Nomad Heart

Dan McCarthy

Nomad Heart

for Kevin Page


Sometimes looking to the cold wintry stars

you can feel the planet move as it whirls

in the flux of the galaxy, the whole

path of the milky way buzzing like a hive.


They say it’s better to journey than arrive—

halting being the usual rigmarole

of move-along-shift. Sometimes the soul

just craves a place to rest, safe from earthly wars.


The city lights come on in twos and threes

and leaves are freezing hard in mucky pools,

cars are stuck in jams or droning home.


If we’re not brought to our knees, we’ll fall to our knees

in thanks, in praise, in trust, in hope—the rule

of law mapped clear on heaven’s ample dome.



Paula Meehan,  fr."Painting Rain"

 

 

Meehan's description of looking up at the stars  - did you recognize how she felt? This is the thing about poetry, it shows us the things that flow between us, strangers, friends, enemies. How many of us have looked up at the night sky, and thought we felt the earth moving in its orbit, saw the stars and the more we looked, the more we saw? How small, how small we feel! And yet, we have our part. Our place. We, stars and cars, cities and planets, moving together on a journey - through time and space  - to where? To what end? And is it really better to journey than to arrive? "If we're not brought to our knees, we'll fall to our knees..." Is that true? Are you thankful, hopeful, full of praise? Should you be? Is there "a rule of law mapped clear on heaven's ample dome"? Is there order and purpose and destination? What are the stars saying?

 

 

Music

Henri Fantin-Latour

Music



It must be somewhere, the original harmony,

somewhere in great nature, hidden.

Is it in the furious infinite,

in distant stars’ orbits,

is it in the sun’s scorn,

in a tiny flower, in treegossip,

in heartmusic’s mothersong

or in tears?

It must be somewhere, immortality,

somewhere the original harmony must be found:

how else could it infuse

the human soul,


that music?

 

Juhan Liiv

Translated from the Estonian by H.L. Hix & Jüri Talvet 

 

Somewhere. The original music. The sound that all of us dream in. The song that all of us find ourselves within. Singing, dancing, moving, and we resist or surrender to it. Where is it? This original music, this rhythm that persists in spite of our anger, in spite of our lostness. "The furious infinite". Yes. How could it not be so?  An anger that resists Untruth and Less than Right and Not Quite Beautiful. "It Must Be Somewhere".

Somewhere.

"How else could it/infuse the the human soul"?

Indeed. How?




 

Fall, Leaves, Fall

Eliot Hodgkin

Fall, Leaves, Fall

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;

Lengthen night and shorten day;

Every leaf speaks bliss to me

Fluttering from the autumn tree.

I shall smile when wreaths of snow

Blossom where the rose should grow;

I shall sing when night’s decay

Ushers in a drearier day.

Emily Dickinson

What a departure from the expected, to encourage the leaves to fall, to impatiently wave flowers away! Miss Dickinson has an independent, contrary mind. When we bemoan the seasonal change, she cheers it on. Urging the darkness to come, she actually anticipates the shorter days. And that amazing line, "Every leaf speaks bliss to me/Fluttering from the autumn tree." Well, I can see that. Today especially is one of those where the sun has backlit the trees, so that the gold and scarlet and orange flame up, and seem incandescent with light, with an inner fervour. I love summer, but summer doesn't burn and blaze like autumn. Autumn is alive with fire, with a combusting, consuming energy. And each detail, each leaf, is individual in its change. Each its own work of art; it's own palette of colour and pattern of splotched decay. I can see that this is a kind of bliss. And the poem goes further, speaks of snow as a wreath and a blossom, and I can't disagree with that either. Snow is gorgeous. A white, untouched field of snow is a kind of heaven. The millionfold sparkle that reminds us of diamonds or stars - and the knowledge that each flake is utterly its own self, its own shape, and unique from all others - I agree, this is a wonder. Why would I not look forward with expectation to all these?! But then she says the strangest thing, she says (as if it were the culmination after a long period of waiting), that at the dawn of a grey and dreary day, "I shall sing."

I shall sing!!

Really? Hmmm. And then I think, well, yes, like the leaves speaking bliss to her in their falling and dying, the poet also sings (to herself, to us, to all who listen) in the dreariness, the greyness of life, because she herself is fervent with colour and fire, because she is blazing. Because she too has a leaf-like beauty, a beauty deepened over many seasons of growth and decline, the colours of victories and loss, and she has something to look back on and something to look forward to. She has something to sing about. (And for.)

My gosh, is it possible that we do too?

Who Shall Deliver Me?

Kai Samuel Davis

\

Who Shall Deliver Me?

God strengthen me to bear myself;

That heaviest weight of all to bear,

Inalienable weight of care.

All others are outside myself;

I lock my door and bar them out

The turmoil, tedium, gad-about.

