Solstice- December 2010

This year's greeting, when I was feeling pretty discouraged about the state of things, especially political.


We are at the Solstice:

Willful human darkness,
dried up dusty old ideas,
murky greed and fear
retreat
as light spreads,
freshness stirs
and cracks through to the sun.

Last night I heard a boy's clear voice singing
"O Come, O Come Emmanuel"
and hope came back to me.
He expects another chance,
he has the energy,
the world is his.

Snow

This was last year's Christmas poem- I was afraid I'd lose track of it:

Snow

When it snows overnight
I hear the silence,
leap up light as a child on Christmas morning.
White sweeps clean the city,
shines like hope.

Again I think:joy!
How could we have children otherwise?
Knowing what we know,
the shadow slipping along behind us.

It is our blind and happy nature
to think it all will change,
that this Christmas will be the one,
this birth the saving grace.

Earth and Moon

For Alison and Emily- At Camp

When I joined
that longest line of women,
it was earth that fed me,
my wings folded over
the world within.

Your souls were air,
but we were all wetness,
milky melting,
barely formed.

The moon pulls
my wombless winging self.
You fly over earth,
circling each other,
then
for a moment,
straight back to the space
where you used to be.

Driving Back from Michigan

The day I left Michigan there were tornado warnings.

I stayed for church to hear my brother sing, stayed for dinner with my mother at the retirement home for one last goodbye, guilty that a part of me was relieved to be going.

I heard the radio weather reports as I rushed eastward, hoping to outrun the storm, but it hit: blinding sideways rain howling gray and unimpeded across the flat Ohio fields. I pulled over, but the road signs were ripped loose, the car rocked, the lone trees twisted and torn.

Should I keep going, maybe drive away from it, or sit helpless while the car rolled over and over? My heart was pounding, I who love wind, and I went on slowly for more than an hour before it finally let up. Later I heard that tornadoes had touched down several places along the Ohio Turnpike.

That night I dreamed I was in a car with my mother. One road was rutted ice by a cliff's edge, the other so steep it went upside down. I steered toward the cliff road and woke in a sweat, turned on the light.

When will I become like my mother? Far from fearing death, her memory fading, slipping her thoughts away from unpleasantness. We asked her to sign a DNR form, then she looked out her window:
"What is that little bird on the feeder? Have you ever seen such shaggy bark on a maple tree?"

June Walk at Valley Forge

Milkweed, thistlefield, sunscenting flowers,

blackbird screaming at a hawk in the eggshell blue,

my legs sturdy,

soaked in rain grass and grain chaff,

striding straight as the deer runs,

ticks be damned,

small as a vole under tall sky and sailing clouds,

my own back to myself,

whoever I am self:

not much matters but the sweet air.

Some Thoughts about Childhood

This morning I was sitting on a rock in Penn Treaty Park at the foot of our neighborhood, watching a cormorant in the Delaware River diving for food. A young family came nearby and I heard the clear voice of their four or five year old daughter,
" Look at the duck! His head is sticking out of the water!" The bird disappeared under water and she cried,"Where is it? Where did it go?"

I couldn't resist and I answered,"It's diving down for fish. It's a special kind of duck called a cormorant. It'll come back up."
The parents and their two girls moved closer and watched for a while, the older child exclaiming all the while. When they moved on , and I got up and passed near them, the daughter had found a small weeping willow tree, and she was excitedly pulling her sister under the canopy and calling it a house. "And here's the door!"

I have worried that all of the overly attentive parenting and scheduling of this generation of children might be squelching their essential imagination. But I could hear a familiar note of discovery in her voice. I remember feeling bad that my own daughters didn't have the same freedom that I had. When I was a child, summer was a pure open field and sky of possibilities. By the time I was nine I could run across the street to the park on my own and climb trees, explore the "Indian" trails, or ride my bike out into the country. Friends were nearby, and we made our own games. We would have been surprised and annoyed to have our parents trying to play with us. They watched our plays, Mother baked cookies with us, Dad took us hiking as a family and gave us a garden plot for zinnias, proper parent kinds of things, but we had plenty of dream time of our own.My girls couldn't safely go alone to the park in our bigger city, and friends were scattered. Still, they found plenty of creative space in their minds.When I heard them one day making a clubhouse under the forsythia in our yard in Richmond, I knew their childhood was intact.

I hope that young parents will feel okay about letting their children goof around, daydream and explore their physical world on their own rhythms. Such pure freedom will never come again.