Category Archives: Earth Whispering: Poems

It’s my discipline to write a poem a day, and I post a poem here almost every day. To find a given poem or poems on a given topic, use the search bar at the right. To receive my poems by email, please subscribe, at right.

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Songs and Longing

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Vineyard Haven Kite Song turned out to have three chapters.  I know it’s odd to refer to songs in terms of chapters, but I felt impelled to call them so at the time.  Each one came to me with melody and words together, and each one illustrated something of my passage through that difficult, though at times beautiful, summer.  
When composing it (if that can be the word for letting it come into my mind) I didn’t really notice the longing in it.  That was something my brother later pointed out.
Vineyard Haven Kite Song, Chapter Two
Afternoon off and I’m drifting on down
Wandering with the wind into the town
Stepping along, looking around
A little bit lost and a little bit free
Knowing there’s something here waiting to find me
I’m seeking, seeking something worth keeping
Not even speaking but silently hoping
Hoping, hoping too hard for coping
Choking on chances but with my eyes open
Open to see something strong and flamboyant
Something that’s vibrant, gentle and sweet.
Leaving, sighing – nothing worth buying
Still keep on wandering, trying to find it –
Something or someone to kindle my soul
That I might fly again
That we may know
That we together have somewhere to go, too
Someone and me
To set ourselves free
That we might reach the sky over the sea.


©Wendy Mulhern
August, 1978

Truth Conditions

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I remember the phrase truth conditions from my study of linguistics at Penn, where we talked about how an utterance was true if all its truth conditions were met, both the asserted and the presupposed.  The truth conditions of “The king of France is bald” are  a) there is a king of France; and b) he is bald.  We talked about how negating the sentence doesn’t touch the presupposed truth condition: “The king of France is not bald” still implies that there is a king of France.
I found myself thinking of truth conditions in another context with regard to writing.  In order for a line to go into a poem, it must be true, and it must be what I want to say.  Those are its truth conditions.  Rhymes will eagerly suggest themselves even when they have nothing to do with truth.  It is my job to reject them, even in the most mundane of verses.  Last night I could truthfully write a line about leaving the dishwasher to its burbles.  But I couldn’t, even in a verse far from worthy of posting, write that I would go to bed and dream of gerbils.  Sorry.  Wasn’t going to happen. Didn’t meet truth conditions.
On the other hand, sometimes a song will come to me almost whole, mostly, as it seems to me, following the leadings of rhyme and meter, and afterwards suggest something to me that, though I hadn’t known I was thinking about it, seems to me in some sense true.  The summer after I took a year off of college, I returned to a job that was idyllic in many respects.  But some crucial supports were missing, so there were unexpected tensions.  One day I hitchhiked most of the way to work and walked the remaining several blocks, through the small town of Vineyard Haven.  I saw a kite in a store window, and by the time I got to work a song had formed in my mind, which I hastily wrote down.  The tune was cheerful; the song entertained me.  It was only later that I considered what truth conditions may have been met:
Vineyard Haven Kite Song, Chapter One
Icarus with burning wings
Spoke to the flying clouds as he fell:
How can you
Not doing
Anything
Catch the resplendent sun so well?
The water that caught him was sparkling blue
Like the sun and the sky that he thought he knew
But the sea was still and the sun was silent
Nothing to tell of a fall so violent
Save a few feathers and, up above,
A father that mourned for the son he loved.
Daedalus, Daedalus, tell us please
What is the lesson you’d teach from this?
Is there a hope for arms such as these
To find the sky and the sun’s great bliss?


