Home | News | Programs | Facilitators | LBOL | NL | Membership

Section F: .................................................................. June 15, 2000

Here is a little piece I wrote on my recent spring trip to a remote corner of the Yosemite. It may give you a sense where and why I am going to these places.

VISIT

Sitting quietly
in the warm sun
a little blue fly
lands on my hand.

You tickle me
while probing my skin
with your tiny feet.
You rush fro and back
while grazing my skin
stopping a long time
to check my thumb nail.
I hear now the buzz of your tribe
present since early sunrise.

Your visit would go unnoticed
at home among books, TV,
with friends, the hourly news
and minutes from malls and movies.

These woods are your home.
I come as a guest,
alone and on foot
scarcely protected
and no soul for miles

Taking a deep breath
you're startled and fly off,
rejoining your tribe
waiting for my next visit,
the next inspection.
I take another breath,
shoulder my pack,
celebrating today.

On April 30, I was in Mount Carmel, Tennessee, at Oak Grove Baptist Church, the shaping institution of my journey and . So many calls for "professions of faith" at "times of decision," in the Baptist manner, inform my childhood that such would be truly beyond counting.

My father, 84, a Freemason and Knights Templar Commander, has taught the Men's Bible Study Class, largely octagenarians, for more than a decade. Whenever I am in town, I am expected to teach the class in his stead. The elders in this class were the leaders of the church in my childhood, in a small, rural, wooden church building located in Sawmill Hollow, or Holler. Now many of elders have died, and more are dying quickly now.

On this occasion, those of the Women's Bible Study Class suggested combining classes. I asked if this had ever happened before. No one remembered such an occurrence, and since the collective memory there goes back about eight decades, it seems to be a reliable fact.

The lesson, in the Southern Baptist "quarterly" sequence, was the first chapter of the Book of Judges in the Old Testament. As usual, I opened my heart for to somehow find in the text some . Rather quickly the lesson, concerning the "idolatries" of the children of Israel after the death of Joshua, emerged this way:

Whenever we are stuck, whenever we are at an edge of consciousness and fixated with a "problem," we have a tendency to experience that problem as an . The image of the problem, the neurotic complex, then is equivalent to a "graven image." [Standing humbly before them, I was acutely aware of how such "graven images" are so imbued in the mythic consciousness that prevails, in agonizing fusion with the mental and mental-rational, in that congregation.] Indeed, I suggested, based on the Hebrew scripture, that the arrival of "disturbances" [mutations] signals the possibility and necessity for ongoing growth, to undo the pull of regression and welcome the forcefields of ongoing divine processes, or, the emergent actuality of growth.

Of course, I didn't use this language, and the lesson seems to have been well enough received. A few seemed to be made uncomfortable with the idea that idols might be found within everyday habituated behaviors.

Here is a poem I wrote after return to California, having also visited my 82-year-old mother, suffering after hip surgery, plagued with dementia, in the nursing home:

PROFESSION OF FAITH

times of decision
progressions of faith

transgressions

could not have predicted
it would happen this way

not this way

the sacred thing strikes me
is not who we have been

who we are who we may be

it is what we are right now
paying attention to

what we are noticing

algorithms properties
bodies of water

a heart shattered in light beams

is whole and is at home
everywhere

we arise

in cloud forests
we walk snake paths

our cells go up in flames

and this is how loves grow
and burn away

and then remain

Well, here are some poems or word salad, sometimes I don't know which. Last Tuesday was the Jewish remembrance day of Shoah, the Holocaust. It figures in to the last poem.

SHADOWS ON THE WALL

The wash invited me to lie down in it and listen
To listen to the desert breeze sweetly caressing
The plants growing above my head on either side of the wash
The wash is really a narrow gorge seven feet deep and only a few wide

Narrowly did I notice a moving shadow on the east wall of the wash
The afternoon sun low and casting stark shadows
Remember when you made a rabbit's head in front of a light?
The shadow of a jackrabbit moved again

I glued my eyes to the spot on the creamy light brown earth
Where the sun casts the shadow of the edge of the west wall onto the east wall
In such miniature dimensions did I scope that this thing of ears and haunches
Was indeed a rabbit and moving along the west edge of the wash

It was in truth nothing more than a jackrabbit as in truth I saw
As I looked the very beast darted down and across and disappeared

THE ESCAPE

The instruments of torture lie to my left
How good it will be to know the surety of their pain
Rather than the uncertainty of seeing them
And hesitating to believe I will be miraculously rescued.

