June 4, 2012

I believe we are in the summer routine already, warm morning, blue skies with white fair-weather clouds, humidity, and cicadas.  The birds were all out early, you could hear about all of them at one time or another, even the woodpeckers, yes, more than one.  Now, this late in the morning, most of what you hear is the chirring rhythm of cicadas.  It's odd, I rarely see the actually insect, I know they are out there but I just don't see them too often.  More butterflies are out, the little white ones, and some larger dark ones, and an occasional yellow one just for a brightness.  The water bowl seems to be holding water, and the blue jays are taking every advantage of it.  The little sparrow types have to wait their turn, and it's a long wait!

Sometimes a poem will appeal to me and I won't really know why . . . here is one of those poems, today's poem from Verse Daily:

Terra Incognita

I have scaled unknown ridges and cliffs,
only to abseil downward, dropping inside
the holes of caves where stalagmites pierced

the floors of darkened rooms. I have found
mines deep within the crevices of sleeping
mountains, waded in underground springs

of manatees, minerals, sand. I have upturned
rocks, searched the roots of trees in acres
of eclipsed valleys, hiked along shores,

lakes, becks, running streams.
Once it stopped for days at a single hillside,
made a bed inside, woke to the sound

of falcons and the distant morning dove,
the sun glinting off pines that reached
upwards with outstretched hands.

But do not tell me that love makes us into fools.
I know the shadows that pause within the folds
of these hills, still miles from where I stand.

I've heard the secrets farmers keep, irrigation
and rotating crops, when to move in, when to start a fire.
I've seen the red skies. I know the warning of dawn.

I know too that frozen waters can flow,
can once again flow, how fields will blaze
anew, if touched by the sun.

Blame me, but I will open the curtains.
After all, I have lived here for a million years
and am long past finding my way home.

Andrea Witzke Slot

Right in the middle, "do not tell me love makes us fools.", right smack in the middle, the oddest line, and one on which the whole poem seems to turn, that love might be part of everything else in the poem, part of the natural world, falcons, and pine trees, caves and mountains.  And after love, the farmers and all the ordinary things of the world we know.  The red skies in the morning . . . sailors take warning . . . things are beginning to change.  That frozen waters thaw and flow, and, evidently, so do frozen hearts, frozen fields will blaze with that changing sun.  It's the last stanza that made me have that feeling of recognition, that I open the curtains daily on my world, and still sometimes feel I am long past finding my way home, that there will always be some feeling of being alien, homesick for something I don't even understand, that I have lived here forever and still every day something new presents itself.  Sometimes I think that's a good thing, sometimes it just makes me feel a kind of nostalgia for a place I am sure never exists in this world, a place where everything is known, even me.