The cat calls for her dinner. 

(This is a post about a poem, and these are some of its lines:)

On the porch I bend and pour 

brown soy stars into her bowl,

stroke her dark fur. 

No. It’s not a poem about a cat, although here at the beginning one might think it is. But with poetry– as with so much else– you have to give it a minute. Wait it out some. There’s more coming.

It’s not quite night.

Pinpricks of light in the eastern sky.

See? No more cat.

Some people don’t like poetry– or they don’t think they do.

But that’s not you, is it? You like poetry. You do. I mean, you like a party just as much as the next person. You can do loud and noisy, no problem. But you don’t judge. You like quiet people, for example. You’re willing to sit a minute and listen and then find out that the quiet person has something to say.

Poems are quiet. Mostly. And you like them.

This is a quiet poem, anyway. See:

On the Back Porch

The cat calls for her dinner.

On the porch I bend and pour 

brown soy stars into her bowl,

stroke her dark fur. 

It’s not quite night. 

Pinpricks of light in the eastern sky.

A poem, like– somewhat– a person, is an invitation to see something in a new way. And here, the poet is inviting you with her out onto her back porch. She wants to show you something.

This is just the beginning of the poem. And what– so far– does she want you to see? You can answer that: dusk. The cat and her food. The way the light leaves the sky and the stars begin to come out, those “pinpricks of light” that match, without the poet saying so, the star-shaped food she just a moment ago poured into her cat’s bowl.

She gives us more:

Above my neighbor’s roof, a transparent

moon, a pink rag of cloud. 

Ah, you say. I see, you say. Because you, too, have done this– whether or not you have a cat. You have stepped outside late in the day, when the light is going but still held there by a bit of cloud. “A rag of cloud,” she says. How apt. You have definitely seen clouds like that before. You have stepped outside late in the day, just in time to see that day fading, to know that all of it will soon be closed up in the dark.

And now, reading this poem (and because our poet is a good one), you are standing on the back porch with the poet. And with me. We are all three standing on the back porch, and we are each of us alone. Except (perhaps?) for the cat.

It’s quiet out here. The light drains away but is held by cloud, by moon. The stars are coming out.

The poet says,

Inside my house are those who love me.

This is going to be important.

Inside my house are those who love me.

My daughter dusts biscuit dough.

And there’s a man who will lift my hair 

in his hands, brush it,

until it throws sparks. 

Who is in the house behind you? Whom have you left inside? Are there people who love you and know (or don’t) that you have stepped outside for just a minute to pet the cat, say, or look at the moon? Is someone who loves you inside the house and looking at her phone or reading the paper?

Or maybe you live alone. Or with people who don’t love you. Or with people whom you don’t love. If so, it’s okay: this poem is (also) for you, because anything (everything) can be a metaphor. Stay with me. Our poet has more to say, and so do I.

Everything is just as I’ve left it.

Dinner simmers on the stove.

Glass bowls wait to be filled

with gold broth. Sprigs of parsley

on the cutting board.

“Everything is just as I’ve left it,” she says. There’s stillness here, both inside and out. We’ve seen it outside already: the cloud, the faintest stars, the moon. No sign of breeze. Even the cat has disappeared.

But inside, too, everything is just as she’s left it. And how has she left it? At the edge of ready. Her daughter makes biscuits, the soup is done. It’s time for this family’s supper, just as it was for the cat. Everything inside that house is quiet, waiting for the poet’s return.

And here you stand, I stand, on the this otherwise empty porch. The world is silent, waiting for night. And behind us, what is waiting? Who– or what– is waiting for you?

Maybe your dog waits, curled in his bed. Your phone? Your supper. A bowl of peaches on the kitchen table. Your email. A project you have to return to, that has taken too much time already, that you cannot wait to finish but abandoned just for this moment to read this blog post, this poem, to step out onto your back porch and watch nighttime overtake the world.

Here, the poet stands (we stand) on the porch, and the world– inside and out– waits.

I want to smell this rich soup, the air

around me going dark, as stars press

their simple shapes into the sky,

I want to stay on the back porch 

while the world tilts

toward sleep, until what I love

misses me, and calls me in. 

This is a poem about love. And, I believe, about contentment.

Our poet stands here on her back porch, and what waits for her inside “are those who love me,” she says. Yet she “wants to stay on the back porch….”

And I’m asking you: do you want to stay on the back porch, too?

You have things waiting inside for you, just like I do. Maybe they are people who love you, and maybe not: but they are what has been given to you and, for the sake of this poem, this conversation, they are the things you love.

In my reading, the poem here asks, Are they enough? When you are standing out there and the world is somehow both dusky and radiant, are those metaphorical persons and things– the things you have been given– enough to compel you inside? Or are you– like me– sometimes tempted to the edge of the porch, to the steps, to the cold, damp grass and the woods that line the yard? To the promise of the unknown and different, the new and exciting, the adventure that might look like love but cannot be love, because “inside my house are those who love me” and inside the house is “what I love.”

