| An Interview with Penny Harter |
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| by Colin Stewart Jones | ||||||
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Colin: Hello Penny, and welcome to the pages of Notes from the Gean. Your awards and accomplishments are many: you are a poet and writer of fiction and an editor, a former president of the Haiku Society of America, a writer in residence, a poetry workshop leader and a professional educator. From your answers to Curtis Dunlap’s ‘Three Questions’ on his Blogging Along Tobacco Road site, I see that you believe poetry is an act of seeing first and foremost—a position I fully agree with. Your résumé also shows a strong commitment to enabling young people to develop their poetic potential. Therefore, my first question for you is; do you have to teach children to ‘see’ or is it natural for them and if you do have to teach them to see how do you go about it so that they get that ‘click in the gut’. Penny: Hi Colin. Thank you for your kind words about my awards and accomplishments—and for looking back at my answers on Curtis Dunlap's blog. Regarding your question about whether we have to teach children to "see" or whether it's natural for them: I think children naturally "see". I remember as a young child spending hours lying on my stomach in the grass watching the activity of an ant hill, or hollowing out snow from under an ice crust so I could look up at the sky through it. And more . . . . What has to be emphasized, I think, is affirming with children of all ages how wonderful it is to see that way . . . to take the time to really see what's around us on this old planet, both in the natural world and the lives of those who share it with us—all the creatures, including ourselves. One of the challenges today with respect to children (and all of us) and seeing is that more and more they are seeing a virtual world. Both my grandkids are playing games on the wii, glued to their DSL or i-pads, tv, etc. And particularly in urban and suburban areas, parents are less often willing to let their children roam freely, as I was able to do day after day in the woods of my childhood. This is understandable, given our increasing media-driven knowledge of predatory behavior focused on children (don't know whether it's also a geometrically increasing incidence of predatory behavior), but because of both our technology and heightened concern, we pay a price. When I go into the schools, I talk with the kids about the role of technology / media taking time away from seeing the real world. I then read them lots of haiku and/or nature poems, some by kids, some by adults—and I do this from primary grades up. We stop and talk about several, about what we saw in our imaginations as we heard these, and then I ask what they've seen in real life that relates to any of the ones I've read. We go from there. I do point out that we notice things because they are different from usual, startle us because they are very beautiful—or disturbing, or connect two things in new ways. But I also say that even the most ordinary thing can become revelatory if we spend enough time with it, really looking at it, touching it, listening to it—using all our senses appropriate to the experience. I sometimes bring in a basket of all kinds of natural objects, have the kids blindly reach in and choose one, and then spend time exploring it before writing. They can just describe it, or pretend it is something else—but always using sensory images. I guess the bottom line is that if I share how I "see" with them, they catch it – absorb it unconsciously, get it by osmosis. And of course, many of them are already there, or have been there when younger, and just need to be reminded that they can still see the world that way. An example I sometimes use is my poem "Tulip" from my book Turtle Blessing (La Alameda Press, 1998):
Tulip I watched its first green push through bare dirt, where the builders had dropped boards, shingles, plaster— killing everything. I could not recall what grew there, what returned each spring, but the leaves looked tulip, and one morning it arrived, a scarlet slash against the aluminum siding. Mornings, on the way to my car, I bow to the still bell of its closed petals; evenings it greets me, light ringing at the end of my driveway. Sometimes I kneel to stare into the yellow throat, count the black tongues, stroke the firm red mouth. It opens and closes my days. It has made me weak with love, this god I didn't know I needed. Or, any number of haiku. Here are some of mine, all previously published: evening rain— I braid my hair into the dark For the above, I ask them what the difference in the feeling and meaning of the poem would be if I'd written "in the dark" instead of "into the dark." They "get" it. Here are a few more I've used: do I gather peonies or do they gather me— the summer garden all night against my window’s frost rose thorns migrating butterflies cover the names— war memorial Penny: I love that Shaw quote. So true! With adults, the first step is to share some of my own haibun and talk about the circumstances of my writing them—emphasizing that the subjects can be totally varied. I also stress, with examples, that not only can the subjects be varied, but also the lengths of a haibun vary, from one or a couple of sentences to a page, and from including one haiku to several—either framing the piece or interspersed between the prose paragraphs. And I point out that the haibun is very much akin to the prose-poem—that economy of language and use of specific images are both very important. For me, the haiku need to move away from the central narrative but still relate. Therefore, I talk about the fact that although in some successful haibun, the haiku is closer to the narrative, perhaps even on the same subject—either focusing on a moment mentioned earlier or summarizing the overall theme—I think it's better if the haiku can move away, "link but shift" so that integrating it into the prose opens up ripples of association, expanding the meaning. I think the most important thing, rather than going on at length about what a haibun is and does, is to read a number of examples, both of my own and other haibun, and then turn them loose to write. As a new writer of haibun, I would most hope to learn how haiku relate to the prose, and, as I said in my piece for Wingbeats, that one can take narrative poems and/or prose-poems and transform them by turning them into haibun.
