Prize-Winning Poem for Halloween

In the spirit of Halloween--which should, ideally, take a light-hearted look at dark and scary things--ide, I'm happy and proud to include here the poem by my wife, Lynn Schiffhorst, which won First Place in the humor category recently at the Florida State Poets Association.

Lynn Schiffhorst                                                                       

ALL HALLOWS EVENING

 

When rain is falling in chilly wet sheets

And no one’s around in the town,

I pedal my bike to the churchyard and yell,

“All of you – out of the ground!”

As the bones in the clay start to whistle and hum,

They twitch and they stretch and they spring

From the flat horizontal in which they were laid

To a sitting and strutting and leaping parade.

 

As dancers they’re stiff, and they trample my toes,

But their smiles have a useful white glow

That light up like lanterns the dark sodden grave

Where they drop me as hopelessly slow.

How they caper and curtsey and blow the man down,

Dashing and flashing around and around,

Till I have to bellow, “Enough!  Underground!”

They go, but they go with a sneer and a frown!    

 

How real is the past?

I visited my 96-year-old friend Mary last week. Although her bones are wobbly, she has lost none of her faculties. Her long-term memory is especially alive with stories of World War II and life on Long Island 60 years ago, and she comes alive in telling these stories.  She finds joy in "re-living the past" without being trapped by guilt or needing to re-hash old grievances.

When she said, "the past is not over and done with," I thought of William Faulkner's famous statement: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
This seems to mean that the present is unreal, that "right now" is always becoming the past and so does not exist.

I will come back to that. After seeing Mary, I happened to find a cache of old family pictures and high school memorabilia; and before finding a new home for them, found myself being pulled back more than 50 years, thinking of friends as they were then and convincing myself, for a time, that they were as alive to me--and as real--as the images of long-gone actors on the screen, which deceive us into thinking they are still alive.

It almost like the delusion that doomed the tragic protagonist in The Great Gatsby, who was convinced he could repeat the past, that somehow he could recapture Daisy as she once was, as if the intervening years had not occurred, as if he could extend his remembered past happiness into the present.  Poor Gatsby.

Someone said that the past is always a work in progress. I think of this often when I read biographies that re-visit familiar figures from the past and bring them "to life."  What is happening, of course, is that the reader (like the historian) is re-interpreting through the imagination a new version of what the past might have been.  Augustine, back in the 4th century, saw in his reflections on time in the Confessions, that memory and imagination are related, almost interchangeable.

All our experiences are filtered through remembered events as they become part of our past.  In saying this, I am neglecting my spiritual conviction, often called mindfulness, that tells us that only the present moment is real. God, Ultimate Reality, is revealed to Moses as "I AM." 

The contemplative mind, whether following Christian or Buddhist practice, pushes aside the past, which is as unreal as the future; in this way only the present moment, fleeting as it is, can give us access to the kind of timeless present found in meditation--and evoked by T. S. Eliot in his later poetry.

Many poets have sought those timeless moments "in and out of time" that hint at eternity, just as mystics try to find words for the inexpressible moments of union with the divine.  Great poets are mystics in the sense that, for them, past events, recalled by the memory and enhanced by imagination, live on in the mind and in their art, which is impervious to time.

So I think that it is to great writers, especially poets, that we must turn for a proper response to Faulkner's idea of the past, which I think of as a work in progress; it often tries to snare us into thinking that it's real.

More Quiet Rhymes: a note of thanks

This is in part a belated--and totally unconventional--note of thanks to one of my faithful readers, Chris Parmentier, who has taken the time on several occasions to comment on my posts. Since I have no other way of thanking her, I begin with this acknowledgement: that every writer longs for a few perceptive and appreciative readers; even one (like Chris) will more than suffice. Ned is another, but I know how to thank him personally; so, too, Kurt. The others are nameless but also appreciated.

Since Chris commented two months ago concerned my listing of Lynn Schiffhorst's newly-published Kindle book of poems for children, I thought I would mention here that Lynn, who happens to be my wife, has published a second volume of "quiet rhymes for quiet times," entitled Spoons on the Moon, intended for younger kids (6-9) but, of course, also directed to their storytellers.  So this post is also an unabashed advert, as the Brits say. (Butu at least it is not a fund-raising request!)

Lynn has had a difficult time finding a conventional publisher. Few editors seem interested in her old-fashioned, literary pieces that would have easily found a wide audience in print thirty years ago or so.  So we have turned to Amazon, where anyone can peek at her books, and those with Kindles can download them for $2.99.

This week, Lynn Schiffhorst is launching two works on fiction (novels for young readers) on Kindle; the first of them, set in Denmark, is called Cats, Dogs, and Miracles. It will soon appear on the Amazon.com site and I hope will attract readers.  Even if she reaches only one or two readers, that might suffice.

I remain grateful to all the readers who find something of value in what I write and would welcome comments at schiffhorst@yahoo.com.

Why Rilke Matters

I am not about to convince you that reading Rainer Maria Rilke can change your life, though it might. Of course, you have to understand his poems, which can be quite a challenge because it really means understanding the German originals. Even in the various good English translations, I find complexities and would find teaching them impossible (in a way that teaching Dante is not).

Yet I have always sensed a mysterious power in his taut verse, which searches for the ineffable in a pre-modernist mode--he died in 1926--that speaks to the secular world of the early 20th century about matters of the spirit.

Although most people who read them admire his Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, I have a devotion, thanks to Robert Bly's translation, to his earlier Book of Hours, or, as Bly calls it, A Book for the Hours of Prayer. This was Rilke's first major book, written 1899-1903.

Here Rilke shows himself to be the poet of solitude and silence, the poet of darkness, the darkness of fertility and unknowing, as in the mystics of the medieval tradition. Although Rilke rejected the smothering piety of his mother's Catholicism, he was deeply affected by its traditions and by the value of prayer, especially the via negativa.

Rilke is the poet of inner spaces, as if interiorizing the desert image found in other writers. He is also the poet's poet, the careful craftsman who lived largely in isolation in various parts of Europe, waiting for the great outbursts of inspiration that produced both lyrical prose and incomparable verse. Although he can be faulted for seeming self-centered, Rilke speaks with a cosmic voice, as when he says (Bly's trans.), "I have faith in nights."

This poem begins by addressing God or the creative darkness: "You darkness that I come from,/I love you more than all the fires/ that fence in the world...it is possible a great energy/ is moving near me." You see what I mean: the English is uniquely direct, simple in style, yet subjective, elusive and untranslatable. He is like a modern John of the Cross. (I am reminded of T. S. Eliot's statement that we do not have to understand a poem in order to appreciate it.)

The holy in these poems is deep down within, dark and distant yet always close, too, beyond time and place. Bly says that Rilke's final sonnets are essentially poems of praise, so we have poetic prayers of appreciation and longing in verse that is religious despite its rejection of religion in the usual sense.

From his prose, I must quote some memorable lines from his "Letters to a Young Poet":
"Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek answers which cannot be given to you now because you would not be able to live them now. And the point is to live everything, to live the question now."

And: "Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without ever having to step outside it."