poetry

It feels as good as the feeling of peeling puff paint
in strips off a white cotton t-shirt,
As good as the feeling of growing your own tomatoes,
or running a hundred yards in the summer sun.
It feels as good as the feeling of stealing ice cream
from the freezer when your mother is away,
and eating it, chill-faced, all afternoon.

I don't know what I am writing about (maybe I do, but I will keep it to myself). I just liked the puff paint phrase and went from there. Plus, I do have tomatoes growing in the sun by my door (and gold and crimson mums, planted today). And I just enjoyed the feeling of stealing a green-tea Mochi from our freezer. My question is, what feels this good to you? I am in the phase of lots of little writing projects, and one big, and submitting things like crazy. I am also in the phase of lots of cooking projects, working my way through the six enormous kale plants in our garden, and developing ways to eat pita bread. The current favorite: rub a little olive oil on two sides of a pita, put in pan on high, sprinkle coarse salt, cracked pepper, rosemary on top, and fry on both sides until puffy!

poetry (beggarly heart)

When the heart is hard and parched up, 
come upon me with a shower of mercy. 

When grace is lost from life, 
come with a burst of song. 

When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from 
beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest. 

When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner, 
break open the door, my king, and come with the ceremony of a king. 

When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one, 
thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder

Rabindrathe Tagore, "Beggarly Heart"

poetry

Back in Wheaton, a few more days of work packed in, and a new library card!

The Glen Ellyn library doesn't have any fees for renting DVDs, and you get to keep them a whole week instead of 5 days. Plus it is on the way to and from work. The fact that I know all of this information and now hold two library cards in this area makes me feel like . . . I . . . am . . . settling. Not for long, and not completely, but I have lived as an adult here for a few years now, and haven't done so back in California, so
I suppose it makes sense that I am beginning to feel more connected to this square of sidewalk.

I began to think about it, and realized that the list of things that make up my life here is quite concrete: I graduated college here, have planted flowers and vegetables in Illinois soil and am watching them grow, possess two library cards, know the train schedules by heart, can drive to two airports without looking (mostly) at maps, know which grocery stores carry what produce, made and lost friends here, fell in love, have worked full-time for over a month, paid rent here, and have now lived every season at least once through. My church is here, my bicycles are here, I am familiar with the thrift stores. More importantly I am finally starting to invite family over for dinner, and get up early enough to enjoy my kitchen and call people I know are in the area to spend good time with friends. I do remember not so long ago (pictured above) my cozy single room on Evans Four and the uncertainty of what would come with this summer.

And as my vibrant younger sister heads off for a month of backpacking in Europe, and I make my bed every morning in the Midwest, I can't help thinking how funny it is that I am living in the suburbs, gardening behind a (dilapidated) picket fence and making pies for my neighbors at twenty-one, planning wild adventures for just a little bit later. It's a funky brand of independence, but I quite like it here.

And to prove I still do a few things creatively, here is another mix-and-match scones recipe, made this morning for roommate breakfast:
Torunn's Lime-Ginger Scones
2 cups flour
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup rolled oats
1 egg
3/4 c coconut milk
1 tbsp baking powder

1 tbsp grated lime zest
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp fresh grated ginger

poetry

Since this week is my last week of chapels, likely ever, here is one from earlier this semester:

In Apology to Chapel Speakers

I listen to your stories

of rags-to-riches spirituality,

wonder what I could say

if called upon to speak

in front of thousands of slack-jawed twenty-somethings.

Would I be asked?

I could self-diagnose, talk about the redness

of depression, talk about how it feels

to mouth the vowels of loneliness.

Then I am each quivering girl

who ever spilled her soul

over in chapel, hoping to scare

up a smidgen of empathy, maybe a confession or two

later, in the quiet of the dorms.

We have heard it before.

I might talk about the words fear

not, how I don’t understand them -

pupils dilated, molars tight.

Then I am a narcissist, as though

my fears are different

from anyone else’s.

I should quote Jeremiah, talk about

plans, talk about goodness,

but I would not really know

what either one of those words

even means.

poetry: denise levertov

I had grasped God's garment in the void
But my hand slipped
On the rich silk of it.
The 'everlasting arms' my sister loved to remember
Must have upheld my leaden weight
From falling, even so,
For though I claw at empty air and feel
Nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummeted.

