Winter poetry

Afternoon

Winter moods etched in trees now bare.
Alone in the sky, branches reach toward
clean blue day,
but it isn’t there.

Night

Storm clouds,
thunder, humid wind and rain,
moistening the night in springlike warmth,
I step out on a wet porch,
It’s very quiet.
The cat is rocking in the chair.

Morning

The rain has ceased, the wind is weak;
I cannot see the world afresh.
I thought it would be
as I peered out my window at the oak tree.
No clear, cold, bracing world of wind-driven clarity,
just a waiting time,
watching skies for signs of parting clouds.
Calm before the cold.
Gray ambivalence since dawn.

When I write poems such as the short ones above, I do so because I suddenly, and for mysterious reasons, feel the need to express myself in some kind of freer and less constricted form of writing when no other means of expression seems right or appropriate. I never wrote much poetry before starting an online journal. I didn’t read much poetry after I left teaching. I was an English teacher for three years, and almost every week I would either read, write, discuss, assign poetry for class, or have poetry writing sessions in my classes. It was eye-opening. I saw deeply into poetry for the first time because I was making a conscious effort to know what the poet was at least trying to say. I was deliberately reading the poems, with the purpose of trying to elicit other points of view and interpretations from my students. Thus, the experience of reading poetry was greatly enriched and more meaningful than I ever would have imagined.

When the students wrote poetry for class, the results were often staggering, mysterious and beautiful. They wanted their poetry to be read, although anonymously sometimes. Poetry coming from the minds of the young can be so fresh and exhilerating, free from the inhibitions of older writers. I was often in awe.

Now, I have to read poetry without the subtext of teaching it and preparing to discuss it. Or reading it out loud, which often brings it to life in ways silent reading can never approach.

But I will continue to write poetry as long as one person reads it because it is the only way I can sometimes say anything at all. I would be wordless, speechless on those occasions without the ability to write down my thoughts in poems.

I came to realize that to study poetry was to replicate the way we learn and think. When we read a poem, we enter the consciousness of another. It requires that we loosen some of our fixed notions in order to accommodate another point of view — which is a model of the kind of intellectual openness and conceptual sympathy that a liberal education seeks to encourage. To follow the connections in a metaphor is to make a mental leap, to exercise an imaginative agility, even to open a new synapse as two disparate things are linked….Further to see how poetry fits language into the confines of form is to experience …the need for information to be shaped and configured to be intelligible. It is to understand that form is a way of thinking, an angle of approach.

Billy Collins
U.S. Poet Laureate

I know what you mean, about writing poetry because, sometimes, it’s the only way to loose whatever it is in your mind and heart. You do so admirably. Take care of you.

i spotted your latest entry on the main forum page and recognized your name from some former notes to my journal and from geek poet’s. i extend you great admiration for the short poems above. they are very evocative. i write (or attempt) poetry regularly and i’ve never been able to reach the level of observation and clarity that those short poems expressed. also, you’re a former

school teacher, which really strikes me as remarkable since some people, who not necessarily like that line of work, never really pursue anything else and they retire without having done anything else. what is it that you know?

i think i was possessed by something during the last sentence in my former note. the targeted question was, “what do you do now for a living?”

He’s right about the connection of poetry to “intellectual openness and conceptual sympathy.” I’ve always been a bit embarrassed, given my background, that I don’t seem to be willing to work as hard as poetry sometimes requires. And I certainly can’t write it. Thought-provoking piece.

RYN: many people seem to have the same opinion. In fact, many people would argue that I’m a great conversationalist–I hear it all the time. But I don’t see it. I’m much more comfortable writing words. Speaking. . .it’s opening up too much. My voice isn’t as nice as the words in my head. So. Writing it is.

The winter-poem…hmmm I can see it here from my window. Everything looks so clean now, and can you believe that sounds outside are much softer now. Like as if nature and everyone outside (even the cars) are whispering! And writing, whether poems or journals, I think it’s easier for me also then say the same when talking. ~~smiles~~

I love poems, I love the words between the lines, I love the unsaid, I love your words, my friend. Take care

Your poems had a clean wintry quality,a simplicity, like branches unadorned in winter.I have been learning to READ poetry and learning to feel the musical & metaphorical qualities of language since coming to OD. I am still not courageous enough to write in poetic form, too fearful of it being “bad” poetry. My experience with visual art was always so enriched by my young students & their work.

Excellent poems. Poetry can really create a scene in a way that other words can’t.

So that’s the place you come from in writing poetry! Glad to know it. I seek more constriction in writing poetry and in that the tension arises, hopefully. Love these little poems you share. Wil read them as long as you share them. Isn’t it wonderful how teaching something forces us inside the work? I miss that. Have a blessed holiday, dear friend. ryn: I am fine; all is well. [mags III]A46

I drop little poems–fragments– into m-3, here; visit sometime. Haven’t lately but will continue.

Oswego, I’ll be back to read your entry later. I just wanted to stop by and wish you a Merry Christmas. There’s an imaginary box of shortbread beneath your tree – that’s from me. Enjoy! 🙂

******************************************************* Have yourself one of those merry little christmas’s (Christmases?) that Judy Garland once sang of. ******************************************************* Now regarding this thoughtful entry on poetry, might I add: The beauty is in the pause the reader takes, after reading, to reflect and wonder why. [Jude Alone]A44649

My friend – wishing you Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. All the best

adrift

December 23, 2001

Sometimes, if we let them, the poems just write themselves~ 🙂 Wishing you a VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS & a HAPPY NEW YEAR! Thank you for the gifts of your writing, the touching embrace of your notes, & the sharing of yourself. These are Gifts of your Heart that we will cherish always~ With loving {{{hugs}}} and lots of Christmas *smiles* always~

The cat knows what’s important in life. Thank you for sharing your world. Happy Christmas.

merry christmas.

HarpHill (2)

December 25, 2001

Amazing how we read your entries and interpret them. I missed “you’ in this one and then the bottom line told me this was the work of another. Hope you are enjoying the holidays. Mine is quiet and reflective…remembering some of the good days.

Thanks for sharing your perspectives and sending us along on new paths.

Merry Christmas, my friend. I hope it’s treated you well.