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Category Archives: everyday poems

Poetry Archives: Mary Karr

11 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by marie in dear apples, everyday poems, Uncategorized, writing

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I read somewhere
that if   pedestrians didn’t break traffic laws to cross
Times Square whenever and by whatever means possible,
      
the whole city
would stop, it would stop.
Cars would back up to Rhode Island,
an epic gridlock not even a cat
could thread through. It’s not law but the sprawl
of our separate wills that keeps us all flowing. Today I loved
the unprecedented gall
of the piano movers, shoving a roped-up baby grand
up Ninth Avenue before a thunderstorm.
They were a grim and hefty pair, cynical
as any day laborers. They knew what was coming,
the instrument white lacquered, the sky bulging black
as a bad water balloon and in one pinprick instant
it burst. A downpour like a fire hose.
For a few heartbeats, the whole city stalled,
paused, a heart thump, then it all went staccato.
And it was my pleasure to witness a not
insignificant miracle: in one instant every black
umbrella in Hell’s Kitchen opened on cue, everyone
still moving. It was a scene from an unwritten opera,
the sails of some vast armada.
And four old ladies interrupted their own slow progress
to accompany the piano movers.
each holding what might have once been
lace parasols over the grunting men. I passed next
the crowd of pastel ballerinas huddled
under the corner awning,
in line for an open call — stork-limbed, ankles
zigzagged with ribbon, a few passing a lit cigarette
around. The city feeds on beauty, starves
for it, breeds it. Coming home after midnight,
to my deserted block with its famously high
subway-rat count, I heard a tenor exhale pure
longing down the brick canyons, the steaming moon
opened its mouth to drink from on high …
-“A Perfect Mess”

Poetry Archives: Naomi Shihab Nye

26 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by marie in everyday poems, expat life, Gaza, Palestine, refugees, Syria, travel

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“Since no one else is mentioning you enough.

The Arab who extends his hand.
The Arab who will not let you pass
his tiny shop without a welcoming word.
The refugee inviting us in for a Coke.
Clean glasses on a table in a ramshackle hut.
Those who don’t drink Coke would drink it now.
We drink from the silver flask of hospitality.
We drink and you bow your head.

Please forgive everyone who has not honored your name.

You who would not kill a mouse, a bird.
Who feels sad sometimes even cracking an egg.
Who places two stones on top of one another
for a monument. Who packed the pieces,
carried them to a new corner. For whom the words
rubble and blast are constants. Who never wanted
those words. To be able to say,
this is a day and I live in it safely,
with those I love, was all. Who has been hurt
but never hurt in return. Fathers and grandmothers,
uncles, the little lost cousin who wanted only
to see a Ferris wheel in his lifetime, ride it
high into the air. And all the gaping days
they bought no tickets
for spinning them around.”

-“The Sweet Arab, The Generous Arab”

Cinco de Mayo!

06 Friday May 2016

Posted by marie in cinco de mayo, everyday poems

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A very happy belated Cinco de Mayo to all my American friends!  Hope everyone had their fill of margaritas and tacos 🙂

 

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Ode to Twenty-Somethings

21 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by marie in dear apples, everyday poems, journal, quarter life crisis, writing

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'Sure I'd like to have everything but where would I put it?'

Dear Apples,

I was going to write a post about children’s books, because I love them and because I love to write children’s stories, but then I read a message that you sent me last night and it really got me thinking. And then I wrote a little poem for our lovely generation:

“When you’re 30 you will thrive”
I told myself at 25.
But now that I’ve reached 29
I’m doubtful of that hopeful line.

“Lean in!” says Sandburg, “Show your clout!”
I whisper back…Can I lean out?
“It’s woman’s day! We won the fight!”
Am I ungrateful for my rights?

They tell me I can Have It All
But All’s too tall for one so small
“Do what you love! Forge your own way!”
…My way forgets there’s bills to pay.

“Single life is your best look!
But check out these weddings on Facebook!
Juggle all the balls at once!”
(And you’ll look like a fumbling dunce)

“If you’re outside the public eye
You may as well not even try
All that matters is your brand
Even the Pope has instagram!”

The questions swirl inside my head
Mind if I just go to bed?
I’ll do my best to check your boxes
If you’ll please help me with my taxes.

