The summer is waning here, and there are

touches of fall in the air…interesting for mid to late August. I’ve seen Canadian geese flying in formation, heading north, their honking a very different call from our Sandhill cranes.

It seems that this month, always to be avoided if possible, is tempered by it’s own weariness of the years cycle. I look at the amount of garden spiders and there are fat bodies all over their webs. It has been a productive time for tomatoes, spiders and kudzu.

I’m making jelly today…kudzu jelly…those domestic things that take me to
the perimeters of my property and allow me the peace that outside, in the exciting world, I rarely find.

I will continue to write what I find so fascinating about John Ralston Saul, but I have ” to read it forward” to be able to say much. He still is one of the most fascinating of new Humanists I have ever read. I do find ‘hope’ in his writings because they aren’t meant, I believe, just to inform, to share knowledge, but to pique our actions.

I’ve always been a politically active person, not in the usual forms, but active in my community on many issues. I have dropped off  in the past few years because there was something basically ‘rerun’ in the doing. Now, through reading Saul, I know what it was. It was a closed circle of ideas, each one tried over and over, and going from a lower to a higher level. Leading to the same non-solutions.

The problem was the prevalent ideology of ‘action’…unleavened with ideas that would give a fresh perspective. Actually the problem was ‘ideology’ but that will be another blog entry. Saul is nothing if not an upsetter of ideas and traditional ‘truths’. Saul is nothing if not recherche. He is exotic and obscure sometimes, but he is refined. And we need refinement in all fields today.  We keep running the same foot races, as this present national political situation shows, regardless the ‘historic’ difference that is touted by the media and as many voices as possible.  New faces putting out old solutions with a new binding.

I am working to publish my first book. It’s not one of the novels, but is a collection of various forms of poetry, short stories and flashers (200 word scenes or stories) called “A Seasoning of Lust”. Bill Penrose of ERWA has already sprung for the cover art…and it’s rather funny. Probably will go through a number of revisions, but he’s a good friend who has been very encouraging in my writing since the beginning. Doing the cover is a big push to get this book published.

Life’s been a bit of an uproar but now things are settling. You hold onto what you can of friendships and go on. All of this is to say that I have benefited from everything that has whirled around me. I have grown. Hopefully, with some grace somewhere in there.

Back to the jelly.

Lady Nyo

WINTER POEMS

4.

Walking in the new winter woods
crunch of frozen ground beneath
my boots,
my dog’s paws will be sore tonight
for we aim far afield.
I think of this morning when we
argued at breakfast,
the smell of maple bacon should
stop all that, but didn’t.

We can’t get past the desiccated ghosts
who have taken up residence in our hearts, inviting
slights and outright blows never delivered
but still lingering in the air.

I took the gun loaded with birdshot
in case there was a duck down by the pond.
Were, but they were those sitting ducks
didn’t seem right, too easy a target
like this morning at breakfast when either one
of us could have let swing and landed a good one
on tender flesh and raw nerves.

The dog is game for hunting, but my heart
isn’t in it.
My thoughts go back to you standing there,
that old apron around your waist,
determined not to let me see tears
and my own cracks and soon I head back with
a peace offering of a bough of holly.

Jane Kohut-Bartels
Copyrighted, 2008