The Poetry Of Snow

Photo by Kathleen Tyler Conklin

Snow is beautiful, exciting, mysterious and sometimes treacherous. So is curiosity.

One man, Wilson Bentley (1865-1931) saw the beauty of snow, was fascinated by it and became curious about it.  As a young man, he was drawn to the natural world around him on his farm in Vermont.  He loved studying butterflies, leaves, raindrops, spider webs and snowflakes. Especially snowflakes,

Bentley devised a way to connect a microscope and a camera in order to photograph snowflakes. He stood for hours in the Vermont cold winter catching falling flakes and pushing them delicately with a feather onto the microscopic lens.

He photographed 5000 snow crystals this way over the course of his lifetime. Magically, every snowflake that he photographed was unique. He published photos of 2300 of these images in his book Snow Crystals and the Smithsonian Archives houses 500 of his photographs.

Ironically, he died from pneumonia after walking through a blizzard.

I read this story recently in The Washington Post and it reminded me how a curious mind responds to beauty. The intersection of science and art. Bentley’s curious mind appreciated and memorialized the unique beauty of the snowflake. His story inspired me to write this poem. 

                                              Snowfall

                                  Humans in some ways

                                  so alike

                                  predictable,

                                  we share our similarities

                                  hide our dissonances,

                                  alike at first glance

                                  and last chance.

                                  Like falling snow

                                  when examined deeply beneath

                                  our surface sameness---

                                  so different,

                                  as Bentley found

                                  when he captured each snowflake,

                                  memorized its uniqueness

                                  with his camera.

                                  Each of us perfectly unique

                                  as those white hexagons,

                                  when we allow

                                  our truth to fall up

                                  from our

                                  lovely, lonely center.

The Lyricist As Poet

DC Christmas Market

In past blogs, I have mentioned some well-known musicians like Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen,and Bob Dylan whose lyrics are strongly poetic.  

In a recent blog, I did fleetingly refer to a woman, Frand Landesman, who was a lyricist and a poet.  She began her career by putting words to jazz music in the fifties and sixties. She has been labeled “the godmother of hip.”  

Landesman’s lyrics are dark, cynical and strangely compelling.  She put her signature twist on T.S. Eliot’s line “April is the cruelest month” in her lyrics for “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most”, one of her best-known songs.  “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men” is another hit song featuring her haunting lyrics.  N.Y. Times critic Stephen Hollen compared her to “a cranky,  jazz-steeped Dorothy Parker.”   It was reported that movies star Bette Davis liked Landesman’s poetry and memorized her poem “Life is a Bitch.”  Fran Landesman (1927-2011) spent the last ten years of her life in London and New York City performing her poetry (from five published volumes), singing her songs and talking about her life.

In contrast, let me turn the spotlight on Mary Chapman Carpenter, one of our contemporary lyricist-poets.  She writes many of her own lyrics, which are also a reflection of her life experiences.  They can be sad, but are often filled with hope, determination and as she matures, a peaceful acceptance of life.  Let me show and not tell, by sharing her lyrics with you.

                                                We press our faces to the glass

                                               And see our little lives go past

                                                Wave to shadows that we cast

                                                On the longest night of the year.

                                           Make a vow when the Solstice comes

                                                   To find the light in everyone

                                                Keep the faith and bang the drum

                                                 On the longest night of the year. 

Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most

Photo by Kathleen Tyler Conklin

Spring in the environs of Washington D.C. ranks high on the list of the world’s most beautiful.

It seems especially so this spring, in part perhaps in contrast to the ugliness of the political antics happening, being reported on and endlessly discussed here.  The contrast is poignant, but not only caused by political chaos.  Exquisite beauty can often stir up feelings of longing and sadness…a sickness of heart, sometimes referred to as spring fever.  Bipolar we become…knocked out by the loveliness of nature…but unsettled because we realize our human nature is so far from the perfection we find there.  We can’t quite capture it in our works of art.  We hope others will be able to feel  the beauty we felt, but know it will be fleeting and somehow changed forever.  We are left with a feeling of not quite getting there, a feeling of loss, a restlessness of spirit.