For Love of Words

19 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by marie in dear apples, everyday poems, fiction, for love of words, journal, writing

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Below are small excerpts and clippings that I’ve extracted from things I’ve read or re-read recently.

“I could absolutely taste the chocolate, but in drifts and traces, in an unfurling, or an opening, it seemed that my mouth was also filling with the taste of smallness, the sensation of shrinking, of upset, tasting a distance I somehow knew was connected to my mother, tasting a crowded sense of her thinking, a spiral, like I could almost even taste the headache that meant she had to take as many aspirins as were necessary, a white dotted line like an ellipsis to her comment: I’m just going to lie down” -Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“Every morning he ties his shoes, packs newspaper inside his coat as insulation against the cold, and begins interrogating the world” -Anthony Doerr, All The Light We Cannot See

“Because it’s true: more than the highlights, the bright events, it was the small and the daily where she’d found life. The hundreds of times she’d dug in the soil of her garden, each time the satisfying chew of spade through soil, so often this action, the pressure and release and rich dirt smell…” -Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the crimes, follies and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother’s wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women.” -Lemony Snicket

“That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children’s tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing…That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped.” -J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“She was a masterpiece of composure; nothing ever ruffled her or made her upset, and though she was not beautiful, her calmness had the magnetic pull of beauty — a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room.” -Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Poetry Archives: Vampire Weekend

22 Friday May 2015

Posted by marie in everyday poems

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“Everlasting Arms”

I took your counsel and came to ruin
Leave me to myself, leave me to myself
I took your counsel and came to ruin
Leave me to myself, leave me to myself

Oh I was made to live without you
But I’m never gonna understand, never understand
Oh I was born to live without you
But I’m never gonna understand, never understand

Hold me in your everlasting arms
Looked up, full of fear, trapped beneath a chandelier that’s going down

I thought it over and drew the curtain
Leave me to myself, leave me to myself
I hummed the “Dies Irae” as you played the Hallelujah
Leave me to myself, don’t leave me in myself

If you’ve been made serve the master
You’d be frightened by the open hand, frightened by the hand
Could I’ve made serve the master?
Well, I’m never gonna understand, never understand

Hold me in your everlasting arms
Looked up, full of fear, trapped beneath a chandelier that’s going down
Hold me in your everlasting arms
Looked up, full of fear, trapped beneath a chandelier that’s going down

Hold me in your everlasting arms

Settling In

11 Monday May 2015

Posted by marie in dear apples, everyday poems, journal, Lebanon, travel

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IMG_6884 Dear Apples,

Last week, I found myself sitting in front of my laptop and –quite miserably–observing the various achievements of creative individuals, whose beautiful websites appeared in droves at the merciless commands of my own browsing.  Crowded tabs of virtual success stories popped up one after the next, while I found my shoulders slinking further down as I considered the companies I have not started, the books I have not written and the Great Unknowns of my current state of affairs. I was recently talking with a friend about career paths, and we were both commiserating about how so many others have quite specific skill specializations, or a drive to produce that seems greater than the uncertainty of the outcomes.  I, on the contrary, feel myself to be carried along by the flow of life; I perceive myself to be a recipient of circumstance rather than a molder and shaper.  And yet, I am not sure whether or not this is an accurate explanation of where I am and how I arrived at this point.  It’s quite clear that I also chase after my desires, which is why I now find myself landed in an improbable, yet somehow delightfully fitting, life path.

Having returned once again to Lebanon after a sojourn around the UK, now newly married, and with plans to settle in for a good while, I find I need to re-center myself.  The honeymoon was lovely and surreal, but even as we were trekking through breath-taking expanses of landscape or hiking up buttery gorse scented climbs, I think we both realized that we prefer building the rhythm of daily life. The sweet mundane of home, with the challenges and joys that make it our own.

For me, though, this is all still new. I am learning the particular symbiotic between open trust and active pursuit of what I want in life.  It’s a relationship that requires a bit of discernment.  Control is mostly partial.  We have autonomy over our response to our circumstances, and over the actions we take to influence certain outcomes, but there is also the wide and wild realm of possibility and chance that is largely outside of our jurisdiction.  This is the space that I have come to respect and revere.  What has become most essential to me is an abandonment to the mystery of that which we cannot fully predict or foresee.

