April is National Poetry Month: Good Poems for Hard TImes

"At times life becomes impossible, and you curl up under a blanket in a dim room behind the drawn shades and you despise your life. It can help to say words. Moaning helps. So does prayer. Poems help". Garrison Keillor in the introduction to Good Poems for Hard Times. This is the second anthology selected by Garrison Keillor from the collections that have been heard on The Writer's Almanac on public radio. When I first began reading this collection I thought all the poems would be about dealing with sadness. Actually, many are uplifting and remind us of happiness, birthdays, and spring. The poem I have chosen for today reminds me of the things that surround us every day. We need those things.

Things
Lisel Mueller

What happened is, we grew lonely

living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.

April is National Poetry Month: Prayer for Peace

" One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. In this anthology, I have tried to include poems that reflect things that were important to her- a spirit of adventure, the worlds of imagination and nature, and the strength of love and family."- Caroline Kennedy in the introduction to The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

This anthology is a favorite of mine because of the mixture of poems collected that span from the Old Testament to Shakespeare, John Keats, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost just to name a few. There are poems that celebrate America, verses read to children, poems of love and romance, and a collection penned by Jackie herself.  I learned the following poem as a worship song, but the words express much by themselves.

Prayer for Peace
St. Francis of Assisi

Lord, make me an instrument of Your Peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon,
Where there is doubt, faith,
Where there is despair, hope,
Where there is darkness, light,
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may
   not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
To be understoon, as to understand;
To be loved, as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

First Bouquet: Spring 2010

Yes, these were picked!

Top Ten Things I Love About the Methow Valley

 1.  Eating lunch in the oldest "legal" saloon in Washington State (Three Finger Jack's).

2. Getting reacquainted with Molly's Soaps. When I lived in the Tri-Cities Molly always had a booth at the Allied Arts Fair. Molly led me back to her handmade soaps in Winthrop!

3.The Trail's End Bookstore in Winthrop. Read about it here.

4. The Cinnamon Twisp Bakery in Twisp.

5. Discovering the Back Country Coffee Roaster's Buck Mountain Blend. It "takes you out of the rut".

 6. The Methow, Twisp, and Chewack Rivers.

7. Early Winters Campground.

8. The new beverage holders at the Mazama Store.

 9.  The North Cascades and

10. Lost River Cabin, JEJ, and the dogs.

I think Shelby got a bit tired of sightseeing!

April is National Poetry Month: Fixers

The anthology I have chosen today is The Way It Is, New and Selected Poems by William Stafford. This collection combines previously unpublished poems written close to his death and selections from previous books.  I had not read much of William Stafford's poems until I heard him speak with his son Kim at a NCTE conference about twenty years ago. After that day I was a loyal follower of his work. I really like the second section of this book that includes in order the last poems he wrote before his death in 1993. There are poems about family, other poets, history of place, nature, and retirement. The following selection is an example of how Stafford can depict everyday people that we recognize and have known all our lives.

Fixers
On back roads you can find people
who keep machinery alive. With a file,
a wrench, a hammer they scrape, twist
and pound until the old tractor wakes up
or the plough bites again into the ground.

I've bullied rusty iron and made it
remember what to do, and once on a back road
I put out a fire under the hood of a car;
but these greasy geniuses have to conjure
miracles day after day just to keep going.

Often their audience is a customer eager to
get started again, or maybe their little daughter
watching how Daddy fixes things. And sometimes
only an old dog-wise in when to jump aside-
studies mechanics and barks when The Master says,
"There!"

-William Stafford

April is National Poetry Month: 100 Poems to Lift Your Spirits

The third anthology I am going to feature this month is one I purchased a few years ago on a spring break trip to Lake Chelan. This collection was a nice companion on that trip and one I pull out when I need my spirits lifted. When Leslie Pockell edited this collection she organized the poems by Nature, Nonsense,Spirituality, and The Human Connection.  There are old favorites like " To Autumn" by Keats and "Daffodils" by Wordsworth to modern classics such as "Dawn Revisited" by Rita Dove and "Filling Station" by Elizabeth Bishop.

The memory of the poem I am going to share today was not as a poem, but a song. I sang these words in Junior Choir at the United Church in Kellogg as a child. I don't know if I sang it during Eastertime, but the words seem to fit today.

 Maker of Heaven and Earth (All Things Bright and Beautiful)

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.

Each little flower that opens,
Each little bird that sings,
He made their glowing colours,
He made their tiny wings.

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

The purple-headed mountain,
The river running by,
The sunset, and the morning,
That brightens up the sky;

The cold wind in the winter,
The pleasant summer sun,
The ripe fruits in the garden,
He made them every one.

The tall trees in the greenwood,
The meadows where we play,
The rushes by the water,
We gather every day;--

He gave us eyes to see them,
And lips that we might tell,
How great is God Almighty,
Who has made all things well. 

by Cecil Frances Alexander