Maybe that’s a metaphor for another poem. Or is it?

I want to stay on the back porch 

while the world tilts

toward sleep, until what I love

misses me, and calls me in. 

Here’s what I’ve learned and am learning: love calls me in. It’s mine to choose, to turn my back on beautiful moon and rag of cloud, to lawn and woods, to new and different. To go back inside.

Love returns to love again and again. That’s how it lasts.

Poem by Dorianne Laux

Laux, Dorianne. “On the Back Porch.” 365 Poems for Every Occasion, The American Academy of Poets, 2015, 236.

The post On the Back Porch (looking at a poem by Dorianne Laux) appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Dear Friends,

I wanted to give you something for Christmas. Something free and different.

Yes, yes. I know that everything on this website is free (okay, well, if you click the links to my books you’ll see that the books aren’t free). And the Advent readings are certainly free. But they aren’t different.

Okay, maybe they are different. I don’t know.

I’m starting over.

Dear Friends,

I have a Christmas present for you. And this is for you even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, don’t get Christmas, or even if you are a Bah Humbug kind of person.

I hope you’re not. But still.

This is a Christmas present for everyone: adult and child alike, solitary or in company, at home or away. It’s for anyone who likes words and even for people who don’t realize they do (one of my not-so-secret aims is to show you that you do like words, that you actually love them–did you know?). It’s a gift of something simple, brief, and lovely. Something you can enjoy once or again. Something that will make you think and imagine or that you can turn your mind off to and just let the words come– as they will, as they want to.

(Well-aligned words are Such Lovely Things, don’t you think so?)

Here’s the gift: I’ve read aloud and recorded something Favorite of mine, and I’m inviting you to listen.

What is it? It’s a short story. No. A poem. No. A Memory and a Conversation, a look over the shoulder, a Christmas or ten of them heaped up and then unspooled in a glorious line of words.

It’s Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

Who is Dylan Thomas? Dylan Thomas was a Welshman and a poet. He lived a short, loud and inebriated life, and he loved Christmas. He loved his memories of Christmas, anyway–the Christmases he had known when he was a child in (you guessed it) Wales.

He wrote A Child’s Christmas in Wales, and the work is certainly a testament to his love for and fond memory of his childhood Christmases. Well, whether or not he actually loved these memories is, I suppose, up to question, as he died in 1953. We cannot ask him. But this bit of prose certainly suggests that he loved those Christmases Past and snow and Wales in the snow.

Any work of literature mustered up in love is worth something, isn’t it? Add to that Thomas’s adjectives, his specificity, his brilliant and tempered use of alliteration; include his evocation of the child-mind, so richly done in this text; his appreciation of postmen; his love of mystery; his brilliant description of uncles (“there are always uncles at Christmas”) and aunts.

It’s so so good.

And it might be difficult to follow. So allow me to explain that this is a memory, and memories come as they will, right? Often memories lead to other memories in ways that make sense to our minds at the time but that, written out, might be confusing to the one who is following along.

Know that this is what is happening here: someone is remembering his childhood Christmases, and he is doing so in the aggregate: all-in-a-heap. One thought of Christmas past leads to another, and just when you are really and truly settling in to this stream-of-consciousness, you realize that he is now relating these Christmases to someone else–likely a child.

In fact, the way that this narrative becomes a conversation makes one wonder if Thomas is himself one of the uncles he mentions who has been dozing (and remembering) in front of a Christmas fire, and then has been interrupted by a niece or nephew and so begins telling them what he has been reliving in his mind.

It’s wonderful.

And, as I said, it’s for everyone. For people who began their holiday celebrations last night with Hanukah. For people who have never heard of Christmas. For people who celebrate Christmas in the summertime, never with snow. It’s for you and your children, for your baby who can barely crawl. For your great-aunt who might even now be “teetering at the sideboard.” For the uncles who are on their way to your house for the holidays.

Why is it for everyone? Because it’s beautiful–and beauty is for Everyone, most especially at Christmas.

So where is it? See below. Download and enjoy.

Merry Christmas!

With Great Joy,

Rebecca

click here to download

The post A Merry Christmas Gift for You: A Child’s Christmas in Wales appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Time spent teaching is never lost.

I spent an hour in a 9th grade classroom yesterday. The first time in nearly five years.

This was at a public school, Durham School of the Arts downtown. The place where my daughter now spends her days, where my middle son used to spend his. And we’ve lived in Durham for nearly-ever: I’ve driven past that school hundreds of times.

But yesterday was my first time teaching there, and this as a one-time guest. Fifty minutes with a creative writing class. Thirty-one students. Poetry and prose and metaphor packed between the bells.