If the Cross fits, wear it

It is best to be immune to everything

WAIT HERE; I'LL CALL YOU

The lady swept the floor with love
While a noisy patron wept silently
Then I kept my peace unto myself
As I sipped rum, white clear rum

Other noises, television, talk filled the air
If I am on one side or another
What would be united?
Would there still not be one side against another?

In a little hotel cafe in Phoenix
The parade continued in full swing

THE WASHING ANGEL

I am the washing angel
Here to wash away your sins
"Wash me? Cleanse me?
As if my sins had never been?"

But what are sins, anyway,
I reasoned
And then I though better of it
For I know those things

About myself
That never bear repeating
And yet repeat them I do
Muttering like an idiot

Sorry if it displeases you
To hear me say I have sins
But when the washing angel
Soothed my weary soul
I came out white as snow

SHOAH

What a gift to be given:
Fierce burning love
For my own life
And for the great I AM of all!

The story of Jesus is my compass
As the story brings
His Spirit to life
In my broken holocaust heart

Chris Lovette
Chlovette@aol.com

SUCTION

On her back, feet in stirrups,
her doctor gowned, masked, positioned.
A tube inserted slowly,
through cervix into uterus.
Suction machine turned on,
a vacuum pulled placenta and fetus,
bits and pieces,
through a tube
into a bottle.

Clean, quick, nearly painless.

That was what she had been told.
Then, after rest and counseling,
she could go home
to resume normal duties.

Nothing said about dreams.

Home to make dinner for family:
husband and two children.
Pauses while prepping vegetables
to see her son, age four, at the table,
gazing off chanting singsong.
His smooth swooping youth ineffable.
Thinking he really does resemble her father.
Most in movement and look.

The doctor at home thinking of the day.
Eight procedures. His children are teenagers.
High school. He doesn't yet know
that his daughter is pregnant.

The mother transfixed by her son
in drenched kitchen sunset shafts.
Wonders why she again thinks
of a walk down a certain street
over twenty years ago in her home town.
Why, at moments, remember that?
What draws her memory through the years?

The doctor sits alone in his living room,
reading the New England Journal of Medicine.
His wife in bed, the children out,
he reads until the page behaves as if underwater
and his head nods.

The man in the parked van across the street
from the doctor's residence sits perfectly still in shallow breaths.
Looks at the house through a spy scope.
Scans and stops at the lighted window
and the figure of the doctor reading, his head bobbing.
The doctor's head in the crosshairs,
thin electric blue crosshairs so precise.
The man in the van is electric himself: with fear,
with purpose, with power. There to gather
information and not be caught. He will come back
again and again, the adrenaline demanding.
He will come in different vehicles,
trying to establish a pattern of behavior,
trying to find the one best shot to murder a murderer.
Awake nights thinking it is the observing.
The observing makes his heart thud.
The risk, the danger, the quarry, the observing.
He prays.

On his way to bed the doctor thinks of the number,
the number he will never say aloud,
the number he pretends he doesn't know.
Weary up the stairs, pausing at a landing;
wonders: Am I healing anyone?
Sleeps fitfully every night
beside snuggling wife.

The woman can't sleep. Her husband has been little help.
She tries to imagine the moment of conception,
fretting with her ignorance of her own body
and the mystery of life. Thinks of it as male sperm,
one of those messy orgasms
she's had to wash away in the bathroom.
Wonders of her eggs: what do they look like?
Wonders is the moment viscous
with red glistening womb-meat everywhere?
Thinks if she had her way it would be a moment of light;
a squirming salute, a blink, a warmth, a knowing.

Looks at the clock. It is nearly two thirty.
Slips out of bed and down to the kitchen
where she sits and leafs through the phone book.
A call to information tells her the doctor's number is unlisted.
The woman who gave her counseling is listed.
She dials the number, sits listening to the purring ring.
An answering machine clicks on. Takes in a breath
that is hard to find, her voice only a white whisper,
she asks the machine, "What do they do with the bottle?"

Donald Marsh
marsh@cruzio.com
(To receive one of these free original poems emailed each Monday, contact Donald Marsh.)

Top of page
LBOL Index
Creative Edge Home Page

Section E: .................................................................. May15, 2000

I made a batik of the Chartres type labyrinth in cotton with permanent professional fiber dyes and gave it to my friend to do "something" with it. Sara Schrader quilted it into this coat which she designed. She is an artist at our small art center and has made pottery, stained glass, fabric art.

