drawing up

It is not our job to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves
Like the trees, and be born again,
Drawing up from the great roots.
 - Robert Bly  

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slow down the world

Women laugh, cut, cook, stack fruit, chat,
Gossip, feed fires with kindling and charcoal,
Chop meat, caress greens, forget their troubles,
Remembering families far away near mountains and rivers
Under a sheltering sky.
I don't know and I don't care, said a laughing market woman,
Pouring batter into tin cups for baking
Confections and coconut balls above her fire.

moon metro

Moon Metro subterranean subway car sped through optical tunnels.

Outside, an old Turkish man wearing a crumpled white hat walked with his wife.

She is his noun. He is her verb, her action.

Just get to the verb, he whispered.

Their language is filled with autumn browns, yellows, greens, golds, sparrows, blue jays, and love’s doves.

Far away on Memories Street, a street of regrets spilling potential, Passion danced with Death.

Moon Metro picks up speed hurtling through space-time.

Silent, salient passengers wear sad eyed desire.

They crave sleep in a tyranny of sheep-less-mess. 

 

never written

There are poems
that are never written,
that simply move across
the mind
like skywriting
on a still day;
slowly the first word
drifts west,
the last letters dissolve
on the tongue,
and what is left
is the pure blue
of insight, without cloud
or comfort.
 - Linda Pastan
yama bato  Read more…

*

Here is a book of tongues.
Take it. (Dark leaves invade the air.)
Beware! I now know a language so beautiful and lethal
My mouth bleeds when I speak it.
 - Gwendolyn MacEwen  Read more…

educational paradise

Inside a Myanmar prison block of teachers' apartments

reminding him of Chinese reform through re-education schools

in Sichuan and Fujian

where he lived, taught and breathed years ago

hearing underpaid, undersexed and overworked teachers smash sticks on podiums

using fear as a motivator screaming

wake up idiots

near five-story class tombs

surrounded by walls, dirt, silver strands of barb wire

removed from glowing rice paddies, soaring white herons

Burmese pythons constricting choices and consequences

freedom of speech with Big Brother in deep shadows

near goats foraging in trash as village women lugged buckets of water on thin shoulders

or balanced stacks of bricks and rocks on heads to build a new wall

a new tomorrow, forging new futures for the monied class

a man read a newspaper after 50 years of censorship in Myanmar

as sunlight streaked morning clouds above Shan mountains

inhaling a glorious day in educational paradise.

Repair time.

Salute the sun.