A New Poem: The World of Our Making

A few weeks ago I attended Deena Metzger's Writers' Intensive.  Once again, a profound week with a wonderful group of writers.  The intensive does not focus on writing poetry, but rather on stories.  Still, one poem came in response to the poem I received at the beginning of intensive, something to contemplate and consider.  I may blog some of the personal story I wrote about later, but in any case, here is the poem.

This summer,

water use in our dry

northern California

will be restricted.

My little pomegranate tree,

only two years old,

just burst out with three deep red flowers.

Last year the tiny fruit fell off, too heavy

for spindly young branches to bear.

I don’t want the baby tree to die

from lack of water, so I will

catch shower-heating water in a bucket

and save the liquid from steaming artichokes

to dribble onto the dry soil.

 

The rains do not come, cannot come.

No rain to evoke sadness

or a flow of memories, but sadness

and the ghosts of memories arrive.

What comes from the sky is dust,

what water arrives is in our eyes.

Looking up for omens and comets,

we struggle to see, to hear something,

to wait for a message, to change.

And still, I love the earth.

The earth Is not the world.

The world of drought and fire,

floods and reckless storms

is of our making.

Our tears are salty and insufficient.

The blown dust and ash clog our eyes.

Yet despite all the horror, all the brokenness,

the redwoods and pines draw up

and display their good green life.

The earth still and always reminds us

to keep on, to love anyway,

to sit down with our ancestors’ ghosts,

to keep telling the stories.

The earth has everything, bears everything –

us, the trees, the life-giving waters,

the myriad other beings.

With all that we have done to her,

can we do any less?

A New Poem: Falling

Our front door (visible in this photo) is down an outdoor flight of stairs, as we live in the lower unit of a duplex on a hill.  

I've been worried about the grandkids on the stairs ever since we moved in.  The two who live upstairs often run up and down, but wouldn't you know it?  I was the one who fell.  It was a doozy - headfirst down some number of steps (I don't really know where the slip actually happened.)  I was really fortunate in that no bones were broken and I didn't get knocked out.  Just nicely banged up and bruised.  This was a few weeks ago, and I'm fine now, and, boy, am I careful going down now!  An experience not to be repeated.

Interestingly, afterwards I was in a Zoom meeting with about 25 other people, and it turned out that six of us had fallen recently.  It set me to wondering what was up with that, and in such dark times that we are living in.

And so, this poem came.

 

Falling.

We are all falling.

A trip

         on a tree root.

A headfirst dive

         down a staircase.

Carrying groceries.

         Or crossing the room.

 

We are all

Falling.

Birds are falling

         to the ground.

Whales are falling

         onto the shore.

Bodies are falling

         from missile strikes.

What does it mean,

         all of this falling?

Will there be time and a way

         to rise back up, or

Will we sink down, down,

         going down with the ship?

Will we sing

         as we go?

 

A card falls out of the deck,

Landing face up on the altar.

It is the card

         of Gratitude.

If we land there,

         our hearts may

Fall

         open.

 

SoulCollage® card: Gratitude

Godforsaken: A New Poem

 I just had a delightful time sharing poems with a friend, sitting on our deck.  After reading this one to her I decided maybe I could put it out a little further into the world.

Who would blame the gods 

for forsaking us now, 

given what we have done 

to what was bequeathed to us?

Yet I feel their presence, the old gods, 

the ones here at the beginning.

I sense them watching and waiting,

still filling the air with presence,

still charging the earth with fertility,

despite our efforts to poison them 

and the waters as well.

Only fire is uncorrupted, 

breaking out here and there

in the overwhelming heat 

of unnatural summers.

But its intent to cleanse 

rages out of control,

and the winds rise 

to fan the flames and

to whip storms into 

a frenzy over the seas.

Is there still time for us 

to reverse course,

to remember the gods 

of the earth and the sky,

the depths both below and above?

I want to cry out, “I won’t forsake you, 

gods of our ancestors, goddesses of my heart! 

I will honor the ancestral and the sacred.”

Maybe they will hear me, but I do not expect

them to intervene in our debacle.

It is up to us to adhere to the teachings 

that we scrabble and scratch to unearth 

below the glittering surface 

we have been taught to sanctify.

Like Rachel, I will keep my teraphim, 

my household gods, and worship 

what they stand for and embody.

What is holy is holy.

The least I can do 

is not abandon 

what I know to be true,

SoulCollage® card with my own teraphim

It Begins With a Call (Part 20): Grief Rituals

Our annual grief ritual is over.  Such challenging and important work! Having lost a dear friend four days earlier, I was primed.  It also rekindled the last grief work I did in June.

With some trepidation (given my experiences two years ago when I returned from heat and fire with a headache that became chronic), I headed back to Topanga for more work with the teacher.  From the get-go it was clear that this would be an entirely different experience.  No fires.  No 113° heat.  The first morning dawned foggy and misty.  Water dripped from the eucalyptus trees.  The first two days stayed cool and windy.  Even when it cleared up, the temperature stayed below 80°.  The group was a little smaller this time, and a tight community feeling developed quickly.

