A Poem I found While Cleaning Out a Large Cardboard Box

And God, the mast of my ship:
tall, thick, true, leads me straight
on, by eye, to the North Star,
His Son by mouth, the allelujah
of starboard! And by dream,
pulling rope hand over hand
in a measurement of heaven,
I reach into my pocket of infinity
and pull out an anchor.

c. 2009 Robin Rule
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Juliet, I realize this might not be yr spiritual path , but I want to ask you and anyone else, a question from a purely literary position: After looking at the poem that I wrote dec 2, 2007, I want to change it to "...I reach into my pocket of infinity..." because my relationship with the Holy Ghost is forever (since I was eight), but is
"I reach into a pocket of infinity and pull out an anchor..." (I left it "an", so you could see how I was originally thinking/feeling when I wrote this poem, but I am an intense editor, re-drafter and like to know in the end, that the poem is as perfect as i can make it. What say you, matey?

juliet's purple poem

dear juliet, i didn't know where to put a comment, but nevertheless, i felt the poem deserved its own blog. You made it come alive. when i saw the assignment, i groaned. I didn't think it could be done without being silly, but you even through in the ecology there which i'm a sucker for. bravo!Robin

How Birds Are Made When God Is Busy

How bright the gates look from the great inside;
how tall from out beyond the world.
We children play, then sleep
and in our sleep, we dream.
We sew the feathers real birds leave behind
to the shoulders of our shirts;
rub mud into our glorious faces;
and sing the sun hello.
We tell each other all our dreams
and comfort those who’d none.
This is how birds make themselves,
if they haven’t come from eggs.

All That White Stuff

It's snowing for the first time this year! Now that I live almost in town, snow has returned to romance. When living in the cabin a half an hour from town down and through a muddy pot-hole-y road all slippery and slide-y, I am so glad to be loving snow again as when I first moved to my String Creek cabin when I was a teen. At first, it was frightening, being all alone if I had to do something outside, because I knew if I slipped and fell and broke something, I could easily be snowed over and smothered with a white blanket.
Sitting next to the fire with a hot cup of tea, reading and even watching the snow fall from a window was far sweeter; but firewood had to be brought in and when I raised one goat for milk, she had to be fed and brought in, so these chores had to be started the moment I saw the first flurry of snow and finished definately before dark if it were an afternoon storm. Then I would run inside to load up the wood stove and fill the kettle up with more water. (I always kept water in it when there were a fire, so that humidity filled the air.)

Now, with this in-town snow, there was little to do. My pipes were long ago wrapped. Any plants that were delicate had long ago died back until next spring. Now it was simply time to enjoy all this white stuff.

I lie in bed and slipped the glass curtains to one side (which I thought looked like snow the way I had arranged four layers of them and crocheted lace pieces tacked to the wooden part at the top of the window itself when I first moved into the caboose) and admired the way the snow had fallen on the heads of my stone girls and filled their baskets and some had fallen in the criss-crossed arms of St. Francis and from a distance looked like he was cradling a lamb. It was a holy card in assemblage.
I have been in bed all day and watched the sky grow dark until I thought it was going to rain, but the thermometer kept dropping and dropping until I suspected it was going to snow and it is.

I love weather. I love to watch the garden transform itself with the changing of the seasons. Except now, I am so lonely. I couldn't even go to church this morning. I had sat up all evening on Saturday at the art opening and I think the metal chair did my spine in. I hope by tomorrow I can walk. When it hurts this much and even the morphine doesn't help, I am such a crybaby. Oh, it's all inside. I'm silent, but the pain is like snow on the hands for too long. And now it's dark and I can't see the lovely white stuff lying on the roses and the bricks, so I think I'll close.