December 17, 2010:
This is a pause between big posts, as the Clan gathers.
Friend Crescent Dragonwagon, writer and humanist supreme, stopped by for an overnight and for a deep and oft hilarious conversation. Then son Adam & Co arrived very late (plane an hour late leaving Minneapolis, so they got here at 1:30 a.m.) for a ten day visit for the holidays. Hard to know when I will get back to the journal.
Bits of writing, none of it good or good enough to mention. Lots of holiday cards. Lots of ho-ho-ho cheer. The Christmas bird count. Fun and games and drinks with neighbors. The usual.
So I will instead leave you with two recent poems:
Annual Children's Illustration Show: Michelson's Gallery 2010
I envy artists the tools of their trade,
so full of color, bristle, tooth.
They live through their eyes.
A piece of white paper is saturated with life:
each line telling a story.
An arc for them, like a tree limb, carries weight.
They place a dot on the page;
it becomes an eye, falling rain,
the buttress of a tiny bridge,
the start of a new life.
Perspective bends.
A spot of red signifies
dusk, dawn, a riding hood,
trillium by a darkling river,
the bursting of a vein.
All I have is words.
Some day that may be enough.
© 2010 Jane Yolen
Shadowrama x 4
This shadow
lifting from a branch,
a shadow
of a branch,
into the shadow-filled sky
reminds me of you.
This full moon,
caught in the tree's arms,
the dead tree,
roost for owls,
knocking place for woodpeckers,
reminds me of you.
Each small thing,
in nature's cupboard,
each shadow,
and each shade
of feather, fur, leafmeal, mold
reminds me of you
who is now
tree, moon, owl, sky, wing,
shadow, ash,
memory
as insubstantial as air,
as necessary.
©2010 Jane Yolen
