By Rachel Yeomans
What doth the mind?
How does it know
Just what we want to see or show?
Why do we think
Those things we say
And decide to wake up each day?
When were we told
How the world runs
Or informed when life had begun?
Where is the truth?
Are we so blind?
Why is the mind so hard to find?
How doth the mind
Confuse us so?
If it is US, shouldn't we know?
"I am an online student taking philosophy this semester, and this poem is for you, Shane Teter! Enjoy!
* * * * * * * * * *
“Names”
by Ron Parkinson
by Ron Parkinson
Posted
by the elevator,
“Bertha,
Bessie, Blanche,Special Events for December”.
I smile, know them already.
Names that pinched the crust on a rhubarb pie,
picked prize beans from their Victory Garden,
brought chicken and dumplings
to the Sunday Social.
Blanche
taught school
in
Upper Michigan, boarded with a familythat tilled that difficult soil.
Called off classes in ’23,
snow so deep the wolves were starving,
starting to move in on the cattle.
She feared for her children
walking those cold empty roads.
Bessie
never married.
Secretarial
School at 15then straight thru for 70 years.
Still wanted to work
but cataracts clouded the keyboard.
Bertha fed her family cabbage, kohlrabi,
rutabaga from the root cellar,
watched her children grow
and leave the farm.
January’s
posting is Edna, Elvera, Eunice,
then
Gladys, Myrtle and Nellie.Eunice filled the chinks
with mud daub and horsehair,
Elvera fashioned rugs
from scraps of worn out clothing.
Edna---- my mother’s name----a name
as sturdy as pot roast and potatoes.
She told of sharing her bedroom
with piles of pumpkins,
searching for dandelions in spring,
first fresh greens since fall,
lending ten cents to her mother,
who took two months to pay it back.
Now
I read of Aurora, Taruna
Karena,
and Luna.These raise a vague uneasiness within me,
as if I’ve walked a long hallway
and opened the wrong door.
Karena has cramps when it’s convenient,
usually Friday afternoons.
Taruna spends long hours lounging in the salon,
Wild Raspberry lacquered on her fingers.
My mother picked the berries
head high in slashings,
hands swollen and torn by nettle and thorn,
blood I got used to seeing.
Aurora
and Luna give workshops
on
relationship healing through touching.Each thinks her name a fertile milkweed pod
filled to bursting with seed.
Spill enough into the wind,
some will find ground already disked and harrowed,
spring up sturdy, bear lush fruit.
Did they ever listen to the stories their grandmothers told,
the heavy work with stone boat and stump puller,
breaking the clods with grub hoe and mattock,
gleaning burdock shoots, bulrush roots
when the harvest failed?
That Mary Pickford
never forgot
she was once Gladys Smith?
[See April 6's brief statement about Ron Parkinson.]
