Ripe

We're ripe,
you and me.
Full to bursting with
ourselves.

Is it not some sort of
everyday natural miracle that
despite the excess use of
landlord superphosphate,
we are organically sweet
underneath our prickles,
spurting juice,
ready to fall from the tree
and seep in to feed the
dry saline earth of
our mother?

I made this!  Free to use if you link back to this page, attribute it to susieq777, & don't use it commercially

(in other words, a creative commons noncommercial/no derivatives/attribution licence)

Mack the Freak

He yearns for a move to the compartment next door,
(though there's talk the spoonies are a cult
he is attracted to their softness, their curves).

He yearns to move away from the steak knives
with their wooden-handled arrogance
and their sharp serrations.

Away from the regular knives who
laugh at his wussy handle pattern and his
dull, flat edge that's only good for spreading butter.

Chemtrail Blues

She is standing waiting for a bus
head down, fiddling fingers on the screen.
I drive past her into a horizon of
metallic streaks and dulled sun,
clouds which do not contain rain.

The void between that vision and our collective silence
is a gaping loneliness that moans in my soul.
How do you awaken those whose denial
is a thick blanket shrouding them like death
from the evil of a few they do not wish to face?

Mount Julian

Though they come with a
positive pox reading,
encased in 20 years of
baked-on grease and a face
even a mother doesn't love & though
you won't post them on Facebook,
love your ugly demons.

Though you push them away,
they are portable wisdom units,
rabbit holes where up is
down and in is out and your
future is waiting to teach you
the opposite of what you think you know
about what you haven't yet learned.

Love your ugly demons.
Though they have wet their pants &
they be smelly & though they be
social defectives with rusty iron
grates & spiky palisades, inside
the fortress is a marshmallow centre
for you to put your arms around.

Danza del Fuego (Dance of Fire) by Miguel Tomas Garcia (creative commons)

Song in the Year of Catastrophe

by Wendell Berry

I began to be followed by a voice saying:

"It can't last. It can't last.

Harden yourself. Harden yourself.

Be ready. Be ready."

"Go look under the leaves,"

it said, "for what is living there

is dead in your tongue."

And it said, "Put your hands

into the earth. Live close

to the ground. Learn the darkness.

Gather round you all

the things that you love, name

their names, prepare

to lose them, It will be

as if all you know were turned

around within your body."

And I went and put my hands 

into the ground, and they took root

and grew into a season's harvest.

I looked behind the veil

of the leaves, and heard voices

that I knew had been dead

in my tongue years before my birth.

I learned the dark.

And still the voice stayed with me. 

Waking in the early mornings,

I could hear it, like a bird

bemused among the leaves,

a mockingbird idly singing

in the autumn of catastrophe:

"Be ready. Be ready.

Harden yourself. Harden yourself."

And I heard the sound 

of a great engine pounding

in the air, and a voice asking:

"Change or slavery?

Hardship or slavery?"

and the voices answering:

"Slavery! Slavery!"

And I was afraid, loving 

what I know would be lost.

Then the voice following me said:

"you have not yet come close enough.

Come nearer the ground. Learn

from the woodcock in the woods

whose feathering is a ritual

of the fallen leaves,

and from the nesting quail

whose speckling makes her hard to see

in the long grass.

Study the coat of the mole.

For the farmer shall wear

the greenery and the furrows

of his fields, and bear

the long standing of the woods."

And I asked: "you mean a death, then?"

"yes," the voice said. "Die

into what the earth requires of you."

Then let go all holds, and sank

like a hopeless swimmer into the earth,

and at last came fully into the ease

and the joy of that place,

all my lost ones returning.

Watercolour on card by Alfonso Maggiolo Peirano, under a creative commons licence .

Poem first seen and sucked into my pores at The Beauty We Love

Poetry

Do you write or read poetry?  I really like the way occasionally a poem will come out of the blue.  Sometimes I wake up with a phrase in my head that feels like a poem phrase.  It's like it's this little compact world that with a bit of tinkering I can tease out.

I have never really written any poetry until several years ago.  It's something I'm glad to have discovered.  It tends to feel very different than any other form of writing.  Fun.

I have never written poetry in any regular way, but I do remember what I think is the very first poem I ever wrote.  I suppose I was about eight or nine when I wrote this amazing piece of ethereal beauty:

Mel Brown went to town
in his mother's dressing gown.

On his way he went to church
in a little town called Murch*.

Inside a man called Sheep Shanks gave a cough
because he said Mel popped off**.

*Murchison, in country Victoria.  My grandmother came from them thar parts.
**Farted.

I find it interesting that Sheep Shanks was so terribly rude that he would cough and also mention, in the middle of a church service, Mel's unfortunate flatulence.  What an unfortunate sort of a fellow.  Must be the burden he's carrying, having a name like Sheep Shanks.

I can remember my mum laughing at this poem.  I think it definitely boded well for a glittering literary career in the distant future.

Please Leave the House, Dear

Please leave the house, dear.
Oh, I know that a gargoyle
is hiding in the umbrella stand and
a labyrinth of spiders is waiting in
the dark corner of the hallway to
occupy your hair.

I know that you can't go out wearing this, and
this happens to be attached to your body and
you're trailing drops of blood down
your legs from out your middle and
you haven't learnt to filter out the frantic
braying of demented goats lining the roadside.

But the big tall man is a terrified boy and
the young girl is scared but assured and
the old man is snoring and dreaming and
the baby is spouting wisdom out
through his babbles and they are, right now at least,
occupying the streets.

Everything Turned to White

For diversion you watch faces loom out of a rectangle
yelling to buy variously coloured & shaped objects.
Both the faces and the objects all
are scientifically proven to be more
space than solid, more empty than full.

For work, at another black-framed rectangle fingers
ribbon words marching black to a white screen.
For play you hold rectangles longways
and turn their pages, words flowing
across your eyes & freeforming blue, orange.

Like a swimmer into the water you
sometimes sit silent & carve out into the round &
for beauty you follow long golden fingers
(if you can see them) stretching out into
the silent terror of nullius.

There, every colour & shape, &
Rumi and his field have squeezed through
a just-right chink and sung themselves out
into the beautiful void of
everything, turned to white.

Pic:  monkeyc.net under creative commons licence

For the Young Who Want To

Loving this poem by Marge Piercy.  Seen via a comment by Jane over at Pilgrim's Moon.  (Oh, and I *am* going out for a job interview tomorrow to "get a real job" ... but only if it gives me space to write :)



Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don't have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.'s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else's mannerisms

is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you're certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved

Two Types of Dark

Once upon a time
all that could touch
the dark was
the moon,
the stars,
the fire.

~

On a charcoal beach
the moon runs silver
fingers through the water.

From the cradle of the sky
the dead stars live,
stream light through time.

For bottomless Apollyon
fire forges iron to
cage that bitch up.

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.


~ Mary Oliver

Mirror Pond on Mount Taibo in Shanxi

The water and my mind have both settled down
Into perfect stillness.
Sun and moon shine bright in it.
At night I see in the surface
The enormous face of my old familiar moon.
I don't think you've ever met the source of this reflection.
All shrillness fades into the sound of silence.
But now and then a puff of mist floats across the mirror.
It confuses me a little
But not enough to make me forget to forget my cares.

by Hsu Yun

Life ~ Death ~ Life

It woke you to see
suddenly
it flooded in so instantly from
where it had been brewing in
the darkness down below.

Part of the lens wipes
clearly
and you see the view now instantly is
so much more romantic than the
Vaselined lens showed.

You in a rush see
Mercy
had let you to be its donkey and
you brayed the words most
sweetly from your fingers and your keys.

The words that seemed most
urgently
were dripping the most honey
from their letters as though spoken
by a hundred thousand bees.

But the honey the most
drippingly
felt in your mind most trippingly like
flowering someone's garden from
you watering your weeds.

And you wonder at the
mystery
that flows through everything you see
that death does not speak last but rebirths
life from on its knees.

Image: Negative Tree by Camera-Caritatis

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

+++
Seen at White Flint Farm

Always We Begin Again

I'd slept after I woke
amongst the rocks, but always
I begin again; I picked across to
where I bade me look, into the well
and in I fell.

I dragged myself round
amongst the Gedarene tombs.
There she was; she'd tried wrapping
herself in cheap veils made from
Beijing smog.

I enfold the madwoman's hand.
While we're gone may He make her
a dress and make us a cairn,
a mark to note the summit of the
beautiful mountain.

Pic: Christine Valters Paintner's handmade Canadian coast cairn
from the 37th Poetry Party

Love is a Deep and a Dark and a Lonely

Thanks, Sherry, for mentioning this poem, in our little discussion on loneliness from my most recent post. It is true that loneliness is not a shameful thing, that it is common. It feels good to share that simple small thing, that embarrassment.

I really fell in love with this poem, by Carl Sandburg. It was published when he was 85 years old!!

I'm really looking forward to my poetry workshop next week :)


Love is a Deep and a Dark and a Lonely

love is a deep and a dark and a lonely
and you take it deep take it dark
and take it with a lonely winding
and when the winding gets too lonely
then may come the windflowers
and the breath of the wind over many flowers
winding its way out of many lonely flowers
waiting in rainleaf whispers
waiting in dry stalks of noon
wanting in a music of windbreaths
so you can take love as it comes keening
as it comes with a voice and a face
and you make a talk of it
talking to yourself a talk worth keeping
and you find it to be a hoarding
and you give it away and yet it stays hoarded

like a book read over and over again
like one book being a long row of books
like leaves of windflowers bending low
and bending to be never broken

Diamondshine

You look into yourself
and it's a dark cave, lovely,
lit by candles,
something holy.
A holy common pot that,
plonked on trains & on
park benches is unseen,
devalued, out in the world.

You look out at yourself
at your ageing face mirrored.
The lustre that once attracted
the eye of a man or three has
seeped out your eyes & into
the beginning lines collecting powder
above your top lip. Your face has
begun its slow collapse.

You look out at the world &
suppose you could ring out your thirties
and the West's end with some
listless hearted fucking, some mindless
shopping but the approaching
beginning is setting you despising
cheap baubles & trinkets when the wind
brings thundery scents.

You look into yourself &
see Life dwelling amongst your folds &
you think you could give up cane
sugar & apathetic masturbation &
boredom & caving into fear.
But those things live nevertheless
held in the tension that feels at times like
stretching beyond endurance but for Love.

You look out of yourself &
you see diamondshine
in the eyes of crappy people &
you matter I matter we matter.
And you love, but not so you bloat, but so
that when you stand on the toes of your enemies
you occasionally remember to take off
your sandals, on holy ground.

Pic: royblumenthal

Wailbone

Sometimes it feels like
your emotions are
corseted in. Squeezed in tight
behind your ribs
by whalebone.

Sometimes it feels like
your ocean must have
emptied itself
seven times over
of its tears.

Out of the water, whales
fling onto the shore,
confused by ocean noise,
military sonar and
ships delivering stuff.

Out in the deep, whales,
with bones intact,
swim with hearts
the size of a
small car.

Consolation

Some days
getting off the couch
means stepping
off the cliff.

How many times
must we practise
this walk
off into thin air
falling onto trust?

Seems the more love
the more death
the more illumining
the more spaced the crumbs
leading into the middle
of a densely packed
black forest.

But still
console your heart
with this:
when the night is
at its blackest
while you sleep
the sun lies
beneath your feet.

The Gloaming

A ship hulks to port
beyond the marina boats.
Waterlight shines
in long drawn lines.
City starts glinting.

Everything lulled & lapping
Me, I'm an heirloom
a 14-sided hologram
a body of water.
World stops moving.

Everything lulled & lapping
Jesus resurrecting
Enemies bridging
Elvis singing
Beyond becoming.

I'm not roaming
the stretched-out seconds.
Soul has slowed hovering
over the thin place.
Day drags night over.