Tag: quietness

An Everlasting Quietness

barnstormingblog3 Comments

The simple words no longer work.
Neither do the grand ones.
Something about
The hanging bits of dark
Mixed with your hair.
The everlasting quietness
Attached to the deserted barn
Made me think I’d discovered you
But you already knew all about yourself
As we stood on the edge of a forest
With your dress as languid as the air,
The day made of spring wind and daffodils.
Then the sky appeared in blue patches
Among slow clouds,
Oak leaves came out on the trees,
Grass suddenly became green,
Filled with small animals that sing.
All the parts of spring were gathering,
The earth was being created all over again
One piece at a time
Just for you.
~Tom Hennen “Found on the Earth” From Darkness Sticks To Everything

I’m waking from wintry doldrums,
to earlier mornings, longer evenings,
healing from weeks of cold and weariness.

It is as if all has been rebirthed,
vivid with light and songs and color and smells –
I cannot imagine not sharing it all.

This renewal feels so personal,
as if just for me –
yet I know others are waking too.

I face the morning sun in silence,
my eyelids closed and glowing,
warming in the light.

So I offer up this blessed cup of quiet,
steeped and ready to pour out,
just for you.

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Harrowing Grace

barnstormingblog1 Comment

sunset828142

sunset823143
As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away—
Too imperceptible at last
To seem like Perfidy—
A Quietness distilled
As Twilight long begun,
Or Nature spending with herself
Sequestered Afternoon—
The Dusk drew earlier in—
The Morning foreign shone—
A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest, that would be gone—
And thus, without a Wing
Or service of a Keel
Our Summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful.
~Emily Dickinson

 

sunset828145

 

 

Quieter Beneath the Quiet

barnstormingblog1 Comment

mudpondkoi

Our shadows bring them from the shadows:
a yolk-yellow one with a navy pattern
like a Japanese woodblock print of fish scales.
A fat 18-karat one splashed with gaudy purple
and a patch of gray. One with a gold head,
a body skim-milk-white, trailing ventral fins
like half-folded fans of lace.
A poppy-red, faintly disheveled one,
and one, compact, all indigo in faint green water.
They wear comical whiskers and gather beneath us
as we lean on the cement railing
in indecisive late-December light,
and because we do not feed them, they pass,
then they loop and circle back. Loop and circle. Loop.
“Look,” you say, “beneath them.” Beneath them,
like a subplot or a motive, is a school
of uniformly dark ones, smaller, unadorned,
perhaps another species, living in the shadow
of the gold, purple, yellow, indigo, and white,
seeking the mired roots and dusky grasses,
unliveried, the quieter beneath the quiet.
~Susan Kolodny “Koi Pond, Oakland Museum”
mudpondkoiwateriris

Quiet Eyes

barnstormingblog1 Comment

photo by Josh Scholten

I will be the gladdest thing
     Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
     And not pick one.

photo by Josh Scholten

I will look at cliffs and clouds
     With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,
     And the grass rise.

photo by Josh Scholten

And when lights begin to show
     Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
     And then start down!

-Afternoon on a Hill by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

photo by Josh Scholten
Thanks to Mr. Ryan Smit and the Concert Choir who introduced an appreciative audience to this poem set to music by Eric Barnum during last night’s Lynden Christian High School music concert