Rolling Thunder
Share Article One hot July day my mother rolled her living prose poem of anguish, vision, truth and beauty through Denver and beyond.
“It’s all a myth, a way of remembering the past,” she screamed chasing shadows into blazing sunlight on Broadway Street where immigrant families sat on broken dreams.
She passed devout Tibetan pilgrims walking, singing, praying, and laughing inside the Barkhor circuit in Lhasa. They threw sky crystals at karmic ravens, the symbol of reincarnation.
She rolled past terracotta warriors crashed on bags at Shanghai train stations seeking invisible unknown terminal destinations.
She rolled past Elmore James, Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Sonny Boy, Howling Wolf, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters down at the crossroads sliding their callused fingers on metal frets trading their souls to the devil.
The blues are the roots. Everything else is the fruit.
She flew past Balinese carvers edging faces for shadow puppet plays, jungle painters creating corporate butterfly murals, villagers harvesting rice in layered green pastures and landmine amputees plowing behind oxen.
Hearing Irish tinkers pound pans between villages she rolled past homeless humans dreaming of food as shadows danced on cave walls in the United States of Amnesia.
She rolled past a naked evangelist at his wailing wall forecasting human greed and global economic terrorism.
A phallic snake symbol delighted the envy of quicksilver messengers wheeling past tan cellular idiots waiting for an express bus to financial heaven.
Shifting gears, she burned past her husband’s white-haired aunt in a nursing home painting her final autumn leaf watercolor vision.
She sheared past Ashiakawa weavers threading seasons in Hokkaido, Japan and Sherpa’s brewing tea at 18,000 feet for expeditions collecting Trophy Mountains after paying hard currency to totalitarian emperors for the pleasure of suffering altitude sickness, hypothermia and high blood pressure death.
She rolled past consumers making quick money honey living on plastic debt while driving 4x4s through scarred Rockies as cock-a-roaches devoured natural resources. Land grab development bankers heard mutants scream, “Where is the water for God’s sake? We paid for our thirst.”
She sailed past her eldest son waiting for his NAM dust off chopper from Camp Eagle near Hue toward San Francisco. On the flight to Denver and beyond he became a ghost in exile.
He stayed in Colorado for a month, did eight weeks at the DOD Information School, finished his time in Europe and got out, a free man. He spent six months roaming from Germany to Finland, Portugal, Spain, and Morocco.
In 1973 while attending the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley she knew he’d face abusive rejection from some students. They’d accuse him of being a baby killer and an undesirable outcast.
He became an invisible literary outlaw.
He incorporated passive-aggressive silence. He became anonymous, a figment of their imagination. Staying away from them he practiced covert dark arts on night patrols with stealth, silence and cunning on fully automatic.
Write it down and done, laugh, and move on.
His undeclared major was Survival 101. It wasn’t in the catalog of classes. University admin officials in their cubicles screamed, “You have to declare something!” He selected Cultural Anthropology & Mythology to placate the beast.
She read his final letters home about fire fight survival instincts remembering the horror etched on a black wall in D.C, with 58,000+ names as reverberating chopper blades severed stale humid tropic air and jungle survival removed veils of illusions. He’d surrendered to life and began collecting dust.
Like an old river she careened past Arabic nomads exchanging goats and camels for pearls as oil deserted sand enveloped silk encrusted carpets. Refugees on sinking lifeboats discovered geological family strata amid Chinese shipwrecks shifting divorce paradigms.
Independent shamans played with awareness using active imagination’s free potential - exhaling a mind’s eye making B&W street photography in exile.
Women wearing exploitation’s cloth wrapped in solitude braved whirling third-world poverty as their economic fate shattered malnourished rocks along Bhutanese mountain roads creating capitalistic nirvana. Imported from India and desperate for food they lived in river reed habitats with Gross National Happiness.
Gathering speed now.
Rolling her Wheel of Life, she evaporated six degrees of separation near the Tropic of Cancer in fast rivers celebrating animist tribal dialogues hearing tongues sing air earth water fire languages by crow, eagle, raven, coyote and wolf.
She received the mark of the king tattoo from a Tahiti artist in Saipan.
Indigenous natives were surrounded and confounded by blue-eyed European’s commercial greed and cultural annihilation while calculating slavery’s cost for competition’s profit.
In silence she rolled with patience, solitude, and nature just being her doing nothing poem.
Her life created a ruptured aorta in earth, fire, water, and air with pulse platelets as red lava flowing past Himalayan monasteries heard monks chant prayers in assembly halls at dawn.
Green, blue, white, yellow and red Lung-Tao prayer flags singing wind songs welcomed her sacrifice, liberation and freedom with perfection celebrating Maya illusion wisdom free from Bardo.
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