Compassion

Compassion

We live in a blessed age

where monsters are god and god a monster

to teach us the small surrenders

where we battle

in between.

When god is Love

Merciful and Compassionate

 then we,

omnivorous insects that we are,

eat hate for bread and mate with death.

From monsters sometimes

we learn

compassion.

April 2012

Posted for   Open Link Night   at dVerse Poets Pub

The inspiration for this poem is drawn from past and current events.

Image: 12th-century icon of Archangel Gabriel from Novgorod, called "Golden-Locked Angel", currently exhibited in the State Russian Museum Sankt Petersburg,

Tempera on wood,  public domain

via wikimedia commons

Off the Shelf Archive~March

The month has flown by, and it's now April, so more than time for a change on the Off the Shelf Page. With the death of Adrienne Rich this past week, it's occurred to me how seldom I've featured female poets as a monthly selection, so this time I'm going for some short poems by Emily Dickinson. I often feel that Dickinson did better in her own style what so many contemporary writers try to do with their westernized haiku. She knew how to express depth,layers, nuances, all sorts of complexities, with a minimal amount of words that never  feels skimped.

These poems have been archived for the month of April, here on the

Off the Shelf Page

while the March selection, Ghazal of Unforeseen Love, by Federico Garcia Lorca, appears below:

~*~

Ghazel of Unforeseen Love

No one could percieve the perfume

of the dark magnolia of your womb

No one knew you made martyr

a hummingbird of love between your teeth.

A thousand persian ponies were falling asleep

in the plaza with the moonlight from your forehead,

while I held fast for four nights

around your waist, enemy of snows.

Between chalk and jasmines, your look

was a pale branch of seed.

I searched, to give you, through my breast

the letters of ivory that say always,

always,always, garden of my agony,

your body fleeing forever,

the blood of your veins in my mouth,

your mouth now without light for my death.

by Federico Garcia Lorca

from  Divan del Tamarit, 1936

Photo: Magnolia soulangiana 'Jane', by joy ann jones

© joy ann jones 2010

The Same Stars

The Same Stars

Caught crisscross before the moon
my eyes climb through the boughs to see  

the same stars that rock me in their cradle

now rock you and so will rock the spangled void

for every lover, past the time I'll need their cover

when I am stardust in no one’s eye.

The same stars look down tonight

on every face I held like saving grace

candled in the sky lantern of my palms.

Though every matchstick light I tended

is long blown out, the sweet smoke pools

a shadowed incense in moon's dark garden

for when the spell is wound up,

and three whippoorwills call to the crow

outside the windowed midnight all in a row.

Then my last kiss to you will be

the first newborn thing

the same stars dream

March 2012

Yi peng sky lantern festival, San Sai Thailand

Posted for   real toads

Sunday Photo Challenge: Laura Hegfield 

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Header Photo by Laura Hegfield

Used with permission

Footer Photo: Yi peng sky lantern festival San Sai Thailand By Takeaway (Own work) 

via Wikimedia Commons

Zombie

Zombie

Excerpts from the Journal

 July 2, 1995

...but telegrams from ghosts are unnerving...hard to somehow extract the essence [of the past] without ever wanting it back..

I shed bitter tears for ____ at the funeral Friday, went back to work, came home to crash, woke to screaming nightmares of his corpse pulling me up by the hair ...

mourning for the flame that burned so fitfully but so pure; I go in fear of the black hand that extinguished it….

After I ran away I dreamed

and dreamed of you dead

and now you are
buried in your overalls

laughing brown eyes blanks, rolled up in your head

ivory as  unnumbered dice

the way the whiskey always made them

so dead for you is just another high... 

July 5, 1995

Nearly a year on my new job. Slept too much. Crazy dreams. 

of ______ once again, this time wearing another’s body, but retaining his own insane unfocused brown eyes, ranting at me, holding me by the shirt and shaking me, starting with 

soft words, words that my new lover says to me, 

[‘It will be better, it will all be better soon’]

but always that mad look increasing as I start to know, finally screaming at me;

what, I can’t tell, 

because I too am screaming...denials, guttural cries of child's terror...is it his unforgiving ghost, coming to me in dreams, to finally show what was bleeding and real under the plastic wedding cake cover...

or guilt's last hidden gasp.

...the old dreams from when I left him, that I must fight his corpse--fattened in the otherworld, malignant and mad with unholy life...

now I dream it all again, the headstone so uneasy on the man I knew, careless kind, silly, ineffective, weak and

 [full of the ability to destroy.]

what I feel I deserved to receive / 

or what I actually / behind the masks / received…

 

it’s all too far gone from me now... 

it's always sleeping beside me now

where I'm afraid I'll have to look at it,

don't make me touch it

turning turning in a winding sheet of

strangling nights

blind afraid 

to look and see that those empty eyes 

[there in the dark]

 are staring back and I'm caught again

as of course they always are, and I always am….

