Poyetry

Lily

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 21:59:00 +0000

Every woman turned her head
As he passed down the trolley aisle
Carrying a bag full of beauty.
Cut pink and white lilies
Spilled sweet scent
As he edged past our knees,
Blessing our morning commute.

Betsy McKenzie
October, 2015

the image of the bouquet is from Benchmark Bouquets, selling on Amazon.com

On the Queen City Approached at Night

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 20:04:00 +0000

What dragon would not covet
This lapful of jewels scattered,
White, red, green,
Winking and shining
Across the dark
Rumpled hills

(for a beautiful image of Cincinnati at night, visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeff-schreier/4229381342/in/photostream/lightbox/ )

Goldfish Ambulance II

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 21:44:00 +0000

The doctors shake their heads,
Faces very grave.
"The patient's dried up
Like a mummy frog inside,"
They say, "She needs
Emergency infusions, stat!"

An ambulance rushes up.
Out jump special EMTs.
They lay the patient on
The gleaming metal stretcher.

Gently, they open the back doors.
Inside the ambulance is filled
With blue-green water.
It sloshes to some subtle tide.

Beneath the surface of the water glide
Dimply seen shapes that
Glimmer golden-orange:
Gold fish swimming in the pool.

The desiccated patient
Slides beneath the surface
Without a ripple or errant bubble.
The fish nibble softly all around.

One doctor leans in
With an eyedropper.
One, two, three drops
Administered beneath the patient's tongue.

"Tincture of belladona,"
The doctor dolefully sighs.
Changing places, reaching in,
Another doctor rubs the patient's forehead.

"Powdered mandrake root in goose grease."
He wipes his hand abstractedly
On his pocket handkerchief,
And walks to the other side.

The third doctor pushes
Tiny candles into the patient's ears.
As she lights them with a match
A murmuring chant is heard.

"Poetry candles!" she assures
Her wondering colleagues.

Aug. 19, 2012
Betsy McKenzie

Goldfish image courtesy of http://hearingelmo.wordpress.com/2008/07/14/a-number-of-firsts/
Hearing Elmo is a blog about living with hearing loss and invisible disability.

Billy Collins' Moth

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 21:08:00 +0000

I dreamed Billy Collins
Whispering haiku into
His white dog's patient ears.
First one long, silky ear,
Then the other hound dog ear
Got the lines about
The moon moth sleeping on the
Gigantic temple bell.

In my dream, as Billy whispered
He whispered the moth and bell into the room.
When the moth flew away,
It made the one-tone bell tip,
And its iron voice
Clanged and clanged.

I thought, how heavy was that moth?
His flying tipped a one-tone iron bell
To wag its metal tongue!

How heavy is a baby
Lying beneath his mother's ribs?
How heavy is the bond
That runs between friend and friend?
How heavy is the raindrop
That breaks granite into sand?

May, 2012

Inspired by Billy Collins' poem "Japan" (1998), which was inspired in turn by Taniguchi Buson's Japanese haiku translated into English by X.J. Kennedy:

On the one-ton temple bell
A moon moth, folded into sleep
sits still.

Image of a luna moth courtesy of South Harrison NRI Wildlife Inventory which must be related to Rutgers University.

Cassandra Song

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Mon, 28 May 2012 18:39:00 +0000

On my twenty-first birthday,
My father told me,
"The day your epiphyses seal,
You begin to age and die."

Youth cannot believe a
Prophet of death.
I laughed and chalked it up to
His usual doomsday outlook.

But we spend out lives
Clambering against
A slow-motion
Avalanche of death.

Disability, illness and memory loss:
The three horsemen of
Our personal Apocalypses.

And yet, there is a fire
That burns inside.
It will not let us lie down.

With each mounting indignity --
From nagging aches that
lodge like an unwanted weekend guest

Who simply never leaves,
To major injuries and
Diagnoses that pound us down

Like punchdrunk boxers overmatched --
Yet still we rise,
Stagger up each time.

It is not death we fear,
I think, but surrender,
Of our selves.

Betsy McKenzie
5/27/2012

The secret

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Fri, 25 May 2012 00:27:00 +0000

Sun sparkles on the water
As it pours into the alley
In old Havana; a fountain
From a rusty gutter drainpipe.
The boy is lost in joy,
Dancing under the water.

For so long as he sambas
With the shining water,
Nothing else matters --
Not his sick mother
Nor shoeless sisters,
Nor the father who disappeared.

