“Such Singing in the Wild Branches” – Mary Oliver

It was spring
and I finally heard him
among the first leaves––
then I saw him clutching the limb

in an island of shade
with his red-brown feathers
all trim and neat for the new year.
First, I stood still

and thought of nothing.
Then I began to listen.
Then I was filled with gladness––
and that’s when it happened,

when I seemed to float,
to be, myself, a wing or a tree––
and I began to understand
what the bird was saying,

and the sands in the glass
stopped
for a pure white moment
while gravity sprinkled upward

like rain, rising,
and in fact
it became difficult to tell just what it was that was singing––
it was the thrush for sure, but it seemed

not a single thrush, but himself, and all his brothers,
and also the trees around them,
as well as the gliding, long-tailed clouds
in the perfect blue sky–––all of them

were singing.
And, of course, so it seemed,
so was I.
Such soft and solemn and perfect music doesn’t last

For more than a few moments.
It’s one of those magical places wise people
like to talk about.
One of the things they say about it, that is true,

is that, once you’ve been there,
you’re there forever.
Listen, everyone has a chance.
Is it spring, is it morning?

Are there trees near you,
and does your own soul need comforting?
Quick, then––open the door and fly on your heavy feet; the song
may already be drifting away.

Mary Oliver

Happy First Spring Day

Keep it wild and simple

AnaKWildness

Red Robin

Time stopped. For an endless second.

I felt watched. He watched me.

I watched him, and he at me. 

Curious.

Fearless.

I held my breath and stopped.

He kept watching.

The most beautiful moment.

And then gone.

Keep it wild and simple

AnaKWildness

“This Morning” – Mary Oliver

This morning the redbirds’ eggs
have hatched and already the chicks
are chirping for food. They don’t
know where it’s coming from, they
just keep shouting, “More! More!”
As to anything else, they haven’t
had a single thought. Their eyes
haven’t yet opened, they know nothing
about the sky that’s waiting. Or
the thousands, the millions of trees.
They don’t even Know they have wings.

And just like that, like a simple
neighborhood event, a miracle is
taking place.

“This Morning”, by Mary Oliver

Keep it wild and simple.

AnaKWildness

Shine, Perishing Republic – Robinson Jeffers

First of all, dear readers, my apologies for my ups and downs. Sometimes I write, other times I really do not have time. I don’t have even time to sleep, let alone to sit down and consciously think about something profound and thoughtful to write. Because I don’t want to fill in the net with lots of bullshit. I leave this job for someone else. Anyway, tonight I’ve found a bit of time to share a poet with you. His name is Robinson Jeffers and I think that he is a supreme genius. Firstly, something about his biography and his life.

He was born in 1887 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. During his childhood he studies classical languages and the Bible, as his father was a Presbyterian minister. The Jeffers family frequently traveled to Europe, and Robinson attended boarding schools in Germany and Switzerland. In 1902, Jeffers enrolled in Western University of Pennsylvania and then he moved to California. At the Presbyterian Occidental Collegeh he studied literature, medicine, and forestry. In 1906 he met a fellow graduate student, Una Call Kuster. The two fell in love, though at the time Una was married. They married in 1913 and moved to Carmel, on California’s coast. Jeffers and his wife lived in Carmel for the rest of their lives, building the stone “Tor House” and “Hawk Tower“, both of which figure prominently in his work. It was at the beginning of his time in Carmel that Jeffers turned exclusively to writing poetry. His first volume of poems, Flagons and Apples, was published in 1912, but it was the 1924 publication of Tamar and Other Poems that brought him attention, for his narrative poems and the use of the blank verse.

Nature not only serves as a backdrop for Jeffers’s verse; animals and natural objects are frequently compared to man, with man shown to be the inferior. “There is not one memorable person,” Jeffers wrote in Contrast, “there is not one mind to stand with the trees, one life with the mountains.” Jeffers preferred nature to man because he felt that the human race was too introverted, that it failed to recognize the significance of other creatures and things in the universe.  Jeffers termed his philosophy “inhumanism,” which he explained was “a shifting of emphasis from man to not man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence…. It offers a reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct, instead of love, hate, and envy.” Humanity had been spurned by an uncaring God, Jeffers believed, so each individual should rid himself of emotion and embrace an indifferent, nonhuman god. To develop his philosophy of inhumanism, Jeffers drew on his extensive reading in philosophy, religion, mythology, and science. Critics have connected Jeffers’s ideas to those of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Lucretius, and cyclical historians such as Giambattista Vico, Oswald Spengler, and Flinders Petrie.

In 1932 he was on the cover of Time, and in 1946 his version of the Greek drama Medea played on Broadway. But popular opinion began to turn against Jeffers when a full formulation of his doctrine seemed to calmly foresee the extinction of the human race. Some of his political views, including references in his work to Pearl Harbor, Hitler, Stalin, and Roosevelt, were also uneasily received in the period after World War II. His collection, The Double Axe (1948), included a publisher’s warning on the potentially “unpatriotic” poems inside.  In recent years, Robinson Jeffers has regained his central place in the burgeoning field of eco-poetics. His uncompromising work celebrates the enduring beauty of sea, sky and stone and the freedom and ferocity of wild animals, and strives to create a vision of world in which human experience is productively questioned, qualified, and even decentered.

As you can imagine, I really like Jeffers because of his philosophy of inhumanism, but also because his poems are really so full of rage. Sometimes resignation, but mostly rage because of men’s supposed superiority and confirmed ignorance. I’d like to share with you some of Jeffers’s poems, hoping you’ll find them enlightening.

Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the
mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and deca-
dence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stub-
bornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thick-
ening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there
are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught–they say–
God, when he walked on earth.

Keep it wild and simple. Keep it wilder and simpler.

AnaKWildness

“Don’t Worry” – Mary Oliver

Things take the time they take. Don’t
worry.
How many roads did Saint Augustine follow
before he became Saint Augustine?

“Don’t Worry” by Mary Oliver, in Felicity.

Ci vuole il tempo che ci vuole. Non / preoccuparti. / Quante strade ha seguito Sant’Agostino / prima di diventare Sant’Agostino?

And I guess we all have to follow many roads, and yet our own roads, to find ourselves. Full and rounded. Like apples. So just follow the road you think it’s better for you. Don’t let them steal your dream. Look at the aim. Be confident. Believe in you. Believe in your future. Believe that something will happen. It’s all in your hands.

Gotta believe.

And don’t stop. RUN and FIGHT.

Keep it wild and simple.

AnaKWildness

 

“Both Worlds” – Mary Oliver

Forever busy, it seems,
with words,
finally
I put the pen down

and crumple
most of the sheets
and leave one or two,
sometimes a few,

for the next morning.
Day after day —
year after year —
it has gone on this way,

I rise from the chair,
I put on my jacket
and leave the house
for that other world —

the first one,
the holy one —
where the trees say
nothing the toad says

nothing the dirt
says nothing and yet
what has always happened
keeps happening:

the trees flourish,
the toad leaps,
and out of the silent dirt
the blood-red roses rise.

“Both Worlds” by Mary Oliver, in Red Robin, Boston: Beacon Press. 2008: 51-52.

Sempre indaffarata, sembra, / con parole, / finalmente / poso la penna

e accartoccio / quasi tutti i fogli / e ne lascio uno o due, / a volte alcuni,

per la mattina seguente. / Giorno dopo giorno– / anno dopo anno — / si va all’osso così,

Mi alzo dalla sedia, / mi metto la giacca / e lascio la casa / per quell’altro mondo–

il primo / il sacro– / dove gli alberi non dicono / nulla il rospo non dice

nulla la terra non / dice nulla ed eppure / quello che è sempre successo / continua a succedere:

gli alberi prosperano, / il rospo salta, / e dalla terra muta / le rose rosso sangue si alzano.

(attempted translation by AnaKWildness)

There are days when you just need a bit of poetry, a hot tea. And hope.

Keep it wild and simple.

AnaKWildness

p.s. I’d like to thank all my readers! You are getting higher and higher and I am very proud and happy that Essential Facts of Life is rising! Thanks thanks thanks, wherever you come from, whatever the reasons you are here: thanks.

 

“San Martino” – Giosuè Carducci

La nebbia a gl’irti colli
piovigginando sale,
e sotto il maestrale
urla e biancheggia il mar;

ma per le vie del borgo
dal ribollir de’ tini
va l’aspro odor dei vini
l’anime a rallegrar.

Gira su’ ceppi accesi
lo spiedo scoppiettando
sta il cacciator fischiando
su l’uscio a rimirar

tra le rossastre nubi
stormi d’uccelli neri,
com’esuli pensieri,
nel vespero migrar.

“San Martino” – Giosuè Carducci

The perfect autumn poem.

The mist to the bare hills / as thin rain soars / and under the northwest wind / the sea howls and churns;

Yet through the hamlet’s alleys / from the fermenting barrels /  the pungent scent of wines spreads / to cheer a soul up.

On burning logs turns / the spit crackling; / there stands the hunter whistling / on the doorstep to gaze

In the reddening clouds / at flocks of black birds, / like exiled thoughts / as in the dusk they flee.

Keep it wild and simple.

AnaKWildness

“Meriggiare pallido e assorto” -Eugenio Montale

Meriggiare pallido e assorto
presso un rovente muro d’orto,
ascoltare tra i pruni e gli sterpi
schiocchi di merli, frusci di serpi.

Nelle crepe dei suolo o su la veccia
spiar le file di rosse formiche
ch’ora si rompono ed ora s’intrecciano
a sommo di minuscole biche.

Osservare tra frondi il palpitare
lontano di scaglie di mare
mentre si levano tremuli scricchi
di cicale dai calvi picchi.

E andando nel sole che abbaglia
sentire con triste meraviglia
com’è tutta la vita e il suo travaglio
in questo seguitare una muraglia
che ha in cima cocci aguzzi di bottiglia.

Eugenio Montale ft. Van Gogh, “Olive Trees”

To rest at noon, pale and thoughtful, by a burning garden wall, to listen among thorns and wigs, to blackbirds’ clack, snakes’ hiss.

In the cracks of the soil or among the vetch, to spy on the lines of red ants, now scattering, now intertwining on the top of tiny mountains.

To observe among the fronds the distant quivering of scales of sea, while grasshoppers’ tremulous cries rise from bald hills.

And walking in the dazzling sun, to feel with sad astonishment how life is and all its torment, in this following a wall topped with sharp shards of glass.

(an attempt by AnaK)

 

Keep it wild and simple

AnaKWildness

 

 

“Nothing Gold Can Stay” – Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold, 
Her hardest hue to hold. 
Her early leaf’s a flower; 
But only so an hour. 
Then leaf subsides to leaf. 
So Eden sank to grief, 
So dawn goes down to day. 
Nothing gold can stay.

So this is life, uh? A blink, a second, and then gone, forever. Yet, this is exactly why it is so sturdy and fragile at the same time, so tight to a branch and yet so volatile, so self-willed and so casual, like a leaf swept by the wind.

Keep it wild and simple.

AnaKWildness

 

“Harlem” – Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

      Does it dry up

      like a raisin in the sun?

      Or fester like a sore—

      And then run?

      Does it stink like rotten meat?

      Or crust and sugar over—

      like a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just sags

      like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

“Harlem” by Langston Hughes, in Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)

This is not only about Harlem. Or about Black people. It’s about each and everyone of us. It’s about our dreams. Deferred. Do not give them up.

Keep it wild and simple

AnaKWildness

“What is it?” – Mary Oliver

[…]

and how could anyone believe
that anything in this world
is only what it appears to be—
that anything is ever final—
that anything, in spite of its absence,
ever dies
a perfect death?

from”What is it?”, in House of Light (1990) by Mary Oliver

I don’t want to upload a photo here. Because it should have been the photo of my new little fellow, who passed away this morning. But I could not bear the weight of death, I’m sorry. Not now, not like this, not today. I thought he had come to remind me that I need to fight, that I can still be useful in this world. Now that he’s gone, I don’t know who I am, I don’t know why I am here. I just know that I don’t want to be like this anymore. What’s the meaning of all of this? What’s the point? Why? …I’ll never know.

A.

“Desiderata” – Max Ehrmann

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

Max Ehrmann, “Desiderata” (1927)

Keep it wild and simple.

AnaKWildness