November 11-12: Quick Post, Poet Friend, "A Duck's Quack Doesn't Echo"

Just a short post to let you know I'm still alive.  

Had a long and productive day.  Work-work.  Schoolwork.  More work-work.  Parent/teacher conferences for my son.  Cleaning and sanitizing a church.

Then I met with a poet friend on Zoom for an hour-and-a-half.  We wrote and laughed and lifted each other up.

Saint Marty has a new poem to share tonight . . .

A Duck's Quack Doesn't Echo

by:  Martin Achatz

A duck's quack doesn't echo, scalpels through everything.  Cloud.  Pine.  Mountain.  Redwood.  Ocean.  A duck quacked over the Grand Canyon.  Six days later, a woman named Chunua heard that quack in the midnight sky of Wuhan.  

Named by her mother, because, on the day she was born, years before the coughing started, cherry blossoms filled the lungs of the trees with sweetness and beauty.  You are Chunua, her mother said, my spring flower.  And she flourished in the hothouse of her mother's arms.  

When Chunua heard that quack last night, she thought it was her mother's ghost in the bare cherry trees.  Still fevered.  Breath hard as an apricot pit.  Chunua stopped. Listened.  Not wanting to let go again.  Pressed a ghost hand to her face, felt her mother's love dancing like bees against the petals of her lips.

June 4: Poetry Workshop, Zoom, "Spring Choirs"

So, I'm a little late publishing this post.

I led my monthly poetry workshop on Zoom this evening with a group of talented, wonderful writers.  The theme this month was "Ecstatic Ekphrasis."  We spent the night responding to various works of art, visual, poetic, and musical.  I'm always astounded by the depth of thought and reflection that emerges from participants of such diverse backgrounds (retired English professors, yoga instructors, piano teachers, physical therapists, visual artists, life coaches).  It humbles and inspires me.

That is my miracle for tonight--writing with people who bring out the best in me every time.

For that, Saint Marty gives thanks.

And, to prove that I actually did some writing at the workshop myself this evening, a little sample:

Spring Choirs

by:  Martin Achatz

The spring crickets and peepers were loud as interstate traffic tonight, calling and singing to each other under gauzed light.  I had just turned off the living room lights, shut the windows, put my lunch in the fridge for tomorrow's work.  And then, I went out my front door, stood barefoot in the grass, and listened to the choirs of insect and amphibian, with an occasional dog adding tenor or baritone.  The universe at that moment, that instant, seemed all right, as if nothing could be wrong anywhere in its vast concert hall.  No discord of plague or war.  No disharmonies of famine or hatred.  Just wet grass and mud under my toes, dark fingers of lilac branches reaching up to the starry, starry keyboard of night.  And the crickets and peepers serenading moon and comets and cosmic dust.

Try it now.  Slow everything down to the life span of a cricket.  Until one breath is a minute, hour, day, month, year, decade, century, generation, era, epoch.  Until that breath spills out like a woodwind in an orchestra, playing one, true, clear note into the ear of the universe.