by Richard Subber | Oct 13, 2021 | Joys of reading, Language, My poetry, Poetry, Reflections
“…the hush of autumn is danse minuet…”
Walk this way
The familiar path invites me, always in a new way.
I forget so much each time I turn for home.
Today this wood is a full mystery again,
full canopy shelters full magic for the wanderer,
warms an alchemy in me, my steps and pace precess,
becoming dance, my breath becoming breeze,
my sight becoming rays brightening all
that stretches for sun in the umbra moving with me, pausing with me.
The routine of life is a guise for the wonder of growth
and the resurging energy to sprout anew in mouldy places.
The small deaths are symbiotic in so many ways,
the round of living and dying is danse macabre for insect, bird and beast.
The gush of spring is a greening tarantella,
all speed, all blossom, all scented marvel—
the hush of autumn is danse minuet,
all languor, all afterlife of color, all bending toward earth.
I know my place, my purpose, my delight.
I am another life in this calm living forest.
I do not take root, I am not a caretaker, I do not give or take life,
I do not die and rise again in the turn of seasons.
I am a walker, a watcher, a singer of forest songs.
August 11, 2015
That day the buzz in the forest invited me to sing along.
It didn’t seem surprising that I knew so many of the words.
In my mind, at least, I was dancing to the cascade of tunes, turning from left to right
and back again to shoot those brightening rays…
thus, I learned this poem of nature.
My poem “Walk this way” was published January 23, 2018, in my second collection of 47 poems, Seeing far: Selected poems. You can buy it on Amazon (paperback and Kindle), or get it free in Kindle Unlimited, search for “Richard Carl Subber”
“Walk this way” was published in the Spring/Summer 2017 issue of the Aurorean.
“Walk this way” was published (October 2017) in The Four Elements: Effects and Influences, an anthology by PoCo Publications (Poets Collective), available in paperback on Amazon, click here
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
Book review: Lord of the Flies
Never more relevant…
by William Golding
My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Oct 4, 2021 | Human Nature, Reflections, Tidbits
it takes smarts to deal with change…
“It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility
is the compensation for change, danger and trouble.
An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment
is a perfect mechanism.
Nature never appeals to intelligence
until habit and instinct are useless.
There is no intelligence where there is no change
and no need of change.
Only those animals partake of intelligence
that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.”
Spoken by the Time Traveler in The Time Machine
by Herbert George (H. G.) Wells (1866-1946
New York: Penguin Books, 1895 (repr. 2005)
pp. 78-79
I notice that there is no mention of love and joy and imagination.
I notice that contented animals don’t write poems.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Jul 31, 2021 | My poetry, Poetry, Reflections
in the world of blue water…
next time, ignore all the noise of the ferry passage…
More or less…
The blue water spreads my view
from here to the far edges.
An exceptional hugeness,
such a great nothing,
a silent marvel of rhythms,
such expanded absence
of nothing to point at…
Such chilling restraint on my imagination,
and yet I scan, from left to right and back—
it takes a long time to look at
so much of nothing much.
At sea near Hyannis, MA
August 24, 2018
My poem “More or less…” was published in my third collection of 64 poems, In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears. You can buy it on Amazon (paperback and Kindle), or get it free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Blithedale Romance
by Nathaniel Hawthorne, not really his best…
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In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | Jul 30, 2021 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Reflections
Learn to think about being old…
Book review:
Old Friends
by Tracy Kidder (b1945)
Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993
352 pages
Tracy Kidder is an old friend, and I welcome any opportunity to read something he wrote. There is vigor and bitter reality and calm truth and pulsing delight in his stories.
Whatever your age, try Old Friends. You’re going to be someone’s old friend, sooner or later. You can learn to think about how it’s going to be.
Like Kidder’s other books, Old Friends is in its own category. Nevertheless, it has themes you’ll find in his other books. It contains some kinds of the loneliness expressed in Strength in What Remains (2009), and it echoes some of the humanity that pervades Among Schoolchildren (1989).
You’ll be surprised as you get to know Lou and Joe and the others.
They’re like people you already know, and like real people you’re going to get to know.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
Mary Jane Oliver, R. I. P.
She wrote so many of the right words…
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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Dec 22, 2020 | Human Nature, Reflections, Theater and play reviews, Tidbits
Guess who wasn’t coming to dinner at your house in 1967…
Well, if you grew up in a white family, it’s a pretty good bet that a handsome black guy—a doctor!—wasn’t planning on sitting down to dinner and telling you he planned to marry your daughter.
That’s the reality that was.
So, about 50 years ago, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton and Beah Richards and Roy Glenn got crazy in Hollywood and filmed Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It was a blockbuster. Houghton (daughter) and Poitier (doctor) played lovely young people who were in love, and everybody got with the program by the end of the movie, and they lived happily ever after. (There were Oscars, click here).
It’s a poignant and dramatically dynamic movie. Every character throws firecrackers at least a couple times, and everybody catches the firecrackers with high art and deftly normalized social criticism and passionate declarations about the right thing.
I’ve watched it several times. For me, it doesn’t get old. I like to live in the world with people who say “If you love somebody, you gotta love somebody, so go ahead and do it.”
The movie turned a lot of heads, but I’m guessing it didn’t change a whole lot of minds.
….and don’t forget that the last recorded lynching of a black man (Michael Donald) in America was near Mobile, Alabama, in 1981.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Blithedale Romance
by Nathaniel Hawthorne, not his best…
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Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Oct 30, 2020 | Language, My poetry, Poetry, Reflections
Really, you had to be there…
(my new poem)
Debut
Saucy streaks in brightened sky at dawn
frame enlightened trees on yonder sward.
The arching hues quickly pale
to common blues,
and slide below still darkened earth,
beneath the rim that hides
the great star of day.
March 13, 2016
I was on the road, alone, early, heading downhill, cool in the morning, I was thinking about breakfast…a single break in the tree line offered one glimpse of the hot sauce smeared across the lightening skyline. I didn’t have to stop to make any notes for a new poem. I mentioned everything to my friend at breakfast. The vitality of it was still quivering in my mind when I wrote this little bit later that day. Call it a nature poem. Or call it a love poem, if you’re in love with beauty.
Book review: Cleopatra: A Life
…don’t even think about Gordon Gekko…
click here
My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
