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Ana Teresa Fernandez |
wordhoard
Poems I carry with me: A Scrapbook
Monday, 21 July 2025
Swimming After Thoughts
Monday, 7 July 2025
Through Morning Mist
Through morning mist, preceded by its moo,
The lowing cow looms slowly into view.
Issa
fr. A Net of Fireflies
translated by Harold Stewart
Thursday, 19 June 2025
Question VII
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Albrecht Durer |
At first, the questions seemed child-like and beautiful, but not particularly poetic or deep. Where is the rhythm, the wordplay, for instance? Where is the development of metaphor? But my curiosity was piqued. I read more.
I wrote about this before -( LXXII), and I still hold to those thoughts, but since then they have grown. Something else is happening in the words - something more than mere childlike wondering. For instance, in that question, "How many questions does a cat have?"
That's not naive wondering, it's questioning whether I have been wrong about the world I live in. We are very "scientific" about the things around us. We have tested things on certain levels, and have come to conclusions. But what if we got it wrong? What if we made a specific answer cover too large an area? Or too small?
What if we have skewed our vision of reality so much that we have lost the path and are now traveling down some self-invented by-way leading only into more distortion?
Neruda's question poems cracked open a treasure box for me. When I look at the cat, I see what I have been told is there, and forget that I have agency in seeing, that I need to take up my eyes and use them in a fresh way.
Science is too small explain a cat.
What I am learning is that poetry is thinking and seeing, or something that is both - seeking? (I just noticed that when I patch those two words together, "seeking" is what get.) Seeking the fuller truth of things. Seeking the possibilities. Cracking out of smallthink.
Does a cat ask questions?
Obviously.
Now what we need is a poet to hear them.
Tuesday, 10 June 2025
Nerves
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Martin Lewis |
Nerves
You have noticed the curious increased exasperation
Of human nerves these late years? Not only in Europe,
Where reasons exist, but universal; a rope or a net
Is being hauled in, a tension screwed higher;
Few minds now are quite sane; nearly every person
Seems to be listening for a crash, listening...
And wishing for it, with a kind of enraged
Sensibility.
Or is it that we really feel
A gathering in the air of something that hates
Humanity, and in that storm-light see
Ourselves with too much pity and the others too clearly?
Well, this is February, nineteen-three-nine.
We count the months now, we shall count the days.
It seems time that we find something outside our
Own nerves to lean on.
Robinson Jeffers
I read this with amazement. The date this poem was written!!
It could be describing today.
Sunday, 25 May 2025
On a Boat
Monday, 5 May 2025
The Waggon-Maker
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Carl Larsson |
The Waggon-Maker
I have made tales in verse, but this man made
Waggons of elm to last a hundred years;
The blacksmith forged the rims and iron gears,
His was the magic that the wood obeyed.
Each deft device that country wisdom bade,
Or farmers' practice needed, he preserved.
He wrought the subtle contours, straight and curved
Only by eye, and instinct of the trade.
No weakness, no offense in any part,
It stood the strain in mired fields and roads
In all a century's struggle for its bread;
Bearing, perhaps, eight thousand heavy loads,
Beautiful always as a work of art,
Homing the bride, and harvest, and men dead.
John Masefield
A perfect poem. How every word fits snug in its place! - I feel an intertwining of the writer and his subject. In his appreciation of the carpenter's craft, there is an equal echo in his own.
The way he writes, "I have made tales in verse, but this man made..." and then describes the wisdom of the woodworker and blacksmith, how they use a knowledge passed down to them through time, and with this create something useful and beautiful to last a hundred years.
That sense of Time! And wisdom passed down! And that "only by eye" and instinct! This is an artist recognizing another's artistry.
It gives me chills.
There is something gorgeous in the meeting of arts.
A recognition of the highest purposes? Beauty and Truth, or Beauty and Usefulness?
Together, they are a powerhouse, an explosion, a celebration.
I walk away from the poem wishing I had a part in that Beauty-work.
Sunday, 27 April 2025
The Thrush's Nest
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Bruno Liljefors |
The Thrush's Nest
Within a thick and spreading hawthorn bush
That overhung a molehill large and round,
I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns to sunrise, and I drank the sound
With joy; and often, an intruding guest,
I watched her secret toil from day to day -
How true she warped the moss to form a nest,
And modelled it within with wood and clay;
And by and by, like heath-bells gilt with dew,
There lay her shining eggs, as bright as flowers,
Ink-spotted over shells of greeny blue;
And there I witnessed, in the sunny hours,
A brood of nature's minstrels chirp and fly,
Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky.
John Clare
from The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin
John Clare, bird enthusiast, bird poet.
"I drank the sound with joy."
And that's the impression I get - that Clare was a man who needed nature to bring him
out of himself, to lift him up. The birds fed his soul.
I can relate.