"Gospel," by Patrick Kavanagh

 Reading/video of a short poem by the well known Irish poet and novelist (1904-1967). It's not about "the" gospel. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfNXqnjmkQ

Quick Swedish Rye Bread

My great aunt, Bertha Åström, emigrated to the U.S. from Boden, Sweden (the far north) in the early 20th century. She had become pregnant out of wedlock when she was just 13-- statutory rape, at the very least. It was decided for her, I think, that she should emigrate and leave the child behind. Her eldest brother, Isak, my grandfather, had already come over, and he'd become a hard-rock gold miner, first at the Homestake Mine in the Dakotas, then in Colorado, and finally in Northern California--Grass Valley, Allegheny, and Sierra City. Bertha followed him for a while working as a cook and nanny, before settling in the Bay Area, where she became a nanny. 

Eventually she married, and in the mid-1920s she and her husband built a resort in the Lakes Basin above Sierra City, specifically at Packer Lake. They and some laborers built a log-lodge and some log-cabins. Bertha cooked meals for the guests on a big wood stove. Many people of wealth liked to spend a week or two their in the summers, and they didn't mind roughing it a bit: it wasn't a Hilton. 

By the way, her son Erik eventually made his way to America, and lived in Sierra City for the remainder of his life (and hers).

Before her life was totally disrupted, Bertha was training as a cook in a Boden hotel, and one of the recipes she brought over was for Swedish rye bread, which is quite different from Central European rye breads. It includes molasses, prunes, and anise seeds, and finely diced orange peels, mixed with dark rye flour, white flour, and a few mashed potatoes. My mother learned the recipe from Bertha and passed it along to other generations. It's a yeast bread which requires three risings, so it's an all-day task, pretty much. I adapted the recipe to a quick bread, and it captures the flavor and texture of the original pretty well. Sweet but not too sweet, aromatic, dense. Of course, there's nothing like yeast bread. The recipe:

Quick Swedish Rye Bread

This is a quick version of Bertha Åström’s Swedish (Ostrom’s) yeast) rye bread. The consistency is slightly denser, but the flavor is the same.

Ingredients:

2 cups white flour

2 cups dark rye flour

½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup low-fat buttermilk [if you don't have buttermilk, add white vinegar to milk]

½ cup molasses

½ cup prune juice

2-3 tablespoons of grated orange peel

1 tablespoon dried anise seeds

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

It’s best to sift the flour. Mix flour, salt, soda, orange peel, and anise seeds well.

Mix prune juice and molasses and briefly warm the mixture in a pan.

Add buttermilk and prune juice/molasses to the flour (etc.) and mix. The dough will be quite sticky. Add more buttermilk if necessary.

Briefly kneed the dough and shape it into a circular/oval loaf on a floured surface. Cut an X into the top with a sharp knife.

Place on floured baking tin. Bake at 400 degrees for 30 minutes or slightly longer. Remove from oven and let loaf cool on rack.

Hans Ostrom 11/2019

 

She Wanted to Be Wrong

Cassandra wanted to be wrong.

Her prescience proved to heavy.

She wanted experts, logicians,

or insiders to relieve her of her

knowledge. But, no. When they

ignored, dismissed, mocked, and--

worst of all--reassured her, they

looked like cheerful rabbits

about to be clubbed. Cassandra

wanted the world to right itself

to prove her wrong. She knew

it would remain a hell of war

and hatred. She'd seen the

time when swords hacked

at limbs and arrows buried

themselves in flesh and

people howled at flames

and smoke. Blind, she saw

herself propped against

a wall, hearing and knowing. 

hans ostrom 2020

Budgetary Matters

 [a revision of one I posted years ago]

The spreadsheet is all before you. The farther
left you travel, the more desirable things become.

Indeed the items named seem not just necessary
but inevitable, prophesied. As you travel toward

the reckoning right hand of calculation, acquisition
seems unlikely. You think of Zeno's Paradox.

You begin to feel an urge to save rubber-bands
and bits of string, to eat left-overs, sew

your own clothes, share your food with
people society discounts. When you finally arrive

in the severe, humorless zone of the numbers-column,
you then descend toward the hell of the Bottom Line,

which is, oddly enough, shown by two lines.
At that frontier, expenses devour entrails of income.