Penny: I think haiku is beginning to matter to mainstream publishers and poets. Bill and I gave a presentation on that very subject at the HNA held in Port Townsend in 2005. Currently several top mainstream poets like Paul Muldoon, Billy Collins, Sonia Sanchez, Ted Kooser (& Jim Harrison) in their collaborative book Braided Creek, and others whom I can't remember right now, have been exploring their 'versions' of haiku. I know that some in the haiku community don't consider what they write to be haiku, but these poets do. So not only is haiku beginning to matter to mainstream publisher and poets, but also it is shape-shifting somewhat as it does so. And yes, the fact that both my essay and another by Aimee Nezhukamatathil on haibun as travel writing are featured in Wingbeats underscores the growing popularity of haiku and related genres in the mainstream. I think haibun, in particular, is gaining more of an audience, and more and more poets are starting to write in the genre. Penny: I do advocate "genre" over form, as did Bill. I think of haiku, senyru, and haibun as being defined more by content and style than by a fixed form. Haiku and senyru can range from one to three lines for me, and I feel the format for haibun is pretty wide open—though it must contain at least one haiku. I do recognize the usual requirement of five lines for tanka, and I was immersed in renku and its formal requirements both from working with Bill and with two Japanese renku masters. Anyway, on to the main gist of your question: Bill was, indeed, a kind and gentle man, and a very generous one in his giving to the worldwide haiku community. When we first met, he was continually corresponding with poets all over the world by postal mail, sending out many typewritten letters (keeping carbon copies) , and he continued to involve himself in worldwide haiku and related genres even more so once we got onto the internet. He was kind and gentle, but he also could be quite assertive when talking about something that he believed in—such as affirming the importance of season words in haiku and renku, and arguing the idea that Zen consciousness had anything major to do with haiku, to mention just two examples. Sometimes the HSA meetings in the early days became quite contentious, and Bill was in the thick of it, as were others, of course. That said, he was one of the most loving people I've ever known. Our dynamic as "two writers who share a marriage in both the personal and professional sense" was absolutely mutually supportive—and wonderful. Professionally, we were each other's muses, sounding boards, in-house editors & critics, co-writers, and more. I often helped him with translations, once he got a basic English version of a piece in Japanese or some other language. We showed each other first drafts of our free verse (longer) poems and haiku. I still remember his saying about the occasional poem I excitedly put in front of him, "That's not vintage Harter!" and he was inevitably right. But he was also a fierce advocate of my work when he thought it good, as was I of his. We shared an office once we moved back to NJ from Santa Fe (in 2002), and often we'd read aloud to the other what we were working on, as we were writing it. He worked for a number of years as the administrator of the Union County Office of Cultural and Heritage Affairs (Elizabeth, NJ), but left that to work on The Haiku Handbook. I taught full time high school English during those years, and also typed up a lot of the first drafts of the Handbook—as well as helped write some of it with him. And after we moved to Santa Fe in 1991, I taught at Santa Fe Preparatory School while he worked various full and part time jobs, while pulling together Haiku World and The Haiku Seasons. Eventually, after a bout with colon cancer (they got it all, and he had mild "insurance" chemo for 6 months) he stopped full time work. I wanted Bill to be free to finish those very important books—and because I am prolific, I was able to continue with my own writing career while teaching full time.
