The Horse

Hast thou given the horse strength?
Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?
Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper?
the glory of his nostrils is terrible.

He paweth in the valley,
and rejoiceth in his strength,
he goeth on to meet the armed men.

He mocketh at fear,
and is not affrighted,
neither turneth he back from the sword.

The quiver rattleth against the him,
the glittering spear and the shield.

He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage;
neither believeth he that is the sound of the trumpets, Ha, ha,
and he smelleth the battle afar off,
the thunder of the captains,
and the shouting

Job 39:19-25 King James Version
classification:  The Good Earth

Leviathan

He makes the deep to boil like a pot,
he makes the sea like a pot of ointment,
ointment in a mixing bowl.
He leaves a shining trail behind him,
and in his wake the great river is like white hair.
Upon the earth there is not his like.

Job 41:31-33 Revised English Bible

It appears many Bible scholars consider this to be about some kind of giant crocodile,
but I always visualize a whale or "great fish"

Proposition

Tonight
when the moon comes out
I shall change it
into money.

But I'd be sorry
if people knew about it,
for the moon
is an old family treasure.

Nicholás Guillén, translated by Langston Hughes


I See the Moon

I see the moon
The moon sees me
God bless the moon
And God bless me.


by Jim Brickman
memorized by Jill age 4
classification: the Good Earth

Prayer For Our Daughters

May they never be lonely at parties
Or wait for mail from people they haven't written
Or still in middle age ask God for favors
Or forbid their children things they were never forbidden.

May hatred be like a habit they never developed
And can't see the point of, like gambling or heavy drinking.
If they forget themselves, may it be in music
Or the kind of prayer that makes a garden of thinking.

May they enter the coming century
Like swans under a bridge into enchantment
And take with them enough of this century
To assure their grandchildren it really happened.

May they find a place to love, without nostalgia
For some place else that they can never go back to.
And may they find themselves, as we have found them,
Complete at each stage of their lives, each part they add to.

May they be themselves, long after we've stopped watching.
May they return from every kind of suffering
And be themselves again, both blessed and blessing.

by Mark Jarman, from Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems. © Sarabande Books, 2011

Shall We Forgive Our Fathers?

How do we forgive our fathers?
Maybe in a dream.
Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often,
or forever
when we were little?

Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage,
or making us nervous
because there never seemed to be any rage there at all?

Do we forgive our fathers
for marrying
or not marrying our mothers?
For divorcing,
or not divorcing our mothers?

And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth?
or coldness?
Shall we forgive them for pushing?
or leaning?
or shutting doors?
For speaking through walls?
or never speaking?
Or never being silent?

Do we forgive our fathers in our age
or in theirs?
or in their deaths,
saying it to them
or not saying it?

From "Smoke Signals" the film adaptation of the short story "This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona" from the book "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" by Sherman Alexie, 1993.

classification:  Home and Family

It is a fact that unresolved feelings and problems will resurface again and again during a lifetime until they are finally resolved.  I met people in the assisted living who had trust issues as children, and were dealing with it again in old  age.  A class-mate taught me this saying from his home country  "once a man, twice a child"  
I thing our feelings about our childhood remain with us all our lives to finally be resolved....
in our age?  or in theirs?

Looking Out

It must be odd

To be a minority

He was saying.

I looked around

And didn't see any.

So I said

Yeah,

It must be.

Mitsuye Yamada

This poem written by a Japanese-American

comments on how some ethnic groups

see themselves as part of main-stream culture,

Yet main-stream culture may still see them as belonging to their former culture

classification:  Social commentary

Here in Virginia, we are unfased by middle-eastern women in head scarves, or foreign accents.

They tell me there are more than 100 countries represented in the high school. I consider myself more acculturated than some but I catch myself doing this:

In class I call the name for attendance, I see their face and expect to hear a reply with accented English. As soon as they speak, I realize this family has been here many generations!

The Laundress

She worked as a housemaid, then as a laundress
in small-town Winnipeg, full of emigrés speaking
every language except for her own: She was Icelandic
and as she worked she sang the old Icelandic hymns
and songs: the songs had all her joy, they brought
all her peace. She kept reaching for the language
that got lost in her life. She could never speak it
again, although it always measured her breath.


Late one summer, as she lay dying, she sang again
the Icelandic hymns, sang in her mother tongue
another tongue for us; and as we lay her
in a foreign grave, we, who know no Icelandic,
who know then almost nothig of what she loved
and lived by, say our prayers over her in English.

