Long Clear eyed Poems
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He worked alone in cold, intensely black
peat water. Had to feel his way. Laid down
one hundred thousand concrete blocks, around
a million bricks, and carried on his back
uncounted thousands of the concrete bags
which shored the Minster up. Six endless years
he toiled in tedium. If bored to tears,
he never said so. And if he hit snags,
he overcame them on his own. Such men –
not loud, not proud, not looking for reward –
are just the type we really should applaud.
Perhaps there were more William Walkers then:
clear-eyed, unfussy, knowing what to do,
and quietly disposed to see it through.
Pebbly scree slides and crabwalks me
inside a dim dunk of fog.
I should not have climbed,
should have waited for the sky to clear its eyes
but I was anxious to reach a height that day.
I took the Arimathea way.
I’m beat and disorientated,
falling down while still upright,
feeling a momentum sliding me over
an unseen cliff face.
I see only a vaporous fear
swirling out of my open mouth.
The chill hand of fate grips.
Beyond my funk
I hear someone behind me
Sitting on the cold stones, boot heels
wedged into the rocky scrabble,
I wait to be rescued by a more clear-eyed self.
As the time of spring beckons
We all have this moment of clear-sightedness
when we see we are of little importance other to the world
and clear-eyed grasp our smallness.
We can in our tiny ways push the world forward an inch
perhaps to a fairer society where children do not die under
the rubble of concrete.
We can do nothing to stop these people who will push
us into an Armageddon, and will they somehow think
they can avoid the calamity when there is no one to blame.
There was a time when one could travel unmolested
in the Arabic world, then the smell of petroleum and
the white man came and destroyed the peace for greed.
No, not us the lesser people, we are victims too of their
hunger to dominate and enslave us in mortgages and loans
that can never be paid; so we watch and wait and when
the day of disaster comes shall I help the ruffians to my lifeboat.
Serendipity
God’s hand, like a muse of the serendipity,
Makes His presence self-evident
In marvels colliding
When happy chances of happenstance
Tango with moments of pure whimsy –
Living epiphanies’ lifeblood
In generosity flowing, spilling over,
With revelation’s laughter of surprise
To stumble upon clear eyed condensed coincidence –
The synchronicity of planets aligned –
Lost in the waxing-waning cycles of moonrises
A plea born upon the lips of a servant’s heart,
For parallel footsteps in pilgrimages and side by side
Linked by servanthood planned for such a time as this.
Hearts of affirming collaboration bloom
Like flowers growing through concrete cracks
When rainstorms hurricane this battered plan
A living answer for pacing eyes
Sometimes blinded, wearing discouragement,
As hearts appear in surprise parties
With glimpses of encouragement –
Moments when hilarity finds a perfect bubble heart
On a flapjack’s edge
Or a coffee saucer wearing a topaz colored gem
Tar droppings screaming “Surprise!”
Or thunderheads giggling in celebration of floating miracles
Eternity’s prankster – vitality’s elan
Living in the playful realms of a-ha’s inspiration.
7-22-21
Contest: Muse
Sponsor: Regina McIntosh
When I changed the name of my ministry to A Servant’s Heart I asked God “Are you with me?” From that time on I have been seeing hearts – everywhere – even as recently as today!
Take to the birth canal to climb out
Don't hurt mother or her humble womb
Leave the cervix intact, alone
Climb into the light through tears
See it for what it is and move on
Grow from a child into life alive
Become a teenager wise, clear eyed
Watch out for criminals with knives
Keep your undulating travels straight
Stay awake, alert and vital
Take to the grave but never die
Be alive until it is your time to go
Go where no man has gone before
Take me with you because you can
Take me because you know
Take me because I said so
Let go because you should
Let go because it is time to
Take to the birth canal again if you can
Tell your mother and a friend or two
Speak gently in a tone they understand
Hug them if you want to
(You may never come again)
THE TRUNK AND THE LOST LEAVES
The sharpest tension of all is that we live and die in the same fragile moment,
to know this and still remain whole and gentle — that is all of art and all its cost,
at the center of existence lies a pool of energy with no name and no personal face,
one that falls away from itself and dissolves into the natural universe like wax in fire.
Poems would be easy if the mind weren't so full of today's noise and clatter,
you have to get through to the other side — where the deep rhythms bind you to the stars,
where the tides knock against your temples with a precision older than language itself,
and I keep trying to control my words so I won't be forced to lie beautifully.
Our poems can never satisfy us — they are nothing but diminished echoes,
the shadow of a song we may have heard just once in the whole span of our lives,
and we spend all the rest of our days trying to remember that lost and vanished sound —
a song we aren't even sure we truly heard or only dreamed somewhere in the past.
We have all been expelled from the Garden — but those who suffer most in exile
are those who are still permitted to dream of the perfection they can never reach,
a badly made thing falls apart — its energy leaks out within just a few short years,
form is the function of conservation — what cannot hold together dissolves into nothing.