 --Denise Levertov, "Suspended"

poetry: Accomplished Facts

Every year Emily Dickinson sent one friend
the first arbutus bud in her garden.

In a last will and testament Andrew Jackson
remembered a friend with the gift of George
Washington’s pocket spy-glass.

Napoleon too, in a last testament, mentioned a silver
watch taken from the bedroom of Frederick the Great,
and passed along this trophy to a particular friend.

O. Henry took a blood carnation from his coat lapel
and handed it to a country girl starting work in a
bean bazaar, and scribbled: “Peach blossoms may or
may not stay pink in city dust.”
So it goes. Some things we buy, some not.
Tom Jefferson was proud of his radishes, and Abe
Lincoln blacked his own boots, and Bismarck called
Berlin a wilderness of brick and newspapers.

So it goes. There are accomplished facts.
Ride, ride, ride on in the great new blimps—
Cross unheard-of oceans, circle the planet.
When you come back we may sit by five hollyhocks.
We might listen to boys fighting for marbles.
The grasshopper will look good to us.

So it goes … 

-Carl Sandburg

a few of my favorite things

This polka-dot dress.

“You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world’s hard work.” 

This Annie Dillard quote from Holy the Firm.

This bright Matisse print.

This movie.

This orange bicycle from Public Bikes.

Poem: Call Me

I am working on putting together a collection of poetry by the end of this year (which is an awful lot of editing). I keep working a poem to a certain point and then realizing that it just isn't good. Grrrrr. Here is one from this semester that I like certain bits of but not the whole.

Please Don’t Call Me

I am always climbing out
of tunnels that I am supposed
to fall down not
in the rabbit-hole sense
but in the sense
of an irreversible  journey.
I like my choices to be
reversible, like cars,
but God designed callings
like bicycles.
You can’t really roll backwards
up that hill again.
And I am told that this is good,
because who wants to go back up
that which you were afraid
to go down in the first place?
Me. Always.
I remember it as better,
back there.

poetry (the charmers)

The Charmers

You can weave them into bracelets,
these half-dark prayers,
braid them into the ropes of your daughter's hair,
tuck your son into bed with them at night.
It's impossible not to make them,
these bargains with God,
(knowing that's not how this whole thing works,
half-wishing it was).
Then a hole tears in the pocket of your coat,
the charms fall through,
the bough breaks anyway.
Still, we wash them into our clothes,
bake them into biscuits,
weave and ingest blessings
like wool and salt. 

Torunn Sweers, 12/16/2012

thoughts on december

I was fourteen years old, bundled up in a black wool pea coat and blue scar, travelling by train next to my mother. We were headed through the Loire, from Paris, in December, and there was the faintest dusting of snow on the farms we passed. There is a Stephen Cushman poem that encapsulates this experience - the mistletoe bristling in the crotches of tree branches, the iced grey sky, my sleepiness and excitement and slight sense of resignation. I remember walking frozen through the groomed gardens of Chenonceau, my favorite of the Châteaux that we visited, and imagining myself in a long velvet dress and wool cape.

There is nothing like a train-trip through France in December. 

poetry (a little something of mine)

Cyrnus: A liberal arts poem

“From sound men you will learn sound lessons.” Theognis

There is nothing outside of the text. I read it once on Pinterest.

And I immediately thought of Cyrnus, covered in advice about traveling,

and advice about searching the depths of his mind, and advice about morality.

These things don't always seem compatible, but I am yet young.

You must be prepared to go a long way, Cyrnus, to find truth.

And its best to read for it walking in the middle of the road.

But youth isn't prone to walking in the middle of anything, and the text doesn't help.

We straddle the edges, listening first to the sound man who says Peace,

then turning to the sound man who says Patriotism, worrying about punctuation,

wondering about intent. What if the text was sarcastic? How do we know?

Which was Theognis?

At some point, Cyrnus will toss aside the writings of his sound mentor.

At some point he will block the texts, turn his head, and run.

And this is where I empathize, this point of easy failure.

He will embody human insolence, wincing from the test.

The student becomes love's labour lost, embracing subtleties that,

when spoken, refute all logic. I do it all the time.

Its a simple matter to believe that basest counterfeit, turn our faces,

and test the disposure of our enemies.

And still Theognis says Go a long way within yourself,

and take great pains. Read thoroughly in your own mind.

