How to Drink Water When There Is Wine
How to stay at this desk when the sun
is barefooting cartwheels over the grass –
How to step carefully on the path that pulls
for the fleet unfettered gait of a deer –
How to go home when the wood thrush
is promising the drunk liquid bliss of dusk –
How to resist the kiss, the body forbidden
that plucks the long vibrating string of want –
How to drink water when there is wine –
Once I knew all these brick-shaped things, took them
For the currency of survival.
Now I have lived long and I know better.
How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) by Barbara Kingsolver is published by Faber.
Invitation: “Once I knew…”
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More about Barbara Kingsolver from her web page:
Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955, and grew up in rural Kentucky. She earned degrees in biology from DePauw University and the University of Arizona, and has worked as a freelance writer and author since 1985. At various times in her adult life she has lived in England, France, and the Canary Islands, and has worked in Europe, Africa, Asia, Mexico, and South America. She spent two decades in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to southwestern Virginia where she currently resides.
Her books, in order of publication, are: The Bean Trees (1988), Homeland (1989), Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike (1989), Animal Dreams (1990), Another America (1992), Pigs in Heaven (1993), High Tide in Tucson (1995), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Prodigal Summer (2000), Small Wonder (2002), Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands, with photographer Annie Griffiths Belt (2002), Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007), The Lacuna (2009), Flight Behavior (2012), Unsheltered (2018), How To Fly (In 10,000 Easy Lessons) (2020), Demon Copperhead (2022), and Coyote’s Wild Home (2023). She served as editor for Best American Short Stories 2001. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and have been adopted into the core literature curriculum in high schools and colleges throughout the nation. She has contributed to more than fifty literary anthologies, and her reviews and articles have appeared in most major U.S. newspapers and magazines. Click here to view complete bibliography. And HERE to read more about the book of poetry
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August Courageous Citizen
Lois Gibbs
What inspires me about Lois Gibbs, who had no aspiration to be an advocate, is that she became one once she knew about how bad the chemical toxins were in her neighborhood in Love Canal. She fought for her own sick child. And, she believed she had to fight for the people who lived in her community.
“The dioxin story is the story of how science has failed to provide us with answers, how corporations control policymaking and decisions in our society, and how government is silenced.”
I just finished "Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver which won the Pulitzer Prize. She is one of our generation's most thoughtful writers, in my view. When she writes about staying at the desk, I can imagine that she did stay at the desk... and yet she offers her awareness about the "currency of survival" and she declares -- "Now I have lived long and I know better." Hers is an invitation toward liberation... to leave the desk... to drink the wine. To live, not just survive.
The "currency of survival," indeed. Thanks, Commons, for sharing this!