The leaves were falling from the great oak at the meadow’s edge. They were falling from all the trees. One branch of the oak reached high above the others and stretched far out over the meadow. Two leaves clung to its very tip.

“It isn’t the way it used to be,” said one leaf to the other.

“No,” the other leaf answered, “So many of us have fallen off tonight we’re almost the only ones left on our branch.”

“You never know who’s going to be next,” said the first leaf. “Even when it was warm and the sun shone, a storm or a cloudburst would come sometimes and many leaves were torn off, though they were still young. You never know who’s going to be next.”

“The sun seldom shines now,” sighed the second leaf, “and when it does, it gives us no warmth. We must have warmth again.”

“Can it be true,” said the first leaf, “can it really be true that others come to take our places when we’re gone, and after them still others, and more and more?”

“It is really true,” whispered the second leaf. “We can’t even begin to imagine it, it’s beyond our powers.”

“It makes me very sad,” added the first leaf.

They were silent a while.

Then the first leaf said quietly to herself, “Why must we fall?”

The second leaf asked, “What happens to us when we’ve fallen?”

“We sink down.”

“What is under us?”

The first leaf answered, “I don’t know. Some say one thing, some another, but nobody knows.”

The second leaf asked, “Do we feel anything, do we know anything about ourselves when we’re down there?”

The first leaf answered, “Who knows? Not one of all those down there has ever come back to tell us about it.”

They were silent again. Then the first leaf said tenderly to the other, “Don’t worry so much about it, you’re trembling!”

“That’s nothing,” the second leaf answered, “I tremble at the least thing now. I don’t feel so sure of my hold as I used to.”

“Let’s not talk anymore about such things,” said the first leaf.

The other replied, “No, we’ll let be. But – what else shall we talk about?” She was silent, but went on after a little while. “Which of us will… which of us will go first?”

“There’s still plenty of time to worry about that,” the other leaf assured her. “Lets remember how beautiful it was, how wonderful, when the sun came out and shone so warmly that we thought we’d burst with life. Do you remember? And the morning dew and the mild and splendid nights?”

“Now the nights are dreadful,” the second leaf complained, “and there is no end to them.”

“We shouldn’t complain,” said the first leaf gently. “We’ve outlived many, many others.”

“Have I changed much?” asked the second leaf shyly but determinedly.

“Not in the least,” the first leaf assured her. “You only think so because I’ve got to be so yellow and ugly. But it’s different in your case.”

“You’re fooling me,” the second leaf said.

“No, really!” the first leaf exclaimed eagerly, “believe me, you’re as lovely as the day you were born. Here and there may be a little yellow spot, but it’s hardly noticeable and only makes you handsomer, believe me.”

“Thanks,” whispered the second leaf, quite touched. I don’t believe you, not altogether, but I thank you because you’re so kind. You’ve always been so kind to me. I’m just beginning to understand how kind you are.

“Hush,” said the other leaf, and kept silent herself, for she was too troubled to talk anymore.

Then they were both silent. Hours passed.

A moist wind blew, cold and hostile through the treetops.

“Ah, now,” said the second leaf, “I…”

And then her voice broke off. She was torn from her place and spun down.

Winter had come.

Bambi: A Life in the Woods, by Felix Salten

Wheelchairs

A Rainy Morning

by Ted Kooser

A young woman in a wheelchair,
wearing a black nylon poncho spattered with rain,
is pushing herself through the morning.
You have seen how pianists
sometimes bend forward to strike the keys,
then lift their hands, draw back to rest,
then lean again to strike just as the chord fades.
Such is the way this woman
strikes at the wheels, then lifts her long white fingers,
letting them float, then bends again to strike
just as the chair slows, as if into a silence.
So expertly she plays the chords
of this difficult music she has mastered,
her wet face beautiful in its concentration,
while the wind turns the pages of rain.





Kooser's poetry captures moments in time.  He does not moralize or make a pitch to sell you emotion.  He simply paints a picture. "A Rainy Morning" is one of my favorites.  I imagine Kooser drinking coffee in a cafe.  He looks up and sees this young woman in the window, and boom: a poem sweeps out of her and into Kooser's pen.  Kooser paints her with skill.  He captures her beauty and her determined spirit in just fifteen lines.  Where others may have pitied "a disabled woman" caught in the rain, Kooser, like all good poets, has the ability to see truth.

