Tag: poetry

beauty, poetry, reflecting

First reading

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I’ve been a reader for many, many – many – years now, of course. And over the course of those years, I have also been a writer. I learned to write by reading the writing of others, I think. Words, and the sentences that hold words together, come easily to me. That particular gift allowed me to be a preacher, also. I loved reading and studying the scriptures, and over the years, I’d developed my own rhythm, a rhythm that formed the outline of my week for many years.

And I have written poetry since the days I watched my teachers carefully, studying their manners and idiosyncrasies carefully. I was a careful child, and I took that care to my studies. I faithfully memorized the poems of the great American poets in Miss Ross’ English class at Peckham Junior High School. Miss Ross gave me a great gift with her old-fashioned manner of teaching. I remember so little about her; she was an old-fashioned teacher who wore a navy blue, old-fashioned dress that was covered in little white dots, a dress that covered her knees, modestly. Was her name really Betsy Ross? I don’t know, although that’s the name I’ve carried with me all these years. I was sure she had her hair done at a beauty parlor every week. That’s how it looked to me, with my trained eye!

Every week, I studied a poet’s life and poems, and over the course of the semester I put together a book of my own, a three ringed folder with poems carefully written in my own hand, and pictures to visually bring the poems to life. I cut the pictures out of the pages of my mother’s women’s magazines. I wish I had those folders now. Those pages of poems were a treasure in my life.

The poems, the lives of the poets, the world that books and reading opened to me have been a priceless gift to my life.

But the poems that I have written and collected – not carefully, but faithfully – have formed the book that my beloved husband, Jeff, encouraged me to have printed. I am a published poet now! That’s an identity I find I will have to grow into. Like the day Jeff’s first published book appeared at our house, he and I sat down and looked over the small printed volume of my own poetry, Moments (Balboa Press, 2026).

And I have survived my first reading! Carefully planned and executed, I read aloud to a group of other humans selected poems from my collection. The room – the Edwards Room at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, the church where I had retired from as Pastor in 2014 after a 16 year stint (not bad for a Methodist!). There was a gathered group of people, mostly folks I know, a few I did not know. A woman I’d helped with a family matter a few years after my retirement joined the group. The pastor, Sunae, had made sure a flyer had been included in each Sunday’s bulletin.

And so, I am a published poet, and I am a poet who has survived a public reading. I am grateful. A gathering of friends, of beloved folks from many years in my life, colleagues, former parishioners, and even a man I did not know arrived to sit for an hour of poetry reading! So many of my poems, many written on scraps of paper and filed away in a manila file – these many years – were now properly printed and presented for public view. The pastor and a few faithful helpers set out a nice table of simple food for after the reading. A friend brought her dog and generously agreed to handle the selling of the books, of my book, which I signed for the waiting admirers.

And so I expect that a small part of me will have to take on a new – another – identity: published poet. I’m proud that a photo of mine graces the cover. I was delighted to see who showed up to hear me read, some folks I had forgotten would be interested at all.

Now, that day is in the past. I’ve had my collection of poems published – I’m a published poet now – and I’ve had a reading. I’m out there.

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what comes to mind

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I walked under the railroad tracks at Fond du Lac Avenue and Burleigh Street on the North Side of Milwaukee from those neighborhoods of frame flats, home to two families, up and down, and into another world. I didn’t know it then, but the world I was walking in to when I came out from under the viaduct at 35th Street – across from Master Lock Company – would become my world. My world is different from the world I left in those rented houses. My world is different in so many ways.

I was introduced to other students, students who actually lived on the other side of the tracks, when I walked under those tracks. I was a student at Peckham Junior High School, and so were they, those other students. Many of them would become my friends. At least one teacher made the mistake of thinking I was one of those students, but I was always painfully aware that I was from the other side of the tracks. I never forgot that. I noticed the clothes my classmates wore. I knew that many of them came from families where at least Dad – and sometimes Mom, too – were educated beyond high school. Some of my classmates were the children of professional people. Maybe I felt shame among those students; I saw the differences between them and me, with raw clarity.

Something else happened when I walked under the railroad tracks. I was tracked into the college bound students, the smart kids, based on the IQ tests all students had dutifully taken during grade school. And that changed my life.

Some people along the way would become important to me, to my life. I would never forget their names, how they looked, things they said. For three years I sat behind Larry Atlas, who made me laugh, in English classes taught by Miss Ross. How old was she? As a student of middle school age, she certainly looked very old to me. She always wore black old-lady shoes, and she always wore a navy polka-dotted dress that hung long, between her knees and ankles. I’m pretty sure she went to the hairdresser once a week to get her hair done, cut and permed. I knew this: she was not cut from the same mold as the women I’d known up to then.

I’m grateful to have been educated by the teachers I was privileged to have in the Milwaukee Public Schools in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Not one of them knew it, but they changed my life, changed the trajectory of my life.

In Miss Ross’s class, we studied the American poets. Every week, we learned about a poet, read their poems, memorized a poem, and put our learning into a book of our own, poems carefully rendered in my own hand. I filled a pocket folder with sheets of paper that included carefully printed poems and pictures I’d cut from the magazines my mother received in the mail. Sometimes, I was called upon to stand in front of the class on Friday and recite the poem we’d been assigned to memorize that week. My own love of poetry was fertilized and grew in Junior High English Class taught by Miss Ross. I can still recite most of the poems I learned over those three years. I love to recite the poems I had memorized, so many years – so many decades – ago.

I learned to love poems then. I began to write my own poems then, too. Sometimes I still find a poem in my childlike handwriting, a few words of my own fashioned into my own poem. And sometimes – often – the words of a poem I memorized under the strong and wonderful guidance of Miss Ross comes to mind.

Reciting a poem from memory is a great joy – to me. Later, after Junior High, after High School, somewhere along the way of my now long life, I memorized “Twas’ the Night Before Christmas.” Every year, I make sure to break into a recital of the entire text for someone else’s enjoyment – and for my own enjoyment.

*

Jeff was the one who encouraged me, this past year, to have a collection of my own poems published. Without his kind encouragement, I expect I’d never have sent my poems out to be published. It’s an accomplishment of my life. Its genesis, I think, began on that walk under the viaduct at Fond du Lac Avenue and Burleigh Street, on the North Side of Milwaukee.

***

Moments, Mary Elyn Bahlert, Balboa Press, 2026. Available on Amazon.

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poetry, remembering

I’m From…

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I am from
frame flats with steep staircases, lining city streets.
Daddy’s eyes, sparkling. Momma’s worries.
Baby sister, big brother.

The smell of yeast bread as I climb the narrow steps,
cozy.
The smell of beer, always.
Cereal for breakfast,
peasant borscht for supper at five.
On the back porch, tracing Sputnik across the sky.

Shame: “we don’t say that.”

I am from
Steelworkers Union 19806,
bargaining rights and hoping for overtime.
Snow drifts. Winter winds. Slow springs, long-awaited,
lilacs in big dishes, coleus leaves, hollyhocks.

Moving – again.

I am from
up North and cooler by the Lake,
humid nights, thunderstorms crashing from west to east,
short, languid summers,
sheets fresh from drying in the sun.

I am from
hanging with the smart kids,
the Center Street library,
laughter, and lots of tears.
Anger that never cooled. Warm and loving folks.
Books. Books. Books.

Old World people and me –
tiptoeing into the New World.


“I am from,” Mary Elyn Bahlert, from Moments, published 2026

photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 12/2025

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Life is the color of things

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Life is the color of things:
of places, of thoughts, of people I have loved, of sky and trees.
I know gray well, and I have taken from gray a gift:
the gift of gray is to know – for the first time – the color of things.

Life is the color of things and 
it is good to breathe in the riches of sky, of earth,
of shadows across the sky, 
of green grass that carries the fragrance of earth,
of long orange autumns, bright maples, 
of gray and darkened days of winter,
of spring, snow banks melting,
of a navy-blue awakening, dawn.

The color of things lives in the eyes of friends, 
places where sadness lurks,
where pain is not covered by dull happiness.

Life is the color of things:
this gift, earth, all that is in it,
the heart, the heart, full:

And all that is in it.

Life is the color of things. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, Oakland, View Place, 2025

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“When I am among the trees”, Mary Oliver

Mary Elyn Bahlert

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.

I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world,

but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, October 10, 2025, “Among the trees in my yard”