This month’s poem of the month is an excerpt from my hands-down, all-time favorite poem. Part of me is surprised that I have never selected this poem in my seven years of the Poem of the Month. Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth recounts the poet’s overwhelming emotions and nostalgia as he returns to a place which held deep, meaningful memories for him.

As I thought about the kids preparing to head back to school (and those who are already in the throes of those magical first days), I thought about the closing of Summer and what it meant to me when I was a kid. For my brother, sister and me, Summers were all about heading up to our family lake house on Lake Eufaula, which literally straddles the state lines between Alabama and Georgia. Even sitting here thinking about the lake house brings back an overwhelming torrent of jumbled memories of my childhood Summers – bottle rocket fights at ten years old, water skiing behind our primary-blue colored boat, and my late grandfather sitting on our beach in a lawn chair with his signature unlit cigar in his mouth watching his grandchildren splash in the water and soak up all of the carefree goodness that was summer. I think we all likely carry similar stories and memories of childhood Summers.

As the grandparents left us, and the ten year old began to grow up, those seemingly endless Summers morphed as we slipped into other phases of our lives. We imperceptibly drifted into high school, dating, college, marriage, careers, kids of our own. Jobs carried us far away from our homes and our lake house, but we always seemed to find a way to return on holiday visits or Spring Breaks or during the Summer to try and give our children those same wonderful memories that we grew up with at the lake house.

I look at my own kids, Alex and Emma, and all of the activities that they have enjoyed this Summer – YMCA camps, family camping trips, Pirate Camp, gymnastics camp, and for Alex, a two week trip to London and Spain to visit his best friend. I am sure that they are creating their own, indelible Summer memories that maybe one day they will try, in vain, to explain to their own children. Perhaps there is a good reason why masterpieces and snowflakes were never intended to be replicated.

As my own parents have aged, and my nieces and nephews begin to head off to college, we’ve decided that it is time for us to sell the lake house. We take with us all of the treasured memories of our time there, but maybe it’s time to pass it on to a another family with a grandfather who sits on the beach in a lawn chair with an unlit cigar in his mouth.

I hope that you have all enjoyed a Summer packed with memories.

Stewart

William Wordsworth
(1770–1850)

From Tintern Abbey

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
‘Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

Those of you who know me well know of my unintentional journeyman career as a Training Manager in the 1990’s with a whole string of startups and dot-coms that were acquired or simply settled quietly to the bottom of the corporate ocean. I learned quickly that it was simply the price you sometimes paid to work with really brilliant people trying to solve really complex problems before the funding ran out. It’s true that the first acquisition/layoff was emotionally challenging. The second not so much so. I tucked away my 17 days of employment with one company that failed as a potential plot-line for a future Steven Spielberg film. Or maybe a Stephen Segal martial arts flick. I honestly haven’t decided which one yet.

I also had some great years of career stability. After four years at a “solid” Washington Mutual, I moved on to a new opportunity in advance of the demise of that Northwest institution. But in a nod to Heraclitus’ “Nothing is constant but change,” a recent promotion to Sr. Manager of Sales Training at T-Mobile was followed this month by the news that T-Mobile is going to be acquired by AT&T. I thank all of you who asked if I was ok, or assured me that the deal would never get approved by regulators. The good news is that virtually nothing changes in my work life until the regulators decide on the deal, which is estimated to take 12 months or more. We are still T-Mobile. We still compete against AT&T. We still correct people that the company color is magenta – not “pink.”

All this news made me think back to one of my periods of unemployment, when I would spend hours searching for jobs, writing resumes and filling out applications until I just needed to step away from the computer and get out of the house. I’d regularly drive 45 minutes East to the middle fork of the Snoqualmie River, grab my fly rod and wade out into the cold mountain water. Some days I’d spend a couple of hours there. Some days I could spend twenty minutes, never get as much as a nibble and drive back to Seattle content, relaxed, recharged and refreshed. There seemed to be something in nature that just pulled life back into balance.

It’s that thought that brought to mind this month’s poem by William Wordsworth, which calls into contrast the material world of work and money and the natural world.

William Wordsworth
(1770–1850)

The World Is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

As I thought about all of the angst and trepidation that 2010 brought us, I was reminded of one of those great life lessons – that things sometimes don’t look quite so bad in the rear-view mirror. The oil spill was capped, and nature will slowly return to its natural course. The economy, and the jobs that come with it, are slowly, inch by inch, edging back up from the depths. Perhaps in times like these, the best thing we can take from these events are the lessons they teach us about who we are, and what we are capable of becoming.

