Living in the Lost and Found

Many years ago, when the earth and I were young,  I was reading a magazine and a poem stopped me. It’s a rare moment that you read a poem and can’t take your eyes from it. It was perfect in its mystery and appeal. I tore it out of the magazine and kept it. I was working for an ad agency; I took it to work and typeset it. Framed it. Copied it into my journal. Over the next weeks, I memorized it. The poem was alive to me. I’ve had several poems speak to me that way. But this was so vivid, I remember it all these years later. I hung the poem over my typewriter, but kept the original.

Cover of CD by the bluegrass group "The Lost and Found" Link at the bottom of the blog post.

Years passed. I moved. The poem moved with me, and stayed when the framed version broke.  I’d forget about it, find it, love it all over again. I would read in on those lonely nights when I wondered if I had learned that lesson about trust yet. Or that lesson about learning to be alone. Between Boston and California, I never found it, but it turned up in New York and stayed in my desk drawer for 14 years.I left it on the bed when I walked out, by way of explanation. Another time, with another man, I put it under his coffee cup to let him know I was more than he thought.

When the internet became a searchable place, I searched for the author. Nothing. There was a movie star by the same name, so it was hard to sort it out. In 2007, I wrote a blog about it, but then moved from Typepad to WordPress, and the blog post didn’t make it. So I wrote another blog post about the poem in October of 2008.

This morning, three years after the original post, and a year and a half after the re-post, after searching on the web and in library card catalogs for 25 years with no results,  there was a comment on the post. “Hi Quinn. I’m Jane Greer. . . my poem The Hunter. . . ” After all those years and moves and tears and wondering. There she was. I had to know, so I wrote her. She lives a long way away from me, but our lives have been remarkably the same. We are roughly the same age. We are both writers—non-fiction articles and PR. We both have one son. Oddly enough, they are different people.

There are circles we want to close and can’t. There are circles in our lives that close sooner than we want them to. And then, there is a circle or two that shines through the dark and we notice it, and one day we discover it within our reach and slip it on, and it fits.

--Quinn McDonald is a writer and a creativity coach. Jane Greer is a poet who wrote The Hunter. Until today, they had never met.

Image: Cover of the March, 2009 release of the bluegrass DC Lost and Found.

Poem: A Song On the End of the World

Recently, I thought about how our culture got into the mess we are in. I looked at competition as a cause. The kind of competition that doesn’t demand the best of us as individuals, but demands winning at any cost. And I began to wonder if part of that drive was the inability to be quiet, to be alone with ourselves. And, then, as if by magic, I came across this poem.

When you read about the poet’s life—what he must have seen and experienced—and then read this poem, it gives you a good point to start thinking about what is important as we go through life.

A Song On the End of the World
by Czeslaw Milosz
Translated by Anthony Milosz
* * *
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.

* * *
—Quinn McDonald is a writer, life- and creativity coach. She has started to read poetry again, and is finding stillness there.

Migration

Sun is sinking, the sky no longer blue.
Ragged Vs of geese come in honking, tired
Skidding into the lakes, bumping the water,
searching the grass for dinner.
They look like kitchen appliances,
plugged in by those long black necks.
Startling, suddenly, like a handful of pepper across the sky
come smaller birds in a scatter of speed
and behind them fast, sleek, hungry hawks.

Image: borderland-tours.com
(c) Quinn McDonald, 2007. All rights reserved. Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach, writer and artist. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

Honey in the Great “Out There”

Bloggers write because we have to. We don’t get paid, but at least some of us are writers and have no choice. There is so much in life to put to paper–even if the paper is ether and the thoughts float out into the great “Out There.”

A few days ago I wrote about fear and the potential for growth it brings along with it. This morning I opened my email and found:

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
——-Antonio Machado

And then I understood why writers write. Because other writers write us back. Because it helps us understand the shifting ground under out feet. Because it helps us understand, when we have been to two funerals in one week, that death flows back into life; that mistakes help us grow, and that sometimes, even when we have not screamed first., an echo rolls back to our feet.
–Quinn McDonald is a writer, certified creativity coach and artist. See her work at QuinnCreative.com