Saturday, December 02, 2017

civil twilight

when things
seem absurd
and you feel

bemused
and befuddled about
what is happening —

consider compassion
as
a way

toward dawn
through a
dark night.

koan poem too often too late broken open


I’m Nobody! Who are you? (260)

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –  
To tell one's name – the livelong June –  
To an admiring Bog!
https://m.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/im-nobody-who-are-you-260

Friday, December 01, 2017

nobody loves me, everybody hates me

Cowardly congress.

Absurd executive.

I think I’ll eat some worms.

Thursday, November 30, 2017

lullaby

Where does congress go when it is going nowhere?

Where does religion go when it has nowhere to go?

We are left on our own.

There is no support or integrity.

Where do we go?

To sleep.

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

tatters

It seems the unseemly
rips open seams
of nation’s garb.

When garbled speech
fails to float and
words capsize unbuoyed.

Piece by piece
the peace we seek
falls in shreds at our feet.

Alas, emperor
cloaks himself in tatters
as tattlers tell of penury.

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

enough

Terrible
Repulsive
Untruthful
Monomaniacal
Pitiful

It is so worrying that such a person rules the country and affects the world.

Miserere nobis!

Monday, November 27, 2017

a single fabric

For What Binds Us

                BY JANE HIRSHFIELD
There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight. 
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a 
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.


(Jane Hirshfield, "For What Binds Us" from Of Gravity & Angels. Copyright © 1988 by Jane Hirshfield) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52468/for-what-binds-us

Sunday, November 26, 2017

radical kinship

Sunday morning On Being interview with Fr. Greg Boyle sj. 
Boyle is Buber-esque in his pointing to a homey sense or kinship wherein we’re all locked up together, where refusal to divide, recognition of the everyday, that we are and who we are is deep intimacy and profound respect due each and every being in this existence.

His mantra is: Now. Here. This!

At end he prestents Hafiz:

With That Moon Language

Admit something.
Everyone you see, you say to them
“Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud:
Otherwise,
Someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this,
This great pull in us
To connect.
Why not become the one
Who lives with a full moon in each eye
That is always saying,
With that sweet moon
Language,
What every other eye in this world
Is dying to
Hear.
– Hafiz

Ms. Tippett: Fr. Greg Boyle is founder and executive director of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles. His books include Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion and more recently, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship.