I lost a seed that was given me
to plant in my springtime garden.
I let it fall through thin space
onto a dark and ordinary place
away from light or the need to find.
I did not plant it straightaway
when bright was the sun
and fertile the ground.
Only in hasty scribble penned:
“Write about a lost seed.”
Today I found my hasty scribble
had turned to dry husk
bearing neither flower nor fruit
from that moment it came to me:
“Write about a lost seed.”
Portland, Oregon – March 30, 2020
I began this site in December 2015 after many years of writing only occasionally. During those years I would, from time to time, dash something out on paper and quickly abandon to a box without taking the time to sit with it, work on it or, as often happens now, trash it because it simply was not satisfying and I could not think how to make it satisfying. In those days I thought to myself that, after all, I am not a poet because I do not write or only so rarely as to not qualify even for my own sense of what calling myself a poet might mean.
Since I began In Cascadia I have written at least one poem every month, for four years. My average output per month is something over three poems. Quantifying poetic output doesn’t go well with the poetic sense, I know, but my reason for doing so is simple. It means that I have been writing consistently and for a number of years. This gives me confidence to say, at least to myself, that I am a poet. While I know that the innate desire was part of me, patiently waiting since at least my high school days, it was not until I began to write with some consistency that I felt I could claim to be, in earnest, a poet.
Now, there is no need to go into whether I am a good poet or not. There are far too many subjective and objective qualifiers to go into here. I have, however, read a few “how to” books from “real” poets, enough to understand that the quality of my work will not likely bear the hard scrutiny of established critical standards. So be it.
My own standards are these:
Yes. To all, yes.
My conclusion is that to be a poet means that I must write poetry and with some regularity. This is no different from any other writing form. One just has to sit down and write and see where it takes you. I do not think it has as much to do with meter, rhyme, line break, or any other of the many qualities that are ascribed to poetry. All these are important of course but writing itself is the finest teacher I have – always there for me.
I am very grateful for those few who follow my work here. I never expected to reach many readers so I’ve not been disappointed. I greatly appreciate your expressions of “like” for my work.
Peace,
Tom
We tell stories of our lives
as we remember they were
and believe they are:
clear and distinct memories,
what we learned in school,
works of our hands,
beauty we have seen and touched,
who we loved and lost;
all our senses ablaze for a time.
We do not know well our own stories
they, as wildflowers, growing
in fields abloom, bending in every breeze
sleeping at night among the stars –
winter comes and they are gone.
So we in our fields bloom,
bend, sleep, then go our way.
I watch as indistinct shadows move
behind a thin and trembling veil
telling me about my life –
things strange and unfinished,
without beginning or end.
I see flickering phantasms
playing on creation’s silvery screen
that seem to be about me
but, as in a dream, make no sense
as if I am in and out of my own life
becoming things I do not remember,
as if I were a tree or,
on its branches, a tiny bird.
If only we knew our whole story
told by one who knows,
can tell its whole arc
however long, its shape and texture,
and where it bends into the night.
I wonder if poetry can follow
the thin thread thrown from the heavens
down onto the green fields of life
and tell where it has come from
and where it goes?
Intimations of immortality
may follow that twisting line
to describe the contours of being
formed from cosmic nothing –
hidden, revealed, washed away again
as endless breakers on sunlit shores.
Portland, Oregon – November 16, 2019
Gratitude to William Wordsworth for his sublime, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.” (https://www.bartleby.com/101/536.html) I highly recommend reading this masterpiece. In my own poem, I use “intimations of immortality” as a way of saying how poetry may be able to describe what other artistic forms may not. But, of course, all art forms, even to include the sciences, try to speak to the mysteries of life.
Sitting near a cold spring night
I write with an overhead light
to pierce the slitherly dark thoughts
that slide through the eves
pour from under the doors
steal through foundation cracks
to pry from me my genius –
wary words wrestling their way
through my years, each with promise and loss
the same – of life – given and taken away.
Of the words that might have come
these have come, forming themselves
in scribbles of black on white
to say that I am, one line at a time,
not my own but one written
on a page (what page?) by a hand (whose?)
I seek to know, hope to capture
by poem in its webby tangle of words
woven out of what darkness slitherly brings.
Portland, Oregon – March 27, 2018
In Cascadia 