Feeling Human

When you create art, you must reflect on it. Thinking about what it is to be an artist occupies a lot of time. My teachers along the way have made it clear that as an artist you have to be willing to share your humanity. To not be afraid to reveal yourself in some way. If you are to reveal something true about yourself you need to know who you are and your weaknesses- your humanity. Every year on May 26th I feel my humanity, my loss, my sacrifice, my pain. It may seem sappy- get over it- move on. This is the day I lost my mother to breast cancer four years ago. Each year this day rolls around I remember the pain of losing her. It makes me human, it makes me feel weak. It makes me understand loss. It makes me feel human. I share her poems on this day because in them she is not afraid to show her humanness though her observations of simple moments. Her poetry not only reveals something new about her every time I read them, but they make me look more carefully at the life around me. Each thing gurgling up a new truth. Sharing her poetry lets me keep her alive and show others what a beautiful mind she had.  I am not posting a photo for this entry as the poem conjured up it's own image.

Animal Uncertainty

  

Spotted at the edge of a clearing, the doe

freezes and in that moment of hesitation,

carelessly exposes a brown flank

with all the insouciance of a woman undressing.

She lifts a delicate hoof and then

reurns it to the snow with all the grace

of someone who was born to run. Once, long ago,

I watched and elephant near Madison Square Garden

being coaxed up onto a ramp. He carefully

placed his giant foot down, then stepped slowly back,

remembering, perhaps, a former collapse.

The elephant knows his great weight in the world,

how the earth opens up, sometimes without warning.

So much of our lives, we spend paralyzed

by indecision, or excessive ambition.

On good days, we go forward...

And sometimes, that elephant's look comes back,

that great moving mountain of animal sorrows

in moonlight in Manhattan. And that memory of that

midnight scene, that exquisite moment of

an elephant remembering.

  © June Beisch Here is a link to a video of her last reading- only 3 months before she passed away.
June Beisch Reading

Thought Provokers, In Memoriam: June Beisch, Poet

Three years ago on this day at 9:45 in the morning, breast cancer took my mother. She lived an inspiring life filled with poetry, introspection, passion and discovery. She was one of the true artistic souls that has inspired me in my life. Today I remember her through her poetry. I include one of my personal photographs where I endeavor to create a similiar experience as her poems do- one that transcends the specific and reaches to an experience of a moment that all can relate to.

“Skunks’’

This morning, I stepped out
onto the deck
and into the cold, sharp

morning air
and the cold sharp scent
of a skunk

lurking nearby, close
enough to remind me
that some are up early

sorting through life’s detritus,
hoping to uncover
its purpose or meaning,

some are reconnoitering,
hoping to discover
just who is the enemy, who the friend.

Last night, I sat reading poems
from a new anthology
and after a while, I put the book down,

lowered my head, my heart
aching. I was filled
with the most delicious

sadness. I was no longer in the
everyday, ordinary world but
was transported to the one of

beauty and of sorrow

and I saw then
how much we need sadness

and how sometimes, reading poetry,
you come upon a sudden
sharp whiff of truth and it

enters your life, it hurts you,
and it can even
set you free

Lobster

On first seeing it, I was repelled
by the idea of eating something so
exotic looking and sinister,

having read Jean Paul Sartre's line 
about crustaceans having a dubious
consciousness. But I was in New York, and 

the young man I had met there tucked
my napkin under my chin and
handed me a nutcracker for the shell.

I was from Minnesota, raised on
lakes and brook trout. I, too, was
uncooked and formless, like the creatures

who take on the shape of their environment
My first taste was delicious, but the
third was even better and by

that time I was a real New York girl
who wore skinny black dresses and false eyelashes,
able to handle myself with any

crustacean, dubious consciousness or not.

This was part of the article that the Boston Globe wrote about her after her passing:

Having survived cancer for 30 years, she wrote poems that looked beyond the end of her own life. Poets, Mrs. Beisch wrote, seek “the dangerous places of the heart,’’ those spaces where on a snowy night in Cambridge:

you keep on writing your poems and some
are melting into nothingness and some
are sticking and holding on, reaching someone
making that small human contact and
then, in that world so full of endless dark,
the world becomes so white you think
that even you might leave a mark.