It did not take long for us to plunge into the grief and despair for the state of the planet.  One man, a known journalist and author, spoke at length about his research and subsequent inescapable awareness that the planet is already on hospice, that it is already too late.  How does one deal with that?  By grieving.  We all went into grief.  This week would basically be a week-long grief ritual.

This intensive is significantly different –at least for me – than previous ones.  The teacher has always focused on the need to change our thinking, to rid ourselves of “colonized mind.”  But this time, the work has gone to another level: what to do, how to be, if it is already too late.

Here was the question posed for us all:  What is the mandate for each of us at this time?  The teacher was adamant that we cannot be here only for ourselves and that none of us is innocent.  We must learn to think in terms of “we” rather than “I.”

As we deepened, a few things made themselves clear to me.  The headache, and bringing it back to the place of its origin, would not be the focus for me this week.  Something I said before but not I truly gotten – this headache is my connection to Spirit.  I came here two years ago asking for a more enduring connection, and it came, but it wasn’t in a way that I wanted or even recognized until now. 

I showed the teacher my card with Kali dancing on my neck and she agreed that this headache is the connection.  She said that it came to me for reasons I don’t understand, that I didn’t specifically ask for this, but it is the manifestation I didn’t see.

My preoccupation with my illness is the illness, she said.  It is colonized mind.  I’m no different from the earth.

I asked her what it means to carry fire.  It is the element I feel least comfortable with.  It scares me.  She advised me to truly get to know it.

We are all being challenged to live in indigenous ways 24/7.  They are not techniques.  We must change. 

As the one black woman in the circle said, she has no choice but to live 24/7 with her black skin in a racist culture. 

I dreamed that I am at a bay watching a group of boys challenging each other to go in the water.  They know or see that a shark is out there.  But there is a sea turtle not far out, and two boys jump into the water, apparently thinking that if they keep the turtle is between them and the shark, it will go for the turtle first.  Suddenly, the shark springs out of the water in the form of an eel or snake and in a flash, it flies over the small strip of beach and up the large cliff behind it, disappearing from sight.

The teacher asks what I get from this, from the shark.  I answer, “Wake up!”  Later, I think it is also a message about not buying your own beliefs about how and what things are.  I also realized that those boys were already trained to be willing to sacrifice the turtle to save themselves.

This poem came:

The Earth Is Dying

The earth is dying.

We sit in hospice, we few

who are willing

to bear witness.

People say –

My life is fine,

difficult at times,

but fine.

The rent gets paid.

There is food in the refrigerator.

The sun rose this morning.

But in my lifetime

half the creatures of the sea

have died.

The plankton is full of plastic.

Turtles eat it and are full

of plastic as well, and sometimes

they are trapped in the plastic islands

filling our heating oceans.

The glaciers are disappearing,

almost before our eyes.

You don’t want to hear this.

I don’t want to hear this.

But how will the children breathe

when the oxygen producers are gone?

How will they live

when there is no clean water to drink?

Oh, I will be gone by then,

dead and beyond caring.

But I have children,

and my children have children,

still wide-eyed and excited

by life and possibility.

We are called to bear the unbearable.

She is dying, and so

we are dying.

Will you be with Her?

Will you give Her

your tears?

The Tension of the Opposites

Sitting in the tension of the opposites is apparently where I find myself these days.  I’ve been reflecting on our recent trip to the Czech Republic and Austria.  So much beauty, both natural and cultural.  I fell in love with beautiful Prague and the charming Czesky Krumlov.  I admired the artwork of Alfons Mucha and Klimt.  We had the sweet companionship of friends and family.  I was thrilled to see the Artemis of Ephesus in the museum in Vienna.  And the Austrian Alps – what words can truly describe their grandeur? 

Then there was the old Jewish Quarter of Prague and Terezin.  There was beauty – the Spanish Synagogue, for instance, and the old cemetery.  And there was also the horror and sadness of the names of all the Holocaust dead covering the walls of the Pinkas synagogue.  And then there was the strangeness of Terezin itself.  The Nazis had adapted the fortified town of Terezin as a ghetto and concentration camp. They evicted the Czech residents and interred primarily Jews from Czechoslovakia, as well as Jews deported chiefly from Germany and Austria, and some from the Netherlands and Denmark. More than 150,000 Jews were sent there, including 15,000 children.  Although it was not a death camp, about 33,000 died in the ghetto.  And of the 15,000 children only 100 survived the war.

But going to Terezin… It is a charming little town, once again inhabited by Czechs.  The odd paradox of this fine little town and the horrors that happened here….it is hard to take in.  Only in what they call the small fortress do you really get a sense of the nightmare.  

We were there around the same time as Charlottesville was happening here at home.  The synchronicity was chilling.

But doesn’t this all make sense in a larger context?  We are, many of us privileged and (relatively and so far) safe, yet horrified by what is happening in our country both naturally and politically.  Shortly after we came home we got word of the sudden death of a friend.  Hurricane Harvey hit, and all the California fires.  And yet, I, for one, am in almost daily contact with the most beautiful and wonderful of granddaughters, for whom I have to have hope. 

How do we sit with it all – the beauty and the horror?