So Long and Thanks for All the Fish!
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Gratitude expressed by 4 members:
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The Healing Time
Finally on my way to yes
I bumped into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy
- Pesha Gertler
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Tending the Sedge
The land was first the land’s. Then, the Pomo,
the Miwok and the Wappo lived on it.
The tribelets of the Konohomtara,
the Kataictemi and the Biakomtara
settled on different sections of the wide
Laguna for over 10,000 years.
Little changed except the roots and stalks of
the coarse sedge plants that grew half-submerged in
the water. The Pomo basket weavers
cultivated the sedge fields, passed prayers
for straight stalks and supple roots from mouth to
ear to mouth. Prayed and sang, untangled and threaded.
The basket is in the roots, that’s where it begins.
- Iris Jamahl Dunkle
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Listening To The Republicans
Winter 2016
I don’t want
to be inspired
I don’t need
to be uplifted
I want
to descend
to walk down
to where their pain is,
to where fear,
like a
week-old
rotting corpse,
has absolutely
nothing good to say
I want to listen
to the stench
to the terror
so that when I return
I can keep my heart
open,
so that I
can remember
where
and what
they were
taught.
- Trout Black
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Wild Common Prayer
I dreamt you were whole again, radiant, calm: your hair still golden but
tinged with red — a halo of rosy, burnished light — and your hands
untrembling in your lap. I was surprised to find you home. But I’ve been here
all along, you said. Or might have said. You didn’t speak. You’d only aged
as women age whose bodies ease them toward death; grown softer, more
yourself. And I was the one who stood amazed, there in the kitchen where
we’d spent so many quiet mornings, friend. Wanting to touch you, wanting
to simply not forsake you now. Outside, the pasture lay down calmly; each
blade shimmered in the wind. This is eternity, I thought, and felt you breaking
into all your lovely fragments as I woke.
- Cecilia Woloch
Gratitude expressed by 9 members:
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Of the Color Blue
First in the stark relief
of black and white,
the day emerges through the cottonwoods.
Know the likelihood of that blue
that’s been called headstrong.
It’s the same one
that can represent the distance,
that can awaken the optimist within,
speaking in one of its assorted voices.
Listen carefully while assembling one’s self,
while choosing which mask to put on,
or to leave off.
Today’s reality show will attempt
to make you the star,
competing agendas will clamor
for attention,
for center stage.
Hold tight to your heart center,
to your own firm resolve.
It is your circus,
and your choice of participating simians.
- Pamela Williams
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Poem In Which My Legs Are Accepted
Legs!
How we have suffered each other,
never meeting the standard of magazines
or official measurements.
I have hung you from trapezes,
sat you on wooden rollers,
pulled and pushed you
with the anxiety of taffy,
and still you are yourselves!
Most obvious imperfection, blight on my fantasy life,
strong,
plump,
never to be skinny
or even hinting of the svelte beauties in history books
or Sears catalogues.
Here you are -- solid, fleshy and
white as when I first noticed you, sitting on the toilet,
spread softly over the wooden seat,
having been with me only twelve years,
yet
as obvious as the legs of my thirty-year-old gym teacher.
Legs!
O that was the year we did acrobatics in the annual gym show.
How you split for me!
One-handed cartwheels
from this end of the gymnasium to the other,
ending in double splits,
legs you flashed in blue rayon slacks my mother bought
for the occasion
and tho you were confidently swinging along,
the rest of me blushed at the sound of clapping.
Legs!
How I have worried about you, not able to hide you,
embarrassed at beaches, in highschool
when the cheerleaders' slim brown legs
spread all over
the sand
with the perfection
of bamboo.
I hated you, and still you have never given out on me.
With you
I have risen to the top of blue waves,
with you
I have carried food home as a loving gift
when my arms began un-
jelling like madrilenne.
Legs, you are a pillow,
white and plentiful with feathers for his wild head.
You are the endless scenery
behind the tense sinewy elegance of his two dark legs.
You welcome him joyfully
and dance.
And you will be the locks in a new canal between continents.
The ship of life will push out of you
and rejoice
in the whiteness,
in the first floating and rising of water.
- Kathleen Fraser
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Marrying God
Dark of the moon making
Ritual my own, stone altar
My fire, low and quieted
The incessant tide insists
I hear its rhythmic chant
Above the scratching sound
My own voice attempts
To remember words that
Call forth a Power, protection.