The boy knows this secret:
Every day the sun pours down
Over all the earth. And rain
Kisses the ground, blessing
All who walk in it.
If we only stop to dance
And look up,
Joy is pouring down
Every day.

Betsy McKenzie
9/28/2011
National Geographic image that inspired this poem:

The Jaunty Cap

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Fri, 25 May 2012 00:07:00 +0000

We thought it was a short visit
For a cranky baby. He was groaning,
Hot, and not himself. Like a
Nightmare, the day unrolled.

The fever spiked high, with no
Symptoms but those groans.
The doctor suspected meningitis.
Awful struggle to make a spinal tap
In a six-week, too-small spine.

And suddenly, we were heading
To the hospital, "for observation."
In a far-off lab's petri dish, our sample
Would germinate for three long days.

My clingy-needy child torn
From my clingy-needy arms
By grim-faced nurses.

Behind closed doors, away
From appalled parental eyes,
They installed the needle for IVs
In that tender scalp,
Protected by an upturned coffee cup.

In self-defense, we named it
Joe's jaunty cap.

Betsy McKenzie 5/24/2012

Demeter at the ICU

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Fri, 25 May 2012 00:02:00 +0000

Demeter sits in the waiting room of the ICU,
Exiled from her daughter's side.
She came to bring 'Seph back
To the sunlit lands Before dark Pluto could have his way.

But the techs want no family looking on
When they intubate the patient,
So, silent, the goddess sits,
Demoted from Olympus. And yet...

Still she strides down Hades' halls,
To wrestle Death himself for Persephone's soul.

Betsy McKenzie 5/24/2012

Black marks

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Thu, 24 May 2012 23:58:00 +0000

"Will I have black marks on my soul?"
He spent the day,
Calling them, one after another
To his office.

A reorganization, she calls it.
To be more efficient
And nimble.

But if you do the math,
All the salaries you
Spent the day axing
Might cover three or four
Missing students,
Or perhaps cover two
New development
Back slappers,
Or one fat prof.

Have you been adequately
Compensated for the
Work you did today?

Betsy McKenzie 5/24/2012

Missing the Forest for the Ducks

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 20:04:00 +0000

"Don't you think," said my neighbor,
While eyeing the ducks on the lake,
"That they show how God means us to live?"
She meant that the white ducks had banded
Together at one end of the lake,
And black ducks in a bunch at the other.

What she failed to see, in her rush
To grind a lesson from glimpsed
Postures of water fowl, was that
the ducks and lake were set in
A wider mosaic, more rich than
We can see, intertwined.

Use a wider lens, draw back yet more,
And see a forest round the lakeshore,
Still more to see the towns and farmsteads
In patchwork pattern, rivers ribboned.
Look through time and see prairies emerge
From coral reefs, shallow inland seas.

So how well I answered my neighbor,
"Oh, my yes! I think they do indeed."

Betsy McKenzie
July-August, 2011

This is the first poem I have felt like writing in quite a long time... Hooray!

Indy and Dover: Surprise! Pictures, not poems

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 20:35:00 +0000

I am posting some pictures here of Indy the Cat and Dover the Dog. Some of my friends and relations have been receiving regular e-mails titled "Greetings from Indy the Cat," since we adopted a cat named Indiana Jones. I started these because I wanted to keep the kind folks who gave us Indy up to date on her life. But I kept thinking of more cat lovers I knew who might enjoy hearing about this very colorful feline and her antics. So the list has grown to quite a number of fans of Indy the Cat. She has her humble servants (yours truly and all our family), and her adoring dog, Dover. Dover did not used to be afraid of lightning and thunder. But Indy was terrified of thunder storms. Shortly after she came, she delegated all that to Dover. It was the most amazing thing I ever saw. She handed the fear off to Dover and then she was able to relax while the poor dog took on the burden of shivering during lightning storms. This the cat we adopted.

Dover appeared in Poyetry once before, as a very young dog, when we were first adopting him from the foster home. He is a rescue sheltie. He has grown into a very handsome and playful 3 year old sheltie. And he does love his cat. He has no idea how she bosses him. But he does his share of treat-stealing. And they are both very jealous of one another getting attention.

