Not Time, Yet

 

For Pup

We were traveling together

when you took the turning

where the Disappeared go,

and are seen no more.

I could not follow. The way was barred.

Still, I continued walking,

carrying your soul with me

in a small wooden box,

hidden under my cape,

held close to my heart.

When I tire, and falter,

am tempted to turn back,

I can hear you thumping inside your box.

You will not let me

abandon the journey.

(Asleep, she found herself

crossing a barren desert.

There was a river ahead,

and she could hear voices, singing,

coming around the bend.

They were coming to get her,

but then she came back into her body.

Not time, yet.)

Death is a river, turbulent, roaring

through time-worn rock-walled chasms

green with weeping.

It dashes our brains out on the rocks

so the eagles may feed,

then settles us, lighter and relieved

of our earthly burden,

in rippled ponds along the shore,

where beaver and wolves

may find us.

I will meet you there

at twilight

on the last day.

At midnight, a ghostly specter

glides mistily along the shore.

She is beckoning,

but I pretend that I am blind.

She is calling.

I pantomime that I am deaf

and cannot hear.

Not time, yet.

These words are a pathway

between the time when you were here

and now.

They are as full of your absence

as my heart.

I am still traveling.

You always did go before me on the path.

I am getting just a little closer.

Not time, yet. Not yet.

I wrote this in 2014. Sharing at earthweal's open link.

Here I Am, Still

 

They see me hobbling down the street,
tap tap tapping my cane,
just like my grandma did,
when I walked her back to the old folks' home,
that single tear rolling down her cheek,
her life reduced, no longer
to her liking.

I am luckier than her, or braver.
I chose my dream,
then flew by the seat of my pants
to keep it alive.

It cost me, and aged me,
and slowed me down,
yet here I am, still,
in the place of my dreams.

They see me hobbling down the street
- tap tap tap -
and give me that smile
that people give the old,
as if life and dreams are all over
and I am suspended, just waiting
out my days.

Yet, all the time,
I am remembering:
the cottonwoods, the crickets,
the lazy summer bees,
and us making love
on the side of a mountain,
on the soft, brown, dried out
pine needles,
your dark eyes beautiful,
looking down,
the cerulean sky above.

for Shay's word list: after the poem "Wrinkly Lady Dancer" by  Alicia Suskin Ostriker.

Paradox in the Valley of the Broken-Hearted

 

image from wexas.com

How to stay balanced in a world
where bombs are falling on the innocent
and, a thousand miles away,
a basket of sweet puppies
are sleeping by the hearth
where two people are sipping tea
and smiling?

How to find reason
in the way governments speak lovely words
in silver tones, about how well
they are governing,  and the deified Economy
that rules us all, while thousands
are homeless, thousands more without
fresh water, and the medical system
is on the brink of collapse?

How to trust leaders
when domestic terrorists
have infiltrated government
and there is no reason in their
fevered fanatical eyes?

I sit under a peaceful sky,
in my comfortable rooms,
in a beautiful place
on Planet Earth,
and all over the world
living beings are struggling to survive
cataclysmic conditions.
I feel like a human sensor,
trembling and attuned
to every garbled frequency.
I register it all -
the beauty and the pain,
the peace and the unwellness
of Mother Earth,
a paradox of pain and pleasure
in the Valley of the Broken-Hearted.

After Above the Paradox Valley by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.

Decolonizing Our Minds

Image by Longwalker on facebook

Ancestors, you who walked gently

on Mother Earth, in soft moccasins,

please forgive our heavy steps, our boots

that trample tender green and growing things

and never see them wilting underfoot.

My Tla-o-qui-aht neighbours,
can you,
who lived for millennia in harmony

with nature, then watched silently

as we settlers damaged
land and sea and air
in two hundred years,

teach us all you know about how to

be a good creature on this earth?

I believe, out there somewhere,

countering the dark-hearted of humanity,

are the bright hearts of the awakened ones,

the Rainbow Warriors, who have come

to heal and restore to Mother Earth

some of what has been lost.

Ancestors, you tell us
we have come to earth
at this moment in time
to shift the paradigm.
But we are slow
in answering your call.

I raise my eyes to the starry sky that

illuminates our darkening world,

and send a plea: may we
transform our consciousness
and our way of being

from sea to warming, rising sea,

illuminate our vision,

decolonize our minds.

May our light outshine

our darkness

while there's still time.

for my challenge at earthweal: Decolonizing Our Minds

In the Dark Times, We Light Candles

 

‘In the dark times

will there also be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing.

About the dark times.’

~ Bertolt Brecht

In the dark times, we light candles,

place them in the window to guide

lonely wayfarers home. We hum,

as we stir the thick soup, wash

all the pots, set the table for

whoever will come.

We curl up in a chair by the fire,

with soft cozy blankets, and a

glass of red wine. We remember

our grandmother, telling us

to watch for fairies dancing

in the flames, and how, at her house,

it was always peaceful, always summer,

her garden full of sweet pea and lilac,

and the certainty that, one day up ahead,

when we were no longer children,

life could be

just that peaceful,

just that beautiful.

And now,

because she showed us how,

it is.

In the dark times,

we come together, break bread,

share empathy and humanity

and hope.

In the dark times,

we come together

and sing.

In the dark times,

we dream.

We dream of spring.

Shared with earthweal's open link

Remembering How to Sing

 

Yesterday began with dying camels and starving

polar bears, but just two hours later a blooming

plant popped up in the garden that had never 

been there before: its white curled petals opening 

around its yellow face and, just like that,

my heart turned itself towards spring. The light

is lasting a smidgen longer in the evening,

the sky is a lighter shade of pale.

The apocalypse may be on its way

but it isn't here yet. And it doesn't take much -

the big waves rolling in, the way

the rounded slopes of Wah-nah-jus

circle round the bay, a small bloom

arriving from who-knows-where,

the subtle hint of spring, and my

buoyant heart remembers

how to sing.

 Inspired by Sorrow Is Not My Name by Ross Gay.

The News This Mo(u)rning

 

BBC photo

He told me hundreds of camels are dying

in the drought near his home village;
he is moved by the faces of the pastoralists
on the evening news,

dragging their carcasses and feeding them

with cartons. He says the government

is trying to plant trees, but there is no rain.

This is our predicament: that those who

have caused the least climate damage

are suffering the most.

Our time will come, we, in our monster

homes, with our gigantic trucks, living large

while the world turns and burns.

I wrote back that in our melting north,

polar bears are starving, too, 
for lack of ice on which to hunt,

until all that is left when they finally,

mercifully die, is their skin.

How does the mind compute such things?

How keep from despair, when the

Talking Heads talk on sonorously

and half-asleep, their eyes fixed

only as far as the next election?

Out my window, at this moment,

all is calm, serene. The waves 

are wild right now at the beach,

the sun is bright. In a world so beautiful,

how can so many be suffering?

What kind of species are we

to have had free choice, and everything 

we needed to survive,
and to have created this?

Jesus wept, the good book says.

I think he must be weeping still. 

Sealegacy/Caters News

For earthweal where we are contemplating Ministering the Future, and turning a radical edge or corner in a poem. Today's email exchange with my young poet friend in Africa sparked this response. Everywhere, the most innocent are suffering the most.