Einar P'all J'onnson
translated by Thorvaldur Johnson and M.P. O'Conor

classification: social commentary

My grandma Stephania never put in articles, and sometimes left out conjunctions too. She said "you put a little bit sugar"
Mark, when studying the Russian-related languages (did you know Mark speaks a little Russian?) explained to me that's how Russian is, and that grandma must have transferred this to English.

We know these people, who left their homes and came to Canada
whose language got lost, and their children, unable to speak their language were
bemused by their accent and peculiar language structure, never understanding that language is a filter through which we see and interpret our world.

When I studied US immigration patterns, and saw the echoes of the same patterns in Canada,
I learned that the US became the melting pot, but Canada in leaving cultures and languages intact, was more of a fruit salad. But in immigration, every culture suffers a similar loss of identity.

Uniquely Me

I am
a confusion of cultures;
uniquely me.
I think this is good
because I can
understand
the traveller, sojourner, foreigner;
the homesickness 
that comes.
I think it is also bad
because I cannot
be understood
by the person who has sown and grown in one place.
They know not
the real meaning of homesickness
that hits me
now and then.
Sometimes I despair of 
understanding them.
I am
an island
and
a United Nations.
Who can recognize either in me
but God?

Alex Graham James


classification:  social commentary

Something Told the Wild Geese

"I looked back and shed a tear,

To see it in the rear view mirror.

I said I'd just be gone a couple months,

And now it's more than 30 years."      From   Hymn of the Exiles

Something told the wild geese
it was time to go,
Though the fields lay golden
Something whispered, "snow."


Leaves were green and stirring,
Berries, luster-glossed,
But beneath warm feathers
Something cautioned "frost."


All the sagging orchards
Steamed with amber spices,
But each wild breast stiffened
At remembered ice.


Something told the wild geese
It was time to fly,
Summer sun was on their wings,
Winter in their cry.

Rachel Field
classification:  The Good Earth

It's been more than 30 years since I lived where I could hear the Canada Geese migrate.
In Virginia, I sleep with the window open above my bed, snuggled under the quilts
and I hear the geese honking as they fly overhead.  I'd forgotten what a pleasure it was to hear them.

A Moment's Indulgence

A poem for Kris

I ask for a moment’s indulgence to sit by thy side.

The works that I have in hand I will finish afterwards.

Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor respite.

And my work becomes an endless toil in a shoreless sea of toil.

Today the summer has come at my window with its sighs and murmurs;

And the bees are plying their minstrelsy at the court of the flowering grove.

Now it is time to sit quiet, face to face with thee,

And to sing dedication of life in this silent and overflowing leisure.

Rabindranath Tagore    1861- 1941, Calcutta India

classification:  home and family

This Was My Brother at Dieppe

"Don't worry men, it will be a piece of cake!"  Canadian Maj-General "Ham" Roberts, briefing his officers on the night before the Dieppe Raid.

This was my brother
At Dieppe,
Quietly a hero
Who gave his life
Like a gift
Withholding nothing.


His youth...his love...
His enjoyment of being alive...

His future, like a book,
With half the pages still uncut.

This was my brother
At Dieppe,
The one who built me a doll house
When I was seven.
complete to the last small picture frame.
Nothing forgotten.

He was awfully good at fixing things,
And stepping into the breach when he was needed.

And that's what he did at Dieppe;
He was needed.
And even Death must have been a little shamed
At his eagerness.

By Mona Gould
written after her brother's death at Dieppe 1943


Headlines from Toronto Daily Star "Dieppe Raid "Spine Chilling"   "Dieppe Raid "Model of Skill" "Grand show, you Canadians!" "Until more information becomes available, there is every reason to believe this is a noble occasion, a day of high honour"  H Rooney Pelletier CBC Radio London.
Headlines and Quotes from CBC Digital Archives.

After 3 years of waiting and training in Britain, 5,000 Canadian troops joined British troops and were sent to the French Coast at Dieppe, August 19, 1942.  (Operation Jubilee, The First Dieppe Raid) The Germans were ready for them and the attack became a massacre.  3,000 Canadians were killed or taken prisoner and another 907 died later from their wounds.  To this day opinion remains bitterly divided.  Was it an essential "trial run" for D-Day or a shocking waste of life?

Maj-General Roberts became the official scapegoat and never commanded troops in the field again.

This I Believe

I really believe that every man on this earth is my brother.  He has a soul like mine, the ability to understand friendship, the capacity to create beauty.  In all the continents of this world I have met such men.  In the most savage jungles on New Guinea I have met my brother, and in Tokyo I have seen him clearly walking before me.

In my brother's house I have lived without fear.  Once in the wildest part of Guadalcanal I had to spend some days with men who still lived and thought in the old Stone Age, but we got along together fine, and I was to see those men in a space of only four weeks ripped from their jungle hideaways and brought down to the airstrips, where some of them learned to drive the ten-ton trucks which carried gasoline to our bombing planes.

I believe it was only fortunate experience that enabled me to travel among my brothers and to live with them.  Therefore I do not believe it is my duty to preach to other people and insist that they also accept all men as their true and immediate brothers.  These things come slow.  Sometimes it takes lucky breaks to open our eyes.  I had to learn gradually, as I believe the world will one day learn.

To my home in Pennsylvania come brown men and yellow men and black men from around the world.  In their countries I lived and ate with them..  In my country they shall live and eat with me.  Until the day I die my home must be free to receive these travellers, and it never seems so big a home or so much a place of love as when some man from India or Mexico or Tahiti or Fiji shares it with me.  For on those happy days it reminds me of the wonderful affection I have known throughout the world.

I believe that all men are my brothers.  I know it when I see them sharing my home.

James Michener  July 1954

A Prayer for Safe Shore

The foam of the ocean surrounds

everything

We are lost in the open sea, looking

for a shoreline to call safety.

We float on the deep and dark

ocean like dust on a palm leaf, we

wander in endless space.

Only our fear, that we do not sleep

forever on the bottom of the sea.

We are without food

or water and our

children and

women lie exhausted

crying, until

they can cry no more

No ship will stop

We float like we do not exist.

Lord Buddha, do you hear

our voices?  From every port we

are pushed out.

Our distress signals rise

and rise again.

How many boats have

perished?

How many families are

buried beneath those waves?

Find us

We are lost in the open sea

looking for a shoreline to call safety.

Vietnamese Monk

Los Angeles

classification:  Social Commentary

After the Vietnam War, many people in Cambodia, Laos, and especially Vietnam became refugees in the late 1970s and 1980s.  Fleeing "re-education camps" and the "Killing Fields" in which it is estimated that 165,000 people died, many came to refugee camps in Malaysia, Thailand, the Philipines, Hong Kong and Indonesia.  Others escaped in boats causing great controversy in their destination ports in Australia, the United States and sometimes other western countries.  Their plight became an international humanitarian crisis.

If you want to get rid of undocumented immigrants, quit eating

title quote from a farmer in Alabama

"Especially strawberries, but especially lettuce, but especially carrots, broccoli, oranges, tomatoes, raspberries, cherries, and cucumbers, but especially onions." Posted by Jill on Facebook

Unintended Immigrants


We left no teeming shore in Europe, hungry and eager to reach the New World.
We crossed no ocean in an overcrowded boat,
impatient and eager to arrive at Ellis Island in New York.
No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country,
and left us with the notion that the land was free,
even though Mexicans and Indians already lived on it.
We did not kill, rape and steal under the pretext of Manifest Destiny
and Westward Expansion.
We did not, in fact, come to the United States at all.
The United States came to us.

Luis Valdez quoted in “Fiesta in Aztlan - Anthology of Chicano Poetry”, edited by Toni Empiringham. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press

The territory that now comprises the states of New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, California, Texas, and parts of Arizona and Colorado, were part of New Spain until 1821, when they became part of independent Mexico after the Mexican War of Independence.

After the Mexican American War 1846-1848, the territory was ceded to the US.  New Mexico entered the Union in 1912 as its 47th state.  That is to say, Mexican citizens woke up one morning and were in the US!

classification:  Social Commentary

Nothing Gold Can Stay

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.

Robert Frost, written in 1932

At first, the topic seems a sad one, that anything at its peak, will eventually pass away.
On further consideration, I wonder if it is not also a call to appreciate something
so fine that it will only last a short time--like the first frost of the year that edges the golden leaves for a few wondrous minutes.

classification:  The Good Earth

Tableau at Twilight

I sit in the dusk. I am all alone.
Enter a child and an ice-cream cone.

