Month: July 2011

SUMMER

Posted on by Antoinette Martignoni

Summer comes at us as in a continuous story that began
before we walked into the room and goes on as we pass
through and return, still alive and pulsing and amazing.

It took the words of a famed poet to allow me to just take
the liberty of sharing line after line, without going to the
end, nor looking for redemption or gifts other than the
beauty of inhabiting these lines:

“The fervent heat, but so much more endurable in this pure

air — the white and pink pond-blossoms, with great heart-

shaped leaves; the glassy waters of the creek, the banks,

with dense shrubbery, and the picturesque beeches and shade

and turf; the tremulous, reedy call of some bird from

recesses, breaking the warm, indolent, half-voluptuous

silence; the occasional wasp, hornet, honey-bee or bumble

(they hover near my hands or face, yet annoy me not, not I

them, as they appear to examine, find nothing, and away

they go) — the vast space of the sky overhead so clear,

and the buzzard up there sailing his slow whirl in majestic spir-

al discs; just over the surface of the pond,”
………………………………………………………….

These twelve lines, incomplete yet enough to justify the title:
A July Afternoon by the Pond, by WALT WHITMAN, from a
small delightful book, A Dream of Summer, Poems For The
Sensuous Season, selected by Robert Atwan.

This may be another warm, indolent day coming up, or not.
Matters not, it’s summer.

with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

YES!

Posted on by Antoinette Martignoni

This morning, Joe Riley (Panhala) sent out a poem that moved
me and I felt myself leap from my chair with joy and anticipation
of what life feels like and offers me every day:

“Let him stand there
then
for the human soul,
let his weight come true on the rope,
the way we want to lean
into the center of things,
the way we want to
fall with the gravity
of the situation
and then afterwards
laugh and
defy it
with an upward
ultimately untraceable
flight,
a great ungovernable
ringing
announcement
to the world
that something, somewhere,
has changed.”
……………………….’The Bell Ringer’ excerpt by David Whyte.

YES!

And so it is.

with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

CHANGES THEN & NOW

Posted on by Antoinette Martignoni

I went searching the work of poets of the last century. Just curious.
Some of the lines from these poets’ work are very familiar.
Take this one from Robert Frost (1874-1963):

” Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”,

the first line from a very long poem. Who even remembers the rest
of this poem? Not I, surely. So I read the remaining lines, quite a
few. I would like to share the last third of the poem because it
carries in it some of the same resistance to change that we find
ourselves suffering in this country at this time.

Here it is:

“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.’

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

‘WHY do they make good neighbors?’ Isn’t it

Where there are cows?’ But here there are no cows.

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 does not love a wall,

That wants it down.’ I could say, ‘Elves’ to him.

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself. I see him there,

Bringing a stone gasped firmly by the top

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

He moves in darkness as it seems to me

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.”
…………………………………………………..

Well, Frost died in the 1960’s, and he had
no answers to the poem’s question he’d pondered.
Those ’60’s were a time of huge change, and we are
now in changes as important as those were timely.

I like the simple words of the poem, trusting in the
intention to get at the root of so many ‘why’s’ facing
him then and us now.

with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette