i seized this in passing

                                   

                                    






                                      Blessed Are They  


 


                       Fairview Cemetery, 1879:
                      The wrought iron gate marks the corner
                      Of some pioneer's field.
                      Now these few trees and the distant silos
                      Are the only witnesses on the silent prairie
                       To the parents and a huddle of others
                       Who stand, their feet in the snow
                        Their backs to the wind.

                           I do not care if the silos do not believe;
                           This love shall not pass away.

                             Then a stray dog comes
                              To comfort the children
                               And lick their hands.




                                                              -anonymous









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O ignis Spiritus Paracliti

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fiery Spirit,
fount of courage,
life within life
of all that has being!

Holy are you, transmuting the perfect
into the real.
Holy are you, healing
the mortally stricken.
Holy are you, cleansing
the stench of wounds.

O sacred breath O blazing
love O savor in the breast and balm
flooding the heart with
the fragrance of good,

O limpid mirror of God
who leads wanderers
home and hunts out the lost,

Armor of the heart and hope
of the integral body,
sword-belt of honor:
save those who know bliss!

Guard those the fiend holds
imprisoned,
free those in fetters
whom divine force wishes to save.

O current of power permeating all
in the heights upon the earth and
in all deeps:
you bind and gather
all people together.

Out of you clouds
come streaming, winds
take wing from you, dashing
rain against stone;
and ever-fresh springs
well from you, washing
the evergreen globe.

O teacher of those who know,
a joy to the wise
is the breath of Sophia.

Praise then be yours!
you are the song of praise,
the delight of life,
a hope and a potent honor
granting garlands of light.

 

 

 

- Hildegard von Bingen

 

 

trans.  Barbara Newman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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more than we sometimes know

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dereliction

I quit the carved stool
in my father’s hut to the swelling
chant of saber-tooth termites
raising in the pith of its wood
a white-bellied stalagmite

Where does a runner go
whose oily grip drops
the baton handed by the faithful one
in a hard, merciless race? Or
the priestly elder who barters
for the curio collector’s head
of tobacco the holy staff
of his people?

Let them try the land
where the sea retreats
Let them try the land
where the sea retreats



Chinua Achebe   + 3/22/2013   RIP











.

Vallejo the prophet

                    





          "The Black Heralds"




There are blows in life, so powerful… I don’t know!
Blows as from the hatred of God; as if, facing them,
the undertow of everything suffered
welled up in the soul… I don’t know!

They are few; but they are… They open dark trenches
in the fiercest face and in the strongest back.
Perhaps they are the colts of barbaric Attilas;
or the black heralds sent to us by Death.

They are the deep falls of the Christs of the soul,
of some adored faith blasphemed by Destiny.
Those bloodstained blows are the crackling of
bread burning up at the oven door.

And man… Poor… poor! He turns his eyes, as
when a slap on the shoulder summons us;
turns his crazed eyes, and everything lived
wells up, like a pool of guilt, in his look.

There are blows in life, so powerful… I don’t know!


        trans.  Clayton Eschelman












.

y'got me

So Unlike Any Simple Thing I Know

Near the gray barn, the tumultuous sky
the color of white-bean ash:


it seems as if the lights of the truck
barreling through tunnels of white


do not blink, but strum the gravel
ragged along the road; it seems as if,


half sound, half silence, the sky
is composed to number and stay my wheels:


how long it takes to move round the curve
in the dark, careful like an empty freight


car: how the Schramel farm rises up,
unhurried, its exhausted fence too strong


to fall upon itself in the wind:
how sometimes at twilight you can see


the dead fall and sun floating down
like bloodroot: how I have lived like that.



                 Eva Hooker

strings of cosmic fate

                                                





                                      The Attic 



 Praise to my older brother, the seventeen-year-old boy,   who lived
in the attic with me an exiled prince grown hard in his confinement,

bitter,  bent to his evening task building the imaginary building
on the drawing board they'd given him in school.   His tools gleam

under the desk lamp. He is as hard as the pencil he holds,
drawing the line straight along the ruler.

Tower prince, young king, praise to the boy
who has willed his blood to cool and his heart to slow.  He's building

a structure with so many doors its finally quiet,
so that when our father climbs heavily up the attic stairs,   he doesn't

at first hear him pass down the narrow hall.   My brother is rebuilding
the foundation.   He lifts the clear plastic of one page

to look more closely at the plumbing,
-he barely hears the springs of my bed when my father sits down--

he's imagining where the boiler might go, because
where it is now isn't working.   Not until I've slammed the door behind

the man stumbling down the stairs again
does my brother look up from where he's working.   I know it hurts him

to rise, to knock on my door and come in.   And when he draws his skinny arm
around my shaking shoulders,

I don't know if he knows he's building a world where I can one day
love a man--he sits there without saying anything.

