its silly
to wonder
if today
is last
sun rises
over mountain
cars pass
to town
in youth
i'd bicycle
to church
for mass
now I
turn face
to wall
close eyes
the ritual
turns itself
to mind
remembering
that once
anything
appears it
beckons God --
take and
receive
this
truth
become
gloriously
unnoticeably
transparent
Is it possible?
Are we by nature the Way? The Way without cultivation?
The Way does not need cultivation;
Just don’t pollute it.
What is pollution?
As long as you have a fluctuating mind,
Creating artificialities and pursuing inclinations,
All is pollution.
If you want to understand the Way directly,
The normal mind is the Way.
What is normal mind?
It has no artificial contrivance,
No right or wrong, no grasping or rejection,
No ordinariness and no sanctity.
-- Ancestor Ma (709–788)
Mazu Daoyi (709–788) (Chinese: 馬祖道一; pinyin: Mǎzǔ Dàoyī; Wade–Giles: Ma-tsu Tao-yi, Japanese: Baso Dōitsu) was an influential abbot of Chan/Zen Buddhism during the Tang dynasty. He is known as the founder of the Hongzhou school of Chan. The earliest recorded use of the term "Chan school" is from his Extensive Records.[1]
He is most famously known for his two teaching statements: "This Mind is Buddha" (ji xin shi fo 即心是佛) and "Ordinary Mind is the Way."[2]
It is hard to conceive.
It is hard to believe.
One foot in front of another.
One step then one step then one step.
High above
Airplane passes
No one in there
Knows I am here
So it is
With the gods
We’re too small
To mattter
But the One God
Who knows no other
Feels Itself
In each of us
These days it’s hard to know where to look.
When I see
The purity of
The lotus flower,
Then my heart
No longer is stained.
—Mokuan (1611-1684).
These days there’s so much I forget to do.
Many acquaintances
Are in for murder
We are alike
We sit together
I must have
Murdered long ago
It’s what we did
It’s what we do
I prefer to think
of Siddhartha walking
town to town
I prefer to think
of Jesus walking
town to town
talking about weather
children with mothers
stones untripping feet
two men five hundred
years apart -- good men
with good eyes -- looking
at what is there
a benevolence passing by
everyone better for it
Buddha, Christ --
these titles had feet
look under yours
in and out of planet fitness
in tank tops and sweats
next to Spectrum next to
Maine Health quick care
as dog and I walk behind
building waiting on quick stopee
I read Robert Lowell back in car
this line: “O that morning might
come without the day--“ (from
Ulysses and Circe) and it sounds
right, surmising I’m the only one
reading Lowell in this parking lot.
Test is inconclusive, I’m told as
we drive to ABC bakery for coffee,
cinnamon cruller and bathroom --
the harbor is busy, sail and power
boats coming to dock, marine patrol,
small craft enter and leave --
It is morning that feels holy, day
devolves into purpose and errand
like having to write some other lines
after a particularly good one, knowing
no duplicate will distract those first
slanting beams of emergence from sleep;
Lowell on Marlborough Street book-worming,
in West Street Jail lower Manhattan, then, later,
mid-town, in back seat of taxi, his writing ends
One of the men
Wanted to heal me
This morning
Thank you, I said,
No need. I’ve lived
A long life, long enough.
He was resigned but not
Happy. He’s been in prison
Thirty years. We like him
But if he healed me
I’d have to keep going on
Trying to stand on one foot
If I ever had to take a sobriety
Test. I practiced in the lobby
And wobbled. When another
Man came in to talk about
Mother Mary and seeing God
It seemed natural. I’d been
Listening to Ramakrishna talk
About the Divine Mother earlier
And his seeing God so it didn’t
Seem too far-fetched. It is prison,
After all, a place of anomaly and
stretched imagination to be heard.
So we read two poems about
Grandmothers, dreams, grinding pits
& berries, remembering motion of love
Grandmother
by Grace Cavalieri
for Graziela Zoda
What is the purpose of visits to me twice since you’ve
died?
Downstairs near a woodstove I hear you
in motion, always working,
a long silken dress—
tight sleeves at your wrist, soft above the elbow
wide top at your shoulder for free movement.
When we were young you didn’t visit—
you never baked a cake that I remember
or babysat or held me in your lap.
you were in the men’s part of town running a man’s
business
calling the world to order,
seven children behind you
raised singlehandedly in your large house. You were
moving, always moving.
When I kept losing things like my parents,
my children, money
my time and health
why did you appear in my room with gifts painted
red, yellow, blue,
brilliant colored toys. What
essential fact did you want me to know,
that the body is the essence of spirit and so
must be in motion?
Now that I’ve lost my foothold, my direction, my way,
what is your message, strong spirit,
strong Grandmother,
what is the meaning of your dream-present,
a bright clock shaped like a train—
simply that it moves?
— Poem by Grace Cavalieri.(1932 -). Grace Cavalieri is an American poet, playwright, and radio host of the Library of Congress program The Poet and the Poem. In 2019, she was appointed the tenth Poet Laureate of Maryland.
... ... ...
Tawkwaymenahnah
I walk around the small tribal
welfare cabin Kookum
had lived in, searching
for her grinding stones.
On hot August days
we would sit for hours grinding
chokecherries, pits and all.
She would hum or sing
softly in Cree, put the mash
into small patties on cookie sheets,
cover them with screens
to keep the birds out,
set them on the cabin’s low roof
to dry in the hot North Dakota sun.
In the dead of winter, she would soak
the dried patties overnight,
then fry them in bacon grease,
add flour and sugar,
the small shack filling with a tangy
sweet scent, and summer
flooded my every pore.
I take my grandkids berry picking,
they complain of heat, mosquitoes, ticks,
twigs catching their braids.
I wear my apron, make a pouch
to pick the low hanging berries
with one hand and toss them in
like Kookum did.
Kneeling before the flat rock,
braids tied back,
smaller rock clasped in hand,
I pound the fresh berries
pits and all.
Grandkids want to try,
and soon the rock is singing
my grandmother’s songs.
Copyright © 2021 by Denise Lajimodiere. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 24, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Poet Laureate of North Dakota, 2023–2025
Denise Lajimodiere is an Ojibwe poet and the author of Stringing Rosaries (North Dakota State University Press, 2019), the recipient of a Gold Medal from the Midwest Book Awards, as well as a Silver and a Bronze Medal from the Independent Book Publishers Association.
Lajimodiere lives on Turtle Mountain Reservation, in North Dakota. In 2023, she was appointed poet laureate of North Dakota.
It is beyond curious that no one, no one, is capable of reining in the current president of the United States from his grift and graft, criminal actions, deceitful attacks against anybody and everybody who disagrees with him, war-mongering, ICE-murders, unlawful destruction of the White House, and general usurpation of the legislative and judicial branches of government.
Unless...
Unless it is meant to happen.
Unless the destruction of the United States government has been the agenda of a cadre of Republican operatives who’ve smothered any dissenters and made lemmings of Republican House Members and Senators, and Supreme Court Justices.
The president owns the Justice Department.
He owns media coverage of his every absurd proclamation and lie.
It is damned brilliant.
(I feel so silly.)
My hat is off to him.
Maybe he is the apocalyptic pale rider unmounting and destroying known civilization.
Until I hear otherwise, I will burn sulphur and creosote in his honor and wait for the end to befall.
There’s a new sign at every entry port to the US:
"Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate”(Dante). Abandon hope all ye who enter here!
I disappeared this summer
the gears inside my head froze
i'd sit, stare out, cough, sip tea
nothing wanted to go on
cars passed on road
dog slept under yew bush
mariner went sailing -- I sat
nothing going on, empty
the way cat sleeps on couch
its not so bad, disappearing
mind goes off on its own
not one dream is true nor real
I lived until 82
then I disappeared
where I am now
I do not know
everything looks the same
but no one answers mail
I say something, no response
I think of a Franciscan friend
shot dead today 29 years ago
in Colebrook NH, an editor
he tried to wrestle rifle from
killer’s hands, failed, was shot
Dennis Joos wrote odd animal
stories in Callicoon in winter
As I said, at 82 I am in that
parking lot where he and the woman
he tried to save lay dead in august
lingering about, after the fact
but I don’t know -- it all seems quiet
where two troopers, the woman
and Dennis lay still and unresponsive--
once we walked around the pond
saying beads on crown before studying
the way they spoke in Ancient Greece
scanning lines of Aeneid and Odyssey
pattern drills of Mutter, wir haben post
lowing cows up on the hill
callouses on knees, water on foreheads
But that was long ago. Now the dead
go about their day with Thorton Wilder
detachment and curiosity at what
the living are doing, where no guns
or maddened men try to prove some point
and don’t -- where everything waits
and rests in peace, still wondering,
a still gazing cat on red futon cover
if I were a zen monk
I would do the dishes in the sink
place them on wood dryer
walk away thinking -- there
that’s done -- and wait for door
to open, she thinking, ah, they’re done
Yellowstone sent me to this song:
Turtles all the way Down
I've seen Jesus play with flames in a lake of fire that I was standing in
Met the devil in Seattle and spent 9 months inside the lion's den
Met Buddha yet another time and he showed me a glowing light within
But I swear that God is there every time I glare into the eyes of my best friend
Says my son it's all been done and someday your gonna wake up old and gray
So go and try to have some fun showing warmth to everyone
You meet and greet and cheat along the way
There's a gateway in our mind that leads somewhere out there far beyond this plane
Where reptile aliens made of light cut you open and pull out all your pain
Tell me how you make illegal something that we all make in our brain
Some say you might go crazy but then again it might make you go sane
Every time I take a look inside that old and fabled book
I'm blinded and reminded of the pain caused by some old man in the sky
Marijuana, LSD, Psilocybin, and DMT
They all changed the way I see
But love's the only thing that ever saved my life
So don't waste your mind on nursery rhymes
Or fairy tales of blood and wine
It's turtles all the way down the line
So to each their own til' we go home
To other realms our souls must roam
To and through the myth that we all call space and time
I’m in no rush
morning incense lighted
dog’s food soaking
captain off to harbor
I guess I’m retired
only one more paper to read
from course fourteen years ago
East Asian philosophy
there’s no ceremony when
you fade off into oblivion
just a vacant space where once
something forgettable went by
He is a frightening man.
