A Poem for Today

by Leah Herzing

-For Ryan + Lindsay-

The world is within me

in my tired body. The world 

and the bubbling of too much 

life, too many cells spreading,

​hard at work to take over.

I left for the pines 

where the light filters 

as pure as the whitest hair.

The light is like soft sheets

around the tall trunks with 

flaking bark that is colored

clay and pinkish-gray like a bruise.

The snow, a wet cover of skin 

over the bones of ​branches, rocks, 

and pebbles​. That thirst after the melt?

It is the muscle of meaty mushrooms,

the red-caps and the cauliflowers.

Touch them. 

I am there.  

I left for the lakes where each pool 

is a wide mouth of water.

The well-weathered Superior

with its freckled ice cracking and melting;

another so crystalline you can see

and touch the largemouth, the bluegill,

the northern pike. 

And one so opaque and saline

Where there are hundreds of birds–

the waterfowl, the wading ones 

busy at the salty edges, 

And those  infinitely diligent passerines.

All of the shorelines are an easy breath–

In and out.

In and out.

I am there.

I left for the prairie with the sun as 

eyelids of warmth​ covering the soil,

above the layered depths of dirt just letting go 

of the chill. The bluestem waves hands

as the white tailed lingers, and the rabbits

taste the sugary stalks of the tall grass. 

A year after the burn, there is a path

where the wildflowers part

and the dirt kicks up

as the children run. 

I am there. 

I left for the garden

where magnolias stretch out, offering

bowls of reddish-purple crowns.

In the hot mouth of sunlight, 

the wild bergamot grows, bees nudging its 

fingertips of lavender​.

Prickled, leafy vines hold young

heirloom tomatoes, fleshy full of juice.

Savor them with their colors of 

maroon, tangerine, pale green 

and thick yellow– painter’s colors.

Save the seeds for planting.

I am there.

All of the cycles are within me,

in the spirit of ash and sand​,

more life, more webs reaching.

My connection effervescent,

whispers always, like easy wind,

like the low-pitched call 

of the owls, 

sacred syllables echoing.

I am here.

MEMORIAL SERVICE & CELEBRATION OF LIFE - PEORIA

THANK YOU to everyone who helped make this day possible--bringing my tiny secret vision in my heart to life to honor Dan; the venues, flowers, music, food, av/tech, readings, photos, and everyone who attended both in person and virtually! And thank you the MOST to my sweet son who held my hand and comforted me all day.

 

Ecclesiastes 3

It is written:  For every thing there is a season, 

and a time for every matter under heaven:

A time to be born and a time to die;

A time to plant, and a time to reap;

A time to kill, and a time to heal;

A time to break down, and a time to  build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh;

A time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to seek, and a time to lose;

A time to keep, and a time to throw away;

A time to tear, and a time to mend;

A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate;

A time for war, and a time for peace.

“I Go Among Trees” by Wendell Berry

I go among the trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
    around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
    where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
    and lives for a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
    and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
    and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
    mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
    and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

“Things” by Jane Kenyon (Also shared at our wedding in 2004)

The hen flings a single pebble aside
with her yellow, reptilian foot.
Never in eternity the same sound–
a small stone falling on a red leaf.

The juncture of twig and branch,
scarred with lichen, is a gate
we might enter, singing.

The mouse pulls batting
from a hundred-year-old quilt.
She chewed a hole in a blue star
to get it and now she thrives….
Now is her time to thrive.

Things: simply lasting, then
failing to last: water, a blue heron’s
eye, and the light passing
between them: into light all things
must fall, glad at last to have fallen.

In the Light

Kamini Roy

translated from the Bengali by Lilian M. Whitehouse        We are indeed children of Light. What an endless mart goes on in the Light. In the Light is our sleeping and waking, the play of our life and death.       Beneath one great canopy, in the ray of one great sun, slowly, very slowly, burn the unnumbered lamps of life.       In the midst of this unending Light I lose myself; amidst this intolerable radiance I wander like one blind.       We are indeed children of Light. Why then do we fear when we see the Light? Come, let us look all around and see, here no man hath cause for any fear.       In this boundless ocean of Light, if a tiny lamp goes out, let it go; who can say that it will not burn again?

Sharing Poetry: Maya Angelou "Late October"

 Late October

Carefully

the leaves of autumn

sprinkle down the tinny

sound of little dyings

and skies sated

of ruddy sunsets

of roseate dwns

roil ceaselessly in

cobweb greys and turn

to black

for comfort.

Only lovers

see the fall

a signal end to endings

a gruffish gesture alerting

those who will not be alarmed

that we begin to stop

in order simply

to begin

again.

Sharing Poetry: Julia Kasdorf "First Bird"

First Bird

    The first bird that sings

    sings for all birds, even

    when she stands for nothing

    but herself, a dun-colored finch

    on a dogwood branch.

