April 17, 2012

Though it's still gray with cloud this morning, you can feel the sun behind it slowly, inexorably, making those clouds vanish, the brightness beginning to seep through, and the heat.  After so much rain, when the sun finally breaks out, the water will begin to rise again, drying up puddles, and return to the sky, humidity and mosquitoes left in the wake.

The birds are certainly glad its not raining this morning, seems we have been visited by flocks of them, noisy with joy, and even the breeze making a soft rustle through the cane as back ground to their song.  A pair of cardinals and the pair of blue jays both out there in separate trees, tiny sparrows, and finches, and the ever-present mockingbirds singing everyone's song.

The ligustrum is laden with its tiny white flowers and big sweet scent, and we have grass still because it has not been so hot.  Crickets and cicadas have begun their summer music as well as the tiny black frogs that sound like birds peeping.   So this morning there is lots of sound, to make up for the lack of the multitude of songs the rain and thunder made yesterday.  High off, unseen, this morning jets make their own distant thunder.

This poem combines the thoughts of rain with our stories, and all coming to a new light . . .

To Light

At the spring
we hear the great seas traveling
underground,
giving themselves up
with tongue of water
that sing the earth open.

They have journeyed through the graveyards
of our loved ones,
turning in their grave
to carry the stories of life to air.

Even the trees with their rings
have kept track
of the crimes that live within
and against us.

We remember it all.
We remember, though we are just skeletons
whose organs and flesh
hold us in.
We have stories
as old as the great seas
breaking through the chest,
flying out the mouth,
noisy tongues that once were silenced,
all the oceans we contain
coming to light.

 Linda Hogan

Water is so common and so vital, I like to think of it carrying our stories from the past into today.  The rings of trees tell the whole story of their existence, lean years and fat, drought and flood, all can be told by seeing what the rings have recorded.  Being a woman, it makes me think of how many centuries our stories were silenced, that what was written was written mostly by men, that the daily lives of women and what they saw and considered, their stories were largely unrecorded.   And now women all over the world, sit at their windows and type their lives into the lives of others, or write poems in secret and share them with sisters, or others in their lives, that breaking though the chest and flying out the mouth are all those stories that were never told before, all those oceans coming to light!

Today after the rain, light is breaking out, and making everything washed clean shine with color.  The birds are telling tales, the insects, and even the mothers, the woman down the street, the one in India, or Nigeria, or New Zealand are all telling stories, and what was hidden is coming into the day.