Don's Blog Winter Night 12-30-22

Here is a poem from another retired physician. Happy New Year.

Winter Night

  In the evening, after   a snowfall, look out     onto a field or forest;   calm, untouched, and white.     Listen to the stillness.   This is the best time     to find solace. Look   at the stars, the waning     moon. Let snow silence   fill your head. Winter     is the quiet time,   the slowed-down time,     the time for drifting  to that hidden place within.    

Frederic Hildebrand  2022  

If you wish let me know where in these chaotic times you are able to find The Silence.                    

Don's Blog "Looking Good" 12-27-22

Here is my editorial from St Louis Metropolitan Medicine from October, 1984.

Don's Blog 'Sometimes' 12-26-22

 Well the day after Christmas is a good one for a little optimism.             

          'Sometimes'

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 intentions 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.

Sheenah Pugh

Don's Blog "Adrift" 12-23-22

I have just finished a course in "Gratitude and Awe". This poem surfaced and I have sent it to
friends experiencing the grief process. Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday to you all.

ADRIFT

Everything is beautiful
and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief.

The light spraying
through the lace of the fern
is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat.

The breeze makes the birds move
from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I've lost
in the next room,
in the next song,
in the laugh of the next stranger.

In the very center, under
it all, what we have
that no one can take
away and all that we've lost
face each other.
It is there that I'm adrift,
feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists
inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

—Mark Nepo

Don's Blog Getting On It and Getting Off It 12-21-22

Here is my Editorial in the journal St Louis Metropolitan Medicine from June 1984.

 

Don's Bog "What if This Road"

Here is a poem about by Sheenagh Pugh

What If This Road 

What if this road, that has held no surprises
these many years, decided not to go
home after all; what if it could turn
left or right with no more ado
than a kite-tail? What if its tarry skin
were like a long, supple bolt of cloth,
that is shaken and rolled out, and takes
a new shape from the contours beneath?
And if it chose to lay itself down
in a new way; around a blind corner,
across hills you must climb without knowing
what's on the other side; who would not hanker to be going, at all risks? Who wants to know
a story's end, or where a road will go?

Sheenagh Pugh 2003

from What If This Road and Other Poems

Fwd: Don's Blog Via Negativa 12-16-22

Here is another poem by RS Thomas

          Via Negativa

Why no! I never thought other than

That God is that great absence 

In our lives, the empty silence

Within, the place where we go

Seeking, not in hope to '

Arrive or find.  He keeps the interstices

In our knowledge, the darkness

Between stars.  His are the echoes

We follow, the footprints he has just

Left.  We put our hands in 

His Side hoping to find

It warm. We look at people

And places as though he had looked

At them, too: but miss the reflection.  

 R.S. Thomas, Later Poems 

Its this the  distinction between the wave and the imprint of the

 wave on the sand after it has receded

Don's Blog 'Disappearing' 12-14-22

Here is an editorial from the journal St Louis Metropolitan Medicine from May of 1984.

Don's Blog 'Disappearing' 12-14-22

Here is an editorial from the journal St Louis Metropolitan Medicine from May of 1984.

Don's Blog Poetry for Supper 12-12-22

Here is a poem by RS Thomas, who was a leading Welsh poet and Anglican priest.

He is of interest to me as my mother was Welsh and was also a Thomas. 

Poetry for Supper

'Listen, now, verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck

And grows slowly from obtuse soil

To the white flower of immortal beauty.'

'Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer

Said once about the long toil

That goes like blood to the poem's making?

Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,

Limp as bindweed, if it break at all

Life's iron crust. Man, you must sweat

And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build
Your verse a ladder.'





'You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.'

'Sunlight's a thing that needs a window

Before it enter a dark room.

Windows don't happen.'






So two old poets,

Hunched at their beer in the low haze

Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose.

RS Thomas

Don's Blog 'Yard Work' 12-7-22

Here is another poem by Charles Wright, a former Poet Laureate from rural Tennessee.

       Yard Work

I think that someone will remember us in another time,

Sappho once said—more or less—

Her words caught

Between the tongues tip and the first edge of the invisible.

I hope so, myself now caught

Between the edge of the landscape and the absolute,

Which is the same place, and the same sound,

That she made.

Meanwhile, let's stick to business.

Everything else does, the landscape, the absolute, the invisible.

My job is yard work—

I take this inchworm, for instance, and move it from here to there.

Charles Wright, 1995

Don's Blog " 58 " 12-7-22

    Here is a poem from e.e.cumings book "95 Poems".

                     58

      a total stranger one black day
     knocked the living hell out of me—

     who found forgiveness hard because
     my (as it happened) self he was

     —but now that fiend and I are such
     immortal friends the other's each

     e.e.cummings    

Don's Blog 'Taking Stock' 12-5-22

Here is an editorial from St Louis Metropolitan Medicine from March 1984.

Don's Blog 'Absence Inside an Absence' 12-2-22

Here is a poem to make you pause from Charles Wright.

             Absence Inside an Absence

We live in the world of the voice,  

                                                    not in the world of the word,

According to John the solitary—

Our lives are language, our desires are apophatic,

The bush in flame is the bush in flame,

Imageless heart, imageless absence between the hearts.

And if we cry out,

                            if once we utter our natural sounds,

Even the angels will hide their heads

Under their blue wings,

                                     its also said.

So better forget that, better forget the darkness above the tongue,

Its shorting of words, its mad silence and lack of breath.

Besides there's another spin,

The flame and counter flame by which we come to stillness

Playing over our faces,

                                     over the rose cane and the missing rose,

Over the dreary schooners of snow

Pulling their nets in across the yard,

                                                 over their waters brought to joy.

Still, the idea of absence inside an absence

Completing a presence is dynamite,

                                                          the showings foretold

Unseeable through the earthly eye,

We say to ourselves,

The earth in our cracked hands,

                                        the earth dark syllables in our mouths.

Charles Wright -1995