©Wendy Mulhern
August, 1978

Learning to run

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It had long been a wish of mine to be able to run.  Wishes are different from aspirations, sometimes even antithetical to them.  I wished I could run fast as one of the wishes I might ask if a fairy granted me some (not among the first three, but if I took my sister’s suggestion that my first wish would be all the wishes I wanted for the rest of my life, then I’d wish for fast running among one of those wishes.)  As it was I was agonizingly slow as a child, last picked for sports teams.  I would always get a stitch when I tried to run, a pain that proved too hard for me to power through to any kind of competence.
Later analysis might point out (as my husband did) that my attempt to run was inefficient – that there was far too much verticality going on (what he said was my center of gravity was too high).  What I realized was that I was really trying to fly, trying to leap up with every step.  Which, as it turned out, worked against forward motion.
As an adult I’ve tried a few times to learn to run – a few days of searing, painful treks up to the school on the corner, once around the track and back; later inspiration from a book called Born to Run, which had us running barefoot around the track at Kellogg Middle School, until they closed it down to replace the track with a rougher surface, unfriendly to bare feet.  My most recent endeavor involves running on the treadmill at the Y.  Normally I have eschewed working out at a gym when actual outdoor exercise could do the same thing; my bicycle riding has always been as much for the air and the scenery as for the workout.  But in the winter, when cold air can be a challenge if I’m struggling anyway, I’m finding the tutelage of the treadmill salutary.  And it became the subject for my sonnet today:
Back from running treadmill at the Y
I’m salty, mellow, tired but elated
Five miles today, or almost, and I find
Enthusiasm high, not dissipated.
At night, in resolutions in my bed
I think of marathons, triathlons 
Imagine running miles along the road
A settled gait that takes me on and on
Come spring, when air outside is balmy, sweet
I hope to take off confidently striding
Just me, the road, the sneakers on my feet
Past sprouting blooms, suburban landscapes gliding
For now I’m flush with incremental gains
As treadmill numbers, climbing slow, make plain.
Having finished that, I had a little more to say on the subject, so I decided to try another verse, one whose rhythm might lend itself more to running:
The wave of my gait rolls up and across
Right to left, left to right, as I stride
One movement, connected, steady and strong
Makes me feel I could do this awhile
The treadmill, my training wheels, teaching me rhythm
Makes my steps even and steady
While the green blinking numbers encourage my continuing
Show what I’ve managed already
The music that privately plays in my ears
Makes me smile and augments my endurance
Gives enough difference that each step’s not tedious
Gives me the hint of a dance
I could get used to this – 
That is my hope
That I’ll learn to want more and more
So I’ll run in great freedom and reap from it joy
And it won’t even feel like a chore.


©Wendy Mulhern
Feb 6, 2011
What makes something poetry instead of mere verse?  I feel it has to transcend mundane views, invoke a deeper world.  These don’t.  But it was knowing there would be some like these that made me include “verse” in the subtitle of my blog.  

Weather Report

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(Just to share something)
February cold, implacable
Seeps through around the windows and the doors
Sun’s gleam like steel, a dull and frigid glow
Resounds in hollow tremors through my bones
But sunrise, dawning pink, proffered a peace
And later sunshine, almost generous
Sent temperature to forty-five degrees
Gave reassurance to intrepid bulbs
Yes, light returns, it spreads over the hollows
Where puddles lay before, and sometimes ice
Too thin for spring, but soon that too will follow
The buds will bulge, new life’s quick heat will rise
For now, soft clouds will swaddle up the night
To ease our gentle turning towards the light.
©Wendy Mulhern
February 2, 2011

Daily Discipline

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A lot of my daily sonnets are pretty bad.  But they hone my craft at verse; they hone my ear.  This evening I said to my husband: “I turned your oatmeal off, I think it’s done,” and noticed the iambic pentameter.  Or, to take it further (as I was compelled):
“I turned your oatmeal off, I think it’s done,”
I said, and noticed five feet of iambic
I went to give a prodding to my son
Who lay, near comatose, under a blanket
The evening ticks towards its predicted end
The deep and wondrous thoughts I hoped to capture
Keep flitting off beyond my reach again
Leaving me rhymeless, stuck, devoid of rapture
At last the sticky veil of sleep is drawn
I’ll seek more brightness when the night is gone.
(Not a full sonnet, that, but I had already written a full one – even worse – so I was OK with leaving it partial.)
There are other benefits to the practice.  The search for what to write, pen poised on blank journal page, dated on top and thus requiring that something be written, sends me scanning for feelings, thoughts, whatever stands out.  So the sonnets become a chronicle of my days and thoughts, sometimes mundane, sometimes something more.  I find I need to write about what’s up now, though there is some temporal flexibility. Now can be this moment as I type, or it can be anything in my memory where the thought or feeling was strong enough to leave a spike, such that I can go back and relive it.  
I prefer reliving the high points, recapturing the lofty thoughts.  But yesterday there was a low point, actually left over from Sunday, and I found that I had to address it, to clear the landscape, in order for other things to be able to emerge.  It wasn’t a deep low; I had pretty much pushed it aside, but the fact that I needed to put it in a sonnet proved that I needed to address it in my thought, put it to bed, to re-establish my accustomed tranquility.
I left the potluck quickly and alone
I didn’t want to stay and try to chat
I felt let down by church and on my own
No one to cherish me or what I said
I was a bit embarrassed by my speech
I didn’t do as well as I have done
Didn’t practice, read it, stumbled, lurched
Didn’t tap the knowing of the One.
Not awful, but I didn’t make connection
Failed to convey the spirit I had felt
Spent too much time on other’s loose suggestions
Too little on the light the Spirit dealt
Or maybe it just wasn’t the right thing
Square peg, round hole, a message without zing.

©Wendy Mulhern

Two sonnets for the goddess

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I.
The goddess moved in me, I welcomed her
Let her cool fire lick outward toward my skin
Let my soft heat respond, suffuse the air
As joy rose swiftly upward from within
Why not? Though stern gatekeepers would prevent us
From spreading love so free, unearned, untallied
Would say such feeling, absent set conditions
Was better to be cast aside than valued
For there’s no harm if all is in her service
If every touch, however meant, will bless
Affirm divinity aroused within us
Light up our day with heightened consciousness
Each time the goddess offers to possess me
I’ll respond with a resounding yes.
II.
Much later, in the courtroom of my mind
Considering the thoughts that I had voiced
I noticed, pleased and curious to find
No stance of opposition to my choice.
In younger days I might have thought it wrong
To know the goddess, let her play a part
Along with God, in crafting my life’s song
Elucidate the function of my heart
But now my sense of what is true is clear
God can be All, and I still have the goddess
Just as I still have sunshine, mountains, stars
All good a part of Truth, resplendent Oneness
My goddess flight is granted quiet landing
So, step by step, unfolds my understanding.


©Wendy Mulhern
January 30, 2011

Dreamscapes

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I offer today an old poem – from May, 1987.  I still find it amazing that, when I start to think about dreams I’ve had, memory upon memory of dream sites come to me.  In my dreams they are familiar places, yet I don’t know how many times I’ve visited them.  Only once, but with embedded memories of many times? Or repeatedly, given how familiar they feel?  I’m quite sure at least some of them don’t exist anywhere but in my dreams. They parade before me, one after another, dreamscapes perhaps based on real-life places, but changed enough that I can’t match them up.  That half unreal feeling of dream memories was what I was trying to capture in this poem:
Back Into Dream
Seeing my bare foot stepping ahead on the dock
In afternoon sun
I remember dreaming of wind chimes
The colors of the dream are lit
With different light from those of day
The dark behind the gold
The light within, not from afar.
I find in dreams
A different balance
Lying on my side while walking
Curling smoke-like under doors.
I take grand jumps
Sometimes truly fly.
New power down the insides of my arms,
New currents through my fingers
Long after I wake
The shadow tugs
Drags the corners of my vision out of square
Puts wrinkles in my day
I travel back
In sliding leaps
Inward and sidelong
Through time
Rolling under like surf
Along the large cliffs by the sea
Down the distant inlet once again
Soaring home to the memory 
Of the dream.

©Wendy Mulhern

Stories

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My daughter mentioned today that the first line of a story contains the story.  Should, anyway.  A fascinating concept; I looked through several books I like to see if this were so.  The first book I looked at was one I just read, by Guy Gavriel Kay, called Ysabel.  The first sentence is: “Ned was not impressed.”  I was impressed, though, by how much is in this sentence – the presupposition that something was impressive, or trying to be, but that it wasn’t having the expected effect on the character.  It suggests that the character might, for some reason, not be as easily impressed as some people.  These things turn out to be true, and important to the character and the story; the whys and hows of them unfold gradually, but the kernel is there.
Here are a few others: “My suffering left me sad and gloomy.” (Life of Pi, by Yann Martel)
“Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.” (The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver)
“Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn’t know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a bloodless combat over how my brother and myself would be raised.” (October Sky, by Homer Hickam)
“I hadn’t meant to shoot the cat.” (Telempath, by Spider Robinson)
“Amid the ten thousand noises and the jade-and-gold and the whirling dust of Xinan, he had often stayed awake all night among friends, drinking spiced wine in the North District with the courtesans.” (Under Heaven, by Guy Gavriel Kay)
Most intriguing.  I have so much to learn.
Yesterday I wrote about how a poem led me back to writing stories, and I mentioned that it first engendered a companion.  I got to thinking about what a male muse might be like, and came up with the following:
Muse II
The sphere he holds is black, opaque, and moon-sized
But it is you he looks at, with his soft eyes
A question kindles, stirs you to your core
But is it just a tease, or is there more?
He holds your gaze with enigmatic light
That grounds you, poised and still, to where you are
The sphere exudes a haunting smell of midnight
Fresh and cool, with taste of piquant stars
If he would beckon, Oh! You know you’d follow
And so you reach to touch the silent sphere
It draws you in, you swirl into its hollow
Cold vapor sudden in your throat and ears
What touch sustains you – where are those kind eyes?
That promise of a hand to lift and guide
How fast, how far, will you keep falling inward
And what can stabilize you from inside?
Ah, there – the touch, the hand that steadies
There the light that caught you, drew you in
You’ll walk in him whenever you are ready
Look from his eyes and quietly begin.




