Category: Reading

Poetry Friday: Seeking Light

Catherine Flynn12 Comments

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence
is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
~ Carl Jung ~

The world is a scary place these days. Sometimes it’s hard to see how we will find solutions to the myriad crises the we face. But then wise people like Robin Wall Kimmerer, a brilliant “plant ecologist, educator, and writer articulating a vision of environmental stewardship grounded in scientific and Indigenous knowledge,” wins a MacArthur award. Kimmerer’s writing always gives me hope and inspires me to just be and do better as I move through the world. One lesson I took away from her book Braiding Sweetgrass is the importance of knowing the names of the plants and animals who share this earth with us. Because I have no one left to teach me, I rely on technology to learn the names of plants and flowers that have surrounded me since childhood. Now I have iNaturalist on my phone, so while I’m out walking or working in my yard, I can take a photo of whatever plant or animal I come across, and iNaturalist will do its best to tell me the name of my nonhuman neighbor.

Last weekend, I found this glorious little berry behind my house:

I had never seen such a plant! My first thought was that it was a wild strawberry, but it’s October and strawberry season is long past. After a quick search through its database, iNaturalist informed me that this is a mock strawberry, a species native to eastern and southern Asia. I know I should have left it for the squirrels and chipmunks who have been busy devouring the feast to be found outside my backdoor, I couldn’t resist setting a woodland table:

Of course all this creative play inspired a poem!

October Surprise

Bright red and glistening 
with morning dew,
a plump mock strawberry
is a beacon 
to a chipmunk
foraging for breakfast.

Gobble.

Gulp.

Gone.

Draft © Catherine Flynn, 2022

If you haven’t read Braiding Sweetgrass, find a copy today. Or listen to the author herself reading it in her soothing, patient voice. Your world will be made brighter! Also be sure to visit Matt Forrest Esenwine at Radio, Rhythm, and Rhyme for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

Poetry Friday: Challenges

Catherine Flynn14 Comments

T.S. Eliot claimed that “April is the cruelest month” but I think teachers might argue that August is a close second. Unfinished summer projects taunt us; unorganized classrooms beckon. Add to all that the Inklings’ monthly challenge. Something had to give. You guessed it. It was the challenge.

For our September challenge, Margaret Simon asked us to “Choose a photo from the month of This Photo Wants to be a Poem and share your poem and your process.” Every week, Margaret shares a photo on Facebook as a poetry prompt, a tradition that began with Laura Purdie Salas.

I knew immediately which photo I wanted to write to:

The fields around my house are full of this grass right now and I’m always awed by its beauty. But what to write? I pondered and wrote notes. After several false starts, I began looking at the other photos. Then, while Heidi Mordhorst, Mary Lee Hahn, Michelle Kogan, and I were discussing Ada Limón‘s enchanting new book, The Hurting Kind, someone said that many of Limon’s lines would be good strike lines for a Golden Shovel. All at once, everything clicked. I knew which line would work perfectly with this photo.

“…amidst the perpetual
scattering that unspools the world.”

Ada Limón
(from “It’s the Season I Often Mistake”)

Draft © Catherine Flynn, 2022

Thank you to Margaret for posing this challenge. Thank you to Heidi, Mary Lee, and Michelle for the insightful and stimulating conversation about The Hurting Kind. If you haven’t already read how my fellow Inklings responded to this challenge, please visit them at their blogs:

Mary Lee Hahn @ A(nother) Year of Reading
Molly Hogan @ Nix the Comfort Zone
Linda Mitchell @ A Word Edgewise
Heidi Mordhorst @ My Juicy Little Universe
Margaret Simon @ Reflections on the Teche

Also be sure to visit Kat Apel for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

Poetry Friday: “Looking for the Gulf Motel”

Catherine Flynn10 Comments

I love podcasts. I love that they come in neat little packages that I can listen to while I’m doing the dishes or folding laundry. I love that I can press a few buttons on my phone and Ada Limón or Pádraig Ó Tuama will read a poem to me as I drive to work. This is the best way to begin the day.