    No telling what a bird knows,

    if this seems the first time

    light glowed on the horizon,

    or if she thinks her beak

    alone has pierced the night.

    We know nothing can be whole

    that hasn't been torn.

    There is no holy thing

    that hasn't been betrayed,

    the way notes, once forced

    into her tiny throat,

    come out this dawn as song.

   

Kasdorf, Julia. Eve's Striptease. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.

My Mind

 

My Mind

 

 

Night comes with dimming 

blue shades of dark.

The bats quietly begin 

swooping and darting 

between the honey locust trees.

In the night, my mind is hunting,

searching, listening. Bipolarity, 

maneuverability,

echolocating. 

The order Chiropetera means

‘hand-wings’ in Greek.

Part fingers part patagium-

the membranes stretched in flight.

Mania and depression simultaneously.

Hypomania. The pinky and pointer finger,

the claw, an appendage. 

Also web, arcing and diving. 

Unmoving, the hand-wings fold

into the body, like my mind at rest,

roosting,

hanging,

upside down.

Sitting

 In her room, in her last chair by the window,

My mother was sitting

her liver shutting down

cells fatty and scarred.

When I remember her now,

she sat all her life.

Sitting as living, sitting as dying.

My father said,

“Her mother liked to sit, too.”

I am like them both.

Sitting as breathing, sitting as sleeping.

I remember her quilt, her heating pad,

her TV tray holding a bowl of oatmeal

or one slice of tomato on a hamburger.

Her own mother was gone for so many years.

Now there is a philodendron and a piano,

Two yellow canaries and the last gray finch

They are sitting perched in their cage

pecking and sleeping-

a fur of feathers, rounding their bodies

slipping their heads into their chests.

At the piano I sit, playing

“The Heart Asks Pleasure First.”

They begin singing.

Death Is Nothing At All

Two year anniversary of my mother’s death

Death is nothing at all.
It does not count.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
Nothing has happened. 

Everything remains exactly as it was.
I am I, and you are you,
and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.
Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it.
Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was.
There is absolute and unbroken continuity.
What is this death but a negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you, for an interval,
somewhere very near,
just round the corner.
All is well.
Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!



Source: https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/death-is-nothing-at-all-by-henry-scott-holland

Harper

for robyn

I am grabbing at life today
silhouettes of dogwood,
white ash, and tulip poplar
a delirious pleasure
the light through the trees
illuminates particles
i know we are the dust of it all.

harper can smell the fragments
in green blades, smoke, and vermin miles away.
her dark wet nose and keen mind
will know up to forty feet
what is buried below the ground
only she knows what is stale
in the rafts and scurf
the biological richness
of my human debris.

isn’t the devastation and the
trauma of grief tangled into
the molecules
the bits and seeds
of me?

we share the bed now and i know
sometimes i would be there
with my love in the ground and beyond
if it weren’t for her—the urgent muzzle
in the morning at my chin
the soft whine.

harper squints
at the sun greedy with
the blue-rich sky
her coat against my cheek
feels warm and soft
like fresh laundry pulled out
and hung to dry
her tag reads her name
still with both of our phone numbers
and both of our names
printed on the back.

-Leah Herzing

Eureka Lake Road

September’s fields of tall, crisp stalks
are like dry soldiers martyred by harvest—
Their innards, tender and warm produce
reveal robust kernels or rot—
the industry of cutworms, beetles, borers.
Tassels are fingered by hurried youth
unloaded from yellow, sticky buses
their bundled glands pumping sweat
into drenched long sleeves and socks.

At the lake, the basin is scorched,
undressed by drought.
Groups of family geese with black necks
and white cheeks stagger across the
cracks in the mud bed and huddle as they honk.
Their chests and bellies protrude,
hovering over the dried membranes of their feet.
They will decide to go—take flight
in their groups. Yet it is one single thought.

Creeks have withdrawn unto themselves.
The industry of mice and rabbits becomes
precarious as the hawks glide above,
dropping wide black shadows
across tan trimmed lawns
and hot pavement—a road with death,
where the skunk and squirrel corpses
have already been pillaged.
The throats of the hawks are ready,
their feathers tickled by the air.

Monarchs have lived among the milkweed
in the warmth of the summer.
Now those of the last brood dash over the road;
they dart, flutter, whisper, shout.
Their sunset wings become daring
with thick lines of black warning.
An ancient pulse within them bellows—
It is time for migration.

I am reminded of a Black Swallowtail
I found clinging to pebbles at the cemetery—
her white-dotted body
leaning under the weight of her
large and delicate arms of darkness.
I touched her blue band on her hind wings
and she stayed with me until her final fright
and she leapt away.

It is said that butterflies are a resurrection,
hope, the soul.

I yield unto what I do not know.

-Leah Herzing