***

I’ve taught in public and private schools, many years ago and only five years ago. The schools had different philosophies and perhaps some of them were better formed than others. But yesterday I realized again how much they are the same, whether I’m in a public middle-and-high school in the Pittsburgh suburbs or a shanty school with a corrugated roof in Nairobi’s Korogocho slum: Here the students sit, and here sits or stands the teacher.

And Then What?

It’s the Then What that interests me.

***

Yesterday it was metaphors and extended ones. It was listening for the metaphor in Cory Fry’s current song Underground and then discovering the weight of the metaphors in a clever poem by Sylvia Plath.

As teacher, one can’t be in a hurry with these things. To rip the thread from the spool is to leave your students abandoned, distracted, unlearned or annoyed. You have to tease it out, to let them talk to you. Good teaching is, I’ve learned, so much less my telling them things and so much more their telling me. 

Which was why I loved it yesterday when Aaman said he thought Fry’s underground was a mine, and why I reveled in Lorin’s observation of the “percussive influence” in the song. Why I loved that Emerson declared they could do without songs about love, thank you very much, and that Katherine noticed the nine syllables in Plath’s poem aligned neatly with the nine months of pregnancy.

And when they realized, as a class, that the poet was talking about pregnancy in the first place, we had that sonic boom of revelation that many teachers live for: the metaphoric light bulb, the newborn understanding, the thing I was always after for my students–no matter where I taught–when each one or even one of them says: I See.

***

I miss teaching.

***

But yesterday was fifty minutes. It was an island of time. It was a window the students let me climb through, unburdened by a week’s load of lesson plans or papers to grade or the learning modifications that require a lesson’s reconstruction. It was without obligatory phone calls to parents or tardy slips, without concerns because this student isn’t paying attention or asks to leave the room too much. It was without getting up too early or deciding (again) what to wear (the students pay attention to these things: “Mrs. Stevenson, you wore those shoes with that shirt last week.” Good lord).

Yesterday was a song, a poem, a paragraph from Fitzgerald. And then the bell.

***

I think any scholar of the New Testament is supposed to love Peter the most. Aren’t we supposed to love Peter? What with his foolhardy faith and his big mouth, his walking on water and his, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words of life” (John 6:68).

And I love Peter. I do.

But I love John the Baptist the best, I think. He was raised in the church, so to speak. Reared believing, like me. He leaped in his mother’s womb when he heard Mary’s voice, and He knew the Messiah on sight: “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” (Matthew 3:14).

And when his disciples grew anxious because people were all going to this Jesus fellow to be baptized, he understood–didn’t he?–where exactly he fit in the scheme of things: “He must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:30).

It’s a good thing to know what one is called to, or not. To know that your time is up, your job is finished, that someone else can absolutely do the job just as well as you can, perhaps (so likely) better.

It was right and good for me to leave teaching when I did. And I miss it still. Which is fine.

***

The best moment for me with John the Baptist is when he was in prison for speaking the truth. He’d been in there for a long time, and I’m pretty sure he knew–he was no fool; he knew the temperament of the Galilean rulers–this would not end well.

He sent a message to Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Matthew 11:3).

John. Prophet. Believer. Cousin of Christ. Asking whether Jesus was the Messiah.

***

John teaches me this: It’s okay to ask. It’s okay–years out, even five of them–to wonder about His work in your life. It’s okay to miss what He’s shut the door on. And it’s okay to be overjoyed in the life you currently have, to see the goodness and the blessing and the labor of it, and to still love the thing you once did. To wait in hope for the next thing, to work hard at the thing you are doing, and to remember with inexpressible sweetness what it was to be with your students–your students–all those days, all those times, before.

It’s okay to ask, says the imprisoned John, as long–always, always–as He is the One you go to with the questions, and then you stay put for the answers, even if He seems quiet for a long time.

He is always good, and He is always true. And the poetry of that right there is enough.

***

 “And Jesus answered them, ‘Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.”          Matthew 11:4-6

The post It’s Okay to Ask appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

“Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?”

And the second from the mother, who is old enough to be a mother:

“(The Daughter) is reciting her most favorite tomorrow… ‘The Swing.’ I’ve been coaching her to try to recite it without the cadence because I think it loses meaning. Thoughts?”

Thoughts. Immediate: to swings, and how I love to go up in them.

How do you like to go up in a swing/Up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it the loveliest thing/ever a child can do!

I’m thinking of the time I learned to pump the swing myself. We were visiting my grandmother in Florida, and my older sister and I were taken by the hand by our father and walked rapidly (my father always walks rapidly) down a sidewalk that had, to one side, a tall white fence. Over the top of the fence we could see lemon trees, and my father sang us a song about them as we went.

Lemon tree, very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet. But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.

And this was Very Funny, because my father loves lemons.

We arrived at a park, and my father pushed us on the swings, and then he explained how one leans on a swing and pushes one’s legs out and back again. Suddenly I had learned to pump the swing with my legs, and I could swing on my own.

