First, an update: I finally realized I can turn off the need to sign in to like a post or to leave a comment. I welcome you to try it, especially if you read this blog primarily through the email I send out. I’d love to have more interaction with you, my readers and subscribers.

Moving on: this is, I think, my longest poem, at least for the amount of space it takes up vertically.

It has grown from this morning when I started writing about 6:30 am, eventually forced to leave the poem for a while to get my mom to a doctor’s appointment.

As I often do these days, I engaged my poetry mentor (Chat GPT) in a discussion of the poem as it formed, asking for help thinking through my decisions. You can read that full exchange here.

My idea this morning was to write something about passing things I knew down to my children, things that I have learned apart from schooling, not life lessons, but knowledge about how to do essential things like chopping wood.

It was cold this morning so when I took the dogs out at 5:30 am, I thought out loud, as I often talk to the dogs, “It’s a good day for a fire, isn’t it, guys? I think I’ll build a fire this afternoon.”

And so I will.

This technique, to lay a heavy, longish piece of wood down lengthwise in front of you and directly behind the log you are splitting, is a great technique to know. I’m sure it is out there on the internet along with plenty of other sage advice.

I spent time, as I said here, splitting wood with an axe and then once I had the maul burying that maul in the mud. Then I began splitting on a stump, which is a decent idea, keeping the log higher so that you strike it level with your arms out.

But you can still miss and the swing down can do a number on your feet and legs.

Sacrificing a log while chopping is not so much of a sacrifice, as wood, regardless of how much you damage the sides, will still burn.

The right word is still sacrificial, though, and here I am taking the word beyond, trying to imply that the act of sharing knowledge, of taking the time to actually teach things you know, that is a type of sacrifice too.

My neighbor has an hydraulic, gas-powered wood-splitter as well, so the lesson on splitting was helpful, but he also let me borrow his splitter when I needed it.

And as for dangerous, that powered splitter is much more so, the wedge moving down slowly but if you are not extremely careful and attentive, you can leave your hand in a bad spot, or the wood improperly placed might pop off the steel supports. Either one of those things can hurt you. Badly.

I thought of Robert Frost as I wrote this and his poem, “Mending Wall“, not for its form or his brilliant skill at verse and layering meaning, but because it is a story about communicating with a neighbor.

I am at one of our local libraries right now and found several poetry books in their current book sale, one of perhaps the first grand American Poet before Frost and Dickinson and many others, of course.

I found a copy of Leaves of Grass along with another book called visiting Walt, a collection of Walt Whitman inspired poems.

Leaves of Grass is hand annotated in pencil by the previous owner, something I too have started to do with all of my poetry books.

I found another book called Talking With Poets, a collection of interviews with the poets Robert Pinsky, Seamus Heaney, Philip Levine, Michael Hofmann and David Ferry.

The interviews are transcribed from audio recordings of students interviewing each poet for a class the editor Harry Thomas taught.

Just having books of poetry out on the table here in the library is inspiring.

I have begun to layout my own first book of poetry and here’s hoping that it will also inspire someone else sitting at a sunny table in a library to compose their own poem.

And now, let’s see what the WordPress AI has for an visual interpretation of this poem:

That does not look safe.

I took the featured photo right here in the corner of the library. There are great lines here and taking the corner between these two windows found a number of them, including some rays of light that run along the corner and, in my opinion, some well placed clouds for effect.