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Avocado
The avocado is a fruit with much adaptability.
It can be used in many ways because of this facility.
Without the skin and inner pit it can be eaten wholly.
When mashed it turns itself into delicious guacamole.
Sliced it gives to any salad a touch of sophistication
And chopped, it brings a tasty start to a gazpacho creation.
Although it has a lot of fat, it meets the healthful trend
Because its fat is omega-3 which doctors recommend.
What’s good about avocado use I think I’ve fairly covered,
But hope you’ll find more positives that aren’t yet discovered.
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Grapes
Grapes when born have colors they did not choose.
There’s red, and white, and black and more you’ll find.
But it’s what’s inside that really matters, not the hues.
And that is how it should be with our human kind.
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Why Davy loves Avocado and Grapes :
“Among some of those I’ve met who take poetry (too) seriously, nothing seems to be frowned upon more, within poems, than rhyming or humor. I love all kinds of poetry, so this view has always seemed a bit narrow to me. After all, it was brilliant, playful rhyme-masters like Shel Silverstein who’d excited me about the possibilities of poetry in the first place.
Food is a crucial and often under-recognized part of our daily lives, and when my dad published Marvin Brandwin’s delightful book “A Smorgasbord of Verse,” I found myself utterly charmed by Brandwin’s paeans to even the simplest types of grub. His keen and subtle eye for details of tastes and textures brings each food’s unique richness leaping to life. Oddly, it turns out that his book is also a great bathroom read (which i consider a real compliment). There’s something both strange and pleasing about gobbling down a few poems about food while leaving your own digested treasures behind.”
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WHEN MY ORIGINAL PLEA FOR POEMS WENT OUT, THE VERY DELICIOUS DAVY ROTHBART, who also happens to be the genius behind the FOUND magazine empire, sent me an email asking for a list of my favorite foods. A few weeks later, a beautifully annotated series of poems about avocados and grapes and some of my other favorite foods arrived on my doorstep. For, it seems that Davy’s dad, Hal, has set up a small printing press in Ann Arbor Michigan, where courtesy of the local copy store, he publishes the work of his pals, many of them retired professors from the hood, and sets up little tables at local books fairs and sells them. The poems Davy sent were from the hand of ninety year old, retired professor, Marvin Brandwin’s latest poetry collection, “A smorgasbord of verse.” They warmed my heart on many levels and I hope they warm yours too; and if you are thinking about chanukah-chrimbo-quanza presents right now, Marvin’s collection is a perfect stocking stuffer. Contact details under the poet spotlight; drop charing cross publishing a line and tell them Poetry Post sent you. They’ll treat you right.
XOXO
nicola
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{ Poetry Tuesdays }
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Trust
by Thomas R. Smith
It’s like so many other things in life
to which you must say no or yes.
So you take your car to the new mechanic.
Sometimes the best thing to do is trust.
The package left with the disreputable-looking
clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit,
the envelope passed by dozens of strangers—
all show up at their intended destinations.
The theft that could have happened doesn’t.
Wind finally gets where it was going
through the snowy trees, and the river, even
when frozen, arrives at the right place.
And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life
is delivered, even though you can’t read the address.
Reprinted from Waking before Dawn, Thomas R. Smith, Red Dragonfly Press, 2007.
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Why Elisha loves Trust :
“I sent this poem to Nicola in response to a message that she was going though a tough time. Little did we–all her “people”–know these poems would spark Poetry Post. Well actually, if you know Nicola you would absolutely know that it would, indeed, spark Poetry Post. ‘Trust’ was sent to me by my now-husband during our long-distance courtship. I’ll probably get into trouble for publicly saying this–because he is quite shy about this–but back when we were dating, I almost always woke up to a song or poem or love letter in my inbox. So when I thought about what to send Nicola, I went back to this poem he had sent me. For me it was a reminder, on the days I was tormented by the distance of our love, to ‘trust’ in my relationship. For Nicola, it quite obviously was a reminder to ‘trust’ that she would get out of something that felt agonizing at the time.
I love the way this poem feels so everyday. I love that it starts with the trust of taking your car to a new mechanic, because I would never think, as a poet, to start a poem about trust with that concept–clearly a ‘guy thing’. I love what it says to all us ‘control freaks’ in the world. I envision that everyone who reads it has the same response–a little softening of the breath, a small smile creeps on the face, a realization that just like the ‘small’ trust we put in the bank when we make a deposit into the ATM, so will the bigger things in life fall into place…as they should.”
