Tuesday afternoon, mostly sunny 77 degrees.
Now that the weather has gotten warmer again, I’m trying to sit outside in the afternoons. Unfortunately, with the warmer weather, the biting and stinging insects have emerged in full force. I actually had a bumblebee that got an inch from my face and hovered there for a second or two. Weird. I’ve never really minded bumblebees, that is until Corey informed me that they bore into wood. Funny story: I was showing Corey all of the pollen that had collected on my deck chair; he said, “that’s not pollen; that’s wood from the bumblebees. Look up.”
Damn if he wasn’t right. Isn’t it enough to have termites that bore into wood? We have to have bumblebees as well? Crap.
Anyway, thought I’d post these two poems that relate to spring for today’s post. Enjoy.
More later Peace
Spring Poem For the Sake of Breathing, Written After a Walk to Foster Island
The sky wants the water to turn grey,
but if I notice how waves
play with the clumps of yellow flags,
or the way turtles share logs,
or even try to understand a friend’s decision
to walk onto a glacier
and end her life—I will be ready
for any poems that have been waiting.
The horizon opens as I walk,
escorted by swans and Canada geese.
I need to stop backpedaling into the present.
In my old life people would straighten
the truth, but the river
flows in curves.
The names of my father and my mother
rest next to each other in Greenwood Cemetery.
The distance between me and the mountains
measures an uneven thought: I feel like an orphan.
An early moon is just a piece of change
in the softening sky.
Light is such an actress. Time to seek
Hopper’s wish to simply paint sunlight
on the wooden wall of a house. I am growing
older. Maru in Japanese means
the ship
will make it back home.
~ James Masao Mitsui (found on Poetry Foundation)
From An April
Again the woods smell sweet.
The soaring larks lift up with them
the sky, which weighed so heavily on our shoulders;
through bare branches one still saw the day standing empty—
but after long rain-filled afternoons
come the golden sun-drenched
newer hours,
before which, on distant housefronts,
all the wounded
windows flee fearful with beating wings.
Then it goes still. Even the rain runs softer
over the stones’ quietly darkening glow.
All noises slip entirely away
into the brushwood’s glimmering buds.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke (Trans. Edward Snow)
Music by Tom Grennan, “Run in the Rain”
Lola's Curmudgeonly Musings 