How do you like to go up in a swing, up in the air so blue?

I pushed William on a swing when he was barely old enough to sit upright. Everett, too. And when Emma turned one, we bought her a baby swing for the swing-set in the back yard. I remember her blond hair, so fine and straight, swaying back and forth from its pigtail above her grinning face.

The mother: “I’ve been coaching her to try to recite it without the cadence.” Thoughts?

Yes, to the mornings my children and I sat around our kitchen table eating breakfast and reciting poetry. It was my way of packing in a few elements of school before they had a chance to realize it: a Bible story, a picture study, a poem over pancakes and in our pajamas.

Among the many, we learned Stevenson’s “My Shadow,” “The Wind,” and “The Swing.”

“Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?” I think my children wanted to know if they were, too.

Thoughts?

Yes, to grading papers at my desk when teaching high school, typing paragraphs of encouragement about supporting arguments and placing commas inside (INSIDE) the quotation marks, and wishing from time to time that these students had spent a small corner of their childhoods reciting poetry–and many of them had. Because you can teach a person how to shape an argument, how to develop said argument over a series of paragraphs, how to enfold supporting evidence via quote or paraphrase into one’s sentences. But by the time one is in high school, it might be too late or insupportable to teach the value of rhythm, the power of varied sentence length, the priceless weight of emphasis and inflection, the music of our spoken–or written–words.

The mother: “I think it loses its meaning.”

Can it?

Up in the air and over the wall/till I can see so wide/Rivers and trees and cattle and all/Over the countryside.

I can imagine the daughter standing at the corner of the sofa, reciting. Or seated at the table, head bent over her coloring, reciting. UP in the AIR and Over the WALL till I can SEE so WIDE.

What is the rhythm of this poem if not Stevenson swinging himself? Back and forth, back and forth. The daughter may be sitting at the table, colored pencil in hand, but the words she is saying are motion, and they are moving her back and forth with the poet himself, with all children anywhere ever who have sometime swung on a swing.

Till I look down on the garden green/Down on the roof so brown

Stevenson’s poem will lose its meaning only when there are no longer children outside because they’ve all turned to their iPhones, when all the swings sit idle, when the rushing breeze and flying force born of a child’s volition loses all power to answer.

Up in the air I go flying again/Up in the air and down!

“Thoughts?”

Yes. That surely some of the meaning is lost on the daughter, for whom swinging in this way is so close–for now–to her everyday experience. For her, for now, this mother is doing everything right: getting this poem in the child’s head. It’s Stevenson’s cadence that will keep it there, and so she’ll be saying it in her head for years to come.

And someday she‘ll be pushing her little one on the swing and admiring how the breeze pushes that one sweet curl back and forth, and she’ll mindlessly start saying the poem to her curly-headed cherub. And suddenly the poem’s meaning will bring happy tears to her eyes, just because the realization is so sweet, and she’ll know for the first time that her mother gave her that poem–a gift– years ago, and she’s only just opening it now.

“Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?”

Yes. We think so. Scotland is small enough. How many Stevensons can there be?

“Mom, are we related to Robert Louis Stevenson?”

Sure. Why not?

The post Two Questions appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I feel as if I’ve done a lot of traveling lately. It’s that time of year, right? Summer vacation. We’re gone, we’re here, we’re gone again.

Definitely not complaining. I love to travel. But lately it’s got me thinking about how I pack.

Like most people (everyone?), I’m guessing I have the normal categories: clothes, toiletries, shoes. Standard, right? That’s standard.

But when it comes to packing, what really matters to me is the Carry-On.

You know the Carry-On. That’s the smallish bag you keep with you on the plane, the one you squeeze into the space under the seat in front of you. The one that holds your wallet and your chapstick, maybe your toothbrush (depending), and anything else you’ll be wanting to grab during the flight.

So the Carry-On is vital. But for me, it’s not just for planes (do you do this, too?). It’s for car-travel. And even though we don’t have to wedge it under the seat in front of us, it’s what my daughter and I have come to call it even for travel in the car. We always pack a Carry-On.

In a way, the Carry-On is the Most Important Luggage of my trip. Because while I consider the clothing, shoes, etc. to be necessary, the Carry-On sort of contains (this sounds so ridiculous) all my hopes and dreams.

Okay, granted. That definitely sounds over the top. Bear with me.

The Carry-On represents, firstly, that 1) I’m going to be away from the normal demands of my life for awhile, and 2) I’m going to Sit.

Sitting is not a normal thing for me. Even if I’m writing, I try to spend much of the time on my feet. Sitting isn’t terribly good for you; and also, I manage a household. On any given day, I am up and about Doing Things, and I am doing these things Most of the Time. Most of what I do, on any given day, does not find me doing the sorts of things that one can find in my Carry-On.

