Cello

Nov. 15th, 2018 03:03 pm
[personal profile] redcheekdays
When a dead tree falls in a forest
it often falls into the arms
of a living tree. The dead,
thus embraced, rasp in wind,
slowly carving a niche
in the living branch, shearing away
the rough outer flesh, revealing
the pinkish, yellowish, feverish
inner bark. For years
the dead tree rubs its fallen body
against the living, building
its dead music, making its raw mark,
wearing the tough bough down
as it moans and bends, the deep
rosined bow sound of the living
shouldering the dead.
[personal profile] redcheekdays
Shut the door. Outside, the newspapers fly themselves
to the stone and glass of this place until the light stops.
Come, my little contradictory several-chambered thudder.
Take the chair closest to the radiator. We love our small
comforts. Our lavender tea and quiet boulevard. No one
is blaming you for these. Soldiers in all wars lean into
their vices, and I know that you hate war. But war
is here. Is you. Is our brilliant city, on fire even
as we speak. Is a flag we take to the back porch
to wring out quietly, before family arrives.
So as not to talk about the blood. So as not
to discomfort those who made us. But heart, oh

heart. Discomfort is the weapon we bring to this
needful table. Without you, we are all statistic
or fist. Without you, more and more fire. Look
how the wind disturbs the curtains through
the closed window. Look how it finds a way in.
[personal profile] redcheekdays
Explain how poetry
pursues the human like the smitten moon
above the weeping, laughing earth; how we
make prayers of it.

Gesture

Nov. 15th, 2018 02:53 pm
[personal profile] redcheekdays
Did you know your hands could catch that dark hour
like a ball, throw it away into long grass
and when you looked again at your palm, there
was your life-line, shining?
Or when death came,
with its vicious, biting bark, at a babe,
your whole body was brave;
or came with its boiling burns,
your arms reached out, love's gesture.
Did you know
when cancer draped its shroud on your back,
you'd make it a flag;
or ignorance smashed its stones through glass,
light, you'd see, in shards;
paralysed, walk; traumatised, talk?
Did you know
at the edge of your ordinary, human days
the gold of legend blazed,
where you kneeled by a wounded man,
or healed a woman?
Know -
your hand is a star.
Your blood is famous in your heart.
[personal profile] redcheekdays
I have held the bright storm of you
hot in my hands. I would do it again,
however quick, however long it lasts.
[personal profile] redcheekdays
I worry that my friends
will misunderstand my silence

as a lack of love, or interest, instead
of a tent city built for my own mind
[personal profile] redcheekdays
I thought of happiness, how it is woven
Out of the silence in the empty house each day
And how it is not sudden and it is not given
But is creation itself like the growth of a tree.
No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark
Another circle is growing in the expanding ring.
No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark,
But the tree is lifted by this inward work
And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.

So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours
And strikes its roots deep in the house alone:
The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors,
White curtains softly and continually blown
As the free air moves quietly about the room;
A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed wall–
These are the dear familiar gods of home,
And here the work of faith can best be done,
The growing tree is green and musical.

For what is happiness but growth in peace,
The timeless sense of time when furniture
Has stood a life’s span in a single place,
And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir
The shining leaves of present happiness?
No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,
But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless;
Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.
[personal profile] redcheekdays
& all you can do
is lie face down on the carpet

& wait for the heart to finish buffering
[personal profile] redcheekdays
can you believe it's already May?
something big is coming – it's called
summer, it's called being up to
our knees in river water & screaming
along with the desert peach &
the sun like a lemon dipped in
sugar. how sweet is it that something
called a desert peach exists? little
oasis in rough land, little place to rest
& find soft. i'll be the sweetest heart
you ever knew, & i'm just getting started.
just praying to the apple trees to
be strong this year & give us shade &,
now, watch me lie in the sun
with my eyes closed &
imagining the kindest things.
you know the sound the river makes
when no one's around & it's happy
to just be living.
[personal profile] redcheekdays
Teach the children. We don't matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones – inkberry, lamb's-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones – rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and the silent, beautiful blossoms.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.
[personal profile] redcheekdays
At some point it becomes true that all stories
are love stories. all making, love making.
I didn't make this rule. but it binds me
all the same. I wish there were a law
against condescending against love. against
the economy of fear that says your joy
means less joy for me as if love
were pie, or money, or fossil fuel
dug or pumped from the earth, gone
when it's gone. it's just not true. the heart
with its gift for magnificent expansion
is not coal. not fruit set to spoil or the dollar
cringing in its wallet. when you say darling,
the world lights up at its edges. when mouths
find mouths and minds follow or minds find
minds and mouths, hands, hips, toes, follow –
how about you call that sacred. how about you raise
your veined right hand and swear on the blood
that branches there, yes. I take this crush
to be my lawful infatuation. I will bend toward joy
until the bending's its own pleasure. I will memorize
photographs and street maps, I will acquiesce
to the maudlin urgency of pop songs and dance,
and dance – there's a perfection only the impossible kiss
possesses. there are notes you can only hear naked
in the dark of a room to which you will never
return. anything that moves the world toward light
is a blessing. why not take it with both hands,
lift it to your lips like a broth of stars. this
is the substance that holds our little atoms together
into bodies. this sweet paste of longing
is all that binds us to the earth.
and all we know of the gods.
[personal profile] redcheekdays
I am scared
is not a good enough reason to not get out of bed
The world is falling apart
is not a good enough one either
I ask my mother if growing older means
one wound piled upon another
until we are just a collection of hurt
and she insists no
[personal profile] redcheekdays
A poem should never be a tourniquet
You have to let the blood go where it wants
[personal profile] redcheekdays
A Baba Yaga is the ultimate tester and judge, the desacralized omnipotent goddess, who defends deep-rooted Russian pagan values and wisdom and demands that young women and men demonstrate that they deserve her help. But what Baba-Yaga also defends in the nineteeth-century tales collected in this volume are qualities that the protagonists need to adapt and survive in difficult situations such as perseverence, kindness, obedience, integrity, and courage[…] In all the tales Baba Yaga is compelling and dreaded, because she forces the protagonists to test themselves and not to delude themselves that there is an easy way to reconcile conflicts.
[personal profile] redcheekdays
Laughter is not our medicine. Stories hold our cure. Laughter is just the honey that sweetens the bitter medicine.
[personal profile] redcheekdays
To be rendered powerless does not destroy your humanity. Your resilience is your humanity. The only people who lose their humanity are those who believe they have the right to render another human being powerless. They are the weak. To yield and not break, that is incredible strength.

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