Month: April 2023

A slice of memoir poetry: Island gift

/ Fran Haley / 12 Comments

National Poetry Month is winding down, and while I haven’t posted each day here on the blog, I’ve written a poem every day in April for VerseLove on Ethical ELA.

April 22nd was Earth Day. Host Emily Cohn invited poets to “remember an island: real, fictional, ancestral, or otherwise… Imagine or describe a world there.”

I have a favorite childhood memory about an island. I wrote a post about it seven years ago (Breakfast Island); this week I returned to it and condensed it into a poem.

Two takeaways: 1) Rewriting IS writing and 2) Less is more. I find the original post far too wordy now.

Here’s the revision.

*******

Island Gift

On a chilly gray dawn
my family piles into 
my uncle’s motorboat

we are all together
speeding over the Severn 

the grown-ups have decided
it would be fun to have 
breakfast on the beach

my uncle knows just the place
a little island where people
sometimes stop off

I shiver in the lifejacket
until my teeth chatter

I am starving 
how long
is this going to take?

turns out the island
is only a mound of sand
with a bit of scraggly brush
In the middle

I walk the entire edge of it
while the grown-ups
are building the fire

the sun is up, golden,
warming my cold skin

the gray Severn
is now sparking blue

What is this island’s name?
I ask my uncle
as sausage links begin sizzling
in a pan

It doesn’t have one
 
I have never heard of a place
not having a name

Why don’t the owners name it?
 
No one really owns this island…
it’s just a small place,
here in the river
 
I don’t know why
this makes me want
to cry

my uncle, turning the sausages,
squints up at me:
what is the matter?
 
It should belong to somebody
 
You’re right. I think
it should be you. 
Congratulations!
You now own an island
 
my heart beats fast
because I know, right now,
that I want this island
to be mine forever
but

Do I have to pay for it?
 
my uncle laughs loud and long

(I will remember this
when the family
isn’t a family
anymore)

Since there’s no other owner
it’s free

someone is frying apples
the aroma rises
like incense from an altar
in thin blue smoke
vanishing in the breeze

I tell the island I love it

it whispers 
that it loves me back

and I know
for this one morning
that I am the richest person
on Earth

I own an island

and it’s free


Photo: Paul VanDerWerf. CC BY

*******

thanks to Emily Cohn for the island invitation on VerseLove at Ethical ELA

an to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life sharing-place

For my finch followers: hatching

/ Fran Haley / 14 Comments

When death
is all around
be still, listen
to the sound
of birds

to hopes lost
and found

here in the song
life and grace
abound


Backstory: House finches return year after year to build nests on my front door wreath. Every spring and summer, my porch becomes a bird sanctuary and nursery; I, a present but uninvolved custodian, watch it all unfolding from the periphery. This winter the little finch pair actually roosted in the wreath at night. That is a first. I imagined them nestled together in the grapevine, keeping each other warm, dreaming dreams of life to come. They started awfully early this season, building their nest in the wreath and laying at least four eggs before the last week of February. It was still cold. March arrived with gusting winds and sustained freezing temperatures; I worried about the tiny life on my door. During winter’s only snow this year, well before before spring officially arrived, the baby finches hatched. Because of the cold, I stayed away; I didn’t want to startle Mama Finch, who needed to be on the nest keeping her babies warm. I saw the hatchlings when they were a day or two old and didn’t check again for about three weeks…expecting they had fledged and possibly gone, as the happy singing and trilling bird-talk at my door had ceased. When I came around to check the nest, I found one fledgling dead, its little head drooped over the front of the nest, and another beautiful fledgling, so tiny, with such perfect little wings, enmeshed with the nest at the back—almost becoming part of the nest. This is another first: in all these generations of finches I’ve not known any babies to die. In fact, they usually stay in the nest after they can fly, seemingly unwilling to leave. I marvel at how they can still stuff themselves into it. Home sweet home…until now. Not wanting to leave the dead baby finches and fearing there were parasites or some disease in the nest, I removed the babies, placed them deep in a bed of leaves by the woods out back, and destroyed the old nest.