 Abled-bodied persons often associate words like "limiting" or "restrictive" to the wheelchair.  Artist Sue Austin wanted to do something about that.   She drew parallels between her wheelchair and scuba diving gear.  With scuba gear, divers are able to explore a world--a beautiful world--that would otherwise be unavailable to them.   So it is with a wheelchair.   A wheelchair allows speed, agility, and distance for people with physical disabilities.  Wheelchairs are about freedom. They are not about restrictions.  Sue is brilliant.  Her art is creative.  Watching her ten minute video will change the way you view powerchairs (as she likes to call them).  When something of beauty--which was once hidden from the senses--is revealed, that, my friends, is poetry.*  

  


To watch another video that is exceptional along the same vein, watch Notable: the story of people with disabilities living in Uganda. 

*Because I am married to a logician, I am forced to admit to myself and to you that "beauty revealed" in not a definition of poetry but rather one characteristic of poetry.

Every Riven Thing

"There is a passage in the writings of Simone Weil that has long been important to me. In the passage, Weil describes two prisoners who are in solitary confinement next to each other. Between them is a stone wall. Over a period of time — and I think we have to imagine it as a very long time — they find a way to communicate using taps and scratches. The wall is what separates them, but it is also the only means they have of communicating. “It is the same with us and God,” she says. “Every separation is a link.”

                                                                                                                             -Christian Wiman*

                                                                                                photo link

Ten years ago my dad asked me to not knit in the car.  He had a random thought about knitting needles and car accidents, and so for ten years I’ve wanted to knit in the car--and guilt-free---but I haven’t been able to do it.  His words carry weight.  When I shared with my father my spiritual struggles of the last half decade, he asked me to begin--again--memorizing Bible verses. He offered no sermon, no pity, no suggestion of passages that would convict.  Instead, there was the simple belief in the words of his god.  It struck me as a beautiful and reasonable request for an elder of a faith to ask of his offspring, and it allowed me to better follow the advice of Father Goodrich: In periods of spiritual drought, put as much time and thought into your beliefs as your disbeliefs.  Another opportunity came from my friend Myra.  She gifted me with the book, My Bright Abyss:  Meditation of a Modern Believer.    Written by poet Christian Wiman, it is a lyrical narrative of Wiman's journey to find faith's high places.  My faith journey seems to circle around the foot of the mountain with ruts of weariness and sometimes fury (because of the weariness).  Yet, I yearn for connection.  Wiman's words--the scratches and taps against the wall--offer me hope that spiritual heights happen in silence, and that even the wrenched open and the torn apart can find peace.

Every Riven Thing by Christian Wiman

Before I read this poem I had to look up the word "riven" in the dictionary.  
Riven:  to wrench open, to tear to pieces.

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made
sing his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky,
man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he’s made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into the stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing he’s made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.

from Every Riven Thing (2010)

*Read Wiman's article in its entirety:  Gazing Into the Abyss

Delight is as the flight

Dishes are done with the intelligence of the hands. The eyes are needed very little. This is the reason for the window above the sink. As I work, I watch a squirrel in an elm tree.  Sitting fat and still, he is a little Buddha. It’s easy to imagine, the Buddha’s placid smile and a string of pine nuts circling his neck for prayer beads. He is at peace. He has a street lined with trees for his pleasure. The elms are the grandfathers of the neighborhood, strong grandfathers never bothered by hard winters or seasons of drought.  But a few years back, Dutch elm disease took the life of one them. Now an orange X marked by the city on the trunk marks another's fate. It is diseased. 

One night, we are asked to move our car, and a neighbor, borrowing a few hands and an old red truck, removes the grandfather in a matter of hours. Hours. The squirrel, I imagine, is safe in another tree. Perhaps still sitting silent in contemplation. My daughter, nurturer and protector, needs to understand what has happened and why. She researches Dutch elm disease. She looks for signs in the other elms. Looking over her shoulder, I feel frustrated.  Thinking about the root system of the Grandfathers, it seems complicated and a little hopeless. But I lack belief in the mystical. My daughter consults her book of fairies. She writes out this wish, “I wish that Dutch elm disease was gone. Elm Tree Fairy.” She has done her part. She has given the name of the disease to the tree fairy. It is his work to do the rest. “Fairies do what they can. They can’t fix everything,“ she says.

