Things That Don't Change

Woman Reading by a Window, Gari Melchers, c.1905

I still clutch the cuffs of my sweater, one arm 

at a time, the way my mother taught me when
I put my coat on so it wouldn’t scrunch up my
sleeves at my elbows. The mother is gone and
the coat long outgrown, and I miss someone
fussing at me out of love and concern for my
clothing and comfort. I know a woman who
mounted a spring on her screen door so it
would slam shut as it did when she was a child.
The past can’t be reclaimed with hardware,
however, and the screen door might snap at
her fingers, as it must have when she was a child.

So I cling to the age I am—I can be sure of that—
and look around for the things that don’t
change. Today it’s the season’s first robin,
grown fat as a fireplug; new grass; and the slant
of the afternoon sun at the equinox, warmer
than yesterday’s, clearer than memories,
carrying images: baskets of bread by a
window... dark-blue linoleum kitchens... winter
coats worn one last time before hanging them
up in the attic with mothballs... embers not
quite cold now stirred into flame by the
ages-old afternoon sun at the equinox.

The Symptom

Machu Picchu —https://www.andbeyond.com/tours/a-peru-family-adventure/

The many-feathered thing that scared me had

six eyes and seven feet and eighty other parts
I’ve never seen on any living thing, and if it had
a clever aspect or a bashful grin I couldn’t say
because I dared not more than glance. I saw
that it was quite peculiar, and I wasn’t feeling very
strong, not up to confrontation, certainly, or even
hi, how have you been, so I assumed, as one does
(wouldn’t you?), it was the enemy, plus it arrived
without an invitation—didn’t phone or text ahead—
one minute I was by myself, the next I had a
feathered six-eyed, seven-footed stranger on my
bed. I did what anyone would do—jumped up and
ran around and ‘round the room, in case it got it in
its six-eyed head to spray me with a noxious liquid
that would paralyze me or else, worse yet, stain my
frock.

I ran in circles for a while, assuming it was after me,
but, no, it sat sedately on the bed—a bit bemused, it
must be said, as if it were expecting me to stay and
chat instead of dashing hither, yon, and back again.
In my defense, it hadn’t said a word, so how was I
to know what sort of language to address it in,
American or Alien or French, assuming that I were
inclined to overlook its strange, outré demeanor
and proceed to conversation? I just wished it to be
gone. I didn’t want, right then, to know its history
or antecedents, only its intention. But it kept its
silence. Panting and exhausted, I was forced to stop
and catch my breath, and there it sat, no more
malicious than my daddy’s hat, the gray fedora
that, when not on Daddy’s head, perched on a
high shelf in the entryway. The creature radiated
curiosity and not a bit of malice, but I turned my
head to cough, preparatory to an inquiry about its
origin, and when I turned back it had gone.

Well, isn’t that the oddest thing, said I to me, to up
and leave just when I had begun to see it
differently? If there are any lessons here, they are,
first, lock your doors, and, second, keep an open
mind when you’re presented with a little feathered
person of the six-eyed, seven-footed kind. It might
mean an adventure; don’t reject it out of hand and
find to your regret that it has gone to Machu
Picchu and you have been left behind.

My Tree Charlie

There’s a sturdy tree, a Norfolk Island
pine whose name is Charlie; genderwise,
I’m pretty sure that she’s a girl. In any
case, I tend to her as if she were a
croupy child. I’ve given her the finest
spot I can arrange, there being limited
availability of sunny windows
in my little place. She seems to like the
kitchen table, which gets ample daylight
after two p.m. I hydrate her with water
from the tap and feed her evil-smelling
fertilizer; and, when I remember
to, I whisper tenderly in the
direction of where ears might be—you never
know with trees—and play the music of
Franz Schubert, Haydn, Bach, and Telemann—
melodic and conducive to serenity,
for me at least... again, you never know with
trees, and Charlie has her own
peculiarities.

Perhaps I’m overly concerned with
Charlie’s growth and day-to-day vitality—
I hover, I confess—but when I’m tempted
to neglect her (she’s a room away from
where I tend to nest, a daunting twelve or
thirteen steps), she shoots me a reminder
in the form of needles turning brown, and
Charlie sheds at an alarming rate. So
I pretend that she’s my sacred self. It
helps not only for recalling that it’s
time for her to have a drink and that I
have to turn her now and then, but also
for my tendency to see her as an
ornament, ignoring, temporarily,
what makes her Charlie—not inanimate but
living and respiring and essential
as the U.N., my attentive next-door
neighbor, and the light and air we all
depend on if we want to breathe, which
I do, constantly. With this in mind, I
have to hope she doesn’t prematurely
die of some arboreal disease; and
when her time with me, beside my kitchen
window, has to end, as is the way of
things for indoor trees, I’ll know I treated
her with more than kindness but with awe and
reverence, I don’t mind saying, for her
soul, forever fresh and green in
some sweet, fragrant heaven that’s reserved for
noble creatures such as Charlie and her
brother-sister trees.

To Heaven and Back in an Afternoon

Behind a veil I cannot see are wonders 

making ready to amaze me. They will
answer all my questions, which I’ve asked
forever, or at least since I could speak
without a lisp. I risked the wrath of half
the population of my childhood, dogging
all my elders unremittingly and never
missing, not a single day. The big kids
are intimidating. Go away! they used to
say, not so unkindly, laughing anyway
and running way too fast for me to catch them.

Sweet, funny Mom, bright-eyed, alert,
and smart as a new hat, would be the only
answerer. It seemed that no one else was
half as bold—not that she knew which shade
of green the scenery might be, which scents
and sounds prevail, or whether there are structures
roofed and gabled or just splendid open air.

It must be beautiful beyond imagining,
she’d say. It may be there are colors never
seen on earth, or even in this universe.

Now she no longer has to guess.

Here’s what I suspect: Right now, as I sit
on my bed, at least a dozen angels
are my guests. My mother’s here. My father, too,
Aunt Polly, Alma, and a gaggle of the
ancients, all their faces lit with love like
treetops in the first pink flush of sunrise.
Clumps of pure white flowers send their light
perfume into the atmosphere. One by one,
the sun illuminates them. See? They line
a smooth and slender road extending all the
way to glory, and their story draws me
through the veil. Each step I take expands my
vista exponentially. Without a sense of
having climbed, I find myself above the
highest mountain with the whole world at my
feet. I holler, Look at me! An echo mocks
good-naturedly, repeating Look at me... at me...
at me....

It’s spring, not even May yet, in my bedroom...
and a warm midsummer day behind the veil,
the breeze sufficient to hold off the heat.
Flat, glossy leaves like workers’ hands are clapping
just above me in the tree I just this minute
sit beside and then lean back on. I can
feel my eyelids flutter. No! I want to
stamp this afternoon upon my memory—
to paint indelibly a picture of the
bright green rolling landscape—fields of corn
and soybeans; stands of maple, cottonwood,
and Dutch elm trees; old barns crying out for
paint; and steeples, tractors, skinny winding
roads where pickup trucks make clouds of
dust that chug with them from house to
road to town and back.

What odd place have I landed in? Is this 

a slice of Heaven, or Ohio? I need you here
to anchor me in your accommodating
vision of reality—not physical
(the spirit flies, defying gravity)—
but not allowing me to paint the sky
with candy clouds and overlook the cyclone’s
eye. I need to know that you can see them
too—the ancients in new incarnations,
beaming, calling, Look at me... at me... at me....

Motherhood

I’D CHOOSE YOU AGAIN~

They say that children choose their mothers

from on high, before they’re born.

If it’s true, and there were others

just as caring, just as warm,

pure as honey, sweet as clover,

soft as spring they might have been...

but if I had it to do over,

gladly, I’d choose you again.

by Mary Campbell May 2010 for Melba Campbell 1912-1974

Life Is Poetry (Now)

When you find your spot and hit your stride,
regardless of how hard you tried to be
on time and didn’t quite succeed, yet neatly,
gracefully, and perfectly in step,
slipped into your appointed place as if
you were the missing tuba player in
a marching band, but landed with a grin
and saucy bow, finessing now,
extemporaneously starring in
an unpremeditated bit, and everyone
applauded, just assuming it was part
and parcel of the entertainment — then
you’ve made a work of art out of a chance
anomaly, and life is elevated
from the ordinary: It’s a symphony,
a dance, a comedy… perchance, by grace,
beyond felicity, to be accompanied
by ginger tea and love and handmade lace
and wondering at Coleridge and Blake…. Now
you must get some pixie dust (before
you are allowed a bit of rest and solitude)
to give you extra effervescence and
a bit of magic, and, not merely reading
sonnets of Rossetti, Keats, and Sidney,
be a sonnet, one with careful, offhand
rhyme, magnificent. Be poetry;
its tide is in, its time may not soon be
so sensible again.

