Donna Hilbert, From the Peninsula

The Germans seem to have a perfect, if almost untranslatable, word for everything.   Sitzfleisch, from sitzen (to sit) and fleisch (flesh), is the word I am thinking of today.  The Wiktionary defines sitzfleisch as the ability to endure or carry on with an activity.  It is the actual sitting down in my office that provides the greatest challenge to my life as a writer, because the beauty of my neighborhood continually calls me to the window.

When I first moved to the peninsula I was so distracted by the ever-renewing beauty of the ocean, I could do little more than stare.   Thirteen years later, the diving pelicans, the occasional pod of dolphin, the cargo ships lined up for the port, still call me forth.  I love to see the weather change, to hear the music of waves slapping the shore.  This morning there will be an astronomical high tide.   Big waves predicted.  I will be watching; I will be listening.

Here is a poem celebrating the new moon, by the late Long Beach poet Jane Buel Bradley, from her chapbook, World Alive, published by PEARL Editions, 1997.  Jane’s poem was inspired by Robert Frost’s poem “Moon Compasses.”

 A silver eyelash in the sunset sky

draws me outside to look and dream the why

this monthly promise always stirs my soul

and keeps me hopeful that before the whole

full moon lights up the autumn’s darkest night

I shall find words to speak of my delight

in this world’s beauty and begin to face

the waning and the darkness with some grace.