Day: October 12, 2015

Where are their shadows,where is now their night?

  • Where is the artist who could unfold
    The world like Graham Greene,the good,the bad
    The sinful priest who saves a woman’s soul,
    The dead, the lost,the starving and the mad?

    The shivering menace that we felt but could not see.
    Osama bin Laden shot while we sipped China tea.
    No judge,no court,no jury,no tribunal.
    No face,no body,death but not a funeral.

    I see the graphs of chaos theory and the forms,
    As butterflies’ wings shake,creating wilder storms.
    I see the ellipses,circles and the squares.
    They seem to hint at something not yet there.

    In the forests of the Congo,secret agents hide,
    Where Joseph Conrad thought his hero lost his mind.
    The snakes of Eden curl around the trees.
    Who can know what strange satanic gods they see?
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    The Impressionist artists painted flowers filled with light,
    Where are their shadows,where is now their night?
    My impressions are of webs with too much geometry.
    A world of email,text and failed economies.
    Where are the silver moon,dark sky and wind-lashed trees?
    Where is the world the magician’s eyes have seized?

    I hear the government want to read my mail,
    My blogs,my texts, my chats,all my details.
    Will it help or hinder if I write in blanker verse?
    Or if I make my poems and stories shorter and more terse

Lullabies from American life in poetry

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Patrick Phillips lives in Brooklyn. Here’s a poem fromElegy for a Broken Machine published by Alfred A. Knopf.

I chose this because I sang lullabies to my husband while he was dying.They were what my dad had sung to me when I was little,before he died prematurely.

The Singing

I can hear her through
the thin wall, singing,
up before the sun:
two notes, a kind
of hushed half-breathing,
each time the baby
makes that little moan—
can hear her trying
not to sing, then singing
anyway, a thing so old
it might as well
be Hittite or Minoan,
and so soft no one
would ever guess
that I myself once
sang that very song:
back when my son
and then his brother
used to cry all night
or half the morning,
though nothing in all
the world was wrong.
And now how strange:
to be the man from next door,
listening, as the baby cries
then quiets, cries and quiets
each time she sings
their secret song,
that would sound the same ten
thousand years ago,
and has no
meaning but to calm.

Give them the boot

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Cognitive distortions

Affect  our emotions

We can’t see very well

So we make life hell.

Why should we suffer

And not some other b*gger.

If we are going to lose

We’ll destroy whatever we choose.

Even if it’s our own

Destructive seeds are sown