Delight is as the flight

by Emily Dickinson

Delight is as the flight --
Or in the Ratio of it,
As the Schools would say --
The Rainbow's way --
A Skein
Flung colored, after Rain,
Would suit as bright,
Except that flight
Were Aliment --

"If it would last"
I asked the East,
When that Bent Stripe
Struck up my childish
Firmament --
And I, for glee,
Took Rainbows, as the common way,
And empty Skies
The Eccentricity --

And so with Lives --
And so with Butterflies --
Seen magic -- through the fright
That they will cheat the sight --
And Dower latitudes far on --
Some sudden morn --
Our portion -- in the fashion --
Done --

Alms for the Poor Gardener

Every year I try my hand at gardening. Because of the shade in my yard and my searing impatience for the North Dakota growing season, I harvest little.  

"I reap more vegetables from our friendship than from my own garden," I say to my friend Amy.  But am I disappointed? Not when I consider the offering.  

Beans Green and Yellow

By Mary Oliver 

In fall
it is mushrooms
gathered in dampness
under the pines;
in spring
I have known the taste of the lamb
full of milk
and spring grass;
today
it is beans green and yellow
and lettuce and basil
from my friend’s garden -
how calmly,
as though it were an ordinary thing,
we eat the blessed earth.

Blackberries

 I grew up on acres of wild timber.  A creek ran through it, and in the summer my brother and I would dam the stream to make a pool for swimming.  In the winter, we laced our snow boots and skated down it.  Not far from the creek, just up a hill, was a patch of blackberries.   No plant has a better defense than the wild blackberry.*  You may breach its thorny briars, but never without inflecting raw wounds upon the flesh. Still, it's true what they say; pain makes victory all the sweeter.   

This is my father-in-law's hunting stand.  A stone's throw away is a thick bramble of blackberries.  Last week, roaming the woods with Papa, my children and nephews picked the ripe fruit.  As we worked, I remembered a poem by Mary Oliver.  That moment in the woods I could not recall her exact words, but there is a reliability in Oliver's work.  I knew with certainty how it would read.  There on the page would be my morning described with tender perfection as an act of piety. 

 

August

by Mary Oliver

When the blackberries hang 

swollen in the woods, in the brambles 

nobody owns, I spend

all day among the high 

branches, reaching 

my ripped arms, 

thinking

of nothing, cramming 

the black honey of summer 

into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is. In the dark 

creeks that run by there is 

this thick paw of my life darting among

the black bells, the leaves; there is 

this happy tongue.

*I read a book last summer called What A Plant Knows.  I learned that plants have a lot going on upstairs, even without the help of a central nervous system.  They see--in a sense—and they feel.  The Venus flytrap is an obvious example of this.  Plants smell and can hold information for a few hours at a time.  It's an interesting book.  Anyone wants to borrow it?

Hope for the Impoverished Soul

The Quiet Power
-Tara Sophia Mohr

I walked backwards, against time
and that’s where I caught the moon,
singing at me.
 
I steeped downwards, into my seat
and that’s where I caught freedom,
waiting for me, like a lilac.
 
I ended thought, and I ended story.
I stopped designing, and arguing, and
sculpting a happy life.
 
I didn’t die. I didn’t turn to dust.
 
Instead I chopped vegetables,
and made a calm lake in me
where the water was clear and sourced and still.
 
And when the ones I loved came to it,
I had something to give them, and
it offered them a soft road out of pain.
 
I became beloved.
 
And I came to know that this was it.
The quiet power.
I could give something mighty, lasting,
that stopped the wheel of chaos,
 
by tending to the river inside,
keeping the water rich and deep,
keeping a bench for you to visit.
 

------

Some say, "Enough."   Others--I am one--scrape and scrape at sore spirits looking for--always more--to give.  We givers create our own bête noire.  The beast never feeds, for that is how she devours. She takes peace and gives harried moments.  The last bits are her hallowed things.  Her wheels will not still until we exorcise this way of giving and learn to tend the spirit.  That is why I love this poem.  It is the blueprint for recovery.  It offers hope.  My gifts will come from abundance.  My waters will be rich and deep.  

The poet, Tara Sophia Mohr, blogs at http://www.taramohr.com/.