There is something, it is said,
Holds everything together
In the Vedic religion, Ṛta (/ɹ̩t̪ɐ/; Sanskrit ऋत ṛta “order, rhythm, rule; truth; logos”) is the principle of natural order which regulates and coordinates the operation of the universe and everything within it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%B9%9Ata
So, we are held
Together, everything, it is said
She sits by bed her father occupies
His look of exhausted life by window
There’s nothing to do, hand on shoulder
Hand on hand, eyes on backyard flowers
Death is near, the day creeps slowly
No need to go anywhere, no task undone
No corrections to be made, no amends
Just daughter by father in a quiet light
Fernando Pessoa, with his heteronyms, came to our attention at our bookshop/bakery in the late ‘90s through 2000s at Saturday poetry sessions. A colorful psychologist would make Pessoa a regular at the poetry sharing. One of the many characters presenting the points of view only poetry unveils.
Autopsychography
TRANSLATED BY EDOUARD RODITI
The poet is a man who feigns
And feigns so thoroughly, at last
He manages to feign as pain
The pain he really feels,
And those who read what once he wrote
Feel clearly, in the pain they read,
Neither of the pains he felt,
Only a pain they cannot sense.
And thus, around its jolting track
There runs, to keep our reason busy,
The circling clockwork train of ours
That men agree to call a heart.
Source: Poetry (October 1955)
I sit and stare
after taking pills
wondering what
mischief throat
will make with them
it has to do with
getting old, aliments
arguing with each other
whose turn is it to grab
allegation poised at
brink of 'this is it'
and 'oh my God'
a nightly ritual noting
suspect heartbeat and breath
I don’t want to smoke a cigar
I don’t want to drink whiskey
I don’t want to abuse young boys or
young girls, rape or enslave the unwary
I don’t want to cheat and steal
I refuse to respect evil people’s crimes
If all that makes me un-American
I'm content to be a Mainer from Brooklyn.
Leave me be, i'm trying to learn how to pray
one of these days God will learn how to assay
My body is going away
nothing really wants to stay
so I sit and wait, wait and sit
for birdsong to sound and fade away
Beating the heat is like hiding from guests:
Just stay in the shade in the All, and keep quiet
A few tall Wu-t’ung trees will ward off the sun.
A winding stream will beckon the breeze.
And if, in the heat, guests appear after all,
They might just like to hide here too.
--Yuan Mei (1716-1798)
When I stopped caring I wasn’t believed
try to remember, they said, you were conceived
to earn heaven and God’s love, to flee from hell --
I wasn’t believed that I had nothing to tell
not anyone that said ‘believe me.’
It is a rare disease, this no belief
it begins with ’trust me’ and ends
with ’this will make you better’
it don’t
It won’t
stay hidden,
you’re not bidden
just this
instant I am
alive
when I am dead
I will not
say that
there will be
nothing said
or heard
I am good
with this as
I am now
They shot and murdered him
Then pulled his dead body from his car
Handcuffed it, let it stay in the street for hours
His little girl was in the back seat
Thank you, Ikkyu!
Every day, priests minutely examine the Dharma
And endlessly chant complicated sutras.
Before doing that, though,
They should learn how to read the
Love letters sent by the wind and rain,
The snow and moon.
--Ikkyu (1394-1481)
He lived his life, for a time, as a vagabond.
Ikkyū (一休宗純, Ikkyū Sōjun; February 1, 1394 – December 12, 1481) was a Japanese Zen Buddhist monk and poet who had a great impact on the infusion of Japanese art and literature with Zen attitudes and ideals.[1] He is perhaps best known for his radical approach to Zen, which included breaking Buddhist monastic preceptsand his stance against celibacy.[2][note 1]
Toward the end of his life, Ikkyū told his disciples:
After my death some of you will seclude yourselves in the forests and mountains to meditate, while others may drink saké and enjoy the company of women. Both kinds of Zen are fine, but if some become professional clerics, babbling about 'Zen as the way,' they are my enemies. I have never given an inka, and if anyone claims to have received such a thing from me, have him or her arrested![9]. --ibid
If I were to pray
It would be for kindness
To spring up somewhere
As ugly indecency shovels
dirt on our faces and walks away
A list:
ICE is murdering people in America
ICE is murdering people in America
ICE is murdering people in America
Astute criticism both soothes and crushes ambition.
Mono no aware (物の哀れ),[a] lit. 'the pathos of things', also translated as 'an empathy toward things', or 'a sensitivity to ephemera', is a Japanese idiom for the aesthetic appreciation of impermanence (無常, mujō), or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.[2]
Japanese woodblock print showcasing transience, precarious beauty, and the passage of time, thus "mirroring" mono no aware[1]
I like the Japanese translation and explanation.
It captures my attention.
Then frees it.
Breeze wavers trees across way
swaying upper branches against blue sky --
Bald Mountain, verdant elephant, doesn't move
This poem by Lisel Mueller from Doris this morning:
Pillar of Salt
More and more I resemble
the woman turned stela,
whom I imagine standing
like a solitary cactus
at the edge of the desert.
By now I too have become
a storage tower of memory
that salty substance not absorbed
or sloughed off by the body.
Like her, I was rescued
(who knows why) for survival
and looked back at the destruction
of the place I had come from,
stunned by history’s genius
for punishing the guiltless.
Surely not all of her people were wicked.
Perhaps the ones who loved her
and whom she loved
were gentle, like my people,
whom I reprieve from their deaths
each time I remember my life
among them, my grandparents,
three guardian angels.
As a child I played
with Japanese paper flowers.
In the package they were
tiny, shriveled bits of confetti,
nearly weightless,
but when they were put in a bowl of water
they sprang open, transformed
into a splurge of lotus flowers,
amazing yellow, orchid, rose.
It’s like that when I think of them,
when I give them back brilliant moments
of family happiness
in random sunlit spaces.
The show is not for them.
It is for me. l set it up
so I can change the ending,
stop short of hell,
give them a bearable old age,
a decent death. It doesn’t work;
it hasn’t worked all these years;
history has taken nothing back.
Memory is the only
afterlife I can understand,
and when it’s gone, they’re gone.
Soon I will betray them.
Think of it as the solid pillar
dissolving, all that salt
seeping back into the sea.
(--Poem by Lisel Mueller )
…
Lisel Mueller was born in Germany in 1924. ln 1935 she fled to the US with her family to escape persecution after her father spoke out against the Nazi regime. In a recurrent theme, this poem reflects her struggle to reconcile the “brilliant moments of family happiness” of her German childhood with the horror that came out of that same nation. In that, she speaks for me, also.
I enjoyed looking up “stela.”
A stele (/ˈstiːli/ STEE-lee) or stela (/ˈstiːlə/ STEE-lə)[note 1] is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected in the ancient world as a monument. The surface of the stele often has text, ornamentation, or both. These may be inscribed, carved in relief, or painted.
Stelae were created for many reasons.[1] Grave stelae were used for funerary or commemorative purposes. Stelae as slabs of stone would also be used as ancient Greekand Roman government notices or as boundary markers to mark borders or property lines. Stelae were occasionally erected as memorials to battles. For example, along with other memorials, there are more than half-a-dozen steles erected on the battlefield of Waterloo at the locations of notable actions by participants in battle.[2]
A traditional Western gravestone (headstone, tombstone, gravestone, or marker) may technically be considered the modern equivalent of ancient stelae, though the term is very rarely applied in this way. Equally, stele-like forms in non-Western cultures may be called by other terms, and the words "stele" and "stelae" are most consistently applied in archaeological contexts to objects from Europe, the ancient Near East and Egypt,[3] China, and sometimes Pre-Columbian America. (wikipedia)
Lisel Mueller also words this poem which reminds me why poetry is so often so delicious:
There Are Mornings
Even now, when the plot
calls for me to turn to stone,
the sun intervenes. Some mornings
in summer I step outside
and the sky opens
and pours itself into me
as if I were a saint
about to die. But the plot
calls for me to live,
be ordinary, say nothing
to anyone. Inside the house
the mirrors burn when I pass.
(--Lisel Mueller from Alive Together (LSU Press, 1986)
I sometimes step out of my sarcophagus solitude into dooryard green, Adirondack plastic chair facing Bald Mountain, birdsong, leafy branches, cut grass, and Ensō dog burrowed under Yew. I sit there. I look over what is there. Everything is right where it is.
Near-stone.
Stela.
A boundary marker as yet unfixed.