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A Poem For Me
by Janice A. Farringer
More pop than sass, more sass than flash, the leopard gloves of Paris
hang along the pegged wall with a coat from Eden…North Carolina. In
times of crisis there are boats and trains and lots of walking. And
here around the corner of Kenya, I find what I have sought in the
colors of my slides without the greens to override the reality of predators.
At once I recognize the loden and take it to swim in the Aegean,
place of the gods so warm and white and off again to fly above the
mountains and the snow aboard a glider that makes my hands tingle with
gripping. And so to war. Across a Germany so like itself and up to
Scandinavia for the summer, and then around the foot of Italy to see the
shoes.
Serenity so prolonged and soft comes in Shinto shrines filled with
flying paper prayers and lost in ten million cities of ten million,
dotted with fire tender’s pots of lucky smoke, who cannot read my face
and think me tall in red wedding kimono I try on for a trick.
And then to Hong Kong and up off the rim to pick the labels off
the floor and paste them on anything at all in Seoul. I run to Edinburgh
for wrapping in a woolen and hiding in old parts where people are red and orange
and love to laugh and don’t think my hair too loose.
At the end are tulips. Not Keukenhof's but mine. Around in the grass
and up into the pots along the porch. Off again to Bald Head Island
where there are no flowers, only pelicans, gray and weary against the
spit of sand, Cape Fear.
Book a Workshop
Excerpt from COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY, ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING A TOUR. JULY 13, 1798 by William Wordsworth
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,--both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
Welcome
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
As You Like It Act 2, scene 1, 12–17
