whatever you think about good taste, you’ve got to admit that’s one darn good dirty limerick.
Stephen Murray, the British writer and free-speech-advocate, who created the contest had this to say:
“I think it is a wonderful thing that a British political leader has shown that Britain will not bow before the putative Caliph in Ankara. Erdogan may imprison his opponents in Ankara. Chancellor Merkel may imprison Erdogan’s critics in Germany. But in Britain we still live and breathe free. We need no foreign potentate to tell us what we may think or say. And we need no judge (especially no German judge) to instruct us over what we may find funny.”
Amen. God save the Queen. And don’t tread on me.
When spring starts to fade
PASSION LIKE A FLOWER
Passion like a flower must expire.
Nothing can be rigged to spare desire
From life’s rigors — magic nor petitions.
Petals fall to various conditions.
When the dizzy petal-peak is past,
Some folks act as if the bloom could last,
Pick some wilting lilacs for their table,
Haul them homeward just to show they’re able,
Plunk them in a fruit jar lately washed
Clean of last fall’s bounty, cooked and squashed —
Like they thought the glass itself had power
To delay the spoiling of the flower.
It may work a day, two days, or so,
Then the smell and color start to go.
Nothing glassy can preserve desire;
Passion like a flower must expire.
Spring comes early in the Northwest. By this time, many flowering trees are spent. the blooms that were so intense in late March and April are brown and gone.
As I walked through town tonight, I couldn’t miss the signs of the season moving on. Trees that a week or two before were full and fragrant were now brown and empty. Flower petals were scattered across the grass. The heady first-flush of spring was long gone.
Here’s an old poem that seemed right for the season.
Hometown Haiku
My town’s motto states:
“Smart dog, nice folks ….” Pretty sure
the dog, too, was nice.
The most famous resident of my hometown was a dog
When I moved to the central Missouri town of Marshall in the late 1950s, I was six years old. My father had literally sold the farm and was setting out on a bold attempt to pursue the American dream by going into the farm implement business. After spending the first six years of my life on a farm in northwest part of the state, Marshall, with its 12,000-plus inhabitants, seemed like a big city to me, full of potential and possibilities. For the first time in my life I had a room of my own and indoor plumbing.
One of the first things I heard about my new hometown was that it was that it had been the home of Jim the Wonder Dog. It had been just a little over 20 years since Jim’s death, and many of my new neighbors had seen Jim while he was alive. Someone gave us a book about Jim, which I eagerly devoured. We were told to be sure and visit Jim’s grave out at the end of Yerby Street at Ridge Park Cemetery. He was the only animal buried in the human graveyard, we were told, and he deserved to be there more than a lot of the people, one added. We visited Jim’s grave with my mother, who brought flowers, because that’s what you did when you visited cemeteries in those days.
Everyone we talked to accepted the story of Jim at face value. To them, Jim had been a true walking miracle. He was a dog who could understand human speech, and follow instructions to the letter. But more than that, he knew things that humans could not possibly know. He was not only highly intelligent. Jim was also clairvoyant, we were told. Jim could predict the future. He could accurately predict the gender of babies before they were born and he knew who would win elections and sporting events.
To a six-year-old boy with an active imagination, this was a fascinating story. But I grew up and forgot about Jim. I went away to college, and started a career and a family, and got involved with my life.
Years later, I returned to Marshall, and I discovered that Jim was enjoying a revival of popularity. The Viking Hotel (formerly the Ruff Hotel) just off the town square, where Jim and his owner had lived, had burned down. A civic group had raised some money, and convinced the city fathers allow a memorial park to be created on the site.
Jim was becoming a full-fledged tourist attraction.
Then someone (bless their hearts!), persuaded the city to adopt a town motto. It reads, and I kid you not: “Smart dog, nice folks ….”
I admire the humility and sense of humor that animated that motto. It is in the same spirit that I wrote this little haiku.
Spring Poem
As spring comes into its full, glorious own here in the Pacific Northwest, I discovered a wonderful spring poem I had never read before.
Mary Karr posted a short poem by Philip Larkin last week on her Facebook page. In one of those interesting coincidences, I had just been encouraged to look into Larkin by my literary friend and colleague, Mark Neigh.
(You know how you discover a new word one day, and then you see it and hear it all around you the next? It was sort of like I was surrounded by Larkin all of a sudden.)
I already had Larkin’s “Collected Poems” on my bookshelf, but hadn’t read much in it. I’d never been much impressed by what little I had read of Larkin, but his spring poem really hit home. I must never have given him a proper chance. Or the timing wasn’t right.
Here it is, just 12 short, beautiful lines:
The Trees
by Philip Larkin
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
You can listen to Larkin read this poem here. (It just sounds better when he reads it.) This small gem gives me hope that I’ll find other poems that speak to me in Larkin’s work.
Poetic Champions 