The Dog Has Always Answered

Running in the forest with my border collie Nel is a regular practice that brings me great joy. I feel privileged to have her companionship - to share her exuberance, witness her intelligence and be the recipient of her immense loyalty. The forest is a special place for us. It helped heal us both.

Turkeys

Sometimes we saw shadows of gods in the trees; silenced, we went on. Sometimes the dog would bound off over the snow, into the forest. Sometimes a tree had twenty or more black turkeys in it, each seeming the size of a small black bear. We remember them for their care for their kind ever since we watched the big hen in the very top of the tree shaking load after load of apples down to the flock. Sometimes I felt I would never come out of the woods, I thought its deeper darkness might absorb me or feed me to the black turkeys and I would cry out for the dog and the dog would not answer.

           Galway Kinnell

A Found Poem

Galway Kinnell

I am no cook so rather than write about the best meal I've ever made I decided to post a poem I wrote in response to "Oatmeal" by Galway Kinnell. It is partly a Found Poem in that I have used excerpts from other writers.

 

I ate porridge for breakfast.

I made it on the stove
in the French cast iron saucepan.
I made it as I like it,
so thick the spoon stood up,
and sweetened with agave nectar.
I thought of a poet
not to have breakfast with -
Sylvia Plath -
(not after nearly three hours
of Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” last night).
I think she would
take her porridge “as a morsel, cold".
And those scolding vowels
setting my nervous dog on edge –
“You do not do, you do not do…”
If  I’ve learned
anything from the black rook
in rainy weather, it is to
“let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
without ceremony, or portent.”
Tonight I will make the seven leeks
pulled from the ground this morning,
(roots glistening silver) into a pie
and invite Mary Oliver to dinner.

Quotations used are from "Antony and Cleopatra" - Shakespeare and "Daddy" and "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" - Sylvia Plath

Found Poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning. The resulting poem can be defined as either treated: changed in a profound and systematic manner; or untreated: virtually unchanged from the order, syntax and meaning of the original.