Saturday, May 14, 2011


Forty years ago, May, 1971, I turned in a project for a high school Humanities course at Sacred Heart in Grand Coteau, Louisiana. I recently found it, stained and crumbling, in the bottom of a trunk. I'm posting the entire project because frankly, it still moves me. There is something enduring about the poetry and the photography.

The poems are by well-known poets from the US and UK. The photos and art, best I can recall, are from 1960s issues of Smithsonian and National Geographic.

Because of the way the blogger.com templates are formatted, it'll start with the last page. Each day, I hope to post the images and poems from the previous page, in sequence. After a little over a month, all the material should be posted. The last entry will likely be the cover page. I welcome you to check it out: Humanities Project 1971.

My photos of the images aren't that well defined, but I think the original photographers - and poets - are still speaking to us.



Wednesday, May 11, 2011


A day or two after I posted the e.e. cummings poem here, I found in a trunk a similar e.e. cummings verse in a literary project that I'd done for homework in high school. I looked it up and was surprised to discover that the poem in the project was only the first half. The lines I'd posted in the blog were the second half of the same poem! So here it is below, in its complete form:


love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds


e.e. cummings

Tuesday, May 10, 2011


To the mind that is still
the whole universe surrenders.

Buddha

Monday, May 9, 2011


In yoga, there are always things some bodies can't quite do every time. Traditionally, one might substitute variations, or sometimes keep trying, and laugh. There was this one form from my yoga past that involved making a V with your legs and holding on to your feet while balancing on your rear. Maybe it has to do with center of gravity, but I almost always flopped forward or back, and the few times I got it, I wobbled without grace.

Tonight, in kundalini yoga, there was a breath exercise involving whistling. There was a series where you whistled on the breath out, and then there was whistling on the breath intake. I can't whistle worth beans. A flimsy, thin-pitched noise came when on the out whistle exercise, and nothing during the breath in whistle. How do you whistle breathing in???

But, there are gifts in every situation, and because my whistling was silent, I got to hear the other participants making a continuous sound by alternating the timing of their breathing and whistling. These rich, long notes -like from an organ, or from an exotic place in space - filled the candlelit room with its windows looking out on trees at dusk. A bird outside started to sing, with fine timing, contributing its own melodic warbling in the fainter spaces of the continuous chain. I listened in ways I couldn't listen if I had been more capable. I was the audience to something extraordinary, a spontaneous cooperation, a symphony of human and avian sound. It was beautiful.

I was looking up quotes about mothers, and found this tucked among them:


'Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children, and no theories.'

John Wilmot

Sunday, May 8, 2011


"Admit it," said Lotus. "Admit that if tomorrow all of humanity disappeared to be replaced by cats that this would only be an improvement. No traffic jams or pollution, no wars or television shows. Every ridiculous, time-wasting, misery-inducing preoccupation of your species...gone. Just like that. Doesn't it sound lovely?"

"Oh, very lovely," agreed Ed.

...Judy thought about it, and it didn't seem so bad to become a cat. Her life hadn't been going very well, and it wasn't as if she had much of a future. But things like that didn't bother cats. She wasn't sure how she felt about having a tail, but she did like tuna salad and sleeping in.

from Monster
A. Lee Martinez

Thursday, May 5, 2011



yes is a world

& in this world of

yes live

(skilfully curled)

all worlds



e.e. cummings
'love is a place'
No Thanks (1935)

Tuesday, May 3, 2011


The trees bend down and whisper,
You're one of us, don't go.



(1974)

Monday, May 2, 2011


the clothes pins
could have been wooden rabbits
on a tightrope,
or soldiers marching out to sea...

Sunday, May 1, 2011





First there were the hundreds of swallows, probably Cliff Swallows, soaring and whirring about me. They were diving down to a ditch, focused on the ditch. Their energy felt ecstatic. I wondered if they were drinking water, since it was so hot out. Then they rose, a whirling entity. A few feet ahead was a pedestrian bridge, and, they flew there. As a group, they were building a colony of nests. So then, I looked back, and from this direction I could see the small muddy peninsula in the ditch, the source of their construction supplies. Soon, the penninsula was covered again with swallows. By the hundreds, they were taking mud in their beaks, and applying it beneath the overhang of the bridge, building their sturdy structures.

(Sorry that the poor quality of these pics doesn't do justice to the experience!)