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'

Fourth place

Stalk the woods and name the places

Third place, you said, meaning I don’t work here

And I don’t live here,

But I’m home here.

Fourth place, I am seated there.

Heavenly space,

divine pace,

realm with no need of sun.

Concrete yet unseen, city

designed and build by God.

Foundations immovable, indivisible,

Far above all rulers and authorities

under One whose dominion knows no end,

everlasting enduring, 

engaging in unfinishing

I will live there.

I am there.

I am home there, even now.

Never been

but known there,

A place with my name on it, prepared.

This year: fight, flight, write

This year I will
Believe
This year I will
Sail
I will, said,
My will
“I will say”
This is my year for fulfillment
I will N O T wait.

This year, I will
This year I will I will get
This year
I declare
I will embark—
Bon voyage.

Set type
This year I will write
I will set myself right
To receive.

Set course
This year I will sail
To lean into sterns, notch rope, and wind;

Set heart
This year I will sow
I will soak in love, beautified;
To ring, union

This year
To flesh: oneness, yes
To jibe and tack
To sink deep into words;
This rest.

This, year.

Love expressed

Our prayer must not be self-centered. It must arise not only because we feel our own need as a burden we must lay upon God, but also because we are so bound up in love for our fellow men that we feel their need as acutely as our own.

To make intercession for men is the most powerful and practical way in which we can express our love for them. John Calvin