Two Poems of Reflection Holding Lives into a Whole -- Completion is the Whole of Humanity
friend and compatriot leaves me in awe with her poem and painting!
A Clay Bird into a Rising Sparrow by Paul Haeder
the sky sometimes is his heaven
buffalo brother, that is
millions east and north on plains
a thought any human barely
can hold inside without exploding
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I dream of those days, man-
child of Ireland and Prussia
brought to this land where my roots hold soil
even as interloper by birth
I hold these truths for bird, swale,
beachhead and arroyo
inalienable truths I have held in youth
breakneck into old age, which is no statuary calm
as each spike from the capitalists
are my own machete swipes against tethering
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I can dream of Gila monsters crawling
into tent, the flying foxes nine thousand
miles away as I sip green tea
truths held not as some finger hold
on memory, but roots of life like veins
connectivity to this ‘whole’ of humans
those who have sound in their hearts
music in their words, seeking
prayer or proposals, happy
for the language of intersection
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I can hold those divergent fractured
discordant flows of negative, positive ions
into some vortex of truth as boys and girls
yes, homeland of civilization
implode not just with bombs
but through empty rhetoric of modern
monsters, moguls who tell us how to see
or hear or believe genocide
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they have no sense of ten thousand Sonoran toads
blossoming out of monsoon, or bats in the millions
lifting acrid air and hearts in New Mexico
the flailing lives of armadillos
partially squashed by F150’s
something will bring an old man home
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again, while babies bleed out in Palestine
while mutated baby Jesus is white and pale
so those illegal Pilgrims
see a Palestinian Christ empty
of dark eyes, skin, hair
but the real people know red hair
and blue eyes herald in
destruction, a hundred million
culled for Europe, this spasm
of rape and rapine -- America
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I know the vision quest of
my bear, in mountains capped
with Arizona snow, a big black
monster of a guy, leading himself
five hundred miles to peanut butter
or that big bag of dog chow
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it is my reality of the season
reaching back while pushing ahead
an orb of love and anger, reflection
and revulsion, but the few souls
still left in my tribe are more than
“just friends,” but the pilgrims
in my journey, a painting lifting
story after story, memory and dream
in order to slip in and out of each
other’s journey, all pilgrims
new to a land, but rooted in
mother soil, mother culture
so connected in blood and DNA
we fail to see our global family
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Holidays — by Maria Kraus
I remember life in fragments
like shreds of flying clouds.
Partial views of birds in flight,
Sudden gusts of wind through trees.
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What do our personal battles mean
Among the screams of war, earthquakes,
Hurricanes and floods,
The daily news,
reports of murders,
Accidents, fires, deaths,
Acts of generosity and courage,
Lives lived to safeguard ours.
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The G7 heads of government
laid wreaths at the monument
to the bombing of Hiroshima
and then got down to business:
planning an alliance
with their former enemy
to encircle China
with an armada of nuclear submarines.
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What is progress?
Is it faster communication?
Is it a machine that can make compost in 4 days?
A bomb that can kill a thousand times more people
Than the one dropped on Hiroshima?
Is it whatever the mind can conjure up
And sell to enough people
to justify the investment?
Or is it the silent labor of a farmer sowing seeds,
A baker kneading dough the way his father did,
Who in turn learned it from his,
Or a watchmaker repairing minute, intricate gears
In his tiny shop in the ancient
Jewish community of Samarkand?
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Where is the touching point
between the vast universe,
the grasping mind that
delves into its faraway reaches,
And the quiet strength of the nurse
Making rounds among her patients?
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Could we, in love with what was once pristine,
recreate the landscape of a world
untouched by techno-madness?
Like the dream-infused object
of adolescent love,
we ignore our real, multi-colored lives,
driven by the horror
that an ancient mad desire
has birthed in the galloping holocaust of progress.
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I moved to the city to be available to family.
In Gaza, families explode into a milliard flying parts.
How can we end the universal nakba?
How can we see with wide eyes
the depths from which we spring
into the vastness of the universe?
Is there time for anything else?
Yet our burning busy days,
Render us deaf to exploitation
of all that is alive or inert
in our earthly home.
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Painting is my connection
with depth and vastness,
A dialog I want to continue
To its end.
If children must mine for cobalt, let’s have no electric batteries.
If Gazans must be killed for Israel to exist, let’s have no Israel.
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Although the day’s events
Are more worthy of mourning ,
We celebrate unity
In the intimacy of our Holidays.
Let us rejoice
in the connection
that ever-again summons us toward peace,
towards shared understanding,
towards shoring-up the remains
of our most pristine memories.
"Icarus" — By Maria Kraus
Moving “language” in the “body” of these ideas.
These questions.
It makes me “uncomfortable”, yet provides me solace.
Today is solstice.
Without the happy.
Yet, I’m glad we’re here,
together.
☮️