Tag Archives: purpose

Thoughts make themselves known

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If I hadn’t tried to write it in a poem, the thought, a little glimmer, would have expressed itself in far different ways.  Did, in fact; I wrote a page in my journal about cleaning the house while thoughts hovered just at the edge of my accepting them – borderline negative, but held at bay by some impervious membrane.  I came to the place of seeing how much the same we all are, for all our sense of singularity and frequent isolation.  We all need to bring forth that within us which makes us who we are.  In poetry, it came out like this:
There is no existential fact of night
the word speaks of the endless depth of space
the field wherein the play of stars is staged
Each star gives tribute to the light
Each star must serve the existential light
the pulse within, essential churning force
which rises out of need and tumbles forth
We see their sharp travail across the night
We see their offering across the night
and know we, too, must ever do the same
we too must birth our inner urgent flame
Each life gives tribute to the light.


©Wendy Mulhern
March 12, 2011


Cricket in a Grass Cage

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I turned on the light and went into the cold room, closing the door behind me.  I opened the sliding closet door and, on my knees, began to take the shoes off the plastic box.  Why, I asked myself, do you keep your writings in a box that is so hard to get to, and whose lid is so hard to open – as I wrestled with the tightly snapped-on plastic.  
I was looking for a poem I wrote in high school.  I remembered most of it, and remembered writing it, how the phrase “cricket in a grass cage,” had just come to mind, and how the words had effortlessly unfolded from there, revealing their story.  I was thinking about how, though the sentiment wasn’t one I had striven to express, it seemed true enough at the time.  And how, though I hadn’t acknowledged it then, the poem was probably influenced by Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill,” a poem my mother loved and had shared with me.
The copy that I found was one I had prepared to submit for publication, and I had changed some words from the ones I remembered, and had left out a stanza to make it more taut (so I thought).  But the missing stanza was one that, for me, drove the rhythm and feeling of the poem, and left its strong mark on my memory, so I put it back.  
The poem has the sensibilities of a high school student, but I still like it.
Cricket in a Grass Cage
Before myself, we used to fly
And walk life’s mountain paths
Our step was sure and we were strong
And we could see forever
There was no limit
All we knew was hinder-free
High bouncing or whatever
In a never-time or instant
Life was sweet – we learned to sing its song
In timeless – free and easy – laughter
And in tender caring, tears
With joy and softly knowing, never fears
But slowly or with crashing 
Came myself, and I am here
And time was thrust upon a soul
And ticking limits hold my flight
They measure out the tune
All is chained except the spirit
And I am here
With no free movement very far
With no free will to go or stay
So little to express my being
With only me to say I am.
And so I sing my song
Like a cricket in a grass cage
With all the glory of the meadow
Confined in this precise bamboo.


©Wendy Mulhern
Spring, 1974


Politics and Poetry

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Yesterday had strange lights in it.  I sat with a group of homeless women and wrote about peace, and heard poignant tales of trauma and redemption.  I read about Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain.  I finished a poem about a vision I saw, nearing sleep.  Today I read some poetry online (looking into taking a class, trying to find the right teacher) and found much that was foreign to me.  And I read about a group of young people from Serbia who are teaching people how to successfully bring down dictators.  http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/16/revolution_u?page=0,1
Which engendered the following:
Political Conversion:
     Ode to CANVAS
What wins? Can empires truly crumble?
Can decades of oppression be brought down?
Perhaps they can, with methods wise and humble
the youth from Serbia have worked to spread around.
They look around and find the power areas – 
the forces to win over to their side,
In Egypt’s case, police and military,
their land as one, a people unified.
They build for years, with quiet, small successes
They grow their movement almost secretly
till when they stand, their voice can’t be suppressed:
The people claim their courage and are free.
Such wonder! That these dedicated youth
Are proving to us all the power of truth.


©Wendy Mulhern
February 22, 2011
Poetical Confusion
Some call it poetry when words are snatched
from multi-tasked attention – meaning hatched
perhaps as afterthought, upon observing
juxtapositions of their random pennings.
It may be so for them, but as for me
I crave a higher sensibility
I want to be transported by a poem
made to see and feel in ways I haven’t 
beyond the market’s dull, bombarding drone
the drift of mindless clutter on the planet
I don’t believe we can’t discern what’s true
that anything that flits through thought will do.
The culture speeds at furious velocity
I still hold out for luminosity.


©Wendy Mulhern
February 22, 2011


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