It broke my heart.

The parents must have been watching me…I read that birds mourn for their little lost ones.

They began rebuilding immediately. With urgency, Soon there was a perfect green nest artistically adorned with a long gray feather from some other bird, lined with layers of the softest, whitest fluff —wherever do they find this? And a week before Easter there were five—five!—new eggs.

They began hatching yesterday. I’ve been keeping close watch…and this is the first time I’ve caught a glimpse (just the very quickest glimpse) of a finch actually hatching.

The poem at the opening was inspired by one shared for VerseLove on Ethical ELA yesterday, coinciding with the hatching of these finch eggs: Why Do You Write Poems When Death is All Around Us?

The answer, for me, is a matter of awe: Life is all around, somehow overcoming, even singing at the door.

*******

with thanks to Andy Schoenborn for sharing Kyle “Guante” Tran Myhre’s poem yesterday
and Two Writing Teachers for the weekly Slice of Life story sharing-place

and to the finches
for infusing my days
with so much awe
hope
and notes
of joy


Poetry: keeping the channel open

/ Fran Haley / 2 Comments

For VerseLove on Ethical ELA this week, host Margaret Simon shared this quote from dancer Martha Graham (on The Marginalian):

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware of the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.”

Margaret invited poet-participants to free-write for ten minutes and “just flow.” She shared a poem she composed in her Notes app while walking, along with this encouragement to keep going: “Mary Oliver says ‘You do not have to be good’ in her poem ‘Wild Geese’…accept what comes and be open to it. We all have an energy inside us waiting to be released in some creative way… Forget the rules today and flow, flow, flow.”

In keeping the channel open…here is where my mind went first.

Gifts from the Limbic Sea

Before it is quite morning
the otherworld of dreams
begins to recede
the hippocampus
swimming in its own sea
of memory
is unable to hold onto
the waving grasses
ever how beautiful
or important these
may be 

Try, I tell my twin seahorses
before I am quite awake
I would tighten
the ethereal reins
but I know I am
only dreaming

my hands cannot grasp
anything solid
images dissolve into foam
all I can feel
is a gentle current
ebbing away

or maybe 
that strange and bright
otherworld remains
and I am what transitions
from there to here
borne away on 
mystical tides 
back to reality

and so I rise 
in the darkness
before it is quite morning
to find my journal

and write
before the hippocampus
shakes off 
the remaining residue

it’s not much
this grasping
but I do it
because
these last particles
of dream-dust
preserved on the page
mean something

and they 
are mine

Hippocampus coronal sections. Danielsabinasz. CC BY-SA 4.0

‘Hippocampus’ by The Black Apple. Halogen Gallery. CC BY-SA 2.0

Found story-poem

/ Fran Haley / 2 Comments

On Ethical ELA this week, host Dave Wooley invited VerseLove participants to compose blackout poems: “Find a piece of writing that you want to use as a source, grab a black sharpie and start redacting. The words that are left will be your poem.”

Basically, a blackout is a found poem, with chosen words and phrases remaining in original order. Examples can be found here: How-To Blackout Poetry.

Great! I thought. This will be easy.

It was not.

The problem: First thing that came to mind was a new poem that completely awes me…

Amy Nemecek, The Language of the Birds, 2022.

I started blacking out lines and stopped, because a thing happened.

I just couldn’t reduce this stunning poem. It felt like…desecration.

Instead, I lifted a few words out that especially sang to me. They brought with them their own images, forming something new and other.

Thus was my “found-story haiku” born (not sure if that’s even a thing… I guess it is now):

History of Ideas

from firelight, a spark
illumination flaring
then dying in dust

from the river, song
improvisational joy
free and beckoning

from the silhouette
of trees against starlit sky
infinite longing

from the heart crying
against its impermanence
a reliquary

from calloused fingers
a hieroglyph on a wall
before papyrus

from the weightless bones
a shell of structure is formed
the embryo stirs

out of the static
spark, song, longing are harnessed
the fragile thing lives

For the record: I finished blacking to reveal the words I pulled, although this in itself is not a blackout poem.

It is my seed-bed of ideas.

Science poem: Existential Dance

/ Fran Haley / 5 Comments

For Monday’s VerseLove on Ethical ELA, host Brittany Saulnier extended this invitation: “Today, write a poem inspired by science and perhaps, whimsy…The challenge is to ensure the reader can simultaneously glimpse the scientific concept you were inspired by and a universal truth.”

As always, my thoughts turn to nature. It is always teaching; are we heeding its lessons? Nature’s messages don’t come on words but from its own rhythms and coding. I write much of birds. It is said that they are they last living dinosaurs. Maybe even now they are the impetus, in their always-inspirational way, for my digging deep to see what I might find…

Existential Dance

sea and earth
earth and sea
complicated
choreography

streams of movement
building higher
freeform deposits
wetter, drier

life rising, falling
layer on layer
it’s all timing, timing,
the dragon-slayer

everything alive
to remain, must eat
until nothing remains
but remains under feet 

strata with volumes 
lined on a shelf
stories kept secret
unto itself

sea and earth
earth and sea
consolidated
choreography

streams of movement
releasing the store
freeform deposits
washing ashore

when miners come
millennia later
scratching their heads
no translator

for what they’re seeing
drawn from the earth
looking for phosphate
to be stunned by girth

of ancient teeth
from a creature long gone
scientific name:

Megalodon

(meaning “big tooth”)
—what great irony
this turns out to be
last laugh of earth and sea

monster-shark teeth
unearthed in a way
with a side effect:
workers’ tooth decay

everything alive
to remain, must eat
until nothing remains
but remnants…of teeth

sea and earth
earth and sea
conspiratorial
choreography

Carcharocles Megalodon Tooth. 5.4 inches long, 4.4 inches wide.
Excavated from Lee Creek Mine, Aurora, North Carolina, USA.
Public domain.

My grandparents lived on the outskirts of tiny Aurora, North Carolina, home to the largest phosphate mining and chemical plant in the world (miningtechnology.com archive). In the 1970s, prior to the establishment of the Aurora Fossil Museum, “rejects” or unwanted gravel material from mines were scattered on the many dirt roads around the area. As a child I walked in these rejects along the old dirt road by my grandparents’ home, finding bits of coral skeleton, shark’s teeth, possibly some Megalodon teeth, and fossilized eardrums and vertebrae of log-extinct creatures. Now visitors can dig through this material in the fossil pits at the Museum, which will host its annual Fossil Festival May 26-29.

The April 2023 edition of Our State Magazine contains an article by Katie Schanze about Aurora and its fossils: the area “produces the most prolific fossil record of Miocene (2.3 million to 5.3 million years ago) and Pliocene (5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago) marine life on the Atlantic coast.”

It was by chance that I stumbled across references elsewhere stating that one of the detrimental effects of phosphate mining is tooth decay from prolonged exposure to fumes of chemicals used in the process. What irony, I thought, tooth decay caused by mining something used as fertilizer to grow food, while simultaneously finding preserved teeth of one of the mightiest sea predators ever to have lived…which likely went extinct due to loss of food.

*******

with thanks to Brittany Saulnier for the poetic inspiration on Ethical ELA
and to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge
and Our State: Celebrating North Carolina, Vol. 90, No. 11

For my finch followers: returning thanks

/ Fran Haley / 2 Comments

Dear Delivery People:

Thank you
for respecting
my taped-up signs
that say stay away 
from the front porch
it’s a bird sanctuary again
the house finches nested early
on the door wreath I left for them
Mama laid four tiny eggs in blue cold
mohawked nestlings hatched in a snowfall
by mid-March I thought the fledglings
had all flown, for there was no more
happy chatter-song at the door 
and when I checked I found
two perfectly beautiful
fledglings dead
in the nest

how 
why
what
happened
here

I placed them together 
in a deep pile of dry leaves 
at wood’s edge because birds
do not bury their dead
they are creatures
of the air

I tore down
the death-nest
and my taped-up signs

and read online
that birds grieve
the death of
their young

the next day
blades of green grass
appeared on the wreath
where the nest had been

the day after that, more
grass and flowered strands

scientists say that only
the mother finch builds
the nest but I am here
to tell you that the father
worked just as hard

in tandem they flew
with string and fluff
in their beaks
chattering their
architectural plans

in five days,
recreating 
what was lost

and now
in the most
exquisitely-lined nest
I’ve ever seen

there are new blue eggs

exactly
two

so thank you,
Delivery People
for reading my
freshly-taped signs

this
is a sacred
little space
where miracles
of nature
take place

*******
with thanks to b.c. randall for today’s VerseLove invitation on Ethical ELA:

“Write today’s  poem for someone else: the boy who bags your groceries, the neighbor who walks by your front window every day, that colleague or friend who has been on your mind. Craft the poem  to be left for another to unwrap (a gift that we all need).”

For my finch followers: New beginning

/ Fran Haley / 1 Comment

The nest is finished
for new life to begin there
this bright Sunday morn

*******

Backstory/timeline:

March 1: Auspices – discovery of an unusually early nest and eggs laid in February (with photo)

March 5: Eavesdropping – audio of the parent finches’ joyous chatter

March 14: Nestlings – likely hatched during a snowfall (with photo)

March 27: Finch elegy – sad discovery

March 28: Finch fortitude – beginning anew, so quickly (with video of the parents)

March 29: Blessing – the gift of carrying on (with photo)

March 31: For my finch followers – Day 4 of nest rebuilding, softly and tenderly (with photo)

Haibun poem: Breath

/ Fran Haley / Leave a comment

On the first day of National Poetry Month, Glenda Funk kicks off VerseLove at Ethical ELA with haibun poetry writing:

“Haibun originated in Japan and combines prose and haiku. Haibun can feature many genre forms, including narrative, biography, diary, essay, prose poem, travel journal, etc. The prose section comes first and is followed by the haiku, which an article on Poets.org describes as ‘a whispery and insightful postscript’…

Compose a poem juxtaposing ideas about rest with the haibun form…I’ve noticed the economy of words in the haibun and believe this is achieved by omitting as many being verbs (and dare I say adjectives) as possible.”

I have never written haibun before.

I do not know why the image of the child struggling to breathe in the night came to mind, but she did.

More on that after the verse…

Breath

Night takes the stage like a magician bent on harm, draping the child in her bed with a velvet cape intended to suffocate. Ghost-hands press theme music from her lungs, just pipes and whistles, an accordion straining, straining to get enough air in and out. Carnival music distortion, chorusing with the machine at the bedside rattling and spewing steam. It doesn’t help. The child craves release. Air. Sleep. Please. Please…she wriggles against the ghost-hands, piling her pillows, drawing her knees to her chest underneath her, not knowing this is how she slept as a baby. Not knowing she’s a victim of in-betweenness, planted in a time before widespread use of inhalers and eras beyond physicians prescribing the remedy (for adults, anyway) of smoking jimsonweed. Nightshade. The magician’s sleight of hand, again. In the fog-filled room, moisture trickling down the walls, she’s akin to the bald cypress in the bog, relying on knees to —stabilize? —to breathe? She does not know that even trees rest at night (measure the droop of their branches; see it restored at morning). Like trees repatriating nutrients before winter, turning their fragile leaves loose, she knows she has one hope for staving off ruination. Her knees. In this pocket, the ghost-hands lose their grip; the magician is undone. The velvet cape slips away. 

Sleep repairs the brain
but there would be no breathing
at all, without trees

#Repost @_sunkissed_gal_ ・・・
The trees are our lungs, the rivers our circulation, the air our breath, and the earth our body. — Deepak Chopra.
Sterling College. CC BY 2.0.

—I was the child, suffering with asthma.