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| Kathryn welcomed everyone and then shared some poetry during Poetry, Prose and Pie. |
Welcome
to Poetry, Prose, and Pie! We are so pleased you took the time to join us
tonight and we hope you’ll enjoy.
Most
of you are here from a connection to my parents. I could, of course, say so
much about what they have given me as their child, but I believe, perhaps more
than anything else, they gave me an appreciation for beauty - in nature, in
art, in music, and most of all in words.
Living
where we do, there is beauty aplenty, but in way of culture, art, and
performance it can feel a bit scarce. Dunlap, after all, boasts no theatres, or
art museums, or even a coffee shop with an open mic.
But
my parents have spent years connecting with the storytellers, musicians,
artisans, and poets in this little corner of the world, and my mom in her usual
fashion, made it her mission to host this event to share the bounty of this
community.
So
if you have joined us here tonight, feeling a bit thin in spirit, I hope you
leave full of heart, with a bit of substance to get you through.
And
If you are in a season of plenty in your life, I hope you will share the gifts
of this evening in the (cold) days and weeks to come.
And
with that, I want to share a selection of poems.
When
we find some rhythm with nature and the cycles of season and Solstice, there is
space and time, quiet and reflection, memory, and then renewal.
First
is a piece about Time, which is actually the prologue to a novel by Diana
Gabaldon.
“Time is a lot of the things people say that God is.
There’s the always preexisting, and having no end. There’s the notion of being
all powerful--because nothing can stand against time, can it? Not mountains,
not armies.
And time is, of course, all healing. Give anything
enough time, and everything is taken care of; all pain encompassed, all
hardship erased, all loss subsumed.
Ashes to Ashes, dust to dust. Remember, man, that thou
art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.”
Next
is one of my own pieces titled “Woven Baskets” which I wrote after a walk at
dusk.
Woven
basket holds pink,
red,
orange
basket
of grey, brown
branches
holding the sky
and
my one-star dusk; one
star
in blue, fading and sliding,
sneaking
into darker blue
Woven
basket of one-star sky
and
moon
waning
crescent rising in the
east
as I run into the woven basket of
one-star
sky moon
and
you...
I’d
like to invite my friend Zavier Phillips to come up. He’s a student a
University Chicago currently studying and also performing with the Comedy Troupe. .
The
poem he will read is titled: “To the Garbage Collectors in Bloomington, Indiana
on the First Pickup of the New Year” by Philip Appleman
(the way bed is in winter, like an aproned lap,
like furry
mittens,
like
childhood crouching under tables)
The Ninth Day of Xmas, in the morning black
outside our window: clattering cans, the whir
of a hopper, shouts, a whistle, move on ...
I see them in my warm imagination
the way I’ll see them later in the cold,
heaving the huge cans and running
(running!) to the next house on the street.
My vestiges of muscle stir
uneasily in their percale cocoon:
what moves those men out there, what
drives them running to the next house and the next?
Halfway back to dream, I speculate:
The Social Weal? “Let’s make good old
Bloomington
a cleaner place
to live
in—right, men? Hup, tha!”
Healthy Competition? “Come on, boys,
let’s burn
up that route today and beat those dudes
on truck
thirteen!”
Enlightened Self-Interest? “Another can,
another
dollar—don’t slow down, Mac, I’m puttin’
three kids
through Princeton?”
Or something else?
Terror?
A half hour later, dawn comes edging over
Clark Street: layers of color, laid out like
a flattened rainbow—red, then yellow, green,
and over that the black-and-blue of night
still hanging on. Clark Street maples wave
their silhouettes against the red, and through
the twiggy trees, I see a solid chunk
of garbage truck, and stick-figures of men,
like windup toys, tossing little cans—
and running.
All day they’ll go like that, till dark again,
and all day, people fussing at their desks,
at hot stoves, at machines, will jettison
tin cans, bare evergreens, damp Kleenex, all
things that are Caesar’s.
O garbage men,
the New Year greets you like the Old;
after this first run you too may rest
in beds like great warm aproned laps
and know that people everywhere have faith:
putting from them all things of this world,
they confidently bide your second coming.
To
end the poetry portion of the evening, a reflection on the New Year titled: “To
the New Year” by W.S. Merwin.
With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning
so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible
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