spinning winding then weaving spiraling into endless connections which appear to be hanging nowhere suspended without edge ending always at inception never does the fiber fray the beginning continues
follow where it leads through the unknown miles of endless webs a glittering reflection metamorphoses illuminating the darkness accumulations of ancient intricacies
dispersed without direction resonating chords of the cosmos naked glory of formless flow undefined by outlines unshadowed unbroken blurring the boundaries between us and we
For earthweal, where Sherry asks us to Contemplate the web of life and see where it takes you.
moon appears as reflection– sun mirrored into night but brighter, closer
and how far is far away?– forever, sometimes, as if never were always the answer to the question of when
third eye digs deeper, dreamclosing the distance, the interval between asleep and wings
It was cloudy when the moon was eclipsing last night, but later on it cleared into mist, and woke me up, as it is wont to do–the top photo is how it looked through my bedroom window about 3am. And above is a close up. The mist allowed me to get some detail–when it’s very clear all that shows up in photos is an intense light.
A quadrille using the word sleep for Sarah at dVerse. I’ve borrowed the dual title idea from David at The Skeptic’s Kaddish–I ran across the word avigation (it means aerial navigation) recently, and I’ve been wanting to use it for something ever since.
My message from the Oracle. The almost-full moon woke me again last night. And at dawn–robin, blue jay, mockingbird, cardinal, mourning dove, crow–they are still here.
birds grow quiet as the spirit wanders between why and the ancient moon that wakes me shining through this season of night
I ask dawn for song listen as dark becomes light
Another one of my Redon-inspired collages, and some birdlings from the archives.
My memories of my childhood, the years between ages five and eleven, are good ones. We had moved from the city of Cleveland to the suburbs, from a 2-bedroom house where my brothers and I shared a room, to a 3-bedroom house where I had my own, if tiny, space.
But this was the 1950s suburbs—there were still fields and vacant and wooded lots. The houses and yards were small. The trees had not been cut down to build the houses. Each was different. Landscapers were not called in—yards were maintained in a casual manner. No one owned a leaf blower or a snowblower. We raked and shoveled and played in the leaves and snow while doing it.
Families had one car and people rotated carpooling or took Rapid Transit trains to work. There was little traffic on our dead end street, and we often played there. Railroad tracks stood at the dead end—we spent hours just watching the trains, counting the cars and waiting to wave at the caboose, climbing the fence and playing in the woods, fields, and streams “across the tracks”. We walked or rode our bikes to school, to friends’ houses, to the candy store.
I recently looked at that house on Google Maps, shocked to see a bare front yard—all the oak trees had been removed. What was once a dead end had been connected to the next street. Gone was the Beck’s house on the hill, and Beck’s field where we played baseball in summer and ice skated in winter. Gone was the Fleming’s double lot with its beehives, rabbit hutches, sheds, and hiding places perfect for kick-the-can. Worst of all, “across the tracks” was now populated by warehouses, not fields and trees and the creatures that lived there.
My entire childhood had been erased.
screens the new playgrounds– no more cloud-watching, fresh picked berries, forts of shoveled snow—
finding a four-leaf clover in the middle of your lawn
For earthweal, where Brendan asks us to witness the magnitude of the changes in our environments.
For how can I be sure I shall see again the world on the first of May? Until the end I thought it was the beginning of the middle. Time happened, then all of a sudden what you once believed in could no longer be retreived. The truth was hard, never soft, never easy. But it contained a life.
May came, but you did not see it.
And so it begins, and so it ends, always with a question. And if there is no answer to give—only a silence that acts as if asking were enough—how does the wheel turn? Or is the question the pivot on a circle whose edge contains only unknowing, infinite stillness? Is that where you are?
How can I be sure? Every answer is the wrong one in a world where there is nothing left to say.
A prosery for Merril’s prompt at dVerse of these words from Sara Teasdale.
“For how can I be sure I shall see again The world on the first of May”
The Fashion Institute of Technology had only one dorm, reserved for out-of-town students, so I felt lucky to have been granted a room, even if I knew it was only for the first year of my two-year program. My roommate had sisters in the city, but had grown up upstate, in a Catholic group home, really an orphanage with all its attendant horrors. Nothing has changed about that since the time of Dickens.
Her mother died when she was very young. A family friend wanted to adopt her, but the Catholic Church refused to separated her from her two older sisters—the friend could not manage three more children. Her sisters married as soon as they aged out of the system, and now lived again in the city where they had been born. My roommate was a talented artist, and her high school art teacher encouraged her to prepare a portfolio and apply to FIT. She wanted to be a textile designer.
Her father had abandoned the family when her mother became pregnant with a fourth child. Unable to imagine being able to support three children, let alone four, on her own, the mother sought an abortion. It killed her.
Her daughters had no choice but to accept the fact that both parents were permanently lost to them. But there was a simmering anger in my roommate, a wound of loss and grief, that remained.
I lost touch with her—we both moved around a lot after getting our associate degrees, and the internet was not even a blip on our consciousness in 1973—but I thought of her again when the decision overturning Roe v Wade was leaked to the press.
Now, as then in the 1950s, our government blames the poor for their poverty, penalizing most of all the living mothers and their living children, abandoned by fathers, or forced to flee abusive husbands and partners, condemning them to hunger and homelessness as a punishment for not being born lucky, for not having friends and family who have enough wealth and stability to pick up the pieces when they need a helping hand.
another grey sky– spring comes late this year—crow calls inside the graveyard
For dVerse, where Lisa asks us to consider the topic of grief.
The moon has risen on the last remnants of night– floating she brushes the heavenly stars. The lake has widened till it almost joins the sky and the mist rising from the water has hidden the hills. Far off the Dipper lowers toward the river. You’d think you’d left the earth– body and spirit for a while have changed place and open, open– the world’s affairs, just waves.
A cento poem for NaPoWriMo Day 30. Thanks to Maureen Thorson for once again hosting this wonderful month of verse.
poets in order of appearance Po Chü-i (title) Po Chü-i Li Po Po Chü-i Ou Yang Hsiu Tu Fu Ch’in Kuan Po Chü-i Li-Young Lee Li Po
K. 