A Field of Stars to Light Your Way
There were the beaches of your youth
where you marked impossible feats in the cool
sand
that you tossed up in cartwheels,
piled up in castles
and burrowed under.
You built and destroyed and built again.
You shone with the dust of eons on your skin.
You collected tales of seafaring folk,
like polished stones
that you shifted
in your pockets and carried home.
Older, you watched the sky for storms.
You got a dog that barked at sea foam.
You never stayed long.
Then older still,
eccentric and wild-eyed
you climbed to the top of the cliffs,
and you cried:
“I lost everything here. Life was so hard.”
THE COAST with its cliffs jagged and worn
and rivers that spilled and mixed with the brine,
forests old before prophets were born,
all your kin, all your life, all your time,
all those who would have called you back
are gone and you’re
adrift
like a tiny raft lost in the ocean’s sway
alone beneath
a field of stars
a field of stars to light your way.

Thanks to you Charlie and John Cale and Oliver Schroer who plays in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTPQNMe9yRc&list=RDDTPQNMe9yRc&start_radio=1

I couldn't afford to renew my paid account so I think the link was removed but if you cut and paste the above you can get to the video of Oliver Schroer. He died of Leukemia.

this is written by someone who saw his last concert:

"“The first week I moved to Toronto I went alone to a random benefit concert for Oliver Schroer, a fiddler I had never heard of. He was dying of leukemia and needed money for an experimental treatment. His former students had flown in from the corners of Canada and put together an amazing impromptu show in a desperate effort to save his life. The place was packed.

Oliver was supposed to be at the hospital that night, but he snuck in toward the end of the eve, a frail sallow man in vibrant striped pjs, with a powerful frame, cheerful hands, and hulking Mongolian boots, such a striking visual contradiction. He was in the building for all of 15 minutes attended by a wild interweave of medical equipment and one very concerned-looking doctor, yet he managed to play a single song and see his friends before being rushed back. The doctor insisted that no one touch him. I remember thinking that must be hard.

This piece was played 3 feet in front of me by a man who had dedicated his whole life to music and knew it was likely he would never play another song; yet he had the fortune to play for his most desired and intimate audience. I felt so incredibly lucky to be witness to that. It was undoubtedly one of the most profoundly beautiful experiences of my life.

He died a few days later.

I bought the album, Camino and learned that the music had been composed during his 1,000 km walk along the Camino de Santiago, an ancient trail between France and Spain. With a portable recording studio, violin, and sleeping bag in his backpack he stopped in the churches to record what you hear.”

Day eight
the prompt was to write about earth as an alien

Polar Bears, Buddhas, Kittens, Sleeping Babies, Homeless People, Flowers Opening, Atomic Mushrooms, Sunsets Sun Rises, mass migrations of Birds Fish Mammals, Insects; a billion tiny wings , pictures spinning each picture the cover for a volume of data TOO MUCH DATA. A billion references full of an unfathomable number of words, each thought a note in a separate symphony... discordant at times and sweet at others, sensations in this body that he can no longer bare, this body made of Earthly awareness, this body flinging to the walls his costumed unanimity, his cosmetically altered personal loneliness, his desire for connection and inability to connect.
“I am alien. We are all alien. We are so unbearably lonely”.

Day nine
prompt was to write about "the writer's desk"

Oh WRITER'S desk,
with your
stickers of the spice Girls that she cannot scrape off,
and desktop computer she doesn't know where to take
warning her of unimaginable punishments for having an inauthentic version of Windows
AND sitting beside it the new laptop she can't talk about because she gets faint when
she thinks of her credit card debt.
The NEW version of Word seems to mock her
with its phoney concern and encouragement like
a relative on suicide watch, overly cheerful greeting
"Welcome back! Pick up where you left off?"
You are NOT a "writer's desk".
You killed the writer with your expectations
your blinking accusing cursor
that wakes her in the middle of the night
"ASSHOLE ASSHOLE ASSHOLE"
just fuck off!

Day ten
not from the prompt

I don't want to think about it,
manage mostly to forget and
besides,
nobody else knows,
I look good enough, I smile and I'm fine.
You know I always prefer clothes with pockets and
when I get nervous, well,
I hide my hands
and there it is,
My fingers slip around it
dried to a hard stone
and soon I'm dissolving in shame
enough to rehydrate a desert.
But you say
that's just me being dramatic.
You're fine too.
This was never your heart.

