Author Archives: Paula Josa-Jones

Dec21

a Solstice gift

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    starlings_9 Murmuration #5, Rome, Italy, 2009

starlings_9

Starlings in the Winter

 

Chunky and noisy,

but with stars in their black feathers,

they spring from the telephone wire

and instantly

 

they are acrobats

in the freezing wind.

And now, in the theater of air,

they swing over buildings,

 

dipping and rising;

they  float like one stippled star

that opens,

becomes for a moment fragmented,

 

then closes again;

and you watch

and you try

but you simply can’t imagine

 

how they do it

with no articulated instruction, no pause,

only the silent confirmation

that they are this notable thing,

 

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin

over and over again,

full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

 

even in the leafless winter,

even in the ashy city.

I am thinking now

of grief, and of getting past it;

 

I feel my boots

trying to leave the ground,

I feel my heart

pumping hard.  I want

 

to think again of dangerous and noble things.

I want to be light and frolicsome.

I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,

as though I had wings.

 

~Mary Oliver, Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays

 

family-fun-2_1809895a

 

Dec20

for my daughter

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14695,xitefun-the-beautiful-boats-10

blessing the boats

by Lucille Clifton
(at St. Mary’s)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back    may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

 

Dec13

alone together

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2-people-texting

I love this interview of Sherry Turkel by Bill Moyers.  I read her book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, and was struck again and again by her take on mediated existence and the need to post our experience.  As she says, “sending is being” or “I share therefore I am.”  She sees that young people (and the rest of us as well) can no longer tolerate the “boring bits” and that in all the texting and tweeting, lies a powerful seduction of being wanted.  She tells us that we have lost our appreciation of solitude, and that we need to (re)learn – or in the case of younger people – learn how to gather ourselves and experience the richness of solitude.  Like this:

Childhood’s Retreat

By Robert Duncan

It’s in the perilous boughs of the tree
out of blue sky    the wind
sings loudest surrounding me.
And solitude,   a wild solitude
’s reveald,   fearfully,   high     I’d climb
into the shaking uncertainties,
part out of longing,   part     daring my self,
part to see that
widening of the world,   part
to find my own, my secret
hiding sense and place, where from afar
all voices and scenes come back
—the barking of a dog,   autumnal burnings,
far calls,   close calls—   the boy I was
calls out to me
here the man where I am   “Look!
I’ve been where you
most fear to be.”

Robert Duncan, “Childhood’s Retreat” from Ground Work: Before the War. Copyright © 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1982, 1984 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.