©Wendy Mulhern
I sensed that the two poems together might contain an idea for a novel (I needed to write one, as I was participating in NaNoWriMo, at my daughter’s behest.}  She was the one who suggested that the two could be muses for each other, and that became the basis for my plot.  So much to learn, but a huge part of my learning that month was how alive it made me feel to write the story.  Especially as the characters began to fall in love; I experienced the zing of it as if it were my own.  I felt it not only while writing but whenever I wanted to, and I wanted to more often than I told anyone.  Though it was fiction, it was very real for me.
So I’ll keep working at how to do it.  I’ll become a master of my first lines, and my plot lines, and my character development.  Well, first I’ll be an apprentice; I’m not proud.

Muse

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I had talked myself out of writing stories, though it had been an elemental urge, one of childhood’s strong attractions.  I told myself I didn’t have any, didn’t have a voice. In truth I just didn’t know how to take on the monumental task of crafting fiction.  It was a poem that led me back.
The poem started with two lines that floated into my thought on a bicycle ride.  I worked on it later,  at home, at Carkeek Park, at home again, teasing out the images until a story emerged.  That poem later inspired a companion, and those two poems became the basis for my first attempt at writing a novel.  Though I have much to do to hone that craft, the joy it brings me keeps me at it.  So in a real way, this poem I wrote in the spring of 2009 has been my muse:
Muse
She slips between the curtains of the day
To walk the secret landscape wide away
Vistas lift along the rise of hills
Colors shifting on the lake
She slips between the curtains of your mind
Down your enshrouded corridor to find
You waiting by your quiet bulb
Her clasp is cool, her hands are slim
She leads you like a ripple in the wind
Light darts quickly, runs in sparkling lines
While water underneath it moves more slowly
Revealing glinting glimpses of the depth.
You follow, and you don’t know where you’re going
Your solar plexus full of light and air
The view too huge to paint, beyond all knowing
The touch too true to speak, too soft to bear
You feel a stab of desperate dependence
Aware her frame is far too light to lean on
Beyond your overwhelm, you seek transcendence
And something solid to believe on.
Don’t be afraid – she isn’t going to leave you
She’ll shine through you like light through water
You won’t need to live, create without her
She came to you because you thought her.

©Wendy Mulhern

What is Poetry?

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My sister and I were talking about communication, and how difficult words sometimes are.  They have their different meanings and connotations to different people, they have their ruts – phrases they stubbornly stick to, huge concepts and their antitheses that suddenly slide into people’s thought with a word or phrase that you use, till at some point you realize that, with the set of words you share, there’s no way of making yourself understood.  And my sister said, “perhaps poetry is the only place where words can be unchained.”  Which I thought was interesting – probably true even though in poetry the words are more constrained (and yes, I noticed the rhyme in my thought.)
Janice asked me yesterday, “What is poetry?” because I had told her about my new blog and she’s taking a poetry course.  I said it’s a good question.
I think one aspect of poetry is an agreement that the writer and the reader  make to unchain the words from their usual associations, to be open to new ones.  Sometimes the constraints of form – rhyme and meter, size and shape – divert the thought from more prosaic meanings so that the urgent questions – How does this make sense? Do I agree with it? – can be put aside.  New questions can be considered: How does this touch me? How does it sing?  
Both poetry and prose can share the admonition:  say exactly what you mean – don’t add words to be impressive, flowery, rhythmic or rhyming.  Don’t leave things out because you don’t know an easy way to say them.  The meaning is the gravity. The words are the water.  They fall down over the constraints of form in the most vertical route, at each moment, toward the sea.  The poetry or prose is the river that results.
I tried to write a poem this week about a walk I had with my friend Becca.  But following my own criteria, I had to admit that it didn’t pass.  So instead of sharing it, I will share a very bad sonnet about the process, from my “sonnet a day” collection:
Failing at Poetry
I tried too hard to write a poem today
Saturday, too, and it would not emerge
My urgency to post got in the way
Of needed clear-eyed dumping of the verse
Some images I liked – they sounded true
Some rhythms and some rhymes lined up quite nicely
But others lurched, and certain lines were trite
And I didn’t get the mood precisely
So though I wrote a clearly stated blurb
On what makes poetry and prose be good
To follow with that poem would be absurd
Would mock the truth of everything I said
I need to find the truth within a poem
Or I won’t find the words to bring it home.


©Wendy Mulhern
January 25, 2011