Here’s another poem from Sounds of Rain, the book I wrote in 2006 after SANDY and I took a trip up the Amazon River.
Nightly Concert
Clouds smother moon and stars, snuff their lights, the night goes out.
Somewhere a great tinamou bird cries a heartbroken solo, each note wavers higher, sadder, soulful sounds linger to haunt after the sobbing dies.
From both banks hidden choirs throb the evening anthem. Their cadence thrums the rain forest pulse, a million drummers marking time singing urgent songs of love and warning.
Makes no difference if it’s dark, every singer knows its part, the nightly concert plays for all who listen.
While snow turns lawns into sculpture gardens and the air shivers, I’ve decided to spend a few days posting poems from warmer times and places. I wrote Sounds of Rain after SANDY and I took a trip up the Amazon River and major tributaries in Peru more than 100 miles into the rain forest. I was constantly in awe of the majesty, abundance, and variety of life around me. DOUG DUNCAN, physician, friend, and photographer, took the pictures.
Rhythms
You see the sky that has always been there, feel the water tugging, insisting the boat move with the rhythm of the river flowing down in slow motion toward the distant sea
And around the edge of your vision trees crowding, voices calling out through heat and fragrant vegetation, makes you think of all the ageless, endless repetitions by things too many to be seen or named
And you know that deep within this great Amazon universe the beating heart of the forest measures time.
During the coming days I wish you well as the expected storm hits in the area where you live. If you lose power, I hope you can find ways to stay comfortable. Looks like it will take quite some time for the snows and ice to melt. I’m sure that internet outages will be widespread. In case we lose ours, today I may work on a few posts in advance and hope I will have opportunities to get them released as the days tick by.
I hate winter, always have. I’ve posted this poem before but it comes back to me today. It’s in my autobiographical collection, Connecting Dots (2004) When I was 8, my family moved from Ajo, Arizona back to Springfield in the winter of 1945 so my dad and a partner could start a block company. That December ranked as the 9th coldest up to that time since the weather bureau started keeping records in 1895. The average low nightly temperature was 17.5 degrees. The only place we could find to rent was little more than a shack located on the Roberson farm on Oak Grove Lane, a mile from the school I would attend. No electricity. Privy out back. We heated with coal in a small potbelly stove. If the fire went out, the temperature inside dropped to roughly what it was outside. Water left in a glass beside my bed sometimes froze to ice during the night.Mom papered the windows with newspapers to help block the cold air coming in around the casings and on windy nights the loose linoleum floor covering made spooky noises flapping up and down at the threshold of the only door. We slept with our clothes on and all available sheets and blankets piled on our beds. One morning walking to school my hands became frostbitten. The janitor ran cold water over them and rubbed them until the pain subsided enough for me to go to class. Here’s the poem.
Welcome to Missouri
Cold surrounds my warm spot. Rolling over is like touching snow. I think of snow angels.
With extra clothes piled on the bed, I think of chalk outlines. “This is where we found the frozen body.”
I miss my friends. I hate this house, the coal stove with its belly full of cold ashes.
Dad says soon we’ll find something better.
A prisoner inside my own outline, I wait for morning.
I had lunch yesterday with a dear friend, LINDA BENSON, a professor emeritus from Missouri State University English Department and always a great companion for a lively, wide-ranging conversation. Among out topics yesterday over burgers and drinks was the Ken Burns documentary in two parts about Mark Twain that Sandy and I watched this week.
We got to talking about how Clemens drew material from his youth as inspiration for his work. We agreed that mining material from childhood comes more naturally to some than to others, and that reminded me of something I sometimes do with students during school visits. It’s the think about it, talk about it, write about it process. Some writers can skip the middle step and go from remembering something to writing about it, but the point of the exercise is that it is easier to write about something once it becomes clearly pictured in the mind. Recalling something that may have happened long ago doesn’t necessarily spring to life all in one piece. That’s why it helps to talk about it, maybe tell it to someone. What first may center on sitting before a bonfire will develop into a fuller picture: the smell of the wood, spiraling smoke, surrounding forest, glimpse of water, boat tied to the dock, mosquitoes, strange noise in the dark, favorite good-luck shirt, marshmallows on a stick, and so on.
For me, by the time I start writing, the memory is clear in my mind. I’m looking at and experiencing what I’m describing. I’ve read some wonderful pieces by kids in school after they thought about and talked about a special memory. Naturally, this technique is not limited to writing about memories. Good writers can see what they are feeling and describing. Sometimes it takes longer to put down that first word than it does to prepare for it in our minds.
I was rejected the other day. Nothing new about that, but this editor had told me she loved my funny story. Said she got a big laugh from it. Said she shared it with a colleague. Said she would get back to me.
Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
Dear Editor. What?
Said her colleague loved my funny story too. Said she’s too busy to consider it now. Said to get back to her in a few months. I got turned down on a story that two editors liked.
Children's Author David L. Harrison's Blog 