Kevin's Meandering Mind | Archives | 2021 | January

When Conversations Turn (in)To Poetry

Date January 7, 2021

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“An Australian Landscape” by sachman75 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

It’s no surprise that my good friend from Australia, Wendy, would share out an amazing book connecting various kinds of writing to the Australian landscape, history and social fabric, called Reading the Landscape. Which she did, on Twitter, and which I tried to get here in the US via library system but to no avail — the title is a regional publication. She and I chatted about the book a bit in Tweets.

Then, Wendy wrote and shared a poem — Read the Land — that I really loved after reading it at her blog site, and I started to consider a poetic response (as some of us in CLMOOC are often apt to do). Riffing a poem off the lines of someone else is something I consider to be a complement (I’ve written about this before).

Here is what I wrote as poetic response to Wendy:

It might be that your teeth
touch dirt, that your tongue
might hurt, that your body
could cry out for a quick escape

But when a writer shares a verse
of the wide open landscape,
their poem becomes water,
and our thirst, slaked

I struggled over that last line — the rhythm is intentionally off and the rhyme, false — so I was happy when Wendy noticed and noted in appreciation how I used “slaked” as the final word. I wasn’t sure it really worked until she commented on it.

Peace (poems on the distant line),
Kevin

Borrowed Lines: Poems Inspired by Vesper Flights

Date January 6, 2021

Posted by dogtrax

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“bird flight” by suncana is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Reading Helen MacDonald’s essays in her book Vesper Flights inspired some of my morning poetry writing the last few weeks. Here are the poems that took flight from her words of birds, animals, nature and the world …

(inspired by High-Rise)

Above us;
insects in flight,
riding jet-streams
and wind eddies

while birds of prey,
always at the ready,
dive through night;

the sky teems
with life

(inspired by In Spight of Prisons)

Walk with me, awhile,
won’t you, and let us
wander into words …

Needless screens;
for if these diodes
of light and neon
beacons released us,
we’d see the sky,
not as pins, but as
remembered night

She doesn’t fly;
she only sings,
glitching her songs
to those who are
listening

It’s our own stories
that may yet save
us, the midnight
wanderer who recalls
lightning bugs and
glow-worms, the way
stars floating just above
this fleeting Earth
shimmered in mystery

We’re all mad,
scientists now,
pulling magic
into glass prisons,
dipping nature into tonic,
writing with wonder
of how the world
carries on, always,
even without us

”… the song continues, and the air around us is full of invisible wings.” — from Eulogy

Some things
get let go:

like falcons
at night, in
flight

like friends,
last breath, near
death

no longer mere
witness, listen:
invisible wings
flicker forgiveness

”… and then all at once, as if summoned by a call or a bell, they rise higher and higher and disappear from view.” – from Vesper Flights

Some mornings feel
like scattered words
on the wind

just sounds, we steal,
with hope a poem
might begin

to take shape, in sky,
like the fluttering flight
and soft wing

of evening swifts; we glide
through borders of unseen
so we may sing

“There would be no escaping the deep sea from the shore.” — from Dispatches from the Valley

for what are we but broken shells,
battered by waves and currents
and the moon’s luminescent glow

Safe haven may not be this beach,
not this sand, neither these dunes,
but somewhere in the ears of us

all listening, if we can, in tune to
the world

Peace (flying free),
Kevin

Slice of Life: Goals for the New Year

Date January 5, 2021

Posted by dogtrax

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(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write on Tuesdays about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)

With my students back in the building in our Hybrid/Cohort model, we spent some time yesterday morning after the Winter Break charting out some goals and aspirations we have for the new year.

Sharing our writing was a way to connect after a few weeks on vacation and a few weeks in Remote Learning, and as always, I shared out my own goals with the kids, too.

For many of us, the Pandemic was a common theme (mostly, to be done with it in some way or another). I guess that would be a common theme everywhere these days.

Peace (aspiring towards it),
Kevin

Book Review: Vesper Flights

Date January 4, 2021

Posted by dogtrax

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I know very little of birds, so reading Helen MacDonald’s Vesper Flights (like her last book, H Is For Hawk) is like entering an unknown forest and paying attention to the world. Her writing is a tour guide, and with this collection of essays, MacDonald continues to spin literary magic — bringing the reader closer to the ground and closer to air, to notice the animals and the landscape in different ways.

Vesper Flights also provides MacDonald a chance to anchor her own personal experiences, from childhood to adulthood, with her curiosities that make her writing so exquisite to read and to absorb, with beautiful prose lines in every piece.

Her overall message, although one that she does not hammer you over the head with, is how climate change and people are changing the environmental landscapes, and that animals are changing, too, either by disappearing or relocating or dying off. She writes with intent, reminding us all of our obligations as fellow passengers in this world of wonder that other living creatures are here, too, sharing this space with us.

The essays in Vesper Flights are a crash course in varieties of birds (more names than I could ever remember) but also in our shared humanity. The stories of the wild always intersect with our own, MacDonald suggests, and we best pay attention to it.

Peace (in flight),
Kevin