A parent is easily beguiled
By sight of this coniferous child.

The friendly embers warmer gleam,
The cone begins to drip ice cream.

Cones are composed of many a vitamin.
My lap is not the place to bitamin.

Although my rainment is not chinchilla,
I flinch to see it become vanilla

Coniferous child, when vanilla melts
I'd rather it melted somewhere else.

Exit child with remains of cone,
I sit in the dusk, I am all alone,

Muttering spells like an angry Druid.
Alone in the dusk, with the cleaning fluid.

Ogden Nash



A Promise to My Children

I promise to prize your friendship and the love of your children above
any household item they may (ahem) spoil.

I promise to never present you as
"one of MY (put tally number here) children/grandchildren"
as though you were a notch on my belt,
but rather to treat you as unique and interesting people
with your own stories to tell.

I promise to always love our adorable Nikki, our cholo David,
and Mai (who makes Mark so happy) and anyone else who enters our family circle,
or indeed even touches it.
I will never ask them to "step out of the photo" because it is "just the family"
I intend for our family to also include such dearly loved people
as Sonia, Grandma Maruja, and Jhonathan, on into the eternities.

I promise to never begin a conversation with
"well I am 70 years old" (or whatever)
and suppose that will trump your expertise.
I promise to not stubbornly repeat
some old fact from my college days, but rather
inform myself and ask intelligent questions.

I promise to do my best, to keep in touch, whatever the cost.
To hear of your emergency room visits,
report card brags,
your work events,
And NEVER say "I'm sorry I gotta go to the library now."

I have realized that my dearest wish,
is to hear you tell me about the world;
and to do that you must:
sit on counters,
sideswipe cars,
forget and remember things,
give me a cold,
and lose my tweezers

I realize that sometimes you will
sleep when I am awake,
and be wakeful at late hours of the night.
I promise, on those occasions,
to never sweep out in a queenly snit
and remind you that my sleep is precious.
Because it isn't
at least not in the sense that you are.

Love from your mum

When I Look Back

I planted my little garden too late in the season.  

My tomatoes are trying to ripen in October.

I think it is a metaphor for my life 

When I look back on the fields I've sown,

The weedy prose and the spindling rhyme,

I know what I've always known:

So much to do and so little time.

The seasons lean on my sweated shoulder; 

The year is old and I am older

And now is already yesterday.

I envisioned acres of golden earing.

And ripened fruits of a fertile loam,

But it is fall in my thistled clearing,

And I have nothing for harvest home.

by Gilean Douglas

classifcation:  Inspirational 

Antonio

I like this poem simply because the sound of the sylables
 tickes me.

Antonio, Antonio
was tired of living alonio.
     He thought he would woo
     Miss Lissamy Lou
Miss Lissamy Lucy Malonio.


Antonio, Antonio
Rode off on his polo-ponio 
     He found the fair maid
     In a bowery shade
A-sitting and knitting alonio.


Antonio, Antonio
Said "If you will be my onio
     I'll love you true
     And I'll buy for you
An icery-creamery conio."


"O nonio, Antonio!
You're far too bleak and bonio!
     And all that I wish,
     You singular fish,
Is that you will quickly begonio."


Antonio, Antonio,
He uttered a dismal moanio,
     Then he ran off and hid
     (Or I'm  told that he did)
In the Antarctical Zonio.

by Laura E Richards
published in "Tirra Lirra" by Little, Brown and Company Boston 1932
Many of the poems in this book are of the same tone as "Antonio"

classification:  Humour

Loose Leash

I really miss my dogs.
Even the crazy little one.

My leash was loose,
so now I'm off
To see the world,
Out on my own.
Down country roads
And city streets
in my red car.


Free and alone.
Armed with my map
I'm going far--
Just need to learn
to drive this car.

Amy Schmidt

classification:  Humour

"Hold Me a Little Longer" for Emma

Hold me a little longer,
Rock me a little more,
Tell me another story,
You've only told me four.

Let me sleep on your shoulder,
I love your happy smile,
I'll always love you grandma,
Stay a little while.

Collected by Grandma Paulette Fisk about 1998

classification:  Home and Family

Colonization in Reverse

I thought long and hard about the dialect spelling the poet uses in her poem, and finally decided to shorten the poem to its most important story line and leave the dialect spelling.  There are notes at the end for difficult constructions.