Over the years, we wrote renku together and led renku / renga workshops together. We collaborated on presentations. We did readings together. We loved sharing our varied impressions after attending a day at a conference or some other poetry event. No matter what we were involved in, from working with kids in the Poets-in-the-Schools program to leading adult writing workshops, we used to say, "You may hire one of us but you get both of us." One of my regrets, though, is that his passion (and talent) for being the critic / editor / translator / and contributor to haiku-at-large constantly tugged him away from his strong desire to write his own poems. And after he died, I found in various of his notebooks and loose papers a number of fine longer poems he'd never gotten around to showing me, and some fine haiku, too. He was always too busy doing his other work. After we moved back to NJ during the summer of 2002, I taught at Oak Knoll School for the Holy Child, a private parochial high school in Summit where we lived, until retiring in 2005, while Bill worked at home—and supported me hugely by taking on, between December 2002 and October 2003, the enormous task of helping me deal long-distance with my mother's hospitalization and death on 2/2/93. At that time, my parents and younger sister were both living in Texas, and Mother died seven weeks after an accident caused by my father driving with Alzheimer's into the back of a stopped 18-wheeler on a Texas access road. During those very challenging months—which were during my first year teaching in a new school—Bill spent hours on the phone each day trying to get my very resistant father the care he needed. I had had to get long distance emergency guardianship, and with my sister's help, we finally got him into a facility. Dad died in October, 2003. I could never have made it through all that without Bill's constant help, so we continually gave back and forth to one another in all sorts of ways. Personally—and much of the professional detailed above is also personal—people would say that when we walked into a room, our love for each other, or our visible connection with one another, was such that they "knew what was possible though they hadn't had it, themselves." We shared serious conversations about lots of things, and we also laughed together, often. We had fun! The only problem that cropped up now and then during our marriage was that Bill was so busy doing "his work" that household responsibilities sometimes got neglected, and he would take on so many projects—full of enthusiasm and convinced he could do them all—that some went by the wayside, unfinished. Perhaps he somehow knew his time with us would be limited. I miss him dearly; it will have been three years on October 11th, but I am doing well and moving on in both my personal and professional lives. And I often feel him cheering me on from the other side . . . but that's another story. I need no mirror to show me your death, Every day I translate your last breath. Penny: Thanks, Colin, for mentioning my poem "In the ICU". It also appears in Recycling Starlight (Mountains and Rivers Press, Eugene, Oregon. Ce Rosenow, editor. 2010), a chapbook of poems processing my journey through grief into some measure of healing—poems written during the eighteen months after Bill died. I might submit a few of Bill's poems—have already sent some of his unpublished haiku out now and then to people requesting his work for one purpose or another. As for submitting the longer poems I found—I'll have to re-find them first. There are still files, both mine and what I saved of his, that I need to sort through since my move down to the southern NJ shore area in January of 2009. There are two I have in mind that, if I find them, I'll send them on to you. Both incorporate portions of translated haiku from, I think, Issa. Will double check that.
