Eleven Inside

Do you remember being eleven? I do, very distinctly. My head buried in a book more often than not. It's the very age I feel inside. This excerpt from Luci Shaw makes me feel eleven all over again and nourished by the gentle reminder of love given.

from "Gifts for my girl"
by Luci Shaw

At eleven, and always,
you will need to be nourished.
For your mind - poems and plays, words
on the pages of a thousand books:
Deuteronomy, Dante and Donne,
Hosea and Hopkins, L’Engle and Lewis.
For your spirit, mysteries and praise,
sureties and prayer. For your teeth
and tongue, real bread the color
of grain at a feast, baked and broken
fresh each day, apricots and raisins,
cheese and olive oil and honey
that live bees have brought
from the orchard. For drink
I’d pour you a wine
that remembers sun and shadow
on the hillside where it grew,
and spring water wet enough
to slake your forever thirst.

Read the full poem here.

I hope you're feeling nourished, but if you need more poetry for the soul, visit Robyn for Poetry Friday Roundup.

Freezing Rain

Tara hosts the Poetry Friday Roundup today at A Teaching Life.

I've been working on some poetry this week and wrestling with my tendency to get hung up on the facts and miss the wonder behind some of the adventure stories I am drawing from. I love the way Luci Shaw's poem explores the ideas that poets convey. 

And it's very cold here again, so this one fits the forecast for the day. 

Enjoy!

Freezing Rain by Laslovarga

Freezing Rain

by Luci Shaw


Most of the things a poet has to say
are tentative, lists of foggy clues
and suppositions-an unattested version
of the way the wind breathes at night,
an essay at atmosphere, predictions
as unreliable as weather forecasts. I stab
at the truth with a pencil, sometimes,
moved too suddenly to words by the shadings
on a cloud, or its shape, shivering
at a hint of thunder (sure that it
means something) .

But in the lines set down on paper
all suggestions become categories-
intuition or illusion edited to sound
like logic. Naked ideas turn assertive
in print, sharp, as intricate
as the edges of a woods in winter seen
against a blank sky.

Read the rest here.