Miracles

Laura Thomas

Miracles


Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim-the rocks-the motion of the waves-the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?


Walt Whitman

 

Whitman is right. Miracles are common as dirt. Everywhere we look – can we explain the things we see, the normal, everyday things – a glass of water! Think of the mysteries in a glass of water alone – what is the water made of ? How has it come to be in the glass? Where has it been? And the glass – we may think we know what it's made of, but how was glass first discovered? Who was it that saw what could be done with it? One question only leads to another. One fantastic thing only leads to another. And we walk through our homes, through our streets, through forests, along beaches and streams – surrounded, innundated, swirled within an expanding crescendo of amazement. 

It's quite true, there is nothing I know that is not a miracle.

 

Night Sounds

Brent Cotton

Night Sounds


And now the dark comes on, all full of chitter noise.

Birds huggermugger crowd the trees,

the air thick with their vesper cries,

and bats, snub seven-pointed kites,

skitter across the lake, swing out,

squeak, chirp, dip, and skim on skates

of air, and the fat frogs wake and prink

wide-lipped, noisy as ducks, drunk

on the bloozy black, gloating chink-chunk.



And now on the narrow beach we defend ourselves from  dark.

The cooking done, we build our firework

bright and hot and less for outlook

than for magic, and lie in our blankets

while night nickers around us. Crickets

chorus hallelujahs; paws, quiet

and quick as raindrops, play on the stones

expertly soft, run past and are gone;

fish pulse in the lake; the frogs hoarsen.



Now every voice of the hour -- the known,

the supposed, the strange,

the mindless, the witted, the never seen --

sing, thrum, impinge, and rearrange

endlessly; and debarred from sleep we wait

for the birds, importantly silent,

for the crease of first eye-licking light,

for the sun, lost long ago and sweet.

By the lake, locked black away and tight,

we lie, day creatures, overhearing night.



Maxine Kumin

“And now the dark comes on”, a change takes place, mysterious nocturnal creatures invade our once familiar daylight world.  Kumin prefaces each stage with "and now", "and now", "now". It's as if we are the audience for a performance of  the night orchestra. Under cover of darkness it sings, thrums, nickers, chirps, squeaks, prinks  - and every hour has a voice, a part in the chorus. Notice how the people build their fire "less for outlook than for magic", I love that. Isn't that what we build fires for mostly while camping, or evenings in the back yard - sure, we need warmth and food and light, but we also need magic. This poem reminds me of the drama of darkness, how it gives us mystery and music and a sense of familiar things becoming strange, of the known changing form and becoming new. Sometimes we don't recognize the wonder in front of us until we observe it from a different point of view. Sometimes we need the dark to show us what we have never seen.

On the Island

Andrew Wyeth, "Starfish"

On the Island

After a night of wind we are surprised

by the light, how it flutters up from the back of the sea

and leaves us at ease. We can walk along the shore

this way or that, all day. Sit in the spiky grass

among the low whittled bushes, listening

to crickets, to the whisk of the small waves,

the rattling back of stones. “Observation,”

our Golden Nature Guide instructs, is the key to science.

Look all around you. Some beaches

may be quite barren except for things washed up.”

A buoy and a blue bottle, a lightbulb

cloudy but unbroken. For an hour

my daughter gathers trinkets, bits of good luck.

She sings the song she’s just invented:

Everybody knows when the old days come.

Although it is October, today falls into the shape

of summer, that sense of languid promise

in which we are offered another

and then another spell of flawless weather.

It is the weather of Sundays,

the weather of memory, and I can see

myself sitting on a porch looking

out at water, the discreet shores

of a lake. Three or four white pines

were enough of a mystery, how they shook

and whispered, how at night I felt them

leaning against my window, like the beginning

of a story in which children must walk

deeper and deeper into a dark forest,

and are afraid, yet calm, unaware

of the arrangements made for them to survive.

My daughter counts her shells and stones,

my wife clips bayberry from the pathway. I raise

an old pair of binoculars, follow the edge of the sky

to the lighthouse, then down into the waves as they

fold around rocks humped up out of the sea.

I can turn the wheel and blur it all

into a dazzle, the pure slips and shards of light.

“A steady push of wind,” we read in the book,

“gives water its rolling, rising and falling motion.

As the sea moves up and down, the wave itself

moves forward. As it nears the shore friction

from the bottom causes it to rise higher

until it tips forward in an arc and breaks.”

On the table in front of the house

is the day’s collection: sea-glass

and starfish, a pink claw, that blue bottle—

some to be taken home, arranged in a box,

laid on a shelf, later rediscovered, later

thrown away, casually, without regret,

and some of it, even now, to be discarded,

like the lesser stones, and the pale

chipped shells which are so alike

we can agree that saving one or two will be enough.

Lawrence Raab

 
 

“The weather of memory”. This is a poem of reflection, of looking forward, looking back, saving and discarding, life moments coming and going like waves washing in and out…  The writing seems easy and effortless, but the more times I read it, the more art I find. “Observation”. Yes, exactly. Observing the poem. Maybe the poem also is, for us, something to be found and collected together with others, taken home – certainly I am arranging them here, on a kind of shelf. Poems like reminders of thoughts, of days, poems to be treasured and displayed. That is my goal for this blog, I would say.( But one or two are not enough.)