Day: September 1, 2022

A wild,stark awe

At the edges of the  failing year,
Since October when the clocks were changed
The furrows, fields freeze with a wild, stark awe.

Trudging landscapes keen and winter-bare
The lines and lengths artistically arranged
By  my eye, this cold day of this year

A single bird flies high with dark winged flair
Insects disappear in sullen rage
The furrows fang the fields with snake-like airs.

Where’s the goat untroubled by a care?
Where’s the lamb they wish to be destroyed,
Unknowing of its future, as Jews were?

See the dead men rising up afar
The eye creates the image and the stage
The furrows stagger, stutter, “here’s the  war”

On such themes, imaginations crash
Aching for God’s chosen unto death
Will there be another farmers’ year?
Why do furrows feel like wailing stars?

 

 

 

Start when you’re older

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/21/your-money/finding-success-well-past-the-age-of-wunderkind.html

Life didn’t unfold quite that way. Instead of having a literary career, she married, took a teaching job and raised three children. She wrote off and on, mostly for herself. But when she retired in her late 50s, “words came tumbling out of closets and drawers, leaking from rusty faucets and reappearing as character actors,” said Ms. Shulklapper, now 80. She began sending out poems and short stories, and published her first book of poetry in 1996, when she was 60.

Since then, she has published four chapbooks, which are typically small editions of 40 pages or so, and a fifth is in progress. And in January, Guardian Angel Publishing released Ms. Shulklapper’s first children’s book, “Stuck in Bed Fred.”

“I am living beyond my dreams,” said Ms. Shulklapper, a widowed grandmother of six who lives in Boca Raton, Fla. “I feel as though it’s my baby. A long pregnancy and now its delivery, all 10 toes and fingers.”

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Conventional wisdom holds that if you do not write your “Farewell to Arms,” paint your “Starry Night,” start the next Twitter or climb Mount Everest by young adulthood, or

How to Become a Writer? Start Writing

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/style/how-to-become-a-writer.html

Adam Smith talked about the invisible hand of the market. What you’re experiencing is the invisible hand of art, the desire to pursue a life of creativity. That’s beautiful. But it’s unlikely to lead to financial security, at least in the short term, which is important to you because of your mother’s experiences. So you have to do what every artist does: find a patron. It might help to think of your accounting gig as that patron, at least for now. It will underwrite your apprenticeship, and help you uncouple your artistic aspirations from financial expectation, so you can write what you feel called to write without worrying about whether it will make money. It’s worth thinking, too, about the role you want writing to play in your life and what you’re willing to sacrifice to make that happen. I realize this doesn’t sound very romantic, but there is a practical aspect to the pursuit of our dreams. You have to ask yourself a few candid questions about what you consider essential, whether it’s a decent car or a nice place to live or enough financial security to keep anxiety at bay. The last thing you want is for writing to become a source of stress, because you’ll come to resent it as you do your current job.

CS In asking these questions, you’re undoing some of the ideas you absorbed that led you down the wrong career path, C. P. That’s exactly what you’re supposed to be doing at this moment in your life