⧫

For more on this poem, see Poem E: God's Time Is the Best Time

The Two of Us

I AM THE ARCHETYPAL MOTHER

There is a frightened little girl in me
who fights the good fight every minute
every day and cries herself to sleep
and I don’t comfort her enough,
but now I’m longing to enfold her;
so we sit and rock, the two of us,
and, oh, what simple strength
there is in that, and bliss.
And as I wrap my arms
around the child, it seems
as if the whole big wild chaotic
universe is sitting on my lap
surrounded by and drenched in
love. I am the archetypal mother,
crooning, soothing, weeping for
my children’s pain. But the Creator
takes my tears, as all are gathered
for a baptism of rain, sweet, tender,
healing rain that makes the iris
and the poppy and the peach tree
bloom in spring. So when we cry,
the child and I, our grief is not
in vain. Our sighing is a gentle wind,
and when we laugh the leaves dance
on the trees again.

by Mary Campbell, 2008

Sigh from a Lady Robin

mary had another little iamb

iamb (n.): a metrical foot consisting of one short (or unstressed) syllable 

followed by one long (or stressed) syllable.

MARY HAD ANOTHER LITTLE IAMB

Do the English-speaking population of the planet 

and descendants of the guys who colonized
the archipelago of Curious, the Cat Star—couched
among the first and least-dense embers cooled,
the early incubators of fertility, where growing
things analogous to trees still thrive in colors
never seen on Molokai—require another
metaphor of mine, a fresh pathetic fallacy,
with sonnets scattered here and there
for garnish? Are my anapests and little iambs,
rhymed or un-, necessities in galaxies
where volumes equaling in heft the OED
are written, polished, proofed, and posted
hourly?

If something harmless is to be produced,
however, on my watch—and all the world
has been assured I don’t darn socks, do auto-glass
replacement, oversee production crews
for artificial kneecaps, or approve (nor do I vilify)
financial backing for an enterprise
that has invented still another way to package
nonprescription drugs in plastic bubbles—
then perhaps I satisfy my mission,
my raison d’être, and my strategy for staying
out of trouble, as a poetry creator and purveyor,
pointing out, with artistry not yet achieved
by chance by chimpanzees by banging frantically
on Smith-Corona typewriting machines,
that truth is poetry and poems are so many
mangoes hanging from not quite so many
mango trees.

I have to write, you see. It is my contribution,
my amusement, and my destiny, which God and I
agreed upon prenatally and not a word exchanged
about utility. With inactivity the brain begins
to hum Stravinsky or Saint-Saëns off-key 
and thumbs do calisthenics so as not to stiffen up 
mid-simile. And thus I keep on doing as I ought, 
conjecturing delightedly, Has anybody ever had 
that thought? Why not? So what?

Think On This

Fly Ranch Geyser, Washoe County, Nevada

I am a river churning seaward underground,

surrounded by a cavern, solid granite but for 

fissures I insinuate my presence into, yearning for 

the surface, called by light and dandelions and 

loveliness... for I am more than ordinary water.