Walking the labyrinth is something I love to do so I started making small batik pillows for finger walking and some larger ones for hanging. The coat has been in a show called "Symphonies of Light" at a regional center here—also it is for sale!.

Mary Ruth
fac@deskmedia.com

YOU WITH SOMETHING TO SAY, GET OVER HERE!

One by one the polyglot thickens, thinking it amuses you.
Misogynists reenact Hiroshima at Easter
Never thinking of the anomalies of the misbegotten

Moon laced rhythms of chrysanthemums and amethyst
Ring around your little finger

The forgotten echo the litany of their tragedy,
And beyond theirs lies ours as graves do on shaded hills

And the funny thing is, I can't tell you
What it's like to be me inside.

(That was this evening's work, here's a sonnet—I do owe a credit to Wendell Berry, the American poet who refurbished the form.)

SOUTH TUCSON: MORNING BLUE NOTE

"When everything is loose and tight
at the same time it's alright."

Insomnia—cold and indifferent
Life passing before me in slow motion
In the mind's eye, regurgitating years
Like chocolates in Forrest's candy box

Lowriders/gangbangers blare rap music
Driving by in one o'clock morning sounds
A Union Pacific train engineer
Blows the train horn a long short and long blast

Man—what am I doing here, up this late
When I have to report to the office
In less than six hours on so little sleep
To do or die and race for the money

I like the train whistle after two weeks
Living here; and the way the desert smiles.

Chris Lovette
Chlovette@aol.com

In June of 1995, I was lay-ordained as a Zen Buddhist. It was a big step and I was so nervous during the ceremony I mispronounced everything. Afterward, although I felt that I should expect nothing, I couldn't help hoping: some enlightenment, something transforming would happen.

Nothing did. I had the same confusions and habits I had before. Days later, I noticed something: I was walking differently. I was conscious of my foot on the earth. Actually, it was foot on cotton sock on plastic sneaker on rug on floor on concrete most of the time. But I also walked on the earth barefoot and became conscious of my ankle flexing, my heel coming down, meeting the ground, then my instep, my sole, my toes. I felt the earth, felt my toes grip it as I pushed off. I stepped, feeling that I had, as everyone does, the right to step where I did. I felt the earth as part of all, of me, everyone, everything.

(A Rakusu is the symbolic robe of Buddha, a kind of bib worn while sitting zazen.)

RAKUSU WALK

I go wherever my foot fall takes me,
and I take each foot fall easy and slow,
a grace of stride and heart in amity.

Stepping softly through my life's sad debris,
regretting actions taken long ago,
I go wherever my foot fall takes me.


Alone and baffled, confronting ennui,
dancing a singular adagio,
a grace of stride and heart in amity.

I walk, unsure, through life's optimacy:
to love, to sorrow, to inherent woe—
I go wherever my foot fall takes me.

I face a time of inadequacy—
getting old, souvenired dreams in a row,
a grace of stride and heart in amity.

Acceptance of age with thought fancy free,
while heartbeats quaver as an old banjo,
I go wherever my foot fall takes me,
a grace of stride and heart in amity.

Donald Marsh
marsh@cruzio.com
(To receive one of these free original poems emailed each Monday, contact Donald Marsh.)

Top of page
LBOL Index
Creative Edge Home Page

Section D: .................................................................. April 15, 2000

DEATH IN PAMUKKALE

My tour
through the ruins
is a blur.

Nothing left
on my arrival.

Surface of salt pools
is muddied-up, no longer
blue,
a hot spring,
stifled by lodging
for the aimless traveler.

It's my sight.
It's my breathing.

But I trust pillars
to secure the scene,
for prayers can be
heard by dirt,
just as they are with rain.

For what's fallen is
a powdery cure,
seeping through
to points of re-entry
to heal the place
where once I lived.

Pamukkale, Turkey is a site of Greco-Roman ruins.

Iskandar Soekardi
ismail@mbay.net

In Celebration of the Spirit: For more years than I could remember, my heart had been closed. Disappointed, burnt out and full of rage, I saw a barren, used-up world outstretched before me. In a leap of faith, I stopped drinking. That simple act opened the door to the real treasure that I'd buried so long ago—my spiritual nature.

WHAT IS SPIRITUALITY?

(For me,) Spirituality is the result of having developed a sense of the depth of my own invisible nature. It is a treasure that nothing or no one can ever damage, and it belongs absolutely to me. I do not have to earn it; I do not have to hold onto it, or even protect it. This gift, the first stirring of my spiritual nature, began in childhood.

The one element from my childhood that stands out in my mind the most is loneliness. Perhaps it was this sense of alienation from myself that inspired the extraordinary occurrences that I would later call spiritual gifts.

I must have been seven or eight years old when I became aware of these unusual, spontaneous occurrences. Late at night, when I was alone in my bed, I felt pleasurable, nurturing sensations. In my mind's eye, these feelings had texture and color—either a smooth brown or a textured green. These occurrences happened at random throughout my early childhood. I would not experience anything like it again for three decades, until early sobriety.

After the breakup of a relationship with a man with whom I'd been living, I applied for my own apartment. That night as I was lying in bed worrying as to whether or not I'd get the apartment, the smooth brown sensation spontaneously filled my body. My fears stepped aside, replaced by the invisible, nurturing presence. I slept peacefully that night. The next day I learned that I had been approved for the apartment.

Several years later I experienced two more spiritual occurrences that were a month apart. On both occasions I was engrossed in the process of hand quilting late at night. Without warning, I saw a flash of light, quite bright, out of the corner of my eye. I felt enveloped and filled with an indescribable sensation that I can only equate to ecstasy, for it was outside the realm of the usual five senses. On the second occasion the same unearthly sensation penetrated my being, but I felt released from my body, like I could float. Conscious and uninhibited, I dropped the sewing needle and raised my arms up toward an invisible presence and exclaimed, My God, my God, my God! I thought this must be heaven.

I didn't know what had happened to me, or to what purpose. In solitude I came to realize that the spiritual gifts were a manifestation of acceptance and love from my own spirit within. To perceive the depth of my spiritual nature is my greatest joy, for it contains the miracle of healing.

Caroline Seibert
cseibert@fix.net

Back from a vacation. Back from watching whales migrate north to the Bering sea, watching Turkey Vultures swoop so low, inspecting. Huge meadows windblasted and stubbed, great manic waves mounted and bending, breaking white to hammer cliffs in an extravagant slow motion explosion. And a tall patient silence so old. I am made anew.

WHAT I COULD NEVER NAME

Everyone has the moment. Everyone knows.
For me it was as a teenager walking along a berm
next to a roundhouse and a confusion of train rails.

A need to be someone somewhere other.
A twisting in me, a cloven satyr strut
as a want want want danced mischief
for a few eternal strides.

Then walking the berm hoping
no one had seen, not knowing
what it was I wanted wanted wanted.
Not able to say it, name it.

All my life looking, tasting a success
only to not want it. Failure the same.
I wanted wanted wanted
and was a stranger in my own life.

Closest I ever got was the want to be a hermit.
So much throbbing headfirst caring
prevented that.

Now, in long familiar shadows,
delicious naps, old friends,
soliloquies in smiles,
I've let go of so many wants,
seen them circle and roost
tender and tentative,
then take wing free again.

But I can't let go
of the want I could never name.

Donald Marsh
marsh@cruzio.com
(To receive one of these free original poems emailed each Monday, contact Donald Marsh.)

Section C: .................................................................. March 15, 2000

Here are three more haiku poems out of the theme: Dominion of light.

UNTITLED

Blue sky at night.
Darkness at noon.
Tension rising.

The seed of yin is in yang.
The seed of yang is in yin.
Balance is tension at rest.

The artist's gift,
affecting change.
Stay or become.

Franz Spickhoff
franz@sj.znet.com

UNTITLED

A quick silvered flash
no longer,
nor terrorizing mouth,
the fish floats
belly up in the pond
rudder-like fins held bone-stiff against the liquid green darkness.

Though still visible,
with movements degenerated
into the awkwardness of rigidity
he has metamorphosed into a captured thought,
transformed
from mystery into mundane.

No longer
all that might be
merely
that which is:
a dead fish floating belly up
on a cold green winter's pond.

Jenny Mamola

"The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed."—William Gibson

I find this quotation in an Asian magazine, the entire issue devoted to concepts of time. I am intrigued, attempt to pursue the maze of thought my mind has entered in reading these two sentences.

Outside songbirds distract me with their sweet high notes and the sky begins to lighten. While I have been in contemplation, time has been in motion without me, an unevenly distributed future. I remain lost in the meditative state, but everything else stirs and continues the process of evolution. I am often left behind.

Only occasionally, I experience a lightning flash, propelling me forward, a foreshadowing of eventual cognizance.