Day 10
The prompt was, first kiss

My First Kiss I thought
there was never anything
ever before THIS

Day 11 (For Alexander McQueen)
not sure what the prompt was but I watched the docu on netflix

Give me enough time and I'll start a revolution"
When the divine speaks through all tooo human flesh
So fragile and temporary
Without cauterizing all the wounds
inflicted on the artist's heart,
The message bleeds out
Becomes an awesome river
And we the hungry mob drin at its shores,
Frenziedparticipants in his beautiful and terrifying show

Day 12 Black Hole prompt

First,
a sensation of being sucked into mud
while simultaneously being crushed,
then, on the other side of the peer edit
you find yourself senseless
as everything tht mattered
collapses into the nonreflective
singularity of
WTF

Day 13
prompt was something about what you thought a poet was when you were young or something like that, it went on, the prompt did and I could see the person already had a poem in mind or at least an agenda so I just took some of the word in the prompt and moved them around till I got this. I think it is my best this month.

when you were young

before
you could
write
a poem

you were a poem

Prompt 14

Prompt: Old Friends

There once was the idea that
a person would spend the first twenty years on learning
the next establishing themselves in some way in the world (family, social activism or commerce)
and the last twenty in contemplation, in some cultures in a monastery, walk-about, or in a cave in a wood, like a witch or a Bodhidharma
and then drop dead at sixty.
Now few people die at sixty, and they can be any age beyond, even one hundred.
Some get easy, delighting in the world.
Poverty,
reduced pliancy of all sorts
and loss are not the same for them.
Time becomes a companion that opens doors to everywhere.
When you meet them you can see
from birth to death
they aren't afraid,
they are like a needle
that can pierce all contexts,
and they laugh
at confusion,
especially
their own.
They have room for you.
But some get stuck
like the friends who
tell anyone in earshot
how much everything sucks
and who wrecked the world for them
and how cool they were before they got old.

Trying to Remember What He Never Told Me

Peaking on peyote while I watched the sunset
he might have killed me had he known I was high
and yet
He put his hand on my shoulder
and stood with me
the orange light filling the room
filling our eyes
mine with pupils black and wide
imagining we could
reach through time
to find a father for us both.
***
He wrote the word "Hands"
neatly in white pen on black paper
beneath a photo of himself and my brother
tying knots on a porch;
my father teaching him to make a snare
a moment I envied to this moment
a moment I never had
because I was
a girl
a problem
until I ran from the house
like a madwoman or a whore
or just all the wildness that he feared.

My father's gloves
seemed small when I put them on after he died,
turned them inside out to find the truth and found nothing
and though he thought he was still that frightened child
hiding under his bed for days and days after his mother left
after his father died
after his brother hopped the rails and his sister went wild
after the town bachelor took him in
and everyone whispered when he passed by
after he made himself hard
after he learned not to cry
I was smaller when he punched me in the face.


I don't want those to be the last words in a poem about my father so

I will end with these:
I found
another photo,
an indigenous girl,
beneath neatly written in his hand
"Foot--cousin" (Blackfeet)
this
his only reference to
the mythology of a difficult life,
a story as heavy as cast-iron pots
swinging from a hand cart during a long walk.



 

Cast Iron Pots

My brother's wife was taking his cast iron pots to the donation bin.
Everyone in my family was taught that you had to have cast iron pots and 
you had to keep them forever
god forbid, some disaster ended you
and they were lost until a bunch of
archeologists could dig them up.
But even still they'd be good, 
just needing bit of scrubbing and seasoning.

No one outside our family
can understand this
need to hang on
to something so
impossibly
heavy.
or why we tell a history hidden behind a patina of alteration.

one pilgramige or another
possessions of the fallen passed down the line,
 iron pots clanging.

So we conspire.
I tell him I will go to Value Village
and buy them all back

—give them to her for Christmas—

adding another chapter in the mythology of  our family's resilience, and iron.

 

 

Midway, Canadian National Exhibition:

Stroller pushers

and sticky handed candy floss flossers.

Ring toss tossers,
Swing the hammer swingers

Show-off muscle builders,

and "Try again to win the giant panda for your pretty gal" geezers.

The spin-around ride riders and

the roller coaster fanatic-ers:

The first time and next time and "never again"ers.