Under the surface of my poems there is always a song that wants to take over,
incantation needs no language — it needs nothing but sound and a little darkness,
and sense struggles to assert itself, to mount the rhythm and become inseparable from it —
this struggle is all of poetry — a gentle war between magic and clear-eyed truth.
I want poems that are natural, luminous, deep, simple as the breath of early morning,
I dream of an art so transparent you can look straight through it and see the real world —
what remains after all the anxieties of youth are the great simplicities of living:
birdsong, sky, and weather — the trunk stays solid while the leaves drift and float away.
An early breath of air fresh by the cusp of a rising sun
up in the sky a gold coin shines bright, tinged in ruby red
All of life is good when it is understood by the pilgrim
who loves the pulse of nature and Druid Magic !
Trudging through the forest with a staff in her right hand
made of bark and decorated wood carvings and runes,
she becomes a legendary hero of her time.
Soon as she crosses the magic woods, all good things
come to pass.
Dipping her feet in ochre soil she walks bravely onwards
to her destination, a wizened woman unbaffled by nature
braving the weather, through high winds and storms.
Black spruce, poplars , white pines and sugar maples,
all greet her as she passes by, " Queen Of The Amazon"
they call her, enchantress of SANANGA
Once clear eyed one can never return to a world,
filled with plastic and dying ocean whales...
So over by a running river she sits and waits
for two Titania fairy wings to join her.
Together they sit by the Morning's Quiet Fire,
entrenched in the magic of the woods.
Re-animate as the returning winds of day,
they trade reality for fantasy, then opening a door
they walk through, once more.
The End.
By: Mystic Rose
Why does the heart get all the credit for love?
By so-called affairs of the heart,
that most storied of organs is not unduly inconvenienced.
It beats,
now faster, now slower,
that is all, its task ever unvaried.
But the brain.
The brain is swarmed
by a scream of consciousness,
the amount of work that lands on its desk
swollen by an epidemic of incoming data
as body-wide receptors caffeinated by intimations of love
report frequent sightings of
unexampled beauty followed by euphoric contacts.
Every signal, real or illusory, is taken into custody and interrogated
to determine its authenticity or duplicity.
Every word is a code that needs to be deciphered with a
clear-eyed detachment it can no longer muster.
Every look is transferred to the left side
for facial-contextual-inferential analysis but often hijacked by the right
for the purpose of aesthetic appreciation.
Every scent is identified and catalogued with
a perfumer's olfactory precision.
There are hints to catch,
spats to be postmortemed,
crucial dates to be inoculated against amnesia,
preferences to be recorded, compared, grafted,
model answers to catch-22 questions drafted,
declarations of adoring allegiance crafted.
The subject’s mind is apparently required to be read,
two sets of past, present, future to be crossbred,
blindness to other females pled.
There are virtues to exaggerate to divine proportions,
flaws to modify to virtues with willful distortions,
desires to mollify by counseling patience,
thoughts to be felt,
feelings to be thought,
vertigo to be fought.
Still the to-do list grows,
the repairing of an attention that no longer spans,
the mistaking of what happens to millions of others daily
as a unique personal miracle,
the confusing of being loved with being special,
the projecting of an untested passion into an eternity,
the steadying of feet that has taken to walking on air,
the murdering of ballads meant to be trilled,
and the admonishing
of that nonchalantly speeding heart
to be still.
Jaundiced Eyes
Jaundiced eyes covet past tense masquerades
In crypts where yellowed brittleness recall bitterness
Where glassy-eyed failures suck truth dry -
Vampires with addictions
Distorting graveyards at the altar
Of introspection
Like green-eyed monsters
Grasping
At monetary dust of renunciation -
As thirty silver coins of delusion
Smash against a field of potter’s headstones
Of mummified expectations –
Snake eyes coil to strike
Festering bones of rose colored bifocals
Framed with near-sighted prejudice
In cock-eyed bloodied clarity distorted
Prescriptions,
Opaque, ochre tinted corrections
See beauty as bloodless crumbling petals
When black holes of envy blind side the mindful
Blaspheming the self-evident
In catacombs of blind spots
Where the battered armor of rightness lies still
Awaiting revelation’s softly spoken new light -
A perpetual whispering
In humility's tears restoring lenses knowing the need
For a baptism of clear-eyed focus.
6-25-21
Contest: The Jaundiced Eye
Sponsor: Unseeking Seeker
She likes to embroider me -
a subjective needlepoint
yet a realistic arts and crafts.
A long relationship
requires some fine stitching.
I see a broken thumb nail,
a hand greasy with engine oil.
A vinaigrette of my silhouette
cleaning grandpa's old revolver
just because I do sometimes,
just because.
A chipped tooth and beat-up nose
the fist that hit it, now nowhere
to be challenged.
A telltale hint of man-boobs
an old man's wrinkly bottom.
Her fingertips are clear-eyed,
but the images are softened
with a patient love.
She also embroiders
hummingbirds, butterflies
and flowers -
a holy trinity to encircle a baldhead,
the dome of which
she kisses each night.
She composes
all these scraps of my reality
on a broad white cloth
that I am happy to wash
my sleep-fuzzed face with
each morning.