haibun

Gone Straight

The day feels as limber as a body carved in stone, and yet time remains elastic. A Möbius strip to which I cling, never certain if I’m inside or outside or whether, in fact, I’m located anywhere upon the twist of fate at all.

Dylan sang it simple, but simplicity in his mind means traveling on a roller coaster through an arcade of hallucinatory smoke and funhouse mirrors blindfolded and bound by myriad inexpressible desires. “A little confused”? That statement is not only under, but buried so deep beneath layers of denial that the concept of clarity no longer exists.

We are all born too late, really, searching over and over for the lost eternal beginning, the still center, not the unmappable edge we cleave to, against all reason, with the desperation of an addict looking for a permanent fix.

So which way does this finite world turn? Does the Universe have its own compass, or is it, too, like humanity, lost in space?

plus, minus—neither
more nor less than tomorrow,
yesterday, today

The NaPoWriMo prompt for today is to write a poem in which you describe something with a hard-boiled simile. I’ve also used Muri’s Scavenger Hunt words, limber and elastic.

Come In (she said)

What do we remember of the womb, the world of mother-child, when we were one? Do we remember gentle waves, rocking on a seabed of safety, embraced by its self-contained shores? Do our cells forever feel the pull of oceans?—longing to find once more the lost liminal—floating free, water and earth overlapping in an intertidal dance?

Is shelter the same as home?

If we carry our belonging on our back like snails. If we build temporary abodes like caterpillars, waiting for transformation, a future entirely reconfigured, a momentary ephemeral flight.

Is there an either/or, or is it always both/and? The leaving, the long road back, the journey the same but different, a vast and endless circle, each step verged, again and again.

I stand impermanently on a threshold of sand, looking for solidity, a resting place. Where is the first mother, starborne, moonshadowed? What existed before the beginning, the original dreaming?

mystery
of return—how to
meet yourself

Sometimes I feel like I keep recomposing the same poem over and over. This meditation on shelter, for earthweal, is just the most current version of my repetitive state of mind.

The Distance Traveled

If I had been asked how many minutes I had been there, I could not have said. Time did not belong to this space; I could not measure it.

As a child I saw no contradiction in some afternoons expanding joyfully, while others stifled, impossible to escape. Growing up meant constructing arbitrary boxes to make things fit into the space we were allowed to have.

Ask the butterfly
how it transforms the air. Ask
the bird how its wings

capture light. Ask the bees
about the ancient magic

of their dance. Ask the
trees how it is that roots and
branches contain all

the maps needed to complete
the circle, sustain, abide.

Some days pass by and disappear as if they had never been. Some days live forever. Those are the days I seek.

For earthweal, where Sherry has asked about our wild heart.

Also linking to dVerse OLN, hosted by MsJadeLi.

The Gravity of Home

They’re sending out bird machines pasted to the sky over a smoke-filled collage of clouds and burning buildings. In the silence of departure, on a pathway of storms, I turn away from the life I’ve known towards the unforeseen, tangled in bare branches, winter, all of it retreating from a world that contains no escape.

Between the above and the below, floating uneasily, ghostly silhouettes shadow my footsteps as I head blind into a collision with the invisible horizon, held captive by a threshold that seems to extend forever.

No shelter appears here on this road of leaving.

Clinging to tattered
wings, sparrow searches for some
anywhere to land.

Merril at dVerse has given us some wind-tossed paintings to use as inspiration for Ekphrastic verse. I chose the painting below, by Joseph Farquharson, ‘Cauld Blaws the Wind Frae East to West’

Communion

She thinks of summer, the beach. She remembers the full moon rising above the water and shining a path from horizon to sandy shore, like the deserted backroads of a lonely night. She wonders if those drives are only memories of dreams, condensed into something far more infinite than the actual roads she may have once traveled.

Her boundaries seem to follow her everywhere.

She remembers sitting on the deck, looking up into all the places she will never visit in this body. Her mind drifts with the rising and falling of dark waves.

What is never anyway to the ocean that rocks her, the heavens that reach out to her retrospectively from that vista imprinted on her mind? It spirals her like a galaxy, coiling her longing into stars.

trails of sparkling dust–
secrets of ghost owls echo,
shadowing the moon

For earthweal, where Brendan has written about wild mind, the one that needs no device to set it free.

Correspondences

Looking at the photo Butterfly on Asters by Lisa Smith Nelson, I’m immediately reminded of a story in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass”. Kimmerer is asked by her college advisor why she wants to study botany. She tells him she is hoping to learn “about why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together”. Her advisor is appalled. To him, the beauty of a field of flowers has no place in science.

I could have told her, as her artist friends later did, about complementary colors. But I did not know, as she learned in her further studies, that the eyes of bees, like those of humans, are naturally attracted to complementary colors. I looked up butterflies and their vision, too, is similarly color sensitive. When asters and goldenrod grow together, they complement each other in more than color—they attract more pollinators. Plants need pollinators to reproduce.

The combination of purple and yellow is part of the ecosystem.

It seems that beauty is indeed a necessity for life.

which came first–
the delicate wings
or the seed?

Colleen’s Tanka Tuesday prompt this week was a photo chosen and taken by Lisa Smith Nelson, above.

Children of the Night

“Listen to them, the children of the night, what music they make.”
–Bram Stoker

There’s a dark path in the forest that reaches not only to the horizon but far up into the stars in the sky. The contours float, infused inside and out by an endless melody that sings chaos into shimmering pattern.

Where does the story end? Perhaps it leads to dreams that have been hidden away, to possibilities invisible in the light of day. To once upon a time that becomes here and now.

If you listen–still, silent, boundaried by the night–it’s possible to catch a glimpse of these distant voices. But only a child can find the entrance to this liminal landscape of matter, spirit, and sound.

wonder shines
silvered, transcendent–
opening

The Kick-About prompt this week was the quote from Dracula, above. These monoprint paintings were a response to that.

The road from Samhain to vampire costumes for Halloween travels through the pop culturization of every holiday we celebrate for commercial purposes. But that does not completely disguise its real roots in the transition from fall to winter and the crossing over that occurs between the worlds of the living and the dead.

It’s fitting that we have turned Samhain into a children’s festival–we can join in for their sake, hidden behind masks, remaining rational adults while keeping a thread tied to our ancient rites of passage.

Children are our conduit to what we are ashamed to acknowledge. They remain close to the Other Worlds–they still believe completely in magic.

For earthweal, where Sarah has asked us to think about Samhain and celebrate the places that lie between.

Still #2

“It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.”
― Joseph Heller

“And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.”
–Kurt Vonnegut

August 6 marks the 76^th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, which was followed by the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9—the only time nuclear weapons have been used in war.

Between 130,000 and 230,000 people were killed, mostly civilians. Many of those who survived the bombing itself were stricken with radiation sickness and died painful and premature deaths.

The story of 12-year-old Sadako Sasaki’s attempt to make 1000 origami cranes after falling ill with leukemia turned the Japanese Crane, long a symbol of immortality, into a symbol of the wish for nuclear disarmament and world peace.

There are currently less than 1800 Japanese cranes surviving in the wild, for the usual human reasons—loss of habitat and food sources, pollution and poisioning, poaching, disease.

And so it goes…

burning floods
birds singing silent
ash and bones

For Frank’s haibun prompt at dVerse, August. I’ve written about this in August and used these images several times before.

This is our cry.
This is our prayer.
Peace in the world.

–inscription on the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima
http://www.nippon.com/en/images/k00009/

Sadako Sasaki was a toddler living in Hiroshima when it was bombed by the United States. Ten years later she died as a result of leukemia, “the atomic bomb disease.” If you don’t know the story of Sadako and the 1000 Cranes, you can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadako_and_the_Thousand_Paper_Cranes

Midway

If I approach before, must I retreat after? The mirror is always turning. The reflection reverts, echos, remembers, forgets. Meets itself, coming and going. Centered, stilled.

on the cusp
earth bows to the sun
abiding

Perhaps the sudden and expanded silence is what heals, releases the mind from meaning. Can words ever really stand in for what they are not?

Without time, I can relocate who I am. I reach for next, but I don’t understand until later how very far it is from now.

widdershins
the circle dances
into fire

Frank at dVerse has us thinking about the Solstice.

And my title has me thinking about Joni.

More art from the archives.

Oasis

It’s a robin, I think, as the melody enters my consciousness through the window. But then it morphs into a litany of birds from cardinal to crow. There may even have been a frog thrown in for good measure.

I can’t locate the bird to see who is gifting me with its repertoire of local wildlife sounds. It could be a starling—I once lived in an apartment where the local starlings would sit on the roof railing next door every morning and tell me all they knew. But there are also plenty of both mockingbirds and catbirds hanging around.

city fades
a sanctuary
feathered skies

A meditation on sanctuary for earthweal. Also linking to dVerse OLN, hosted by MsJadeLi.

K.

lines that aim to be