Category Archives: Poems & Stories

Looking Forward to Local Yarn Store Day Tomorrow! Sharing Thoughts from Northfield Yarn; Pablo Neruda’s Poem “Ode to My Socks”; & Context for Poem “Decoding the Dream” (April 24, 2026)

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Sky Striped Like Fine Sock Wool
A Medley of Handmade Socks

When I first drove to Northfield, decades ago, at the edge of town near the Malt-o-Meal plant was a sign that proclaimed Northfield’s motto: “Cows, Colleges, and Contentment.” Awhile back, this classic phrase was revised to “Cows, Colleges, and Community.” In recent years, both contentment and community have been exemplified for me by a small down-town business called Northfield Yarn–whose motto is cleverly “Cowls, Cardigans, & Contentment.” Since 2011, this welcoming place truly has created a community space, a place of teaching, learning, making, discovering, and befriending. Tomorrow, I plan to visit that tempting emporium. This morning, Northfield Yarn founder Cynthia Gilbertson emailed a thoughtful essay on the importance and great value of supporting local businesses for human community and for the natural environment. (It also included a link to a global map of participating yarn stores!)

My own vestigal knitting skills were learned as a child but never yielded anything (not even pleasure). These skills were reawakened during our homeschooling years when another mother offered a knitting class for mothers and children. Each of us made a hat in infant size to donate to the Northfield Hospital to help a newborn stay warm. Building upon that experience, and now understanding how to knit in the round on bamboo needles, I bought a simple pattern for knitting socks at Northfield Yarn. I was befuddled by the instructions for turning the heel, until another mother of my acquaintance (and a master knitter) graciously taught me what to do and helped me decode the runic instructions. I have blessed her name every time I turn the heel on a new sock, and I hear her voice explain, “What you are doing is creating a little box for the heel to rest on.”

Since then, I have made many pairs of socks and even, due to the hand-holding I needed from Cynthia’s “Sweater Academy” and the Knitting Clinic available from master knitters at the shop, knitted two sweaters. I have made other hats and some scarves and mittens, but my comfort zone is certainly socks.

The socks I am wearing as I write this

In college, before I had ever knitted one sock, I read with great pleasure a translation by Robert Bly of a delightfully magical and wise poem by Pablo Neruda called “Ode to My Socks.” The entire translation is available on the Poets.org website. It is the celebration of beauty, utility, and friendship, and winds down the page like a bright strand of spun wool. The poem ends with this stanza:

The moral
of my ode is this:
beauty is twice
beauty
and what is good is doubly
good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool
in winter.

Pablo Neruda was not a knitter himself, so far as I know, but he understood the intricate craft involved and the significance of the gift of a hand-knit, custom-made pair of socks–and the importance of using the gifts we are given.

Context for Poem “Decoding the Dream”:

Today’s poem was fashioned out of a dream I had about ten years ago that still has the power to make my pulse race. Ah, knitting patterns…and all seemingly straight-forward sets of instructions!

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

Part of Tim’s Collection of Hand-Wrought Socks–Visibly Worn!

Happy Shakespeare’s Birthday! Considering the Met’s Exhibit “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” and Context for Poem “Raphaelite Legacy: A Sketch from the Met” (April 23, 2026)

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Photo: Lynn Sara Lawrence

The tumble of history means we are constantly re-evaluating what we think we know. In the field of art history, this process of assessing an artist’s body of work has been aided by precision imaging akin to the technology used in modern medicine to diagnose and treat the human body. This fascinates me. The painting above, for example, has been restored now, but for centuries this betrothal portrait, advertising the eligibility for marriage of a well-born maiden, was cloaked with after-paint covering the unicorn and turning its meaning on its head, replacing the unicorn with a wheel, iconography associated with the Catholic St. Catherine, who refused marriage to tyrant would-be emperor Maxentius.

I am seldom able to attend retrospective exhibitions of graphic art in person, but I feel quite enriched by the one currently on display in far-off New York City that reexamines the work of Renaisance master Raphael.

