mary_j_59

This came to me while thinking of the tragic arson attack on the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes. I cannot say anything at all about Charleston except that I am praying for the victims and their families.



Hunger

For years, the elder brother
Gulped envy; swallowed bitterness,
Till, at last, he spat them out
In anger,
Forgetting
(As his brother, eating greed and shame
in his pigsty, also forgot),
That there is love enough
To feed everyone.

Here's a poem I drafted in the journaling workshop I held today at the library.

Blue eyes,
And a blue dress.

The little girl stares at the tigers
through the cage bars.
They are pacing towards her.
They are cream, striped with chocolate,
their eyes as blue as hers.

She shivers in the breeze
coming from the water.
"Don't be afraid," the woman says.
"They can't hurt you."

She is not afraid. She is sorry,
so sorry, for the great cats
with eyes like hers.

She shuts her eyes and turns away,
facing the sun.
Kaleidoscope colors flash under her eyelids.

There is no blue.

Mary Johnson, 2011

Here's what Deirdre just put up on her wordpress blog. Isn't it great?

http://deirdrea.wordpress.com/2010/06/11/the-cat-and-the-moon/

I will try, like them
to be my own silence:
and this is difficult. The whole
world is secretly on fire.

That is an excerpt from "In Silence", a short poem by Thomas Merton. I found it on Ivan Granger's blog, and he kindly gave me permission to link to it here. It's one of my absolute favorite poems, and I hope some of you will love it as I do.

Here's the link: http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/blog/2008/07/16/thomas-merton-in-silence/#comment-4015

In memory of Rachel Corrie, and also Abir Aramin (Palestinian, age 10) and Smadar Elhanan (Jewish, age 14). May there be peace, and may we help to bring it, so that no other young girls will die.

The Words Under the Words , by Naomi Shihab Nye
Author's dedication: For Sitti Khadra (her grandmother), north of Jerusalem

My grandmother's hands recognize grapes,
the damp shine of a goat's new skin.
When I was sick, they followed me,
I woke from the long fever to find them
covering my head like cool prayers.

My grandmother's days are made of bread,
a round pat-pat and the slow baking.
She waits by the oven watching a strange car
circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son,
lost to America. More often, tourists,
who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines.
She knows how often mail arrives,
how rarely there is a letter.
When one comes, she announces it, a miracle,
listening to it read again and again
in the dim evening light.

My grandmother's voice says
nothing can surprise her.
Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby.
She knows the spaces we travel through,
the messages we cannot send - our voices are short
and would get lost on the journey.
Farewell to the husband's coat,
the ones she has loved and nourished,
who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky.
They will plant themselves. We will all die.

My grandmother's eyes say Allah is everywhere,
even in death.
When she speaks of the orchard
and the new olive press,
when she tells the stories of Joha
and his foolish wisdoms,
He is her first thought, what she really thinks is
His name.

"Answer, if you hear the words under the words -
otherwise it is just a world
with a lot of rough edges,
difficult to get through, and our pockets
full of stones."

(From 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East by Naomi Shihab Nye.

I am rather upset about the state of the world - the world news, of course, is beyond horrible. I don't even want to comment on it. But I've also been reading about the plagiarism debacle in the Harry Potter fandom, and this has persuaded me that, in general, it is a very poor idea to put one's original works online. One of the boys in writing club wanted me to post the revisions of a couple of fairy tales I've been working on. But I do hope to publish them someday, so, even though very few people read this journal, I don't want to take the risk.

However, there is one original work which I think deserves an audience, and which is not likely to be published elsewhere - it does not fit in with the book of poems I'm working on, and I can't imagine anyone stealing a poem, in any case. There's no profit in it. So - because of the state of the world - I am going to post this one poem. It was written in 2004, after the Abu Ghraib scandal, and is copyrighted to me - Mary Johnson.
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