(October 7, 2013 - excerpt from Time Magazine article, "Power Surge," by Bryan Walsh, p. 39)

The same innovations that have resurrected oil and gas production in the U.S. have extended the age of fossil fuels, making it that much more difficult to break free of them.  A number of independent studies have suggested that the world has to stop emitting carbon dioxide by midcentury to avoid dangerous climate change.  We're not likely to get there if we keep inventing ways to extract and then burn the hydrocarbons still in the ground.  "It appears that the good Lord has set up a real test for us," says Bill McKibben, the writer-activist who helps lead the group 350.org.   "We have to decide if we want a habitable planet or not--and if we do, we can't dig this stuff up."

The threat of climate change is very real, and we now know that we're ingenious enough to extract more than enough hydrocarbons to burn ourselves alive.  McKibben is right.  If we want a habitable world, we'll need to choose it.

Afternoon on a Hill
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

 I will be the gladdest thing
   Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
   And not pick one.

I will look at cliffs and clouds
   With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,
   And the grass rise.

And when lights begin to show
   Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
   And then start down! 


(I hate the word "gladdest" and this isn't my favorite of Millay's poems, 
but I have stood on this hill and visited Millay's house, and the poem 
recreates a lovely memory.)

Butterfly Prayer Square  (The butterfly is a symbol of resurrection and renewal.) 

This cloth is adapted from a Drops (Garn Studio) butterfly motif chart for a free sweater pattern.  I wrote the directions based on their butterfly chart.  I have made numerous changes along the way.

Cast on 19 stitches with worsted-weight yarn and size 7 needles.

Rows 1-4:  Knit
Row 5:  (wrong side) k4,  p11,  k4    (Extra knit sts to prevent rolling.)
Row 6 and all even (right side) rows:  Knit
Row 7:  k3,  p13,  k3
Row 9:  k3,  p2,  k1,  p7,  k1,  p2,  k3
Row 11:  k3,  p2,  k2,  p5,  k2,  p2,  k3
Row 13:  k3,  p2,  k4,  p1,  k4,  p2,  k3
Row 15:  k3,  p3,  k3,  p1,  k3,  p3,  k3
Row 17:  k3,  p4,  k2,  p1,  k2,  p4,  k3
Row 19:  k3,  p3,  k3,  p1,  k3,  p3,  k3
Row 21:  k3,  p2,  k4,  p1,  k4,  p2,  k3
Row 23:  k3,  p1,  k4,  p3,  k4,  p1,  k3
Row 25:  k3,  p6,  k1,  p6,  k3
Row 27:  k4,  p11,  k4  (Extra knit sts to prevent rolling.)
Rows 28-31:  Knit
Bind off loosely.  Weave in ends.

(version #4)

Descending Dove Prayer Square
 

3" x 5" size        Size 7 needles, worsted-weight yarn

Cast on (long tail) 19 stitches.

Rows 1 to 4: knit

Row 5:  k4, p11, k4  (WS)  (Extra k sts to prevent rolling.)

Row 6 (and all even rows):  knit (RS)

Row 7:  k3, p6, k1, p6, k3

Row 9:  k3, p5, k3, p5, k3

Row 11:  k3, p3, k7, p3, k3

Row 13:  k3, p1, k11, p1, k3

Row 15:  k3, p1, k3, p1, k3, p1, k3, p1, k3

Row 17:  k3, p1, k1, p3, k3, p3, k1, p1, k3

Row 19:  k3, p5, k3, p5, k3

Row 21:  k3, p4, k5, p4, k3

Row 23:  k3, p3, k3, p1, k3, p3, k3

Row 25:  k3, p3, k1, p5, k1, p3, k3

Row 27:  k4, p11, k4   (Extra k sts to prevent rolling.)

Rows 28-31:  knit

Bind off loosely. 

(version #3)

Single Cross Prayer Square (3-stitch x 9-stitch version)

Cast on 17 stitches using knitting worsted on size 7 needles.

Row 1-4:   Knit all. 
Row 5:   k4, p9, k4      (Wrong side) 
Row 6 and all even rows:   Knit all sts.     (Right Side) 
Rows 7, 9, 11, 13, 15:   k3, p4, k3, p4, k3 
Rows 17, 19, 21:   k3, p1, k9, p1, k3 
Rows 23 and 25:   k3, p4, k3, p4, k3 
Row 27:   k4, p9, k4 
Rows 29-31:   Knit across.  
Bind off loosely.

Some churches have started a new ministry using small knitted prayer cloths to give as reminders of God's presence in our lives.  I've searched the internet for patterns and have adapted them to this ministry.  The first one follows, and I intend to add more.

Single Cross Prayer Square (2-stitch x 6-stitch version)

  Use knitting worsted on size 7 needles.
 Cast on 16 stitches with long tail cast on.

