Carolyn Martin - Poet

“All my life I have tried to find the truth and make it beautiful.” – Sting

It happens this way ...

Happy April Fools’ Day

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It happens this way …

For all you lovers of jokes, pranks, hoaxes, and punks, this is your day to shine – or, according to Merriam-Webster Online, to behave foolishly, to fool around, to fool with, play the fool, feel foolish, be fooled, or to be made a fool of.

Since I can’t tell a joke to save my life — I always flub the punch line — and can’t pull off a prank without giving it away with a premature laugh, I’ll stick to what I know better: poetry.

Literary folks may remember the opening of TS Eliot’s The Wasteland:  

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

 

Or the beginning of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, 

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, 

And bathed every veyne in swich licóur 

Of which vertú engendred is the flour; 

I played with those two classics to create this sonnet:

A Sonnet for Early Spring

When April mixes memory and moss,

twenty moles pilgrimage the yard and toss

aerated soil around our flower beds.

When three feral cats train to track red-heads

and orange-tails, there – beneath crusty leaves –

baby snails, grubs, and worms yearn to believe

the world was made for them. When daylight frees

itself from thoughts of winter-death and trees

convince the earth oblivion’s a hoax,

then every squill and bee engenders hope

that sundry folk, daffodils, and sweet peas

will raise voices with saints of every creed.

They’ll inspire young bleeding hearts to sing

about the lean elegance of waking spring.

 

All joking aside, enjoy the “lean elegance of waking spring” wherever you are today!

 

Let’s Celebrate February 2

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It Happens This Way …

It’s Candlemas Day: the half-way point between the December Solstice and the March Equinox. This day was important to farmers. As an old English song said,  “If Candlemas be fair and bright, /Come, Winter, have another flight. / If Candlemas brings clouds and rain, /Go, Winter, and come not again.”

 It’s also Groundhog Day when Punxsutawney Phil, that prophetic little forecaster, announces if winter will stay go or stay. (According to people who track such things, the critter is about as accurate as flipping a coin.)

Which leads me to one of my favorite movies of all times: Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. Murray plays Phil Collins, a cynical, narcissistic weatherman who’s sent to Pennsylvania for the fourth time to cover their February 2 event. If you Google the movie, you’ll find articles about a variety of theological and philosophical interpretations. One writer even claims Groundhog Day is “a deeply Catholic movie” (https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/08/no_author/groundhog-day-a-deeply-catholic-movie/).

Whatever the deeper meanings, the major plot line is simple: Phil is trapped in 24-hour time loop that dooms him to spend every day in the same place, seeing the same people, doing the same thing over and over again. As long as he acts the way he always has –with distain and self-importance – he wakes up on February 2 to his clock radio playing Sonny and Cher’s “I’ve Got You Babe.” Time has certainly “got” him in its clutches!

Remember that old Chinese definition of insanity: doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. Although the pandemic may have intensified this kind of insanity, many of us were already trapped in repetitive loops of thinking the same unkind thoughts, engaging with the same toxic people, fighting the same unwinnable battles, complaining about the same uncontrollable things, bemoaning our lack of success or acclaim or productivity. And so it goes.

Today is the perfect day to shake up our shadows and become aware of how they’ve trapped us. Let’s light a candle and allow its warm glow to sooth the winter chill of our hearts and minds. Whatever Punxsutawney Phil prophecies today, spring is coming and, along with it, messages of rebirth and light. That’s worth celebrating.

 

 

 

 

 

To resolve or not

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It happens this way …

I hate New Year’s resolutions. They always seem a set-up for disappointment, guilt, and self-incrimination. Then I came upon this wisdom from Thich Nhat Hanh and it hit home:

Last week a friend was going through some painful stuff. What it was about isn’t the point. What is the point was my knee-jerk reaction to her suffering: I wanted to fix it, take it away, rescue her. I wanted her to accept my words of enlightenment so she could embrace my joy and peace, and make them her own. Wrong!

