Adrien's poem, Waterfall.

Waterfall

You step beneath a crystalline spray,
A shiver records the temperature shift.
Warmth descends over shoulders, back
Bare flanks to calves, carried in rivulets
Streaming. Breathe and tip back your head
Feel the beat on closed lids and brow
The trickle into your ears, the sluice into
The hollows of your collar bone. Ah...
Supremely sweet heat releases the
Tightness of pent up care and fatigue
The road is forgotten, sleep beckons.
Think of your shared humanity,
How those stumbling into bright lights
From the cattle cars' reeking horrors
Would have calmly embraced the hope
Of what you experience now.

                                                                    By Adrien Helm

A waterfall poem by Mariel Hess

Mariel Hess wrote a waterfall poem in response to what we affectionately call our "homework."  This task was connected to our first meeting, in June, when

left to right:  Ellen Mass, Joanne Giannino, Mariel Hell, Adrien Helm

we saw Paterson, the film, ending with the scene in Paterson, New Jersey at the Great Falls.  Our waterfalls here and about are also nice, as is Mariel's poem for us.

WATERFALL

When I need to retreat from the world, to find calm or solitude

I imagine you, losing myself in your mesmerizing movement and soothing sound

I surrender to the paradox of your simultaneous coming and going

Your perpetual stationary movement gentles my body and soul

I note the light playing your keening, careening body with sparkles and dapples

I listen to your myriad competing voices telling stories - unintelligible,  enigmatic

You carry a wisdom that I cannot fathom;

I rest peacefully in the knowledge of not knowing.

- by Mariel Hess, 7/4/2017

Poem by Jeany Morris

Jeany Morris on the right, Fran Smith to her right.

the weather falls down
in front of my eyes

the weather seeps into
my eyes
and distorts some part
of my sight

I wait for (a) clearing

                      6-28-17

Prize-winning poet Charles Simic to give a Back Roads Reading at Brownington

Until I looked him up on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simic, I didn't know Charles Simic was out-and-out famous.  I only knew that I liked his poems in The New Yorker.  Don't know how we are so lucky as to receive him in the NEK, but a mailing from the Old Stone House Museum lists an event in the Back Roads Reading series at Brownington Congregational Church, Sunday August 6 at 3 pm with a reception at the Samuel Read Hall House across the road.

Two earlier readings are on July 9th, for Leland Kinsey, and July 23, Ellen Bryant Voight.

Here's a sample, Stone:

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river,
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom

This from NYC, 42nd St. approach to the big public library

Millions have walked on this plaque in sidewalk approaching the NYC big one, but its message shines through to us even so.

a page from another blog with old picture, new (and newly published) poem

Monday, 5 June 2017

Photo vieille, poème nouveau

Une photo vieille, Venice-au-Quebec, Lake Memphremagog

et aussi un poème publié recemmant en Waterways

Tant Pis

written with (rather) fine black marker
your only margin note on page roman 6, vi

vi to sound like swiftness or life
in French, vit or vie

to rhyme with pis or English pee

or vi as in English vinegar
for that matter if it matters in this
piss and vinegar state we share

and it must because we share, too,
thanks to you, The First Man by Camus,
and this in English

for your one black note on white,
marginal, before you realized
you were in the copy you meant for me,
tant pis, and moved on to your own

for rather fine notes in black
on marginal white, free to write now
on your own.

[written for Mary Teague]

(That other blog is Quebec Journal,at www.quebecjournal.blogspot.com.)

Billy Collins' poem in the Amtrak magazine, The National

Hey.  Maybe my 4 days and two nights on Amtrak trains to get back up to the Northeast Kingdom lets me copy here Collins' poem that's on page 42 of issue number 04.  Here it is.  He's how we got started, after all.


The Convergence of my Parents

This morning I am looking out my window
at a crowd of white irises,
imagining my Canadian mother in 1934
looking out her window on a train,
the one she rode from Toronto to Los Angeles
to work as a nurse at Queen of Angels Hospital,
only her train has stopped short of a little town
somewhere in the Midwest,
and she is looking out at the irises in someone's garden.

And while that might have been occurring,
my Massachusetts-born father was riding
another train from Boston to Galveston
to work as an electrician on an off-shore oil rig,
a man who was more likely to be reading a newspaper
than admiring the blossoms in a stranger's garden,
but who must have spent some time
looking out at the scenery, wondering about himself,
and maybe a field of wildflowers went flashing by.

Only years later did two other trains
carry the two of them east,
the tracks of their lives meeting in New York,
where I was born -- because I wanted to be close
to my mother, my father liked to joke.
She was still a nurse, and he was her patient.
He had been struck on the head by a wrench
a co-worker had fumbled, and that is the story
of how I got here, how I pulled into the station of my life.

                                                                            Billy Collins



He likes for poems to be humorous.  Is this one that?  I can't tell.  Maybe I was too long on the train.  In any case, I like this one.  And I look forward to when the Wednesday Poets converge again. -- Sylvia