A(nother) Year of Reading

Linda gave us our May challenge. After spinning the wheel of chance that paired us up with another Inkling, we sent off a poem and received a poem. Then, we were tasked to “Fiddle with, play with, tinker, tear-apart, be inspired or stumped by the poem.”

Here’s what Heidi sent me:

Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, 
that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.
~Mary Oliver

Golden Haystack

It’s not common, it’s not every 
day 
I come across words in which I 
see 
sparks or 
hear 
a sounding something
that 
opens the locked box of a poem. This one more 
or 
less demands that I pry at buried boxes, more or less 
kills 
me. 
This year delight will not stay with 
me.  I can see it, hear it, feel the gauze of delight 
that 
surrounds me; I try to hold it but it leaves 
me 
like a pin dropping, like a coin rolling, like 
a 
sharp momentary needle 
in 
my arm. I am vaccinated against joy. I search the 
haystack 
daily for shine, ordinary evening stealing the keys of 
light. 

Heidi Mordhorst 2021

Is that not the most perfect encapsulation of what The COVID Year was like? How our creativity was muffled and elusive?

I chose to respond to Heidi’s Haystack with some hay bales (a bit like last week’s pebbles), created from handfuls of straw, first from her poem, and then from the Mary Oliver quote.

Golden Hay Bales

There will always be this –
even in a year
devoid of delight,
when hope will
hide its face behind a mask, not
letting me remember to cup my hand around its flame – I can stay 
as malleable as the candle with 
wax dripping, flowing, creating a new me.

.

a loaded paintbrush, a sharpened pencil, a
threaded needle –
all poised in
the hand of the
maker – her thoughts a loosely massed haystack
of
hope, an undulation of light.

.

Stymied by introspective search,
brushing off the
chaff from life’s haystack 
of daily
human indignities, I head for
the garden and its abundance of hopeful shine.

.

Like a crowd bearing purple-flamed torches, every
iris in the bed is poised to bloom. Any day
now I 
will wake to see
the torches flaring open like firework explosions or
a hopeful chorus of purple joy I can and yet cannot hear.

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2024

.

It wasn’t until I had finished writing that I saw how light and hope are the twine that holds my bales together.

What a fun challenge! Thank you, Linda. Thank you, Heidi.

Here’s how the rest of the Inklings met Linda’s challenge:

Linda @A Word Edgewise
Catherine @Reading to the Core
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Molly @Nix the Comfort Zone
Margaret @Reflections on the Teche

Buffy Silverman has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup. And because I had a small brain lapse when I put out the call for roundup hosts last December, leaving off June, here is the call for roundup hosts June – December 2024.

The hay bale image is from Wikimedia Commons. (Do you know how hard it is to find pictures of old-school rectangular hay bales? They’re all round now!

* * *

Edited on Thursday evening to add…a bunch of the torches have flared open. I wish this photo had smell-o-vision!

* * *

all those years
walking in early-morning dark —
does Orion miss me?

* * *

I tend the trillium —
oak’s companions since forest-time —
do they know me?

* * *

insect on the car —
we’ve never met before now —
did you choose me?

* * *

leaf-footed bug —
Leptoglossus oppositus —
what name do you call yourself?

* * *

full moon wakes me —
my face, briefly bathed in moonbeams —
do iris buds feel it, too?

(c) draft, Mary Lee Hahn, 2024

.

The Poetry Sisters’ challenge for this month was inspired by Rebecca Kai Dotlich and Georgia Heard’s, Welcome to the Wonder House. Our mission was to write about “unanswerable questions.” And though life seems often to be one unanswerable question (or unfathomable event) after another, I found it INCREDIBLY hard to write to this prompt. Luckily, Jane Hirschfield was able to offer assistance. In her new book, The Asking, she has several collections of small poems she calls “pebbles.” I’ve found these “pebbles” in several sections of the book, and it must have been more than coincidence that when I turned the page for today’s reading, there was [THIRTEEN PEBBLES]. Thank you, Jane.

Here’s what the rest of the Poetry Sisters are wondering about:

Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon
Tricia @ The Miss Rumphius Effect
Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas
Sara @ Read Write Believe

Ruth has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at There is no such thing as a God-forsaken town.

The image is via Unsplash.

I was as mesmerized by the story of this unlikely hero as many New Yorkers were. And I was as devastated by his death. The necropsy report was recently released, showing that he had high levels of rat poison in his system, along with a severe pigeon virus. Both of which likely contributed to his demise.

Is the vandal who slashed open Flaco’s enclosure at the zoo responsible for his death, or for his incredible final year of life? Would as many people have pondered the importance of The Wild if Flaco had remained in his cage? How can we refocus this attention on the plight of a single bird and help people to understand the cataclysmic extinctions of entire species every. single. day. (up to 150 species per day, according to some estimates)?

Maybe the human brain is incapable of wrapping itself around the big picture, and the best we can do is to love and care for The Wild in our own yard, neighborhood, and city. On that note, I’m going to go check to see if the milkweed in my garden has poked its head up yet. Maybe this summer, I will have monarchs again. If not, I will have done my best for them.

Here’s how the rest of the Poetry Sisters met the challenge of a pantoum to, about, or including an animal:

Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon
Tricia @ The Miss Rumphius Effect
Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas
Sara @ Read Write Believe

Tricia has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at The Miss Rumphius Effect.