Journal entries from 1995, revised and extensively messed with, March 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Poet Stu McPherson is running the show at the pub today, and his prompt is to explore the nightmare edge of our dreams. This is a bit of a departure for me, more prose than poetry, and taken from life ( or more accurately, death.) I've redacted names

July 5 1995

Images © joy ann jones

Flash And Thunder

Flash And Thunder

Flash and thunder can’t break the panes in

the hothouse I keep at heart's core    

where you’re centered in my cells

moonflower on fire

where no careless-shut

door can let in

a flash of

killing

frost.

Frost

curdles

as sure as

fire consumes

or flood waters drown

but who wouldn't plead for

quick burning over a soaked

sponge of lung or the long white death,

stiff in winter's numbing arms alone.

March 2012

Posted for   Fireblossom Friday   at real toads

where her challenge is to write on a topic, er... embodied... by some aspect(s) of the physical body.

This is a more or less a nonet (or maybe two) a syllable counting form of nine lines, beginning with nine syllables and ending with one. I've arbitrarily introduced a second stanza and reversed the form, going from one syllable to nine. 

Image: winter time, by micmol, on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License 

Harem Dance

Harem Dance

The harem girls dance

in turn, daily nightly

evanescent bubbles in the hookah

of his pleasure.

They serve their finest dishes; tender

quails trembling with ginseng, coriander buns

redolent of cinnamon, to tempt

his failing appetite.

Each day brings another exhibition

trapped satellites of a heavy sun

turning only the loveliest warm face

outward under his needle gaze

but behind hides the cold hemisphere

of darkness, pitted waste of light's

rejection. He ponders the pale moon

breasts of the new one from Tangiers.

In the tamarisk each night

whichever one performs

the blue nightjar snaps moths and sings

straight through to the dagger dawn.

March 2012

 Posted for    real toads

Challenge: Poem Sketching

Ella asked us to 'sketch' out a poem from a short list of words as a writing exercise, as promoted by poet and teacher Sandford Lyne. I used my own list of these four words below:

evanescent

satellite

coriander

needle

Image: The Harem Dance, by Giulio Rosati 

oil on canvas, Public domain via wikimedia commons

The Problem of Being the Wine

The Problem of Being the Wine

 After reading Robert Hass

A woman who liked me once recommended my vintage

to a folksinger I seemed to love.

He told me “Judy said you have the soul of a butterfly in there

and we must make love if you would like that.”

Being young is such a snare and makes gifts of this nature

impossible to either use or refuse. ( Likewise, being old.)

So I poured for him that quick drink with the flutter of wings before

he left for graduate school and his war exemption.

He wrote he lost his blue eyed music, gave his heart to a restless

housewife, wet Pensacola nights, palm trees and a blonde summer.

Blowing down the road to the dustbowl in your cyclone of winter dark eyes

and skittering aspen-leaf hair seemed the only logical response.

March 2012

 Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Robert Hass is a celebrated modern American poet, post-beat, translator of haiku, and former Poet Laureate of the US from 1995-97. Among other things, this poem is a pastiche of his somewhat laconic style.

Image: Gold, by stephee on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

In the Yellow House

In the Yellow House

In the blue room of the sun

in the yellow house, 

behind terracotta walls

a tossed night is pulled from the bed

and thrown on a pile of other nights

wrinkled, indelibly lorn.

The woman hums as her hands stroke

farewell before it goes in the basket,

remembering the voice in the deep,

how she was loved

with words and lost in silence

far from this landlocked yellow boat

on a prairie sea, ribbed by the

bleaching shipwreck of her life, where 

in the front room she hears

the men say, 

Talk

is cheap.

It takes money to buy whiskey.

Light’s first nod is still a few miles away

across the grainfed graveyard out the window

where Orion sinks in another 

lightening quicksand sky, one foot

on a scruboak branch, both hands uplifted

to the horizon plummeting hawk sure,

hanging on to the moment

before his last fingertip slips past in the fade, 

drowned till tomorrow in star foam,

floating memories, the breaker crashed

ebb of the voice in her dream

softening away away, murmured in the constant

wind rasped fretting of the wheat, sleepless

as the oblivious sea;

so she knows

no wave is ever really gone

no word ever said wasted

no whiskey bought stronger

than what musics her morning song.

March 2012

Posted for    real toads

Today is Open Link Monday at real toads, and I am using a photo from the Sunday Challenge there, which featured Kat Mortensen, late to the party, as usual.Thanks, Kat!

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image copyright Kat Mortensen

Used with permission.