#4 equinox 2021

I read my Mom’s journals and am impressed by how full they are with quotes, sketches, scribbles, and beginnings of poems, leavened by only occasional moments of doubt about her work or her school choices for us children. Her poems, at times, may be too concerned with rhyme for my taste, but her inspiration from NYC entering into spring as each tree on her block begins to bud is infectious.

She was driven to express the simplicity and the variety of growth in flowers, bushes and trees. She was dedicated to finding joy in the everyday and spreading that joy and hope. Each day she sought to be more organized, to have her worktable ready to go though frequently that was a loosing battle. She wanted to work on nice paper but so often was afraid to use it so instead used small postcards and printed on the backs of envelopes. She felt strongly about choosing a path that was very human, aiming to show her true self. At one point in her journal she asks herself, what is it about sunrise and sunset that moves her to take so many photos, to make so many drawings? She answers, sunrises and sunsets are the treasure; they remind her of the essence of life right here and now.

I don’t worry about rhyme. Two trees,
One next to the other, are rarely identical.
I think and write the way flowers have color,
But how I express myself is less perfect,
For I lack the divine simplicity
Of being only my outer self.
I look and I am moved,
I am moved by the way water flows when the
ground slopes,
And my poetry is natural like the stirring of the
wind …

Alberto Caeiro, from “XIV” in The Keeper of Sheep; A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems of Fernando Pessoa, ed. & transl. Richard Zenith, Penguin Classics, 2006