Retirement Dream, a poem by Nancy Jane Moore

 RETIREMENT DREAM

By NANCY JANE MOORE

I’m told the Moon’s gravity is
one-sixth of that here on Earth.
Imagine time spent in a place
where there’s so little resistance.

I could do a grand-jeté there
even though I flunked out of ballet.
Or maybe a jump kick to the head
since I prefer fighting to dance.

Wouldn’t matter that the cartilage is gone.
My knees wouldn’t hurt on the Moon.
And falls wouldn’t do any damage
if my bones grow brittle and thin.

No one yet lives on the Moon.
Scientists are focused on Mars.
They’re looking to make great discoveries.
I’m seeking full life to the end.

This poem first appeared in the January 4, 2024 issue of Strange Horizons

 

Publication of this poem was made possible by a gift from Space Cowboy Books/Jean-Paul L. Garnier.

Today's Quote

 What would you love if your love could ignite

a sea full of stars on the darkest night?

Bernadette Miller

Questions to Consider When Waking

Auntie Deborah’s Autumn Writing Advice Column

More tidbits from the desk of a hard-working author.

Dear Auntie Deborah: 

Help! My characters have gone amok and won’t follow the plot of my book! What can I do to whip them into shape?

-- A Frustrated Author

Dear Frustrated:

The short (but brutal) answer is that your characters behave the way you created them. Their histories, personalities, goals, and motivations are all part of that creation. So if you — like so many of us! — find your characters resisting the demands of the plot or going off on their own adventures, it’s time to take a step back and delve deeper into what’s on the page and what’s in your creative imagination that isn’t explicit but nonetheless exerts a powerful influence over the character’s behavior.

Looking at it another way, stories can be driven by plot (a series of actions where one leads inevitably to the next) or by character (the motivations and inner conflicts dictate the character’s goals and actions). (Other possibilities include ideas — mysteries, for example — or environments — where the world itself is the focus. But your problem really pertains to the competing demands of plot versus character.)

If you’ve conceived of the story as a plotline first and foremost, of course you want interesting characters but you also want them to follow the script. One way to do this is to work backward to discover what kind of person would make those choices and have what it takes to overcome those obstacles. You cannot simply plug any character into any role and have it work (unless your characters are all “cardboard.”) “Misbehavior” = mismatched personalities and roles.

If, on the other hand, you have a compelling, fascinating character with an agenda of her own that doesn’t fit your plotline, you can always chuck the script and see where the story goes when driven by this character.

Housekeeping

Housekeeping

Three months later
I'm still vacuuming up dog fur,
Each clump a ghost of her.

Maybe this one hair
Came from the previous Shepherd,
Loyal, fierce, and strong,
Or this bit of fluff
My old tortoiseshell cat.
Gone four days later,
Content to pass on at 20 years of age
In the sure knowledge
She'd finally outlasted the damned dog.

Short Book Reviews: Prose Poetry to Savor

Mary Oliver has been one of my favorite poets since I read her poem, “The Journey,” at just the right

time in my life. I was delighted to see her new collection, “Upstream,” and I was not disappointed. Surprised a bit by the prose format, but not disappointed. The trick is to read these entries as if they were in “poetical” form, that is broken down into short lines, to be read slowly and savored, not your usual essays that you can gloss over with some version of speed-reading, grabbing for the main concept and not the subtleties of language and imagery. As with “proper” poetry, the journey is the heart of the piece, and phrases that ring in the mind like sweet bells or brash sirens can be found everywhere. The poems form a loose sort of journey centered around a cabin in the woods near a pond (somewhere in New England, I suppose), through the seasons and with digressions into the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others. I love what she has to say about them and how — especially in the cases of Emerson and Whitman — she weaves those observations into the context of the natural world that was theirs as well. Just as “The Journey” struck me in the right way at the right time, Upstream carried me along through the final illness and death of our dog. Not a big thing in the grand scheme of things, but neither is a turtle laying her eggs, a wounded gull, or building a little house by hand, or any of the other things portrayed so beautifully in Oliver’s work.

 

Wild Geese 

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes, 

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, 

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting 

over and over announcing your place 

in the family of things.

from Dream Work by Mary Oliver
published by Atlantic Monthly Press
© Mary Oliver

Lifting the Lamp, Locking the Door, by Jane Yolen

I am the daughter of an immigrant, who arrived at Ellis Island, having -- like Jane Yolen's ancestors -- survived pogroms and near-starvation, but whose life was now filled with hope. Let that same light shine for future generations!


By author and poet Jane Yolen: Listening to Donald Trump’s major speech against immigrants yesterday, I wrote this. You have my permission to share it but the © MUST be appended.

Lifting the Lamp, Locking the Door
I am the daughter, the granddaughter
of immigrants, fleeing the pogroms,
not all of my relatives
of high moral character.
But the lamp was lifted for us.

My professor husband’s Irish folk
fled the famines on coffin ships.
They counted cheats, grifters,
drunkards among them.
But the lamp was lifted for them.

And now Trump trims and dims those lamps,
threatens to turn them off at the source,
to send the Lady home to France,
an immigrant like the rest of us.
Slam the door, his followers chant.

Slam the goddamn golden door.


©2016 Jane Yolen all rights reserved, shared by permission only

Singing Kaddish

Because my friend is dying

I went on to the land she loves

            To say Kaddish for my mother,

Under fir trees, through overgrown thistles

Past the echoing barn,

The last holdouts of summer blackberries,

Following a horse trail,

            a goat trail,

            a deer trail,

            a labyrinth carved by the generations: Exodus.

A cricket told me where to rest,

There by the single daisy,

            the Queen Anne’s lace.

Thorns snatched at the fringes of my prayer shawl.

I prevailed.

We do prevail, said the twilight.

We prevail from our ashes,

            in the sea

            in the cedar grove
            on the mount

            on the mountain

at the wall

at the wailing of the day.

I traced the Aramaic letters,

            stumbling like a stranger to my own faith.

And then, as if in the beginning,

            Bereshit,

A voice rose up through me,

A song that made itself up as it went.

This memory is all I have of you.

This moment is all we have ever had of one another.

This grief is a verb.

This peace is always, always becoming what it will be.

Deborah J. Ross

17 Tishrei 5774

Delicious lines

The Spangled Pandemonium
Is missing from the zoo.
He bent the bars the barest bit,
And slithered glibly through.

from the poem by that name by Palmer Brown

Why didn't I think of "Spangled Pandemonium"? It's so wonderful!