I kick off 2011, the Poem of the Month’s 7th Year (and hopefully a very lucky one for us all) with Walk Whitman’s “As we O Me! O Life!

Walt Whitman
(1819–1892)

O Me! O Life!

O Me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

It has been a while since the last poem of the month, and I am thrilled to be back on the POM cadence.

Where to begin… From the moment Summer hit, everything seemed to just accelerate. The summer was filled with all manner of excitement for the Todds: a trip to California to visit the Bay Area contingent of Jody’s family; camping for a week with the Kealy Clan on Orcas Islands; a new position for me at T-Mobile that continues to keep me busy and happy; Emma performing as Portia, one of the wicked step-sisters in the Broadway Bound production of “Cinderella”; the disappearance – and surprising reappearance – of our 18 year old cat, Emily; a summer of soccer and fly-fishing for Alex; and my parents coming to visit us from Alabama. An active summer filled with some really wonderful memories.

Our most recent adventure was the trip Jody and I took to Portugal about four weeks ago, and which served as inspiration for this month’s poem.  As most of you know, Since 2006, I have been traveling to Portugal every fall during the Port wine harvest on my friend Roy’s “For The Love of Port” Harvest Tour. However, this year I decided to give his other tour (the For The Love of Port “Fortification” Tour in May) a try, as it combined northern Portugal’s Port wine region with a visit to the island of Madeira – famous for that “other” type Portuguese dessert wine.

A few days before I left on the May trip, I received notice that I’d won a sweepstakes sponsored by the Portuguese National Tourism Board and (of all things) the Sports Illustrated 2010 Swimsuit edition. Apparently Lisbon was one of the cities that SI chose to shoot their 2010 Swimsuit edition. And apparently, at some point I registered for the sweepstakes on the visitportugal.com web site. And apparently, I (who rarely wins anything) won the grand prize of a trip for two to Lisbon, Portugal.

So at the beginning of October, Jody and I set out for Portugal – my second trip of 2010 and Jody’s first trip to Portugal. We spend a few days in Lisbon – wandering it’s amazing neighborhoods and reveling in all of the sights and sounds of such an amazing city. We then took the train up to Porto in Northern Portugal, where we visited with old friends in the Port industry, and spent a wonderful night at the Yeatman, a brand new hotel and spa with views that rival any other hotel in the region. We then took the train East up the Douro River Valley into the heart of Port wine country. We met up with my friend Roy and the Fall Harvest Tour, visiting some historic and legendary wineries – Quinta do Vesuvio, Quinta de Vargellas and Quinta do Crasto. These were properties that I visited on my first trip to Portugal in 2006, and seeing Miguel, Alistair, Gilly, and Dominic was like visiting with old friends after a long absence.

There were so many memorable parts to our trip, but one quote in particular really resonated with me, and it typifies the passion that so many Port winemakers in the Douro share. At a tasting at Ramos-Pinto, Winemaker João Nicolau de Almeida described the process of blending various years of tawny Ports into a perfect blend as “being like a conductor of an orchestra. You have all the instruments at your disposal, but it’s up to the conductor to bring them all together to make beautiful music.”

We drank in our time in Portugal. It was a feast for the senses, and a deep appreciation for the passion, the wines, and the spirit of the people of Portugal.

This month’s poem is “I’m A Keep of Sheep” by Alberto Caeiro (also known as Fernando Pessoa, one of Portugal’s most famous poets, and beloved sons).

Wishing you all the best,

Stewart

Stewart & Fernando Pessoa – Lisbon, Portugal

Fernando Pessoa
1888 – 1935

Alberto Caeiro
(pseudonym for Fernando Pessoa)

I’m A Keeper of Sheep

I’m a keeper of sheep.
The sheep are my thoughts
And my thoughts are all sensations.
I think with my eyes and ears.
And with my hands and feet
And with my nose and mouth.

To think a flower is to see it and smell it
And to eat a fruit is to taste its meaning.

That’s why on a hot day
When I ache from enjoying it so much,
And stretch out on the grass
Closing my warm eyes,
I feel my whole body lying full length in reality,
I know the truth and I’m happy.

As always, previous poems of the month can be found at:
http://www.stewarttodd.com

Photos from our Portugal adventure can be found HERE.

Miller Williams
(1925 -  )

Of History and Hope

We have memorized America,
how it was born and who we have been and where.
In ceremonies and silence we say the words,
telling the stories, singing the old songs.
We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.
The great and all the anonymous dead are there.
We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.
The rich taste of it is on our tongues.
But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know.
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
to keep on going where we meant to go.
But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how
except in the minds of those who will call it Now?
The children. The children. And how does our garden grow?
With waving hands—oh, rarely in a row—
and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow.
Who were many people coming together
cannot become one people falling apart.
Who dreamed for every child an even chance
cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.
Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head
cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.
Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child
cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.
We know what we have done and what we have said,
and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,
believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become—
just and compassionate, equal, able, and free.
All this in the hands of children, eyes already set
on a land we never can visit—it isn’t there yet—
but looking through their eyes, we can see
what our long gift to them may come to be.
If we can truly remember, they will not forget.

April is National Poetry Month, so you get bonus a bonus poem this month (which is particularly warranted since I’ve been remiss in sending out the Poem of the Month on a regular basis lately).

It has been a very busy month for us, and we have had the joy of celebrating, among other things, my parent’s anniversary and 7 family birthdays (including my daughters, and my own today).

I’ve begun reminiscing a lot about what birthdays meant to me as a child, but also thinking about what they mean to me now as my own children grow older. My daughter Emma just turned 9 last week (with my son Alex reaching the “13” milestone a month ago), and it is cliché but so very true for every parent out there that in the blink of an eye, it seems, our small infants have grown up overnight, developed personalities, quirks, and lovely natures that we don’t seem to have much control over any more. We raise them in the best possible way we know how, and then comes the moment when they cross that invisible threshold and cease to be a little “us” and are suddenly their own little “them.” It is a brilliant, humbling moment, and is usually only recognized in hindsight. I can only imagine that it must have been exactly like this for our own parents years and years ago…

Yet that moment also holds hope – hope for their future – a future (as Miller Williams’ poem points out) that we as adults will never be able to fully see. It doesn’t exist yet, but is the expression of everything we hope and dream our children’s world will be one day.

I thought I’d turn to two poems this month to celebrate the dichotomy of birthdays – the helplessness of watching our children grow older, and the possibilities embodied in the year(s) ahead.

Gerald Stein
(1925 -  )

Waving Goodbye

I wanted to know what it was like before we
had voices and before we had bare fingers and before we
had minds to move us through our actions
and tears to help us over our feelings,
so I drove my daughter through the snow to meet her friend
and filled her car with suitcases and hugged her
as an animal would, pressing my forehead against her,
walking in circles, moaning, touching her cheek,
and turned my head after them as an animal would,
watching helplessly as they drove over the ruts,
her smiling face and her small hand just visible
over the giant pillows and coat hangers
as they made their turn into the empty highway.

An annoying – though thankfully non-destructive – virus decided that my computer would make a good temporary host, delaying the March Poem of the Month.

The confluence of the virus with Spring Break didn’t speed up the healing, but thankfully the patient has now made a full recovery. With the remnants of Spring Break still lingering in the air for many of us, I thought it was an appropriate time for a poem about travel…and birds.

Happy Spring everyone!

Stewart

Timothy Steele
(1948 -   )

In the Memphis Airport

Above the concourse, from a beam,
A little warbler pours forth song.
Beneath her, hurried humans stream:
Some draw wheeled suitcases along
Or from a beeping belt or purse
Apply a cell phone to an ear;
Some pause at banks of monitors
Where times and gates for flights appear.

Although by nature flight-endowed,
She seems too gentle to reproach
These souls who soon will climb through cloud
In first class, business class, and coach.
She may feel that it’s her mistake
She’s here, but someone ought to bring
A net to catch and help her make
Her own connections north to spring.

She cheeps and trills on, swift and sweet,
Though no one outside hears her strains.
There, telescopic tunnels greet
The cheeks of their arriving planes;
A ground crew welcomes and assists
Luggage that skycaps, treating bags
Like careful ornithologists,
Banded with destination tags.

I was exchanging emails with an old high school friend last week discussing our 20-year reunion, coming up this summer. One comment in her email struck me, and I’ve been thinking about it on and off ever since – “Could you have ever imagined 20 years ago that you would be where you are in life today?”

