Best Composting Poems
I see the future
in the constellation of my crystal tears
as you siphon the sparkle off what’s left of my joy.
Heavy is my heart where you spread your composting ego
sacrificing my fire.
Your unwillingness
to ascend from darkness
on wings of breath and light
is not lost on me..
as you strut your fan of peacock plumes
snuffing out any hope
for my flickery flame.
Susan Ashley
July 19, 2018
~ Third Place ~
Contest: Any July 2018 Poem
Sponsor: Dear Heart a.k.a. Broken Wings
~ POTD ~
July 21, 2018
She laces this dark late winter's evening
with white manna grace,
flowing flying frosting
folding in and over and around
dark naked tree limbs
Dressed up and out
under ice limned networks
down in-flowing rivers
emptying onto cold cover
of frozen lace-flake
shivering shimmering
sad season
Hovers over what had been
pedestrian front predation lawn,
now transforming and mesmerizing
ecstatic ice crystals
Twinkle in response
as their ice-flame children
follow in post solstice pilgrim path
to die their individuality
within this here-now scurried view.
I smile, perhaps flirtatiously,
within shy winter's virgin dream,
a stubborn storm of snow
softly settling
quieter than white noise still
so so civilly right,
a silent black then white
bright moving set
frames a roundly wonderful life.
S/he is not smiling back;
I know that
But I feel this cold embrace
teasing tickling of too-perfect beauty,
hope imagining S/he could sleep
within heaven's blanket
Dream down Her winter's rain
for deep composting thirst
to drink through walls of hibernating glad
brewing spring's warmest winding offer.
This could go on all night
free of freezing fright
This reverse stalking
inside window peeper out
across front and back porches
Glazing Gaia's grace
elational transfiguration,
silent musing ecodrama
shows off Her magic show
for those with ears to see
through silent first snow
of momentous perennial occasion
Falling just in time
to brighten this sad day for dreams
of Beloved black in white Communions
spreading EarthMother's silent storm
Of love,
impossible to ever sleep
deep same again
Unlikely to become unlover,
to uncover
supremely white slippery cover.
Such elegant purgation grace!
I would dishonor Her
to break such silent sleep
within surrender's coldly storming space.
Variations on a Punishing Theme
When people are hungry and at risk of homelessness
despair
chronic depression
and climatic extinction
Is it because their leaders
and community developers,
learning incubators
and technical assistance providers,
grantors and lenders,
representatives
and public sector service providers
absorb too many investments and nutrients
for their own mouths and mortgages?
sleeping soundly at night
unaware of how their Continuous Quality Improvement intentions
economically and ecologically miss their mark
of solidarity and mutual subsidiarity,
of recreating the comfort and nutrients
they intended to invest in those with greater need.
Perhaps the self-blaming unruliness of hungry homeless people
Is due to oversight interference of well-intended practitioners
expert administrators
senior consultants
expertly dominating fragile margins of poverty
feeding dissonant anger and fear
and mistrust.
Chronically at-risk species fear living death's dissonance
and entropic non-thrival trends,
Because we are anxious to survive,
to build life; not so much death and perpetual advent.
Wilting personal lives
have no bandwidth left
for righting macrosystemic death trends.
It is mutual-mentors who co-invest in cooperative thriving,
That incarnate wise evolution of deep ecologically balancing lives.
Self-composting toilets
have surprisingly greater nurturing value
to people without a pot to pee in
than community-composting banks
and governments.
Who am I talking to
as I rehearse my memory stories,
shadow voices,
echoes,
and my own heroic victim analysis?
How snugly language fits
within karma's great chain of becoming
Earth's prophetic saintly sage
lecturing Othered parasitic peers
Living off malnourished Mother's
ambivalently valued,
too often ego-possessed
yet slavishly steadfast
bicameral creative mind
and reconnecting heart
and communing bilateral root
System seeking just right peaceful race
amusing pace
sage sacred place
Bicameral lungs
seeking midway co-gravitating energies
of Yang's grace face of Yin-squared win
bilateral neural processor
Ego-voicing within egocenter
Id-choicing within anthrocenter
SuperEco-dancing YinMind/YangBody Earthcenter,
polypathic
multisystemic
0-souled chi
1-identity...
