December Fog

FOG

by Carl Sandburg

The fog comes

on little cat feet

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

The fog that poet Carl Sandburg describes came this week to Huron County. It sat and sat. Barns appeared and disappeared. Telephone poles, wind turbines, farm houses -- all floated in and out of a distant nothingness.

This barn on Helena Road, captured with a telephoto lens, sits looking at a corner where, just like the fog, I move on.

One Today

One Today

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,

peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth

across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.

Poet Richard Blanco read these lines yesterday, at the second inauguration of President Obama. Blanco's  words invoke the image of the vast and wondrous landscape that we, the people, share.

Early on a frigid January morning, on the day after the inauguration of another American president, I watch a ship plowing north through the icy Great Lakes. The sight of that single ship propels me into the one today that the poet writes about.

I just have this one day. It's really all any of us have.

Let it be a good day and let it begin.


Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

A Barn In Autumn

Questions For A Barn in Autumn

How do maples display such elegance
along a commonplace highway?

Weathered wood, so gray, 
how can such dullness push bright orange, melon, yellow to leaping brightness?

A boat, a trailer, camper, tractor, summer table -- 
why fit so perfectly beneath the majestic canopy of maples?

The back bluff, like a stiff spine,
how does it lift and hold and steady?

Autumn -- how does it stamp away the emptiness from my heart?

Copyright 2012
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Three Day Moon

I started calling this post "Wisconsin New Moon," but a closer check of the moon phase app on my Kindle Fire revealed that this is really a three day moon. Taken on Monday, August 20 at 9:19 pm  near Eden in Fond du Lac County, the image shows a moon that is 12 percent visible.

Whenever I see a sliver moon like this one, I think of Tony Bennett singing Dorothy Parker's lyrics, "I Wished on the Moon."

I wished on the moon for something I never knew,

Wished on the moon for more than I ever knew,

A sweeter rose, a softer sky,

An April day that would not dance away.

 

Let's change that to "an August moon" and wish for summer to not dance away, to linger just a little longer with cool nights, and few more meals of sweet corn and garden tomatoes.

 

 

Golden Moon

April Moon

Dusk and a New Moon

 

Copyright 2012

Wanda Hayes Eichler

 

 

 



My Father, The Poet

One of the benefits of climbing into a pulpit week after week is the discipline of writing and speaking. My father, The Reverend Stanley C. F. Hayes, added another aspect to his preaching by writing poetry. The poems were often four or eight lines, usually in a quatrain form.

Many of them are in his hand writing, jotted down as time permitted and the muse moved. Here is one in typewritten form. Written in January of 1955 while we lived in Marshfield, Wisconsin, it is a reminder of the years when writers depended on typewriters to advance and preserve the words that they wrote.

The family in 1955 -- Penny, Wanda, Tim, Carla. Mary, not in photo

I would have been almost seven years old when Dad wrote this. There were five of us Hayes kids -- Wanda, Carla, Tim, Penny, Mary -- by then, so Mom would have been involved in guiding the very young family through each day's waking and eating and sleeping times.

I remember that on Saturdays Dad would head to his study in the church basement where we could find him busy at his desk with its typewriter. Saturday was when he finalized the week's thoughts and polished the manuscript for his Sunday sermon. Often he wrote a poem that formed the focus for the weekly sermon.

Dad had a black chunky typewriter that was moved to the middle of the desk so he could convert a longhand draft into a typewritten manuscript. He'd welcome a visit from any one of us when he was working. I don't ever remember being shooed away from the basement study that was filled with shelves with books and paper, his desk with pencils, pens and photos, and houseplants in the high basement ground level windows.

Dad's poety was published as Behind The Plow,  a poetry collection that my sister Heidi edited. Heidi and Dad worked from Dad's files and were able to compile a small volume of poety that is representative of a body of work that spans more than six decades of writing and preaching. Released in 2006, this book is a testament to the discipline of weekly writing that Dad followed for most of his adult years as a preacher and pastor.

Copyright 2012
Wanda Hayes Eichler