As for Bill's "death poem": You may have seen in Frogpond, in the issue that had a memorial for Bill, the haibun he wrote only 8 days before he died, and only three days before he went into the ICU. He wrote it on a yellow pad, and the pad didn't go down with his things when he got moved to ICU; however, the wonderful nurses searched the floor and found it. Bill was so happy that it reappeared! He and I had a conversation about its content the morning of the day he died. He told me he wanted me to type it up in three different ways: the professional part (which appeared in FP), the personal paragraphs (only a few more after that), and then the whole. That was Bill—professionally committed to seeing it done right even just hours before he died. After we settled all that, and after he spoke about the memorial celebrations of his life that he wanted for both his haiku and longer poems (specifying their nature, when / where, and whom he wanted to read his longer poems)—and after we shared personal words, I guess he felt all was in place, and he died peacefully mid-afternoon. Here's the text of his last writing: Bill’s last personal writing, a haibun, written Friday, October 3rd, 2008, eight days before he died. Well-Bucket Nightfall, or New Day? We don’t always know about it while we’re going through life’s major switch points. For this brief essay, I want to use the Japanese season word “well-bucket nightfall” (tsurube-otoshi) as a sort of anti-theme. The theme is set in October, when dusk seems to swoop down suddenly on a world only a few minutes ago filled with the end of a busy day’s activities. The image itself, now certainly metaphorical for most Japanese (and probably all haiku poets!), comes from agrarian village life, where a people drew water from their wells to prepare for evenings’ activities. One moment, the bucket is there on top. The next, plunged into darkness. While I do not have this same rural experience—my grandmother’s well responded to a hand-pump in her kitchen—I love the remembered taste of that sweet well water from my early childhood, how great it tasted after the exertion of the pump. And later, the taste of a spring we found on a nearby hillside after the water in the well went bad. Well, a small flight from rural Japan to rural Connecticut, such as the mind of an old man might make. Is this, then, to be the journal of my own well-bucket nightfall, when my own life will be snuffed out in a few weeks’ time? Or the journal of a dark night to a bright new day? I have lived a long and productive life, to my own understanding, lived much of it on my own terms, much on the pure dumb luck of some accidental word or event no one could have predicted. Who could know that a single verse spoken in an endless year of USAF Japanese vocabulary drills relating to parts of weapons and flying airplanes would lead to a life-long interest in Japanese poetry that has sustained me through all the rest. smell of bile . . . I waken to October after glow October afterglow . . . will my lucky star shine tonight? hospital window in the clear dawn sky one full moon Penny: It was my pleasure to share Bill's final written work with you. He would be pleased to be having it published again. Before I officially discovered haiku—though I vaguely knew what it was—I had begun writing free verse (longer poems—but not "long"—just longer than haiku or tanka) and some rhyming poems in the 1960s. Then I found and bought one of the Peter Pauper Press books of haiku in a local bookstore. I was still counting syllables in those days, and had started teaching high school English—though I was not having my students write haiku, or any poetry to speak of, then. From the beginning, my poems used images, often of the natural world. In the mid-1970s, I met Bill and other haiku poets like Elizabeth Searle Lamb, and started attending HSA meetings in New York City. Of course, I then became much more aware of what contemporary haiku in English were—the variety out there. From that time on, I not only wrote haiku (Bill used to say I learned it by osmosis—intuitively), but also found that the "cut" or "turn" in haiku probably contributed to my coming to a place in my other poetry where I told myself it wasn't enough to create an image—told myself that the poem had to "turn a corner" and go somewhere! People had already commented that they were struck by the way my poems ended, startling them sometimes, and I wanted to deliberately do that more often in my longer work. But as it turned out, I didn't have to try; it just began to happen more often. My other writing outside of the haiku genres has consisted of adult free verse; some formal verse now and then; prose-poems; whimsical rhyming poems for children (in The Beastie Book); mini-stories and short stories (have published more than twenty short stories over the years); personal essays and the occasional critical essay or book review; articles related to writing and/or teaching writing, many of which appear in various Teachers & Writers Collaborative books; and even a novel, all 550 typewritten pages of which are languishing in a file drawer—written in my mid-thirties before word-processing entered my life. I'd like to give a few examples that show the variety of things I write. I'll even include a poem from The Beastie Book for all of us who are still children inside—obviously, the child in me wrote it. So, after each, I'll cite the book or journal it was published in. If there's no credit, it's probably new and not yet published.