My owned HereNow listening
incarnating SpaceTime-self unfolding
Triumvirate Tiered post-Freudian sacred stages
Sacred musing
EarthTribe's perennial ringing
singing
dancing EarthTree of Life
Rooting down into Dark TreeCore Vortex
Death promising integrity's ReBirth
without aversive grasping,
no warring against life's composting light,
when wrestling with death's night vision,
balancing Left with Right...
How do my pre-languaged
Universally Intelligent and Informating
natural systemic cells and organs,
embodied skin embrace of chi-center soul,
speak my Left-brain semantic thoughts
of past revisited
with future hoped for
and feared
belong to
longed for
since all past Elder enculturing regenerations
stepped into this HereNow
embyronic enbrightenment
to light past's future Nature/Spirited memories?
If any sage outside
listens to internal musing questions,
revolving hypothetical inclusive
resonant win/win resolutions,
these prayers for self-healing co-redemption
re-seed Earth's exegetical ecotherapy
absorbing my own Ego's dissonant pathology.
glorious day calls
donning summer's broad-brimmed hat
for LOVE of sunshine
locate garden shoes
unworn since last november
garden work my FUN
laggard spring was late and cold
urgent..seeding must get done
dig them up and put them in
setting sets in ..seeding seeds
hoeing, raking, composting
POETRY alive
Won a 5th with this
By: Joyce Johnson for Linda's contest "Fun & Frolic" (3 forms)
Miracles of GrandMother Tree
begin with her purgative peaceful birth.
For at this time,
so long before her cycling rings of time began,
we see her original seed
and this seed's less original composting environment,
and within this brief timeless moment,
before her benign becoming,
these each appear to decompose
into each recomposing other,
beginning GrandMother Tree's long waging of peace-filling rings,
recording recycling time's historic four fractal seasons
of perennial reproduction
Once begun with consilient fertility,
GrandMother revolves through days and nights
relentlessly deepening creolizing root systems
of nonzero co-relational recreation.
For each new ring
another year of cooperative becoming.
Cooperative thrival,
and only as necessary
competitive survival,
or healthy becoming decays to loss of living
Yet even these degenerative transitions
are not equivalent to springing back to prior springs.
She cannot go home again
because she carries her original home
within her still small skeletal seeds
reincarnating past purgations and ministrations
All while extending further rooting down
ever richer deeper cooperative
health-seeking Win/Win system sensors.
And so, at last,
GrandMother Tree begins to fade from Yangish life
toward Yin-emptying death.
Whether fast, through uprooting hurricane,
or slow, through slowing drying aging defense/offense loss of balance,
her woody organs disintegrate
creating compost perfect for her dormant seeds
and, even more richly,
for seeds of her adult children,
now become intrinsic to
her richly interdependent forested environment.
Her forest floor
each spring
producing metamorphic regenerations
of seeds and benign environmental compost
remembering each Win/Win peace fulfilling communication
GrandMother Tree winds and water
reweaving nutrients of time
in economic co-invested
political co-empathic space
Ecosystem rooting for waging peace,
ever more robustly resilient
While waging defensive war
strenuously defeats dynamic balance,
waging Win/Win peace requires root systems
repeating GrandMother's dharma balance.
SPRING!!!!
I stepped in it this morning
soft squishy, tracked it into the house
SPRING!!!
Mud, ice crusted, glistening,
steamy, warming in the
mirage of early sun.
SPRING!!!
Aromatically composting
Autumn’s neglected harvest,
SPRING!!!!
Worms aerating the soil
playing tug-o-war
with early birds
SPRING!!!
Crocus and Jonquil
Opening Day
SPRING!!!
Hats and jackets
celebratory decorations
swaying in the breeze
SPRING!!!!
Princely kiss awakening
Sleeping Beauty
3/13/2016
submitted to – Spring – Poetry Contest
sponsor – Catie Lindsey
There was a time
not so very long ago
when clopping horses
and sighing sleighs
and paddle splashing canoes,
and then, later, trains
and electric streetcars
were the resounding heart
of multicultural transportation.
And local newspapers
with indigenous,
perennially planted village editors
among ecoschooled
one-room patriarchal chiefs
competed only with local gossip
in barber shops
and beauty parlors
for communicating hearts,
listening among each democratic trusting,
sometimes mistrusting,
but rarely anti-trusting, other.
