Flashback.

In either high school or junior high, I adored this poem. Can't remember which.

What a wonderful bird the frog are!
When he stand he sit almost;
When he hop he fly almost.
He ain't got no sense hardly;
He ain't got no tail hardly either.
When he sit, he sit on what he ain't got almost.

-Anonymous

I have not thought about it once in probably fifteen years. Came across it online tonight, and it brought a wide grin to my face. Then it occurred to me that other people may have seen my delight in these kinds of things a little odd.

I've never been one of those people who are wired to modify their behavior based on what other people think. Even in junior high, that most agonizingly self-conscious period, I shrugged if something that intrigued me was considered "uncool."

I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure this poem would have been one of those things. I also wrote long notes to my friends in rhyme, had a pet pink JcPenney's shopping bag (rolled into a poofy ball) named "Durf," and made knotted friendship bracelets from embroidery floss a full year before the craze hit my school (which made me uncool at the time, but cool a year later when I was an expert and could design my own patterns).

I remember losing a friend in eighth grade because I refused to say that her bulimic vomiting and dare-based makeouts with Popular Boys was okay with me. I wouldn't answer questions about my sexual experiences (in seventh grade!) at a slumber party. Uncool. I kept on being a girl scout through high school despite its obvious uncoolness. I never did curl my bangs into an enormous Hairspray Cliff. And I didn't care if the popular people liked me or not, which was perhaps the greatest Uncool of them all.

Other than being smart and a girl.

...but I had a happy adolescence. I enjoyed my friends, had my secret crushes, excelled in band (flute) and academics and attended various gifted enrichment programs in the summer. A few guys liked me, and I generally didn't like them back, with one important exception who's downstairs sleeping in my bed right now. And I emerged from adolescence pretty much unscathed.

And really, I still like that silly poem.

Wage Peace.

I had almost forgotten about this poem. I'd been told it was by Mary Oliver, who is amazing, but now (upon Googling to find it) I learn that it's from a poet who lives in New Mexico, Judyth Hill.

I like that she lives there.
I like that her name includes the word Hill.
I'll have to check her out.

This is the kind of person I want to be. Sometimes I hold the rubble and terrorists and confusion in for far too long, dwelling on it, letting it poison me.

I want to be able to release it and instead relish all that's here to be enjoyed. And there is a LOT to savor.

WAGE PEACE

Wage peace with your breath.

Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists
and breathe out sleeping children and freshly mown fields.

Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.

Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.

Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.

Play music, memorize the words for thank you in three languages.

Learn to knit, and make a hat.

Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief
as the outbreath of beauty or the gesture of fish.

Swim for the other side.

Wage peace.

Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious:

Have a cup of tea and rejoice.

Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.