Spirits In Peace Blog

Almost anyone who loves literature is familiar with the famous lines by William Wordsworth:

“It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration…; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity…” *

The past couple of evenings have been just like that here, an unusual occurrence in this maritime climate. Usually the fog rolls in, the wind picks up, or it just plain becomes too chilly to sit outside and enjoy the later part of the evening. But of late, the days have been uncomfortably hot, while dusk has been pure perfection.

After almost a month of seemingly incessant rains, we are finally getting a bit of summer, bitter-sweet, of course, as it will all end soon and there will be a nip in the night air. It is wonderful to be outside and see, hear, and even smell the exuberant enjoyment others are taking in this late start to a very abbreviated summer. The sound of laughter on nearby decks, the whiff of a barbeque, and the shrieking and splashing of children in a swimming pool are sheer delight.

Photography Courtesy Of BigFoto

The sunsets have been spectacular, the stars, well, stellar, and my poetic imagination took flight as last evening’s sky became streaked with ever-changing pinkish clouds. This is the result:

August Mandolin

Where have you gone, mid-summer mandolin?
Have you slid smoothly into saxophone or falter-fainted
into flute? Have you vanished just to reappear
as vapour-violin, strings puce-plucked in evening sky,
frets a faded rose? Have you trickled into piccolo,
your tune of paltry pitch, transformed into tuba,
or swelled to sousaphone? Or is your symphony
such sound as stirs my sun-starved heart,
your August grandeur so august as to mystify my soul?

Carol Knepper ©2009

* from the Petrarchan sonnet “It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free” by William Wordsworth

When it’s a prose poem, of course!

Not all poetry arrives in neat, tidy stanzas. Sometimes a poem arrives almost as prose, but is distinguished from that by still retaining poetic characteristics and language usage. Kahlil Gibran wrote prose poems, for example, as in the famed “The Prophet.”

Recently, as piece arrived in that format, basically requiring almost no editing other than the usual correcting of typos. When that happens, a poet knows the piece is in some way special - a gift from the universe, and the writing is often spiritual in theme or somehow related to spirituality.

Nature is always a great source of inspiration for me, and my muse is often most generous on a balmy day. After this summer’s incessant rains, the past couple of days have been sunny yet with a haze in the distance due to my proximity to rivers and the bay. Just the sort of weather when the Muse often visits quite spontaneously.

Here, then, is the prose poem that chose me as its author just yesterday.

The Hazy Day of Great Abundance

On certain summer days, when the southerly breezes off the bay brought a torrid heat accompanied by gentle mists in the distance, her imagination took flight as it rarely did in any other season. She hardly experienced epiphanies in winter, for example, her soul being too congested with the back-breaking labour of ice and snow for the whisperings of the universe to enter. But on this particularly hot day, with its incipient fog, she began to note stirrings along the lines of abundance and its relationship to addiction.

Let it be said that over the course of her three-score and some-odd years, she had come in touch with the usual assortment of addicts. When she was young, she encountered some who seemed unable to exist without a drug-induced high, and eventually the inevitable alcoholic or two made an appearance. Many of her female friends seemed obsessed with weight and food; some were overly concerned with relationships. And more recently, as face-to-face conversations were replaced with electronic chat rooms and dating sites, she came to the conclusion that many were hooked on these forums as well.

And thus, on this hot and hazy day, came to her a rather obvious realization: that which we feel we are lacking, we crave. The person lacking in human warmth and communication becomes addicted to chats; those lacking the high of euphoria become hooked on drugs, alcohol, and occasionally exercise. Persons who believe themselves unloved become love addicts, and those who perceive themselves as unseen and unheard crave attention. The second fiddle craves the praise normally awarded first violin. A dieter, believing herself to be lacking food, craves more of it, quite a self-defeating pattern, and one which she herself had often endured.

Realizing the perception of abundance to be the root of all contentment, as the mists rolled in off the surrounding rivers and bay, she said to herself in an unabashed manner, “I have enough.”

And this had been the gift brought in by the heat and humidity, of which there was most assuredly an abundance on this particular day…