What The Tree Remembers

 

Stumps  cut down in their youth

line the ditch. Roots full of life

 

with a reach wider

than their whacked-off crowns

 

cut off at the knees

        (can you feel it?)

now have nothing to feed.

 

The parked bulldozer

        (can you smell it?)

with its claws in the dirt

 

is poised to make smooth

the way of man.

 

But wait.

        (look closely)

Saplings spring stubbornly

 

from stumps left alone.

The tree remembers.

Written for What's Going On Blog which challenges us this week to see both the dark and light in a world abounding with both and find a balance. Showing, somehow, the beauty and hope in a world that often feels dismal and divisive; with highlights to poems by Mary Oliver and Deena Metzger who do this all the time in their amazing poetry.

Writers On Writing

As we close the door on 2019 with high hopes for the new decade, I thought I'd share some of my favorite quotes from poets and writers, from Mary Oliver to Elmore Leonard. Good luck with your writing and Happy New Year!

“Imagination is better than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

 -Mary Oliver

  "Why say very beautiful? Beautiful is enough," said James Joyce, hardly a miser when it came to words.

"A  writer must take infinite pains-if he writes only one great story in his life, that is better than writing a hundred bad ones-and that finally the pains the writer takes must be his own."
 - John Gardner

"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write."
  -Saul Bellow

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
― Mary Oliver

"If you’re doing your job, the reader feels what you felt. You don’t have to tell the reader how to feel. No one likes to be told how to feel about something. And if you doubt that, just go ahead. Try and tell someone how to feel."

 -    author unknown
Or..
     As Elmore Leonard said, "the reader  either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care."

"Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life."
  - Barbara Kingsolver

 "The true novelist is the one who doesn't quit, though the rigors of novel-writing generally bring no profit except to the spirit. For those who are  authentically called to the profession, spiritual profits are enough."
   -John Gardner

And, finally, the one that haunts me in the dead of night when sleep eludes me:

"What do you plan to do with your one, wild precious life?"
   -Mary Oliver

The Wake

I met a man at a wake who knows

the highest point in the Great Lakes Basin

is a bluff where water drops nine hundred feet

to the untrespassed river bottom,

where the remains of the last wolverine were found

and where wolves crossed.

Others eat shrimp, drink wine and toast the deceased

and don’t know they don’t know

I’m pinned in place like a butterfly in a classroom

while he takes me into the forest to listen for loons.

I met this man who goes to Isle Royale for the silence

not for the call of the wolf

because in spite of what some say,

they might not be there anymore.

A man who pays attention to words

like a craftsman to the tile cutter slicing through water.

When I talk I feel his eyes

listening, listening.

And I want to go on and on about something

so he'll keep looking, and looking.

Was it the sound of water falling

or the warble of a water bird that infected

his story of kayaking on Lake Superior in a storm?

The cry of the loon is interrupted

by the clap of the skeet outside the yacht club.

They punctuate our conversation like a grammarian.

Shooters send their targets flying across the water

with no mind to the wake inside. Life goes on.

You only ever hit what you aim at.

The first time you hear a loon, you know what it is,

like the first time you meet someone

who could draw a map on a napkin you would follow,
but only the loon in lonely decibel can take you there.


Linked also to The Garden's Tuesday Platform 
as we remember Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize winning poet who recently died. From my favorite poem of hers  The Summer Day:  "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"