DANCE RECITAL

Stage struck babies wrapped
in purple passion tulle
try tearfully to tuck
their lacquered fine hair
back into ballerina buns,
as they
follow their leader, their leader,
whoever she may be.


A blue eyed bunny’s disguise
of make-up masks her childhood
as she twirls her wired ears,
poking her pretty little partner
hopping dutifully “too close.”
She’s just
following her leader, her leader,
whoever she may be.


Parents proudly pose with videos
already watching the screen
instead of the stage,
believing the fees, the costume costs
were all worth it.
Or were they just
following their leader, their leader.
whoever they may be?

PRACTICING PATIENCE

Practicing patience?
I practiced patience
on the gravel playgrounds
of third grade
waiting for the scaredy cat
to drop
or finish her hand-over-hand.

Practicing patience?
I practiced patience
on the starlit backseats
of teen love
anticipating a hand inside
my sweater
but brushing it back when it came.

Practicing patience?
I practiced patience
on the antiseptic gurneys
of motherhood
hearing “Don’t push” warnings
and knowing
that’s all I wanted to do.

Practicing patience?
I practiced patience
in the suffocating schedules
of married life
finding Durkee’s oregano for
special spaghetti
never tasting the results.

Then you asked me to
Practice patience again
as I was cast into
wrenching grief
deepest, darkest despair.
Staying with me
practicing patience.

Practicing patience?
Now I’m practicing
inside the soothing sanctuary
of my Master’s garden
digging out worms of worry
bugs of bitterness
planting instead love seeds.

In My Garden Quilt

FINDING YEATS

Somewhere in my youth I missed the connection. Looking back I could blame the professors, but I think now that is a cop-out. Or maybe it isn’t. I was filled to overflow with their words, their witticism, and their take on literature. I had no idea I was to give them mine. Bluebooks and essays covered lectures and published critics, not floundering student ideas.

Consider Yeats. I hated Yeats. Why? I didn’t get Yeats. I read poetry of Yeats for half a semester and can not remember a verse. I look over my notes written in the margin of the poems and know they are only my professor’s words, his lecture. I had no relationship Yeats' poems.

Today, forty years later, I read about "Lorraine" in Brussat’s Spiritual Literacy (1996). The book quotes John Fox’s FindingWhat you Didn’t Lose:

“Lorraine, who works in the fast-paced business of radio broadcasting, tells me she has memorized “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats. She has spoken that poem aloud to herself so many times that the tranquil “Isle of Innisfree” has literally become an interior place for her, a place she knows like she knows her own home. She uses this poem to keep herself centered. She keeps a copy of it on her desk. She says it helps her to recall a sense of stillness. It becomes a source of inspiration and sustenance to her." (280)


I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

My tight little college note next to Innisfree is “Walden.” I have underlined Innisfree and linnet. I assume my professor said something about Yeats seeing his Innisfree as similar to Thoreau’s “Walden.” Since I still don’t know what “linnet” means I probably underlined it as a reminder to look up the definition, however I didn’t write the definition anyplace.  I have found now it is “a common small finch of the old world.”

A Bristish web site, .rspb.org.uk/birds/guide/l/linnet/index.asp, describes a linnet as:

"A small, slim finch, widely distributed, and once very popular as a cage bird because of its melodious song. Males are attractively marked with crimson foreheads and breasts, females much browner. It can be flighty and has an undulating flight, usually twittering as it flies. Now it is declining, in common with many other birds which use farmland, and is a Red List species."

Red List means the linnet is protected in the United Kingdom, certainly close to our endangered species list. Did my father see linnets when he walked the roads of western England? “The linnet is a lowland farmland bird, preferring areas of scrub such as gorse or blackthorn, suitable hedges, especially hawthorn, or low trees. It may also be found in orchards, heathland, uncultivated land…” Did my father hear its “warbling, twittering song; call a twittering 'chi chi chi chi.'” Did hearing and observing the linnet link him to home, his own Innisfree? Did watching the linnet “twitter and undulate” remind him of flying, remind him of why he was there, in the middle of England, in 1944?

Yeats coveted an evening of “linnet’s wings,” watching them swoop and “chi, chi” to each other. I covet the chickadee of Michigan the same way as I scrutinize its chubby little body’s hyperactivity as it flits from pine to juniper to hemlock near our Lake Michigan retreat called The Gathering.  As “chick-a-dee, dee, dee,” echoes from the needles, I send praises upward for its resonance. Like Yeats I am thankful for the “bee-loud glade..,”. At the Gathering “I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore. And most of all at the Gathering, like Yeats and Innisfree, “I hear it in the deep heart's core.”

