Exhuming truth from bits of books
the lie can be exposed.
Let him who has eyes see
him who has ears hear
Those hermits that write
find voice in libraries
seeking those hermits who read
those undistracted
without a TV—
without campaigns of disinformation
Books are slow enough to engage us.
Imagination is more trustworthy than images
beamed directly to the brain
washed away the chance thoughts
that we are creeping closer to fascism.
From where I sit, with those I have read,
I can’t buy it anymore.
I don’t care to imbibe what’s being served up:
Angelina, Jessica, Brad.
I saw impeachment for lies about Monica,
But not for a war based on lies.
They say no one could have expected it to go so poorly
to create a less safe world for America,
I’m not so sure.
They say no one could have anticipated
hijacked Airplanes as bombs,
But there are rooms full of plans
with things like: Operation Northwoods
Our future worth living
won’t come without discussions.
Questions posed by Chalmers Johnson,
Antonia Juhasz, David Ray Griffin.
I want to live for that future
when lies surface timely enough
to stem the tide towards empire.
When we just say no to bread and roses.
Leave cleavage and media events to adolescents
And the mainstream is
Repair all the damage caused by the Corporate Rule of America.
A time when we direct our best and brightest to
restore ecosystems, repair relationships with those our ancestors stole from
and those we continue to kill as I write these lines.
A time to dismantle dams and missiles and megalopolises.
A day we can know what happened on 9-11
and are able to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
The apparent acceleration towards destruction,
calls me away from Fast Food and Shopping.
The war—dead ghosts urge me to stop living the lie.
And for my children’s sake--Stop taking it lying down.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Childhood’s End, By David Fitton
A significant portion of the earth’s population will soon recognize, if they haven’t already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. A still relatively small but rapidly growing percentage of humanity is already experiencing within themselves the breakup of the old egoic mind pasterns and the emergence of a new dimension of consciousness ElkhartTolle, The New Earth.`
Because compulsion won’t let go until it teaches us how to see and be with what we are experiencing. Mary O’Malley The Gift of our Compulsions.
Mother used to say:
Walk, don’t run
But I was young and full of it.
Daydreams, Aspirations, energies
cursed obligations from before us.
And no one can solve it by exclusion.
Inertia has mounded nightmare mountains,
Dumps, Wastes, Floating garbage islands.
We made them
and must carry them regardless.
Their legacies – intended as dreams
more enlightened we see our nightmares
Owning them slowly carefully.
We’ll need all the might of increased computational abilities
coupled with all increasing compassion,
beyond that which built them,
carry them to our brighter children
with full understanding:
Hate and a gun only make them stronger.
Mitigation on Love’s terms, which
is long term, sometimes sacrificial.
Cracked Reactors, fissionable half life’s
reaching into a future we can’t currently comprehend.
Remind us how careful our future needs to be.
These problems are bigger that a poem
Our war on lies has only just begun.
They’re war for oil leaves us short of superfunds,
but if we can regain congress
and get it to starve the Pentagon quietly,
under the radar, without raising their ire,
funds may be sufficient.
Super, Mega, Mass need to change to
Normal, Some, and Enough.
Mother used to say pleasant dreams.
Act on this.
Pass on Escalades, Hummers.
Plant them in a Park,
with benches around them
Veneration of our past stupidities.
All the death we’ve built,
or allowed to be built on our dime
won’t go with a fight
Cap it off in landfills
Make it inert.
We’ve saved too much for too many rainy days
Force a showdown and the levies may break again..
Pay attention to dreams
sow we can grow into
Dreams of peace, Means of peace
and in some far off world, Peace.
But the intention cannot die
Because nightmare wants Far Off to be Never
Today is my opportunity,
conceding doublespeak
like homeland and enemies
means they win
and we all lose.
But our great mother yet lives
as do we
We honor her and our dreams
Ever to turn away slowly
one at a time from things
and toward this mother
and each other
This truth others have told me:
Trees, Sun, Dreamers
Because compulsion won’t let go until it teaches us how to see and be with what we are experiencing. Mary O’Malley The Gift of our Compulsions.
Mother used to say:
Walk, don’t run
But I was young and full of it.
Daydreams, Aspirations, energies
cursed obligations from before us.
And no one can solve it by exclusion.
Inertia has mounded nightmare mountains,
Dumps, Wastes, Floating garbage islands.
We made them
and must carry them regardless.
Their legacies – intended as dreams
more enlightened we see our nightmares
Owning them slowly carefully.
We’ll need all the might of increased computational abilities
coupled with all increasing compassion,
beyond that which built them,
carry them to our brighter children
with full understanding:
Hate and a gun only make them stronger.
Mitigation on Love’s terms, which
is long term, sometimes sacrificial.
Cracked Reactors, fissionable half life’s
reaching into a future we can’t currently comprehend.
Remind us how careful our future needs to be.
These problems are bigger that a poem
Our war on lies has only just begun.
They’re war for oil leaves us short of superfunds,
but if we can regain congress
and get it to starve the Pentagon quietly,
under the radar, without raising their ire,
funds may be sufficient.
Super, Mega, Mass need to change to
Normal, Some, and Enough.
Mother used to say pleasant dreams.
Act on this.
Pass on Escalades, Hummers.
Plant them in a Park,
with benches around them
Veneration of our past stupidities.
All the death we’ve built,
or allowed to be built on our dime
won’t go with a fight
Cap it off in landfills
Make it inert.
We’ve saved too much for too many rainy days
Force a showdown and the levies may break again..
Pay attention to dreams
sow we can grow into
Dreams of peace, Means of peace
and in some far off world, Peace.
But the intention cannot die
Because nightmare wants Far Off to be Never
Today is my opportunity,
conceding doublespeak
like homeland and enemies
means they win
and we all lose.
But our great mother yet lives
as do we
We honor her and our dreams
Ever to turn away slowly
one at a time from things
and toward this mother
and each other
This truth others have told me:
Trees, Sun, Dreamers
Flicker Flash, By Mauree McKaen
This just in.
Along Longfellow Creek
this morning
all is well
with the world.
A bright sun
glistens
on frosted dew.
Indian Plum
bursts impossibly forth
in white blossom and
in the distance
a lone Flicker drums
a tall spare deadwood.
Just blocks away
machines made by men
also flicker to life
as City dwellers
robotically start them up
to suck up
that first of their
daily downer doses,
which, obliterating
any sense of
dawn and dusk,
leave only
drive times mostly
to bookend
desperate days.
But here
above the laughing stream
the authentic Flicker lifts off,
a flash of brilliant orange blaze
splitting the morning blue sky,
and below him
a vibrant young mallard
and his mate
ride a middling current
down a meandering stream.
6 March 09
Seattle
Along Longfellow Creek
this morning
all is well
with the world.
A bright sun
glistens
on frosted dew.
Indian Plum
bursts impossibly forth
in white blossom and
in the distance
a lone Flicker drums
a tall spare deadwood.
Just blocks away
machines made by men
also flicker to life
as City dwellers
robotically start them up
to suck up
that first of their
daily downer doses,
which, obliterating
any sense of
dawn and dusk,
leave only
drive times mostly
to bookend
desperate days.
But here
above the laughing stream
the authentic Flicker lifts off,
a flash of brilliant orange blaze
splitting the morning blue sky,
and below him
a vibrant young mallard
and his mate
ride a middling current
down a meandering stream.
6 March 09
Seattle
I Remember Sarah, By Mauree McKaen
I Remember Sarah
The Day of the Snake
I remember talking to Sarah one day and discovering that we both remembered each other easiest among the six of us kids. In her first memory she describes it, “I am crying and crying and crying. Still nobody comes. First I saw that wild thatch of standing-up jet black hair and then an arm stretching through the bars of the crib and then my bottle rolling to me.” That must have been when we were living in Pinckney. I was perhaps two and half so she must have been one and a half.
In my first memory of her I am not nearly so heroic. In mine the sun burns hot but the shade stays cold. It is October on the Angle farm. I am on fire with fun chasing her and fat little Billy with a dead snake. It was a gigantic Blue Racer that had already been dead at least a day by the time that I wrapped it around a small tree branch I had turned into my magic spear. So it was big and stinky and plenty scary. No one recalls a family foot race that Sarah didn’t win but with every little shake of that snake stick she burst into after burn and only her shriek could keep up with her flying feet. This, of course, fired me up more. Round and round the yard we flew. The more she shrieked, more I laughed.
It seems funny now how many of our stories were in the fall. That autumn, it feels like we we’re nearly always laughing. In a blur, more felt than seen in my memory, we had arrived at the Angle farm not that long before snake day. While mom and Dad unloaded, we flew from the old Ford like kids exploding through the schoolhouse door on the last day of the year.
