I feel foreboding in the air -
my hands, my jaw, my shoulders clenched,
and then, it pelts my exposed hair,
and though I'm feeling wet and drenched,
our thirsty soil will soon be quenched
as sprouting seeds bring the land's rebirth,
and I'll smell the freshly moistened earth.
I had a dream.
I don’t remember most dreams.
I was cleaning the floors of heaven.
It seemed a mixed blessing,
I was in heaven, after all
but I was cleaning the floors.
It was a part time job,
I knew that intuitively.
I don’t mind house cleaning,
heaven cleaning.
It’s calm work, kind of Zen.
Are we supposed to think of religions in heaven?
At first I scrubbed on my hands and knees.
The floors are soft in heaven, like golden gym mats.
Then I thought of it, and suddenly I had a swiffer-wet mop,
just like that - and the pad never wore out.
After a while, I had an iPod, and AirPods too.
Then a daiquiri - a banana daiquiri with a pastel rainbow umbrella.
They make rapturous daiquiris in the hereafter - they never run out.
‘Heavenly,’ I thought, snorting out a dizzy laugh.
.
.
Songs for this:
The River of Dreams Billy Joel
If the Lord Wasn't Walking By My Side by Elvis Presley
Love in its majesty and spendour
Visits hearts kind and unkind
Waxing her odour and ardour
To help the love-lost to find
Little spaces, loving faces
Enamoured enough
To rise from surfaces
Where disappointment tough and rough
Lampoons discomfiture
Inflicted in the name
Of a culture whose stricture
Makes the lost lame
With heartbreaks
Torrents of tears
Ruing mistakes
Made as fears
Sprang on the lost the illusion
Baked in their soft centre
In reaction to the disaffection and delusion
That feelings may never enter
Into contests
Where the ruthless inflict maximum pain
Under pretexts
A go at love in the main
Signifies a journey on the back of futility
Backed up by contrary advice
Veering towards the volatility
Love tags along in every slice
Love snaps on suitors
Mad
Enough to pose as imitators
Of sad
Hearts that cried
Once smitten
To the core when they tried
To tame love forgotten
Into the dustbin of history
Replete with burnt fingers
Whose mixed blessing story
Singe many Cupid singers.
To be polypathic alone
in an anti-empathic
LeftBrain dominant culture
is, at best,
a mixed blessing,
strange grace.
To become ecologically
and bilaterally polyphonic
in a polyculturing nature-spirit healing environment,
is the blessing
of never being alone
and yet nearly always feeling cooperatively alone together
as co-arising EarthTribe,
sufficient to become healthier residents
of this Milky MidWay.
Unable to grasp the the context
Despite her greatest resolve
The Queen Bee frowns at her, vexed
Into the background my girl dissolves
Hive order is a nasty one
Mean girls, stingers in back
Each social stratum is hard-won
Her skills of nuance do lack
Their fell dance she does not get
Not made to bow to throne
Forever on the outside, yet
Safe, hidden, and alone
From lonely heights she sees
Hot updraft carries higher
Her mind flowing with an ease
Than the hive could never aspire
So safe, but wishes she weren’t
Within abides crimson yearning
Others to share the current
While below, vanities burning
4/30/16
© Thomas W. Quigley
For my Daughter, who shares the family "gift"--
The mixed blessing of an independent mind,
and its social challenges.
For further elaboration, see my poem "Of Asses and Burgers"
The discounts are now quite a few
And cause for a feeling that's blue
It's true--what a drag
As the parts start to sag
A bonus for age sixty-two
It either comes stealthily at first like a spy or announces as a fanfare but more often
like a bride in white being no respecter of beings or things equally fooling all in the
guise of a fluffy warm blanket.
It is the delight of children who miss school and teenagers having a mock cricket or
baseball match as a form of courting.
It is the bane of commuters even worse than a leaf on the line, fog on the tarmac or
gales shutting ships in or out of port and slip siding away on the roads.
It is a mixed blessing to the old bringing back to the brim of memory the tales of youth
more exciting than any computer game or the fear of bringing with it loneliness and
racketing fuel bills.
It is for those sleeping rough or the unemployed a frigid beauty or just dirty and ugly
as though nature is also against them as well as the state or society too.
It takes the boredom from our doldrums of the post Christmas celebrations and New
Year revelries before Spring and Easter give us hope these often so hopeless times.
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