 Rows 1-4: knit
 Row 5: k4, p8, k4  (Extra k sts help prevent rolling.)
 Row 6 and all even rows: knit  (Right side)
 Row 7: k3, p4, k2, p4, k3  (Wrong side)
 Row 9: k3, p4, k2, p4, k3
 Row 11: k3, p4, k2, p4, k3
 Row 13: k3, p4, k2, p4, k3 

 Row 15: k3, p4, k2, p4, k3
 Row 17: k3, p4, k2, p4, k3
 Row 19: k3, p2, k6, p2, k3
 Row 21: k3, p2, k6, p2, k3
 Row 23: k3, p4, k2, p4, k3
 Row 25: k3, p4, k2, p4, k3
 Row 27: k4, p8, k4 (Extra k sts help prevent rolling.) 
 Row 28-31: knit  Bind off loosely.

The Harvest Bow       by Seamus Heaney

As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.

Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks
Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent
Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
I tell and finger it like braille,
Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,

And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall—
You with a harvest bow in your lapel,

Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
Nothing: that original townland
Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser—
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

hunger 


"Give 'em what they want.
They won't even know they want it."

Always
feeding the hunger
of an appetite
for nothing,
not one calorie.

That would take guts
and time
and sacrifice.

So
make it easy.
All flash and no dash.
Fleeting trendy lite.

Make it skim the surface
only.

Make it slide off the mind
or
come nowhere near.

And then abbreviate it
so tht u r rdy 4
the nxt bt of flf.

You won't even know you are starving
you will be so full.


lkm, February 2013

Jane Hirshfield from Remembering Seamus Heaney at poets.org 

 In the poems, it seems to me, were two bedrock qualities, along with the virtuosity of Heaney’s singing and seeing—that signature joy in existence, and then the tempering knowledge of human choice, character, story, consequence. Consequence, above all perhaps—his words were never arabesques drawn on air for the sake of their own shapes. Beauty served him as a sextant for navigation, as a larger righting of justice and deepening of connection. Deepening mattered: his poems went as often into the earth as above it, and it’s interesting to notice how many of them take on some vertical axis, whether digging or climbing.
Two lines from his 2010 book, Human Chain, came to mind and stayed, once I’d taken in the shock of his too-soon passing—

I had my existence. I was there.
Me in place and the place in me.

An Interruption by Robert S. Foote

A boy had stopped his car
To save a turtle in the road;
I was not far
Behind, and slowed,
And stopped to watch as he began
To shoo it off into the undergrowth—

This wild reminder of an ancient past,
Lumbering to some Late Triassic bog,
Till it was just a rustle in the grass,
Till it was gone.

I hope I told him with a look
As I passed by,
How I was glad he'd stopped me there,
And what I felt for both
Of them, something I took
To be a kind of love,
And of a troubled thought
I had, for man,
Of how we ought
To let life go on where
And when it can.

At any rate, when light breaks over me

The way it did on the road beyond Coleraine

Where wind got saltier, the sky more hurried

And silver lamé shivered on the Bann

Out in mid-channel between the painted poles,

That day I’ll be in step with what escaped me.

Seamus Heaney (1939 - August 30, 2013)

Mother Night

by James Weldon Johnson

 

 

Eternities before the first-born day, 

Or ere the first sun fledged his wings of flame, 

Calm Night, the everlasting and the same, 

A brooding mother over chaos lay. 

And whirling suns shall blaze and then decay, 

Shall run their fiery courses and then claim 

The haven of the darkness whence they came; 

Back to Nirvanic peace shall grope their way. 

So when my feeble sun of life burns out, 

And sounded is the hour for my long sleep, 

I shall, full weary of the feverish light, 

Welcome the darkness without fear or doubt, 

And heavy-lidded, I shall softly creep 

Into the quiet bosom of the Night.

JOHN HOLLANDER

October 28, 1929 - August 17, 2013

________________________________

Some Playthings

A trembling brown bird

standing in the high grass turns

out to be a blown

oakleaf after all.

Was the leaf playing bird, or

was it "just" the wind

playing with the leaf?

Was my very noticing

itself at play with

an irregular

frail patch of brown in the cold

April afternoon?

These questions that hang

motionless in the now-stilled

air: what of their

frailty, in the light

of even the most fragile

of problematic

substances like all

these momentary playthings

of recognition?

Questions that are asked

of questions: no less weighty

and lingeringly

dark than the riddles

posed by any apparent

bird or leaf or breath

of wind, instruments

probing what we feel we know

for some kind of truth.

Excerpt from A DRAFT OF LIGHT.

"Is there anything I can do to make myself enlightened?"

"As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning."

"Then of what use are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?"

"To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise."

