Poetry Month #18: "Let's Be Silent" by Pablo Neruda

The Seer

Today, on the 18th day of Poetry Month for 2020, I've decided to dedicate the rest of the month to poetry in the time of corona and actually found an entire program doing just that:
Love In The Time of Corona: Poetry for our times

One stanza of this poem stunned me as it seemed to call for a time just like the one we're in: a time of quieting and slowing down, of contemplating our world and what's truly important.

If we were not so single-minded

about keeping our lives moving,

and for once could do nothing,

perhaps a huge silence

might interrupt this sadness

of never understanding ourselves

and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us

as when everything seems dead

and later proves to be alive.

Click here to listen

Neruda was a Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet-diplomat and politician. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old, and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poem. (Wikipedia)

Let's Be Silent (Keeping Quiet)

by Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

Poetry Month #17: Outwitted by Edward Markham

This is first poem that ever hit me hard enough to memorize it. I'm not sure if I identified with the rebel being shut out or the one with enough love to bring him in, but somewhere in there was an emotional connection.

 

Outwitted

“He drew a circle that shut me out-

Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.

But love and I had the wit to win:

We drew a circle and took him In!”

 

Edwin Markham was the Poet Laureate of Oregon from 1923 to 1931. One review, however, makes me think my poetry leanings could be outdated:

"In his day Markham managed to fuse art and social commentary in a manner that guaranteed him a place among the most famous artists of the late nineteenth century. His reputation has faded because of the somewhat dated nature of his verse; nevertheless, he remains a notable figure for his contributions to American poetry. 

His work stands as an example of what American critics and readers valued near the turn of the century. His poetry offers insight into an important phase in the development of American letters."

Love Letter to my life #22: Time of the seedling

by Joyce Wycoff 

(We know the day we were born, but most of us do not know the day we will die. This love letter to my life is written on the day I've designated as my death day, the 17th of every month, and reminds me to be grateful for my incredible life.) 

My daughter is an environmentalist. During her work-from-home days, she has been creating a “freedom garden” using all recycled materials: plastic bottles, soda cans, plastic containers of all sorts. 

She gave me a package of black cherry tomato seeds and I began my own mini-garden even though my history of gardening is not encouraging. After writing this love letter to my life, I was looking for an opening photo and decided this tiny sprout is how I feel these days: a fragile seedling in a new world.  

I am grateful to be a new seedling, sprouting in a strange world, but it makes me wonder: what will we do with the new information we are gaining on a daily basis?  

What seeds are we planting? 

What new directions will we choose? 

Will we come to value each other more than financial markers? 

Will we begin to honor our only home planet?

Our future is ours to choose.

In the past week, COVID-19 killed almost as many people as heart disease, the #1 killer in our society.

It is interesting to write a love-letter to my life when at least 35,000 of my fellow countrymen have died from a disease that we still don't understand fully. I am grateful that the virus has not touched me personally, but social media keeps me touched by the heartbreak of others, as we collectively experience grief, the frustration of dealing with the uncertainty of the future, and watch the stricken economy wreak havoc with the already precarious balance of so many working people.

As it became apparent that we were in the midst of a pandemic unlike anything we’ve experienced in my life-time, I began an almost-daily meditation in words and art, titling it Corona Curiosity because I wanted to know more about the disease and how we would react to it. 

Every disaster brings out the best and worst in people. This one is no different.

102 years ago, 500 MILLION people were infected by a new flu. Between 10% and 20% of them died a horrible death, often within hours of becoming sick. The virus was colorful … starting out with mahogany spots on the cheekbones and gradually turning the extremities blue then black and eventually darkening and hardening the abdomen and torso. Laura Spinney, author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World states:

As long as you were conscious, therefore, you watched death enter at your fingertips and fill you up.

While most of what we see now, happened then, we are far luckier today because we understand contagion, have a much better healthcare system, and are apparently dealing with a less virulent virus. That flu (misnamed “Spanish” flu even though that was not where it originated), attacked the young and healthy as well as the elderly … and, perhaps most alarming, it came in three waves.

Most of the deaths came during thirteen weeks of the second wave. What we are seeing today doesn't begin to let us imagine the horror of those times, especially coming at the closing of four years of World War I.

In those days, there was no way to see the virus or understand how it works. Today we have electronic microscopes and a deep understanding of the genomes of viruses. We even have the genome of the 1918 virus thanks to a tiny village in Alaska and a curious Swedish microbiologist and Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa. It’s an interesting story.

Brevig Mission, the village, was populated by 80 mostly Inuit Natives. In five days, 72 of the villagers died of the flu and were buried in a mass grave site on a hill outside the village.

Johan Hultin, the 25-year-old student, obtained permission from the village elders to excavate the burial site in 1951. He succeeded in obtaining frozen tissue, but the limitations of technology at that time stymied his search for the virus. 46 years later, he joined forces with another researcher, made a trip back to the village, at his own expense, and discovered “Lucy” buried in 7 feet of permafrost and succeeded in recovering lung tissue which eventually led to the sequencing of the virus.