Shakespeare’s sonnets surely speak to the beauty of nature, but also to that feeling of never quite arriving home.  T.S. Elliot reminds us in his poem “The Wasteland” that “April can be the cruelest month”.  The jazz rendition of those words found in the song “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most “(lyrics by Fran Landesman) expresses so well the ache found in the sweetness of spring.  Listen to Ella Fitzgerald sing these words and feel better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd5VVELfWC8

The Poet’s House

New York City - Central Park by Kathleen Tyler Conklin

If someone told me to imagine 65,000 volumes of poetry books in a library, I would probably picture the yellowed, cracking pages of dusty tomes on shelves. But not so at Poet’s House, which sits at the tip of Manhattan overlooking the Hudson River.  It is a light filled building, buzzing with activity,  As well as housing those 65,000 poetry books published in the last two decades, it offers work space, readings, art exhibitions, classes, films and even a Children’s  Room for events and parties.

Poets House, founded in 1985 by poet Stanley Kunitz and poetry advocate Elizabeth Kray has become “a national library and literary center that invites poets and the public to step into the living tradition of poetry.” It has the largest poetry collection available to the public in open stacks and welcomes chapbooks, literary journals and multimedia.

Aspirational poets can come there to write, use reference materials, photocopying equipment or attend a workshop. 

Everyone is invited to read, listen to tapes, watch videos, view art exhibits or attend a poetry reading. The professional staff is there Tuesday  through Saturday to help keep poetry alive and well.

Bill Murray, the well known comedian is also a poet and supporter of the non-profit Poets House.  He gives a yearly benefit reading to help support all of the free programs Poets House offers to the public. Far from being dusty and stagnant, Poets House is a well spring that nurtures and celebrates the vital pulse of poetry.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

Some poetry sticks in our minds. Hopefully, it is good poetry, which is the most memorable.  

I have never forgotten rhyming couplets from my long ago childhood. They would not make the good poetry list, but they come unsummoned  to haunt me around this time of year, when we are susceptible to memories of Christmases past…happy memories, painful ones and some a little weird. ’Tis the season of jolly bells and Scrooge rattling his chains.

The first graders in the Catholic School I attended were part of the annual Christmas pageant. We stood dutifully in our various homemade Christmas-appropriate costumes (shepherds, kings, angels), each holding a letter in front of us. We strung ourselves across the stage spelling out Merry Christmas. The good but rushed nuns made up letter-specific rhyming couplets for us each to recite.  My letter, which I held in front of my tinsel-belted, white sheet angel costume was the Y in Merry.  When my turn came, I recited my couplet from memory, in what I'm sure was a less than angelic voice. “Y is for Yuletide which we keep every year. May Christ be its center as it approaches more near.”

Oh my! The nuns who drilled correct grammar into our young brains every day must have been desperate as the Christmas play approached.  If we had said more near instead of nearer within their earshot, we would have received a firm correction. But there it came…tumbling from my lips without a ripple of disapproval.

At this time of year this couplet sneaks back into my consciousness at odd moments, along with a vision of myself as a six year old angel. I cheerfully give up any analysis and look to the meaning of the message. Let Christmas and all the other holidays celebrated around this time of year remind us to take ourselves out of the center of things and focus on others.  Don’t worry about getting everything just right.  Give yourself poetic license to move more near to what is meaningful.  Offer as much loving kindness and compassion as you are able to the other people who touch your life.  Merry Christmas.

Poetry of Nature

Lower Kimball Lake, NH
by Kathleen Tyler Conklin

When we look for poems about nature, we usually expect to find lyrical poetry about the beauty of nature…poems about stunning landscapes or the change of seasons. We desire to bask in words describing nature’s gifts, words that help us to picture the exquisiteness of a field of flowers or of a singular beauteous bloom.

The poets came through for us, starting with the early Greek poets and their pastoral idylls and moving through time with Emerson, Frost, Wordsworth, Yeats, Dickinson, to the present with poets like Snyder, Oliver, Williams and Gluck (to name a few). I love these poems.

After the strongest hurricane ever hit Mexico, I became curious about the poetry written about the destructive side of nature. As inhabitants of the earth, subject to hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, blizzards, earthquakes, I knew that nature could be fierce and that there had to be poems about such catastrophes. They just didn’t come to mind as readily.

I did find some, even written by the same poets as listed above, but not as many seemed available as the more romanticized versions of nature. They made for a thrilling, sometimes chilling read.  Basho, a master of haiku, the distillation of nature poems, explored nature’s darker, more challenging side in his work.

Here’s one of his that gives us layers of meaning in this autumn season, also the season of numerous political debates.