Here I am walking down the vibrant, aching-with-passion Hamra street in the heart of Beirut.  Here I am waking up each morning to a pack of garrulous garden roosters, and opening the window to the mountain breezes.  Moving to the balcony to enjoy an early daily coffee with my C. Here I am calling Lebanon home with a sureness that still surprises me.  Here I am feeling homesick and unravelled and often rather lost.  But I try to welcome that discomfort, because the alternative would be to clench my fists so tightly around certainty, that my life might become a series of narrow calculations.

Instead, I want to answer to the guidance that comes when I meet the demands of the present. I know that perspective is a key to the puzzle, but I don’t think this openness I am working towards is reached simply by maintaining a positive attitude.  It’s more of a virtue than an outlook, in the sense that it takes practice and work to acquire.  What an admirable trait it is to develop the courage to refuse victimhood, and to look squarely at the whole beloved broken package of yourself, and say “This is it.  Here I am. Let’s go.”  To bless your failures for the roads they take you down and the lessons they teach you.  To realize that in everything there is hope–and that hope, when chosen, is more reliable than what may appear impossible in the moment.

I know that I’ve been most amazed by life when I’ve been willing to both walk forward without being sure what’s out there, and to meet the demands of the present, here and now, and then watch in wonder at how life unfolds.

We borrowed Mary Oliver’s articulation of these thoughts for our wedding brochure:

Mysteries, Yes

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity,
while we ourselves dream of rising.

How two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the scars of damage, to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.

—Mary Oliver

what help looks like

08 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by marie in dear apples, everyday poems, journal, writing

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photo

“I can’t name it. Not to them”

“Why?”

“Because ..what if my own struggle looks appealing somehow?”

“Why would it?”

“I have no idea, but people are strange in their desires and jealousies.”

“And then?”

“And then…they would fall.  And maybe they wouldn’t get up.  And I would watch them spiral.  And the pain would crush me”

“Is that what will really happen?”

“…Well I guess no two people are alike.  I guess I can’t foresee the outcomes.”

“Has your own struggle taught you anything?

“Probably the most important things.”

“And why would that not be true for them too?”

“Because I’ve seen people who can’t get up.  I’ve seen people alone and defeated.”

“Have you though?  Have you seen their ends?”

“Not totally.  I can’t totally.”

“What happens when you yourself spiral?”

“I cry out.”

“And are you heard?”

“Yes.  A thousand times over. And it always catches me off guard.”

“Will they not be heard if they fall?”

Poetry Archives: Rumi

04 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by marie in everyday poems

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this being human is a guest house.
every morning a new arrival.
a joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

welcome and entertain them all!

even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of it’s furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
he may be clearing you out for
some new delight.

the dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing
and invite them in.
be grateful for whatever comes,
because each has been sent as a
guide from beyond.

– jelaluddin rumi

An archive of smiles

24 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by marie in dear apples, everyday poems, journal

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Tea Bag Yogi tells me today that “every smile is an achievement.”

Watch the cat wander the house looking for company, quixotic in her indecision.  She wants out, then in, then to perch in my lap, then to sit close but not overly so.  She walks the edge and can’t yield to company nor endure her own loneliness.  She paces in and out of my thought-scatter; her movement stirs up surprises there until I can see my own reflection in her soft gray mind.

The snow falls fast and layers up a quick thick inch with no sign of stopping.  There’s ice hidden in patches below, but no detecting where, so the most purposeful steps become clumsy skids and slips, making children of everyone.

A morning walk through the flat freeze of the day tells the brain to assemble an endorphin parade.  A gladness of small birds and fallen pine and rowed homes sealing the ones within, while I pass along in stillness.

The skin of the body raises in a chill before its submerging in the free fall pyramid under the shower head.  The will acquiesces to lay itself out below and feel the gentle battering of every droplet.

An inner struggle wages and I am the victor.  The impossibility of it is delightful.

The brooding of nighttime brings familiar faces before the mind and begins a run of the mishaps that could ruin them.  This time, I recognize the terror as just that, and breathe out stronger prayers, slowly and deeply, until the peace at the pit of me spreads itself out and sings me to sleep.

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