Not long ago, on Poetry Unbound, Pádraig Ó Tuama shared “Looking for the Gulf Motel” by Richard Blanco. Although I have never been to the Gulf Motel, or Marco Island, Florida, I instantly recognized everything in Blanco’s poem. Substitute my father and friends clamming at Head’s Beach, or the Cafe 2000 in Newport, and this poem is the poem of my childhood summers.

Although many of you may have already read this poem or heard this episode, I’m sharing it today in honor of Father’s Day, the start of summer, and all the Gulf Motels of our childhoods.

“Looking for the Gulf Motel”
by Richard Blanco

Marco Island, Florida

There should be nothing here I don’t remember . . .

The Gulf Motel with mermaid lampposts
and ship’s wheel in the lobby should still be
rising out of the sand like a cake decoration.
My brother and I should still be pretending
we don’t know our parents, embarrassing us
as they roll the luggage cart past the front desk
loaded with our scruffy suitcases, two-dozen
loaves of Cuban bread, brown bags bulging
with enough mangos to last the entire week,
our espresso pot, the pressure cooker—and
a pork roast reeking garlic through the lobby.
All because we can’t afford to eat out, not even
on vacation, only two hours from our home
in Miami, but far enough away to be thrilled
by whiter sands on the west coast of Florida,
where I should still be for the first time watching
the sun set instead of rise over the ocean.

Read the rest of the poem here.

Please be sure to visit Michelle Kogan for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

Poetry Friday: National Poetry Month Isn’t Over

Catherine Flynn11 Comments

It’s time for the monthly Inkling challenge. This month, Linda challenged the Inklings to “Honor someone’s April Poetry project in some way with a poem in the spirit of their project, a response poem or any way that suits you.” 

I knew immediately that I wanted to base my response on Tricia Stohr-Hunt’s (aka Miss Rumphius) project of “sharing original poems written in a variety of Japanese poetic forms (haiku, tanka, dodoitsu, etc.) to primary sources. I’m using photos, letters, newspaper articles, and more to inspire my writing.” Tricia shared many treasures from her family archives and her poems always captured funny or poignant insights into her source materials.

Like Tricia’s family, my family (specifically my maternal grandmother) saved everything and I have many photos and letters. I also have my grandmother’s diary from 1936, which is the only one we know of. Mostly, she recorded the weather, her daily household chores, and what she baked. There are also a few headlines from the wider world: The last line for Monday, January 20th reads “King George V of England died. Edward VIII becomes king.” She stopped writing on Saturday, August 22th with this short entry: “Rained on Sat. Went to town in A.M. Did shopping. Bought a pot roast. Not much new. They will finish the forty acre lot in one more day.” (I’m sure this refers to haying on my great-grandfather’s farm.)

I suspect she stopped writing because of this entry a few days earlier: “Feel certain that we will have a baby by spring.”

That baby turned out to be my mother and her twin sister.

Here they are, about 3 or 4, ready to attend a cousin’s wedding.

My mother is on the left
Draft © Catherine Flynn, 2022

There are troves of poems waiting in that diary, but how could I resist writing about this photo? I chose a most forgiving form, the Gogyohka. This is a five line verse without a specific syllable count. As Tricia explained in her post, it was “invented in the 1960s, the idea was to ‘take the traditional form of Tanka poetry (which is written in five lines) and liberate its structure, creating a freer form of verse.’ You can learn more about this form at Writer’s Digest Gogyohka: Poetic Form.”

Please be sure to visit my fellow Inklings to see which NPM project they honored:

Mary Lee Hahn @ A(nother) Year of Reading
Molly Hogan @ Nix the Comfort Zone
Linda Mitchell @ A Word Edgewise
Heidi Mordhorst @ My Juicy Little Universe
Margaret Simon @ Reflections on the Teche

Then head over to Jama’s Alphabet Soup, where Jama is serving up the Roundup.