                               speaking out

                              my lips are cold

                              in autumn wind

At the Turquoise Table: Poetry In The News

At the Turquoise Table: Poetry In The News

Poetry In The News

Jeffery Brown is a Journalist and PBS Chief Correspondent for Arts, Culture and Society. He co-anchors the nightly news program on PBS and also hosts “Art Beat”, the News Hour’s online arts and culture segment.

As a reporter, Brown speaks of the necessity of sticking to the facts and of not being able to express the emotions that sometimes arise with the telling of a particular news story.  He has now expressed some of these emotions in his recently published book of poetry aptly called “The News:Poems”.

The New Poet Laureate is the first Latino named to that position.  

Jose Felipe Herrera

Juan Felipe Herrera is the son of Mexican immigrants.  He was born in California to migrant farm worker parents. He traveled up and down California with his family, but with the help of a program for disadvantaged students was able to attend UCLA. He went on to earn a masters degree in Sociology from Stanford, but then turned to the realization of his passion for writing by attending the Iowa Writers Workshop for a MFA in poetry.

Write he did…poems, plays, children’s books…both in English and Spanish, sometimes combining both in one work.

Connecting with people is important to Herrera. “I used to stand on the corner in San Diego with poems sticking out of my hip pocket, asking people if there was a place where I could read poems.” It promises to be a lively year ahead for Poetry with our new Poet Laureate at the helm. Bienvenido Juan Felipe Herrera!

What Is it About Poetry?

I recently read two articles in the newspaper that touched and amazed me and started me wondering what it is about poetry that makes it powerful. The first story concerned a soldier, who upon killing his enemy decided to go through the dead man’s pockets. I’m not sure what motivated him to do this or what he hoped to find, but what he found shocked and puzzled him.  There on a folded piece of paper was a poem.

The second story was about a mother’s effort to reach her troubled teen-aged daughter who was deeply depressed. Her daughter was acting out her despair in a rebellious way by refusing to wear shoes to school. It came to an ultimatum from the school, shoes or no school. Shoes had become a touch point, a focus of her daughter’s depression. The mother was inspired to use the shoes as a place of connection and hopefully of healing. She began to leave a folded poem in her daughter’s shoe each morning to let her see 

that “people had been in pain before and had struggled to find hope.”  The poets took that pain, that struggle and put those thoughts into the best, sparest words they could.

After some time, the mother noted a change in her daughter…the dark cloud seemed to lift a bit.  At the same time, she found the poems unfolded in her daughter’s pockets.

She was reading them and they were beginning to have an effect. “Poetry knew where hope lived.”

An enemy soldier carrying a poem in his pocket, a troubled teen finding a poem in her shoe every day, reading it and finding hope again. Pretty powerful stuff.  I am not promising you a magic elixir, but it seems there is something about poetry that deeply touches the human heart, gives it comfort and helps it to heal. And perhaps more.

Science and Poetry

Strange Bedfellows.  Not Necessarily.

A friend and I attended a poetry reading at the Folger Library in D.C. in December.  Rafael Campo, a poet and a medical doctor read the poetry of Emily Dickinson, as well as some of his own.

Wait a minute…a medical doctor writing poetry…that had to be interesting.  It was! 

Rafael Campo is a practicing physician at Harvard Medical School and at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is also a published poet since 1993.  He has published several books of poetry and two prose collections, including “The Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Poetry.” 

There it is in the title…the merging of science and poetry, a confession of Campo’s strong belief that poetry (and other arts) is an effective treatment for our illnesses.  Poetry can heal us not only emotionally but physically.  Art nurtures that strong connection that exists between our mind/heart and our body.

Campo’s poems describe his world vividly, blood and guts, birth and death, sickness and recovery.  As part of his healing path, Campo also teaches writing classes to patients and medical students. Campo’s hope is that these future doctors will perhaps become more sensitive, more personal, more human, and more compassionate in their interactions with patients through their contact with poetry.

In his lecture, Campo noted Emily Dickinson’s profound scientific knowledge that permeated her nature poetry.  She had studied botany for years and worked in her home garden with devotion.  To know something so well may inspire deep feelings of awe and inspire the poet to write about them lyrically.

I think Emily Dickinson did in the past and Rafael Campo is doing so today.

Emily Dickinson

 

Rafael Campo

Poetry By Heart

I wish I had a photographic mind.  Then I could pull up hundreds of poems from memory and recite them word for word by heart.  Alas, that is not the case.  I have a few poetic lines tucked in the brain folds which rise to my lips to be recited for comfort, fun or for the “see I’m a cultured know-it-all “ gamesmanship face-off.  

