Wash the dust and grime,
traces of a life of labor,
mining, farming, laying track,
tell me what you see then,
when you wash the dust and grime,
from my hands, from my face.
Straighten my bent, stooped back,
bent in a life of labor,
hauling coal, harvesting, toting rail,
let me look you in the eye,
when you straighten my bent, stooped back,
from a life of labor.
Open and loosen gnarled, misshapen hands,
grasping, clutching, in all weather,
pick, hoe, shovel, sledge, or hammer,
Maya Angalou,
known to many. Few recognize,
Langston Hughes.
April 20, 2015
Remember The Secret? Maybe it’s 6°s of separation, or precognition, or something? But…
Go back a couple of Sunday’s to when Yevgeniy Yevtushenko was the Sunday Guest and then I’ll tell you about this past Sunday, yesterday.
When I introduced Yevtushenko I mentioned that I first experienced his poetry through a Saturday Evening Post article in a 1963 edition. When I wrote that my youngest son and I were going to go to a huge outdoor flea market called The Elephant’s Trunk in New Milford the following Sunday. But, the ground was still too wet so that market, the opening one of the year, was postponed until yesterday. And our trip yesterday resulted in this.
We’d just started down the many rows of vendors and were looking at a young woman’s eclectic collection of tools, antiques, knick-knacks, and a box of magazines… Saturday Evening Post? The sign taped to the box said it contained 1960 editions. What were the odds? I squatted down and began to work through the copies. Half way, flip, flip, flip, flip back… Lift the upper ones. There it was! POST, The Saturday Evening Post August 10 – August 17, 1964 20c.
Banned in Russia:
A Soviet poet’s brilliant story
of his life and fight for freedom
under Stalin and Khrushchev
So maybe I’m making more of this than it just being a strange coincidence that right after I write about a poet who impacted my view of poetry and need to create poetry I’m reunited with the spark that ignited the fire.
Yes, I post in the past. Every so often I open a sketch book, old journal, etc., and find a haiku or other bit of doggrel laying there. So I use the scheduling tool in WordPress, just one of the many reasons I love WordPress, as a time machine and post that find in the time it would have gone on one of my earlier but now long defunct blog sites.
Just in case you were wondering, ‘Why am I just getting this notice now?’.
Life has its own meter and rhythm…
composing itself into haiku, and odes
pacing itself, stately and oh so slow,
then childishly ignoring what bodes.
Rushing at times without apology
or angry, weeping, open heart bleeding,
painful moments expressed in eulogy,
changing tempo, closing crescendo.
Life in its own meter and rhythm…
Again this morning, yesterday while driving, on waking, in the middle of a meeting… How often do the perfect words form? At the most inappropriate times. Leaving you waking to their evaporating memory.
Do you leave it, swirled into mist, unsharable, only a fleeting memory of what might have been? Or, do we hastily make some notes, never capturing the whole, and later spend hours trying to hammer it back into shape. It still looks like the front end of a ’58 Ford, slightly dented, hammer marked, and badly painted.
‘night embrace…’ is not the poem that formed in the night. It’s only the frustration that replaced that captured, then lost, image.
I
do
see
you are
are unique
you, many, colors
come together in
perfect harmony
to raise each one
to their personal
peak in lifting
each other
none need
mine
me
I
i
You come, stealthily, in the night
embrace, excite, seduce me, then slip away.
Perfectly formed words slip away
Fox, foxy, sly dog
chasing prey through the night.
Youthful beauty take flight.
Haiku Journey 