by Christina Watkins | Aug 12, 2022 | Poems
On The River
On land good dialogue is difficult.
Seasons tell us when to rest and when to grow.
The river is the place for easy flow.
Flotsam and jetsam float on by.
The daystar and night stars light our way.
Huck and Jim were friends
on the river.
I offer this poem, which I wrote in 1982, not because I think it is a good poem. I offer it because it came
to me and has stayed with me. I hope some poems come to you and stay with you. I hope you honour
your insights.
I took a course in American Literature when we lived in Northern Ontario. After reading and being
smitten with Mark Twain’s novel, Huckleberry Finn, I had some thoughts and feelings about the novel’s
two main characters, Huck and Jim. They were close friends but their social relationship and power in
the community were not equal. Sometimes I identified with Huck and sometimes with Jim.
Jim, who in the story believed he was still an enslaved person, was naïve and gullible but was also
honest and sweet in his friendship with Huck. Huck treated Jim badly and got away with it because he
was a white boy. He painted Jim blue which humiliated Jim. He tied Jim up and sometimes threatened
to ‘turn Jim in’ because Jim was thought to be a runaway.
But, Jim was blessed with natural intelligence. He knew that a storm was coming because of the way
the birds were behaving. He recognized the two main fraudulent characters in the story, the King and
the Duke, and knew it was best to stay away from them. Jim was stalwart in his friendship with Huck.
He was a good friend. When the two boys were together on the river in the raft, just the two of them,
they were both sweet and respectful of each other, good friends.
The boys’ friendship issues were more or less resolved at the end of the story. Jim had been given his
freedom by Miss Watson and had not known it. Huck did eventually leave. He ‘lit out for the
Territories. ’It was something he had thought about and talked about.
My two ongoing questions about the story are: What and where are ‘the Territories’ in people’s stories?
And, are Huck and Jim forevermore connected because of their love for each other?
I remember that the structure of metaphysical poems is in this order:
remembrance, understanding and will.
Many poems are loosely structured in this way. For me, ‘the Territories’ in Mark Twain’s novel could
represent understanding or, in more modern terms, consciousness. ‘The Territories’ could be Huck’s
understanding that he will need space and movement in the world if he is going to’ grow’ into his true
adult self.
In the case of my little poem, ’Witness’ and ‘Testiga’ on pages 22 and 23 of Poems~Poemas, the ‘will’
part of the structure of the poem would be my vowing to remain open to whatever newness I witness.
The insight is the importance of the freedom to be open to what is new.
by Christina Watkins | Jul 16, 2022 | Uncategorized
This line, which can be useful every day, is from American poet and painter, e.e. cummings:
Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love if the stars walk backward.
The 1990s were some of the years when I learned most about loving relationship. We lived in Denver,
Colorado and then Scottsdale, Arizona.
Early on, my hairdresser, who was friends with ‘ puppeteer’ Jim Hensen, suggested that I volunteer
with Colorado AIDS Project, a dynamic local organization that helped people living with HIV/AIDS join in
community with people living with the same disease and also with people who wanted to walk with
them. I was a volunteer who gave support to the volunteers who were ‘buddies’ to people who wanted
a ‘buddy.’ As a new volunteer, I filled out the same questionnaire everyone did. I noticed that, like
most people there that day, I had left behind community and was seeking a place of respect where
participating in loving relationship might be possible. We all knew that we would be sharing in the
suffering of others and also our own suffering. It was a community.
My experience with those volunteers and the people they were walking beside was extremely powerful
for me. I witnessed depth of love, bravery, faithfulness, kindness, respect and hope which I will
remember always. At the same time I was involved with Colorado AIDS Project, I was volunteering
through the Methodist Church teaching ‘English as a Second Language’ to legal and illegal Spanish
speakers. My experience with Colorado AIDS project was opening my heart and mind to a larger
understanding of freedom and loving participation in suffering. I was with people I could care about.
Another experience of witnessing loving relationship in Denver was my friendship with Sister Mary Luke
Tobin, one of Denver’s beloved and well known people. She had been the only American woman invited
to attend VaticanTwo. My spiritual director in Toronto had asked her to meet me.
We became very good friends. Age and status were not considerations at all. She was in her 80’s and
90’s when I knew her and I was able to witness the way she was always fully present to every person
she met. She was vulnerable to who they were. It was disarming for people. She asked me to drive her
to events at which she was speaking and to meetings with other people active in the Peace Movement
or other activities she was involved with. (She laughed when she confessed to me that she liked me to
drive her because some of the other people who wanted to drive her were not good drivers.)