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POETRY POST LUCKY NO.8, FROM THE WONDERFUL ELISHA LEVIN, ARRIVED ON THE BACK of a gorgeous postcard where a little toddler is gazing up at the vast trees all around her. The image itself could not be more perfect for the poem at hand; for it’s often when we find ourselves in the middle of Mother Nature’s awe-inspiring vastness that we’re instantaneously reminded what tiny dots in the world order we human beings are. A remembering that often brings with it a deep sense of calm because, when you are that teeny tiny, who has any choice but to trust?
Granted, even in every day life, there are so many arenas in which we trust that we will be looked after (some would say take for granted) that we barely even remember that we are trusting in them. We trust that the electricity will turn the light on in the morning, that the water will come out of the tap in the kitchen, and that every time we turn on the tele, somewhere there will be a Seinfeld episode playing. And yet there are so many other, equally important arenas in which we do not.
I have revisited this beautiful poem often over the past few months and pondered how it is often so much easier not to trust. For on the road to the deep, fulfilling sense of trust that so many of us yearn for, there is a region of no-mans-land, of vulnerability, where we know intellectually the benefits that may lay ahead, but where we still fear the loss of control and the feeling of safetly we will have to sacrifice in order to cross that threshold. But as we have all been told a thousand times and know in the deepest regions of heart, this is precisely where the good stuff happens, and so we trek onwards.
So, I invite you to join me this month in pondering an area in your life where you could let go a little more, allow yourself to be vulnerable a little more and…trust. What is that area? And what would you have to put in place to do so? Trusting doesn’t mean being reckless, although it some times does, and it doesn’t mean being a Pollyanna and sitting on your bottom “trusting” that the world to provide you with everything your heart has ever desired. No, for the really good stuff to happen, it tends to be a mixture of our own efforts married with a deep sense of grace, trust, and letting go. We do the work and then we let go. And I posit that stepping slightly out of our comfort zone will be a key part of this process. Where is that place in your heart where you know you could extend a little bit more faith?
This week is the Jewish New Year, a time where we are invited to really look inside and shed the old and invite in the new, a time where we are given the opportunity to return to the best versions of ourselves. This seems like a perfect time to heed Smith’s call, to commit to trusting life a little bit more, stepping out with everything we’ve got, even the niggly bits, and seeing where it leads. I will if you will. For, as Smith tells us, We’re all going to get there in the end anyways, so why not Trust a little more along the way?
And finally, on a personal note, as many of you know, i started this poetry project last year when i was rather poorly, as a way to lift my spirits. This poem arrived several months into my lyme disease saga, at one of the many moments where i feared it might never end, that i would never come back to “normal” life. Receiving and reading this poem, with Elisha’s simple and beautiful words encouraging me to trust, felt like an angel swooping into my mailbox that day reminding me that it would indeed be over one day. And in that moment, I truly felt it. Fast forward, one year later, with my health so greatly restored, I am truly humbled by the entire experience and so grateful for this poetic reminder, both then and now. So, thank you Elisha, thank you Thomas R. Smith, and thank you beautiful trees and child on forest road.
with love, your partner in trust,
nicola
PS: This picture was taken in the 1950s. One can’t help but wonder where that little girl might be today, and of course hope that the trees are standing in exactly the same spot!
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{ Out Loud, Poetry Tuesdays }
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Pocketsize
by Linda Thompson Carlson
Stories are pocketsize.
They appear magically before your eyes.
They can be short or long,
Develop in riddle, poetry, or song.
Stories share joy or sadness,
Frolic, folly, maybe even madness.
Reach in your pocket,
Let your hand slip deep
And you’ll be surprised
At the stories asleep,
Waiting to be roused,
Waiting to be told
As possibilities unlimited
Before you unfold.
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Why Linda loves Pocketsize :
“It is my privilege to share a short piece with you that I wrote for a forth grade class one time many moons ago. I have always loved it. My life’s work is in the field of creativity but I have followed through the realms of spirituality and conscious-unconscious mind work along the way. I know where stories come from :) This poem called Pocketsize was my attempt to affirm to the children that each of them had access to stories, and maybe even poetry deep inside them, since I spoke the message to them in a poem.”
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POETRY POST NO. 07, THE BEAUTIFUL POCKETSIZE, WAS ONE OF THE FIRST POEMS TO arrive from someone I had never met. It was also the first time someone sent in a poem that they had written themselves. But you can see why it immediately had to be part of the canon, right? I loved it. Loved. As with all things so elegant and simple, in a few short stanzas, Linda encompasses one of the notions that we storytellers and story-lovers hold so dear: that we all have stories and magic hidden deep inside our souls and all we have to do to unleash them is take the time to look for them.
Imagine if this poem was taught as the guiding principle of every school in the land, from kindergarten through graduate school. For all society’s emphasis on learning facts and developing analytical faculties, aren’t imagination and storytelling the most important tools that our young and our not-so-young should keep exploring at every stage at life? Clearly I’m not suggesting that all facts and more linear faculties be burnt with our bras, but we nix the importance of creative expression at our own peril.
