Gardener

Suppose you were a pretty good high school baseball player in your day and have been for your whole life an avid major league baseball fan.   One ordinary spring day you go to your mail box and find a roster of this year’s All Star game.   You read it, and notice that your name is on it—along with old time players like Willie Mays and Rod Carew and current players like Mike Trout and Nelson Cruz. That’s a little bit how I felt when, a couple of days ago, I went to my mailbox and found a book of poems with the title Final Exam .   It was a book containing eighty-five poems written by sixty-five different poets, all of the poems about teachers and their students.   As I perused the index I saw names like Jane Kenyon, Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, Theodore Roethke, Carl Sandberg, William Stafford and many more, a Who’s Who of American Poetry over the last hundred years.   I saw some of my favorite poets and poems:   John Ciardi’s “On Flunking a Nice Boy out of School,” Howard Nemerov

Several weeks ago (May 8) I issued a challenge to readers to figure out the connection between my son Luke’s poem “Bee Still” and my poem “Ascension.”   Several of you responded and one of you, my boyhood friend John Rozeboom, got it mostly right.   If you read the last word of each line of my poem--in order--you will have Luke's poem.  This device--placing the words of another poet's poem (or just a line from the poem) at the end of each line of your poem--is called a Golden Shovel--invented by a friend of the great Afro-American poet Gwendolyn Brooks.  He asked friends and fellow poets to write a Golden Shovel poem to honor Brooks and got a whole book of Golden Shovel poems.  Here's another Golden Shovel poem I wrote using the words of just the last line of another of Luke's poems and placing each one, in order, at the end of each line of my poem. From "Where the Spokes Were Missing" . . . I saw this.  And some other night I'll see this  l

There are no burning marks where her hands grabbed the railroad tracks No haunted smile hovers above the eerie grass in a nearby pasture After the train had passed, after the whistle’s crazy scream, the ditches grew demons for thistles, and she is merely a clotted pool a glistening stain tomorrow a weak reflection the blooming poppies the tiger lilies making ferocious summer love under the hottest sun in the wildest field The moon will dance a wan dance tonight in her unsweetened blood and the townspeople glad with gossip will shake their heads rattle her last rare words discover hidden virtues at last in a bottom drawer Death by a dumb locomotive, DEATH BY A DUMB LOCOMOTIVE the morning headlines read and stars fall down to worship the saddest death in years and in heaven angels kiss her broken soul and the gods repair her dangling bones oh and her fisheye stare is diamond oh and her sour gray hair is gold             

One of the best things about living in a Northern climate is rounding the curve that takes us from winter to spring, from cold to warm, from brown to green, from no flowers to a land lush with flowers.   As we move from May to June, the whole land seems to be in bloom.   Few flowers are more typical of these parts and of rural life in general than the peony. (Most of the farms gardens I have seen—my mother-in-law’s in particular—have had long lines of peonies.) Every year around the second week of June, these gaudy, short-lived beauties burst on to the scene, extravagant in their fragrance, their colors--rich pink, violet, purple and white--their fragile fist-sized blossoms.   The poet Jane Kenyon calls peonies her favorite flowers, remarking that peonies “are not Protestant work-ethic flowers.   They loll about in gorgeousness; they live for art; they believe in excess.   They are not quite decent, to tell the truth.” Another contemporary New England poet, Mary Oliver writes o

"For daily gifts both large and small, For Jesus, greatest gift of all, For mercies new at morning light, We thank thee God with all our might." For ten or fifteen years now, my wife and I have been saying aloud, in unison, this little prayer before we eat our breakfast.  We love it even though we know the "with all our might" of the last line is trite and could be improved upon.  In fact we did improve it once, but one or the other of us always forgot the improvement as we were saying it, so we just went back to the old "with all our might." This morning I asked her, "Did you think of the meanings of the words as you said them?"   She said she did.   "Do you always?" I asked. "Well, no, probably not.  How about you?" "My mind was on staining the deck," I said. I suppose any of us who speak a memorized prayer regularly would have to confess that sometimes we do not consciously rea

Below are two poems, one, "Bee Still," written by my son Luke back when he was in college.  The second written by me.  (Yeah, I know, his is better.) Now here's a little challenge:  The two poems are closely related, but how?  If you can figure out the connection between the two, tell me what the connection is by emailing me at dschel@dordt.edu Don't write it as a comment, since that would give it away to others who have not yet figured it out. bee still motionless when he flies he is still in the air pure wing power he flies a million miles an hour and does not move closer to or farther from the flower                                                                 --Luke Schelhaas Ascension Heads tipped back, motionless, they had not quite believed him when he said he was going home.  A sparrow flies beneath his disappearing form and he is gone, yet is still present not in flesh but in their minds, in the words he spoke, like poem

If you are married and if you are a man, then you are a husband.   But that was not always so in the English language.   Until the 13th century, a male spouse was called a wer .   So a married couple was wer and wif .   Using wer as a designation of maleness has been retained, as far as I know, only in the word werewolf .But by the 13th century, the word husband was used to describe a married man. Husband is a combination of two words, hus , meaning house, and bondi, meaning dweller.   So we have “house dweller.”   But early on husband also meant “master of a household,” in other words, someone of sufficient means to own his house. There is another meaning for husband as well, perhaps several.   We still speak of animal husbandry, and my dictionary defines husbandry as “the careful management of domestic resources.”   Is this meaning of husband related to the male spouse who is a house dweller?   It is, and the connection is really quite clear.   If one dwells in a