I lock my door upon myself,

And bar them out; but who shall wall

Self from myself, most loathed of all?

If I could once lay down myself,

And start self-purged upon the race

That all must run ! Death runs apace.

If I could set aside myself,

And start with lightened heart upon

The road by all men overgone!

God harden me against myself,

This coward with pathetic voice

Who craves for ease and rest and joys:

Myself, arch-traitor to myself ;

My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe,

My clog whatever road I go.

Yet One there is can curb myself,

Can roll the strangling load from me

Break off the yoke and set me free.

Christina Rossetti 

In spite of the regard I’m supposed to feel for myself, I am acutely aware of the weight of this “selfness”. It's cumbersome.  “ God strengthen me to bear myself”, if those aren’t honest words, I don’t know what are. Like the speaker of the poem, I can hold others off, barricade them out, wall off from the rest of the world; but inside that fortress is still the ever-present enemy. "If I could set aside myself, And start with lightened heart..." Yes, if only I could do that. How to break out of this inward-looking circle, this snake-biting-its-tail, this whirlpool of self-centredness that pulls me down and down. How? I'm not saying that it's bad to be me, I'm saying that it's miserable being stuck with me, being tied to being me, being tethered to this me-pole. Hardly any space to move, and no scope for expansion. What I'd like is to be able to let myself go. Cut the rope, open the door and let myself out. Like the speaker in the poem, there is only One I know who can help, who splits the snakeskin and allows me to breathe deep. But even so, Self tightens around me gradually, closes in, sits on my chest, and I'm back crying for a deliverer. It's a continuing process. However, each time I have grown, I have strengthened somewhat, I have stretched beyond the former boundaries. I am no longer the same. One day I hope for a full transformation, but for now, I'll have to take it one inch at a time.

 

 

Leaves

Kaii Higashiyama

Leaves

The winds that blow -

  ask them, which leaf of the tree

   will be next to go?

Soseki

Yesterday I was driving down a mapled street as a gust of wind kicked up. Suddenly I was in a storm of swirling, flaming leaves. They struck at the windshield from all directions, skidded across the road in front of me, made little leaf-cyclones along the avenue. It gave me the sense of an event, as if on my way home I had come upon a street festival or a riot, people laughing and crowding, pushing me along, jostling me in their enthusiasm. When the wind died down, it was as if something had happened to me. I was unsettled, elated. Coming around the corner I had caught a glimpse of a drama unfolding; as if I were a character walking into a scene of a story I had not known I was part of.

October

Rick Stevens

October

The green elm with the one great bough of gold

Lets leaves into the grass slip, one by one, --

The short hill grass, the mushrooms small milk-white,

Harebell and scabious and tormentil,

That blackberry and gorse, in dew and sun,

Bow down to; and the wind travels too light

To shake the fallen birch leaves from the fern;

The gossamers wander at their own will.

At heavier steps than birds' the squirrels scold.

The rich scene has grown fresh again and new

As Spring and to the touch is not more cool

Than it is warm to the gaze; and now I might

As happy be as earth is beautiful,

Were I some other or with earth could turn

In alternation of violet and rose,

Harebell and snowdrop, at their season due,

And gorse that has no time not to be gay.

But if this be not happiness, -- who knows?

Some day I shall think this a happy day,

And this mood by the name of melancholy

Shall no more blackened and obscured be.

Edward Thomas

I wonder how long the image of the elm tree waited in Edward's mind until it finally broke out in poetry. How many moments stay with us and we have no idea why? And do these images/moments/scenes silently germinate within us over time?

“Some day I shall think this a happy day,

And this mood by the name of melancholy,

Shall no more blackened and obscured be.”

Those lines impress me. The speaker is melancholy, he doesn’t say why, and I like that too – (how often do we understand exactly why a feeling overtakes us?) but there is also this green elm with one great bough of gold. It’s enough to give him hope that he will feel different one day, better – perhaps even happy. 


 

Words

Carl Spitzweg

Words

Words are my instruments but not my servants;  

by the white pillar of a prince I lie in wait 

for them. In what the hour or the minute invents, 

in a web formally meshed or inchoate, 

these fritillaries are come upon, trapped:  

hot-coloured, or the cold scarabs a thousand years 

old, found in cerements and unwrapped.  

The catch and the ways of catching are diverse.  

For instance this stooping man, the bones of whose face are like

the hollow birds' bones, is a trap for words.  

And the pockmarked house bleached by the glare 

whose insides war has dried out like gourds  

attracts words. There are those who capture them  

in hundreds, keep them prisoners in black  

bottles, release them at exercise and clap them back.  

But I keep words only a breath of time 

turning in the lightest of cages - uncover  

and let them go: sometimes they escape for ever.

Keith Douglas

“The catch and the ways of catching are diverse.” Golly. It’s taking everything in me not to gush over this poem.

 It’s freakin’ fantastic.