And we are here, as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, While ignorant armies clash by night. Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
Each day, we find new roads closed. Evenings now, after jack hammers still, street barricades are stacked haphazardly, a little jauntily. When the sun slips away, their orange lollipop lights begin to blink, not at all in sync, shooting confused instructions for caution into all the houses on our street.
Days contract for the duration of this disruption. What age are we in? Gold? Silver? Bronze? No— Silicon or Microbe. Of social media and social distance. Of masks and doubled-locked doors, small panics, and tidier drawers.
Not an age of Oak or Ash. No way is pure or clear. A kind of Plywood Age, strong in its way, and useful if—viewed edgewise— unbeautiful. Insights and erosions laid in layers like phyllo or millefiori, then folded
into new shape, new tesseractive points of view. Innocence and Anxiety are commingling. Something else is coming, cloudy and stormy as the birth of a star. Perhaps a coalescing, expanded sense of who we are.
Leslie Schultz
I was reminded this morning that it was the British Victorian poet Matthew Arnold who coined from German the English word “Zeitgeist” or “Spirit of the Age” in order to describe the social unrest of the Industrial Age, the widespread disruptions and erosions caused by a move away from hand tools toward machines, away from pastures and fields into cities. We still have ignorance clashing with insight, of course, because we are humans, but I am grateful to be standing on my particular corner of this darkling plain. I find I am quite interested to find out what will happen next.
The giant red nebula, NGC 2014, and its smaller blue neighbor, NGC 2020, part of the Large Magellanic Cloud in the Milky Way, about 163,000 light years away, in this new image by the Hubble Space Telescope.Credit…NASA, ESA and STScI
We have come to the end of the alphabet sequence but not to the end of the month. Who know what tomorrow will inspire?
Grandma Marie is a founding member of the Knit-Wits. They turn out hats, sweaters, scarves, and socks. They turn up for canapes and cocktails, a little discreet dishing of those not there, complete with embroidery but just around the edges, building up the local gossip row by row. Here’s the thing: we learn from each other how to make it new.
In storytelling, too, there needs to be a looping back, complications that only appear to be tangles. Details are key; so are color and contrast. Without some holes, there is nowhere for the attention to catch hold. But, ladies, let’s remember— vary that pattern but don’t make it up out of whole cloth or improbably sticky yarn. Leslie Schultz
It is a shame to waste these precious drops, to fling water like pearls of rain onto sand.
(On the other hand, flow is everything.)
Long roots filter out rank poisons. Water carries them back into the making dark. (Rejection or chagrin are perennial, self-sowing.)
Depending upon conditions, select with care.
For sun: asters and black-eyed Susans, coneflowers and yarrow, blazing star and prairie dropseed, even Blue Heaven little bluestem.
(Read! Read! Read! The blaze of tradition shines forth and nourishes.) For shade: columbine and wild ginger, wild geranium and Solomon’s seal, pachysandra and dead nettle, bugleweed and red twig dogwood, wild hosta and cinnamon fern.
(The coaxing practices, the lattices of form and habit.) Finally, perhaps a rain garden? Something to catch what spills in?
(The index cards handy. The pencils sharpened.)
“A garden,” said Stanley Kunitz, “ is a poem that is never finished.”
He knew a thing. Or two.
Leslie Schultz
Today’s poem is inspired by a perennially favorite text, The Northern Gardener: From Apples to Zinnias–150 Years of Garden Wisdom by Mary Lahr Schier. Two years ago, that handy and beautifully written compendium introduced me to a new word and inspired a poem, “Cotyledons,” about those first two tiny green leaves thrust up by a sprouting seed. This year, the chapter on “Xeriscaping” inspired a poem.
The photographs here of plants were taken on Earth Day, 2020 at the nearby McKnight Prairie Remnant,seven miles from Northfield. This thirty-five acre piece of land is the epitome of xeriscaping with native plants and is cared for by Carleton College. Tim and I were able this year to visit early enough to see, for the first time, the pasque flowers blooming.
Window If eyes are windows to the soul, then do panes of glass allow us to pass into the spirit of a house, a ship, an old barn?
One cavernous space, now a wrecked cairn of splintered wood once stood against snow and wind at the home place
where my husband was born. Though now disappeared, like a rejected draft, torn, carted off, I recall its cool majesty on a hot day; the scents of long-ago cut hay
mingling with motor oil, alfalfa, and old timber; the way its echoes would change the timbre of my voice to undersea splendor; and the way the sun poured
like transcendent, light rain from the high window above the always-open door. Unprepossessing from outside, the barn held an ample store of quiet dignity inside.
Leslie Schultz
The real-life orientation of this photograph is a quarter-turn to the left. This barn at Red Oaks Farm, where Tim and his siblings grew up, was long, like a semi-circular stand of wooden hoops or like a stand of juniper, low against the wind. Recently, it was the wind that did it in, flattened it like a cardboard box. Somehow, though, it looks right to me this way, and so the print I keep on my desk has this orientation, and it was the inspiration for today’s poem. Here are some other images of that now-disappeared landmark.
Priming the barn at Red Oaks (Photo: Leslie Schultz)Photo: Marea Mohr (April 2019)
Thinking about windows this week makes me smile because so many people (in Northfield and probably in every city) are placing stuffed toys in their windows to cheer children lonely for their friends. Walks with their parents in the spring sun can turn into a bear hunt or toy safari. I started participating before Easter, and just recently found one a bear large enough for a child to see easily from the street. (It was one that Julia was given by Mary Alice Sipfle at my baby shower, and it was a great nighttime comfort for our daughter, twenty years ago, when the two were the same height.)
Yesterday, because my door was open, I saw a flash of tiny red sundress–like spotting a cardinal for just a moment–and heard a small voice say, “Look, Mama! It’s a BEAR!” A girl, maybe three years old–about as high as an American Girl doll, come to think of it–was walking beside her mother (who pushed the stroller). The mother was wearing a flowered sundress. Both of them looked so peaceful and connected to each other that it made me feel a little bit nostalgic. (I am prone to that these days.) I am glad I happened to overhear that snippet of conversation, because I was thinking that our street seems to be mostly construction workers grinding old asphalt these days, and that maybe the bear looked a bit ludicrous and woebegone.
Today, I think I will open the cupboard under the eaves and see if there isn’t a friend in there who could join the bear in cheery sentry duty.
Happy Shakespeare’s Birthday! LESLIE
Though this year my poem for April 23 is not inspired by William Shakespeare, of course, on his 404th birthday, he is on all of our minds! If you are looking for a short, lighthearted birthday waltz with the Bard, take a look at this video from the Great River Shakespeare Festival called “Shakespeare’s Test Kitchen” or watch along as at 9:20 CST 154 actors participate in a marathon reading of the sonnets. (Thanks to GRSF for the image above!) Here is information about how to participate–though you might have to type in (rather than click on) the links below, as I copied them from an email.
Sonnet Marathon with LinkedInOur very own Doug Scholz-Carlson is taking part in the first ever #LinkedInShakespeare Sonnet Marathon today, on Shakespeare’s birthday! He will be one of 154 actors/readers reading all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets LIVE, to #supportthearts.
At 9:20 CST, Doug is dedicating his reading of Sonnet 149.
To get a FREE ticket and reminder, or to donate to a bonus fund that will go to one of the 154 organizations represented, go here: bit.ly/LISHAKESTIX
Though theaters are dark, people are still bringing the light! Join us!
And don’t forget, for all of you who enjoy the sonnet form, to consider submitting a sonnet or three to the annual Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, also sponsored by the Great River Shakespeare Festival. You have plenty of time–the deadline is June 1!
Earth Day Flag (Designed by Peace Activist John McConnell)
Vantage Point April 22, 2020—50th Anniversary of Earth Day for Beth
There is a little climb ahead. It is worth it. I promise.
Yes. These prairie grasses are tall, already, in April. It is hard to see the trail today. But it is there, made by feet before us.
Look! A pleated gentian, blue as the sea. And a pink wild rose, sister to the apple and strawberry. Here’s the flick and bob of the prairie warbler, olive gold with a voice like silver bells. And over there, past the orb-weaving spider in her web, can it be a small stand of cacti, sheltering against a wall of white sand?
Yes. I see some char, some broken glass. I guess that is natural, too.
There is a compass plant, something to steer by, almost as tall as a tree. And there is the lone cedar, shaped by the wind, reaching, reaching…
Sure. Take a moment to catch your breath under this immense blue. It is true, there are a few storm clouds on the horizon infused with the colors of abalone, holding the rattle of thunder. Let us hope for some streaks of Promethean fire.
Tonight, the new moon offers new beginnings: Tomorrow and all the tomorrows ahead.
Leslie Schultz
I have been thinking a lot this spring about how the first Earth Day, back in 1970, arose from the catalyst of photographic vision–both scientific and poetic–from NASA’s first images of Earth from the vantage point of the Moon. We saw in a flash, it seemed, that this is a single if intricate whole that all of us share. We saw the beauty and the fragility, and that we are in this together–not just humanity but all of the forms life takes. That profound insight help to shape progressive legislation and a shared vision. I believe we are all experiencing something like that now, in this pandemic that knows no borders. My hope is that going forward we will be able to act on this insight so as to enlarge our sense of compassion and belonging, our confidence in the effectiveness of individual and collective actions to make a positive difference.
I think today’s poem might be a pencil sketch for a longer, more complicated poem that looks at the lives and works of John Muir, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and Gaylord Nelson. Perhaps others, too. On April 22, 2017, I published this villanelle, “Motif for Ansel Adams”, inspired by his own words. (I included there a link to a six-minute documentary–“Ansel Adams: Photography with Intention”.) I would like to do something similar for these other environmentalists, but I see I will need more than one day to think all that through.
When I was in high school, I received a writing award from the National Council of Teachers of English, and afterwards a signed letter from Senator Gaylord Nelson congratulating me. I wish I had known then of his stellar environmental record and of his own (much more influential) literary accomplishments. Now on my wish list? His last book, published in 2002:Beyond Earth Day: Fulfilling the Promise. I see there is also a new edition of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac with an introduction by Barbara Kingsolver. At the urging of our friends, the Clarys, we have already ordered a copy of the documentary, Tomorrow. I hope it comes today.
Meanwhile, I shall just take it one step, one breath, at a time. Perhaps today will be the day for a trip to the McKnight Prairie Remnant near our home. If conditions are right. The vantage point there is unparalleled.
Happy Earth Day! LESLIE
Julia and Tim at the Aldo Leopold Home Site in Sand County, WI (Photo: Karla Schultz)Compass Point, Winona Street Labyrinth, Winter
