melancholy – Page 6 – Barnstorming

A Renewed Dawn

May 30, 2016 barnstormingblog1 Comment

momdad

(for my father on Memorial Day)

It was only a part of what we knew about you-
serving three long years in the South Pacific,
spoken of obliquely
only if asked about,
but never really answered.

We knew you were a Marine battalion leader,
knew you spent too many nights without sleep,
unsure if you’d see the dawn
only to dread
what the next day would bring.

We knew you lost friends
and your innocence;
found unaccustomed strength
inside a mama’s boy
who once cried too easily and later almost never.

Somehow life had prepared you for this:
pulling your daddy out of bars when you were ten
watching him beat your mama
until finally getting big enough
to stand in the way.

Then Tarawa, Saipan, Tinian beaches
bitterly bloodsoaked
battles won,
to be restored and renewed
as vacation resorts.

We let you go without knowing
your full story–
even Mom didn’t ask.
You could not share the depth
of horror and fear you felt.

It was not shame that kept you silent;
simply no need to revisit
the pain of remembrance.
It was done, finished, you had done your duty.

So as we again set flowers and flag
on your grave,
reunited with Mom after years apart,
I regret so many questions unasked
of your sacrifice beyond imagining.

Sleep well, Dad,
with Mom now by your side.
I rejoice you have wakened
to a renewed dawn.

wedding

dawn12221

Bereft in Winter

January 15, 2016 barnstormingblog2 Comments

starlingmurmur3

starlingmurmur

Silence and darkness grow apace,
broken only by the crack of a hunter’s gun in the woods.
Songbirds abandon us so gradually that,
until the day when we hear no birdsong at all but the scolding of the jay,
we haven’t fully realized that we are bereft — as after a death.
Even the sun has gone off somewhere…
Now we all come in, having put the garden to bed,
and we wait for winter to pull a chilly sheet over its head.
~Jane Kenyon from “Good-by and Keep Cold”

___________

Every day now we hear hunters firing in the woods and the wetlands around our farm, most likely aiming for the few ducks that have stayed in the marshes through the winter, or possibly a Canadian goose or a deer to bring home for the freezer. The usual day-long symphony of birdsong of the rest of the year is replaced by shotguns popping, hawks and eagle screams and chittering, the occasional dog barking, with the bluejays and squirrels arguing over the last of the filbert nuts.

In the clear cold evenings, when coyotes aren’t howling in the moonlight, the owls hoot to each other across the fields from one patch of woods to another, their gentle resonant conversation echoing back and forth. The horses confined to their stalls in the barns snort and blow as they bury their noses in flakes of summer-bound hay.

Last weekend I was startled by the cacophony of a starling murmuration or “rumble”, hundreds rising and falling together in mass over the farm, landing brashly in our treetops and bleaching the ground beneath with their droppings, shattering the silence for an hour before moving on to another piece of real estate. Our farm was quiet once again.

The chilly silence of the darkened days is now interrupted by gunfire percussion, no melody at all. There are no morning birdsong arias, leaving me bereft of their blending musical tapestry that in a few short months will wake me at 4 AM. There is no peeper orchestra from the swamps in the evenings, their symphonies rising and falling on the breeze.

It is too too quiet and I’m left bereft, hungry for a song, any song. I listen intently for the familiar early morning and evening serenades returning.

It’s not long now.

starlingmurmur2

These Melancholy Days

December 28, 2015 barnstormingblog4 Comments

snowice

barebones8

The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sear.
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s tread.
The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay,
And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.

Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood
In brighter light, and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood?
Alas! they all are in their graves, the gentle race, of flowers
Are lying in their lowly beds, with the fair and good of ours.
The rain is falling where they lie, but the cold November rain
Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again.
~William Cullen Bryant from “The Death of the Flowers”

octleaf4

octleaf7

These dark and sodden days are scarcely recalled while basking in the lightness of June when the sun shines 19 hours a day. There is no way to cope with such overwhelming darkness except by adding in a few minutes more a day over six months, otherwise the shock of leaving behind the light would be too great. The howling wind knocks and batters, the rain beats mercilessly at the window panes, the puddles stand deeper than they appear, the mud sucks off boots, the leaves thoroughly shaken from embarrassed branches.

We have no remnant of summer civility and frivolity left; we must adapt or cry trying, only adding to a pervasive sogginess.

Nevertheless, these melancholy days have their usefulness — there are times of joyful respite from frenetic activity while reading, snuggled deep under quilts, safe and warm. Without such stark contrast, the light and bright time of year would become merely routine, yet just another sunny day.

That never happens here in the north.

We can now celebrate the emerging light with real thanksgiving and acknowledging this darkness makes gratitude more genuine.

We are privileged to live within a paradox: there is, after all, a gladness in our sadness.

barnrooflines

morning1219151

Grief Illuminated

November 17, 2015 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

fulmoon2

A waning November moon reluctantly rose,
dimming from the full globe of the night before.
I drive a darkening country road, white lines sweeping past,
aware of advancing frost in the evening haze,
anxious to return home to familiar warmth and light.

Nearing a county road corner, slowing to a stop,
I glanced aside where
a lonely rural cemetery sits expectant.
Through open iron gates and tenebrous headstones,
there in the middle path, incongruous,
car’s headlights beamed bright.
I puzzled, thinking:
lovers or vandals would seek inky cover of night.
Instead, these lights focused on one soul alone,
kneeling graveside,
a hand resting heavily on a stone, head bowed in prayer.
This stark moment of solitary sorrow,
a visible grieving of a heart
illuminated by twin beams.