I think I'll open with the poem for the letter "U" from The Beastie Book. If readers are interested, they can get the alphabestiary of imaginary creatures on amazon.com or b&n.com. The wonderful artist, Alexandra Miller, has hidden each letter in each of her brilliant, full-page illustrations. amazon.com does have a couple of the illustrations for readers to see, along with the accompanying poems, in their "look inside" feature. This one is, among other things, about sharing: Umfillumpticus The Umfillumpticus can fly above the summer trees. She spreads her sunlit scarlet wings and drifts upon the breeze. But she’s very scared of lightning, and thunder makes her jumpy. She doesn’t even like the rain because it makes her grumpy. So when a sudden thunderstorm with lightning rumbles by, she goes back to her deepest nest and covers both her eyes. If you should find her in a tree, hiding from the thunder, get your umbrella from the porch and please invite her under. This one I wrote while at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) while in residence there last January. It affirms my feeling that all is interconnected, and my commitment to the Earth: Mid-January Dream of the World Without Us On the greening grass, two scarlet leaves, fused by a smudge of leaf-mold at center, glisten with a trace of last night’s rain. In the cerulean sky, more clear than we remember, the sun bathes the Earth—announcing nearby star, provider of all life. We were negligent—foolish not to contemplate the heavens more often, or cherish fallen leaves in the ready chalice of our palms. Now a skein of blackbirds wheels and wheels far above the naked trees—a single bird-mind flinging it against the plum horizon. And water cycles through the clouds and seas, feeding forest life and fallow fields, carving canyons in ancestral hills. These have all endured, though we are done— these, and whatever else survived our blind meddling in their communal lives; survived our hubris in believing we alone were destined to inherit the Earth and the fullness thereof— we who now have lost the primordial garden. Here are two more. The first, from Recycling Starlight, I wrote to honor the first anniversary of Bill's death—though I wrote it probably at about the 16-month mark. And the second, also from Recycling Starlight, is a sonnet—once in a while I do write "formal" verse. By the River This is the final day of years of sweetness. Petrarch You have been gone a year. The taste of you has stayed with me these twelve months, your honeyed warmth lingering on my limbs. Today, I sit on a floating dock by the river, listening to the faint hum of insects as I enter a rippling that flows from a center I have yet to find. For your last meal, you wanted sweetness— lemon sorbet in a paper cup— and I watched the nurse spoon it into your waiting mouth as if you were an infant, watched you savor a sweetness that would carry you out. It is autumn again, and the trees have begun their fierce burning. Remember how we walked through scarlet and gold, stooping to pick up the best of the fallen? How I sent some to my mother just weeks before she died, sealed the envelope with the kiss of my saliva? Today, I give our sweetness to this river, send it out on floating yellow leaves that flicker on the water like candles for the dead. I Swim a Sea That Has No Shore or Bottom after Petrarch I swim a sea that has no shore or bottom. I drift through space around a dying star. Awake, I stare into a blue tomorrow. Asleep, I try to reach that place you are. Each night I find myself in rougher waters. With every stroke I reach for your dear hand. The sea-birds call, their cries a faint reminder of houses we once built upon the sand. The memories I float on this salt ocean are nothing more than bubbles in the foam. And I am swimming in an ancient riddle, still hoping I can dream myself back home. I swim a sea that rocks me in its thunder, yet buoys me so that I can’t go under. And finally, here's a poem from my 1994 book written to the woodblock prints of Hiroshige and Hokusai, Stages and Views, published by Katydid Books—and now out of print. The Hiroshige poems are haiku-like free verse, and the Hokusai poems, the same, are linked renga-like by haiku—which also appear together as a separate section at the back of the book. This one is from "Stages"— responding to a print from Hiroshige's Fifty-Three Stages of the Tokaido: 16. KANBARA On the distant hills snow folds into snow— black specks of pine. Near branches sag, only a few tips still uncovered. Bent against the weather, villagers climb the slope. Their geta chop holes. All the thatched roofs— one white silence.
