http://joannelehman.mennonite.net/My_Bookshelf en-us Sun, 22 Nov 2009 01:38:42 GMT Caravel CMS RSS App http://joannelehman.mennonite.net/My_Bookshelf:=AnotherEve.html@CB2 Another Eve

I remember Mom out there in the yard
chopping up a garter snake with a hoe and me
in a cotton dress just a bare-footed
pig-tailed kid standing beside the broom bush
that our Dad set on fire in the fall—
like Moses’ burning bush.

And Mom, who was she? Another Eve
hacking to bits that devil of a garter snake
rather than be tempted into poetry—
beating the rhythm of her fear
into the uncoiling green music.

Years later I want to reach out
my grown up hand and stop her—
say, “You should meet D.H. Lawrence’s snake
with its “yellow brown slackness”—
or Wendell Berry’s—the “leaf patterned back.”
Let me introduce you to Mary Oliver’s
“cold cauldron six months below simmer. . . “

But it’s too late to change that day.
I’ll never go back to live childhood over.
Here, in this memory, I stand forever in the yard,
mute helpless and barefoot, remembering
all—knowing what I didn’t know then;
wishing to life the things I didn’t say. Wed, 26 Oct 2005 04:07:18 GMT http://joannelehman.mennonite.net/My_Bookshelf:=PotteryMuseum.html@CB2 Pottery Museum

At the pottery museum in East Liverpool they have
all the old dishes, bowls, pitchers, soup tureens and platters—
even a green four-foot china trophy honoring
the fastest flying carrier pigeon.

Bowls embellished with gold, stamped on the
bottom with trademarks; Homer Laughlin China Company,
or Vodreys, Rockingham.  Everyone back then
knew clay and practiced shaping it into a vessel—

copies of European china—the voices these pieces had.
Here they gather on glass shelves—
none holding water or dough or fine ladies’ calling cards,
Sunday dinner.  A life still, in their emptiness.

Even the equipment used to make them remains--
this old iron vise to flatten a dozen hanging
flaps of clay, squeezing water out, preparing a
soggy malleable slab.  Clay, waiting to become

yellow ware, white ware, Grandma’s wedding dishes
crazed with advanced age—gold-glazed rims,
and the lacy, long-extinct fanciful lotus-wear,
a revelation of what all clay might have been. Wed, 26 Oct 2005 04:08:42 GMT http://joannelehman.mennonite.net/My_Bookshelf:=ListenToYourLife.html@CB2 Listen To Your Life

Listen to your life.
It will speak from
empty sidewalks, whispered
droplets on the asphalt
after you’ve left the singing children
in the school auditorium.

Listen to your life
in the echo
bouncing back to you from the eyes
of the stranger
sitting in the front row.

Listen to your life in the
unnamed dreams rising
in rumpled softness.  Pull
your life out of the dry grass
at the edge of November
and carry it on your body
like a bead necklace.

Listen to your life. It is
the silent house, the dark
afternoon when you are still
at your desk, a chance
meeting on a street corner,
the swans on the pond
you passed by yesterday. Wed, 26 Oct 2005 04:09:55 GMT