There is a picture of Indy's eating area. This is because Indy has recently taken to protesting when her bowl is empty. She tosses all the plastic containers over the side. She will even shove the wooden box over that holds the food containers you see on the side there. She used to have a larger bowl made of heavy stoneware. She had that and a plastic bowl of water up on the higher platform. She tossed the water overboard one day, and we decided the water would be kept on the floor. Then she shoved the empty food bowl down one too many times and it shattered. So, now Indy has a bowl that I think must have metal inside the heavy plastic. It is amazingly heavy, with a non-skid, hollow base. But it's still too easy for Indy to move it. So, we made a square, U-shaped brace to hold the bowl, so it would be harder for Indy to shove it over the edge. We also finally have added a small plastic lid with high "lips" that fit tightly under the edges of the food bowl. We have taped it down, but will probably staple it in place. You now have to twist and lift to pick up the food bowl, but we can still pick it up to wash it. But Indy will probably still find a way to knock it down. She is a very resourceful and determined cat!

Other pictures above show Indy's box bed that was made from a large mens' slippers box. We saved the tissue and added an old lambswool muffler. She seems to like sleeping in the box, and can somehow open and close the hinged lid. Very tricky cat!

Holocaust of a Savage God

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 16:52:00 +0000

Holocaust of a Savage God

Betsy McKenzie Dec. 31, 2005

All those long-lost boys
Who wore their pain
Like trailing clouds
Tinged with blood.
They wandered off
And winked out
Like so many candles
In the first holocaust;
Sad little
Obituaries saying only
Closed casket.
Now the remnant
Feel safe, secure.
They have cocktails
to hold off the virus.
Now comes Tina:
Seductive high priestess
of the savage god.
He takes his next
Harvest
When they feel most
Safe.
Insidious, addictive,
Tina takes your
Mind, your money
Your teeth, your house
Your friends, your
Reputation, your job.
And finally, serves you up
To the savage god.
Cry for the waste of it.
We made the god.
We fashioned it from
Hate and fear and beatings and law.
It would have no power without us.

Moon Song

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 02:15:00 +0000

Moon Song

It is the killing time,
Just after the turn of the year.
The new moon hangs like an ivory horn,
Shockingly large, just over the treetops:
Creamy as butter
Yellow as beef tallow;
Memento of some
Beautiful, hieratic white heifer
Destined for a jealous god's altar.

The moon remembers,
The moon reminds us.

We don't recall,
We who dwell with
Electric lights and
Central heat and
Internet ports. And
We believe we are
Divorced from all the
Cruel realities that
Mired our grandcestors
In the mud and the blood of the past.

But my beast-body knows the truth.
It has no words
To speak its hard wisdom,
The bone-deep knowledge,
But it knows beyond all doubting
What that crescent moon is doing
In the dark sky.

Jan. 20-21, 2010
Image of the moon is courtesy of http://www.areavoices.com/astrobob/ from Bob King of Duluth, Minnesota.

Sketch

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 04:48:00 +0000

Sketch my life lightly
On the back of the world.
Lay me like a moth or pollen,
Or a shadow on a wall.
I will abide, yet leave no mark.

How long, or how hard
Would you have to live
To grave a mark on granite?
A life like a glacier,
Perhaps to gouge a glyph.

I cannot bear a glacier's
Life. I hang between
Moth and tortoise.
I neither build nor destroy.
I garden. I brood. I shine
My brief day and slide
Away, leaving no mark.

Betsy McKenzie
Dec. 31, 2009

Peace Medal in the Time of War

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:03:00 +0000

The words shimmer out
Like dark coins from Norway.
They roll across my floor
With irony,
Thrown like
A handful of silver
At the feet of a sinner.

December 10, 2009
Betsy McKenzie

On the occasion of President Obama's speech receiving the Nobel Peace Prize shortly after his decision to increase American troops in Afghanistan.

Here is a link to a wonderful website with poems by soldiers and other members of the armed services. It includes poems from as far back as WWI, the famous guys like Rupert Brooke, Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, but this link takes you to contemporary poets speaking from Afghanistan.

The image of the Nobel Peace Prize medal is courtesy of http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/medal.html

Twitter Song

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:26:00 +0000

Twitter, flitter,
Tweet my peeps,
Hope it's not too busy;
Fail whale, just bail.
The site comes tumbling after.

Britain names first female poet laureate

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Sat, 02 May 2009 15:22:00 +0000

England has named its first ever female poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. She is also the first openly gay poet laureate for England.

Here is a charming example of her down-to-earth poetry style,

Valentine
Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.

Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.

While there are lots of business-like announcements of the fact, my favorite story about Carol Ann Duffy is here, in the Mirror, dated February 5, 2009. Reporter Daisy Goodwin opens her story:

The first time I met Carol Ann Duffy she made me cry. I was meant to be interviewing her but within minutes of meeting her I had told her everything about my broken heart.