Poetry Friday & NPM: Skyglow

Catherine Flynn6 Comments

This month I have been writing poems in response to the ideas, connections and echoes between All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson and Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit, by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. I’ve focused more on Rooted and the fundamental beliefs, or tenets, that are at the heart of rootedness. Like countless poets and scientists before her, Haupt knows that “poetry and science intermingle.” They “bring depth and knowing to one another–all mingle as co-expressions of a wild earth.” (p.24)

Poets and scientists have been inspired by the mysteries of the universe since the dawn of time. All living creatures are guided by the natural cycle of light and dark created by earth’s rotation and orbit around the sun. But we are disrupting these rhythms by leaving the lights on. Mounting evidence makes clear that this disruption is harmful both physically and mentally to humans, plants, and animals. The International Dark Sky Association has declared this week “Dark Sky Week.” There are simple steps we can all do to eliminate much of the light pollution that threatens us. Let’s start by turning off the lights.

Skyglow

Once guided by the stars above
we’ve lost our celestial map,
its compass rose
erased by bright skyglow.

Warblers, winging northward,
confused by all this light,
are steered off course,
crash into glass and steel
instead of settling into soft nests.

Creatures of the night exposed:
No shadows to hide in
or darkness alerting frogs
and toads its time
to serenade their sweethearts.

One more balance we’ve disrupted.
Another threat to harm us all.
How will we find our way forward
if we look up and see nothing,
nothing at all?

Draft © Catherine Flynn, 2022

Photo by Adrian Pelletier on Unsplash

Previous NPM Posts:

Day 10: The Cosmos
Day 9: The Fox
Day 8: A Haiku
Day 7: Ode to an April Morning
Day 6: Wander
Day 5: For the Good of the Earth
Day 4: Enchantment and Wonder
Day 3: Reciprocity
Day 2: Kith and Kin
Day 1: The Thing Is

Please be sure to visit Jone Rush MacCulloch’s blog for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

National Poetry Month: The Cosmos

Catherine Flynn4 Comments

This month I have been writing poems in response to the ideas, connections and echoes between All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson and Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit, by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. I’ve focused more on Rooted and the fundamental beliefs that are at the heart of rootedness. One tenet, “poetry and science intermingle” is woven into many of these poems. Haupt explains that “poetry, science, story, art, all bring depth and knowing to one another–all mingle as co-expressions of a wild earth.” (p. 14)

Last weekend I came across 50 Ways to Help Save the Bees by Sally Coulthard. This short book is filled with relatively simple steps we all can take to protect these engines of our ecosystems. One step is to plant a pollinator garden. I’ve been gardening for years, but never focused specifically on bee-friendly flowers. Coulthard includes a list of “Blooms for Bees” and one of my favorite annuals, cosmos, is included. Anxious to get my bee-friendly flowers started, I planted packets of cosmos, sunflowers, and cornflowers (indoors–it’s not warm enough here in western Connecticut to sow seeds outdoors). This poem was inspired by all that planting.

Dozens of bees orbit
a galaxy of blossoms,
probing pollen-packed pompoms
bursting from the shining center
of the cosmos.

Draft © Catherine Flynn, 2022

Maurice Flesier, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

You can learn more about how to help bees here.

Previous NPM Posts:

Day 9: The Fox
Day 8: A Haiku
Day 7: Ode to an April Morning
Day 6: Wander
Day 5: For the Good of the Earth
Day 4: Enchantment and Wonder
Day 3: Reciprocity
Day 2: Kith and Kin
Day 1: The Thing Is

National Poetry Month: The Fox

Catherine Flynn4 Comments

This month I have been writing poems in response to the ideas, connections and echoes between All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson and Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit, by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. I’ve focused more on Rooted and the fundamental beliefs, or tenets, that are at the heart of rootedness. “Everyday Animism,” is one of these tenets. Haupt explains that “all ways of being, from hominid to dandelion to dragonfly to cedar tree, possess a kind of aliveness.” (p. 24) She also states that “It is time to acknowledge animal consciousness–both the continuities that we share and recognize, and the mysteries that we may never comprehend.” (p.137) Today’s poem attempts this acknowledgement.