Penny: I'd love to do that. Here's a recent haibun (published in Haibun Today). It reflects the place I've been in since Bill died. I was already there, but am even more so now—knowing that all is really one, totally interconnected. That certainty is reflected in much of what I'm writing these days. One Bowl As I load the dishwasher this evening, I think about how it would be to have one bowl, one fork, one spoon, one knife, one cup . . . and one small shelf to keep them on. Washing these by hand after each use, I would raise each piece to the light to contemplate its shining singularity. One bowl—cupped hands. Which bowl would I choose from the many I possess? A small bowl my late husband bought at a private school crafts fair thirty-five years ago, its form born from a student shaping clay on a wheel. Brown lines criss-cross its white glaze, triangles circling the rim. One bowl, one spiral on a potter’s wheel, one orbit of a planet round its host, pulling the spectra of a star’s gaseous fire from red to blue, and back. One bowl, one arm of the Milky Way slowly wheeling through the unfinished round of the sky in the iris of your eye. One . . . winter hive— the cluster of bees vibrating And now a longer one—a verse / haibun. I've been exploring "riffing" off of words that fascinate me, selecting dictionary definitions that resonate for me. Here's one for "Keep". I was first fascinated with the word as a noun, as in the medieval Keep or stronghold / castle. But then I veered off into all sorts of places. I've also done the same for "Portal," "Anchoring" and "Deja Vu." More of those to come, I'm sure. And interestingly, this sequence wanted to end with a haiku. Right before the end, I mention a "feast of celebration." I have always been a celebrant of life, and these days I pray that I may be a source of unconditional love and incandescent light—as best I'm able. Keep ~ v. to be faithful to / not swerve; to preserve or maintain We keep the hours, mark them on our walls, wear them on our wrists, hoard them in the chambers of our ticking hearts, faithful to the cycles we’ve ordained for sun and moon. I keep your memory in cabinets of papers, on shelves of books, in drawings and photos, while the dust you’ve left behind has settled in a pillow that no longer keeps your head beside mine, though I embrace it nightly. Who keeps the tides? ~~~ ~ v. to tend, as in sheep or garden; to watch over, defend from danger, harm, or loss n. British: pasture for grazing I have seen sheep—wandering white puffs glimmering in hillside pastures—though I have never tended them. My mother kept a garden, spoke to the dark earth with veined hands, raised smiling pansies. Years ago, I tended vegetables, worked to stir good topsoil into clay. Pole beans, squash, and ripe tomatoes tutored me in rhythm. I have watched over husbands, parents, children, and dear friends, kept dogs and cats, and would defend from any harm those whom I love. But what of dangers that brook no defenses, losses that outrace the wind? Our words, a flimsy hedge against their aim, may fail to hold them in restraint, may crumble in our mouths. Who tends us? ~~~ ~ n. a stronghold, castle; prison, jail; one who keeps or protects From what memory do I pluck this noisy barnyard, white fowls running amuck, pigs snorting in the mud, and I, barefoot, shaking my apron free of dusty grain? Mountains surround this keep; mated swans drift in a moat behind stone walls I wonder whom or what this keep enfolds. That which bars the other keeps us in. Who is the keeper of this castle? ~~~ ~ v. to restrain from divulging; to withhold I never told you that after you fell ill, I often woke in the night and turned to lightly touch your back, confirming breath. Or that I entered the child’s room, leaned over the crib, and did the same, before I could sink into sleep. What else would I keep back from those I love? That when we wrap our arms around each other in the dark, we hold light—hug the flickering atoms that define our flesh? Or that our eyes have descended from stars? I cannot withhold these gifts. And I will not conceal what I've prepared for the feast of celebration. When is the feast? ~~~ ~ v. to persist in a course of action another dusk— the robin’s even-song joins mine And I'll close the haibun examples with one I wrote while at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Every day I passed these horses as I walked from the Residence Hall down to my studio. And then, one night coming back up after dark, I saw a shooting star. The two come together in this piece. For Two Horses By the Fence at VCCA They stand there, side-by-side, seemingly unmoving, gazing off toward the mountains. Now and then the darker one slowly turns his head to look at me, one brown eye following my passage back and forth on the dirt and gravel road. I stop to talk to him, to pat his nose. He comes closer, bares long, sharp teeth, and I back off a bit. They both stand silently for