a black kid
as I was carrying out stuff
“you moving?”
“yeah, to a farm.”
“oh . hey, is your sister moving too?”
yeah, to the city
To continue, click here.
Copyright 2015
Author: Jnana Hodson
In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.
A LOVE OF WORDS, INDEED
Susquehanna remains one of my favorite words in the language. (And to think, it’s an import, from the New World.) I love the way the syllables dance around in the mouth and roll off the tongue.
So what is your favorite word?
~*~
For more of my exploration of the word in its world, click here.
PRELUDE & FUGUE 49/
to lovers who were never quite present
* * *
good-bye in the night who never were lovers
repeatedly saying good-bye in the night
who never were lovers repeatedly saying
good-bye in the present night who
never were tubercular contortions or squiggles
good-bye tubercular squiggles to lovers’ night
repeatedly saying never quite contortions
squiggles repeatedly saying good-bye
to lovers never quite tubercular night
~*~
Poem copyright 2016 by Jnana Hodson
To see all 50 Preludes & Fugues, click here.
DRIVING NAILS
near the waterline, someone’s hammering
throughout the day, someone’s always
hammering
a staccato telegraph
of winter’s approach or gratitude
so little demands repair
or just some old goat’s survived
though when the hammering ceases
he may be eating a sandwich
or sawing a board to be hammered
yes, two taps secure its position
in the quiet, he’s
gone off to the supply house
for a another box of nails, another size
a door slams from another direction
where new hammering erupts
before the man puts his hammer down
on a leather tool belt
and then orders a beer
you’ll find boxes of hammering
in the tool shed, brown paper bags
of hammering in the mud room
old jars of hammering
on his truck bed
open any one
and his arm and shoulder
begin moving
the whole world as his anvil
Poem copyright 2016 by Jnana Hodson
To see the full set of seacoast poems, click here.
TO AND FROM CUBA, DEARLY
How many years ago did I write this? What’s come along since could fill a book!
One of the most exciting developments in New England Yearly Meeting is the Puente de Amigos – the Bridge of Love with Cuba Friends. Agamenticus Quarterly Meeting finally accepted the invitation to affiliate with Holguin Monthly Meeting, a pastoral congregation in the easternmost part of Cuba, a relationship that will force us to reexamine many of our own diversity of notions. The visiting Cubans have been gently reevangelizing New England, and when Wellesley’s teens were asked by their Cuban counterparts to “tell us about your conversion experiences,” a dialogue ensued that would have been difficult if not impossible to instigate otherwise: “our what?” Let us tell you!
~*~
For more Seasons of the Spirit, click here.
SIMPLY LISTEN WITH HANDS
People typically listen with their heads, attentive to logic and thought, or with their hearts, to feeling and insinuation. But there is also a frequently untapped ability to listen with one’s hands, as I recognized at a Susan Stark concert in Brunswick, Maine. There, two Quaker pastors from Kenya (themselves excellent, forceful singers) sat with arms flexed out before them, as if each held an invisible beach ball squeezed slowly. They were appraising the vibration of the room, the presence of Holy Spirit moving. This time, the current was plentiful and active. Try it, in public – at a governmental hearing, a poetry reading, a concert or play, a sporting event – and you, too, may observe how the sense of each occasion may differ. Watch a master carpenter or a first-rate baker, as well, to see how hands ponder a task, running ahead of mental comprehension. A musician often seems to hear music through the fingers, as if playing, even when no instrument is present. Perhaps a surgeon does the same with medicine.
These poems celebrate the movement of Spirit perceived through a Third Ear, between the hands. The tactile response. Here’s one:
~*~
TO USE TOOLS
Connect
four fingers and thumb
sometimes, double
into the fire, and out
a pot, a pan, or a skillet
with or without a lid
and its handle
extending to a blade
or straw, depending:
All the wonder of the work at hand
cooking, keeping house,
gardening, splitting wood –
to say nothing of the factory,
farm, boat, or mine –
hunting or warring –
Even basic parts we touch
with each other
Poem copyright 2017 by Jnana Hodson
For more, click here.
THOU SHALT NOT?
At least they’re not commandments. Holy Moses! Ten more from my end of the universe.
~*~
- Sometimes I enjoy being in the front passenger seat the entire trip. Get to see more, for one thing. It’s an opportunity not to be in charge, not to be fully responsible – just let go and observe. What a relief!
- All the waterfowl, the tip of the wing nearly touching the surface they fly over: how do they do it?
- As Richard Brown Lethem says of his work, “For my entire life I’ve been trying to mine the subconscious.” No wonder I’m drawn to his paintings, inexplicable as so much remains to me.
- I feel myself to be from another planet, looking at a world I once wanted to inhabit.
- The grief men carry. Could it simply be the passage of time? Or something more fundamental to Eden?
- As the news story reported, a neck-slasher to his stepdad: “I’m going to kill you and your life is going to end.” (The redundancy is emphatic.)
- The Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston’s Bay Back really is a magpie’s nest, an egocentric collection of bright and shiny objects. I do wish the curators were at liberty to give its masterpieces better display, contrary to Isabella’s directives. My, there’s so much clutter in the way!
- Rather than heading back to Maine, she’s spending the night here. Thus, it’s NO YORK.
- Pockets in a room that aren’t doing anything: that hold, in effect, dead energy. What’s the better usage?
- Who am I, at the core? What do I really want? (That, for someone she accuses of being self-centered.)
~*~
THE SOLACE OF FAMILIAR SPACES
richness / depth
discovery and a confession we don’t have it right, yet
as for a prescription, we’ll never have it exactly right
if we wanted surprise, we’d go someplace else
so by narrowing the focus, the unexpected twist appears
the asparagus bed or lilacs
my ferns, finally
eight springs at this dwelling
this repetition for greater completeness
complexity as a responsibility
within myself/yourself, too
a spouse rather than a lover alone
Poem copyright 2016 by Jnana Hodson
For more, click here.
AFTERNOON AT OUR THIRD-FLOOR APARTMENT WINDOW
white body
with black wingtips
on white sky
a gull flitted past
the third-floor apartment window
on an overcast day
the next afternoon
panes sliced sunlight
onto a bubbling aquarium
that opened as butterfly wings
on the opposite wall
still, she was a question mark
who made him a question mark
in return
my Indiana, so faraway then
To continue, click here.
Copyright 2015
ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S GRAND FUNERAL MARCH
a tight-cropped raccoon staring full of question
in the green leaves in front of an intricately tiled wall
a white panther spews water
into a pool of lilies
320 days a year you’d be hungry
an owl in snowfall
three landscapes, including a road through a desert
a smiling fisherman holds a salmon
the length of his leg
twelve neckties a father would love:
none of them fit for the office
roulette wheel with a ducky decoy
for games no player can win
egos as a blindfold
tied with leather work gloves
the pink smoke, uncoiling
wordlessly
shocks of wheat
around a woman in dream
two more windmills
half of the sky, a rusty eggshell
a flame
as an open door
a clock and classical portrait suspended on ribbon
wind mill manufacturers in Batavia, Illinois
Poem copyright 2016 by Jnana Hodson
To see the full set of Partitas, click here.
