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Letter Box On Line (LBOL) Files #9
Section F: .................................................................. December 15, 1999
Carmel, CA
with Dawn again us
and light bearing ménage á trois
and the wind blown
the stars away the weight
off my shoulders all these
planetary and figures
emerging the livelong day
particulate i observe
myself to be full body mass
wide-eyed attending Earth
swerving released
perchance
i will
i must leave unformed
find the poem on its own
between us of insecurity
is crazy so why
do i not feel this morning
not even why do i smell
seasalt and taste aliveness see there
we are we are and all this is all
so short shortlived i find that life is very long
and i hear this as Dawn slips
away in stark converging
with this day's athanor@mbay.net (Athanor)
(Check out John's new program:
The fogscape at the treetops
There are those who'll say
But as I approach and descend
And I wink.
Iskandar Soekardi
AN ANGEL SOMEWHERE IN TIME
Once somewhere in time I know I had a special love. I long to remember
She must have been there, because what else explains my tears at sunset?
This life time has brought me much pain. I have lost so much. And there
Recently a woman has come into my life. She is full of obligation. And
Then she explained with great patience that this was just a reflection
Newell Dodd
(Notes from my journal) A WALK ON THE LABYRINTH OF CHARTRES
Not knowing why, some years ago I began to practice Zen Buddhism, one of the hardest and simplest things I've ever done. This poem is an expression of my gratitude to my teacher.
They elude, the words.
It has to do with darkness,
The darkness is not dark,
The darkness is not seeing
My teacher abides
With the attenuated stillness
In listening I am aware
Feel saturated with doubt,
"Notice," my teacher says
There is the offered path
There is a place
I take the no path.
Donald Marsh
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Carmel, CA
the luminous
Moon is
of Night
swaying so
behind this
morning's thick
unfolding unto
Dawn not yet
——(mahabindu = Great Point)
ARRIVAL
Dawn arrives
Venus tags Orion
dancing stars
are finding places
among her scarves
(Check out John's new program:
I am sending you the poem I wrote during the recent Creative Arts Retreat Weekend, I would be honored to have it on the Creative Edge web site, please consider this as a submittal. Thank you again for your hospitality and the opportunity you provide with the Creative Edge.
Building my nest, in the soft needles of pine
There once was a little girl, walking
She stooped down to pickup a bouquet
As she grew she became strong. Her
Then there was horrible emptiness. Such a
of blue and yellow light,
Walls slide wide
All sleep except me
Sharon Davies
They come elegant,
Then for a mighty instant
In them a telling,
Then gone,
A bubble of sorrow
Donald Marsh
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Here is a poem that I wrote for my little sister who died in April.
The time has come
I'll be on my way.
And here is another for a friend who just died of a brain tumor.
it was color that I thought of
Steve Brown
My youngest sister, Barbara Christie Mansfield, who was also my best friend and wisest
advisor, died without warning on Nov 5, 1996. This poem is about the "little" physically unexplainable things that happened in the next several weeks, especially relating to comments she made in what was our last... though I didn't know at the time, conversation.
Your fingers reached across,
At first I barely dared to hope
Showing me that you still are
I've written every day since I was 9 and was published at 15 (poetry). I realize, my poetry hasn't changed since then... either the process or the depth. I make my living as a writer, but in the areas of non-fiction. It has been a game for me to master each medium.
Gloria C. Christie
I got up early this morning
Charlotte Sky
Cold crunchy steps on the descending path
The Ancient Mother, the Canyon, opens Herself,
I notice how exuberant I feel, powerful,
The Divine Mother lives in my heart
Adriana Farkouh
Everything is sacred,
Sacred are the churches,
Even those that insist
It is all the boom, flood,
Donald Marsh
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I was browsing the Creative Edge web site and decided to submit something for Letter Box On Line. While this is not a poem, this is a piece I am fond of -- I wanted to capture the depth and connection that occurs writing in the group process.
COMING TOGETHER
Monday Journal Group
April 27, 1998
"We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways." Marge Piercy
"A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom." Robert Frost
Coming together from our individual agendas and lives, we meet on Monday nights around a table to share writing as a means to better understand ourselves. We and our offerings of food gather at the dinner hour in the fading light. Sharing nourishment and conversation first, we ease into the protection of common risk and reward. A single candle flame gives illumination, spiritually and literally, to our pages. A poem, a quotation, a picture, almost anything becomes a ticket to our paper journey. For long
periods there is only the scratch of pen, turning of page or a deep sigh. We are exploring here, feelings and histories, old wounds and new pleasures, winding deep into the core of who we are, uncovering the layers and healing the grief. The moment comes when we lay down our very soul in an astounding phrase and we are that much more complete. But then we go one step further. We open our hearts and listen to each other. What one risks in reading, another recognizes some part of herself previously unexpressed. The words drift above the table, waltzing from ear to ear. No one is alone, no one isolated, all connected by chords and melodies that have been flowing in our blood, our feminine bond. Ages uncounted, we travel forward and backward on
the stories we have written in the candlelight and humanlight -- speaking our reality and trading wisdom for wisdom as women have always done. At the table we are five sisters and one dancing fire.
Laura Bayless
The air here seems to rob me of immediate memory...perhaps I'm living more in the moment? Or more in the words that want to flow out and be captured like the gosamir wings of a dragon fly in a spider's net. Speaking of which, I sketched a quick poem
after overhearing some shouted words.
What is sparked inside those that have had a violent past when that flicker of life angers them again? How difficult it is to control the anger-impulse; the hand that lifts to hopefully, this time, relieve the intensity of the feelings.
I heard the angry Belgium today
The tales of his anger-raised
I saw him, the father,
I shook at the sound
Today he totters
Mine shall watch from afar,
Sharon Davies
Dumped on a country road
What now? Who now? Where? How?
Abandonment-it digs, pokes, and tears
Looking left, right, up, down along the country road
So step by step she moves along
Sometimes the way is straight,
What else is there to do?
UNTITLED
Awaken creativity, bring in all elements.
Live, live at the center,
Live, live in and with the pain
Live, live.
Adriana Farkouh
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I came across this poem the other day in my old computer and a little inner voice inspired me to send it along, since, very rapidly we're approaching another winter.
I suspect it sprung from a growing awareness that seasons and cycles exist within my own being as well as in Life and Nature. For many years I was disconnected from deeper sensitivities to these aspects and others such as ritual, stages, ages, layers, and even Spirit. But Spirit, Soul and Life have propelled me toward growth. Step by step I have been opened to new dimensions. What a blessing! I now understand that Winter can mean many things. Winter can be devastation and destruction of the old to make way for the emergence of something new. It can be any time of the year when dark and quiet want to prevail, where seeds that have been planted, perhaps long before, begin to germinate and send shoots toward the surface of Life.
Around me, inside me, is Winter, contrasting,
Days bring bright, startling Sunshine,
Nights fill the black skies with stars and moon,
Breath taking, tear-bringing Dawns and Dusks,
In winter comes deep, deep, dark huddling
Winter transforms and ends, distilling
Winter inside and out gathers up,
Adriana Farkouh
Seven, eleven, ninety nine.
My heart feels too hard.
Sandra Peters
WAKING IN A DREAM
(Notes to my friends)
Yesterday was a day of contrasts. After the joy of meeting nuns that came to our hameau, in the afternoon we took a drive in the countryside south of here ... I found a small lake in an area we hadn't explored yet, so off we went in the car ... It wasn't what I had hoped for, a semi-hidden, willow draped body of still, reflective water -- somewhere to take a kayak or canoe that reminds me of the Lafayette Reservoir (in California), a place where I can be "on" the water and drop to that dreamy state within myself that is soothed and mesmerized. What we found was a "vacation village" of sorts along a fashioned, windy water that didn't appeal to me. So we turned down the road toward a chateau we saw in the distance, pulled into a small, dirt parking area and walked up the dirt path. Near the entrance we came to a dim sign that looked familiar
somehow. When we saw the lady right behind it watering her plants, we recognized the "honey lady" from the Friday markets in Limoux. I've bought her products before and chatted a bit as she speaks English, having been here from England for 25+ years.
Well, as I said, contrasts. The nuns were filled with deep pleasure that bubbled up and over and took us into their joy whole-heartedly. But Eyvonne, although she seemed to warmup when she recognized us, she soon fell back into her dour countenance that we've noted in the market before; each word seems heavily wrought. It was more her beingness that spoke out loud. Although she's done a magnificent job, and a difficult, back-breaking one at that, with her place there in one of the four corners of the chateau (it has four square corner towers, 3 stories connected by broken down walls around an
interior grassy courtyard with a tall "keep" in the middle), there the initial interior "light" that we glimmered in the beginning was soon restrained and "dour" won out. I asked a few questions based on her "negative" comments, but no, the villager were honest, friendly, etc. and she seemed to get on with everyone. Didn't seem to be an outright "reason" for her general demeanor.
I wonder if we have a "natural landscape" within us that is true to who we are from the beginning of life. Then if we cultivate that landscape, if we're lucky enough to be surrounded by people who help us learn to garden well ourselves, our "natural landscape" flourishes and spills out of us. I'm sure it's true and like our outer surroundings, that landscape can be honored and allowed and become a natural fountain for all life; but if it is shaped, roughed up, covered over, then another kind of "landscape" grows that does not nourish life but shines a focus light on the hardships, the ugliness that can exist. And one's true, natural light cannot grow from a wee candle in a huge darkness to a essence that beams brighter than the stars.
I can't help but hold the three women side by side in my remembered experience: the two "soeurs" from the abbey, being old and wrinkled, not too pretty but radiant and beautiful with the one "honey lady", younger, hardly a wrinkle, pretty but dour and unlovely. Where did they all start? What happened along their ways? How much was "under their control"? They all three have been hard workers ... the honey lady with her bees and single-handedly wresting the land and building into order, the nuns members of a "working" order tilling the land.
As I wrestle through life with my "natural" sensitivity, I wonder how much "control" I've had, or have. We hear that we can choose our "attitude"; "walk joy and you'll be joy", and the like. But I've had too many years where I could feel myself covering over the natural, interior flows of my life with an outer slip of "cheerful", and other years (these are all bunched and warped and wafted in bits and pieces) where I've been grumpy but have chosen to "be kind" or to laugh or to simply spend a bit of time alone to "regroup" so that I could "be kind", and my grumps have melted into a
mellowness and acceptance.
So here I sit, near to tears and not knowing why, writing into the darkness
of an early awakening, at 57 still not knowing; still fumbling and always
questioning. Maybe it's just knowing that transition is upon me once again
and that I have a day and a half left here in Molieres.
Ah yes, waking to a dream ... I was in a dream where at the end Molly (my daughter), as a much younger girl, was showing me her hand with cuts and scraped places. She
was telling me that there were 4 girls at school with razor blades that cornered different girls when they were alone and cut them. She didn't seem disturbed at all; but I, of course ... well I awoke to a full moon and the frogs still in full chorus (4 am), not only worried about Molly, but about all the children ... the ones who are in danger and the ones who hurt others.
Thrust, by my dream, into the chaos that is modern civilization, perhaps simply the mileau of all human existence, for all time -- there is no safety in the mere outer shell of life.
Oh, I just heard the first birdsong so morning must be about to dawn. The full moon is still up in the sky but there must be a different quality to the brightness of the sky that awakens the birds.
Sharon Davies
Charles Bukowski, a poet and novelist, once wrote, "I notice there are a lot of poets around, but not much poetry." I have never wanted to be anything but a poet and have spent too much of my life pretending to be someone else in various disguises. I have never been blessed/cursed with ambition or organization and have always felt the last thing a poet should do is conform, especially to what other poets think a poet should be. Or, reflecting, maybe I have an ambition too damn big and scary for me to name. I have been quite serious -- no doubt too serious -- about writing in pursuit of my lone vision.
Over the years it has brought scorn, self-doubt, pity, self-pity, laughter, sympathy for my wife and children, admiration, praise, despair and depression. It has also brought moments of dancing glee and something more, something I'm not going to name, but I hope you feel it in your life too.
"The Last Poem" isn't the last poem, it is just called that. Each poem might be the last, because, after all these decades, I still don't know where poems come from or why.
So how it finally happens
And not a sitting down
Or none of that. A shrug perhaps,
And it's not about being
But the end, rock gray and cold,
Too tired for tears
Writing has been a long wonder
No breath to fog the mirror;
It ends beginning all over again.
Donald Marsh
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I fussed and fudgeted around phrases, sounds, meaning, original intent, inspiration -- saying all versions aloud to the walls beside me, the tree tops frothed by the wind, my "listener" who sits somewhere upper left in the air and frowns at every awkward sound and keeps me going... on and on and on... I would leave "final" versions open on my desk, come back to them between playing cards, house cleaning, lunch and cleanup, reading ... and this is the current "final" version.
Flies whine at the window.
Language cannot find me
in the river flowing fresh
Layers of sediment
Nature--
Roots
Twisted wood, a Joshua Tree
I can fart my way
I carry a Swiss army knife
I can have a "Senior Moment"
I squint and smile
I meet with an old friend
Old age is like every age,
I can have a "Senior Moment"
When a supermarket checker says,
I can take delicious naps,
I wake in the middle of the night
I can be kind to anyone
This afternoon
ROUND ROBIN
He
She
He
She
He sputtered,
She
Donald Marsh
Thank you for your creative offerings!
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
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