hoola hand

              





                            by Henry Real Bird





Today as I let go, a hoola hand into the dawn
Among silhouetted horse heads, held by a rope corral
But then, that day was many winters ago
To good horses you are drawn
I have asked that you ride the best
Of beautiful words to create images
Of life’s reflections filled with feelings of reality
Winters many may you ride the best.

As sunlight moved in the wind
Among the shadow of an ash tree
I gave the sweat lodge a drink
In the absence of memory
An ole’ feeling sprouts
In the charred remains of life
It is customary
That I have no doubts
Wishful thoughts and prayers through dreams strive
For peace in our souls
May you ride the best
Through the four different grounds
Upon our sacred mother earth.

to live is to grieve

Poem by Juan Gelman






                                 M.A.




These visits we pay each other,
you from death, I
close to it, are childhood that places
a finger on time and says
that not knowing life is a mistake.
I ask myself why
When I turn any corner
I find your surprised candor.
Is horror extreme music?
Sorrows lead to your warmth
sung in your dreams,
the houses of smoke where brilliance lived.
Suddenly, you are alone.
I smell your distant solitude
obedient to its laws of iron.
Thought insists on
bringing you and returning you
to what you never were.
Your saliva is cold.
You weigh less than my desire,
Than the tight tongue of the air.






                     +  14january2014















.

THE FAR FIELD

 

 

 

I

 

I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.

II

 

At the field's end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, --
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.
I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
How they filled the oriole's elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, --
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, --
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches,
While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,
And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.
-- Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
Fingering a shell,
Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;
Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;
Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,
Believing:
I'll return again,
As a snake or a raucous bird,
Or, with luck, as a lion.
I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.

III

 

The river turns on itself,
The tree retreats into its own shadow.
I feel a weightless change, a moving forward
As of water quickening before a narrowing channel
When banks converge, and the wide river whitens;
Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent
And the yellowish-green from the mountainy upland, --
At first a swift rippling between rocks,
Then a long running over flat stones
Before descending to the alluvial plane,
To the clay banks, and the wild grapes hanging from the elmtrees.
The slightly trembling water
Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays;
And the crabs bask near the edge,
The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and bloodsuckers, --
I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,
My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water. I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air.

IV

 

The lost self changes,
Turning toward the sea,
A sea-shape turning around, --
An old man with his feet before the fire,
In robes of green, in garments of adieu.
A man faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.
The murmur of the absolute, the why
Of being born falls on his naked ears.
His spirit moves like monumental wind
That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.
He is the end of things, the final man. All finite things reveal infinitude:
The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;
Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree :
The pure serene of memory in one man, --
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.





                               Theodore Roethke



....

haiku

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just enough moon

To make the smell of apples

Light up the orchards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Richard Wright

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

by Pinchas Sadeh

Egyptian Night

The Maid;  

On the sandy path
So slowly - my heart was sinking -
I have born the basket
With my little sibling.
Water, reeds around;
I lay there a-shiver;
Afar now I knell
 Dusk sets on the river.

The Waters;

 From the springs in hills unknown
Abyssinian abysses
Shaded by brown date-palms
And carobs like molasses
By the yellow dunes
Dry and dead reed and grass
Under the silver moon
Endless we flow and pass.

 The Maid;

 Ho you holy waters
Please flow still and deep.
There in the reed basket
The child is now asleep.
Please do not wake him
Flow by slow and mute
Carry him tenderly
He's a boy so cute.

 The Waters;

 In most deadly silence
Like angels in the ether
Amidst mourning shores
We pass and travel.
Not like you, the maiden
Kneeling on the shore,
Doomed for ever
To live and suffer sore.

 The Maid;  

Now the night has come
Darkness reigns and quiet.
The sky is calm.
The earth is silent.
Ho you holy water
Please flow still and deep
There in the reed basket
The child is now asleep.










trans.   Moshe Ganan
..

upon becoming aware of the passing of Amiri Baraka

.


Notes For a Speech

 


African blues
does not know me. Their steps, in sands
of their own
land. A country
in black & white, newspapers
blown down pavements
of the world. Does
not feel
what I am.

Strength

in the dream, an oblique
suckling of nerve, the wind
throws up sand, eyes
are something locked in
hate, of hate, of hate, to
walk abroad, they conduct
their deaths apart
from my own. Those
heads, I call
my "people."

(And who are they. People. To concern

myself, ugly man. Who
you, to concern
the white flat stomachs
of maidens, inside houses
dying. Black. Peeled moon
light on my fingers
move under
her clothes. Where
is her husband. Black
words throw up sand
to eyes, fingers of
their private dead. Whose
soul, eyes, in sand. My color
is not theirs. Lighter, white man
talk. They shy away. My own
dead souls, my, so called
people. Africa
is a foreign place. You are
as any other sad man here
american


           + 9 january 2014








....

one by William Rose Benet

 

 

 

How To Catch Unicorns

 

Its cloven hoofprint on the sand
      Will lead you—where?
            Into a phantasmagoric land—
                Beware!

There all the bright streams run up-hill.
              The birds on every tree are still.
                But from stocks and stones, clear voices come
                  That should be dumb.

If you have taken along a net,
     A noose, a prod,
       You'll be waiting in the forest yet…
           Nid—nod!

In a virgin's lap the beast slept sound,
     They say… but I—
             I think (Is anyone around?)
               That's lust a lie!

If you have taken a musketoon
     To flinders 'twill flash 'neath the wizard moon.
        So I should take browned batter-cake,
            Hot-buttered inside, like foam to flake.

And I should take an easy heart
        And a whimsical face,
             And a tied-up lunch of sandwich and tart,
                And spread a cloth in the open chase.
                  And then I should pretend to snore…

And I'd hear a snort and I'd hear a roar,
   The wind of a mane and a tail, and four
          Wild hoofs prancing the forest-floor.

And I'd open my eyes on a flashing horn—
          And see the Unicorn!

Paladins fierce and virgins sweet…
           But he's never had anything to eat!
              Knights have tramped in their iron-mong'ry…
                 But nobody thought—that's all!—he's hungry!

ADDENDUM

Really hungry! Good Lord deliver us,
         The Unicorn is not carnivorous!
























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from india

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