The Fox

On the verge of night,
I stand at the edge of the field.
I see only the black tufts of his ears.
He senses my presence;
Becomes one with the spikes of grass.

I freeze.

But he is on a mission, 
and it’s growing dark.
His whole head rises.
I stare into
his coal black eyes.
They carry this plea:

Save me.

Draft © Catherine Flynn, 2022

Previous NPM Posts:

Day 8: A Haiku
Day 7: Ode to an April Morning
Day 6: Wander
Day 5: For the Good of the Earth
Day 4: Enchantment and Wonder
Day 3: Reciprocity
Day 2: Kith and Kin
Day 1: The Thing Is

National Poetry Month: A Haiku

Catherine Flynn3 Comments

One of the challenges I’ve had this month is choosing a subject/topic for my poems.  My goal of writing in response to the ideas, connections and echoes between All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson and Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit, by Lyanda Lynn Haupt provided a framework, but that was just a first step. Another decision that I have struggled with is what form to use. Today, I decided haiku was the best form to capture my thoughts after seeing this picture my daughter-in-law shared with me.

Lyanda Lynn Haupt lays out twelve fundamental beliefs, or tenets, that are at the heart of rootedness. One of these is that “all is sacred.” Haupt explains that “a recognition of the sacred in all of nature is the source of any movement toward reciprocity–inner and outer. It hallows our life and work.” This wreath should have come down months ago, but it will stay a few more weeks, until it’s now sacred task is completed.

forgotten weathered
Christmas wreath shelters new life
resourceful mama

Draft © Catherine Flynn, 2022

Previous NPM Posts:

Day 7: Ode to an April Morning
Day 6: Wander
Day 5: For the Good of the Earth
Day 4: Enchantment and Wonder
Day 3: Reciprocity
Day 2: Kith and Kin
Day 1: The Thing Is

National Poetry Month: An Ode to April

Catherine Flynn11 Comments

I know it’s Saturday afternoon, but here’s my Poetry Friday post. This month I had every intention of writing a poem a day in response to the ideas, connections and echoes between All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson and Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit, by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. That hasn’t happened, but I still have a week!

In Rooted, Haupt includes creativity as one of the tenets of rootedness. She writes that “the joining of our own unique arts to those of the collective whole is the deepest — perhaps the only — hope for the continuation of a wild earth.” (p. 28) So on this day after Earth Day, here is my contribution to the collective whole.

Ode to an April Morning

This April morning
the world vibrates with life.

Day-old goslings, 
swaddled 
in gray and yellow down
scramble onto the edge
of the pond,
follow mama and papa
to a patch of fresh grass,
nibble their first meal.

Painted turtles 
bask
in the warmth
of the sun,
heads raised in
celebration.

A pair of cardinals
dart in and out
of a holly bush,
scouting out
the perfect spot
to build their
nest.

And in the field, 
violets shimmer
with possibility.

Draft © Catherine Flynn, 2022

Please be sure to visit Margaret at Reflections on the Teche for the Poetry Friday Roundup and to catch up with this year’s Progressive Poem.

National Poetry Month: Wander

Catherine Flynn6 Comments

In Rooted, Lyanda Lynn Haupt recommends wandering. She writes, “Wandering brings mind and movement into a healing congruity.” (p. 64) Wandering is something we could all use more of.

This poem began as an acrostic of wander. Technically, it still is, but like most writing, it had a mind of its own and wandered off in another direction.

Wake to whispering trees
Awash in the surging green of
Nascent leaves and petals, still
Dappled with last night’s rain,
Eager to burst open and host
Robin’s reveille

The robin in charge
of reveille in my yard

Previous NPM Posts:

Day 5: For the Good of the Earth
Day 4: Enchantment and Wonder
Day 3: Reciprocity
Day 2: Kith and Kin
Day 1: The Thing Is