And I’m not alone in thinking so. Our old pal Einstein explained it perfectly when he said “I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.”
Amen, brother. And as this poem insinuates, imagination really is the great equalizer. We are all born with stories inside our soul, we are all born with imagination and the ability to wonder. Alas, it seems that as we get older, many of us forget the fact.
I should add that Pocketsize has fast become a favorite of the perusers of the Poetry Post folder. There is something about its simplicity, perhaps the fact that we all know in our hearts that this is a fundamental truth we all share, that makes it a winner. Several friends have asked to photocopy it after they read it, and my friend Jules suggested we print folded up little versions of Pocketsize so that all and sundry can put one in their pocket and remind themselves of the magical stories that they themselves still have inside them.
So I invite you to go, spend a few minutes alone (what a concept) and ask your insides what story has been sleeping inside your soul, waiting to be roused? Then take a pen and start writing. I posit you might be surprised at what comes out, and I can’t wait to hear about it, so please send a note and share!
with love and wishes for a week filled with both frolic and folly,
nicola
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{ Out Loud, Poetry Tuesdays }
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the WHY CHEAP ART? manifesto
by Bread and Puppet
People have been thinking too long that
ART is a PRIVILEGE of the museums & the
RICH. ART IS NOT A BUSINESS!
It does not belong to banks & fancy investors
ART IS FOOD. You can’t EAT it BUT it FEEDS
you. ART has to be CHEAP & available to
EVERYBODY. It needs to be EVERYWHERE
because it is the INSIDE of the
WORLD.
ART SOOTHES PAIN!
Art wakes up sleepers!
ART FIGHTS AGAINST WAR AND STUPIDITY!
Art SINGS HALLELUJA!
ART IS LIKE GOOD BREAD!
Art is like green trees!
Art is like white clouds in blue sky!
ART IS CHEAP!
HURRAH!
Bread & Puppet | Glover, Vermont, 1984
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Why Gregory loves the Why Cheap Art? manifesto :
“I like the words as text as font as heiroglyph. As art. How it makes it seem like grafitti on a museum wall. A fuck you to a docent. Beyond the perfect passionate tone, indignance for costly frames, it moreover supports an egalitarianism to art and OF art. It legitimizes the amateur. And creates a museum anywhere you stop to look. Something nice to that.”
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POETRY POST NO.06 CAME FROM GREGORY BONSIGNORE, WRITER AND GENERAL LIFE rabble-rouser, on the back of a postcard of the Library of Alexandrina. Yes, the library of Alexandrina in Egypt, where Gregory managed to get himself ensconced as playwright in residence for six months a few years back. We should probably ask him to do a guest-blog about what being the playwright in residence at the library of Alexandrina entails but in the meantime, to the poem/ manifesto.
It seems it was written by self-confessed hippies back in the eighties protesting, as you may imagine, the corporatization of Art. Now, when i first received it, i thought it was really fun and i loved that this was gregory’s favorite poem of choice, but in terms of it truly stirring something in me, i was left a little at a loss. I just wasn’t sure that i completely agreed with it. What happens to the artists’ self-worth and their psyches if we tell them to create cheap art? As a society, don’t we tend not to value things that are cheap or free? How is that going to help Art soothe pain and fight against war and stupidity?
Then a funny thing happened. I have a quote on my wall by Harry Houdini, that tells us rather poetically “I am a great admirer of mystery and magic. Look at this life — all mystery and magic.” And suddenly, like eisenstein’s theory of movie montage, where seeing two different images next to each other magically create a third idea in your mind, i suddenly got what gregory had understood all along. The manifesto wasn’t only ranting against the richies and the investment bankers for buying up our art and hanging it in their offices where we can’t see it. No, it’s also, and perhaps more importantly, alerting us to the fact that when we choose to view art in this context, as something to be stared at on a wall of a designated place where we go to experience “art”, it becomes a rarified experience, and we lose the innate understanding that art and its ability to nourish our soul is in fact absolutely EVERYWHERE.
Houdini and the folks at bread and puppet theater are nudging us rather loudly, in CAPs no less, to remember (for we certainly knew it when we were bambinos) that magic and wonder are all around us. As Gregory puts it so eloquently, “A museum anywhere you stop to look.” I love that term. Hippie-wotsit as it may sound, this increasingly seems to be the answer to what many of us yearn for in this life. Not the money or the success that we think we’re looking for (but never seems to quench the hole if and when we get it,) rather the ability to be fascinated and astonished and artistically nourished by what we see around us at any given moment. Which ultimately, if we can stop for long enough to really get there, is a very exciting concept.