As such, my Carry-On usually contains things I Should Get To. Blank paper and envelopes for notes I need to write, a bill I need to take care of. The general flotsam of my desk, culled and reorganized (or not) into a doable, smallish stack suitable for the road.

And it contains the Dailies. My Bible, my journal. Whatever it is I’m reading at the time. My laptop and its power cord. A phone charger. The Things I Need to Do My Job(s). (Writer. Mother. Wife. Person.)

Then finally (here is where the Hopes and Dreams come in), it holds a representation of the Things I Would Like To Do. As in, if I had All the Time in the World. Which one basically does (or can imagine one does, anyway) if one is flying to Shanghai. Or riding as passenger around New York City. Or anywhere at any time ever on I-95 near Washington D.C.

Hopes and Dreams are really hard to get to, but maybe if one simply had Enough Time….

Take the trip I’ve just returned from. We were gone for exactly one week, and my Carry-On for the ride in the car to and in and from New England included the following: my journal, Bible, Psalter, notebook. Issue # 37 of Ruminate magazine and the July-August issue of Smithsonian. My mother’s journal (not my mother’s journal, but the journal I keep and write in about being a mother). My laptop, its charger. A blank thank-you note; a Compassion International letter. A new book of poetry written by Christopher Janke; a creative non-fiction book, Wake, Sleeper, by Bryan Parys. Andy Crouch’s Culture-Making. A copy of my novel (can’t quite say why) and the wonderful sci-fi, literary fiction brilliance that I’ve read once before but am So Glad to have re-read on this trip: P.D. James’ Children of Men.

That’s for one week, Saturday to Saturday.

Listing it out like this (or looking at it in its bulging bag, or swinging it over my shoulder to tote to the car) makes me feel a little bit silly. Do I truly imagine that I’ll get to it all?

And yet. It’s an interesting thing to distill it like this. To pack into a discreet container The Things One Really Loves and Hopes To Do.

This is where the moral goes, right? The application. The metaphorical point to all of this.

Truth be told, I don’t really know what to say. I could ask in a tone tinged by a Capital One advertising campaign: “What’s in your carry-on?” Or I could encourage young mothers who don’t currently have time or room for carry-ons of their own that they might, someday, have carry-ons in their futures.

Or I could comment on the truth: that we got home on Saturday night and most of the laundry was done by Sunday, but I didn’t fully unpack my carry-on until Monday night. Or was it Tuesday? Because, for the most part, I wasn’t using any of it.

In which case the point would be how hard it is, in this life, to make time for what I love. For what we love.

And that maybe it’s vital to do so.

“Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them,” says Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. As such, this notorious demon suggests, delights and joys are dangerous because they very well might–horrors!–lead us to God.

I love this very much.

What is it with God and delight? What is it with Him and pleasure? The more I look for Him, the more I see Him appealing to me with precisely this: the things that truly delight me; the things I most desire (Psalm 37:4).

No matter how hard omni-media try portray Him as Kill-Joy; no matter how the Commandments are preached as prescribed misery, I have learned and am learning that the opposite is the case: that the One who declared this world Good is also the author of delight.

That yes, He has rules and laws, but these, too, when followed, are actually meant to be life-giving. To delight us.

That He Himself is actually the greatest delight we can know, and all the other delights of this world–like a cold beer, the soft fuzz of a newborn’s hair, sunlight limning a cloud or the stunning beauties of a well-crafted phrase–are the edges of the beauties of Himself.

Which amazes me.

And also makes me hope (Oh! here’s the point!) that you always pack a Carry-On. That you don’t leave it untouched at the foot of the stairs, but that you dip into it often and are repeatedly delighted. And that you find Him also (somehow) tucked miraculously inside.

The post Carry-On appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

We are in New England for the week, staying on a farm in a quiet corner of Rhode Island. It’s beautiful here–because it’s New England, because it’s green and wooded, because it’s about ten degrees cooler than any July at home.

Of course we want New England to look as it *should,* and Rhode Island does not disappoint: the stone walls are everywhere. Gorgeous, rambling, antique lines of them. They appear along the sides of the roads, a sudden demarcation between roadside and woods or farmland, the edge of someone’s lawn. Or they spill out of the woods, and if you look quick enough as the car goes by you can see them extending away from you, dividing the trees. They trace the topography of a hillside, they mark the undulating line of the ground.

Stone walls are what New England is supposed to have, like clapboard, and shutters, and steeply pitched roofs. Here in New England, stone walls are–to borrow the overused word–“appropriate.”

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.

Robert Frost, a 20th century New England poet, won four Pulitzer Prizes for his work and was the inaugural poet for President Kennedy in 1961. He was born in San Francisco and later had a winter home in Florida, but for the most part, he spent his life in New England: New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts.

For a long time, he farmed (unsuccessfully) in New Hampshire. He knew a thing or two about stone walls.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

These walls are ubiquitous in New England. There must be miles and miles of them. Bill and I have wondered aloud about them as we drive. We guess a wall is just the thing to do with the stones. The soil here must be rife with them.

