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Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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I could have done without all of that.
Thanks.
Made me laugh.
She could perform the Bhangra dance with le petit Justin, the reason why we need a wall along our border with the Great White North: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8ypraEielc
That’s just sad.
Instantly went from funny to sad.
Another victim of the failed “war on drugs”. Build the wall and kill all drug dealers who specialize in coke and meth. Just line ’em up and shoot ’em.
+1 on Jack’s comment. I’d like to add heroin to the coke and meth he mentioned. Biggest manufacturer of heroin? Mexico. Biggest producer of heroin’s raw ingredient? Afghanistan. Build the wall/ border security and get out of Afghanistan, Mr. President. Stop the kabuki theater/ pro-wrestling show and get it done:
https://heroin.net/types-of-heroin/by-area-of-origin/
When my twins were wee toddlers, pushers moved into the apartment below us. As we immediately found out, law is never on the side of the law abiding. We tried every legal remedy to have them removed. No success. Finally, opportunity came knocking when the old lady across the street died and her house stood empty. I only ventured out with the babies when the thugs were asleep…they stayed up all night and slept from sunrise to sunset.
And what a glorious opportunity for revenge it was.
The next door neighbor, Mr. Crotchety Old Gossip came out to rant about last night’s noise and I told him that the FBI had moved into the empty house across the street. But please don’t say anything. I wasn’t supposed to be talking about it.
Needless to say, the problem neighbors moved out that very hour.
Excellent, Jewel; not to mention, Outstanding!
She straddles the line between utterly free spirit and feral human. For her, lunacy would be a godsend.
Same bee gee song done to North Koreans marching. I get a perverted kick from watching the Nork women soldiers march.
We had two tweaker friends die recently, boyfriend and girlfriend. He had heart problems, then a heart attack. He died over a year ago. She died this fall. She had a stroke, major brain bleed at the base of her brain. Nothing they could do. You can’t overdose on meth, you know. It seems to be hard for folks to give up
A new definition of eternity (besides two people and a baked ham) is sitting, jammed against a window seat, next to a tweaker on a 5 1/2 hour flight. Tweaker girl, all decked out in what looked like army issue long johns, no coat in January, no carryons, and complicated, bondage looking boots, alternated between banging her head on her tray table and flipping her waist length hair up and over her head, jabbing me every so often or so with her elbow while doing this. While it was tragic in an abstract way, it was also very disturbing and frightening and seemed like it w et on for eternity. The flight crew did nothing, hoping, I think, not to escalate the situation. This is the new, horrible normal.
EMTs will finally quit reviving people and just say …after the third time trying…on your way then. Somewhere down the line some star chamber is going to sentence these people to disappear.