The "Guess your weight" guessers and the "Don't you dare" darers,

The bump into-ers and the "Watch it!" accusers.

The tummy aching throwing-up-ers
Cry-baby mommy worriers

The "going home now" goers,

The let go of balloon losers.
AND

One big, red balloon
as it gracefully

floats away.

I did post yesterday, but I forgot to post here. I posted to "Quilting is My Addiction" my blog at Wordpress. If clicking on the link is just too exhausting (believe me, I get it, I have lost entire mornings chasing rabbits down the link rabbit hole) you can just read it below. I didn't put the links from the post in it, you have to go to the original if your are interest.

The textures
of the many distant lives I waved goodbye to
are measured and added to the quilt,
warm in this winter of my life.

This is the only poem I have written about quilting.

I am not sure where APAD started. It is not always source of great poetry, I have a hard time writing anything that I would not be too embarrassed to share, but it is a fun challenge. Live Journal has several writing groups, most notably Brigit’s Flame which has moved here to Word Press, check out the entries, join in the fun. If you don’t write poetry you can use APAD to lead you to discover the works of the many wonderful poets the English language has been blessed with (many of them still alive!).

Or you can switch it up to be “A Picture a Day” or “A Painting a Day”. The internet has become a very visual medium. A picture can be a poem. Check out this post and see if you agree.

going to sit all day in front of a blank wall

Coming to terms with
where I am
and
who I am
is hard.

Sometimes it is everything except those two things that has me
running around and doing this and that
even thinking I'm pretty hot
smart and something more
than everyone else
and definitely
more
than
this breath in
and
this breath out.

But in the end
those two things are the only things that matter, I mean
IN THE END END.

This breath in
and this breath out,
in between
where I am
and who I still am

I am
still where it's hard
YOU KNOW?. coming to terms.

</I have been with flu/cold all week and missed a few important things, like the subway at my stop is closed today and I can't get to my zen sitting on time and the other is that A Poem a Day started two days ago! So the three I posted today are not original, but this one I never published so its sort of new. Well, enough! I have to get a move on if i am EVER going to get there. "What's your hurry? I am late for doing absolutely nothing! i>

Wow, where did the month go?



Well, it is a self portrait and done a long time ago. My hair fell out and then I got to like the feeling so for years I kept shaving my head.  I got tired of explaining what was the simpliest thing about me all the time, i.e. no I am not a lesbian, no I am not having chemo, no I am no longer a formal Zen student...  so I let it grow out.  I think it looks like me.  I have a very long neck and big ears and a round face.  I weigh a lot more now so maybe my face is rounder. ;)

While I am appreciative of the many birthday wishes, I ask that all sentiments be redirected to YOUR MOTHER'S NAME who did most of the work that day 25 years ago. In doing so I hope you'll remember that life is not a right, but a privilege; one you did not earn yourself. If you are alive right now, it is because another chose to sacrifice much and risk more, with no help from you, so that you could be. You have no inherent right to live, your existence is not 'owed' to you, but given freely by choice. It is a choice that belongs to the women making those sacrifices; a choice I hope you will defend, lest every birthday become a celebration of slavery.


Thanks son. No one wants to tell a Handmaid Tale! And for that reference please check out Margaret Atwood's novel of the same name. LOL Yes choice is essential! That said, all of us, your dad, your sister, your brother and countless others are really happy we kept you! p.s. Grandma thinks you are now the best looking of all her grandchildren. So the rest of you, consider updating your wardrobe, cutting out the carbs maybe, a trim? Chop chop!

wow, my feminist son blows me away. So for Youngest Son:

Escaping Gravity

“I’m falling into the sky.”
he said
when he was three,
looking up
imagining he
could break free.

Today I am dancing; my hobbled legs do a jig while
he plays
on his accordion.

I look up and see there are no clouds.

Okay, so  didn't paint this! Marc Chagall did. Some of Chagall's work seems to tickle an unknown part of my brain so much that I have to come back again and again to it. Nothing like my "style" which is no disadvantage, believe me, but something of my memory...? or dreams?, that when I am truly lost in depression it is a sort of "sense" of this non-sense that comforts me.

I tried an homage to him with this:

called Sally, for my friend who committed suicide three years ago. Not a painting, just pencil crayon.

She had asked me to paint something from a photo she took on the west coast. I do find it interesting that many people find relevance and relief in images for what is hidden. Art is essential if often discarded.