Serendipitously, I had just read an article about Megan Devine’s work with grief and loss (https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/12/16/megan-devine-okay-not-okay-grief/). She says the best way to help people feel better is to acknowledge their pain and let them be in their pain. Whoa! Counterintuitive, right? – but effective.

She explains,

Often, we mistake for personal failure our inability to salve another’s grief or mistake for their failure the inability to snap out of it on the timeline of our wishes.

In the brilliant video toward the end of the article – it’s worth a few moments to view it – Megan quotes educator Parker Palmer:

The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed exactly as it is.

What’s the most effective strategy? Acknowledgment. Join others in their pain, don’t try to cheer them up.

So,  2021 may invite me to resolve to keep digging and digging and digging my own well while acknowledging that everyone else has the ability to dig their own, too – according to their timeline. That way all of us can claim the enlightenment, joy, and peace that we can only give ourselves. Anyone up for digging during the coming year?

The art of feeding birds

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It happens this way …

One early winter years ago, I felt a twinge of empathy for all the birds scrounging for food around our yard. I hadn’t gotten into feeding birds yet, but this was an aha moment that ungrinched my tendency to ignore them. So I went to a local store and bought what I thought was an upscale birdfeeder and a package of high-grade thistle. I placed the feeder in a spot where I could enjoy watching the thankful critters dine. But, alas, it was not to be. Here’s what actually happened:

 To the songbirds who spurned my feeder

I’m confused. I thought when thistle filled

the Copper Triple Tube, we had a deal.

You’d breakfast in tranquility, spread notes

around our cul-de-sac, return

for evening snacks, and sing, of course,

your best for me. But I thought wrong.

 

You’ve scavenged through my annuals,

electing seeds – prosaic and alive – 

in lieu of mixtures trendy and refined;

refused to jump from ground to rim

before the winter storms set in

to shut my garden down.

 

I’ve cut my loss and hurt, and stashed

the copper with my thistle sacks.

See the note tacked on the vacant pole:

We’re closed. Gone south. Enjoy the seedless snow.

____________________

Well, maybe not “actually” when it came to that sign. However, I was so incensed by their ingratitude that I took down the feeder, packed away the food, and huffed and puffed. It took some research to discover that birds need time to find a new feeder and that thistle is not quite delicacy I thought it was.

Now I have several feeders and a suet cake container in our yard and delight in watching the Steller’s jays, juncos, sparrows, flickers, and others take turns eating sunflower seeds and other Audubon grains every day. Lesson learned: You can’t force Nature to do what you want her to do. Up with creatures who take their time to decide what’s good for them!

And, as we travel through this holiday season into 2021, may we become wise as to what is good for us. 

 

 

 

 

Order Nothing More to Lose

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It happens this way…

Therese and Carolyn with their preview copies

 Thanks to all of you who   have already pre-ordered Nothing More to Lose, my poetry chapbook based on based on Therese Kolbert Dieringer’s autobiography, My Life Lived and Remembered – A journey through Hungary, Germany, and America.

There’s still time to order your copy at its pre-publication price.

Deadline: December 1, 2020

About the collection:

Nothing More to Lose is a 60-page chapbook filled with poems written in Therese’s voice.  It contains photos of the Kolbert family as they journey across Germany. It ends with a series of “Corky poems” that capture Therese’s meeting, marrying, and traveling with her dear husband of thirty years.

As Therese says:

“In Nothing More to Lose, Carolyn Martin has read and written my soul. No one has been able to feel what I felt before this poet shared her inspired words with me and now with the world. I spent more than 70 years trying to forget the events that shaped my life and gave me nightmares. Now, through working with Carolyn on both my autobiography and this chapbook, I feel healed. The nightmares are gone. I hope these poems will help readers find courage in the realization we are not here on our own. We are guided by a Higher Power. This book is a good way to end my journey.”

Click here to order your copy today.