Mary Luke was a very effective story teller. I wrote a poem telling of her sharing a story with me about a
priest who had died that week in Denver and another priest who had been sent out from the east to be
with the dying man through a time of suffering until the end of his life. It is a story of coming to
consciousness about what largeness love is. I hope you enjoy it.
Travelling with Sister Mary Luke Tobin,’ Poems for the Journey, p.1
Also, I remember that great song, ‘He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother’?’ It is a good song to sing.
by Christina Watkins | Jul 5, 2022 | Uncategorized
We were in Buena Vista over Memorial Day Weekend on the first warm day of the year as a party of six –
– four senior adult people, two couples, and our friends’ two dogs. The older dog was a senior chocolate
lab and the other a young black lab and pointer mix. We were all respectfully friendly with the young
and older hikers we met on the trails. They were all extraordinarily outgoing and welcoming to us. It
was remarkable to me, a Canadian living in British Columbia. I admired the outgoing energy of these
beautiful people in their late afternoon activity.
When we all reached the parking lot below, a boy of 8 or 9 was standing near our vehicle holding a
white and red toy assault weapon. He was watching us. He wore an unattractive grin on his face. We
saw the boy raise his plastic AR-15 toy to his shoulder. He fired at the adults first – streams of red light
which landed on us one after the other in a rush. Then he shot the dogs.
I looked around to see if there was a second toy shooter in sight. If there was a second shooter I
couldn’t see him. Perhaps his brother was out of sight. I saw a group of people who might have been
the boy’s parents. I thought of going and speaking with them but instantly knew that would not be the
appropriate thing to do.
Instead, I am writing this piece and thinking of how like the 18 or 19 year old shooters of real AR-15
grown ups’ assault weapons we see in TV footage these days move like this 8 or 9 year old boy.
Auden’s tribute to Herman Melville says:
Evil is unspectacular and always human,
and shares our bed and eats at our table.
I hope that the boy we saw that sunny day will have some experience which will make him want to
work towards peace. I hope he meets people with fire in their hearts about peace. Perhaps peace will
come to him on the wind in the mystery of love.
See my poem titled ‘Peace’ in English and ‘Paz’ in Spanish on pages 80 and 81 in Poems~Poemas.
by Christina Watkins | May 26, 2020 | Poems
DIAMONDS AND SUTRAS: A Sestina, written June 21, 2013.
‘Diamonds and Sutras’ is in Poems for the Journey.
Read my tutorial on how to write a Sestina here. I hope you will enjoy it.
Some people make their fortunes finding diamonds.
Others practice knowledge of the sutras.
Everyone loves listening to stories.
Many forget their worries watching baseball.
I wonder how we all live into surrender
know that all shall be well beyond space and time.
In a game with rules and the mystery of time-
out, played in an open field shaped like a diamond,
playing together requires a kind of surrender.
Commentary for this could be based on the sutras.
Long afternoons richly spent focused on baseball
bring on dreams and become the stuff of stories.
From the beginning I read our children stories.
Those were the final innings of every bedtime.
My own childhood was enriched by the game of baseball.
It was lovely to spend that time focused on diamonds.
Now I’m writing poems and reading the sutras.
Batting and running help me balance surrender.
Lack of balance leads to uncentered surrender.
Practice and play take us home again to our stories.
Some things can be explained best through the sutras.
A practice of love is active over time.
Many assume that all of us are diamonds.
Groups of three can remind us of more than baseball.
Evenings spent under the stars watching baseball –
with overtime the splendid surrender
to freedom from clocks — a treat as rare as diamonds —
replay in my heart as memory that has become story.
One day I’ll write a poem about the time
when ‘It ain’t over till it’s over’ became my sutra.
Playing is more precious even than sutras.
Plenty has come to me through games like baseball.
Nothing moves more relentlessly than time.
Now I gather my strength for what seems like surrender
while praying and paying close attention to stories
about lives of fire and ice brighter than diamonds.
Our grandchildren now play baseball on diamonds.
We make up sutras to help them with surrender —
enrichment for us and our stories over time.
by Christina Watkins | May 11, 2020 | Poems
‘The Way Things Are Is Large,’ is a villanelle in Poems for the Journey p.19. I like writing poems that have some form. It helps get me started with words on the page. Two strong lines about things the poet cares deeply about give energy for finding the other lines. For a while this poem was called ‘Earth Suffused With Light,’ when I saw it again I knew to go back to this original title, ‘The Way Things Are Is Large.’ Hope people try this and have fun with it. The lines can be one very silly and one serious.
VILLANELLE FORM
A, REFRAIN 1
B
A, REFRAIN 2
A
B
A, REFRAIN 1
A
B
A, REFRAIN 2
A
B
B. REFRAIN 1
A
B
REFRAIN 2
A
B
A, REFRAIN 1
A. REFRAIN 2
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