Wat a joyful news, Miss Mattie,
I feel like me heart gwine burs'  (1)
Jamaica people colonizin'
Englan' in reverse

By de hundred, by de tousan'(2)
From country and from town
By de ship-load, by de plane load
Jamaica is Englan' boun' (3)

What an islan'! What a people!
Man an woman, old and young
Just a pack dem bag an baggage (4)
And turn history upside doun'

oonoo see how life is funny
oonoo see da turnabout?
..............
What a devilment a Englan'
Dem face de war and brave de worse
But me wonderin' how dem gwine stan' (5)
Colonizin' in reverse.

by Dame Louse Bennett

Louise Bennett is a Jamaican Poet who has been knighted and the title "Dame" is
the feminine equivalent of "sir"

(1) I feel like my heart is going to burst
(2) by the thousand
(3) England bound
(4) pack their bag and baggage
(5) how they're going to stand

photo by your mom while working in Tumaco Colombia

Love Poem

In Southern France live two old horses,
High in the foothills, not even French,
But English, retired steeplechasers
brought across to accept an old age
Of ambling together in the Pyrenees.
At times they whinny and kick
At one another with impatience,
But they have grown to love each other.

In time the gelding grows ill
And is taken away for treatment.
The mare pines, pokes at her food,
Dallies on her rides until the other
Comes home
                    She is in her stall
When the trailer rumbles
Through the gate into the field,
And she sings with impatience
Until her door is opened.
                   Then full
Of sound and speed, in need of
each other, they entwine their necks,
Rub muzzles, bumping flanks
To embrace in their own way.
Together they prance to
The choicest pasture,
Standing together and apart,
To be glad until
They can no longer be glad.

By Paul Zimmer, from Crossing to Sunlight Revisited
University of Georgia Press.
Quoted in "Writers Almanac' PBS, Read by Garrison Keillor

Category :  "The Good Earth"

Thanks to Amy for the beautiful picture

Simply There

Tonight, I'm going to 
my father's birthday party.


My mother will prepare 
his favourite meal
and best-loved cake.
And each of us
will bring a gift 
to help him celebrate.


But I know my father well.
We could come empty-handed,
and he would never care.


Surrounded by his children
and their children too,
his face will show
the gift he really 
treasures most
is simply that we
are there.


Rae Turnbull


classification:  Home and Family

Extracts from "English con Salsa"

Welcome to ESL 100, English Surely Latinized,
inglés con chile y cilantro,
English as American as Benito Juarez.
Welcome muchachos from Xochicalco,
learn the language of dólares and dolores
of kings and queens,
of Donald Duck and Batman,
Holy Toluca!
In four months you'll be speaking like George Washington,
In four weeks, you can ask, "More coffee?"
In two months you can say, "Can I take your order?"
In one year you can ask for a raise, cool as the Tuxpan River

Welcome, muchachas from Teocaltiche,
in this class we speak English refrito,
English con sal y limon.....

When a teacher from La Jolla or a cowboy from Santee
asks you "Do you speak English?"
you'll answer  "Sí
yes, simón, of course.  I love English!"
...
excerpts from "English Con Salsa"
by Gina Valdez "Cool Salsa:  bilingual poems about growing up Latino in the US"  Lori Carlson Editor, 1995

I love this poem, I live it every day I teach Spanish or English!

picture from latino foxnews

Extract from "The Cattle Country" by E. Pauline Johnson

Foothills to the Rockies lifting
Brown, and blue, and green
Warm Alberta sunlight drifting
Over leagues between.

That's the country of the ranges,
Plain and prairie land,
And the God who never changes
Holds it in His hand.

by E. Pauline Johnson
One of Canada's most popular and successful writers at the turn of the 19th century.
Born to a Mohawk Native-Canadian father and an English mother, she used the Mohawk name Tekahionwake.
photo of the Qu'appelle Valley, Saskatchewan

poem category : The Good Earth

Welcome to Your Mom's Poetry

In grade 4,
I collected the first poem I intended to save forever.
And since then, the file just gets thicker and thicker.
I intend them to get them in an electronic form to give to everyone someday,
but I keep adding notes,
and background to some of the obscure ones,
and searching for author's names,
and verifying
and I haven't closed my collection yet.

Here are a few of my favourites
Just for you