Dear readers and subscribers,
As I write this, the old year has not quite turned; and as you read it, the new year will have arrived with all its promises, threats, questions, quandaries, and opportunities.
With its arrival, I would like to thank all my readers for their kind attention to my poetry, for the inspiration of that attention, as well as the good-hearted and thoughtful comments (thank heaven I haven’t had to deal with other sorts here so far), not to mention the encouragement of those who press the little heart in the corners of posts. And a very special note of thanks to those who have taken out paid subscriptions. Your direct support means so very much.
If there is one thing I can offer as we enter the new year, it is the hope that we can find delight in the wonders, beauty, and love around us. And that we can protect and preserve beauties that began long before us and lives not our own.
With love,
A. Christine Myers
Today’s poem is unusual for me in that it began purely as a concept. Most of my poetry contains germs of the form and the word flow in the initial stages, but this one emphatically did not. It existed in my files simply as an incipient list. Some of the words were there, but that was all.
It required a great deal of phrasing and rephrasing, re-ordering lines and sections and occasionally swapping words and then changing them back again, eliminating lines altogether and then adding a few at the last minute. It was free verse from the beginning, but other than that the structure only developed as I fleshed out the poem.
One of the reasons I enjoy writing form poetry is that the form itself often creates a flow for the words and ideas, but I couldn’t fall back on that in this case. It was the presence of a simple list that defined the poem, and happily, in the end, I feel that I have that simple list ordered and completed.
That is the story of this poem. I hope you enjoy the results.
A Note of Delight
I shall rejoice in the wonder
Of round things:
Gifts of night and day,
Of summer and winter;
Here I shall thank them for their delight.
The roundness of the full moon,
The startling orb of the evening star,
The faint splatter of the Milky Way,
And far below it
The spangle of city lights seen in the distance,
While somewhere near at hand
The yellow circles of an owl’s eyes,
Are brilliantly open but unseen.
The mighty disc of the sun,
The crimped edges of white clouds
Warming at sundown,
The halos of many-hued rainbows
Ringing the mountains,
The cream baubles of yucca blooms,
And all green leaves that display
The tiny red half-domes of ladybirds
With enameled black spots,
The prickly pears–a monument
Of plump curves after rain,
The orange globes of ripening tangerines,
And the gold drops of their fairy-sized cousins
The desert hackberries among their curl-cut leaves,
The gray quail spherical on chill mornings
With one small black knot at the tip of the crest
And a spatter of white dots at the wings,
And up in the brilliant bubble that is the sky,
The plunging green ember of a passionate hummingbird.
These things have my thanks.
I like the splatter and spatter, the celestial and the earthly commingled. thanks
I'm very grateful I discovered your Substack, Christine. Your poems, your writing, everything.
That's my own clumsy note. Happy New Year!