This benediction of mourning
as light pierced the blackness;
gentle fingertips traced
the engraved letters of a beloved name.
Feeling touched
as uneasy witness, I pull away
to drive deeper into the night,
struggling to see despite
my eyes’ thickening mist.

a full moon in Ireland

fullmoon

Angel of Grief--Stanford University

Angel of Grief, Stanford University Mausoleum

An Oath to Live

November 8, 2015November 8, 2015 barnstormingblog4 Comments

mossdrop1

morningmoon118151

It is…the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life…
The man who kills a man kills a man.
The man who kills himself kills all men.
As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.
~ G.K. Chesterton

Suicide rates globally have climbed 60% in the past forty five years,
particularly in developed countries where most folks are sheltered and fed,
where daily survival is entirely in our own hands.
Based on the distress and anguish of the patients I see every day,
there will be no slowing of this trend:
this temptation, this contemplation, this resignation of dying, only a passive
“I wish I were dead” or
“the world is better off without me”~
wipes out the worth of the world.

~where there is no oath of loyalty to live, our own or others’,
as stressful, painful and messy as life can be,
~where there is no honoring of the holiness of the created being,
whether unborn, or breathing heavy through daily struggles, or suffering or dying,
~when there is no longer resistance to standing up to the buffeting winds of life,
only a toppling over, taking out everything and everyone in the way,
~then with each suicide, the world also is wiped out,
the value of all people killed in one act of self-murder.

November is Suicide Prevention Month

woods27

morninglight11815

In the Dusk

November 6, 2015 barnstormingblog5 Comments

Sap withdraws from the upper reaches
of maples; the squirrel digs deeper
and deeper in the moss
to bury the acorns that fall
all around, distracting him.

I’m out here in the dusk…
where the wild asters, last blossoms
of the season, straggle uphill.
Frost flowers, I’ve heard them called.
The white ones have yellow centers
at first: later they darken
to a rosy copper. They’re mostly done.
Then the blue ones come on. It’s blue
all around me now, though the color
has gone with the sun.

There is no one home but me—
and I’m not at home; I’m up here on the hill,
looking at the dark windows below.
Let them be dark…

…The air is damp and cold
and by now I am a little hungry…
The squirrel is high in the oak,
gone to his nest , and night has silenced
the last loud rupture of the calm.
~Jane Kenyon from “Frost Flowers”

Even when the load grows too heavy,
our misery rolling in like a fog that
covers all that was once vibrant,even then
even then
there waits a nest of nurture,
a place of calm
where we are fed
when we are tired and hungry.
We will be filled;
we will be restored.

Seized of Quiet

November 1, 2015November 1, 2015 barnstormingblog2 Comments

Leaves wait as the reversal of wind
comes to a stop. The stopped woods
are seized of quiet; waiting for rain
bird & bug conversations stutter to a
stop.

…the rain begins to fall. Rain-strands,
thin slips of vertical rivers, roll
the shredded waters out of the cloud
and dump them puddling to the ground.
Like sticks half-drowned the trees
lean so my eyes snap some into
lightning shapes, bent & bent.

Whatever crosses over
through the wall of rain
changes; old leaves are
now gold. The wall is
continuous, doorless. True,
to get past this wall
there’s no need for a door
since it closes around me
as I go through.
~Marie Ponsot from “End of October”

There’s no turning around now
that the clock has fallen back.
We commit our stumbling feet to the path
that trudges toward winter,
silenced and seized
by a relentless momentum of doorless darkness.
There is no escape hatch:
we choose to live in gladness,
knowing that promises of a lighter day
are always kept.

A Wordless Immanence

August 28, 2015 barnstormingblog1 Comment

in celebration of a night’s rain and possibly more to come after months of drought, dust and wildfires to the east ~~~
… relief for the change in weather, but sadness at the coming transition to the dying darkness of autumn.

At the end of August, fall nip in the air,
I sensed something beyond me,
Everywhere I felt it in my flesh
As I beheld the sea and sky, the day,
The wordless immanence of the eternal…
~Richard Eberhart from “The Loon Call”

August rain:
the best of the summer gone,
and the new fall not yet born.
The odd uneven time.
~Sylvia Plath

I want to be bruised by God.

I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.

I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.

I want to be entered and picked clean.
~Charles Wright from “Clear Night”

Blown Away

November 29, 2014 barnstormingblog1 Comment

A wind has blown the rain away
and blown the sky away
and all the leaves away,
and the trees stand.
I think, I too,
have known autumn too long.
~e.e. cummings

The Back of Your Hand

October 15, 2014 barnstormingblog1 Comment

Just when you’d begun to feel
You could rely on the summer,
That each morning would deliver
The same mourning dove singing
From his station on the phone pole,
The same smell of bacon frying
Somewhere in the neighborhood,
The same sun burning off
The coastal fog by noon,
When you could reward yourself
For a good morning’s work
With lunch at the same little seaside cafe
With its shaded deck and iced tea,
The day’s routine finally down
Like an old song with minor variations,
There comes that morning when the light
Tilts ever so slightly on its track,
A cool gust out of nowhere
Whirlwinds a litter of dead grass
Across the sidewalk, the swimsuits
Are piled on the sale table,
And the back of your hand,
Which you thought you knew,
Has begun to look like an old leaf.
Or the back of someone else’s hand.
~George Bilgere “August”

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