Tulips

I love Mark Halperin's poem about tulips.

Tulips

May our failed hopes rise like tulips

Out of the cold ground,

And, when we look around,

There our satin bowls are, chocolates,

And swaying, velvety clarets, aglow

With memories of help we thought would

Appear and beliefs we watered.

And we do have something to show,

goblet-like reminders of our stubborn

labors – or we don’t, and refuse

odorless flowers and choose

to live without consolation.

Mark Halperin

First published in River Styx, issue 61, 2001

The Peace of Wild Things

Yes Mr. Berry, there is peace with the wild things.

The Peace of Wild Things 

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

-Wendell Berry

Judith Viorst's Happiness

We examine, experience, lose, question, discuss, dismiss, search for, and relish happiness. Judith Viorst reconsidered it with new eyes. 

Happiness (Reconsidered)

Happiness
Is a clean bill of health from the doctor,
And the kids shouldn't move back home for
more than a year,
And not being audited, overdrawn, in Wilkes-Barre,
in a lawsuit or in traction.

Happiness
Is falling asleep without Valium,
And having two breasts to put in my brassiere,
And not (yet) needing to get my blood pressure lowered,
my eyelids raised or a second opinion.

And on Saturday nights
When my husband and I have rented
Something with Fred Astaire for the VCR,
And we're sitting around in our robes discussing,
The state of the world, back exercises, our Keoghs,
And whether to fix the transmission or buy a new car,
And we're eating a pint of rum-raisin ice cream
on the grounds that
Tomorrow we're starting a diet of fish, fruit and grain,
And my dad's in Miami dating a very nice widow,
And no one we love is in serious trouble or pain,
And our bringing-up-baby days are far behind us,
But our senior-citizen days have not begun,
It's not what I called happiness
When I was twenty-one,
But it's turning out to be
What happiness is. 

Judith Viorst

Snake River

After traveling along the Snake River today I was inspired by this poem.

Snake River

By Jeanne Huff

Just one look

Take one look -
There are wonders here
Sights you can’t believe.
So incredible you’d swear your eyes are
Playing tricks on you.

One look
This way, waterfalls.
Over there, mountains, ancient rocks,
They wrap around
The Snake like primordial guardians.

One look
Is all it takes to want to stay no matter what
Just to see
White-shagged mountain goats, trumpet-eared bighorn sheep.
It only takes one look to fall in love.

Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2006/11/25/61615/read-a-poem-about-the-snake-river.html#storylink=cpy

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Remembering Auntie Lila... Nothing Gold Can Stay
by Robert Frost
Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

When We Come Together As Family

The poem below reminded me of how true this is when family hasn't been together for awhile. The line I love is "it pulls around us like a drawstring, that time, when we come together." As the family gathered today to pay our last respects to my Auntie Lila, I was reminded of this poem. I love this moment with my mother and her brother Bob. They were remembering stories of childhood like it was yesterday.It was like a drawstring pulling us together.

All

all he would have to say is,

remember the time I came home

with a beard and Dad didn’t know me,

and we would all laugh,

Mom would say, just by your voice,

I knew your voice, and my sister

would say, the dog kept barking, and

I would say, that was the

summer I got a camera.

it pulls around us

like a drawstring, that time,

when we come together,

awkward and older,

our frayed conversations

trying to thread some memory

of each other,

one of us will only have to say,

remember the time you came home

from the bush with your beard,

and we were all easy again

with each other,

some will say how

Mom knew his voice, someone

will remember how the dog barked, I

will remember my new camera,

and we are a family again,

young and laughing on the front porch.

-Leona Gom