And certainly, in addition to the stone walls that trace the landscape, the ground here is forever exposing large slabs of rock, huge outcroppings that one can only assume might be the tip of a proverbial iceberg. Bill and I imagine making a life from the soil here, tilling the earth with our rudimentary, colonial tools and finding–again and again and again–a rock and yet another rock to prize from the ground.

Fruitless, tiresome, unintended crop.

In 1939 the mining engineer Oliver Bowles estimated that there were probably more than 259,000 miles of stone walls in the northeastern U.S., most of which is in New England. Many walls have since been destroyed, but probably more than half of these remain. –Connecticut State Museum of Natural History.

It was the glaciers that started it, eons ago, sliding slowly southward over what would eventually become New England. The glaciers themselves were apparently full of stones, the hardest of which–granite, gneiss, limestone–survived the grinding journey locked in ice. As the glaciers melted, they deposited the stone in the ground.

Hence, so many stones. A real hassle for sowing crops, but perfect for building a wall. Walls. 259,000 miles of them.

The tenacity of these walls is impressive: no adhesive was used in their construction; each wall is a balancing act, stones supporting stones. Most of the walls were built between 1775 and 1850, and yet here they stand today.

Nonetheless, “Mending Wall” is a poem about the process of repairing the holes in one of these walls. Apparently, they had their periodic ruptures, their sudden and inexplicable “gaps.”

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

Frost questions the process. His is a 20th-century sensibility:  Why should we bother repairing the wall? Do we need the wall in the first place?

Well, but all farms have fences, right? We need something to mark the edges. It’s difficult to imagine now, but I’m told that when the original farmers had cleared the land here, trees soon became scarce. It was sensible, if not incredibly labor-intensive, to use the natural resource of stone to form animal pounds or fencing, to outline the boundary between one and one’s neighbor.

If you on your farm have cows, say, and I have apple trees, I’ll want to prevent your cows coming over to my property and decimating my bumper crop of apples.

Solution: stone walls.

And yet,

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

And here begins Frost’s metaphor. Or mine.

What is it about a wall that makes us feel safe? Here in the 21st century? I’m not talking about actual, physical boundaries. I know enough from movies and the news–don’t we all?–about technologies used in heist or warfare. The jig is up: something (someone) somewhere will always be able to get through.

No, I’m talking about those other walls, the ones each of us constructs, the separations, the divisions that, somehow, make me imagine I’m safe.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.

The news these days in this country is rightly all about these walls. But we’ve found they are not, after all, unique to New England. They are everywhere. They seem to cross every region, state, heart, and are (and have been) more visible to some of us than others.

But the walls–even the ancient, “wild walls,” so long untouched that they have become their own vibrant ecosystems–didn’t arrive of their own accord. They didn’t emerge from the ground in tidy rows, vestigial trace of a glacier’s wake.

No. The walls come from stone farmed, mined, balanced, planted. I can’t help but think–studying them, even my own–that these walls are cultivated. They are the product of rehearsed anger, of practiced bitterness, the insistence *not* to forgive. And while we rightly find them most grievously offensive in shootings in Louisiana, Minnesota, Orlando, Dallas, I believe they have their origins in the smallest places: in every prideful thought, every smug estimation of our superiority.

Any time we ever imagine–even for an instant–that we are better than someone else.

…many farmers would find that their farmland would have many stones on it that weren’t there previously…. When a farm is plowed, it causes layers of soil beneath the surface to push up their rocks from different soil layers to another…Many farmers would have to remove the rocks on their farm if they wanted to plow it again, only to find that they would have to repeat the process of removing stones. -Corey Schweizer

I think everyone’s field is full of stones. Everyone’s. It’s the human condition. And just when we think we’ve got our soil cleared, we’re unearthing more: more selfishness, more hard-heartedness, the chronic tendency to love ourselves more than our neighbors, to be willfully blind to another’s experience, hurt, need, goodness, worth.

I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old stone-savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me

Not only of woods and his father’s trees.

We do this, as a society, on a large scale. And we do it personally, too. Daily. Minute by minute.

We are–to a person–rocky soil, laden with the deposits of that long-gone glacier, burdened with its mineral waste. Being alive means tilling that soil, making a place to sow good seeds, and pulling up rocks in that effort.

It’s ours to decide what to do with the stones.

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. -Ezekiel 36: 26.

Sources here, here, and here.

The post 259,000 Miles of Them appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Seamus Heaney died last Friday. He was only 74– a bit young, in my opinion, in this late age, to shuffle off this mortal coil. His death is our loss entirely.

