When I was ten, I planned to be an artist or a writer but never a nurse. A teacher wasn’t part of the picture either. And yet teaching writing and art to children and adults, something which I fell into almost accidentally after my first book, The Book of Qualities, was published and I was invited to bring Qualities into a middle school classroom, has been an immense and gorgeous part of my life.
Apoet brings to The Future what is beyond time and space. A pet
at his side. His wings are made of cheesecloth. His eyes are buttons,
glowing in the dark.
What is not known. What is about to happen. He is there, half in
a dream world.
And if he gives you a headache or a heartache, that’s his pleasure.
If you miss that, there is no future. That is to say, he knows how
to push you against the wall. Gently. And you fall into a mythical
dimension – You don’t know that yet.
Where baseball and haiku overlap is the art of deceptive simplicity and the impulse to describe the shining moments of the deeply real. As Jack Kerouac writes in Dharma Bums, “A real haiku has to be simple as porridge, but make you see the real thing.” The Basho of Baseball, Yogi Berra, agrees saying, “You can observe a lot just by watching.”
Black coffee and a sweet Bosc pear
enjoyed in the stillness
of a Sunday morning.
It is a busy time of year,
tomatoes and peppers
fill baskets on the kitchen table,
hazelnuts are in the dryer.
Stymied, I close the front door behind me,
step into summer’s humidity,
leave frustration piled on my desk.
A trail of unconnected thoughts
floats behind me,
mundane words
litter the sidewalk.
Then, I notice
the spotted fawn studying me
from the bushes, startled,
she lopes away.
I have lost the ability
to capture words,
To snatch them from the ether
and pin them to the page.
I have lost the talent
to grab a comely phrase
and spread it on a line.
Even the wind wants
to become a cart
pulled by butterflies.
I remember madness
leaning for the first time
on the mind’s pillow.
I was talking to my body then
and my body was an idea
I wrote in red.
Kim Fowler explores her family history, beginning with a plantation owner’s son and a grandmother born at the end of slavery, in this ode to Black identity.
In her much-beloved poem, Wild Geese, Mary Oliver has something to say about our endless attempts to prove ourselves. Life “calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting,” she says, reminding you of your home in the family of things. Adrie Kussarow reworked Wild Geese to help us sort through our knee-jerk responses to the coronavirus.