The fog horns tell me what
I will find even before I get out of bed.
The dark is compounded by dense fog, the streetlights are shrouded, the
trees just dark silhouettes, barely visible.
The gray is slowly made visible by the sunrise, though you really can't
see the sun from the house, and the light is feeble at best. When I get out and on the road to my class,
the sun is a red rubber ball just barely visible above the horizon of the bay. It looks very red with orange leaking out
the sides and top pushing away the fog and streaking the sky until it is too
light to see that deep a color. The air
is calm, motionless, sounds muffled by the quilt of air.
By the time I get out of
school, the sky is a bright blue with few clouds, mostly high, thin, almost
puffy ones. As I write they are
schooling together like fish, gathering and moving in the same direction. The fog has vanish and there is a little
breeze now.
This morning I found a book
in the school library, quite by accident, a book by one of my favorite poets,
Naomi Shihab Nye. It's an anthology of
work by Texas poets and artists, Is This Forever, or What? Makes some interesting combinations. She starts the introduction by saying Texas
has 2, 842 miles of state line, and that from Texarkana in the east to El Paso
is farther than from Chicago to New York.
When I am talking about Texas to people not from this country, they
think it obscene that a state has enough width for two time zones, yet Texas is
not the only state with that distinction, just one of the larger ones. So I thought I would send some poems from
her book. I liked a lot of them, and
not just because of the Texas connection.
She seems to have a knack for picking poems that encourage us to notice
the world and keep believing in what we find there: natural beauty, the
kindness of strangers, the home of the heart which is the family.
something
I look to you
keyboard
to say something to me
to bring me some intuitive wisdom,
to console me, construct me,
converge me
to send me a message through
my fingers
and your page
to reveal something
I wish I already knew.
I look to you
mailbox
to bring me something
wonderful
to bring me something
special
to change my life
to put something priceless
in my hands
that perhaps is already there
but I have no way of
seeing.
I look to you
telephone
to transmit some important
message
to my ear
to give me news
good news to make a
connection
between me right here right
now
and me someplace
in what I can be
and might become yet
but am still a stranger to.
I look to you
new day
perhaps tomorrow
perhaps tomorrow
always waiting for
something
something
to happen.
Carmen Tajolla
The things that connect us
to other people, keyboard for me for sure, the mail box, the phone. It does seem we are always waiting for
something, some distant time when conditions will be right for what ever we
want to do. When today things are as
right as they can be, but we can't recognize that, we are caught up in the
searching, in the fear of beginning, in what failure might come, so we miss the
rightness of the hour and keep waiting.
I'd like to think that somewhere in that waiting will come a moment that
hits us like a sucker punch and we realize that it's time to start, time to
make that change, time to do what we are meant to do.
It's a new day, let's stop
waiting, let's do something with the day, begin, move along, finish! Something!
Night will be here all to soon, but it's in the day that dreams come
true!
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