I travel between these two dimensions randomly, without dominion over either one. This is the adventure of life, this haphazard fortuitous and calamitous lack of hold on time.

In late middle-age, I observe the lingering shuffle of days that have become my mother's life in a nursing home. It make one wish for a quick and painless exit. I can just barely imagine the courage it takes to manage a civil awakening to another tedious twenty-four hours, a future unwanted. Is this a preview of my own destiny I am allowed so that I may master the grace of aging with as much valor. There are times the mirror is unkind.

I hold onto the fine linen of the moment, reach out to touch the ripening light of early morning. Everything is just beyond our full comprehension. I would not have it any other way.

THE SECRET LIFE

All night the silver blade
in the ebony sky carves
westward seeking the other side
of earth. Crickets
play their fiddle wings.
White owl rotates
his head to catch
a small rustle
under the sage.

All night the stars appear
to follow in the wake
of the moon
on a similar journey
in a larger universe.
Fog creeps upriver
along the south mountain range
veiling village lights
with an eerie glow.

All night a light breeze
weaves through thin fingers
of a pine tree,
carrying its sharp fragrance
past open windows.
A gray fox and his mate pause
to drink from a water bowl,
blessing moisture
with their tongues.

Laura Bayless
ctblaura@redshift.com

Everywhere there are signs of Spring. Trees are budding, flowers pushing up and blooming, robins going happily insane on errands.

IN EASTER AIR

Your voice tiptoes in glee to see
me striding legless in wildflowers
in easy Equinox in Easter air

Fully carbonated and chilled
to see you in lilac light
smack firm substantial rump high thigh
then shoot eyelashed impudent dares
from palmed budding hips
while newly mint green insects
hiccup and rollercoaster in mid air
and everything says÷ It's here,
the grand rockcandy time is here

Donald Marsh
marsh@cruzio.com
(To receive one of these free original poems emailed each Monday, contact Donald Marsh.)

Section B: .................................................................. February 15, 2000

Here are a couple of haiku poems:

Silicon desert,
two fellow nomads talking.
crowded coffeeshop.

Retreat at Monterey.
Postmodern souls gather and
orbit closer now.

"I can only say THERE we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time...Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time but only in time can the moment in the rose garden, the moment in the arbour where the rain beat, the moment in the draughty church at smokefall be remembered; involved with past and future. Only through time is time conquered."
—T.S Eliot

Thinking of time... and me... and you... and all of us... as artists. Time and I have just begun to become companions. In my willingness to not possess it... I am given the privelige of play with it... to bend, stretch, compress it, even mold it into fanciful designs... to let it run free like an unleashed dog in the field and call it home in hopes that it will want to be there. Time, when approached by me with my arrogance left behind, is dropped in my palm like sculpturing clay.

It's 6AM and... time for farm work, time for sipping coffee, blowing candle out and breathing in the sweetness of another day from this moment of nothing and everything... An empty canvas set before me. In all our deliberateness and whimsy, the colors and designs available to us are limitless.

Gary Ibsen
food4you@redshift.com

FRESHENED INTENTION

I return again and again to the meditative state of grace, that of the writing of poems. In the intention lies the promise, the thin gauze of hope. With this line or that haunted two syllable word, desire responds, rises from the night ashes, the phoenix of purified yearning.

It is ever my intention to live into the exquisite mystery of the future with as much ethical decency as I can conjecture from experience. Poems allow me a deeper journey into experience, a gleaning and winnowing. If I can illuminate some particular unsayble ecstasy or seal off one leaking fissure in the heart, the poem becomes an artful elixir of my own restorative powers.

Whether it is the most recent arc of events or past grief reawakened, a poem takes hold, hems the loose ends. How does one explain explosions in stillness, ripening in the midst of decay, love in the vulnerability of loss. One writes a poem to come closer, to confront what one cannot comprehend in linear thought.

In the sounds, the plaiting of music and meaning, the altered permeability of content and tone, an offering is made to the spirit, alms for the soul. In the silence that procreates, I find what has been waiting for me, what sheds another layer of pretense. And in the practice of writing poems, I am uplifted, enriched, reconciled, and reminded of all that I do not know.

ENCRYPTION

Waves rumble,
distant canons.

The sea tosses pitted
stone vertebrae up on the shore.
I cannot crack the code,
tell the stories torn
from empty cavities
in volcanic rocks.

It does not matter to the sea,
thrusting and reclaiming
her white-crested breakers
on the long strand of dark beach.

