Lightly child, lightly.

~ Live & Learn

light

Without a key, light enters
with its hot blond muzzle
and lies upon the body;
and the body stirs and remembers.”

~ Ruth Stone, closing lines to “Light,” In the Next Galaxy

 

Notes:

  • Photo: cutvaya via newthom. Stone quote: Memory’s Landscape
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

10 thoughts on “Lightly child, lightly.”

  4. I have a corner in my mind where I keep my favorite poems. Ruth Stone’s Names has been in residence since the birth of my daughters. Every summer my grandmother Lila took me to Timber Island and told me the names of the wild plants along the way. Each name seemed to fire a memory of the women in her family – Ada, Amy, Georgia, Julia. I have since intertwined these women with the names of the summer wild flowers in Maine.

    Names by Ruth Stone

    My grandmother’s name was Nora Swan.
    Old Aden Swan was her father. But who was her mother?
    I don’t know my great-grandmother’s name.
    I don’t know how many children she bore.
    Like rings of a tree the years of woman’s fertility.
    Who were my great-aunt Swans?
    For every year a child; diphtheria, dropsy, typhoid.
    Who can bother naming all those women churning butter,
    leaning on scrub boards, holding to iron bedposts,
    sweating in labor?
    My grandmother knew the namesof all the plants on the mountain.
    Those were the namesshe spoke of to me. Sorrel, lamb’s ear,
    spleenwort, heal-all;never go hungry, she said, when you can
    gather a pot of greens.
    She had a finely drawn head under a smooth cap of hair
    pulled back to a bun. Her deep-set eyes were quick to notice
    in love and anger.
    Who are the women who nurtured her for me?
    Who handed her in swaddling flannel to my great-grandmother’s
    breast?
    Who are the women who brought my great-grandmother tea
    and straightened her bed? As anemone in midsummer, the air
    cannot find them and grandmother’s been at rest for forty years.
    In me are all the names I can remember-pennyroyal, boneset,
    bedstraw, toadflax-from whom I did descend in perpetuity.

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