Years would be spent studying the virus and how it was different from normal, seasonal flu. The CDC article (referenced below) contains a worrisome conclusion:

No other human influenza viruses tested were as exceptionally virulent. In that way, the 1918 virus was special – a uniquely deadly product of nature, evolution and the intermingling of people and animals. It would serve as a portent of nature’s ability to produce future pandemics of varying public health concern and origin.

The article (written prior to 2019) goes on to talk about the possibility of future pandemics, the importance of WHO, the World Health Organization, and actions taken to prepare for a possible future pandemics. Unfortunately, a great deal of the preparations for future pandemics was dismantled by the current administration.

As interesting as the 1918-1919 pandemic was, this letter is intended to be a personal reflection, so I’m going to outline my gratitudes, disappointments, and hopes.

I am so grateful …

• to be living in Reno near family and easy access to open spaces and natural beauty
• for my good health and the creative impulse which gives me a thousand possibilities to fill my time
• for having a livable Social Security income which buffers me from economic fluctuations
• for the amazing health care system that is working tirelessly to get us through this crisis
• for the Instacart shoppers and the rest of the food supply system that is still keeping most of us fed
• for all the transportation workers who are keeping our supply chain moving, even if slowly
• for all the mail carriers, trash collectors, and others who help us maintain a semblance of normality
• for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Zoom and all the social media, flawed though it may be, that keeps us in contact with friends and family
• and for all the generous outpouring of love and caring coming from so many people all across the globe.

I am so disappointed that …

• people have let their fear and greed turn into hoarding and profiteering
• young people have this additional fear and anxiety added to their world view
• politicians are more worried about the stock market than the health of our people
• people are listening to conspiracy theorists and hucksters rather than seeking out real experts and scientists
• some churches are resisting social distancing at the peril of their own people as well as the rest of us
• 22 million people are newly jobless in the U.S.
• the aid package designed by Congress favors the wealthy more than the needy 
•  the current administration has waffled and delayed taking action causing more suffering and death.

I hope that ...

•  we understand the remarkable healing ability of the planet, if we change our ways
•  we begin to understand that we are all connected, all neighbors on one planet
•  we recognize and prioritize family and friends over material goods and personal gain
•  we choose leaders who serve the people rather than their own personal and financial interests
•  companies will value their employees more than quarterly profits
•  we will be able to trust and value each other and work for our common good rather than individual greed
• and that we soon will be able to go to movies and concerts, eat dinners with friends and family, camp in our amazing parks, and just hang out and socialize with each other.

If you would like to see Corona Curiosity in it's developing, magazine format state, click here:

https://issuu.com/joycewycoff/docs/corona_curiosity_pdf

More Info:

The Deadliest Flu: The Complete Story of the Discovery and Reconstruction of the 1918 Pandemic Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control

Poetry Month #16: Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Heron

Another haunting poem by Mary Oliver who studs her poems with sticky lines that stay with you long after the reading of them.

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Maria Popova in her amazing newsletter Brain Pickings describes Oliver's poetry and offers a reading of this poem by the poet:

Oliver’s work speaks so deeply and with such courageous honesty to some of our most profound human perplexities, struggles, and exaltations that it is read everywhere from commencement addresses to yoga classes, endlessly replicated on the social web and borrowed for those formulaic chapter-opening quotations in pop-psychology and self-help books. And yet despite the vast exposure, something singular, something mesmeric and immutably moving happens as Oliver swirls the intricate thought-things of her poem in her own mouth — to say nothing of the impossibly charming George Eliot anecdote with which she prefaces the reading:

Click here to listen:  

Wild Geese
 
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Poetry Month #15: Still I Rise by Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou reading at Bill Clinton's inauguration

This is the poem for this disheartening time when a spec of virus has stopped the wheels of progress ... or turned us toward a new direction.

Angelou's poem is a paean to the human spirit. No matter how great the persecution, no matter how long the oppression, still we rise. In this deeply personal poem, she offers a promise of hope for all of us.

The incomparable Maya Angelou is one of the few poets who can share a poem with the passion of an old time politician or a spell binding preacher. Don't miss this opportunity to hear her reading this offering.

Click here to listen to "Still I Rise"

 Wikipedia:

Angelou became a poet and writer after a series of occupations as a young adult, including fry cook, sex worker, nightclub dancer and performer, cast member of the opera Porgy and Bess, coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the decolonization of Africa.

She was an actress, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. In 1982, she was named the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. 

Her mother's boyfriend repeatedly raped her and when she told her brother about it, the man went to jail ... for one day ... and was later murdered. Angelou went mute for 5 years and said:

"I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone."

Fortunately for us, she did speak again and touched so many of us with her voice.

Still I rise

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don’t you take it awful hard

’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I’ve got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

Poetry Month: #14 Stopping by Woods by Robert Frost

Wikipedia tells the story of Frost writing this poem:

Frost wrote the poem in June 1922  (age 48) at his house in Shaftsbury, Vermont. He had been up the entire night writing the long poem "New Hampshire" and had finally finished when he realized morning had come. He went out to view the sunrise and suddenly got the idea for "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". He wrote the new poem "about the snowy evening and the little horse as if I'd had a hallucination" in just "a few minutes without strain".

The perfection of the intricate rhyming pattern and the allusion to death make this poem memorable, and it's difficult to imagine that it came fully crafted.

Also from Wikipedia:

In the early morning of November 23, 1963, Sid Davis of Westinghouse Broadcasting reported the arrival of President John F. Kennedy's casket at the White House. Since Frost was one of the President's favorite poets, Davis concluded his report with a passage from this poem but was overcome with emotion as he signed off.
 
At the funeral of former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, on October 3, 2000, his eldest son Justin rephrased the last stanza of this poem in his eulogy: "The woods are lovely, dark and deep. He has kept his promises and earned his sleep."

 In a letter to Louis Untermeyer, Frost called this poem his best bid for remembrance. He is well remembered.

LISTEN to the poet himself reading this lovely poem.

Nevada: Exploring Ghosts in the Sky

Nevada is a big, open state … seventh in size, 32nd in population. Outside the major population centers of Las Vegas and Reno/Carson City, lies space … gloriously diverse space: more mountains than California, the driest desert in the US, the largest alpine and second deepest lake in the country (shared with California), rivers, farmland, mineral mines, and a great basin containing the ghost of a lake that 12,700 years ago would have been one of the largest in North America.

Beyond the geography, there is something about Nevada … from its unique shape to its tendency toward libertarianism (which made gambling and prostitution legal). There’s a quality here .. a rough-edgedness that defies polishing, a defiance of the norms of others, a quirkiness. I’ve never seen this, and it probably does not exist, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find a slot machine in a church. 

Not much about Nevada would surprise me … which makes it a delightful place to explore. So, when Reno weather finally showed potential for an outing and the shelter-in-place blues had set in, I set off with the kids for the Walker River State Recreation Area. (Nevada’s stay home guidelines have an exception for outdoor activities for family only groups.)

One thing about open space is the helter skelter worm trails of the world beyond real roads ... which means you are seldom confident about where you’re going … not exactly lost, but definitely not found. 

Don, Annie and Ava at camp

Several pieces of selenite

We were looking for a hot spring when we found a selenite field that glittered like gold in the sun. Suddenly, we were greedy children picking up Easter eggs. 

Wikipedia says selenite is a form of gypsum occurring as transparent crystals, sometimes in thin plates and offers this bit of history:

The etymology of selenite is through Middle English selenite, from Latin selenites, from Greek selēnitēs (lithos), literally, moonstone or stone of the moon, from selēnē (Moon). The ancients had a belief that certain transparent crystals waxed and waned with the moon. From the 15th century, "selenite" has referred specifically to the variety of gypsum that occurs in transparent crystals or crystalline masses. 

9-mile ranch barn

9-Mile Ranch 

Long before John Fremont discovered this part of the world in 1844, the Paiutes were here, living and leaving the land basically untouched. The discovery of gold would change all of that and the 9-mile Ranch (then known as Cobb Ranchero) became the toll booth on the Carson Valley - Esmerelda (later Aurora) toll-road.

Sam Clemons suffered a financial set-back related to the ranch. Nevada laws required a mining claim to be worked within ten days. When he volunteered to help care for a sick man at the Ranch, he left a note for his partner. Apparently the note was never found because they lost the valuable claim to someone else when the mine wasn't worked within the ten days.

In December, 2016, an earthquake damaged the structure and it is now fenced off.

Aurora Ghost Town

In April, 1862, young Sam Clemens experienced his first life failure. He came to the gold boom town of about 2,000 inhabitants to attend to his brother Orion’s mining claims. He spent several months digging and blasting tunnels but made almost no money and was forced to live off the money his brother sent. “Broken and disappointed,” he left Aurora for Virginia City where he wrote for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise newspaper, which includes a Mark Twain Museum although I’m not sure if it is still open.

 The area was rich in gold and reached a population of 10,000 before the gold ran out in 1970. Today, new methods of gold mining are devastating the mountains and fencing off the hazardous chemical ponds from the public. Mining is one of the biggest employers in Nevada and balancing the value of jobs versus the value of the planet is a dangerous dance. 

Today, there are a few remnants of that once vital town, but perhaps the most touching is the cemetery which scatters through the pinyon pines. It is a peaceful place, many graves still decorated with colorful, plastic flowers. My daughter and I both had a "this would be a nice place to be buried" feeling. 

Visitors to the war memorial have decorated it with a wide assortment of treasures: from bullets to beer, coins to a ball point pen, desert glass and rocks to a tattered flag. We added a few mementos to the altar and continued on our exploration.

 

 

 

Don found this amazing piece of weathered desert glass.

 

Grandmother Cottonwood

Annie had us stop at this stunning old cottonwood to gather "witches toes," the medicinal buds that fall off the tree. They are apparently highly beneficial in salves, gels, or massage oils for their anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties.  

We wound up falling in love with this tree and found a ground nest beneath her limbs.

Here are more photos from the trip: 

If I'd had a forklift, I would have brought this rock home with me.

Lichen, of course.

 And, as often happens in the desert,  you wind up with more questions than answers:

More info:

https://mcindependentnews.com/2017/01/countys-oldest-intact-building-hit-hardest-earthquakes/