Today I saw a dog--a boxer, I think, wearing a hot pink tutu, tulle swishing as she trotted down the street alongside her owner’s motorized cart. Look, sometimes delight comes easy, around the corner like a dog in a pink tutu. Sometimes, though, it’s a slow climb, slogging through, boots sucking mud, over rocks, to find, suddenly, delight. In the climb, and the mud, and the rocks. In the river’s purr and the clear blue of sky through bare winter branches.
Tag: poetry
this is my work
This is my work: to sit quietly in the open air and watch a grosbeak walk sideways along the thinnest branches of the longest limbs of the tallest oak tree, his throat a crimson banner blazing in the afternoon sun. It is also my peace. © stephanie g pepper, 2023
wrapped: reading list, v.2022
I didn’t read near as much in 2022 as I have in the past couple of years. I think my brain worked more in images than words. Even so, I got a little bit of reading in. I finished off Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series (put off several years after reading Gilead, because, well, not my favorite), found myself drawn to memoirs (do yourself a favor and read both Agassi’s and Brandi Carlile’s), and studied photographs in several collections, some of which I didn’t get all the way through so I didn’t include. I even branched out into audiobooks, a trend that appears to be continuing in 2023. So, here it is wrapped up, reading list, v.2022.
Poetry
The Wild Iris, Louise Glück
Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
Appalachian Elegy, bell hooks
New and Selected Poems, Volume One, Mary Oliver
Blue Horses, Mary Oliver
Photography
The Polaroid Diaries, Linda McCartney
Wide Open, Linda McCartney
Sun Prints, Linda McCartney
Photo Basics, Joel Sartore
Advanced ICM Techniques, Roxanne Bouché Overton
Fiction
Home, Marilynne Robinson
Beheld, TaraShea Nesbit
Lila, Marilynne Robinson
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel
Home, Toni Morrison
Jack, Marilynne Robinson
Long Way Down, Jason Reynolds
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret?, Judy Blume
Nonfiction
creativity; Where the Divine and the Human Meet, Matthew Fox
Poet Warrior, Joy Harjo
Open, Andre Agassi
How to Sell Your Art Online, Cory Huff
Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers, Deborah Heiligman
Midlife and the Great Unknown, David Whyte
creativity, John Cleese
Broken Horses, Brandi Carlile
when rain falls
No matter how far
I carry myself
or where I land,
I’ve no doubt that when,
deep into the dry summer,
rain
begins to fall and
thunder
tumbles across the
sky
you will find me on my
porch
with a sweating jar of
sweet tea
muttering, “mm-hmm, we needed this.”
beautiful splinter
The moon was a beautiful
splinter last night, hanging
amber in the indigo sky,
while threads of milky purple clouds
drifted by like lazy hitchhikers
on a deserted highway.
Oh, I wanted a picture—or two—
but between arriving home
and chopping onions for soup,
leaving no time to get the camera,
the moon dropped behind the trees,
then, slipped below the horizon,
out of reach, out of time.
If I’d known—
if I’d known,
I would’ve stood
in her light a little longer,
gazed more fully, breathed more deeply,
taking in the angled crescent
nodding luminous
in the muted night. I carry
it now, a photograph in my mind,
as I do all beautiful things.
©stephanie g pepper, 2020
photo by: stephanie pepper, 2021
make a river
How many drops make a river where silver bellied fish flash in the sun? How many make the puddle in the pothole where a robin splashes in the rain? For that matter, how many make this mug, make this spoonful, make a cup, make a kettle? How many make a spring storm, that soaks the winter weary earth? Don’t ask about the ocean-- it’s futile to guess. So. What is one more drop, or another tear that falls?