-Anthony deMello, from One Minute Wisdom

The Present
I wanted to give you something —
no stone, clay, bracelet,
no edible leaf could pass through.
Even a molecule's fragrance by then too large.
Giving had been taken, as you soon would be.
Still, I offered the puffs of air shaped to meaning.
They remained air.
I offered memory on memory,
but what is memory that dies with the fallible inks?
I offered apology, sorrow, longing. I offered anger.
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
I stood on one side of the present, you stood on the other.

by Jane Hirshfield

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squire’s own daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.

 by Robert Graves

The Balloon of the Mind  by W. B. Yeats

 

Hands, do what you're bid:
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.

"Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it."  (Neil Postman)

God's World

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!
Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart. Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year.
My soul is all but out of me, let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

(I itch to change the thee's, thou's, and thy's
to you and yours, and the old verb forms,
but a lovely fall poem nevertheless.)

Democracy is the current western answer to the problem of how to avoid chaos without lapsing into tyranny, and vice versa. But we cannot assume ... that just because people are able to vote every once in a while that means that we have the balance right.  (Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, England, from a lecture on Law and Faith, to the London School of Economics, February, 2008)

“...the poet’s work is to make a private vision public—through the stubborn, 

inadequate, infinitely flexible medium of language...”

Jeffrey Skinner, from The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets

(American Life in Poetry: Column 382  by Ted Kooser)

The Promise by Jane Hirshfield

Stay, I said

to the cut flowers.

They bowed

their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider,

who fled.

Stay, leaf.

It reddened,

embarrassed for me and itself.

Stay, I said to my body.

It sat as a dog does,

obedient for a moment,

soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth

of riverine valley meadows,

of fossiled escarpments,

of limestone and sandstone.

It looked back

with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.

Each answered,

Always.

Gather
by Rose McLarney

Some springs, apples bloom too soon.
The trees have grown here for a hundred years, and are still quick
to trust that the frost has finished. Some springs,
pink petals turn black. Those summers, the orchards are empty
and quiet. No reason for the bees to come.

Other summers, red apples beat hearty in the trees, golden apples
glow in sheer skin. Their weight breaks branches,
the ground rolls with apples, and you fall in fruit.

You could say, I have been foolish. You could say, I have been fooled.
You could say, Some years, there are apples.

Prophecy               by Dana Gioia 

Sometimes a child will stare out of a window
for a moment or an hour—deciphering
the future from a dusky summer sky.

Does he imagine that some wisp of cloud
reveals the signature of things to come?
Or that the world’s a book we learn to translate?

And sometimes a girl stands naked by a mirror
imagining beauty in a stranger's eyes
finding a place where fear leads to desire.

For what is prophecy but the first inkling
of what we ourselves must call into being?
The call need not be large. No voice in thunder.

It's not so much what's spoken as what's heard—
and recognized, of course. The gift is listening
and hearing what is only meant for you.

Life has its mysteries, annunciations,
and some must wear a crown of thorns. I found
my Via Dolorosa in your love.

And sometimes we proceed by prophecy,
or not at all—even if only to know
what destiny requires us to renounce.

O Lord of indirection and ellipses,
ignore our prayers. Deliver us from distraction.
Slow our heartbeat to a cricket's call.

In the green torpor of the afternoon,
bless us with ennui and quietude.
And grant us only what we fear, so that

Underneath the murmur of the wasp
we hear the dry grass bending in the wind
and the spider's silken whisper from its web.

From Leavings, Sabbaths, 2008, VII., pp. 114-5 by Wendell Berry

Having written some pages in favor of Jesus,
I receive a solemn communication crediting me
with the possession of a "theology" by which
I acquire the strange dignity of being wrong
forever or forever right. Have I gauged exactly
enough the weights of sins: Have I found
too much of the Hereafter in the Here? Or
the other way around? Have I found too much
pleasure, too much beauty and goodness, in this
our unreturning world? O Lord, please forgive
any smidgen of such distinctions I may
have still in my mind. I meant to leave them
all behind a long time ago. If I'm a theologian
I am one to the extent I have learned to duck
when the small, haughty doctrines fly overhead,
dropping their loads of whitewash at random
on the faces of those who look toward Heaven.
Look down, look down, and save your soul
by honester dirt, that receives with a lordly
indifference this off-fall of the air. Christmas
night and Easter morning are this soil's only laws.
The depth and volume of the waters of baptism,
the true taxonomy of sins, the field marks
of those most surely saved, God's own only true
interpretation of the Scripture: these would be
causes of eternal amusement, could we forget
how we have hated one another, how vilified
and hurt and killed one another, bloodying
the world, by means of such questions, wrongly
asked, never to be rightly answered, but asked and
wrongly answered, hour after hour, day after day,
year after year--such is my belief--in Hell.