Praise him.
I know he can hardly bear to touch me.


                   by Marie Howe









.

the eye is a camera

                               CAFE Poem

                 

                      The woman in
                       the corner
                      white on black,
                      white skin,
                        black hair,
                         black dress,
                          lights a long ,white
                          cigarette
                           the orange flame
                            bright
                               against her cheek.


                                      


                                             - Albert Huffsticklor






(obviously noted before major cigarette bans and banishments)










.










.

Marriage

This institution,
perhaps one should say enterprise
out of respect for which
one says one need not change one's mind
about a thing one has believed in,
requiring public promises
of one's intention
to fulfill a private obligation:
I wonder what Adam and Eve
think of it by this time,
this firegilt steel
alive with goldenness;
how bright it shows --
"of circular traditions and impostures,
committing many spoils,"
requiring all one's criminal ingenuity
to avoid!
Psychology which explains everything
explains nothing
and we are still in doubt.
Eve: beautiful woman --
I have seen her
when she was so handsome
she gave me a start,
able to write simultaneously
in three languages --
English, German and French
and talk in the meantime;
equally positive in demanding a commotion
and in stipulating quiet:
"I should like to be alone;"
to which the visitor replies,
"I should like to be alone;
why not be alone together?"
Below the incandescent stars
below the incandescent fruit,
the strange experience of beauty;
its existence is too much;
it tears one to pieces
and each fresh wave of consciousness
is poison.
"See her, see her in this common world,"
the central flaw
in that first crystal-fine experiment,
this amalgamation which can never be more
than an interesting possibility,
describing it
as "that strange paradise
unlike flesh, gold, or stately buildings,
the choicest piece of my life:
the heart rising
in its estate of peace
as a boat rises
with the rising of the water;"
constrained in speaking of the serpent --
that shed snakeskin in the history of politeness
not to be returned to again --
that invaluable accident
exonerating Adam.
And he has beauty also;
it's distressing -- the O thou
to whom, from whom,
without whom nothing -- Adam;
"something feline,
something colubrine" -- how true!
a crouching mythological monster
in that Persian miniature of emerald mines,
raw silk -- ivory white, snow white,
oyster white and six others --
that paddock full of leopards and giraffes --
long lemonyellow bodies
sown with trapezoids of blue.
Alive with words,
vibrating like a cymbal
touched before it has been struck,
he has prophesied correctly --
the industrious waterfall,
"the speedy stream
which violently bears all before it,
at one time silent as the air
and now as powerful as the wind."
"Treading chasms
on the uncertain footing of a spear,"
forgetting that there is in woman
a quality of mind
which is an instinctive manifestation
is unsafe,
he goes on speaking
in a formal, customary strain
of "past states," the present state,
seals, promises,
the evil one suffered,
the good one enjoys,
hell, heaven,
everything convenient
to promote one's joy."
There is in him a state of mind
by force of which,
perceiving what it was not
intended that he should,
"he experiences a solemn joy
in seeing that he has become an idol."
Plagued by the nightingale
in the new leaves,
with its silence --
not its silence but its silences,
he says of it:
"It clothes me with a shirt of fire."
"He dares not clap his hands
to make it go on
lest it should fly off;
if he does nothing, it will sleep;
if he cries out, it will not understand."
Unnerved by the nightingale
and dazzled by the apple,
impelled by "the illusion of a fire
effectual to extinguish fire,"
compared with which
the shining of the earth
is but deformity -- a fire
"as high as deep as bright as broad
as long as life itself,"
he stumbles over marriage,
"a very trivial object indeed"
to have destroyed the attitude
in which he stood --
the ease of the philosopher
unfathered by a woman.
Unhelpful Hymen!
"a kind of overgrown cupid"
reduced to insignificance
by the mechanical advertising
parading as involuntary comment,
by that experiment of Adam's
with ways out but no way in --
the ritual of marriage,
augmenting all its lavishness;
its fiddle-head ferns,
lotus flowers, opuntias, white dromedaries,
its hippopotamus --
nose and mouth combined
in one magnificent hopper,
"the crested screamer --
that huge bird almost a lizard,"
its snake and the potent apple.
He tells us
that "for love
that will gaze an eagle blind,
that is like a Hercules
climbing the trees
in the garden of the Hesperides,
from forty-five to seventy
is the best age,"
commending it
as a fine art, as an experiment,
a duty or as merely recreation.
One must not call him ruffian
nor friction a calamity --
the fight to be affectionate:
"no truth can be fully known
until it has been tried
by the tooth of disputation."
The blue panther with black eyes,
the basalt panther with blue eyes,
entirely graceful --
one must give them the path --
the black obsidian Diana
who "darkeneth her countenance
as a bear doth,
causing her husband to sigh,"
the spiked hand
that has an affection for one
and proves it to the bone,
impatient to assure you
that impatience is the mark of independence
not of bondage.
"Married people often look that way" --
"seldom and cold, up and down,
mixed and malarial
with a good day and bad."
"When do we feed?"
We occidentals are so unemotional,
we quarrel as we feed;
one's self is quite lost,
the irony preserved
in "the Ahasuerus tête à tête banquet"
with its "good monster, lead the way,"
with little laughter
and munificence of humor
in that quixotic atmosphere of frankness
in which "Four o'clock does not exist
but at five o'clock
the ladies in their imperious humility
are ready to receive you";
in which experience attests
that men have power
and sometimes one is made to feel it.
He says, "what monarch would not blush
to have a wife
with hair like a shaving-brush?
The fact of woman
is not `the sound of the flute
but every poison.'"
She says, "`Men are monopolists
of stars, garters, buttons
and other shining baubles' --
unfit to be the guardians
of another person's happiness."
He says, "These mummies
must be handled carefully --
`the crumbs from a lion's meal,
a couple of shins and the bit of an ear';
turn to the letter M
and you will find
that `a wife is a coffin,'
that severe object
with the pleasing geometry
stipulating space and not people,
refusing to be buried
and uniquely disappointing,
revengefully wrought in the attitude
of an adoring child
to a distinguished parent."
She says, "This butterfly,
this waterfly, this nomad
that has `proposed
to settle on my hand for life.' --
What can one do with it?
There must have been more time
in Shakespeare's day
to sit and watch a play.
You know so many artists are fools."
He says, "You know so many fools
who are not artists."
The fact forgot
that "some have merely rights
while some have obligations,"
he loves himself so much,
he can permit himself
no rival in that love.
She loves herself so much,
she cannot see herself enough --
a statuette of ivory on ivory,
the logical last touch
to an expansive splendor
earned as wages for work done:
one is not rich but poor
when one can always seem so right.
What can one do for them --
these savages
condemned to disaffect
all those who are not visionaries
alert to undertake the silly task
of making people noble?
This model of petrine fidelity
who "leaves her peaceful husband
only because she has seen enough of him" --
that orator reminding you,
"I am yours to command."
"Everything to do with love is mystery;
it is more than a day's work
to investigate this science."
One sees that it is rare --
that striking grasp of opposites
opposed each to the other, not to unity,
which in cycloid inclusiveness
has dwarfed the demonstration
of Columbus with the egg --
a triumph of simplicity --
that charitive Euroclydon
of frightening disinterestedness
which the world hates,
admitting:

