Shovelling ovens

In waiting rooms of shovelling ovens
Sweaters remove satraps
While heavens wait
One two three snore
Lips off bothering onramps
Lamps counting
Reverb off
In salmon days of shadows
The snores left behind
Over doors under shelves
The rainbows are trouting
Just before the lunches jump
Swimming in schools
Full of underline
And the cross outs went back
To where the tables left off
There was no understanding
Just the deepness that sweaters together
Pest to pebbles that sleep
Under doors over shelves
Shovelling ovens in that tea deep steep.

Denis Streeter 1/27/12

Crybaby

Crybots alone
Fields awaken
Testing your dreams
All over
Checking feeding stations
Just waiting
You're dreaming
They're telling me
You're nothing
Made of derision
Noon collision
Adam and Eve
There was morning
There was evening
Asking
Where is this going
Isn't this enough
Adam and Eve
Morning and evening
Noon.

Denis Streeter 1/25/12

Martin Pippen in the Apple Orchard

Another quote by Eleanor Farjeon...from Martin Pippen in the Apple Orchard (1921)...with slight line rearrangement...Some background...a small girl lives in a gaunt and gloomy mill-house with her harsh father...who never lets her out...has her do most the work...and a boy three years older knocks on the mill door asking her for bread...she gives him seven ears of wheat 'heavy with grain, and bowed on their ripe stem.'

Then he felt in his pocket
and after some fumbling got hold of what he wanted and pulled it out.
'Here you are child,' he said, 'and thank you again'
He put his present into her hand and swung off whistling.
He turned once to wave at her,
and the corn in his cap nodded with its weight and his light gait.
She stood gazing till he was out of sight,
and then she looked at what he had given her.
It was a shell.
She had heard of shells, of course, but she had never seen one.
Yet she knew this was no English shell.
It was as large as the top of a teacup, but more oval than round.
Over its surface, like pearl, rippled waves of sea-green and sea-blue,
under a lustre that was like golden moonlight on the ocean.
She could not define or trace the waves of colour;
they flowed in and out of each other with interchangeable movement.
One half of the outer rim,
which was transparently thin and curled like the fantastic edge of a surf wave,
was speckled with a faint play of rose and cream and silver,
that melted imperceptibly into the moonlit sea.
When she turned the shell over
she found that she could not see its heart.
The blue-green side of the shell curled under like a smooth billow,
and then broke into a world of caves,
and caves within caves, whose final secret she could not discover.
But within and within the colour grew deeper and deeper,
bottomless blues and unfathomable greens,
shot with such gleams of light as made her heart throb,
for they were like the gleams that shoot through our dreams,
the light that eludes us when we wake.

(page 111)

I wish I could write with such beautiful narrative description...
Fortunately I have writers as gifted as Eleanor Farjeon to hone my gifts...

Eleanor Farjeon

She is probably best known for writing the hymn "Morning has Broken" (1931) based on an old Gaelic tune. Cat Stevens also popularized this song. In children's literature she is best known for her collection of short stories "The Little Bookroom" (1955). I have read this charming book of original folktales many times and given away copies as gifts. It won the Carnegie Medal that year and is still in print. I just discovered another series of stories by researching her at the library computer. "Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard" (1921) and "Martin Pippin in the Daisy Field" (1937). I'm on page 87 in the apple orchard, but the writing is so fine I recommend it to almost anyone.  Her storytelling and descriptions are clarity for the imagination.  Here's one passage from "Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard". Some background:  Martin Pippin is a wandering minstrel and in this story he tells of shepherd, Young Gerard, who discovers a runaway girl near the shed where he sleeps. She's wet, so he invites her in to dry by the fire.  The burning wood arranged like a castle...

And they watched the fire together, and smelled its smoke, that
had as many smells as there were sorts of wood. Sometimes it was
like roast coffee, and sometimes like roast chestnuts, and some-
times like incense. And they saw the lichen on old stumps crinkle
into golden ferns, or fire run up a dead tail of creeper in a red S,
and vanish in mid-air like an Indian boy climbing a rope, or crawl
right through the middle of a birch-twig, making hieroglyphics
that glowed and faded between the grey scales of the bark. And
then suddenly it caught the whole scaffolding of their castle, and
blazed up through the fir and oak and spiny thorns and dead
leaves, and the bits of old bark all over blue-grey-green rot, and
the young sprigs almost budding, and hissing with sap. And for
one moment they saw all the skeleton and soul of the castle with-
out its body, before it fell in. (page 71)

Both Martin Pippin books are considered classics and are still in print. I highly recommend checking them out from the library and researching other books by Eleanor Farjeon...especially "The Little Bookroom". I plan to buy copies of both Martin Pippin books. You never know what may resonate with your life...

Submerged

One of the pieces fell out
I couldn't tell which
When the tenticles fell
Walking pet barnacles
The seaweed was waving
Streets filled with water
Poseidon hunted...
Future generations
Read our presence
A thousand years later
Piecing the past
Discovering their future
Still a kaleidoscope of unknowns
And wonders.

Denis Streeter 12/30/11

Poetry is...

Discovery
The connective links to all life
Linking imagination to the real
Absurd, humor
The depth of our being
Bone core truth
Fearful and fearless expressed
Connecting us to something higher
Than we can know.

Denis Streeter 1/1/12