Photo: Lynn Sara Lawrence
Photo: Lynn Sara Lawrence

Context for Poem “Raphaelite Legacy: A Sketch from the Met (April 23, 2026):

Today, April 23, is the day on which each year Shakespeare’s birthday is traditionally celebrated. My own traditional celebration is to write a sonnet each April 23. My ground zero for the study of the sonnet is the Tudor-era English Renaissance accomplishments of William Shakespeare. My first glimmer of the achievement of the late Italian Renaissance artisit Raphael came from the Victorian revolt against the artistic legacy of Renaissance artist Raphael. I learned about William Morris and Gustav Stickley as a college student, falling in love with their aesthetic. The first real piece of furniture Tim and I invested in was a “baby antique”–a new Stickley sofa upholstered in a William Morris print. But one is allowed many loves in life, and how glad I am for that!

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has opened a ground-breaking exhibition that reevaluates the work of Raphael. “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” will be on view through June 28, 2026.

I was tipped off about this gathering and revaluation of a master artist by NYC poet Lynn Sara Lawrence who shared her impressions of the exhibit with me. She and I were both taken with the new-to-us knowledge that Raphael dabbled in poetry, even using the back of his own sketch to make a draft of a Petrachan sonnet.

Then, yesterday, the latest issue of The New Yorker arrived in our mailbox, and I read the thought-provoking review of this exhibition by Zachary Fine titled “Sleeping Beauty: Why Raphael’s Brilliance is Deemed Boring.” Among other points, Fine notes, “When Raphael died, a hundred torches were carried by painters at his funeral, and he was buried in the rotunda of the Pantheon,” and “…Raphael has the rare distinction of having an entire aesthetic movement named after a desire to go back to a time before him.” In describing the visual structure of an enormous tapestry designed by Raphael, Fine observes that the artist “…collapses the second into the minute into the day, and then doubles the scene over itself through a reflection in water.” These observations gave me the entry points I needed to write today’s Petrachan sonnet.

Oculus, Pantheon, Rome

If you, too, are enamored of the sonnet forms–Petrachan, Shakespearean, or hybrid–and can’t resist fiddling around with the possibilities offered by it, why not send your best efforts to the annual International Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest? The 2026 deadline for receipt of entries in June 1. Or join us for the Sonnet Celebration of winning entries in Winona, Minnesota on July 26, 2026.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

La Muta (the Mute Woman) by Raphael

Happy Earth Day, 2026! Revisiting SUNDIAL OF THE SEASONS by Hal Borland & Context for Poem “Relentless” (April 22, 2026)

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The photograph above is of a nine-spoked wheel, a relic from Tim’s boyhood farm in western Minnesota that is now lodged in our back garden, blooming with rust.

This image connected for me with a book I have enjoyed dipping into again and again. Printed in 1964, Hal Borland’s Sundial of the Seasons collects 365 of the nearly 1,200 nature essays he published in The New York Times between 1943 and 1963. Essays are arranged by season, beginning with March 22, with one brief piece for year day of the year.

As Borland reports, these pieces accummulated little by little over two decades. One initial essay on oak trees, published in 1941, a turbulent season for the whole globe, eventually became “more than a third of a million words.” Daily activities do add up. Borland’s other credits include other collections of essays, two considerations of folklore, three novels, and a collection of poetry entitled America Is Americans. I have never encountered his other work, but I keep this collection, this almanac of observations and questions, to remind me that the natural world never goes out of style.

Context for Poem “Relentless” (April 22, 2026):

I suppose, if pressed, I would say that the context for today’s poem is the collision of the human and other-than-human natural worlds.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

Rob Hardy: Guided Tour of to Poetic Northfield Past & Context for Poem “Under Oaklawn” (April 21, 2026)

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Last Thursday, I received an email containing an invitation from neighbor and Northfield’s Poet Laureate Emeritus, Rob Hardy. In addition to weather warnings for Saturday, Rob, who is an indefatigable historical researcher and a celebrated poet, offered to serve for an hour as a kind of Virgil (my words, not his) for a tour of the poetic shades present at Oaklawn Cemetery on the very edge of town, just across the road from the Carleton College Arboretum.