You may yet find a good man.

But probably not. After all,

Cyrnus and I find life difficult, texting in the middle of the road.

wendell berry: poetry

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

- Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

autumnal leaves

A few photographs I took last Autumn, more to follow from this Autumn - the leaves are amazing!

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 

        Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 

    Conspiring with him how to load and bless 

        With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; 

    To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, 

        And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 

            To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 

    With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, 

        And still more, later flowers for the bees, 

        Until they think warm days will never cease, 

            For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Keats, "To Autumn" for you. A little remnant of my summer Romanticism class. The weeks are flying by, the weekends disappear in a blink, and I cannot quite believe that this will be my last Fall at Wheaton.

poetry

Jeannine Hall Gailey

what makes a home

There are things in my vision, now,
that I will carry with me
through every home I make and discover.
That blue and white willow-pattern tea cup,
purchased for two pounds at a boot fair
in Canterbury. These two cotton quilts,
a little sun-faded, from Pottery Barn,
and the small one in the corner stitched
one Birthday by my grandmother's hands.
A book of Haiku, of Hafiz,
the large Ansel Adams print, black and white.
I am surrounded too, though,
by bits that will stay here. They will last
a year, maybe a month, through graduation.
Still lovely. Orange and pink leather
 Bhurmese slippers (thrifted)
a window full of mason jars and leaves,
funny old mugs, the paper star that lights
my walk home every evening
from our long apartment window. 

fashion post no. 17

There is a 10-40 percent chance of rain or thunderstorms every day, but it is still warm enough out that a jacket is unnecessary, big rainboots are too sticky and hot, and a blister on my heel is preventing me from wearing real shoes. 

Thank goodness for ankle boots that are water proof, and clogs that elevate me out of puddles.

Damp wooden heels,
and daisies, and umbrellas,
and still there is heat. It sinks
like stones from the sky
lit by lightning, warming the earth from above,
and below. Where is Autumn?

august poem

Margaret Atwood

new apartment

Back to school should have a briskness to it,
new notebooks, cardigans and shoes that rub
the backs of your heels. These days its all
heat humidity, old three-ring binders, tank-tops
and flip-flops. And whatever happened to apples?
All the grocery stores have are tense Mexican peaches.
In third grade, I never would have started school
without books. Now, in the rush to move boxes,
my forty-three course texts sit lonely in the bookstore,
held under my name. I miss Anne of G.G., to be honest,
as I set rows of L.M. Montgomery next to Chaucer,
Hemingway, Vonnegut.
Still, there is something about the start of classes,
untouchable by nerves or familiarity or boredom.
Still, there is something about school.

So this is my back-to-school photo, since we don't have them anymore in higher education, taken by my sister in sunny Southern California, which seems far away now.
Bisous, bon chance a toi et a moi aussi! It's a new semester.

adelaide crapsey, by carl sandburg

AMONG the bumble-bees in red-top hay, a freckled field of brown-eyed Susans dripping yellow leaves in July,
I read your heart in a book.
And your mouth of blue pansy—I know somewhere I have seen it rain-shattered.
And I have seen a woman with her head flung between her naked knees, and her head held there listening to the sea, the great naked sea shouldering a load of salt.
And the blue pansy mouth sang to the sea:	5
Mother of God, I’m so little a thing,
Let me sing longer,
Only a little longer.
And the sea shouldered its salt in long gray combers hauling new shapes on the beach sand.

she walks in beauty: deviations

1
She walks in beauty, like the day
Of brightened spring and sunny skies;
And all that's best of March and May
Meet in the love-light 'hind her eyes:
Which, by her nature dance and play
And ill-conceal the mirth she hides.

2
If her hair were either more or less
the way it is, it would not light her face
the way it does, or frame the things she thinks
the way it can, and her thoughts
are sweetly deserving of framing.

3
Cheek, brow
soft, calm, eloquent
smile, tint, glow
days in goodness
spent at peace with all
heart, love, innocent.

I was reading the original poem "She Walks in Beauty" by George Gordon, Lord Byron, and it struck me that the poem could be customized, changed, and slanted in a million different ways. So verse 1 is just a re-wording and slightly shifting meaning with the same form of the original verse, verse 2 is a re-phrasing of the same meaning in the original verse, and verse 3 is merely the core nouns adjectives and chunks of phrase from the original verse.