Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "our duty/to find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world"

It's been awhile.

Rebel Girl has been busy.

Teaching duties.

A family with three staggered spring breaks (the last one is this week).

Her new almost certainly lost cause—check it out at her other blog life: Save Silverado Elementary School!.

Write a letter.

Then last week, Spring arrived in earnest. The hills, burnt to ash a year and half ago, grew thick and tangled with poppies, lupine, mustard and monkeyflower, sage and sagebrush. Ladybugs and painted ladies everywhere. And there they were in the midst of it. It's enough to give you hope forever.

Here's a Sharon Olds poem that came her way via a friend:


Little Things

After she’s gone to camp, in the early
evening I clean our girl’s breakfast dishes
from the rosewood table, and find a dinky
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night, I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, this raised dot of
amber sugar, and this time,
when I think of my father, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the Vulcan blood-red
glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned
to love the little things about him
because of all the big things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this image of resin,
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a
pile of my son’s sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp,
I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to the small beauties,
whatever I have--as if it were our duty
to find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.