"I am such a cow,
if I had a sorrow,
I should feel it a long time;
I am not one of those
who have a great sorrow
in the morning
and a great joy at noon;"
which says: "I have encountered it
among those unpretentious
protegés of wisdom,
where seeming to parade
as the debater and the Roman,
the statesmanship
of an archaic Daniel Webster
persists to their simplicity of temper
as the essence of the matter:

`Liberty and union
now and forever;'

the book on the writing-table;
the hand in the breast-pocket."

 

 

 

 

-Marianne Moore

 

 

 

 

-such alarming for instance

















.

I AM THE VOICE

     2 sonnets


I am the voice where voices seldom heard;
Let men to pale and walk away in fear:
I give to each and every single word
A certain twist the lot of them to hear!

I am the heart where heartless fellows mass;
Let men beware upon their ruthless perch:
My voice rings out so loud it shatters glass;
The priest himself now trembles in his church!

I am the soul where spirits sorely lack;
Let men to dread the very thought of me:
Though wolves decry the leader of the pack,
He comes to them, in time, their liberty!

I am the voice that rings out in the night;
Go tell the wounded ones they've heard it right!

New York

fleeting shades of crimson rise above me
past my widened eyes they slip amongst stars
neon glow of pink outlines outstretched tree
a handsome man approaches me from bar
urban decay glitters below my feet
his hand i take and lips i softly kiss
he scrapes his teeth against my neck to greet
because my shining hair he sorely missed
his sparkling azure eyes are filled with lust
and i seduce but now sweetly submit
i know in heart that my lover should trust
the thought that so makes my emerald eyes lit
the city's lights glimmer above our heads
but tonight we will share two seperate beds


      -Richard Doiron  (acadian poet -  writes in english,  primarily)

...the blight of man...

                                        







                                       Spring and Fall:

                                      to a Young Child

                              Margaret, are you grieving
                               Over Goldengrove unleaving?
                               Leaves, like the things of man, you
                             With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
                              Ah! as the heart grows older
                              It will come to such sights colder
                              By and by, nor spare a sigh
                            Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
                                And yet you will weep and know why.
                              Now no matter, child, the name:
                              Sorrow's springs are the same.
                              Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
                            What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
                             It is the blight man was born for,
                             It is Margaret you mourn for.



                                             Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ







.