In my memory are joy and sorrow, thoughts of

katydids reminding me what time it is—and I recall

contentment. In another life I celebrated

when the wind was fragrant and the wheat was

prideful in its deep green summer garment. Inch 

by inch, wherever I detect the merest acquiescence

or irregularity in this, my prison, I press on with 

certainty that even if I wished I could not stay 

invisible and unappreciated. More than mission, 

more than destiny, my purpose is necessity—to 

manifest as stream or cataract in consonance with 

elemental earth and wind. I never tire; my work 

needs neither effort nor resilience, for it is of the 

universe and thus of love. I cannot go amiss. Long 

since I tamed my only enemies, impatience and its 

sister, striving. Now I wait, when waiting is required,

remaining vigilant, until the rock gives way to air 

and freedom and the open sky.

by Mary Campbell, May 3, 2016

They Will Be Like You

They imitate the way you sneeze and tie your shoes and

cut your food, so please, if for no other reason, eat your

peas and brussels sprouts; and when you hold your head

high, when you scan the sky to find your polestar, they look

up there too, not knowing why, not yet. Your steady

temper teaches them serenity; it readies them to make

their way above the petty and the mean and not get

muddled over seeming versus substance, which is why they

trust that everything is as it needs to be in the reality of

here and now. And so you chart your course on higher

ground, not only for their sake, not just to see the sun

come up and gild the valley till it can’t contain the light; it’s

where the road to paradise begins.

The prophet says: You are beyond forgiven. In the morning

comes the splendid grace that lifts you up, scrapes off the

blemishes, and takes away the sting. And isn’t that (you ask

rhetorically) the Gospel, and the promise kept?—All things

are possible; all souls have wings.

***

This poem is available as a limited-edition print for Mothers' Day.Learn more at/www.zgravweb.net/mothersday.html

Poplar Gratitude

http://kkimagery.com/last-leaf-this-year/last-leaf-on-a-tree/

Gratitude poem of the day #3, five lines in iambic pentameter, 11/25/2015

POPLAR GRATITUDE

A crooked tree, a naked branch--a leaf?

How does it stay attached, this russet thing

with specks of green? Tenacity, perhaps?

Impertinence?  A yes to winter’s no?

Or newly grown and confident of spring....

—by Mary Campbell

Caffeine Gratitude

HAPPY THANKSGIVING, EVERYONE! This week I'm challenging myself to write each morning a gratitude poem of five lines in iambic pentameter. 

Here's no. 1, for 11/23/2015:

------------------------------

CAFFEINE GRATITUDE

My morning coffee—yesterday’s, I must 

confess, reheated in the microwave—

is less a beverage than a simple, cheap

indulgence, plus a timely tweet from God:

“A brief reminder: Bitter can be sweet.”

—Mary Campbell

Wabi-Sabi Autumn

Wabi-Sabi Autumn

Inspired by Whispered Images: Photographs in the Aesthetic of Wabi-Sabi, by Eric Somers, http://www.sandbookstudio.com/photo.html

I notice, this October, skittering shadows

of the brittle leaves that drop from

sycamores in autumn, and I wonder if

the trees shed now-unnecessary foliage

to make compost while they sleep –

protection through the winter,

nourishment in spring for them and their

companions and dependents, birds and

bugs and shrubbery that needs their

shade.

There is along my path an ailing maple,

all except a few limbs bare, but those in

crimson glory, unaware (or, if they

know, not caring) that their brother-

sister branches lack the wherewithal to

bud, the sap too sluggish (or it might be

absent altogether) to remind the naked

branches of their foliating habit when

the air warms and the earth unhardens.

Once I would have grieved or fretted:

What atrocity, what human meddling,

has been visited upon this innocently

thriving urban flora specimen? Today, in

mid-October, I rejoice at the

phenomenon – nature acting naturally

regardless of the stimulus.

Not so long ago I dreaded winter – a

colossal inconvenience and a fearsome

obstacle to my frenetic busyness, to my

insistence that I float from here to there

on friendly breezes, not get bitten by a

north wind that must certainly be vicious

or at least dispassionate to

(unprovoked!) attack a lone pedestrian.

Indeed I took it personally and let it

hinder my activity, when all I really

needed was another sweater and a hat

or else, perhaps, a day of rest and

meditation and of making soup from

scraps of chicken and the half a spinach

salad loosely wrapped in cellophane 

and almost past its fresh-till date.

The grass is showing weariness, and who

can blame it, being hacked and raked

and sprayed at rigid intervals all

summer? But it doesn’t strive, it just

adapts, accepting change according to its

habit. After all, the sun has not retired; it

is only at a greater distance from the

planet than in April, say, or August. It

comes back, requiring none of my

assistance. If I fancy there’s a cosmic

knowing nature has that dormancy is

preparation, I can rest contentedly in

what I sense as temporary, as a time of

restoration, not the end of summers, not

the death of light.

