Morning

Mourning, morning
Afresh mercies woke calling
The clouds, wept. 

Drawing isn’t work, it’s a form of prayer

“Drawing isn’t work, it’s a form of prayer.”

-Christophe Blain’s Isaac The Pirate.

(Via Austin Kleon)

New Beauty

Prayer should not be regarded as a duty which must be performed, but rather as a privilege to be enjoyed, a rare delight that is always revealing some new beauty. -E.M. Bounds

A Poet's Declaration

If you write [type] words
in a particular form,
from a 26-letter contingent
it may be called a poem,
and if you write what may be called a poem
are you thereby perhaps may be called
a poet?

If said words
are just words
and not a poem
if said writer
of said words
is just a doodling sketcher,
just playing around layering letters
just making sound/ in her mind/ in her spare time
and not a poet.

Then who is qualified?
Is it a permission from the gods
is it a loquacious deity who bestows this rod?
Is it the scribe who imbibes the title of his own accord?
Is it bestowed by the father, an inheritance passed to sons of gentlemen?

Oh, the baggage of the label!
This apprehension
to title
this aversion
to inviting judgment
evoking potential failure
from a critic's scornful bite
from the sneer of the loose-leaf rabble.

I am
a writer
who writes words in form,
I am an artist who declares
these words are mine

and now, 
(in humility,
in trepidation,
in star-crossed admiration,
in gaze-averted supplication)
I whisper, I say

I am a poet.

I rhyme rhymes
with my heartbeat
I take time
to defeat
the scourge of nonsense
the dribble
the counterfeit
to be real
authentic
to settle the score with the metal of my sword

Words will win in the end
they are why I was born
To know and speak to the Logos of Life
the Word of God made flesh
and forever fully alive

What will suffice
but to take my daily rhema
and release
to encounter Spirit within me
and plunge deep beneath
inward and toward
the jealously yearning One,
consumed with zeal for His temple begun
in me,
completed, sozoed, set free
to be a life-speaking poet
His emissary.

So turn up the volume
and set your readers aright
this poet is loosed
and she's gonna write.

Fika

Pause, taste
Savor
Watch the falling frozen nature

Reflect
Remember to reject
The non-stop-multi-tasking

Forsake
The frantic for the
Moment

A new pace
Re-ordered space
Of mind

Content to enjoy
Gratitude deployed
Connection envoy

Rivulets
Create the daily ritual
The Fika

The time set aside
Invited to be
Let loose to ponder, reverie

The settling
Banisters crowned with white, branches cloaked in light
This break, rejuvenating.

Outside and Within

Takes a blizzard
To take time
For myself;
Selfish?
Or self-filling

Myself,
I think, but would rather act
Feel or forget
This self
In the flakes swirling in the air like gusts of a down pillow
Like sifting powdered sugar
Like an overturned salt shaker releasing a river.

Some find this easy,
Their inner world is their retreat
I've always needed permission to stop
And when I do, it's hard to get going
And then I'm useless, right,
Not producing?

Also, it doesn't feel safe in this space
Far safer keep moving
Guarded from the questioning,
Restless incessant evaluating. 

I want to, and
perhaps am  
s l o w l y learning
{it's a painful journey}
To look into myself
And see
The worth and the beauty
Imperfect but worthy
In just being.

                                                    s
                                                s
                                            e
                                          r
                                      g
                                  o
                             r
To process the  p
But not to disdain
God, help me.

More comes, the inches accumulate
Record-setting,
The weather reader delights in the forecast
Bundles up, trudging where there was no path

The waymaking takes time.

By design
And in this season
'Nee April blizzards 
I'm learning to accept that. 

Practice of an art

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. ... The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

Ursula Le Guin at the National Book Foundation 

Poetry in the 21st Century

Ingratiated

You would pay $10 a line, $300 minimum, for this One you call poetry

Which is what really, but words, in lines, stanzas you say

Not sentences

Which is cultivated and preposterous

Is invited to parties in lofts she doesn’t want to go to

But she’ll have a pinot and strum along

Cultivating her olfactory prescriptions and wince when the marrow hints too close to the bone

Turning on the Presentiment’s rantings and shower her succulents with water from thimbles

Streaming Netflix and lighting candles

Who is she, this glissading One

Tape measure in hand

Measuring time and rhyme

Existing in wordly essence

Deciding

What unsearchable meter to conquer next.

Senses/Analogies

Air is to sky

As breath is to

Life

Solid

Yet ungraspable

To hold in mind

In hand

In heart

Touch the flow

Hear the rush, ice breaking up

Soaring wings

Echoed in the trees

Movement

Connecting. 

(c) 2018 Christine Yaeger for the Spring 2018 'Write to the River'