Laureen van Lierop: poetry

Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Friday, December 6, 2013

St. Nicholaas Naacht 2013

A beautiful lady named Laureen

Was a princess but now she's a Queen

She's a writer, an artist, an outstanding fartist

And because she's Dutch,

All her baseboards are clean.

by Steve for Laureen to celebrate St. Nicholaas Day

Monday, June 17, 2013

Local Poetry in Halifax

An espaliered fruit tree at Annapolis Royal Botanical Garden, Nova Scotia

Well, here's something new to me. I heard about this a year ago, but last week a hard copy of a poetry journal was placed in my hands and voila!

Open Heart Farming, The Second Seeding, Vol 2. is now available at
http://www.ohforgery.com/

Open Heart's mandate is simple, yet powerful. It is an annual journal of poems on food and farming by Nova Scotians. It is published by Open Heart Forgery, Halifax's grass roots poetry journal. Each month there is a free, downloadable collection and they ask you to share it with others.

Here we have a different kind of garden, local effort, local art, inspired by local greens or not, if there's a drought. It is modest, humble and perfectly beautiful.

There is an annual Anthology, available at Bookmark for $10 or you can order it online (I think)
http://ohforgery.com/OHFanthology.html

I'd like to share with you two poems, one by a Quaker Friend, Sylvia Mangalam and the other because I like it. Of course, I like Sylvia's as well, but there is the Quaker connection that is always fun to toss out.

Fall Rite by Sylvia Mangalam

The Kentucky Blue bean swelled
Bigger than they should.
Tired of the garden,
I picked them anyway.

It's a sort of rite
This anticlimatic harvest
Reaching for the high fat ones,
Rounded over full seeds.

Gathering up the dry corn--
What can I do with this?
The last green tomatoes,
Last marjoram sprigs--

This genuflecting gleaning
Respects all the work here
Of God, of worms, of me.

And this one by Jaywant (Joe) Patil

Fruitless Tree (inspired by Luke 13:6-9)
The farmer about to chop down the tree
which had been fruitless for year three.
Give me another chance begged the tree.
I will be fruitful for sure next year,
if you fertilize and dig around me this year.
Everyone deserves a second chance sire.

These two poems have a spiritual dimension, but there are lots of plain old secular poems as well. One dedicated to hops, another to alfalfa, another to saltwater.

Monday, January 7, 2013

December photo and poem and ....

Still stunned here at home. Doc says the whiplash and concussion are still present and to not use the computer, do any lifting, bending, moving the neck, and the dishes. Naturally, after a good nap, here I am trying to get the blog kept up. And I'm lying about the dishes.... I'm a bit house bound.

Yup, December's photo and poem are a bit late, not surprisingly. This is the last of the images I'll be doing for a while, because we did not make a calendar for 2013. Seems only immediate family use it so we are not going to be sending any out to others this year. Kind of sad, but then it may become a chance to do something different with those images.

Yesterday the holly bush was looking lovely against a grey sky with snow gently adorning its branches. I've been told a couple of times, if I see something, get out and shoot it. I was tired and in jammies, thought it might be there today, but it snowed overnight and the bush is bent over with snow. Looking more irritated than lovely.

Most of the blogs I follow are doing a wrap up of goals met in 2012 (I didn't set any so I can say I was successful at meeting all of mine) and setting up goals for 2013. That's the sort of thing I used to love doing, writing up a list, any kind of a list and just jittering along until I could strike something off any one of my many lists. I was trolling through a sketch book from a couple of years ago, looking for an original image I wanted to revist, when I came across a very detailed list, with lines connecting things to each other, circles making groups and a few explanation marks hovering over everything. In magic marker I had written, "Stop Oppressing Yourself"

It seemed to work. Perhaps it is something that appeals to you as well?

And Finally.....