Prayer for a Wounded Heart

PRAYER FOR A WOUNDED HEART

Divine Beloved: Prayer is as near to me as breath, and 

as essential to serenity. Among the sages of Aquarius 

and higher planes a few claim such enlightenment they 

find no reason or necessity to pray. They say that in 

creation you gave into our possession a messiah – 

everything required for joy and peace and celebration. 

I believe this, yet today in all my striving I have failed to 

find that placid, eloquently silent place within. My faith 

has been waylaid, and on this unfamiliar path are 

self-reproach and bitterness, and the abyss, and in 

despair I turn to you and pray,

O Father-Mother, vouchsafe to me a map of my 

divinity, and a light for navigating in the dark, 

and a song of angels I can follow if the 

candlewick should sputter and the flame 

go out.

Divine Beloved, they say my thoughts make my reality, 

advising discipline, as if directing fishes of the seven 

seas to swim the currents differently. But, God, when 

I would fix my mind on Heaven, I find that it resists. 

Ideas steer themselves amiss and wander into hostile 

territory, taken and held captive there. And when the 

world in its contrariness seems alien, perverse, and 

perilous, I turn to you and pray again,

O Father-Mother, it is but my dread betraying 

me; it is my fear that weighs me down. God, 

vanquish these, my ancient enemies, and in 

the Canaan where they staked their frail and 

tentatively faithful claim, create anew in me a 

clean heart and a keen and ordered mind 

subservient to it.

Divine Beloved, they say the universe is love and 

nothing else exists. But, God, sometimes it seems that I 

am knocking on the universe’s door and no one opens 

it; nobody heeds my urgency; and I, afraid and lonely in 

a cosmos wrought of stone and haunted by imaginings 

of isolation, turn to you and pray for your embrace. 

O Father-Mother, save me from this emptiness. 

Out of the pit uplift me now, above the 

skirmishes and struggles that beset me, 

phantoms of my own anxiety that tug at 

me along the porous edges of my 

consciousness. Raise me to the heights, full in the 

sun, with vision unobstructed, such that I might 

see the allness of the Holy One, the nothingness 

of specious images (which are but errant 

thought’s invention), and the eternal, honest 

truth of love.

Divine Beloved, they say, Follow the cynosure of your 

bliss. But, God, sometimes I don’t know where it is or 

even if I’d recognize it if it met me on the wayside, 

scrambling as I tend to do from this amusement to 

that glittering distraction. I am ill acquainted with it, 

having been too long at sea, gone far from home upon 

an odyssey productive only for what it failed to find. I 

feel ashamed then and unworthy of Creation’s gifts. 

Thus it is I turn to you and pray, 

O Father-Mother, for me you have made nothing 

less than paradise; I am designed for glory, 

guided to release in poetry and song whatever 

music I possess, my poverty of spirit fed, my 

brokenness repaired and blessed abundantly, my 

soul’s treasury enriched according to your 

promise and my glad acceptance of it. For all this 

I am watchful but I need not search; it finds me 

where I rest and dream. 

Thus, Beloved, am I grateful now for what the 

harvest yields today, for tender life emerging 

through hard winter’s crust, for buds whose 

promise comes in measured time, unrushed 

among earth’s orchards, gardens, fields; for 

nature’s generosity to be revealed: great, arching 

trees in full leaf and in flower, however faintly 

scented now, appearing yet in shadow or 

in silhouette.

This is the dawning of the new day, and I, 

impatient for the unrestraint of morning over 

the horizon, sunbeams dappling the stream and 

warming field and forest, had much better feast 

my senses on the songbirds’ predawn crescendo, 

on evanescent drops of dew that settle only to 

evaporate in scented puffs of mist from wild 

grasses tender with the season; on pink and 

pale-blue streaks the sky dispatches forward, 

heralds of the coming glory, summoning the 

sentient created beings, each as witness to the 

ordinary signs and wonders that unfailingly 

appear. Then the watchers gather to give praise 

and thanks, seek mercy, receive healing, and 

turn their faces eastward, where the miracle of 

day ascends and radiates the sure and certain 

light of grace.

Amen.