Tag Archives: Greece

Seeds

Put Down The Lotus

Took for teachers
Mounds of stolid dust;

Crying to be born,
They came in my idleness,
Hunting soul, leaving ideas.

I cracked their spines;
The brain vault opened,
The boy folded in;

Practiced power of self-control
Extinguished tears:
Passion tranquilized.

Dreamt mountains
I could feel without dreaming
From under this roof;

Learned the earth
Drunk with blood
As you with your wine,
Laughing in the sunlight:

Yes you’ve been in love,
Yes you’ve been in doubt:
Only thoughts, now.

Those burning, screaming fire,
They are burned again;
Walk, stumble, run into flame:
What are they?

Took for teachers
Mounds of stolid dust;
Lessons in feeling, they couldn’t teach me.

Drunk in the sun
With love and dreamt mountains.
Beauty,
Power,
Soul and ideas
Flowered the brain vault
With phantom peace:

Hey, put down the lotus;
Wake up.

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Seeds

Youth For Dimes (Pushing Through Centuries)

I.

I push carts for the empire.
The empire is a grain of sand;
I
push
carts
for
the
empire.

II.

Something unknown survives
The years of you and me,
Survives empires.

I push with that
Through what’s in front of me,

And not even I can touch me.

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Seeds

Your Great Big Infinitesimally Small Life

The clock hanging from the wall
Is the shape of the Sun,
The full Moon,
The Earth.

The little light that comes
Shining under the open window
Shows dust particles occupying the air;
You see them on the floor,
On the sill;
They’re behind eyes rubbed
As the room turns black;
They’re everywhere
As the hand moves,
As the sun sets.

A breeze through the opening and
Your thoughts,
Like the dust,
Scatter.

Truly,
Finally,
There has never been anything to do,
But bear it:
Everything:
All of it.

In its finest moment,
Your species,
Alive,
Knows no greater triumph than to
Flash a moment in a network of life,

Citizens of the immeasurable
Knowing nothing
Not unknowingly,
But intimately,
Feelingly,
Searchingly,
Conjecturing the unfathomable;
Burning through the life of the mind,
Grinding truth to dust:

Though everything to you,
It’s hardly anything:
Bear it.

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Seeds

This Inspiration

I.

Yes I read what Orestes said
Having climbed the Tower
Out of the family curse.
Looking beyond us
He turned to his beckoning sister Electra,
Delivered his message of inspiration:
“I have seen the dreams of the people and not dreamed them.”

II.

The thunderstorm between my ears
Inside the café on Laurel St.,
Ripping cracks,
Bolts of division—sonorous voices
Fearing only human things;
Afraid of losing what cannot be possessed—
Sight blinded inward.

A clumsy child, escaped and wild from
Mother,
Trips over his own shoe laces,
Too much excitement for composure.
Too much pleasure,
His body pulling towards me,
He pushes hard into the back of the chair in which I am sunk.
Savior palms fail and he’s flat on his face.
Lesson learned whimpering in the arms of Mother
After the fall: need love.

“Ashes, ashes . . . ”
Girls sing it happily
Skipping rope together outside
And it’s in my ears when
Sodden in meditation,
Dark in the mind,
The lightning snap of the impact
Startles me.
Dark in the mind,
I didn’t see him coming,
And in the force and shock of this moment
Out of my mouth comes the coffee
And it carries to the table in front of me,
By the window,
Some woman instantly
Shooting up from her chair,
Uprooted from her private reality
With arms like flailing tendrils working backwards in slow motion
Made laughable
By the awkwardness of the body’s response
To an anarchical
Revelation of the mind;
Arms flailing in her sprouting body’s answer to some surprise.

Her hand,
Now a crooked claw,
Scraping at and pulling down blinds in the window sill
While trying to avoid the mess unexpected,
Unveils thick rays of beaming sunshine.
Here they come,
They flood into this room and
F
A
L
L,
They flood my face.
My storm over,
I walk out the door
Loving many things, severally,
Leaving the people
Inside
For light.

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