Thank goodness I didn’t abhor Yeats enough to ignore his poetry again. This time I make my own  meaning, my own connections, maybe to my dad from the past, maybe to the Gathering in the present.  Later in a stroll through the Chicago Botanical Gardens I observe "Innisfree" again incribed on a plaque surrounded by delicate pastel petals of perfection dipping ever so quietly into the green ripples of a small lake. Someone at the Gardens had a relationship with the poem too, just like Lorraine, just like me.  Like Yeats, I will not let others take my song again.


I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.

In the “Comment” section of Poetry (January, 2005) Chris Hedge writes:
"Reading great poems, novels, and essays help us cope with our own insecurities and uncertainty, allowing us to plunge to very depths of our inner being, depths that often lie beyond our articulation. These writers help us to define ourselves and give words to grief and pain and joy that would otherwise lie beyond our reach. And reading like this saves us from the deadening textual criticism and academic snobbery that overpowers and destroys the heart and soul of great art." (308)

Was it academic snobbery which kept me from plunging into the depths of Yeats the first time around? Perhaps there was some of that. But I think it had more to do with my own inadequacies of feeling confident of who I was. At twenty my professors were pouring knowledge all over me. My job was to soak it up, as much as possible. I had no idea I should slosh that knowledge around, letting it blend and breed within me.  I finally get it.


William Butler Yeats poetry is from: Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats, edited by M.L. Rosenthal. New York: Macmillan Co.,1962.

QUILTS: THE FABRIC OF STORY

Color…Line…Pattern…Design. For me, writing and quilting form natural links. As a teacher, I was involved with the National Writing Project, a staff development initiative for teachers through out the country. The Project develops, improves and deepens writing teachers’ skills by first having them write themselves. During this Project association I often used the quilting process to explain the writing process: a vision, gathering of ideas or fabric, initial exploration and drafts, refinement and revision of work in progress, editing or ripping out mistakes in precision (i.e. measurement, spelling, grammar) and celebration of the finished product.

It wasn’t until I became a quilter full time that I found a more profound connection to writing: the sense of story. I am always drawn at quilt shows to the cards near the displayed quilts describing the how and why of the quilt. We all know the connection between the Underground Railroad and quilt squares. We savor the tales of the quilters of Gee’s Bend. We empathize with women settlers who used strips of whatever-was-left to sew distinctive, colorful string quilts. I just finished The Quilt that Walked to Golden by Sandra Dallas and Nanette Simonds which narrates the stories of women and their quilts in the mountain west.

It is this sense of the quilt’s story that brings me to a tale which began over forty years ago in the halls of Lakeview High School in Battle Creek, MI, where my friends and I used to pass notes and gossip, share good books and bad boyfriends, match plaids in Home Ec and tally joint adult injustices. After high school, as best friends often do, we drifted into separate lives usually connecting through Christmas cards.

In 1998 some of us sat together at our thirty-fifth high school reunion. We decided then and there that what we really wanted was to reconnect with all those special friends who were so much a part of our lives in the early Sixties. Thus in 2000 eight out of nine met at my second home on Old Mission Peninsula on the banks of Grand Traverse Bay and Lake Michigan. For three days we shared those life traumas we usually only heard about each December: divorces, spouse deaths, deaths of beloved children, life changing illnesses. We even named ourselves the Yeps.

Living in Arizona, Washington, Illinois and Michigan, we are now in constant, daily, email communication. Now we are there for each other, not only during the traumas life throws us, but for the daily joys life grants us. Discussing the bonus decades between the ages of 50-70 year olds we enjoy today, Abigail Trafford says in her book, My Time, “One of the hallmarks of My Time is the recovery of old friends. You go back to the past. This is a way to get started on refreshing your web of kinship.” (P. 167)

As we refreshed our friendships, the devastating cancer of a sister Yep, Betty Sue, brought us to the brink of total sorrow. Hearing about the comfort quilts bring, another Yep suggested we secretly make a Yep Quilt for Betty Sue. Each Yep designed a muslin square detailing some cheerful or significant aspect of Betty Sue’s life. Frantic emails whistled through the cyber waves as the non-sewers cried for suggestions and demanded sewing secrets. Finally finished, the squares were sent to me since, at that time, I was the only quilter in the group. I put them all together using for sashing, binding and borders a variety of purple fabric, one of Lakeview High School’s school colors.

We presented the quilt to Betty Sue at the beginning of our 40th Class Reunion the first weekend in August, 2003. By the last week of that same August, Betty Sue died. Our collective grief was numbing, but we were cheered and strengthened by the quilt story we shared with our dear friend-- a vision, gathering, exploring, refining, ripping and celebration.