The Angle farm was the total opposite of the suffocating summer we had spent in Fowlerville just before. There the city pressed in on us on every side. Inside the tiny apartment the air stood still and stagnanted as everybody was pretty much forced to do everything in the same small room. Going out to play was prohibited where the only door opened practically unto the street. There is a photo of Sarah and I standing out in front that shows a barren grassless postage stamp of a place that couldn’t contain the two of us much less us and our two brothers. In the picture, we are in matching dresses that Aunt Denise and Aunt Nan bought us. I must have been three and Sarah two because the new dresses were to help welcome my mother home from the hospital with another baby brother, Bob. Looking at the photo now the thing I most remember is hating the dresses.
By comparison and in fact the farm was immense in our eyes. There was the farmhouse itself and a great old barn and outbuildings with acres of fields falling away on every side of the farm proper and fields and woods across the country dirt road as far as the eye could see. We flew first to the barn and then into the woods that lay just beyond it. Finally back again and through the back door into the house, catching our mom kissing our dad and laughing somewhere in one of the big farmhouse rooms between the front door and back. It felt so good to be there like begining all over again.
It felt best of all on snake day as round and round we raced, except that Billy, whose short two-year old legs couldn’t possibly keep up kept screaming “mommy, mommy snaaaaaake” as he ran. My mother’s words reached us before she did even before the screen door stopped slapping the frame behind her. “That’s it. I am not going to tell you kids one more time.” We screeched to a halt. Sarah scooping up a broken piece of brick even as she braked and me heaving Big Blue off my magic spear and into the deep weeds. If there was anything that got my mother going even more than us pickin’ on baby Billy it was snakes.
So there we stood, Sarah and I, at high noon in the front yard, the law bearing down on us fast; she with the small piece of ragged brick and me with the stick, face-to-face, eyes locked, “You better put that down.” “You put the rock down first.” My mother’s steps crunched ever closer. The movement was like silverfish . I released my magic spear in one smooth swift motion taking aim at her shoulder. Blood gushed out all over as the spear pierced her face. Looking up at me astonished, she blurted, “I was only droppin’ the rock” and burst into tears. My mother screamed and ran to her. I tried and tried to tell Sarah that I didn’t mean it all the way into the kitchen until my mother, pressing an ice-filled towel against Sarah’s face, told me I had done quite enough and to go away. By the time I turned toward the door blood had turned the white towel red and my mother was dragging Sarah and the phone into the other room to call my Uncle Kevin.
Through the door we could hear Sarah moaning and my mother crying as she talked to Uncle Kevin. I stayed in the yard around the side of the house watching until he came and took Sarah off to be stitched up. Then I ran to barn and cried.
I recently came upon a life history Sarah wrote for her first Psychology class. In it she said that she always knew that I never meant to hurt her on the day of the snake. By that point over 50 autumns had passed between us and she had been two more gone. Reading her words felt like hearing amazing grace.
The Day of the Snake
I remember talking to Sarah one day and discovering that we both remembered each other easiest among the six of us kids. In her first memory she describes it, “I am crying and crying and crying. Still nobody comes. First I saw that wild thatch of standing-up jet black hair and then an arm stretching through the bars of the crib and then my bottle rolling to me.” That must have been when we were living in Pinckney. I was perhaps two and half so she must have been one and a half.
In my first memory of her I am not nearly so heroic. In mine the sun burns hot but the shade stays cold. It is October on the Angle farm. I am on fire with fun chasing her and fat little Billy with a dead snake. It was a gigantic Blue Racer that had already been dead at least a day by the time that I wrapped it around a small tree branch I had turned into my magic spear. So it was big and stinky and plenty scary. No one recalls a family foot race that Sarah didn’t win but with every little shake of that snake stick she burst into after burn and only her shriek could keep up with her flying feet. This, of course, fired me up more. Round and round the yard we flew. The more she shrieked, more I laughed.
It seems funny now how many of our stories were in the fall. That autumn, it feels like we we’re nearly always laughing. In a blur, more felt than seen in my memory, we had arrived at the Angle farm not that long before snake day. While mom and Dad unloaded, we flew from the old Ford like kids exploding through the schoolhouse door on the last day of the year.
The Angle farm was the total opposite of the suffocating summer we had spent in Fowlerville just before. There the city pressed in on us on every side. Inside the tiny apartment the air stood still and stagnanted as everybody was pretty much forced to do everything in the same small room. Going out to play was prohibited where the only door opened practically unto the street. There is a photo of Sarah and I standing out in front that shows a barren grassless postage stamp of a place that couldn’t contain the two of us much less us and our two brothers. In the picture, we are in matching dresses that Aunt Denise and Aunt Nan bought us. I must have been three and Sarah two because the new dresses were to help welcome my mother home from the hospital with another baby brother, Bob. Looking at the photo now the thing I most remember is hating the dresses.
