Month: September 2012

NO BIG WORDS

Posted on by Antoinette Martignoni

With the weekend approaching, it might be
apt to look at the pleasure of all five senses:

” Savoring,
tasting,
touching,
hearing,
seeing — these are the gates through which the
world pours in and through us. The wider we open
those gates, the more fully we shall know the
pleasures, unique to this embodied life, that are
passing even now as we speak.

And we shall come to this knowledge, not by
hurrying to cram it all in, but by slowing down,
so we may glimpse the vastness of every moment,
every mouthful,
every sight,
sound,
and touch of hand to hand
as it happens.”

…………….ROGER HOUSDEN, from his book,
Seven Sins for a LIfe Worth Living.

I could mention all the ‘big’ words, like
friendship, freedom, enough, that move us through
the days of our lives. I could do that and it would
be what I spend a lot of my time considering.

Housden is asking me, us, you, to get out of our
minds to just notice the simpler means we have
at hand to accomplish much.

There it is, that big word: accomplish.
I’m putting that aside until next Monday.
Time enough then.

always with love,
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

Art by Rachel Olson Awes

LAST HOURS OF SUMMER

Posted on by Antoinette Martignoni

It’s 3:00 a.m. and the leaves on the trees are still.
that is so strange! It happens, over and over.
Sometimes I wake up, turn to find that yes, again,
the leaves are still, right then at a 3:00 a.m.

It feels as if I am being awakened to notice
something, to become aware. Right. Today, I
got up and knew that poetry would allow me to
sleep again. Here’s what showed up:

“FOUR HORSES

On Thursday the farmer
put four horses
into the cut hay-field
next to the house.

Since then the days
have been filled with the
sheen of their
brown hides
racing the fence edge.

Since then I see
their curved necks
through the kitchen window,
sailing like swans
past the pale field.

Each morning
their hooves fill my
open door
with an urgency
for something
just beyond my grasp

and I spend my whole
day in an idiot joy,
writing, gardening,
and looking
for it
under every stone.

I find myself
wanting to do
something
stupid and lovely.

I find myself
wanting to walk up
and thank
the farmer for these
dark brown horses and
see him stand
back laughing in his
grizzled and
denim wonder at my
innocence.

I find myself wanting
to run down First Street
like an eight year old,
saying “Hey!
Come and look
at the new horses
in Fossek’s field!”

And I find myself
wanting to ride
into the last hours
of this summer,
bareback and
happy as the hooves
of the days
that drum toward me.

I hear the whinny of
their fenced and abandoned
freedom
and feel happy
today
in the field
of my own making,

writing non-stop
my head held high,
ranging the boundaries
of a birthright
of exuberance.”

…………DAVID WHYTE, from his book,
River Flow, 1984-2007

Yesterday I walked over a field being readied
to be a meadow next year. The sun was high
and the light was clear.
Happiness.

always with love,
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

“…happy
today in the field
of my own making.”

MAY IT HAPPEN

Posted on by Antoinette Martignoni

Conventions parade faces and voices from other
parts of the USA into our living rooms. I have been
full of amazement as familiar political faces were
joined by so many unknown to me because their
papers had not been left at my door.

For the moment we can suspend choice and see
the beauty of the new young ones in all their hope
and strength, now being heard.

As the poet says:

“Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost, green thrives, the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.

The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen, may it happen to you.”

………………SHEENAGH PUGH, from Cardiff, Wales.
in Good Poems , selected by Garrison Keillor.

These “Dailies” are generally written as the sun comes
up, or before. I leave you to take what you will from
their content, sometimes sending me back your take
on what I have sought to share.

Thank you so much, each time you do.

always with love,
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

“The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow that seemed hard frozen, may it happen to you.” Art by Lucy Campbell

A GARDEN

Posted on by Antoinette Martignoni

The end of Summer seems to fall around Labor Day,
part of our cultural homage to change of season.

I went to my bookcase this morning, pulled out
Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, then recent poems by
Mary Oliver, and lastly, Gunilla Norris’s book,
A Mystic Garden.

What the summer has brought up for us all has
been sudden, often unexpected, yet hugely
meaningful. Here, from A Mystic Garden, are
today’s words:

“Any time we make a garden, even a tiny one, we
are in the work of remembering. Working the soil,
cultivating our inner ground, we have a chance to
appreciate and praise the great gift of life and the
earth that sustains us.

We are held by something so beyond our ken
and so essentially unknowable. We call it God
though no word can name it.

Humming through us, through the ground, through
all things, it asks us to be particular, to be living
expressions, to be sons and daughters of earth
and to care for life itself.

It asks us to be fruitful — to tend the garden,
to protect the garden, to share the garden,
to be the garden.”

……..GUNILLA NORRIS.

While the glorious colors of gardens are still with us,
let’s fill our senses with beauty, and share the gifts..

always with love,
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

“We are held by something so beyond our ken and so essentially unknowable…”