“Our enemies are gobsmacked by what’s happening,” [Miles] Taylor predicts. “Under Donald Trump, we’ve walked out onto thin ice and handed our foes a sledgehammer. They must be fist-pumping in foreign briefing rooms.”
With all this in mind, Taylor arrives at a grim conclusion, writing, “Strategically, I believe we are in the most perilous hour of the modern era, and it is peril of our own president’s making. Donald Trump’s real National Security Strategy has been to get revenge against countries that criticize him, to advance his own self interests, and to build bridges to dictators with whom he can work once he leaves office. The great dealmaker has sold us out to the most dangerous nations on earth.” -- --Whistleblower reveals how Trump 'sold out' to US adversaries, (AlterNet)
America is a frightening country.
In a library in a prison we talked
A conversation --
At end, I am educated by his faith
I am not it
but it moves through me
I am doing Sunday evening practice.
What are you doing?
I am listening to Camus and looking out window.
What do you hear?
Absurdity.
And what do you see?
What is there and what is not there.
Are you alone?
Camus is saying that the absurd is sin without God.
Do you agree?
No. I say that God is absurdity without anything other.
Is God, then, no other?
If God is no other it’s why we do not believe in God.
Reading scholarly articles from 2003 Buddhist Studies Review I am taken by how I prefer the ordinary, everyday, quotidian factuality of mere occurrence rather than the fantastical, mythologically embellished supra-extraordinary telling from olden renderings of stories about celestial creatures, beings of incomprehensible deeds, and narratives so out there as to freeze comprehension far short of the ability to say ‘yes, I see!’
The melancholy of worldly things
Can’t match the hills and mountains,
Where green pines hide the sun
And jasper streams flow long.
Mountain clouds are my tent,
The night moon is my fishing hook;
I sleep beneath wisteria,
My pillow a block of stone.
I don’t look up to the Son of Heaven;
Why should I envy lords and kings?
Life and death with no worries;
What sadness could there be?
--Wang Fanzhi (7th c)
Wang Fanzhi (Chinese: 王梵志; pinyin: Wáng Fànzhì; Wade–Giles: Wang Fan-chih, fl. 7th century) or Brahmacarin Wang[1] was a Chinese Buddhist poet born in Hebi, Henan during the Tang dynasty. He is the putative author of two collections of early Tang vernacular poetry. The language can be dated to the 8th century. Very few of the poems were known until the Dunhuang manuscripts were discovered in the early 20th century. --wikipedia
Give me a dog slowly wagging its brown tail walking into room ready to go outside. Or the crows yapping before 6AM out over the barn. Or the cranky cats trying to scratch each other's noses for the crime of walking past the other too slowly.
There is no peignoir here to be complacent. Only the early drivers and bicyclists navigating the road between mountains settled in breezeless stillness.
The gods, (who said it?), who have disappeared behind the clouds will reappear from the center of the earth.
Those of us who do not walk up the stairs of a public church, temple, or zendo have only the distant barking of a dog, the circling of carrion, and the light exhalation of leaf-passing breeze to speak to us of the holy.
There is a sense of nearing. We are no longer far from things. There are whispers. Those who covet rituals practice with sincerity the rituals they choose. Some of us sit in dooryard facing, front and back, holy mountains. God, or the gods, if such are to be named, grow berries on drooping branches over rusted dinghy trailer by property fence.
There's a price to be paid for going deeper into the commotion of the world. There's an equal consideration to be made when sinking into the facticity of the holy.
Schwer verlässt
was nahe dem Ursprung wohnet, den Ort.
Reluctantly
that which dwells near its origin departs.
(--"The Journey," Freidrich Hölderlin, verses 18-19)
There is a language of words as well as a language of silence. Which we cultivate has implications we've yet to consider.
"Man speaks only as he responds to language.Language speaks.Its speaking speaks for us in what has been spoken:"(--Martin Heidegger, in Poetry, Language, Thought)
Sunday morning is a good time to contemplate each of the languages around which we are surrounded.
Here is what I think:
Hör gut zu. Werde zu dem Klang, der deine Seele – dein Wesen – nährt.(Listen closely. Become the sound that nourishes your soul—your being.)