But so long as we see art as something that hangs in a museum, we forget that it also exists on the sidewalk, in the bushes and on the floor of the car park where we parked our car this morning. We walk past a beautiful leaf in the shape of a heart that would have a hundred children gasping with wonder at their artistic discovery and we say “sorry leaf, i don’t even have a moment to notice you. I have an art exhibit to get to.”
Which brings us nicely to our sister in arms: HEARTS: We see love everywhere a lovely example, if we say so ourselves, of what can be created when individuals open their eyes to the idea that art can pop up everywhere they stop to look. So, in the name of Houdini and the bread and puppet theater, and gregory bonsignore, you are cordially invited to come join the gang heart see-ers. As newbies have confessed, you’ll start seeing the world through new eyes and suddenly even a trip to the grocery store or a walk behind your house will become a magical adventure. And that is most certainly worthy of a hooray hurrah!
with love and wonder and lots of it,
nicola
PS: Lastly, and most importantly, how much do we love that gregory wrote it in purple cartridge pen ink? I’m pretty certain you could write your shopping list in purple cartridge pen ink and it would read like poetry.
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{ Out Loud, Poetry Tuesdays }
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Birmingham for Tariq Jahan
by Carol Ann Duffy
After the evening prayers at the mosque,
came the looters in masks,
and you three stood,
beloved in your neighbourhood,
brave, bright, brothers,
to be who you were –
a hafiz is one who has memorised
the entire Koran;
a devout man –
then the man in the speeding car
who purposefully mounted the kerb…
I think we all should kneel
on that English street,
where he widowed your pregnant wife, Shazad,
tossed your soul to the air, Abdul,
and brought your father, Haroon, to his knees,
his face masked in only your blood
on the rolling news
where nobody’s children riot and burn.
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THIS POEM DID NOT COME IN THE MAIL. YES, I KNOW, ARRIVING IN THE MAIL IS ONE OF the pre-requisites for Poetry Post Tuesdays, but rules are made to be broken and every so often a poem appears that needs to be part of the conversation. This is that poem.
Juliet Simmons, of Poetry Post No. 01 fame, alerted me to its existence yesterday. She had already had her Poetry Tuesday moment, she said, but given our correspondence about the London Riots last week (ugh), she had to share this beautiful poem that she had just read in the London Guardian. And thank heavens she did.
It was written by Britain’s Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy for Tariq Jahan, the father of Haroon Jahan, one of the three young men who were mowed down and killed in an unprovoked attack during the Birmingham riots last week, while they tried to protect their community from looters. It is heart-breaking. Too heartbreaking for words. In just a few lines, Duffy gives a devastating flavor of the specifics, the lives ruined, the sacred beauty of the men now lost, and what we should do in response to this tragedy; how we should all be kneeling together on that English street. It won’t bring them back, but it will show the solidarity we feel for their families’ suffering.
There are many fascinating things about the structure of the poem: no period used until the very last line, the indentations of certain sentences that can be read on their own, and the massive gap between the two stanzas that takes place where the unfathomable took place. But this doesn’t feel like the time to go into artistic detail. What feels more appropriate to ponder is how this poem, in a more general sense, illuminates something deeper about the power of the poetic.
In Birmingham, we are reminded that poetry isn’t just about the esoteric, namby pamby, musings of academic intellectuals and love-sick teenagers; rather it is life relevant and time sensitive, and one of the ways that we, as a community, can experience and cope with the tragedies that befall us. In just over a hundred words, Duffy pierces the reader’s soul in a way that the factual “truths” offered to us in newspaper articles and nightly news reports rarely can. When you read or hear the words, “three men were killed in a hit and run during the Birmingham riots”, I postulate that you think it sad, but you don’t feel it in the core of your being the way you do when reading this poem. It’s as though, with the use of factual, poetry-less accurate reporting, we have protected ourselves from the onslaught of bad news that comes in every day by not allowing it to ever penetrate our hearts. We hear the facts. We hear the words. We say what a shame. We move on. Poetry, however, doesn’t allow us to do that. Good poetry is so surreptitious in the way it tells us the truth but tells it slanted, that it sneaks in behind our defenses and smacks us right in the gut, winding us from the inside.
This is how i felt reading Birmingham.
I wish to God that none of us had ever had to read it. But given the circumstances, i am thankful for it.
Haroon’s father said publicly that Ramadan is a time where, as a Muslim, he believes that the gates of heaven are wide open and the gates to hell are firmly closed, and that he takes solace in the fact that these boys’ souls will be only heaven-bound. Let us all send blessings for a peaceful passage. And blessings to their families during this unimaginable time of grief and loss.
with love,
nicola
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{ Poetry Tuesdays }
