I've been in a poetry group for a couple of years now with Actual Children's Poets, and it still strikes me how poetry catches us so off-guard sometimes that the only response is tears. What is it about the in-the-moment innocence and purity of these little bat lives? Who knows. But I very much love it too, and am scouring Abe Books for a couple of copies, hopefully so the Bookniece can have her own.
I am SO amused that I read the beginning of the poem at the top of the blog post aloud to Tech Boy before I saw that you read it to Josh. It just wants to be shared.
I'm so glad that you Get It, in the moment I felt so silly and borderline unhinged, even though on some level I knew exactly why I was having the reaction I was having? It's exactly what you said, the 'in-the-moment innocence and purity of these little bat lives' just wrecked me because it was so entirely lovely and quiet, and Jarrell represents their lives as so full and beautiful and fragile. I think it's the fragility that gets me, and that he was able to take an image that so many people would regard as ordinary/everyday, and show it for what it is: precious.
Pretty regularly, I get overwhelmed by human history, by the idea that every single person who has lived and died is a story—and not just one story, but a universe of stories—and the enormity of that just kind of makes my brain overload. And then you add nature to that, that all of these other species represent the same idea—lives lived, whether their stories are told or untold—and whew, explodey-brain. (And then I inevitably start thinking about how we have, as a species, been so very very destructive, and I head straight into heartbreak, ugh. And I try to remind myself of the beauty that we've created as well, but woof, the direction I head in really depends on the day?)
Related, sort of: I was listening to a podcast last night that Blair Braverman guested on, and she and the host talked a bit about how to them, the dangers of nature are generally less scary than the dangers of other people, because if you get done in by nature, there's no malice? Which makes so much sense to me.
Borderline Unhinged is possibly a fake band name I should get on a T-shirt - or, no. I'm going to embroider that on a pillow. It me...
And I so feel that malice thing. If you get smunched by a moose, well, moose as a species have some wholesale moodiness tendencies, and you probably would have gotten along with it fine an hour earlier or later, but as it stands, you were in the wrong place, and it just needed to run someone off/over, and oops.
EXACTLY. If I keel over and Lemon eats my face before my body is found, well... a cat's gotta eat, right? No sense in letting all that 'tastes like chicken' meat go to waste.
I need this one too. Fantastic.
I've been in a poetry group for a couple of years now with Actual Children's Poets, and it still strikes me how poetry catches us so off-guard sometimes that the only response is tears. What is it about the in-the-moment innocence and purity of these little bat lives? Who knows. But I very much love it too, and am scouring Abe Books for a couple of copies, hopefully so the Bookniece can have her own.
I am SO amused that I read the beginning of the poem at the top of the blog post aloud to Tech Boy before I saw that you read it to Josh. It just wants to be shared.
I'm so glad that you Get It, in the moment I felt so silly and borderline unhinged, even though on some level I knew exactly why I was having the reaction I was having? It's exactly what you said, the 'in-the-moment innocence and purity of these little bat lives' just wrecked me because it was so entirely lovely and quiet, and Jarrell represents their lives as so full and beautiful and fragile. I think it's the fragility that gets me, and that he was able to take an image that so many people would regard as ordinary/everyday, and show it for what it is: precious.
Pretty regularly, I get overwhelmed by human history, by the idea that every single person who has lived and died is a story—and not just one story, but a universe of stories—and the enormity of that just kind of makes my brain overload. And then you add nature to that, that all of these other species represent the same idea—lives lived, whether their stories are told or untold—and whew, explodey-brain. (And then I inevitably start thinking about how we have, as a species, been so very very destructive, and I head straight into heartbreak, ugh. And I try to remind myself of the beauty that we've created as well, but woof, the direction I head in really depends on the day?)
Related, sort of: I was listening to a podcast last night that Blair Braverman guested on, and she and the host talked a bit about how to them, the dangers of nature are generally less scary than the dangers of other people, because if you get done in by nature, there's no malice? Which makes so much sense to me.
Borderline Unhinged is possibly a fake band name I should get on a T-shirt - or, no. I'm going to embroider that on a pillow. It me...
And I so feel that malice thing. If you get smunched by a moose, well, moose as a species have some wholesale moodiness tendencies, and you probably would have gotten along with it fine an hour earlier or later, but as it stands, you were in the wrong place, and it just needed to run someone off/over, and oops.
Humanity, on the other hand...
EXACTLY. If I keel over and Lemon eats my face before my body is found, well... a cat's gotta eat, right? No sense in letting all that 'tastes like chicken' meat go to waste.