I could tell her because I knew she understood about love and loss, passion and pain.

She gets it, and that's what makes her the best poet of her generation and an inspired choice as the next Poet Laureate.

Anyone who has ever known love or heartbreak will find a home in her work. Not that there is anything soppy about Carol Ann Duffy.

She can look quite serious until you say something that she likes and her face cracks open and she laughs her wonderfully dirty laugh.

Duffy's family was blue-collar. Her father was a trade-unionist, like his father before him. Her mother left school at 14, though she regretted it and encouraged her children to get the most out of school they could. Born in Glasgow of a Scottish father and an Irish mother, Duffy's family moved to Staffordshire when she was four. I especially love the fact, mentioned in all the stories about Duffy, that she left the final decision about accepting the laureate up to her 13 year old daughter, Ella.

Carol Ann is single now but lives with the greatest love in her life, her 13-year old daughter Ella, by the novelist Peter Benson. "I let her decide whether I should accept the Laureateship or not.

She was all for it, she said, 'Mum. it's time a woman did it'."

Carol Ann says: "I always wanted a child. Being a mother is the central thing in my life. Having a child takes you back to all those parts of your own childhood that you had hidden away."

May, Carol Ann's mother entranced her daughter with her stories and rhymes. Carol Ann does the same for Ella but she publishes hers. "Since I had Ella, I have written more for children than for adults. I read everything to Ella first."

Ella herself is more interested in music than poetry although her mother says she does "cruelly accurate imitations of me reading my poems". Ten years ago, Carol Ann was quoted as saying she didn't want the Laureateship because "no poet should have to write poems about Edward and Sophie's wedding".

But age and motherhood have tempered that view. "I am a poet of the family, and the symbol of the Royal Family is entwined with the history of Britain. I don't see why that can't make a good poem. On the other hand, no one would thank me for writing bad poems to order." Family is at the heart of Carol Ann's life and work.

This is a pretty cool piece of news. I had to look and see whether the United States had had a woman poet laureate yet. We have. In 1945 - 1946, Louise Bogan, born in Maine, and living in Boston, was the poet laureate. Another woman, Leonie Adams, served in 1948-49, from Brooklyn, NY., and Elizabeth Bishop, 1949 - 1950 (born in Worcester, Massachusetts, but living in Brazil, I think, and fairly close to being openly gay). Josephine Jacobsen, 1971-73, from Baltimore, was another woman laureate (I don't know why 2 years), and Maxine Kumin, in 1981-82, Gwendolyn Brooks, served in 1985-86. Mona Van Duyn was poet laureate in 1992-93 and Rita Dove in 1993-94. Then there was a special deal with "bicentennial consultants" in 1999-2000, with three people named to that title, including Rita Dove again, and Louise Gluck along with a man, W.S. Merwin. Louise Gluck served as laureate in 2003-04. So, the U.S., with a one year laureate term, has had a lot of women laureates, actually. The Brits originally had the laureates serve for life, but the last laureate before Carol Ann Duffy, Andrew Motion, made an agreement with the government that the post should only be filled for 10 years. So, perhaps, they will start running through their poets a bit faster now. Congratulations Carol Ann Duffy and to Britain for an exciting selection!

Photograph is from the Mirror story dated 2/5/09.

Home on the Red-Eye

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Sat, 02 May 2009 00:04:00 +0000

Jet-lagged, droop-looping from a
Nightmare red-eye from
Sun-drenched San-Diego,
I staggered into snowy Boston
Like a drunken sailor
Slapped into awed silence
When he stumbles into the
Silent nave of a cathedral.
I moved in one long day
From sunny palm trees
To snow-silenced roads
Moving nave-like beneath
The snow-draped, arching trees
In Sunday-early stillness.
After the blizzard, the
Roads are still and white,
A purity, an austere beauty;
So sharp contrast to that
Too fecund greenness that I fled.

Winter Street Cathedral

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Sat, 02 May 2009 00:03:00 +0000

Austere hymns of praise
Snow-draped pines, and rock hillsides
Tree-arched, nave-like streets.

Auspice

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:55:00 +0000

Crowds of crows stitching
Mysterious moving poems
Across evening skies.

