Tag: literature

Let’s Try a Haiku
Petals unfurled, where
Deep pink rose eye stares at me;
Daring me for death.

Now, a Senryu
And I look inside
The rose and myself, both deep:
Lost introspection.

Now, a More Pointed Senryu
For interior
Is only seen so far as
One has courage for.

The Final Senryu
Yes, as Nietzsche said,
The abyss looks inside you;
You coward, a rose!

Now, A Waka Tanka
You must not blink, self,
“Rose is a rose is a rose”;
Surely it views you
From love’s history you know, of
Graceful falling days like leaves.

Can I Do a Lϋshi Kanshi?
And if days, leaves fall
Who are we to cry?
And if nights, moons bless,

Why are we to sigh?
And if bud, bloom drops,
What can we do nigh?
And if flower weeps,
Why not let it die?

How About Another Lϋshi?
Will the bloom not forgive us,
For giving it a just end?
Won’t the lover regret us,
For making him just a friend?
Won’t the moon and sun light us
For knowing ire to forfend,
Won’t their bright rays reveal us
For refusing to pretend?

They Say Jueji Kanshi Is Harder
Existentialists,
We gave up our choice.
Asked if God’s alive,
Could she—Hear our voice?

And Jueji Is Harder
Gandhi’s plan of love for all
Speaks volumes thus to Fate here—
Where are we bound, to roses
All, in our place—on a bier.

And The Last Word
And for love, there remains this to be said, this last,
After the final 7 syllables are past,
That roses may be all we have left
For a love which is not universal,
And healing,
But particular, selfish, a feather from a mynah bird,
A chattering and a squawking governing its nature,
For Gandhi had a nation, a world, of children,
Other than his own.

[Wasn’t there a scandal
Of him sleeping with his own grandchildren,
Nieces,
Testing whether he could resist temptation?
Oh, shut the fuck up, you diabolical dragon,
The Chinese call you the breath of heaven,
Do you have to ruin our every illusion,
Or reason to believe?
This is poetry, keep a few facts to yourself.]

We can hardly claim so much for love,
Unless we are likewise given to the quixotic,
The altruistic, the benevolent.
But we, my love and I,
In our time groused and fought and argued,
And tried each other’s patience.

That’s hardly even a rose’s worth,
So let me name the rose as the only reward,
Slight efforts at another culture’s poetic frames
A gesture rosy as dawn, and the rosy-fingered dawn,
And rosy enough for the common parlance
Of roses as petals not of petulance but akin
To the best of adoration.

Thus, the poetic subject, the image, the metaphor,
Dare I even call it a metonymy
For love’s own self-enclosing, in-folding self?
It’s over for now, at any rate.
I’ve exhausted my topic,
And must find another.
So, okay, you’ve done your calisthenics, by proving
(Sort of proving) that if you try,
You can write Eastern forms other than a haiku.

(So Begins the Interminable Interior Dialogue,
Broken Up, One Has to Hope, By Lots
of Real Poetry)
But you’ve cheated, in more than one place.
First of all, where there were supposed to be
So many characters per line,
You, you English-speaking coward,
Used so many syllables per line.
And, in other places, you didn’t adhere strictly
To the rules. You cheated.

But, I don’t have time (I’m getting old)
I don’t have time to learn Japanese,
Or the Chinese that some of the Japanese forms
Are derived from.
Lazy, aren’t you?
Lazy too, on top of it all!
“Had [I] world enough and time…”
Don’t waste my time quoting better poets.
YOU CHEATED.
That’s enough of you, be still!
I’m going to be poetic now,
And not rhetorical,
For at least a little while.

Up and Down on Bailey Commons
Up on Bailey Commons,
Named for her ancestors,
My grandmother owned a huge meadow,
And down on Bailey Commons,
She had her house.
All the property she owned
Went away, little by little,
To feed and clothe and provide for
Her three boys and her
When her husband was dead.
He’d been a dicey lot anyway,
In some respects,
Always sitting down to play the organ
At just the point on Sundays
When she had the boys dressed
And ready for church.
There had been a baby, too,
A girl,
That I have persisted in naming Elizabeth Rose,
Though her tombstone bears no such legend.

The husband was a Bennett,
And the wife’s first name
Was Izora.
Such an odd name,
I’ve never heard the like of it before-a.
I’ve often wondered,
If because she was tall (6’4” in her stocking feet),
Taller than her tall husband, and all her sons
When they were grown,
(Though she didn’t live to see much of that),
I’ve often wondered if some mean little boy,
Some boy of the family, a brother or cousin,
Had jokingly nicknamed her from her name,
A distortion, calling her “Eye-sore-a,”
Because she was so tall,
Though pretty (no, stately and fair) enough.

She had been a schoolteacher,
When things were better,
But when she went in for marriage
And mothering,
The farm was farmed by him,
Though winters, like others, he worked in the mines,
And then, he died.
And she sold it off, piece by piece,
Until there were only those few acres left,
The ones we later had our house on,
And her old house on higher ground, above,
Where just along the drive there was a pear
And a cherry tree
(With a field for a garden and a yard,
And some apple trees,
And a bit of woods on either side,
Impenetrable on the side below her house,
Never cut or forested,
Mysterious).
But on our side, where the apple trees
Fronted the yard’s perimeter,
Often drunks from the tavern just down the road
Trespassed, leaving bottles and cigarette butts behind,
So, we could only be there sometimes,
When it was safe for children.

Though, was such a place ever safe for children?
To play so much alone,
In the woods, eating apples and cherries
From the trees at will,
Berries, strawberry, blackberry, raspberry, gooseberry,
Was it safe to learn that it was all for free,
At least for the time?
Was it safe to climb trees and peer out and spy
On unselfconscious adults,
who had forgotten we were there?

To learn so much about freedom
Without knowing how easily
It could all be taken away.
For, the road had to come through,
Eventually,
Which prevented other children after us
From rejoicing in this blessing, too;
We heard early
About “the right of eminent domain,”
And felt obscurely threatened
For years before it came to pass.

And once it did,
Well, I was away at college,
Brother, a few years younger,
Already sharing a far nicer house
Across town with another widow,
My mother.
(The older men of that family
Seemed to have no luck.
Dead or dying,
Survived by what was once called
“The weaker sex.”)
And the property rented out to others;
I felt lost anyway.
No real home to go to anymore.
Any place could be home.
Oh, the new house was lovely,
Wonderful,
But it wasn’t mine
The way young children
Own their first homes.

But now, I could be from somewhere else,
Anywhere, and soon I was,
Going first here and then there,
For many a year
Until I found another home.
And that’s all that really matters,
Actually,
Lessons about freedom, danger, rights, and home,
For how we learn these particulars,
That’s how we teach others and live our lives.
Okay, so narrative, a start.

A meditation.
But…
No more from you, voice,
For right now.
I’ll get down to the preferred imagistic,
The full works, soon enough.
Maybe even some rhyme,
Though I know it’s really not popular
In this time and place.
But, not a word from you for a good long while.

What’s the Difference, Poetry and Property?
So, that was one of the beginning threads
Through the maze,
The history of property as it changed hands,
As it was both ornamental and useful,
Expecting poetry to be the same,
Changing hands from the poet
To the reader in its transitions,
From being conceived
To being a fiefdom
For the reader as well as the poet,
Something to be shared.

And ornamental, if lovely,
If terrible enough in its dread mouthings,
Its theories of ownership,
The dread being, the lovely and terrible
Created thing
Would in its stark beautiful jaws,
The mad Maenad
Drunk on its own powerful wine,
Take and tear
The reader limb from limb,
Or like the gaze of Medusa freeze them
With its visions and articulations, its blatant images
Of tree, plant, flower, lover,
Rain, and soft sheets of water flowing
Across a desert, in an oasis
Or a mirage, perhaps,
A sole picture disappearing,
That the reader cannot hold,
But must relinquish after each time
Of perusing afresh.

And useful?
How then?
If so dread and frightening,
If so evanescent,
How to keep and hold,
How then?
Through memory?
Committed to memory,
Recitations,
Repetitions,
Still, one hopes, surprising each time
The reborn virginal reader,
As in Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real,
As in the woman Esmeralda,
Oh! for the poet’s delight and privilege,
Saying that “each time is like the first.”

Surprising the reader
As Suzanne in her bath, as Diane caught bathing,
Yet neither of them able to sic hounds on my poem,
Only to surrender, whether art figure, goddess, or no.
Or, is there a male figure from mythology,
That perhaps the goddess of poetry,
The moonglow in love with the reader Endymion,
Could trust for adoration:
Yet what reader can still adore
The poet they go to for comfort?
Always seeming to want the similarity of feeling,
A poem that reminds them not of the poet,
But of themselves?

Though, that’s a matter that needs much negotiation,
For so much of the world is sunk in war and turmoil,
Starvation and suffering, homelessness and wandering
“These days,”—but wasn’t it so, always?—
That we must speak for it, too, the world.

Is the World “Too Much With Us?”
So, if we must speak of the world first of all,
Let’s put it first, then,
The Covid pandemic,
Fraught not only with the disease,
But also with the sublimely ridiculous,
The refusal of many to get the vaccine.

Now, it seems that because so many
Have taken the vaccine and been well
As a result, and a consequence,
That people would follow the lemmings’ example
As they do about some things otherwise unworthy,
Such as following a despot and a madman;
But no, they hold as their excuse
That the officials haven’t yet been absolute, passed
All the vaccines in their tests
(Though, determined, they will, soon enough).
Thus, what more is there to say about that?

We die, people die, both without medicine
And bare of masks, talking crazily of freedom.
Well, I suppose they have the freedom to die.
There’s such a thing as death by cop,
Does this mean there’s such a thing
As death by contagion?
Yes, as far as the little deadly virus is concerned,
There is.
And its perspective is what we’re being forced
To acknowledge.

Then, we look to the latest wild and unfair war,
A model for, an example of, all contemporary wars
In its horror and bewildered human toll.
The desertion of Afghanistan in the middle of its troubles,
The ones that happened first because of our troubles
In the U.S., our hungry oil greed,
Even though whom they say is a good man,
Biden, is here,
And is wrong, in this withdrawal.
(Or is he? How can I, meager me,
Without the knowledge of it all,
Second guess?)
And we see a picture online
Of just one representative, a woman of conscience
Like Biden is too a man of conscience,
(Yet, they were of different opinions.)
She, at her opportunity in the beginning,
Representative Barbara Lee,
Alone stood against getting into Afghanistan,
Now she has said,
She wishes she had been wrong.

Or the February 2022 and on war,
I can only mention it as current
Because it came to a head,
The evil we should have known to expect
That of Russia’s late winter leap
Upon Ukraine.
We do and will know other wars
Should humanity gain foothold and purchase
Against our ongoing fossil fuel obsession,
Though in this conflict,
Oil is again an issue,
A spite in Russia’s head.
The bravery of Zelenskyy
What we wish we all had
In the facing of our nightmares,

How will it end? We have to hope
With the blue sky and golden field of grain below
Defended, victorious,
And by us all if needed,
For we can’t be behindhand with witness
We must defend our humanness
And against also the threat that Russia,
Unimaginable gall,
Has made of nuclear war.

And while all of this is in progress,
Like one of the Fates
Hovering over the scene,
To let the observant know
That we will not have time to regret these conditions
Long,
What Republicans often call ‘climate change,”
And what the more honest call “global warming,”
And I’ve heard it misnamed yet, yes, truly so,
As “global warning” before,
We responsible in either case,
For the happening of it.

I am the poet here,
And these are my opinions,
And I can do nothing to enforce them
Other than to state them.
All I can really do,
Is to be a loud-mouthed example,
(As I am not an activist)
Is to give the example of being unafraid
To give them out,
And write a poem now and then
About these planetary and human traumas.

A coward? Perhaps.
But I am 66 (others have had lives of activism),
And have some strange thing they like to call
“Bipolar disorder,” which sounds ridiculous,
So, I call it as it used to be called more descriptively,
“Manic-depression” (there have been others—)
Yes, no doubt there have.
While, my gift to the world—
What I like to feel as my obligation to the world,
Is to share a gift, made me by whatever force or god
Makes such gifts—
Is to share words.
So little and small a gift,
So unassuming of the greater goals,
But we all do what we can.
And this, I feel, is what I can do.

Excuse, or reason?
(And I see by all this
That the annoying, critical voice
Has here been evident,
Trying to short-circuit me by placing me,
Unwieldly me, in the court of public opinion
For my derelictions.)

It says in its dubiousness,
“Though of course if you’re hearing voices,
Well, that’s a better reason—”
(I won’t lie for the opportunity
To do what I want and need to do.
It’s not a psychotic state, this inner voice,
Only the same kind of annoying,
Or sometimes fulfilling, voice
That every poet or writer
Hears sometimes,
Just a breath of aetherous wind,
Thus, three times the sky and wind,
Being borne through the mind,
A series of thoughts, not hallucinations.
I’m not sorry to disappoint in this regard,

Not owing my sanity to anyone
For their romantic, no, Romantic longings—
As the Romantics made much of it—
To experience even second-hand
The peril, the apparent thrill of insanity.

For one only thinks insanity Romantic
When one isn’t in danger of feeling it,
Mark me, but don’t mark me with it,
I’d like to be known first as poet,
Writer, essayist, the person with words.)
In this manner I issue my creative manifesto
Protecting my barely begun poetics.

Well, what can you say (says King Lear)
To earn your share (of human attention)?
Let me first try to say something
To the unfortunates, the embattled ones
Caught in these bad days’ crosshairs,
Not for an ending, I haven’t that power,
But perhaps for consolation, inspiration:
And let’s hope it is both the same as
And more than Cordelia’s salt,
More than just the bead of sweat,
That salt water of effort,
Symbolically at least as good
As her magical, truth-telling rejoinder.

I Love You More Than Salt
I’ve always loved salt,
Salt more than sugar,
More than bitter or sour,
And not to commit to knowledge
Of that mysterious fifth flavor,
An internal essence I suspect
We all know,
Or all of us who have survived Covid
With a sense of smell
(The interior monitoring limit of taste).

But salt, I’ve loved,
As if I’d once exchanged it for coin
Along the ancient trade route,
As if I could breathe it in the oceans
Like the fish,
As if I had de-iced all the slick parking lots
And city streets of the human heart,
Saving against the careening
Of love’s unpredictability
And sharp slide, with salt.

I love you more than salt,
Though I don’t know you,
Have never kissed your lips
For love, or tasted their saline residue
Where you bit so hard into them that they bled,
Have never kissed your tears
Away from your suffering cheek,
Yes, I love you more than that, those things.

For how could I love all the particulars
I do know well,
If not loving you and your possibilities,
Your human warmths and pains,
Where you abide as you can,
So far away from me in my little realm,
My tiny kingdom of safety?

Some would not love you,
(Now I name those ones politicians);
They would regard you as dangerous,
For you remind us all of the dictates
Of Chance,

Chance, where it stands
Not so much directing traffic
As grabbing up pedestrians by their hair,
Tossing them into the mix
Of colliding cars and trucks,
Of dead falling from the sky,
Of death falling from the sky,
Of bazookas and grenades and then sniper rifles—
But why kill one by one, unless the one
The rifle sights is a spirit of revelation
To the others grouped around?

And it’s mockery, though unintentional,
To say,
That I love you more than I love
The smell of burnt flesh
That arises from its own pyre of salt burn,
The chemicals and derivatives
That chase the more human chance away
And cause you to run for the camera,
And towards white or more fortunate strangers
Who make the most of wishing you well—
“I stand among them, but not of them,”
To misquote Byron in a slight way—

You, running
Away from Saigon, away from South America,
Away from Istanbul and Kabul and—
But from so many places, it’s hard to say them all,
From bruit of war towards us.
And though I am among them,
And they too wish you well,
I beg you will believe, beloved,
There is at least some small word thing
Some little charm I’ll say or do,
Which can soothe, won’t mock,
Your personal hell.

For, I love you more than salt,
I do.
It may be that the rifle sight will take away
One spirit of revelation,
One hero, one holy woman or man,
One president of the people, one poet
Far more noble an activist than I.

Still, I too love you more than salt,
And we, many, many more of us
Love you more than salt,
And more than the sweet flavor, too,
Of caramel apples at a fair,
And soured half-dilled pickles,
More than the sour of that,
More than the bitter of olives,
Picked from wizened limbs
Of trees older than human sins,
And what is more,
And what is more,
We love you more than that deep secret flavor,
Whatever it is,
The fifth flavor residing somewhere in us,
The one Cordelia did not know,
lacking direct knowledge,
But had some still and mystical sense of,
We love you more than that,
Too.

(to be continued)