These were slower
and in some more nutritional
ways more goodfaith experiential based
and less indoors extracted,
distracted from outdoor Earth voices
singing resonance,
preaching resilient multicultural climates
of and for co-redeeming health
as Original Intent
of Paradise WinWin Wealth.
There were these times
when horses and sleighs,
mules and oxen,
cattle and pigs,
camels and llamas,
and then, later, bird flight imaginations,
bikes
and ecoschools
and organic composting gardens,
electric streetcars and trains
were the heart of multicultural
PositivEnergy communication.
Remember great climatic transitions,
memories etched in regenerating systemic syntax,
DNA coded,
but also RNA's much older eco-equivalent health scripture
through God of Time's bilaterally balancing norms,
organic love incarnating
and sacred life outcarnating,
full-polycultural
crown/root systemic health.
Each plant and sludge cell,
eco-therapeutic consumers and producers
of ecologically balancing air,
some seasons warm and more productive
of nutritional outcomes,
other seasons for cold,
with dualdark past meets future
tipping poignant decomposing health and therapy events
composting fertile transitional rebirthing issues
and transformational death opportunities
to consider warmer,
more pregnant days
and nights,
less consumptive of last year's eco-embryonic promise,
like sucking oil out Earth's AnthroSupremacist
privileged monotheistic
nationalistic
narcissistic,
LeftBrain verbally dominant,
codependent Me v They
win/lose 0-sum ableism.
ReConnecting great climatic health v. pathology transitions
through bicameral lens (0)-centric DNA/RNA
Double-fractal
8 to the double-boundaries
of great spectral circles
revolving historic trauma/therapy re-memory
spirals of Time's ReGenerating Health
for springing ReNewing Global Wealth
and falling failing
unknowing
decontextualized
dissonant localized despair
Win/lose oppression
suppression
depression
negative impression
Re/De-Genesis/Exodus
Promised Love
of Her Win/Win Muse Story
and NoPromise Absence
of Win/Lose AnthroSage-dominant
dissonant WarLord
monotheistic SunGod
unenlightened disempowering
misogynistic
unecological unhealthy
un-coempathic lack
of secularized
LeftBrain verbally dominant
SWM clerically privileged
West v East as xx v xy
DNA v RNA
patriarchal v matriarchal-linear scripted
monotheistic v polytheistic
oral trauma v therapy-informed
history.
Beneath the eyebrows, windows.
When I was a child- fresh of life;
Seasons flew past my watching,
Mountains of newness grew before me-
-And I conquered Everest...
Ran like the wind,
Now;
Taken like an autumn leaf-
Weathered and ready for composting;
They give us mood, gesticulation;
Always moving, eyes are on us-
Tell me a story of your ways; what did you see?
Just now or many years ago.
Windows-
To earth, arriving home
Sitting on its clay- waiting
Watching-
Beneath the eyebrows,
Through windows fixed once,
So I could continue to see my view;
A way of life- real and lived in full.
These I will leave to watch over you,
My spirit and soul are my vision now.
Karma, grace, incarnation,
evolution, progress, enculturation,
pick whichever label fits for you,
are like composting souls and soils,
regenerating dispossessed stuff
within myself, society, Earth.
With compost we extract what we cooperatively invest,
both nature with my nurture,
through Ego's intent
and Earth's Logical polycultural nutrient-praxis.
Soil and humane nature's egosoul enrichment
as bicultural co-redemption
compost two layers
of one ecotherapeutic process;
Browns are decomposing Yin function
and Greens are resonant resolving Yang form.
Just-right balance cooperative water,
avoids dehydration and toxins,
and gently stir BiLateral Time
daily CoPresent
Endo/EctoSymbiotic
Earth-(0)-Soul TransFormation.
I've become inordinately attached
to cooperative health-trends
of EgoMe without EcoWe
as one of my less-well-performing compost piles.
Even so, we keep stirring.
Singers and dancers,
artists and writers,
philosophers and poets,
academics and health professionals,
parents and teachers,
actors and contemplatives,
grandparents and children,
live and die between Heaven and Hell.