Auspice is the Latin practice of divining the future by watching patterns of flying birds. The image of flying crows is from a wonderful blog, Outside My Window, A Birdwatcher's View of the World with Kate St. John, at http://www.wqed.org/birdblog/category/crows/

Pizza

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:54:00 +0000

Dedicated to
Perfecting family pizza
Through a long marriage

Chamber Music

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:21:00 +0000

This is only the second guest poet I have posted here at Poyetry; Jeff Flynn, a colleague of mine, wrote this excellent poem, inspired after reading about cardiomyapathy in Doberman Pinschers.

CHAMBER MUSIC

after reading articles by Nancy Morris, DVM & Dr. Carmen L. Battaglia
in the Doberman Pinscher Magazine

Between diastole and systole worlds exist and lives are lived.
How many rooms and light filled atriums will she pass through
While the measure of her heart is taken?
And what import will she place on her fractional shortening value?

Between premature heart beats, eternity.
Her heart's an edifice of many rooms, and
Between atria and ventricles
Septa resist the assaults of time.

While the aortic whoosh rattles those walls,
And VPC's are tallied,
Singular, couplets, triplets...
And time asserts its claim,

Measure her life not by the number of its beats,
But by the music that echoes between them.

By Jeff Flynn
March, 2009

Image is courtesy of WestminsterKennelClub.org

Tidal Ice

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:34:00 +0000

The ice is cracked and crazed
Though it seems a solid piece.
As the river sank and raised
It when the tide was high or low,
The ice followed the water,
Shaping, reshaping its sheet across
The river, bay and land.

Unlike the smooth ice of placid
Ponds and lakes that keep a steady level,
Tidal ice must reshape itself
Constantly as the supporting water
Flows and shifts beneath it.

So is tidal ice like the surface of
The mind shaped by trauma.
Beneath the surface that seems
A solid piece, the level shifts
And moves in tides. The cracks
And crazes in the surface
Allow the surface to spread
Like a smooth sheet across
The changing levels, whether
High tide, or low, covering
Rocks or water, or sandy shore
Beneath a smooth seeming sheet of ice.

Feb. 4, 2008
Betsy McKenzie

Drat, I'm having to cheat

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 22:46:00 +0000

I had promised myself a post a month. I have not written anything worth posting in the time since the last post. I have scribbled but not anything good (readers might be surprised that there is any filtering going on at all... but I assure you I am filtering at least some). So to get something in to the Poyetry blog in January, I am reduced to adding somebody else's poetry.

When I was introduced to Mary Oliver's poetry, I was amazed. I had never heard of her. She is a modern poet, still alive and writing on Cape Cod. Here is a poem that I love, and that meant a great deal to me when my daughter was very ill in the I.C.U. at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, Egrets, originally I believe, in Mary Oliver's book, New and Selected Poems (1992).

Egrets

Where the path closed
down and over,
through the scumbled leaves,
fallen branches,
through the knotted catbrier,
I kept going. Finally
I could not
save my arms
from thorns; soon
the mosquitoes
smelled me, hot
and wounded, and came
wheeling and whining.
And that's how I came
to the edge of the pond:
black and empty
except for a spindle
of bleached reeds
at the far shore
which, as I looked,
wrinkled suddenly
into three egrets - - -
a shower
of white fire!
Even half-asleep they had
such faith in the world
that had made them - - -
tilting through the water,
unruffled, sure,
by the laws
of their faith not logic,
they opened their wings
softly and stepped
over every dark thing.

Broken stems

noreply@blogger.com (Betsy McKenzie) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:28:00 +0000

Broken Stems

Across the broad prairie, tall grasses wave;
Bluestems tall as houses, Gramma like the ocean
Rolling to the skies. A hugeness spreading
In all directions, tan and red and brown.
Shimmering bright and living in the sun,
A million million sheaves of grass woven
Together in a mat, densely through the ground.

But here and there, are broken stems;
Divided from the whole. They are not like the others.
Broken stems and broken roots; they cross among the rest.

Perhaps they'll spread to new zones, perhaps they'll
Bring new styles. They are different from the others.
Perhaps they'll find their place, perhaps they'll
Make their mark. They are not like their mothers.

It hurts my heart to see them. It tears me to the core.
But the broken stems don't know it. They grow their own
Patterns, they follow their own directions to the sun.

Dec. 9, 2008

I wrote this poem after reading an essay that made me think about my own experiences with differently-abled children. Follow link here to read a moving post by Jesuit novice Fr.Ryan Duns at his blog, A Jesuit's Journey considering the life an a profoundly autistic child in Christ.