Photo by aikijuanma
Here is a lovely story of youth adding beauty to the world by setting up a poetry stand and giving away instantly crafted poems to anyone who asked for them.
A few months ago as I was walking in Government Street in Victoria I met a woman standing beneath a tree outside Munro’s Books. The tree had small pieces of paper attached to them and when I looked closer I saw that they were poems, hanging on a “poet tree.” The poet turned out to be Yvonne Blomer and she asked me if she could read me a poem. When I said, with delight, “of course!” she asked whether I preferred any particular subject. I replied that I wished her to read me a poem about the territory of the open heart. She looked at me for a second and then reached into a file folder and pulled out this one:
To watch over the vineyards
O carrion crow, pulpy skull of scarecrow
going soft in your black bill,
in this fetish-orange field lies worship:
the sweep of glossed plumage over glistening
membrane; lies the sweet blood of purple skinned grape
cut on your sharp edged tomia,
shimmering there; sun-light on wet earth.
You too sweet to ripe; you black in the shadows, calling when you’re calling – –
the herds fly in dust gone crow, gone scare,
gone trill in clicks and shouts of krrrkrrr.
I applauded and remarked at how appropriate the poem was in many ways, especially in the resonance of the last sound, which approximated the French word for heart: coeur. She signed the card upon which the poem was written, handed it to me, and wished me a good day.
There is nothing bad that can come from poetry offered freely in the street.
Photo by Vik Nanda
Some things popping up and absorbing my attention this week.
- Mushrooms + human hair = oil spill cleanup
- Customizing big flying spaces. What will the future archeologists say? The economics and ecologics of such endeavours stagger me.
- Wow. Ashley dreams of flying,by putting all that space on the OUTSIDE.
- An old friend from Peterborough, Andy Quan, comes back on my radar with a new book of poems edited by another old friend, John Barton, with whom I was a associate editor of ARC magazine in the early 1990s. I love the web.
- Good media (page 1, page 2) from a recent Open Space event at WOSU in Columbus Ohio run by my friend Tuesday Ryan-Hart.
- Garret Lisi’s theory of everything and some useful discussion.
- “At the root of the music industry’s transformation is a rediscovery, or a renewed appreciation, of the communal origins of music-making and listening. As MP3 players and online video have grown in popularity, so has an appreciation that music isn’t just something that goes on between your ears.” Yes. And. The answer is to write songs about your place.
- The story of stuff and Regenerosity. Two from Pollard.
- Viv’s looking at facilitation too.
- My favourite web radio station at the moment: Groove Salad. Try it with mushrooms!
PS…somehow my annual December 6 post got saved to a drafts folder. I’ve republished it below.
Photo by Darwin Bell
Hyperlinks –
follow these leads
a thread.
- Haiku resources
- My friend Thomas Arthur, who weaves with gravity, posts Wooshclang!
- Richard Sweeney weaves with paper.
- A beautiful and complete list of what the world is made of.
- Does your disaster plan include conversation to mobilize quickly? Or is it still expert driven?
- Nice summary of Senge’s core concepts on Learning Organizations
- You, and many other living creature, have a billion and a half heartbeats to change the world.
- Change management myths. (Not including the myth that change can be managed, but still…)
- Doug’s blog: Footprints in the Wind, which I read all the time, and so should you.
- From Nancy…the power of a line.
Battle Creek, Michigan, USA
I’m reading a marvellous little book called “Dispatches from the Global Village” by my friend Derek Evans. Derek is a remarkable individual, having most notable served two terms as the Deputy Secretary General of Amnesty International. He now lives in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia and is the spouse of my long time homeopath, Pat Deacon.
What I really like about Derek is that he embodies a certain tempered optimism that the human species is capable of great things despite it also being capable of unimaginable acts. Derek has assembled a book out of a series of columns he wrote for his neighbours in Naramata, BC. THe column are the musings and reflections of an internationally important peacemaker. There are many gems in the book, which I’ll share over the next couple of days, but I offer this one tonight to those who are despairing at the moment that we might just have it all wrong.
This is a poem that Derek spotted on the London Underground several years ago by Sheenagh Pugh:
Sometimes things don’t go after all,
from bad to worse. Some years muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives;the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.
This poem reminds me of a line that escaped my lips earlier this year when I was juggling with friends Tenneson Woolf and Roq Garreau. I said that I though juggling is so compelling because “there is always the possibility that a ball might not drop.”
[tags]derek evans, sheehangh pugh, hope[/tags]
I’m really enjoying finding poetry that seems to relate, in an off-handed way, to hosting and the process arts.Here is Andrea Baker, from the new issue of TYPO 9:
PROPOSAL
Each
point was also a centerat the grief
which was
many-centeredand gatherings hungered
in the throat
and at the mouthof each many-grief
which all foamed
to begina new burden
to lay fresh
on the worldso
I set out a bowl
for light to rest inas long
as the long breath pushingbut what is random
never quietsand the will was random
was pullingthe shadow into darkness
and spreading itself
or wrapping its own
wondercontent
and fresh
about the worldPROPOSAL
Small crumbs of darkness
swept about the field
as wind campaigned against
the breathand in the heat of the breath
laid down its own burdens
which the wind insists
are small