Long Redeeming Poems

Sappho fragment #155
translation by Michael R. Burch 

A short revealing frock?
It's just my luck
your lips were made to mock!

*

Sappho fragment #156
translation by Michael R. Burch 

She keeps her scents
in a dressing-case.
And her sense?
In some undiscoverable...

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Pagans Protest the Intolerance of Christianity
by Michael R. Burch

“We have a common sky.” — Quintus Aurelius Symmachus

We had a common sky
before the Christians came.

We thought there might be gods
but did not know their names.

The common...

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A transitional skill
my Mom taught me,
good to use when I start to feel at-risk,
somehow 
anyhow,
whether in my relationship with her,
or with EarthDays more kosmic travels 
through naturally wild 
and domestic spirits.

Remember to ask permission 
before...

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Why does dawn dress robust morning,
while dusk undresses sight?
Each dawn incarnates another Earth Day
a lifetime of Easter mornings 
redeeming nocturnal sight's revolution,
another therapeutic day of gift-it-forward light,
some longer,
some shorter 
before naked covered night.

Why life?
To uncover...

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I have a hardbound copy of
"The City of Hartford 1784-1984"
although most of this coffee table story
of unfortunate events
takes place between 1850 and 1950s,
before and after the UnCivil War,
and,
like the U.S. Catholic Church
and many MainLine Protestant...

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There is nothing weaker than water
But none is superior to it in overcoming the hard,
For which there is no substitute.
(Laotse, "Nothing Weaker Than Water", Lin Yutang, trans.)

That weakness of mind and body overcomes strength
And uniting...

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"Overcoming misleading [economic and political] metaphors
that are physically [naturally, ecosystemically, phylogenically] in [and of] 
your [ecological-organic embodied] brain
is never easy."
            George Lakoff, The Political...

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You.
Reading this.
Right now.
Proof you have descended
from an unbroken powerful line 
of politically and economically successful
Elders.

If we define “powerful Elder”
as those who have had political and economic authority over another,
responsibility for at least one or more...

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Various Heresies 6

Altared Spots
by Michael R. Burch

The mother leopard buries her cub,
then cries three nights for his bones to rise
clad in new flesh, to celebrate the sunrise.

Good mother leopard, pensive thought
and fiercest love’s wild insurrection
yield...

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My early 20s Eldest Black Lives Matter Son
wears his disabling ADHD label uncomfortably,
impatiently,
like a possibly self-redeeming crown
but with unfortunate MessiahComplex thorns
as the Great WhiteMan's sacrificial lamb.

His First, and hopefully last, Girl
is an ADHD Latina,
with sparkling...

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Fascism lives in tension with holy optimism,
as hatred fades in presence of mutual love,
as WinLose evolutionary models
give way to WinWin sacred Energy
stories and songs and dances,
as patriarchal colonization
gives way to matriarchal creolization.

Fascism,
synonymous with Totalitarianism,
as written...

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I wonder if everyone
has a most dreaded dreamed
nightmare worst way 
to conscientiously drop wrong dead.

Mine is claustrophobi-recallish buried
half alive at best is worse
in a wooden rough pine crate.

I'm feeling angry with those who raped,
then buried...

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I'm in the life-long process 
of conjoining a Unitarian Universalist Green Sanctuary
communion of All Souls
living healthy 
on all wealthy Earth soils.

This is not my first time joining an intentional good-faith community,
but it is the first...

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A lovely outcome for our recreational journey,
or Way
or Truths,
or LoveLives,
whichever you prefer to pick out
from among this graced array,
tells a multi-generational creation story
of cosmic sacred ecology
and Earth's evolution revolutions,
drawing on and with 
scientific deductive knowledge
both...

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"We have an enemy within called the ego
who prevents us from using our mind intelligently.
It hides deep within our heart
and emerges with regularity
to challenge and consume our will."
     Rumi (M. Mafi,...

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Before we had the LeftBrain eclipse word,
circa 1200s on back through space and time,
we had great sacred transformational co-arisings,
re-alignment as BlackHole icons
of ancient eco-alignments,
Yang solar resilience 
with Yin lunar resistance.

Before we had dualistic separation,
from sunlight's...

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Future selves recycle past dynamic imaginations,
Greek Gods as muscular Yang athlete images
evolve from older internal messianic bodhisattva Yin,
double-edged incarnations of power.

It is in this coincidentia oppositorum,
claims Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
that the peaks,
the Taoist Tipping Points
of wu wei...

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Well I know it's been forever and you didn't know what to do
Fear no more your philosopher is back with his clerihew
Who will be now name victim of this wonderfully silly form
Probably himself and anyone...

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There is a world of difference
between schism and jism,
but they both end up the same.

Just as patriarchal Roman Catholicism
overpowers living and breathing Christianity,
so too does Capitalism
overpower cooperative capital co-investment,
so too does autocratic rationalism
overpower syncretic enculturing...

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Insufficient knowledge for fully comprehensive consciousness
is also
more than sufficient ignorance
of our individual and collective participation
in comprehensive disease, despair, degeneration, decay,
anger and fearful partisanship,
climatic cultural change
in both Interior and Exterior Landscapes.

So which do we continue to...

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THE LAW

Yet sacrifice would cover for Love's sake
before that time, the Law was sent to guide
sin offerings appeased man's guilty state
but could not change his rebel heart inside.
The WORD was written down on Torah scrolls
with...

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Perfect love is perfection,
it is rare,
if such love exists at all
it must thrive beyond boundaries of my own experience
either receiving,
or giving.

Could this perfection of synergetic harmony and confluence
we have grown to love as love itself
become...

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I took the only seed of hope
for any future healthy Truffula Trees,
but reminded my clinically depressed acquaintance
we are all born co-redeemers,
not addictively incubating extractors.

Ours is not to commodify 
what we could not recreate
for its sufficient...

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Relationships are like farming,
if you don't plant the seed,
you'll have no crop to harvest.
Rumi (M. Mafi, trans.)

Investing is like farming,
if you don't play the game,
you'll have no winnings.

Economics is like farming,
if you don't play this...

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A shaman has two vocations,
inter-related, 
wise teacher
and robust healer

With emphasis on noticing healthy natural systems
shared values
wealthy spiritual development of seasons
with timely regenerative change
without untimely degenerative treasons
to reason

Healers of motherland
and Her EarthTribes.

My favorite teachers
seem to remember...

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