Between the lines: Nadia Colburn’s "I Say The Sky"

A good friend who knows how much I love reading (and writing) poems mailed me a copy of Nadia Colburn’s collection of poems, I Say The Sky (University Press of Kentucky), which contains the kind of poems that help open a reader’s eyes to the wonders and beauty of our world.

In one of the poems, “March,” I love the way Colburn explores the passing of winter and the coming spring and how she draws parallels to what might be melting in us.

“What in you needs melting?” she writes.

“What do you do with your anger and your hope?”

And I love the way she begins the poem:

All winter, we walked on the fallen sky,

walked on clouds until we fell, thigh deep, to earth.

How do you make sense of the line “All winter, we walked on the fallen sky”?

What image does “the fallen sky” bring to mind?

When I read the next line… “walked on clouds until we fell, thigh deep, to earth”… I felt as if the clouds themselves had fallen to earth.

And that image of walking on clouds, as if the sky has fallen, led me to wonder how and why Colburn was comparing the clouds to snow, or snow to clouds.

It’s as if the snow itself is made of clouds, and, to carry the image further, as if we ourselves are made of the same stuff as the clouds— the condensation that forms the clouds— so that it’s as if we ourselves have fallen to earth.

And listen to how she takes the image of clouds further in the next stanza:

Now the clouds are running down the side of the mountain

in small hidden rivers.

Isn’t that just how spring comes?

Snowmelt runs swiftly down mountainsides in small, almost hidden rivers?

Clouds turn to snow that turns to streams… in the way that each spring the world transforms itself, changing again from one form of being to another.

Just like humans, who, like the earth, change and awaken in hidden places that we cannot see until growth occurs.

Colburn alludes to these hidden changes:

All night, down the side of the mountain,

Waters run together where we cannot see.

And again: “Underneath, the earth is awakening.”

And spring comes again each March:

Once more the tips of bare branches

put out new buds.

And in a final stroke of brilliance, she writes:

Again they clasp

their small palms together in prayer.

It’s this final line that brings together heaven and earth in such a powerful way, a moment of new buds clasping one another like palms brought together in prayer.

In making this connection, Colburn takes her readers into an annual rite of passage, the transformation of the earth (and of us), a moment when human and divine seem to come together.

“March” is a poem that contains these gem-like miracles, just as the other poems in this collection contain similar gems.

Thanks to Colburn for bringing such a wonderful collection of poems into the world, and thanks to my good friend for sharing Colburn’s work with me.

If you’d like to read more about Nadia Colburn, visit: 

https://nadiacolburn.com/

You can read her poem, “March,” and other poems here: https://nadiacolburn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Ten-Poems-revised-2.pdf

Between the lines: Jody Gladding's "Blue Willow"

 I found Gladding’s poem, “Blue Willow,” in Poetry 108, an anthology of poems that Billy Collins selected, and immediately felt as if her words cast a magic spell, pulling me into the poem so strongly that I wasn’t just reading the words on the page, I felt as if I was inside the poem, somehow inhabiting the space she had created with the words on the page. 

How did she do that?

Reading between the lines, there’s a mystery contained in the poem’s first line:

A pond will deepen toward the center like a plate

There’s the image of a pond that she brings to mind, not just any pond but one that “deepens toward the center,” and you can almost see the pond getting darker in the middle where the water is deepest, in the center. 

And then she compares the pond to a plate—and that comparison helps you to see the pond even more clearly because we’ve all seen how plates have that slightly deeper area in the center.

And it’s not only that she’s showing you the pond, she’s raising the question: who is giving this description of the pond? And why?

And she gives us the answer to these questions in the next two lines:

We trace its shallow rim my mother steering

my inner tube past the rushes where I looked

This is where I think she’s pulled me fully into the poem by adding to the vision of the pond. Now we’re in the shallow edge along the rim, and we discover the narrator is a child floating in an inner tube, being pushed/steered by her mother. And I feel as if I’m in the inner tube with her, part of this memory she’s sharing, and, like her, trying to see past the rushes. What’s there? What’s she looking at? What comes next?

And the answer is revealed in the next line: 

for Moses we said it was a trip around the world

How I love the way the rushes remind the narrator of a memory, a story that she’s read (or been told or heard) about Moses, the baby, placed for safety in the rushes… 

And I also love how the mother and child say their joint venture—the mother steering the inner tube with her child in it—is a trip around the world, and the child imagines sailing around the world. 

And we become part of their imaginary game, wondering where we’ll go next. 

I’m fully inside the poem here, inside the child’s imagination, inside the adult poet’s memory of this precious time, this scene of childhood unfolding, this time without punctuation, a time when moments and imaginings flow one into the next, as if time is an endless river that will never end. 

And the poem goes on, taking the reader on an imaginary voyage to China, pushing through willow branches overhanging the shallow rim of the pond that tickle her neck, seeing swallows overhead that later the child dreams about joining. 

This is a poem about childhood and feeling safe within a mother’s grasp yet curious about exploring the world around her and in her imagination. And it’s a poem about how time feels to a child like it will last forever, and how the adult poet (in the last line) knows it can’t last… 

If you’d like to read the poem, visit: https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/poetry-180/all-poems/item/poetry-180-146/blue-willow/

And if you’d like to know more about Jody Gladding, visit: 

https://www.jodygladding.org