Between Heaven's interdependent sensory Enlightenment
and Hell's individual secularized Industrious-Militant Revolutions
Pathology and sin result from severing healthy spiritual tools
for development
from degenerative denatured fake-wealth weapons
for destruction.
Heaven's tools restore peace
where re-tooled weapons
without divine mercy
redistribute Hell's sure-fire punishments.
Sacred tools,
like bicameral hearted minds,
were
and are
for hunting,
gathering
harvesting
cooking
serving
cleaning
recycling
composting
regathering,
impressing
not trangressing,
health-restoring FuturePowers.
Weapons were
and are
for killing
threatening
hating
condemning
judging
repressing
depressing
suppressing wealthy MultiGenerational Matriarchal FlowCycles.
Technological tools,
post industrial,
have evolved from
WorldWideWebs of Heaven
for cooperative social health information
Too often devolved into propaganda weapons
against WorldWideWalls for self-ghettoizing Hell
promulgating competitive anti-social disinformation.
Sacred tools, verbal and non-verbal,
derive from
and help build
heart-paths toward progressive liberties in love
and conserving equitable and responsible compassions.
Secularized weapons
contrive from
and help destroy
other paranoid
rabidly bipolar
mind pathologies.
Sacred tools serve immortal life.
Secular weapons serve up violent death.
Just as word choice
is the smallest detail
of communal win/win communication,
Weapon choice is the smallest
and also least cognitively wealthy, part
of commercial and residential conscious win/win choice-making
well-tooled
politically healthy
true-wealth conserving co-investment,
Articulating
incarnating
re-creating
sacred life evolving in-between
LeftBrain's ideas of Heaven
and RightBrain's experiences of lose/lose Hell.
What do you do with road kill
Dispose of it you say
So how does one dispose of it
There is always the Maryland way
You see Maryland picks up road kill
To keep their roadsides clear
And turns it into compost
Mainly made of deer
Bodies are placed in wooden bins
Wood chips and horse poop piled on
Each week the bins are aerated
For the composting of deer and fawn
After three months it is ready
To be spread along the roadway
Helping to grow the grass and the plants
Until sometime around dusk one day
When the deer who are always hungry
Come by the roadside to eat
Along comes a passing auto
And the deer and the auto there meet
So there along the roadside
A deer dies in the weeds
Thus completing the cycle
Of road kill to compost to feeds
tome in this orkney beachstead
Warm in the touch of rotting tip heat
splitskinning addies onto top cook rock
smart eyes closed to stinking smoke
feet still wet from tidepool trapsets
Wondering when will weather break
tothers snore beneath the cook smoke
eagle dreams of summer soarings
when will I earn my right to salt
the cook rock's sate with addies left
splitem and fishwall the fire
t' gae doon sweet in morn
the gut sack's full to bait the pool
time t'wash and dream and drool
translation
at home in this Orkney beach stead
warmed by composting garbage and buried green cut grasses
cleaning fish to smoke
feet wet from tending tidal pool traps
wondering when the storm will end
while the rest sleep in the clearer below smoke
dreaming of summer eagles
looking to gain tribe rights
the flat hot rock above the fire is full
gut the remainder and stack them
to cook around the fire
to taste good in the morning
the grass wove rock sack is full of guts
to rebait the pool trap
it's time to wash and dream of breakfast
seventeen years we went before I knew your friends
names you barely know now and you kept them
absent from me as you keep yourself still, so leave
stay cradle-tucked away as a soothing, sour breast
pocket letter I wrote a long time ago and you kept it
as close as your friends, in a sense
I know you; you want me as whiskey going down easy
making you fuzzy, spitting skins of salted sunflower seeds
th-pping-th-pping—
flooding the green-glass ashtray on our mantel; you gave up
smoking long ago but held onto the equipment like a heavy,
hoard of breath waiting to be used again for anything
other than spat nutlets of the pith leftover, stripped
from our heads of picked-at stems, sneeze-weeds
from our backyard horticulture
I see you :: you want me to forget that bit too? I saw it
through the garden, you leaving the path, seething
steps' impressions follow you—though first paired
depressions, the imprints as all after them, stay
in placating place until the next rain
glazing the brown, composting ground of stage
melting your trespass
into the foreground, back at level-set
ready for another sprouting or the last grasping
seizure of breath from a neck stretching
to see over the gate looking for a new path
on the way out