Accountants costumed in gray feathers perform
a ghastly arithmetical dance. You hear someone

mumble, "Nothing we can afford is worth doing,"
to which you respond, "Nothing worth doing

is quantifiable," which you don't believe.
You stand up and demand to know the origin

of money. You are forcibly subtracted
from the room. As you depart, you

hear someone say, "I think we just found
some extra money in the budget!"

"Passageways," by Antonio Machado

 A reading/video of a short poem by Seville-born poet Antonio Machado (1879-1939). Not sure who the translator is, but Machado's translator's include Willis Barnstone, Robert Bly, and Alan Trueblood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dESDxzFz9yw

"A Thanksgiving," by W.H. Auden

 Recorded this one a long time ago; in it, Auden thanks those who influenced his poetry:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsRCU-ulPZo

"The Composer," by W.H. Auden

 Reading/video of a short poem by Mr. Wystan Hugh Auden in which he distinguishes between music and other arts. Poem is from his Collected Poems from Knopf. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1M48EyRsKQ

It's 1954, And Emmett Kelly Remembers . . .

 . . . the Hartford, Connecticut, circus fire,

1944: the big tent went up, blazing,

and people panicked like animals,
but the big cats got strangely calm.

The famous clown rushed from
the small dressing-tent in makeup,

managed more authority than a cop
because a clown's not supposed

to speak, so when he spoke,
the wild eyed customers listened.

They let him save their lives
with a frown.  Back in his tent,

he said to Willie in the mirror,
"No show tonight. No show

in Clown Alley."  Other clowns
entered, hysterical, told who'd lived,

who hadn't. (168 hadn't.)
'You were wonderful, ' they told Emmett,

who had removed half of Willie's face.
Kelly shrugged, said:  'I did what I could.'

Now in 1954, Madison Square Garden,
Emmett's put on half of Willie's face.

He feels weary.  He tells an interviewer,
"Clowning is nothing you can study for."

A Pebble in the Gravel

Fly-fishing in the North Yuba River

made for miniature revelations

that rose out of casting
and catching, wading and releasing;
out of breathing, walking, slipping,
falling, rising; from deepening dusks, darkening
pools. Sometimes the stream

clarified underwater gravel and boulders;
whorls of debris appeared as if
magnified: and a trout came up,
stared at duplicity, declined. Water
returned to its blurred blend
of liquid window, liquid door.
Sometimes a hatch of gnats
exploded into existence--its own,
mine, the canyon's, Earth's. Or: suddenly

a snake.  Or: a deer, staring, black
nostrils flaring. Or: kingfisher, ouzel,
hawk, robin.  Bat. Or: one's awareness
of one's self as a loose knot
of ambition, instinct, appetite,
motor skills, boredom--together cast
briefly over water, offered.

Sometimes the stream
roared quietly, mumbled forcefully,
and against such sound (North
Yuba, North Yuba), awareness
of one's thin, tentative presence
in presence might rise briefly,
leap, re-submerge.

Of Being

Birth drops us at a train station

near the lip of chaos.

We step off the Evolution Express
carrying a valise of neurons.

We are headed nowhere
and already there.

We live between our bones,
napping in hammocks of selfhood.

hans ostrom 1999/2020

"Metallic Traces"

Metallic traces, yesterday's

steel blues. Metallic traces,

how her mouth tasted--well, it

tasted real. Traces of mercury

in rivers, iron from sloughing

ships at sea's bottom. Everything

that made sense doesn't make

sense anymore. What was all

that foundry forging for? 

Metallic traces, old radio

antennas still seizing sounds

from air and passing them 

along though no one's hearing

because no one's listening. 

hans ostrom 2020

Bravissima

Her frown made me sad--

kind of like tired, pliable carrots

do. Whereas her perfume

delighted like a flower concert

played by multicolored clouds. 

When she talked, I heard

her words as vocal chords

thrummed into the present

moment. And when she 

smiled at me--at me!--

well, I wanted to applaud

in a way that voiced

desire for an encore,

for me an encore.  

hans ostrom 2020

"The Waning Moon," by Percy Bysshe Shelley

 Reading/video of a short poem by the famous British Romantic poet, Shelley, 1792-1822. Husband of Mary Shelley.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjBy-Bx8C-k