I am asking for answers
Requesting questions.
Ritual to heal the hearts
I have broken—my own,
My daughter's, her fathers.
Is it right this joy surrounding
The molten center of grief?
As I sing, resurrecting hymns
Of a childhood of certainty
A God of consequence and presence,
Another presence presents,
A shadow rushes past, so close
I feel its wake. This obscure shade
Mine? His rage? A stranger
Come to make the beach
A bed for the night?
My fire doused, I climb the cliff,
Feel foolish, but certain
Rituals of my own always
Leave me chagrined, find me
Later rewarded. Weeks later
Full sun, I return, armed
With incense and photos—my
Father, his father, hoping to find
A balm, a cure for this crack
In my soul's center, wound inflicted
By life that makes men
Other, condemns us to struggle.
Moonless night, firelight
Now passed. Atop ashes a ring
Wedding ring. Mine now
I wed an uncertain god,
One who promises nothing
Gives all. With this ring
Relic of another's broken
Heart, released to the ocean
Returned to the shore,
I thee wed.
- Rebecca del Rio
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Spiritual Chickens
A man eats a chicken every day for lunch, and each day the ghost of another chicken joins the crowd in the dining room.
If he could only see them!
Hundreds and hundreds of spiritual chickens, sitting on chairs, tables, covering the floor, jammed shoulder to shoulder.
At last there is no more space and one of the chickens is popped back across the spiritual plain to the earthly.
The man is in the process of picking his teeth.
Suddenly there is a chicken at the end of the table, strutting back and forth, not looking at the man but knowing he is there, as is the way with chickens.
The man makes a grab for the chicken but his hand passes right through her. He tries to hit the chicken with a chair and the chair passes through her.
He calls in his wife but she can see nothing.
This is his own private chicken, even if he fails to recognize her.
How is he to know this is a chicken he ate seven years ago on a hot and steamy Wednesday in July, with a little tarragon, a little sour cream?
The man grows afraid.
He runs out of his house flapping his arms and making peculiar hops until the authorities take him away for a cure.
Faced with the choice between something odd in the world or something broken in his head, he opts for the broken head.
Certainly, this is safer than putting his opinions in jeopardy.
Much better to think he had imagined it, that he had made it happen.
Meanwhile, the chicken struts back and forth at the end of the table.
Here she was, jammed in with the ghosts of six thousand dead hens, when suddenly she has the whole place to herself.
Even the nervous man has disappeared.
If she had a brain, she would think she had caused it.
She would grow vain, egotistical, she would look for someone to fight, but being a chicken she can just enjoy it and make little squawks, silent to all except the man who ate her, who is far off banging his head against a wall like someone trying to repair a leaky vessel, making certain that nothing unpleasant gets in or nothing of value falls out.
How happy he would have been to be born a chicken, to be of good use to his fellow creatures and rich in companionship after death.
As it is he is constantly being squeezed between the world and his idea of the world.
Better to have a broken head - why surrender his corner on the truth? - better just to go crazy.
- Stephen Dobyns
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OM
It’s the being
The coming into being
Not wherefrom
Not where to
That matters
No name can explain
No time has the better
Religion has no ownership
Neither time not space
Beyond time and space
Energy becoming mass
Consciousness expressing
Shiva to Shakti
Before to now
The present moment only
Another moment
A new present
A new past
Being, coming into being
The true incarnation
The recycling
Energy to mass
Mass to different forms
The eyes, ears and thoughts of
Earth, Space and Spirit
Thus are we all
Om and
The silence before
The silence after
Om
- Roy Woolfstead
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Psalm for a Lost Summer
By the rivers of Estes Park, there we sat down, yes, we sighed, when we
remembered Italy.
We pressed our pens against paper, and we sat under the pine trees,
listening to the crows.
For there in Colorado we were captive at a high altitude, required
to write without breath; and if we could not write, our consciences
required us to read, and improve our minds.
How shall we write our poems in this strange land?
If I forget you, Venice, let my right hand forget to wind the fettuccini
around the fork.
If I do not remember balmy Sorrento, let me never taste lemons again;
if I prefer not Capri above my chief joy.
Remember, O Muse, the couple who strolled about Assisi; who said,
How lovely this is, but next year let's vacation at home.
O Citizens of Assisi, do not blame us for the earthquake that destroyed
your basilica; how happy we were, looking at your frescos during a
thunderstorm.