I envision the substantial value of having great poems in my memory bank to use in crises. It is not likely I will be actually imprisoned (although one never knows), but at times when my thoughts imprison me in fear, loneliness or worry,  I would like to displace them with the well remembered lines of a beloved poem.  

The other meaning of by heart relates to writing a poem.  It is useful to know something about the technique of writing poems…like rhyme, meter, alliteration, metaphor, etc.

It is important to have some of these to use if we wish, but more important to remember they are tools and not the meat of the work.  That comes from the heart, the depths, the heat of the writer.  The tools cannot get in the way of the connection to the writer’s center…that sincere, authentic, hardscrabble voice of the soul…poetry by heart.

I am not saying that the words can be spilled on the page without discipline or some structure…because they then become just non-sense.  

Iambic pentameter you have a valid place in the world of verse, but don’t let me get so fixated on you that I cannot write by heart.

Photograph by Kathleen Tyler Conklin

The Limits of Poetry

 

I am reading Edward Hirsch’s “How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry”.  It is his own Ode to poetry…a Hymn of praise…264 pages long.   It is a love letter to the poems that touch his heart, bring meaning to his life arouse his feelings and that enrich and comfort him. 

 

In 2011, Hirsch experienced the sudden loss of his son, Gabriel and found no solace in the poems that once impassioned his heart and quieted his mind. Gabriel, 22 years of age, died

from the club drug GHB that someone gave him at a party. It was a harrowing three days before Hirsch found out what had happened to his son. 

 

Father and son - Blois, France - Kathleen Tyler Conklin

Hirsch stopped reading and writing poetry after this traumatic shock.  But he began to record the memories of his son by talking with friends and relatives, writing them down compulsively and haphazardly.  After a while his outpouring of words began to take the shape of a poem.  It became a 70 page elegy to his son; a book length poem recently published called “Gabriel”.  The New Yorker called it a “masterpiece of sorrow”.

 

The poem is written in three-line stanzas without punctuation…a kind of stream of consciousness, a deluge of memories, love and grief.  Perhaps an effort to etch Gabriel’s spirit on the page...to bring him to life with words. Hirsch admits he put everything he could into his poem, but also had to face what poetry could not do.  His passion had been cooled by this tragedy.  He had a new awareness…that poetry has limits. “It cannot give us back the people we have lost.”

 

And yet, in a sense by writing this astounding elegy, Hirsch has given Gabriel to us.

The Woman Behind the Poet

My last blog was on the poetry of war.  I didn’t want to leave this topic without drawing your attention to the poems of Karl Shapiro.  Karl Shapiro won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1944 for his “V-letters and Other Poems”.  He sent his work from New Guinea, where he was serving in World War!! as a medic, to his fiancé, Evalyn Katz, who was living in New York City at that time.  Shapiro had published a chap book of his poems and had a few poems published in literary journals, but was not a well-known poet.  He needed an advocate and in Evalyn he had found one.

Evalyn was his persistent, hard working editor, and the catalyst for getting his war poems published. I know from personal experience the determination of Evalyn, Shapiro’s first wife, as I met her many years later and became her close friend. I don’t often name-drop as I have few names to drop, but feel that a shout out to her is deserved as the woman behind the poet. She did the hard work of “pounding the pavement” to advance his reputation.  Karl, of course, did the hard work of writing good poetry.

Karl’s career took off after he returned home from the war.  He taught at Johns Hopkins University, The University of Nebraska, The University of Chicago and the University of California at Davis. He also became the editor of Poetry and Prairie Schooner Magazines. He was appointed as Consultant in Poetry to The Library of Congress (1947-48), a position now known as The Poet Laureate.

Most critics agree Shapiro was a good poet, but his work doesn’t seem to have stayed in the poetic limelight as much as some of his contemporaries. I’m not sure why this is so other than the whims of the poetry gods.  I recommend looking at some of his poems.  “Wild Card”, a collection of his poems with a forward by Stanley Kunitz is a good place to start. It includes many of his war poems.

