poetry

The Target

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Like many parents, I’m sure, much of my life seems a scramble between work and, honestly, everything else; then yesterday afternoon I picked up my daughter at camp, ate BBQ and lettuce so fresh it had grains of sand on one leaf, and realized, Here’s a bit of normalcy. Run by Fish and Wildlife, the camp’s youthful crew exuded energy, health, and merriment. Suntanned and happy, my daughter sat at a picnic table between an old friend and a new friend.

Here’s my goal for the gorgeous emerald Vermont July and August: remember, this is the only summer this kid will be twelve. Earn enough money, do my work – yes, of course – but much as this girl loved camp, she was happy to come home, and there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes….

From (where else?) Dylan Thomas’s incomparable “Fern Hill”

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Buck Lake, Woodbury, Vermont

 

Oh, Joy!

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Coltsfoot sighting today: a whole wide hillside of the gorgeous tiny blossoms. This Good Friday emanates the radiance of these persistent blossoms. In Montpelier, everyone is smiling. I buy too much Easter candy, chatting with the proprietor at Delish about taxes.

On the street, I see young mothers everywhere, babes cradled in arms, or kicking their tiny heels in strollers. A young man intently mows the State House lawn. I stand on the wide porch of The Pavilion, a warm wind tugging hair into my mouth, as I plot changes in my life.

An old woman walks down the street with two shirtless teenage boys. All three lick ice cream cones.

Collective good will. Collective promise of spring in all her tender green beauty.

The old man
cutting barley–
bent like a sickle.

– Yosa Buson

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Birds of Prey, And Us Non-Birds

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last night at our little local library, a high school student told his story of visiting a falconer. The falcons, he said, have one primal force: to eat. He described feathered creatures who will sit for hours, waiting for a mouse to appear – almost sure prey at a hole – rather than using calories to fly randomly and seek the unknown.

The world of training these regal birds, the teenager relayed, centers on one primary object: a morsel of London broil on a leather gauntlet. That is so not the human way. Perhaps in hunter-gatherer days, single-minded patience and determination dictated human action, but it’s nearly impossible for me to imagine when the human terrain of desire – for food beyond sustenance, sweet, salty, and spicy; for silk and myriad dyed colors for fashion; for adulation on a small and great scale; for the comfort of coupling in bed, complicated or not – hasn’t constantly jumbled up civilization.

Aggravating, infuriating at times, this world I inhabit, and yet this morning, waking in the dark with a child murmuring in her sleep near me, what a wondrous world, too. Not far from my desk, a mouse scurries in and out of its tiny hole, busy with its own rodent variation of London broil. More generous this rainy morning, I think, Go about, little one.

Autumn Haiku

Even from my front porch
the rusted sewing machine
yearns for golden thread.

– Warren Falcon

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Woodbury, Vermont

Writing Lists

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

At a meeting recently, the person beside me pulled out a handwritten list and flipped it over a few times, reading. Because I’m me, I naturally tried to read that list. In between crossed out items, I read fold laundry.

A serious list-writer myself, that particular chore has appeared numerous times on my lists, along with buy cooking oil and go to dump. Isn’t a list a written map, in some ways, of who we are? Years ago, in between buy toilet paper and teach Molly to read, I had  find publisher for novel. I’ve now crossed that item off my list, and now, simply, on every list I begin is write every day. While lists are inherently interesting, what may be more interesting is what doesn’t make lists. For years, while my marriage was disintegrating, I likely should have written either fix this or file divorce papers.

At this point, in my forties, I’d far prefer my lists to read write and fold laundry. I would have scoffed at that simple normalcy in my twenties, but now – a little more steady everydayness goes a very long way. That’s one more reason to savor homemade pickles – although here I am, writing, among veritable mounds of unfolded laundry…..

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

– Alice Walker

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Woodbury, Vermont

A Little More Joy

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This afternoon, sitting on blankets on the grass at Muddy Creek Pottery, while children sang for an audience of their parents, I thought what a better world we would live in with more song. Just singing: voices raised in harmony, trained or not.

Afterwards, my child showed me her handmade treasures: the pottery plate she so carefully designed, a silkscreened butterfly, hula hoops…..

For no other reason but simply to mark that childhood needs as full a measure of joy as possible, I mark my daughter’s happiness this week, with her hands and her clothes dirty, face tanned, her days filled with a familiar friend and a new friend, her sleep sweet.

Do not seek to follow in the
footsteps of the wise.
Seek what they sought.

– Basho

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Caspian Lake, Vermont

 

Ah…. Water

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Now deep in the muggy green of summer, the woods are splendid with fern, but the garden is parched, thirsty for rain. Fearful of my well, I’m reluctant to water, and what’s the point of watering if it’s not done well and thoroughly? What’s the point of anything, if not done deeply and truly?

Now is the time for lakes, preferably spring-sourced, cool and clear, all the way to the sandy bottom. The children’s irritability washes away with swimming. As the evening cools, I step out on the bedroom balcony to admire the night sky. The constellations appear like tiny minnows in a lake, poised just for a moment, suspended in the firmament.

So what’s special about rain? Ever since we crawled up on the land, the water, it seems to us, has been trying to reclaim us. Periodically floods come and try to drag us back into the water, pulling down our improvements wile they’re at it… You know the story of Noah: lots of rain, major flood, ark, cubits, dove, olive branch, rainbow. I think that biblical tale must have been the most comforting of all to ancient humans.

– Thomas C. Foster, How To Read Literature Like A Professor

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Greensboro, Vermont