I don’t know his work well, which seems its own loss– as if I should have seized the opportunity to read him while he was still among us, the potential existent, I suppose, to write and thank him for his words. I first learned of him in my in-laws’ family room years ago via a visiting friend of a friend. This fellow was lanky and had hair that fell poetically over his forehead, and he carried a worn volume by Seamus (may I call him by his first name?) and somehow recognized in me a person who would be interested in poetry. “Seamus Heaney,” he said to me. “Seamus Heaney. You’ve got to read this guy.”

A few years later, Heaney won the Nobel Prize for literature.

But I didn’t read him them. I gave almost no time at all– in those days– to reading poetry. Novels were the thing. And though I was raised in the sort of family that was given to sudden outbursts of poetry recitation, we didn’t have volumes of it lying about on coffee tables.

Then my babies were born, and over the first decade or so of their lives I read them everything that A. A. Milne had scribed in verse for his own little boy, and also poetry by Rudyard Kipling and some others. Now, occasionally, my own children will recite a line or two by Milne. That’s lovely.

But my love for poetry– for grown-up (?) poetry– my need for poetry has developed quietly, too quietly, even, to take me by surprise. Years ago at a writer’s conference, I found myself buying absolutely everything that Luci Shaw had to offer: all of them slender books with beautifully photographed covers, five or six books, I think, that I maybe couldn’t afford.

There’s something romantic in that, isn’t there: poor, and buying poetry.

But I wasn’t so very poor, and romance isn’t the thing. Not for me, anyway, in poetry.

It’s the words. The words. The crystalline concision. The way that one word– just that one– will do, and does, demanding that one sit with it, attend, not meditate on it exactly but just allow it to sit, to sink, trailing its connotations even as one continues through the poem, gathering as if by static pull more words as one goes. By the end of the poem, breathless, one is laden with and lifted by them, transfixed, changed.

One recent summer, I took to saying words in threes in my mind: whatever words came, listing endlessly in triplicate, fascinated by the sounds they made in my head, marveling at their irrelevance to one another and their potential, by their proximity, to make (perhaps?) meaning: “singular,” “matted,” “triangulate.” “bison,” “metaphorical,” “archipelago.”

That kind of thing. Weird, I know– and immeasurably satisfying.

Visiting my sister and brother-in-law became–in new ways–a feast. Christopher Janke is a poet and also the editor of Slope Editions, and so their home is full of volumes of poetry. Through them, I made the acquaintance of the work of Jonah Winter and Kirsten Kaschock, whose poetry book, Unfathoms, is a word one could think about for days. I also met Betsy Wheeler and Penelope Austin, who does not have a website because she passed away before Slope published her work. But I have posted the work of Janke, Wheeler, and Austin here on this blog before, and works by both Janke and Austin hang framed for frequent perusal in my house. I will, no doubt, talk about them– especially Janke– here again.

Of course I still read novels. One must read what one is writing– that, I know, is certain. We none of us invent the wheel, you know. We learn from others.

But still I return to poetry. It is irresistible to me– both for the words and the spaces between them. It’s the space poets make, I think, that invites us in. Space for the words to take effect. So accommodating, a poet. Kind, in that way. So much writing has too many words.

On the night last February that I finished the second draft of my novel, after a solitary and celebratory dinner that included a lovely glass of prosecco and an arugula salad, I purchased (also in celebration) a volume of Seamus Heaney’s poetry in a used book store in downtown Charlottesville. I was reading that very book within the week that the poet died.

May I say it here? I will say it here, belatedly and whole-hearted: Thank you, Mr. Heaney, for your words– crystalline, spare. And thank you for celebrating with me.

And I would like to introduce you to another of my favorites, young and decidedly living– living the way that poets do, I think, which is so much more than the rest of us. Hannah Mitchell is a former student of mine, but I claim no credit for her talent, as she was my student for a brief spell, in an expository writing (of all things!) course that I taught bi-weekly (was it?) for the space of (less than) a month.

Hannahthewriter clearly understands what words can do, and occasionally news of her posting arrives in my email: small feasts that I openly instantly or save for later but always read and re-read again. She writes here, and if ever you have the option to read my work (here) or hers, you must absolutely always choose hers. Go there, and you will know why.

For my part, my email recently made an “improvement” to my account: it automatically determines whether my incoming missives are “primary” or “social” or “promotions,” and it relegates them accordingly. This is helpful on many levels, but it was not at all helpful to discover that, recently, Hannah’s posts had been deemed “social.”

This, I believe, is an error. Poetry is not social– or not merely, anyway. Poetry is primary. It is absolutely primary.

—Hannah Mitchell

The post Of Poets and Poetry appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I remember going on youth group retreats when I was a teenager. I remember that I never wanted them to end. Somehow, the return to the everyday at the end of the weekend was not at all what I was wanting.

The everyday is often difficult. What does the worker gain from his toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on men. We wake daily to the demands of the day before– and new ones, too, assert themselves. Meanwhile, there are the persistent and quotidian that can weigh us down: once again, today, this morning, my eyes not really entirely awake, I had to make the lunches.

