Month: March 2021

From ether to planet

Here are the heroes of time immemorial
Locked in the struggle that lasts for all time;
Here are the questions and some of the answers
Waiting for someone to call them by name,
Here in the vault tucked away in Elysian,
Here in the hearts of the beings named poets,
Not asking, but asking, and serving as pages
To carry the message from on beyond here.
Here are they all, all the words and the music,
Raging and loving and seeking and found
Until they come pouring and flowing on pages
To find immortality or flash in the pan.
Alone and forgotten, familiar and beloved,
The words sing in silence till spoken aloud.
The words sing in silence till spoken aloud.

A poem is a dance of rhythm and words;
The melody’s added to make it a song.
Is it less of a song if you hold back the tune?
I guess that’s the question the rappers have answered
For better or worse, and the talking plods on.

Rhythm — then words — or melody first;
Does the dancing come first, or was it the last?
Capture the wind and the rustling of branches,
Capture the moanings of joy and of sorrow,
Add then the beat and now you are singing
What we call a song, at its deepest a sob.

Am I writing one poem or a series of short ones?
It’s not mine to question while all the words flow.
Just lay down what’s coming from ether to planet
And worry details when the moment has passed.
Yes, it’s a communion of ghosts and of spirits;
I cannot explain where it’s all coming from.
I’m just the receiver of what’s pouring forward,
I’m just a poor poet encased in a trance
That clears away quickly as soon as I’m conscious
And my unconscious subconscious drives me away —
“Get out of here, man, if you don’t want to play!
I’ll find some poor soul who is ready for me,
More ready than your questions allow you to be!”
… And the wind chimes dance in the breeze …

I do love letting the words fly —
Here in the morning, here in this chair,
Coffee cup on my belly, the muse in the air,
Such as she is, trying hard with this sod —
Any transcription issues are on me, not on her.
Sometimes the music is lost in translation,
But sometimes the song saunters through clear as air.

The sideways wisdom

I reach through the fog in search of something to say, some profundity to help my fellow human make progress along the way and fend off disaster, or if not disaster at least fend off inconvenience or a wrong turn.

But when you declare, “I shall write pith today, I shall crack the code, I shall show my fellow human the light,” it doesn’t come.

The miraculous wisdom creeps up on you sideways, catches you from the corner of your eye when you’re looking at the horizon, taps you on the shoulder, and says, “You know what? Here’s what you need right here.”

And you sigh and say, “Of course. I knew it all along, but I couldn’t have told you until just this moment.”

The immortal part of man

I am reading Farnham’s Freehold, a somewhat dated Robert A. Heinlein novel about a family thrown 1,000 years into the future by a thermonuclear bomb. I was attracted to the book by this quote a friend posted on Facebook:

“The last books in the world, so it seemed. He felt sudden grief that the abstract knowledge of the deaths of millions had not given him. Somehow the burning of millions of books felt more brutally obscene than the killing of people. All men must die, it was their single common heritage. But a book need never die and should not be killed; books were the immortal part of man. Book burners — to rape a defenseless, friendly book. Books had always been his best friends. In a hundred public libraries, they had taught him. From a thousand news stands they had warmed his loneliness. He suddenly felt that if he had not been able to save some books, it would hardly be worthwhile to live.”