Happy we shall be again, when we dash from this rented cabin, and
drive down from these great stone mountains forever, Amen.
- Maura Stanton
Last edited by Bella Stolz; 03-05-2016 at 01:19 PM.
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City Psalm
The killings continue, each second
pain and misfortune extend themselves
in the genetic chain, injustice is done knowingly, and the air
bears the dust of decayed hopes,
yet breathing those fumes, walking the thronged
pavements among crippled lives, jackhammers
raging, a parking lot painfully agleam
in the May sun, I have seen
not behind but within, within the
dull grief, blown grit, hideous
concrete facades, another grief, a gleam
as of dew, an abode of mercy,
have heard not behind but within noise
a humming that drifted into a quiet smile.
Nothing was changed, all was revealed otherwise;
not that horror was not, not that killings did not continue,
but that as if transparent all disclosed
an otherness that was blessed, that was bliss.
I saw Paradise in the dust of the street.
- Denise Levertov
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Supporting Roles
A raucous ruckus
was being raised
by the Seal Island seals of Point Lobos
and we were drinking it all in, when
a squadron of pelicans,
a hundred strong,
in single undulating file,
swoops down,
leaving us seal-drunk and pelican-awed. And
you said, best as I remember,
“Pelicans only get a supporting role
in a place like this…”
And your eyes traced the landscape—
sea, sun, rocks, sand, seal, sky.
It took a moment to sink in,
these things do; but
isn’t that all any of us get—
“Supporting roles”—
in the great cosmic melodrama?
Where the only stars
are the stars—
and there’s so many of them
they hardly count.
- Gary Turchin
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Apollo and Daphne, 1622
Solid marble,
empowered by Bernini,
escapes Earth’s bounds,
just as Daphne eludes
the bonds of Apollo’s passion,
wanting to break loose
of his embrace,
yet hesitating, glancing
back over bare shoulder
unbound hair billowing
upward, arms rising,
fingers spread in
supplication, sprouting
translucent leaves –
defying gravity,
the laws of nature,
and the gods.
Unable to resist
the immense pull
of this story in stone,
I circle and circle,
sensing Time’s
harsh breath upon me.
And I long
to deny him, to slip
from his arms,
to dwell, like Daphne,
beyond his grasp.
- Jodi Hottel
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Two Kinds
There are two kinds of people in the world;
the ones with washers and dryers and the ones
who unfurl their slips at the laundromat, spread
saris and bed sheets by the river, hang
their checkered boxers on the line.
There are two: those who love Einstein
for his relativity and those who love his hair.
Those who relish words like infrastructure
and problematic, and those who like to ponder
life in the belly of the whale. For some,
invitations come as night birds; others get
a summons in the mail. These wander wet and
lonely; those soft-shoe in rhythm with the rain.
Two kinds: the tragic heroes and the understudies;
the bootleggers and the cobblers. Wolf-whisperers
and dogcatchers; shovellers of snow and readers
of the flake. There are those who run into the room
with a lit match, stopping to wonder what they came for,
and the ones who run in without the match.
- Prater Sereno
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Irreverent Narrator
I come alive reading
a novel with
an irreverent narrator
because how
can you take
this rascal life
seriously?
Life, everyone’s outrageous
sidekick with the big sombrero
who laughs at you
and almost never
obeys your commands
or even your kind
suggestions,
who make loud farts
AND fart-noises so
you can’t even tell
which is which,
who won’t sit still
for a portrait,
each one of which
ends up showing only parts,
but who
may become a true friend if
you stand your ground,
crack your own jokes back,
mine irony’s rich vein,
and are willing to abandon
every defense at
a moment’s notice and become
a damn fool
for love.
- Max Reif
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that's pretty racist. Only white people do math?? and anti-intellectual too. Math isn't the antithesis of poetry, you know... in classic times, not like our modern degraded age, there wasn't the urge to partition philosophical realms that way. So how bout a #dilettante tag for those who haven't enough education to enjoy both?
ok, one more. If you choose your numbers right, you have 10 fingers not counting your thumbs.
Gratitude expressed by:
Well you see, there are two kinds of people...
One kind feels the need to attack and vilify what they do not understand. This person is often quite literal and unable to imagine any more complicated emotional states or meanings beyond the obvious. The subtle humor and surrealism of a phrase like "math exhibitionists openly flashing" would be absolutely lost on this type. Not understanding, they will not ask the meaning. They will allow their unconscious mind to fill in every unknown from a list of evils they always keep on hand, and then they attack. And maybe tack on a random slur questioning social status and education. This is how witches get burned.
