☀️ The Daily Boost #808
Look what turns up
The Daily Boost (published weekdays) is one of the newsletters of The Raft, the online community of author Phyllis Cole-Dai. We Rafters ride the river of life buoyed by music, poetry, and other arts, along with open spiritual practice. Most everything here is free, but patrons (paid subscribers) get some special perks because Phyllis is extra grateful for their support. Sign up here:
POTATO Jane Kenyon In haste one evening while making dinner I threw away a potato that was spoiled on one end. The rest would have been redeemable. In the yellow garbage pail it became the consort of coffee grounds, banana skins, carrot peelings. I pitched it onto the compost where steaming scraps and leaves return, like bodies over time, to earth. When I flipped the fetid layers with a hay fork to air the pile, the potato turned up unfailingly, as if to revile me— looking plumper, firmer, resurrected instead of disassembling. It seemed to grow until I might have made shepherd’s pie for a whole hamlet, people who pass the day dropping trees, pumping gas, pinning hand-me-down clothes on the line. (from Collected Poems)
(My thanks to Jane Kenyon, via Poets.org.)
The Gentle Nudge
THIS THURSDAY: Poetry Pick-Me-Up (Zoom, 12:00-1:00PM Central, at this link)
SEPTEMBER 9: “Riffing on The Singing Stick”—my online book bash. I’d love for you to come! Details and RSVP here.
Delightful! I was privileged to hear Jane Kenyon read some of her poetry as well as her husband, Donald Hall, in New Hampshire, nearly 30 years ago, before her death from cancer. They were quite a team.
I think one of Jane's gifts as a poet was that she shared the shadowy parts, the throwaways, and the neglected ordinary things of life. I don't remember this one but I find it inspiring without being sentimental.