I saw the movie “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” not too long ago, and one scene in the movie asked a similar question. Brad Pitt’s character narrates an unfolding of events that culminated in an accident that proves crucial to the plot of the movie – “If only one thing had happened differently: if that shoelace hadn’t broken; or that delivery truck had moved moments earlier; or that package had been wrapped and ready, because the girl hadn’t broken up with her boyfriend; or that man had set his alarm and got up five minutes earlier; or that taxi driver hadn’t stopped for a cup of coffee; or that woman had remembered her coat, and got into an earlier cab…”

I can say that I’ve had moments in my life when I’ve applied the same logic to some tragedy or other painful experience – I’m sure we all have. But I can also say that as I sit here sipping a cup of hot tea, my children sleeping quietly down the hall, my cat Emelye curled up in my lap and purring softly, a wedding a few months away, my friends and family on my mind, and a whirl of moments I have experienced, decisions I have made, and paths I could have traveled down, there is a peaceful feeling that life resolves and places us where we are meant to be when we are meant to be there.

Could I have ever imaged 20 years ago that I would be where I am? No. Can I image where I might be tomorrow, or a month or year or 20 years from this moment? No, but like Mary Oliver in this month’s poem, I am extremely optimistic…

Stewart

Mary Oliver
(1935 -  )

Walking To Oak-Head Pond,
And Thinking Of The Ponds I Will Visit
In The Next Days And Weeks

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of a stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I’m fooled–
I’m wading along

in the sunlight–
and I’m sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead–
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week’s trees,
and I plan to be there soon–
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don’t know where
such certainty comes from–
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind–

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage–
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

Today marked the passing of one of the country’s true literary legends, John Updike. I hadn’t featured one of his works since September of 2004, when I shared his poem “The Angels” , so it seemed fitting to dedicate this month’s selection to Updike. I thought this particular poem appropriate to his passing – “…know we go to sleep less to rest than to participate in the twists of another world…”

I hope you enjoy this poem, as we welcome in a New Year, a New Government, a new hope just around the corner…

John Updike
(1932 – 2009)

Tossing and Turning

The spirit has infinite facets,
but the body confiningly few sides.
There is the left,
the right, the back, the belly, and tempting
in-betweens, northeasts and northwests,
that tip the heart and soon pinch circulation
in one or another arm.
Yet we turn each time
with fresh hope, believing that sleep
will visit us here, descending like an angel
down the angle our flesh’s sextant sets,
tilted toward that unreachable star
hung in the night between our eyebrows, whence
dreams and good luck flow.
Uncross your ankles.
Unclench your philosophy.
This bed was invented by others; know we go
to sleep less to rest than to participate
in the twists of another world.
This churning is our journey.
It ends,
can only end, around a corner
we do not know
we are turning.

It seems easy to look back at this year and remember all of the tumultuous events that marked 2008 – economic implosions in the housing markets and then the financial markets; terrorist attacks in Pakistan and India; Governors in New York & Illinois taking precipitous falls from grace, straining our faith in our elected leaders; continuing genocide and humanitarian crisis in Africa; and war and conflict in Russia, the Gaza and yes, still in Iraq & Afghanistan.

But the wonderful thing about our human spirit is that we carry on with hope for something better in the coming days, months and years. Sometimes, an American Olympic Swimmer DOES break all of the records; sometimes BOTH candidates are about doing things a new way; sometimes people DO find the loves of their lives.

Wishing you all a wonderful new year,

Stewart

Sheenagh Pugh
(1950 – )

Sometimes

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

It’s been a busy month here in Seattle, and there were so many wonderful things to celebrate and be thankful for during this last month and especially this Thanksgiving weekend.

Since last month’s Poem of the Month, I accepted a position with T-Mobile as their Manager of Finance Training and Career Development. My role with TM is to develop job competencies and career paths for the 900+ employees in TM’s Finance organization. I’m very thrilled to join such a great company.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, our festivities included my kids getting to meet their “new” cousins from California, who came up with their families to celebrate Thanksgiving at Jody’s parents. It was a convening of the Kealy clan that included Brothers, Sisters, close family friends, and an Aunt and Uncle. We all hit the Seattle Thanksgiving Parade, and to round out the weekend, Jody and I were lured into attending a surprise engagement party, where we got to spend a wonderful evening surrounding by new, and old, friends.

I hope that your Thanksgiving was filled with joy, hope, and that wonderful recognition that life creates infinite things to be thankful for.

Warmest wishes,
Stewart

Starfish
by Eleanor Lerman
(1952 -  )

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who say, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.