Inevitable

Inevitable

It's always been coming,

this over-heat in the system,

burning sea waiting, cracked starving plain

naked mountains racked with slabs of falling Thule,

since we made our first rock a mortar

to pound our brother's skull.

 .

It's a question of numbers,

advice beyond the conquests carefully kept forgotten.

 Oil must be drilled to put in the machine

for each sovereign's puppet-show, each flicker of a golden age

subsumed within deep night: our most lively fear

that someone might have more; 

and our love, the ink

with which we write these prison sagas, 

 the color of spilled blood.

~July 2015 

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Challenge: Get Listed with grapeling

Michael (grapeling;it could be that) gives us a word list inspired by the great cynical Beatles song, Taxman, but I've wandered a bit. This may be more Eleanor Rigby with Maxwell's Silver Hammer.

Image, top: via internet search, author and title unknown
no copyright infringement intended
Image, bottom: Olduvai Chopper, dated at 1.8 million years
British museum, photo by Archeomoonwalker  via wikimedia commons

Bound For Glory

Bound For Glory

Fire showed him young there are some servants
you can't trust, like the machine
of mind, a servant wanting only
to be master, to take more
than it could ever give; even giving life
each day, and all the things of life,
its dear ambitions always yearn
towards your disaster.

It took his home and sister
as a child, when mother's hands
left off tucking in and washing clothes
and turned to burning rafters
when mother's mind
turned to burning coal
in fire her father
drowned  but
couldn't quench.

Later he ruled the road
by having nothing, sleeping cold
on the floor, no trust for the soft
trap of a stranger's bed.
He came to live on Mermaid Avenue,
played, wrote, sang, laughed; he held his children.
But fire and madness chased him
just the same, from town to town,
woman to woman, bed to bed, and found him
and found him.

At last they took his daughter, his songs, his arm,
burned to bare bone at the drunken campfire.
He never played guitar again, the machine
would never kill another fascist, though
behind him he dropped
a thousand flowering bombs;
still, in the end
stiff and locked in his head
in the hard white hospital bed,
I wonder what else he could have done
but sing and run.

~July 2015

"Some will rob you with a six gun
and some with a fountain pen...'

Process notes: Woke up thinking about Woody Guthrie today. He was a hero of mine, the original Dust Bowl refugee and troubadour, and the reason I came to Oklahoma. He was born in Okemah July 14th, 1912, named for Woodrow Wilson, who at the time was a candidate for president. His father was a small-time business man and would-be politician, a possible member of the KKK. His mother, who bequeathed him Huntington's disease, was confined in an insane asylum when he was 14, after burning down their homes repeatedly; in one such fire, his sister died. His grandfather died in a drowning incident also a result of the pattern of the disease. Woody dropped out of high school and took to traveling and playing the guitar, learning every Scotch and Irish and traditional folk ballad extant at the time, and writing many of his own. 

He was a lefty to the bone, and worked tirelessly and with great humor and grace in the cause of justice and fairness for all. He wrote hundreds of songs which have become part of our common sense of who we are as a people, (most famously This Land is Your Land) and which influenced a generation or two of musicians. He married three times, loved children and had 8, including Arlo Guthrie and his siblings, who escaped the disease (children from his second marriage to Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia, a dance instructor at the Martha Graham School in New York.) There also were several from his first and last  marriage who died in various accidents at a relatively early age, possibly due to the effects of of Huntington's, and one, a young daughter with Marjorie, who died at 4, also in a fire. 

His best and most productive years were spent on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, with Marjorie (who, though divorced,later came back when his third wife left him, and tended him till he died) and their four surviving children.  In the early fifties, the disease was eating him up, and his arm was burned so severely by gasoline used to start a campfire that he never played the guitar again. He was hospitalized in 1956 and spent the remainder of his life institutionalized, until he died in 1967.

Woody's autobiography, published in 1943, was titled Bound For Glory. The legend that he never slept in a bed while bumming around as it would 'make him soft' is verbal and may be apocryphal.

via google image search

Images: The Guthrie house in Okemah, Oklahoma, where Woody was born
Public domain via wikimedia commons

Concerning Grace

Concerning Grace

(Two Sonnets, with an Optional Epilogue)

I.

So here's the one whose time has almost gone
who plays in ashes wishing they were fire

who plays with leaving, wishing to linger on
who never knows a quickening desire  
except to rue that sunset follows dawn,

(sleepless, the dark brings out a red hot wire)

where all night's horses trample Hyperion

where every hope is gutted for a lyre.

Grace would be a welcome thing to save

as a thousand mouths split open at their seams,

all bored but quite unable to stop the screech.

Grace here would be a welcome thing to have,

dividing dark from light in separate dreams---

but grace is grey and dancing out of reach.

II.

All things have a radiance at the start
when life is burning like a star that falls
when passion is a door that swings ajar
to a room that never was a room at all.

But I am a thing whose time is almost done

a seed that shattered back on the recoil

that spent its force in cracking mountain stone 

put down its root in dead indifferent soil

thinking it could color and unfold

like Eos blooms her brother's fiery ball

from horizon to horizon, red to gold,

its petals scented jasmine as they'd fall.

Life yields a withered stalk, but gives me grace

to die and leave some richness in my place.

~July 2015

Process note: In Greek myth, Hyperion is the Titan of light, father of Helios, the sun, Selene, the moon, and Eos, the dawn.

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Weekend Challenge: Goodness Gracious

Karin Gustafson (ManicdDaily) asks us to say grace, or at least to speak of it, think of it, and perhaps even write a poem about it. I have chosen to do a couple of sonnets, as grace seems a topic suitable to such. (The first is Sicilian, the second, Shakespearean, hopefully.) 

And for STRICTLY OPTIONAL reading for those who prefer free verse, or who are gluttons for punishment, to complete the theme of 'Three Graces,' I include as an Epilogue my egregiously long, semi-free verse, fragmented pre-poem these sonnets came from (*definitely* a draft!) below: 

Epilogue: Broken Notes on Grace

A thing whose time is almost gone

must look for grace to stop its lingering on;

each moment spent within that lingering

groping for the finick'd forgotten fingering

mocks the spark it once knew how to burn

in ashes of what's gone and all in vain,

for that will never give its light again.

       

~*~

Grace eludes in this clamoring dream

where a thousand mouths split open their seams 

bored but unable to stop their screech

as it dances by, out of their reach.

~*~

All things have a beginning

when they are radiant

when for a moment

they are potent

when grace falls open

like a well thumbed book

to the favorite mark

when grace is a door

without a handle

without a hook

that opens to

no room at all.

But I am a thing

whose time is done,

spent seed that once blew

too dry and far, that

spent all its force

to crack the stone

put down its root in poisoned soil

thinking still it might somehow unfold

instead grew spindly, twisted,

finally cold.

Now in the time of withering

I look for grace

to untie each starveling leaf

and let it fall--

some richness for this tight atomic dust

before the coming winter takes it all.

Images: The Three Graces, 16th Century, by Corregio

Public domain via wikimedia commons

Winter Sunflower, copyright 2014 joyannjones