Skeletal driftwood,
scoured root stumps
and shredded scraps of kelp
emboss the sand.
Landscapes dislodge
beneath my feet.

My life's shifting reality
conducts me out of one millennium
into another.
Even the air keeps secrets.

I am an alcoholic. I stopped drinking in April of 1983. In the intervening time, I've slipped once, drinking wine five years ago. Alcohol does things to me it doesn't do to a lot of people. For a while, I didn't know which was worse: drinking or quitting drinking. Fortunately for me, I had some wonderful friends and I was stubborn. I hated everything and everybody in sobriety. It took me a long time to realize that I actually hated one person. It has taken me even longer to forgive that person and realize that, like everyone, all that I've done and thought, everything I've experienced, including the drinking, has led me to be the person I am now, at this writing. I find, to my amazement, that I am, at times, comfortable with the person I've become.

CIRCLES IN THE BOTTOM OF A GLASS

There are the glazed men fumbling with phones
late at night dialing back for their childhood.
Or sputtering some lust in choking laughter.

Then the befuddled men erupting in frustration
in some nasty fact crystal clear for the moment.
Always the long truth in the time of the hyena.

The brief admitting shrug that one could be more,
the heart trilling to tiny night sounds,
the feeling of a cetacean sob swelling,
the joint-aching wakening to the pain,
to the peepshow slides of the night before,
to the guilt and loathing of not remember.

The desperate oath never again until the evening,
then the night scribbled and erased once more.

Donald Marsh
marsh@cruzio.com
(To receive one of these free original poems emailed each Monday, contact Donald Marsh.)

Section A: .................................................................. January 15, 2000

Barbara Rose Shuler

With the emailing of this poem, #156, it is three years. Can't believe it. More to come. Tonight's poem is dedicated to Lonon Smith because he has always liked it, and Lori Palmer, who had the madness and wit to marry Lonon on New Years Eve. Blessings on both of you as well as on all readers.

SAY HELLO TO EVERYTHING

Sitting in Sesshin attuned to sounds—
to birds, breeze, silence;
to tumbling thoughts—
to a brook down below,
a particular gurgle,
a splash of water atoms
on their way downstream;
to the ocean, the great mix,
to drift and rock with waves,
to be sucked up into clouds,
sail for miles to rain down again.

To be transformed so many times—
to earth, plants, animals, air.
To have been changed for so many eons—
atoms starting as dust drifting
in the sea of eternity, whirling through time
to form first a star, then a solar system
with an earth with a brook
with a gurgle I listen to
sitting in silence with kaleidoscopic thoughts.

A year and a half later sitting Sesshin
again, hearing that selfsame gurgle—
I'd know it anywhere, on its way again.
Hello I think. Hello I think it thinks back.
Then it is gone from sensing,
down to the ocean to perhaps
be washed ashore, wet some dog's paws,
be smeared on a car seat. Dry to
join the air again, whip out a window
onto a freeway. Or instead
stay in the ocean, eventually hang suspended
in the Bering Sea next to a great walrus
dreaming of shoals of oysters.

Then again be sucked up, travel
in a huge thunderhead to become
a big warm droplet on a tree toad
in a Brazilian rain forest;
or make a smack sound dropping
on the carapace of a Green Sea turtle
digging a beach hole
to lay its egg-children
on Ascension Island;
or splatting on the dead open eye
of an Ebola victim in Zaire;
or rain down in a futile cleansing
of one of those besmeared factory towns
in the Balkans,
or drift down a snowflake in Lapland,
watched only by a liquid eyed reindeer.
Or nearly circle the globe and water
American Beauty roses in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Or, for all I know, fall next to me
in my garden while I walk my dogs.
I'll never know, so it's best
to say hello to everything.

Donald Marsh
marsh@cruzio.com
(To receive one of these free original poems emailed each Monday, contact Donald Marsh.)

PAVILION

Below the big
Coaster

Teacups for
The children

See the showcase
Full of prizes

Each booth with
Its rows of gods

Knock one over
Win a stuffed animal

One life is
Not enough

(Check out John's program: on KAZU 90.3 fm
Saturdays at midnight until two a.m. with E-mail contact.)

I invite readers to share their own creative works (poems, stories, images, comment, etc.) in Letter Box On Line (LBOL). I look for work and comments I feel support understanding and encouragement of the creative process, and hence, the process of life.

The Editor

Top of page

Home | News | Programs | Facilitators | LBOL | NL | Membership