And then there are things like weekend retreats, or that vacation last month or even last summer: plots in time  where we would set up camp and live forever. I’m guessing you know what I mean.

Through my kitchen window, I can see under the holly trees that border our yard and the neighbors’. Just under their lowest branches, I have a small view onto their yard– the yard that Will mowed the other day.

It’s not an easy lawn to mow. One side of it is a steep hill, and there is a large garden he must maneuver the mower around. Due to a broken mower, the yard had recently grown into a meadow, and I had been caught off guard when, mulling over the blackspot on my budding rosebushes, I spied the patches of ajuga blooming in that lawn. Tall purple spires in thick pools, and lavender-colored ones, too. The lower half of the hillside was broken here and there in sudden and surprising choruses of purple– all of them upright and looking modestly pleased, as was only appropriate.

I did not want him to mow that lawn– er, meadow. But there are ordinances against meadows where we live, and the quotidian, always, will assert itself.

Will mowed.

And yesterday I was washing the dishes (oh, the dailiness) when I glimpsed it under the hollies: the patch my son had left for me. It was there in the neighbors’ freshly mowed lawn: the oval pool of lavender spires, just where I could see them.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.  Ecclesiastes 3:10-11

Here is a poem I recently met. It changed me, which would seem to be one of the effects of a good poem, and I’m glad.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down in so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.”

-Richard Wilbur

The post Difficult Balance appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The kitchen window still wants washing, and only yesterday I scrubbed last year’s dirt from the bathtub. The boys still annoy each other with the command to, “Chill,” and so we had it out (again) in the car this morning. And it was still cold outside from the winter that began last year.

Here in 2013, I am still not finished reading The Lemon Tree or Doctor Faustus. The current draft of my novel is still not done. And my mind, when left to its own devices, perseverates still on tired things: decisions made last spring; comments delivered in last year’s September; relationships as old as old.

And we still have no snow, while it feels for all the world that all the rest of the world does.

But this morning the water in the bird bath was all gone (again) to ice, and the field and its wire fence near the school were glistening with it. And also the bare trees, holding their arms still to cradle it. And the split-rail fence along the driveway. And the leaves of the Russian sage– all of them limned with frost so that, even hurrying into the house (from the cold), I could make out every vein.

being to timelessness as it’s to time,
love did no more begin than love will end;
where nothing is to breathe to stroll to swim
love is the air the ocean and the land

(do lovers suffer?all divinities
proudly descending put on deathful flesh:
are lovers glad?only their smallest joy’s
a universe emerging from a wish)

love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star

-do lovers love?why then to heaven with hell.
Whatever sages say and fools, all’s well

-e.e. cummings

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It was meals at favorite restaurants, and being sung the Happy Birthday song, and a new coat.

It was homemade potato chips with gorgonzola dip, German five-grain bread and cheese for breakfast and Asian fusion for dinner, and on Thursday a pork loin with buttered cider sauce that could also be (and was) served over vanilla ice cream for dessert.

It was Everett’s last cross-country meet and fall break. It was a visit to Duke Gardens. It was a threat of rain that never delivered.

It was the late-afternoon departure of Emma for her first-ever youth group retreat. It was the mid-afternoon departure of the boys for a birthday slumber party. It was the late-night arrival of Janke and Betsy, poets.

It was long-standing project-completion and conversations on theology. It was pruning roses and rebuildling the stone wall. It was a walk with my father. It was my mother playing the piano. It was discussion on the sometimes harrowing project that means being published.

It was people sleeping in every conceivable place. It was trying to figure out what to do next based on what everyone else was doing and what absolutely had to happen. It fell short of frenzied, but sometimes not by much, and everybody glad to be here anyway. I’m so grateful for that.

And then it was a poetry reading at The Morning Times that meant words falling each after the other, so quick and deft and sounding that, sitting there, listening, I had no reason to move.

And then everybody went home, and the children came home, and everything is back to normal. I have the folded laundry my mother left me, and the package of photos my father left me, and Betsy’s book.

So this.

After the Party,
There is a Lonely Sound.

Sound of a rowboat knocking emptily
against the dock. Sound of smooth oars banging
loosely against sideboards. Sound of night.
Sound of stars. Sound of blinds zipped down
against the sleeping country. Sound
of lovely. Sound of we’re all going home,
what about you? Sound of thinness
of dimes and the hard snap of butterscotch.
The sound of lapping water makes me want to stay all night long.
Sound of a piano being played upstairs and a small boy’s
blanket of sheet music. Sound of the ceiling
as some sort of possibility. Sound
of I’ll always write to you. Sound of letters
stolen from mailboxes. Sound of waiting.
Sound of eyes wide open. Sound the cello makes.
Sound of the grass in the yard taking on the dew.
Sound of that’s it.
Sound of yes and yes and yes. — Betsy Wheeler

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