Best Cyphers Poems
The Fresco Says It All!
From the mountain,
From the forest,
From the river,
From the wild,
We came.
Naked.
Not tamed
In their eyes.
Depicted by cathedral fresco
At Mission BC
Our faces are empty
In their eyes.
No clothes,
No nose,
No eyes,
No ears,
No mouth,
No expression,
No emotions.
No individuals.
We were the faceless
In their eyes
Before the Black Robes
Came.
In their eyes
Were we
Barren pewter plates?
Empty jugs?
Blank paper to write on?
Creatures to domesticate?
To tame?
In their eyes
Were we cyphers
In a ledger?
Were we souls
In a cash register
For deposit in Rome?
In their eyes did they see
'Chum' salmon
Heading home to die
In God?
As seen in their fresco
As seen by their eyes,
Out from the watery wilderness
The first of us converted,
Got a colourless face and shoulders.
The second to convert
Got copper coloured skin,
Got face legs and arms,
And from Rome a number,
To mark a soul as saved,
As the numbers as blessings
Were tallied in a roster
At St Peters.
At first,
We resisted conversion
Until small pox struck our village.
An invasive species like the Europeans.
It brought fatigue, then death after
Rashes, lesions and pus-filled scabs.
As loved ones were perishing
In the fever of the plaque,
We were promised
Life after death
With our elders
In a beautiful heaven.
As seven out of ten
Of our people died
We were saved.
We were promised salvation
And residential schools
For our children.
We have survived it all
As a people.
But we are still living
with the scars
Not of small pox
But from our saving.
This was no miracle.
Blessings
For your pendant fingers
Coconut skin
Heart chakra third eye visions
Knotting off Void
While we shared a harbor
Now
Unmoored in Loss
Waves greet the sky
My blessings sink to cyphers
Of a language buried
In the din of
Ocean
The modern world is an awe-choice saturation
Of stuffness and people,
A punguage,
An allcode,
The hash of all cyphers, nodes and codices
Ever scribed, wrote and written,
Bitten off, stolen or torn,
The mash of all knowledge,
The thrash of all oars televisual,
The splice of all strings
From one edge of time to the other,
The open oeuvre of everything,
An omnithought of toot,
The sum of all inflexions,
Ancient and phonetic,
Yet provisional,
A mighty metaforest pointing
To the centre
Of you know what.
Complex thoughts
need simple words
The meaning foremost
verse to show
The mind expands
new seeds put down
Cross pollinated
left to grow
The soil fertile
just sun and rain
As fields once fallow
rise anew
The world awaits
each problem solved
In cyphers brief
— with letters few
(Rosemont College: January, 2024)
deeply
rooted
dualistic c
in
complex
cyphers
senstive&bizarre
personality
characterised
active
& emphatic
mutually
related
in
phylogeneticsp
rooted
in
spontaneous
purity
n
sparse
transcendent
contriuictions