hours, doing nothing—not even grazing the brown grasses in their pasture. Perhaps they are asleep. Horses sleep in snatches standing up. Some think a horse can sleep with only half a brain—and that while one half sleeps, the other is alert. One eye drooping shut, the other staying open. Alternating. What might half a horse brain dream while the other half stares at the horizon? These horses slow me down to horse time. I would rest like that in some pasture, my legs relaxed and locked so I can’t fall, days drifting by behind my eyes. Last night, walking back to the residence, I saw a shooting star. A second or two, and it was gone, though it turned gold as it died. Horse time, star time—our time a walk between the two—and gone. total eclipse— the sun’s corona streaming through us Penny: Craft-wise, I think that in the future I'll continue to explore mixing prose and verse, free verse and haiku, etc. I know that my work will continue to celebrate the Earth and all who share it with us . . . "all our relations". I also know that I will continue to circle around the mysteries of time, mortality, love, and death—and affirm the oneness of it all—whatever "it" is. I am fascinated with my rudimentary understanding of quantum physics, for instance, and of the possibility of multiple universes. The following two poems from my most recent full-length book, The Night Marsh (http://www.wordtechweb.com/harter.html), reflect my ongoing exploration of these themes that have been in my writing from the beginning. In fact, back in the 1960s, the very first poem I wrote because I had to write it (as opposed to a school assignment) was a rhyming poem about climbing a winter tree to try to touch the sunset—and finding it gone when I got there. It ended: "black branches for your stairway / climb it if you dare. / When you reach the topmost step / you'll find darkness there." Interesting . . . Elephant Heaven In the documentary, the scarred old elephant— kidnapped in her youth from Africa, then bumped from circus to zoo when an accident crippled her foot— after twenty years with none of her kind is released into a sanctuary where she finds trees, grasses, gentle hills, and an old friend, daughter of her heart from their circus days. And oh, the trumpeting joy of reunion, the prolonged welcome of twined trunks, the stroking of one another’s flanks, remembered and beloved in this elephant heaven on Earth. Perhaps that’s how it will be for us after long isolation in the zoos of our flesh when our chains are removed, and we exit the cage, moving fearfully down the ramp, dazed and blinking, into the verdant landscape of our dreams, an Eden from whose forests all manner of spirits come to welcome us, their cries in every language of the beasts. Relativity We move on the Earth as it moves through us, keeping pace like the moon does as we rush along a country road, its pale circle streaming beside us through the night. Thus we stretch the minutes pointing toward our deaths, extend the flicker granted to the molecules that know the road we’re on. And when we stop in the shadow of a mountain to catch our breath, the mountain keeps on going through the atoms of our flesh. Finally, here are the opening two paragraphs of my new children's story. It's called Limula's Magic Tail, and is a transformational fable involving four threatened species in the Delaware Bay ecosystem: horseshoe crab, blue crab, oyster, and sturgeon. Paul Somers, a well-known composer who lives in South Jersey, approached the Jacques Cousteau National Estuarine Research Reserve [http://www.jcnerr.org/] at the Rutgers Institute of Marine and Coastal Studies [Vhttp://marine.rutgers.edu/main/] about our writing a piece for children together. I was to write the story and he to compose the score for it. We completed our project earlier this year, and it will be performed. Now Rutgers is looking for funding to publish it as an illustrated children's book. LImula's Magic Tail: by Penny Harter As the May sun was setting and the first stars began to glimmer in the twilight sky, Limula, the grandmother of all horseshoe crabs and Guardian of the Bay, was crawling in from deeper to more shallow water, along with her many sisters and daughters. She needed to burrow into wet sand to lay her eggs. She knew that migrating redknots and other birds would eat most of them, but horseshoe crabs lay thousands of eggs, and she knew the birds needed some to give them energy for their long journeys. She also knew that many of her children would survive. Early the next morning, Limula was lying at the water's edge, the rising sun shining on her wet brown shell. She was remembering the ancient ones from whom she had descended — her mothers and grandmothers, feeling their love for her, dreaming their memories as if time were washing over her in the gently lapping tidal waves. Penny: Thank you for inviting me, Colin. It's been great to work with you, and fun to be thinking through all of this. |