 

Karl Shapiro-1913-2000

Evalyn Katz Shapiro 1918-2007

The Poetry of War

Photo by Kathleen Tyler Conklin

How can something as horrific as war be expressed in poetic language?  It seems like an impossible challenge and yet war is a profound, deeply awful and unfortunately constant human experience.  War Poetry…"Theirs not to reason why…theirs but to do and die…into the valley of death rode the six hundred."  These lines from "The Charge of the Light Brigade" rise to my conscious mind from the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson.  I read that poem in high school and apparently it has stayed lodged in my memory bank. On rereading "Charge” yesterday, I think Tennyson has captured something of the power and insanity of war.  Ironically, he wrote the poem from his flat in London after reading a report about a battle in Crimea in 1854 in “The Times".  He wasn't even there. (Historical aside---the Crimean War was waged between the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France against Russia. Russia was defeated.  Eerily topical.)

So war inspires poetry or is it that war necessitates poetry.  Homer wrote poetically about war and war poetry endures to the present day.  Is it one attempt of the survivors to make something heroic out of power lust or simply to make sense out of that which is beyond understanding?  A struggle to stay sane. 

James Anderson Winn has written a book called "The Poetry of War" a collection of war poems (published in 2008). He suggests that very early war poetry spoke to the theme of honor and as we move to later wars, including the war to end all wars (World War l which produced a lot of war poetry) and the Second World War, liberty became the theme. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan moves toward an expression of waste and even shame by the war poets. He singles out Phillip Appleman and his poem "Waiting for Fire”.

I cannot leave this topic without calling attention to the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen. "Born in the USA" and "Lost in the Flood".  Anti-war perhaps, but they also record poignantly the plight of the returning Vietnam Vet adrift in a country he loves, which mainly ignores him.

War was a topic which I wasn't eager to explore, but now that I have begun, it has become important for me to read the poetry of war. It is a significant part of the human experience.

 

Lessons Learned
Kathleen Tyler Conklin

The Yin and Yang of April

  

April had its mood swings, its ups and downs. It delighted in daily changes of temperature and temperament. It began with April Fools Day and continued to trick us.  Were those snowflakes or drifting petals?  What to wear today?…a warm jacket or closet dive for summer wear.

The cherry blossom made a late arrival and then burst around us with an abundance of bountiful blooms.  The somberness of Lent gave way to the joy and sensual pleasures of Easter.

Dark skies, chilly rain, one day.  The next---bright colors filled our eyescapes---pale lilacs, sunny yellows, vivid reds.  Trees tightly coiled at night, relaxed into frothy green tips the next morning.

We had to become quick change artists, go with the flow, be patient, be ready, slow down, warm up and let April do its thing.

We need April to remind us of the yin and yang energies that pulse in our bodies and surround us in nature.

April did a good job this year.

Hillwood Estate by Kathleen Tyler Conklin

Women Irish Poets



Eavan Boland

The soul of the Irish poet is given to deep thought and lyrical language.  These thoughts have been expressed by many poets whom we know so well and love so much…to name just a few…

Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, the great W.B. Yeats, Sean O' Casey, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan and Seamus Heaney.  However, we seldom can come up with the name of any woman Irish poet and there have been quite enough.  Google the list and be amazed.

I would like to mention just one in this blog…and a contemporary poet at that…Eavan Boland.  She was born in 1944 and has published over twenty volumes of poetry to the present day. 

She has won numerous awards and taught at various universities in the United States and Ireland.  She also has written a prose memoir "Object Lessons" (1995). 

Eavan "takes on the matter of Ireland and the matter of womanhood " in her poetry…neither a small task in my opinion. And she does it "in a radically different tone and texture from the work of her Irish contemporaries."  I could go on…but see for yourself.  She is a treasure.  She writes in a woman's voice.  She writes in an Irish voice. She writes in a contemporary voice.  Hers is a voice worth reading.

 

Photo of Oscar Wilde Statue in Dublin
Kathleen Tyler Conklin

Poetry of Hope

Photograph by Kathleen Tyler Conklin

The third week of February teased us with warmth.  The cold temperatures have returned, but they don't feel quite as bleak.  The springlike days gave us hope that living will become easier soon.  No more heavy coats, icy sidewalks and roads to maneuver or freezing fingertips and toes. Light has nudged aside the early dark afternoons. We trust more light, warmth and color will soon surround us.

Yet, there are times when we feel this will never happen.  We fear that we will be confined to a life that is cold and dark, drained of color and warmth.  In tough times, despair can take up all the space in our psyche.  We can barely take the next breath.

