Septembering

I was browsing the Poetry Foundation site, feeling a little worn down and out, a little belowed by the falling leaves and the waning day, when I came across Eileen Spinelli's "First Saturday in June".  Here's where it led me.





The Last Saturday in September

just happens to be the last day of
September altogether, with the
sun red and yellow and speckled
like the apple in my hand,
like the leaves of the tree
I'm sitting under.

These are tinder, kindling colors,
the fire of fall just catching
and me just catching the sundown,
watching, mouth full, the dropping
ball at the end of the new
school year, when it all turns
ordinary.

I don't much like endings--
not the last bite of  apple,
not the sun going down,
not the dwindling light,
and not the last embering day
of September.

draft (c) HM 2017


The round-up today features poems about reading by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater, hosted by Laura Purdie Salas at Writing the World for Kids.

let peach begin with me

Meditating today on:
the last day of summer, the last of the peaches at the farmers' market...
on the deep relative peace that I and mine are enjoying while the rest of the world is falling apart, literally...
on the Golden Shovel poems crafted by Nikki Grimes in One Last Word.

Making Peace |  Denise Levertov

 A voice from the dark called out,

             ‘The poets must give us

imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar

imagination of disaster. Peace, not only

the absence of war.’

                                   But peace, like a poem,

is not there ahead of itself,

can’t be imagined before it is made,

can’t be known except

in the words of its making,

grammar of justice,

syntax of mutual aid....

Read the rest of Levertov's poem here. Here's my contribution.

<poem>

The roundup this Poetry Friday is with Amy at The Poem Farm, where she has planted a whole crop of peace seeds...let the harvest begin!

#peaceday

5 words for #PeaceDay2017


Peace:
seeing the pink
underneath

return of the 3LW and Burma-Shave

My One Little Word for this year is really 3:  Ready...Steady...Go.

I've been doing well with Ready:  keeping my eye on things as they develop in my family, in my classroom, in the world, and being better prepared for things not to be 100% rosy.

And Go has always been a strong point for me--I prefer to be Ready before I Go, but I can get Going even if I'm not quite Ready.  In fact I'm a little notorious for Going before all the possible research and analysis has been Ready.  There are models which call people like me "Drivers."

The tricky word for me is the middle one:  Steady.  With that word I was trying to remind myself of two opposing grips (which may explain the challenge I'm having).

On the one hand, I'd like to be holding the steering wheel, the rudder, the throttle, the string on the kite firmly, with a good sense of what is most important in the long run.  Steady.  On the other, I'd like to have a lighter, looser grip, so that day by day, when--as inevitably happens--the steering wheel rudder throttle string is knocked out of my hand by a gust or collision, I don't suffer whiplash and rope burn.  Steady.

How, you may be asking, is all this introspection related to Burma-Shave?

Well, I'd been holding firmly to the idea that my congregation's bazaar will happen this year on a new date the way it always has--with only my smallest contribution of effort.  Good and steady, Heidi. But when a gust of request came from the new bazaar chair for some Burma-Shave style rhyming advertisements, I was holding loosely enough to reach for that fun challenge--which is why I spent time this week writing, formatting and printing 100 pages of Burma-Shave jingles instead of writing a blog post in good time.

Here are a few of them.  Try not to think how much time I spent tracking down a Burma-Shave font (for which I then paid real money).

The peaceful roundup this week is hosted by Michelle at Today's Little Ditty.