©stephanie g pepper, 2022
wrapped: reading list, v.2021
Poetry:
Window Poems, Wendell Berry
Conamara Blues: Poems, John O’Donohue
100 Poems, Seamus Heaney
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems, Joy Harjo
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, Wendell Berry
Given: Poems, Wendell Berry
Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, Mary Oliver
Bright Dead Things: Poems, Ada Limón
The Mad Farmer Poems, Wendell Berry
The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: poems, Marie Howe
Breathing the Water, Denise Levertov
Entries: poems, Wendell Berry
Red Suitcase, Naomi Shihab Nye
Station Island, Seamus Heaney
What Do We Know: poems and prose poems, Mary Oliver
Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey: poems 1991-1995, Hayden Carruth
How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons), Barbara Kingsolver
Dearly, Margaret Atwood
Nonfiction:
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert
Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton
A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, Aldo Leopold
The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, J. Drew Lanham
Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics, Mirabai Starr
Standing by Words: essays, Wendell Berry
Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Beginner’s Photography Guide, Chris Gatcum
If Women Rose Rooted: a life-changing journey to authenticity and belonging, Sharon Blackie
It All Turns on Affection, The Jefferson Lecture & Other Essays, Wendell Berry
Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés
The Body Knows the Way: Coming Home Through the Dark Night, Gordon Peerman
Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll
Wild Like Flowers, The Restoration of Relationship through Regeneration, Daniel Firth Griffith
The Long-Legged House: essays, Wendell Berry
Late Migrations; A Natural History of Love and Loss, Margaret Renkl
The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle
Fiction:
Fidelity: Five Stories, Wendell Berry
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Memory of Old Jack, Wendell Berry
The Once and Future Witches, Alix E. Harrow
The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership, Wendell Berry
Remembering, Wendell Berry
Circe, Madeline Miller
A World Lost: a novel, Wendell Berry
the winter wren
This morning I had a long conversation with
a winter wren. I’m not sure what passed
between us, exactly, only that
something did. Something that
left me feeling
joyful…
giddy, almost…
and definitely delighted.
All afternoon I considered this,
and wondered why such a secretive
little bird would call me out for a chat,
which, clearly, she did, kit-kittering loudly
all around me until, at last,
I called out “hello, Little One,” and
rose to find her in the undergrowth.
She did not startle and fly away
at my approach, but studied me
quite carefully as I spoke. Neither
was she injured, as she crept around under
the rocks and hopped among the
tangled thickets, a worm dangling
from her fine, sharp beak,
chittering all the while.
And now, night has fallen fully,
and the moon peers out
behind the clouds, and I—delighted
and grateful—am
no closer to knowing
what, exactly, passed between me and
the winter wren.
©stephanie g pepper, 2021
when I am beside the water
1. When I am beside the water, I sink to the earth, to my knees in shell fragments and river stones, polished and smooth by the endless passing of water this way 2. and what troubles me dissolves and the jagged edges of my discontent soften 3. how many times will I kneel by the water to heal? 4. the unseen heron cries and reveals himself at last in the beating of great wings 5. and I rise, saved again by the clean air and the blesséd earth and the sweet clear water
©stephanie pepper, 2021
Stones River, December 23
Tonight it will rain and grow colder still,
but this morning is clear and bright.
The early sun is alive, awake behind the treeline,
its beams dancing like fairies on the water,
and casting long shadows on
blue-green glass, to the glory of naked trees.
The river exhales into the chill winter air;
its breath rises in smokey ribbons
through the stillness, like faintly whispered
secrets of its own soul’s longing.
Resting against an old sweet gum,
I sit on its knotted roots, unearthed, exposed
to light by untold years of the river
flooding and flowing and falling.
My gloved fingers lace around a
stainless steel mug of tea;
my restless mind works
the endless questions, asked–never answered–
time and time again.
Out of the hush, a voice breaks the
disquiet in my spirit, and maybe I heard
what the river spoke:
Stop.
Let it feed you.
Let this be only what it is: a quiet morning beside the river
two days before Christmas.
So I lean back into the rough trunk of the
time weathered tree, whisper the words of the
Irish poet across the water in thanks, and
swallow the sunshine with my tea.
©stephanie g pepper, 2021
stephanie pepper 