Most of us have experienced this feeling, whether through personal losses and suffering or from witnessing the conflict, violence and misery that afflicts our world today. Likely both. Life is tough. To be alive is to feel despair.  It is part of being human.  It is at our core a longing that will always be there…whether you feel it as a longing for completion or a union with the divine.  I cannot define what it means for you, but I can suggest one antidote…turning to the mystical poets for help.  Their words may bring you to a better place for awhile.

Rumi, a well known mystical Persian Poet writes "The wound is the place where the light enters you."

Hafiz(Hafez), another great  Persian poet, has left the following words of encouragement.

"I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing lightness of your own being."

May the light of hope be with you.

January Thaw

The snow that came this January is going to stick around for awhile. 
Usually, our January storms melt quickly in warming temperatures
and bright sunlight.  But this year, the cold will mold it into grayish­
brown lumps that displease the eye and that continue to lurk in odd
 places to trip us, when least expecting it.  It is very, very cold. 
Extremely cold for this area.  It is finger and toe numbing cold. 
Numbing is the word of this month and segues into my January blog.

We have so many ways of numbing our feelings.  We push them
down…freeze them into such odd lumps that they become
inaccessible.  We have learned ways to numb our feelings through
alcohol, food, drugs (prescription or other), shopping, TV in excess,
frantic busyness etc.…a list we know all too well.

There are times when it is necessary to "numb out" and ok to do so.
Whatever gets you through.  But if we stick around in these places,
it will be hard to welcome a January thaw.  We will get used to being
numb.  I refuse to use the old cliche, get in touch with your feelings. 
Let me put it this way.  Get in touch with some poetry, some music,
some close friends.  Have a January Thaw Party.  Go to an art gallery
or dig out an art book and let the landscapes of spring and summer
warm you.  Have a heart to heart talk with a good friend.  Let the
tears flow.  One of the best parts of being human is having feelings. 
Feel them.

BAH HUMBUG

'Tis the season to be jolly.  The only reason for the existence of this line is that jolly rhymes with holly (forget folly).  

Christmas is the season when feelings other than jolly can present themselves.  In the midst of all the business, the ghosts of Christmases past often appear in our consciousness.  Charles Dickens has written a masterful tale about Christmas and transformation in "A Christmas Carol".  We are able to identify with many of his characters…and realize there is a little Scrooge in all of us.

Admitting this allows our dark side to float up in times of fatigue.  Irritability grabs us while compulsively shopping for food or gifts, standing in mail lines, endlessly decorating the house or making arrangements for meals and festivities. Let the feelings surface, be sad, give way to a regret or two, make friends with the ghosts. After acknowledging this, like Scrooge, we can let go of Bah Humbug and jolly up.

It will be time then to light the lights, give away a smile or a hug, dip a finger in the eggnog, and if you can, have a dickens of a time.

Poetry And Food

Photograph by Kathleen Tyler Conklin

Food is essential for life.  Some say poetry is too.  Eating can be as simple, forthright and easy as peeling a banana and wolfing (eating in an animal-like way) it down.  No fuss, no prep, no presentation.  But food can also be cooked carefully and lovingly and presented artfully.  Pretty as a picture. Good enough to eat. Then food is an expression of concern and care and becomes an art form.  A poetic cheeseburger.  Probably not.  But an artfully arranged and garnished plate of succulent scallops delights the eye, stimulates the salivary glands and satisfies the hunger of the belly and a soul starved for sensual pleasure. Whew!  I wax poetic.

Writing poetry in response to the creative urge is also a medium for expression.  Reading poetry is an enjoyable experience and feeds the soul.

Imagine gathering at the table for a feast.(Not hard to do since Thanksgiving is upon us.) It is a sensory pleasure, but also a time (hopefully) of conviviality, congeniality and the flow of friendship. Imagine gathering around a table to read poetry.  It can arouse the same emotions, challenge the mind and satisfy the soul. I see many similarities. Bringing food and poetry together seems appropriate. Enjoy my food poem.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.  Savor your meal and after dinner before you nod off…read a poem.

Second Serving

Mother made the potato salad

early in the morning

with raw eggs and cream,

her special recipe.

We five ate it later that day

from the trunk of the car

for lunch.

Then all the August afternoon

we wandered through the exhibits,

the animal stalls,

taking in the smells, colors and noises

of the late summer fair.

We returned for supper

to un-iced food

in the hot trunk

to eat

more of Mother's Potato Salad

Salad to die for--- which

by some unlikely miracle

we didn't.