Podfish, what are you doing here? Running for the Republican nomination? Why don't you be a good cop and put the gun down, ask a few questions next time.
I loved the poem; I enjoyed the binary jokes. I will say, however, that to me math may as well be the opposite of poetry, thank you very much.
At the heart of the white privilege issue I see people who are essentially oblivious to a good deal of their surroundings in terms of the lives lived by folks right in their own town. My ref there was just a weak joke about people being oblivious to their surroundings, farting in church, talking in library etc...
I come to this miraculous fountain of poetry every day (actually it comes to me) and for me it IS a sanctuary. There is a good supply here of something that I find sorely lacking in the world around me and it helps me almost every day. Would I have Dan not post his thought?? NEVER. I had a funny emotional reaction ( a demi-dismay) to the notion of math being discussed in the poetry thread and I made a silly colorful joke about that, I hoped, not taking the time to craft and edit it for clarity and harmlessness. You gonna shoot me for a bad joke? I'd think that a waste of your time. relax, go have some tea and be thankful for something.
I saw your gratitude and I appreciate that, but other folks are involved now and I thought it best to explain and put this to a timely close.
All the best!, Cal
that's pretty racist. Only white people do math?? and anti-intellectual too. Math isn't the antithesis of poetry, you know... in classic times, not like our modern degraded age, there wasn't the urge to partition philosophical realms that way. So how bout a #dilettante tag for those who haven't enough education to enjoy both?
ok, one more. If you choose your numbers right, you have 10 fingers not counting your thumbs.
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Humour - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humour
Wikipedia
Most people are able to experience humour—be amused, smile or laugh at something funny—and thus are considered to have a sense of humour. The hypothetical person lacking a sense of humour would likely find the behaviour induced by humour to be inexplicable, strange, or even irrational.
note: Apparently that person is no longer hypothetical.
that's pretty racist. Only white people do math?? and anti-intellectual too. Math isn't the antithesis of poetry, you know... in classic times, not like our modern degraded age, there wasn't the urge to partition philosophical realms that way. So how bout a #dilettante tag for those who haven't enough education to enjoy both?
ok, one more. If you choose your numbers right, you have 10 fingers not counting your thumbs.
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Well, I had to look up "binary notation" and still don't really understand it, but, having studied the I Ching for many years, I thought that this (from Wikipedia) was very interesting:
The I Ching dates from the 9th century BC in China.[3] The binary notation in the I Ching is used to interpret its quaternary divination technique.[4]
It is based on taoistic duality of yin and yang.[5] eight trigrams (Bagua) and a set of 64 hexagrams ("sixty-four" gua), analogous to the three-bit and six-bit binary numerals, were in use at least as early as the Zhou Dynasty of ancient China.[3]
The contemporary scholar Shao Yong rearranged the hexagrams in a format that resembles modern binary numbers, although he did not intend his arrangement to be used mathematically.[4] Viewing the least significant bit on top of single hexagrams in Shao Yong's square and reading along rows either from bottom right to top left with solid lines as 0 and broken lines as 1 or from top left to bottom right with solid lines as 1 and broken lines as 0 hexagrams can be interpreted as sequence from 0 to 63. [6]
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... hypothetically, some might find it ironic that the characterization of "overly literal" might work both ways... or be amused by the idea that 'hypothetically' and 'hyperbole' are both in use here. I could explain how taking an absurd premise at face value, or extending it to its logical extreme, can both be humourous, but explaining humor is a fool's errand. Although there's humour in foolishness too.
... though I can see that it's possible to see my original post as a personal accusation, despite the wording. Sorry to have left that impression. Still not sorry if my sense of humour isn't universally shared, though. Shoulda used a smiley.Humour - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humour
Wikipedia
Most people are able to experience humour—be amused, smile or laugh at something funny—and thus are considered to have a sense of humour. The hypothetical person lacking a sense of humour would likely find the behaviour induced by humour to be inexplicable, strange, or even irrational.
note: Apparently that person is no longer hypothetical.
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Can't say that that exhibitionist exhibited much. Using binary, you can count to 16 on one hand, and if you used all your fingers and toes you can count up to 1,048,576...