By comparison and in fact the farm was immense in our eyes. There was the farmhouse itself and a great old barn and outbuildings with acres of fields falling away on every side of the farm proper and fields and woods across the country dirt road as far as the eye could see. We flew first to the barn and then into the woods that lay just beyond it. Finally back again and through the back door into the house, catching our mom kissing our dad and laughing somewhere in one of the big farmhouse rooms between the front door and back. It felt so good to be there like begining all over again.
It felt best of all on snake day as round and round we raced, except that Billy, whose short two-year old legs couldn’t possibly keep up kept screaming “mommy, mommy snaaaaaake” as he ran. My mother’s words reached us before she did even before the screen door stopped slapping the frame behind her. “That’s it. I am not going to tell you kids one more time.” We screeched to a halt. Sarah scooping up a broken piece of brick even as she braked and me heaving Big Blue off my magic spear and into the deep weeds. If there was anything that got my mother going even more than us pickin’ on baby Billy it was snakes.
So there we stood, Sarah and I, at high noon in the front yard, the law bearing down on us fast; she with the small piece of ragged brick and me with the stick, face-to-face, eyes locked, “You better put that down.” “You put the rock down first.” My mother’s steps crunched ever closer. The movement was like silverfish . I released my magic spear in one smooth swift motion taking aim at her shoulder. Blood gushed out all over as the spear pierced her face. Looking up at me astonished, she blurted, “I was only droppin’ the rock” and burst into tears. My mother screamed and ran to her. I tried and tried to tell Sarah that I didn’t mean it all the way into the kitchen until my mother, pressing an ice-filled towel against Sarah’s face, told me I had done quite enough and to go away. By the time I turned toward the door blood had turned the white towel red and my mother was dragging Sarah and the phone into the other room to call my Uncle Kevin.
Through the door we could hear Sarah moaning and my mother crying as she talked to Uncle Kevin. I stayed in the yard around the side of the house watching until he came and took Sarah off to be stitched up. Then I ran to barn and cried.
I recently came upon a life history Sarah wrote for her first Psychology class. In it she said that she always knew that I never meant to hurt her on the day of the snake. By that point over 50 autumns had passed between us and she had been two more gone. Reading her words felt like hearing amazing grace.
Tears of Warmth, By Ruth Asare
When shadows start to fade
And the sunset’s glow is reflected on the underside of seagull wings
Thoughts of you begin to unfold over me like a veil of mist
The warmth of my tears caressing my skin – longing for the touch of your skin
The sound of your voice feathering musical notes across my eardrums
And the sunset’s glow is reflected on the underside of seagull wings
Thoughts of you begin to unfold over me like a veil of mist
The warmth of my tears caressing my skin – longing for the touch of your skin
The sound of your voice feathering musical notes across my eardrums
The gaze of your eyes encompassing me like the petals of a flower
Closing for the night
She's Not Here, By Ruth Asare
Going up the driveway
Her car is Here
A rush of excitement & happiness
At the thought of seeing her
Unlocking the door sets off the alarm
She’s not Here
Try to picture golden locks
Falling over her shoulders
The silhouette of her slender frame
The starlight casting shadows through trees
Of the window to the sky above
Sometimes even when she’s Here
She’s not Here
Her smile makes you forget the bad things in life
A flame burns within her
Drawing people like moths to a light
Mysterious at times
She is greatly loved
Her car is Here
A rush of excitement & happiness
At the thought of seeing her
Unlocking the door sets off the alarm
She’s not Here
Try to picture golden locks
Falling over her shoulders
The silhouette of her slender frame
The starlight casting shadows through trees
Of the window to the sky above
Sometimes even when she’s Here
She’s not Here
Her smile makes you forget the bad things in life
A flame burns within her
Drawing people like moths to a light
Mysterious at times
She is greatly loved
Virgin Snow, By Ruth Asare
The stage is set
A curtain of falling snow beckons
Beyond lies a magical land
Driving through the virgin snow
White powder sweeps across the road
Patterns form like swirling desert sands
Driving through the virgin snow
Snowflakes slide down the windshield
Crystalline shapes join
Creating new snowflake designs
Driving through the virgin snow
Soon everything disappears
Surrounded by a cocoon of white
Driving through the virgin snow
A curtain of falling snow beckons
Beyond lies a magical land
Driving through the virgin snow
White powder sweeps across the road
Patterns form like swirling desert sands
Driving through the virgin snow
Snowflakes slide down the windshield
Crystalline shapes join
Creating new snowflake designs
Driving through the virgin snow
Soon everything disappears
Surrounded by a cocoon of white
Driving through the virgin snow
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