It was a day when temperatures had plummeted almost 50 degrees from the day before. Cold winds–gusts of 35 miles an hour–swept in. Flakes of snow shook down now and then, vaporizing before touching the ground. Magnolia and crapapple blossoms, encouraged by the previous warm days, shrank from the cold blasts and struggled to hold on.

You are invited to join me and other Northfield poets at Oaklawn Cemetery this Saturday, April 18, at 10:30am, for the 2nd annual Graveside Poetry Reading. We will read poems by Northfield poets who are buried at Oaklawn at their graves. Robert Watson (the author of Northfield’s first book of poetry); Rev. George Huntington (Northfield’s most famous late 19th century poet; Bjorn Winger (St. Olaf graduate and World War I poet); Helen Field Watson (Northfield native, former president of the South Dakota Poetry Society); Oscar Overby (lyricist for many choral works by F. Melius Christiansen).

I will give a very brief biography of each poet at the reading. We will also pause to remember two Northfield poets who have passed away since last National Poetry Month: Steve McCown and Toni Easterson.

In addition to revivifying the poets, bringing them to life again, in a way, through speaking their names, learning something about how they lived their lives, and hearing their crafted verse, Rob shared information about how Oaklawn Cemetery came to be. I had felt, but not consciously realized, that it is a rich collection of trees, a true arboretum. We also learned that Rob’s research has been shaped into a prose treatise. I think all of us there hope he will find the right publisher soon so that we can read it for ourselves.

Context for Poem “Under Oaklawn:”

This experience curated by Rob, standing as one of nine Northfield poets to honor our predecessors and recently departed by hearing their words again on the wind, like birds returning in April, touched me deeply. Since that morning, I have been thinking about personal and poetic legacy: What is it? What would I want it to be?

So far, I have only questions, and I am grateful for both the questions and the not-knowing.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

Photo: Susan Jaret McKinstry
Photo: Susan Jaret McKinstry

E. D. Redux & Context for Poem “Hourglass” (April 20, 2026)

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Friends stretch one’s boundaries in delightful ways. Imagine my surprise and excitement when my friend Lynn, who lives mere steps from the cultural capital of our country, sent me a CD so that I, too, could experience a bit of the dazzlement she and her husband experiencedi at a live performance at Carnegie Hall of this stunning new opera: EMILY No Prisoner Be. Lynn and Michael are much more conversant that I in all things musical and instrumental, and they, like the rest of the enthralled audience that evening, rose to give this genre-defying celebration of twenty-six of Dickinson’s poems. Reviews of this soaring performance include photographs of the set and mention that Dickinson’s life and work are a favorite of composers, as of readers. There is certainly no one way to read a poem, to sing a song, or to frame and understand a life. That is part of the thrill.

Although I have already shared a post and a poem this April inspired by Dickinson, I have wanted to share my first encounter with this masterful homage by sonic artists almost beyond my ken, and to give it its own space.

For some inexplicable reason, perhaps because I just finished an attentive rereading of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence this morning, the set for this opera–and the audacity of reinterpretation in general–reminded me of this sculpture I encountered last September in the grounds at The Mount, the house designed and built by Wharton in Lenox, Massachussetts in 1902. Perhaps both sculpture and sculpted sound are aligned in my mind because of the way they each give what could be ephemeral more weight and also more sense of flight?

Context for Poem “Hourglass”:

Today’s pre-dawn perambultions drawn from reading and wondering made me think of the Hourglass Spider. Was there such a thing? Yes. They are rare and wonderful, but impossible for me to describe in a short poem. And so I pulled back, pondered the shape, function, and metaphorical echoes of the actual archaic timepiece of the hourglass, and attempted to capture these in today’s poem.

I had also been wanting to share word of the astonishing opera mentioned above, and thought Emily Dickinson might approve of the pairing.

Image by David Clode of Pixabay

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE