I as earth singular as plural river indigenous
Tag Archives: earthsong
doors that are voices
see me through doors that are voices carrying asphalt when it should be loam - dream me through doors that are voices, silting hue - when will the sun sit with me, remember sunken sky & play with half-lives? see me through lives that are doors that are voices carrying the silt of days, banks that are salt & hue -
Gratitude lost
Used to be the bird settled down on the green you sowed, its chirp saying thanks Gaia glad now when it perches on some green, there is a riddle for the sky - and you - to solve how can the bird even speak to the sun's flare with such flutter? Gaia spins an urgent tale no sooner has it been said than the words are felt futile then forgotten
koi kahe ye kis ne kaha tha, keh do jo kuch kehna hai
meeraji keh kar pachtaaya aur phir kehna bhool gayawho said say what you have to say?
Meeraji
I said, regretted, then forgot to say
the storytellers tail
when you spin the tale, the x-axis meeting the why of forlorn metastasized asymptotes of utmost hubris, the storyline mutates into song mutates into symbols that retch out meaning from the shell that numbed as it echoed – when you tiptoed on the storytellers tail ouching the eastern spirits sense of unwantoncy, the tarred streets cried for old ground compelling the poem to tend to the low – the burn of roots & the crafting of impossible syllable –
the borrowing of the forest
Noting the absence of ceremony fire in her stories, Dharamsherni took to a desert where no sants, bhakts or shaikhs - sacred or recreational - were remembered. Sand took form as poetry sprang to quench the mirages’ imagined thirst. There was Number and then the science of Number where taking earth apart from its founding poems - though a tad violent - was deemed benevolent . Dharamsherni saw no forest so she borrowed one from stories from a passing mirage. It was borrowed on market terms with high interest, the science of Number being the middleman. Joy longed to breathe fire back into the forest, but the Numbers intervened citing the infeasibility of it all: the imagined debt was unsustainable, but something could be worked out, the professor of Numbers claimed. Of course there would be war and senseless killing, but nothing that could not be wrapped up in benevolence and parceled off as bits of future. This is one telling of how dreams stopped being fountains.
Exigency of water
Take the withered mountain and try to find its lake whose atoms are forever running late they cannot choose between the exigency of water and the posterity of stone reach of loss equals the reach of small equals the hundred wishes that stand with petals & fronds I catch the passage of these petals & fronds as if it was my name carved out in song as if the algebra of difficulty is measure of frailty if only finality confirmed origin would that the child chide sky -
the unbearable succinctity of the Way
truth being part of the overall whatever, we are beheft somewhat to mark our calendars & heed our maps what was best left untrod is furious at being charted out so -
morning song
mourning tools are not set by stone they are chosen by the howl & sore of wind mourning sages do not rise with sun-shriek nor tire at sun-sink mourning song is neither presaged nor pretooled it is worn by age & tear
Bringing the sun back
To the sun I say my greetings as I did the day before
to the sun’s
memory can I recall which sun I bore witness to?
whose warmth
is like my own, cradled in the same lava that burns
every sun
which looks like my own can I bring that sun to you?
I am preparing myself so that I might remember the teachings of my grandfathers. I would like to give these teachings to you. I believe that, together, we can begin the journey back to find what many of our people left by the trail. This will be a journey to rediscover a way of life that is centered on the respect for all living things. It will be a journey to find the center of ourselves so that we can know the peace that comes from living in harmony with powers of the Universe. I do not believe in isolating myself in the memories of the past. I do believe that with the teachings of yesterday we can better prepare ourselves for the uncertainties of tomorrow.
– Edward Benton-Banai: “The Mishomis Book: the voice of the Ojibway”
iii poemses
i,
as the timidity of morning relents, the
whorl of ashless stars
climbs up into the gut
of heaven to teach it love – relents
the crawl of moon as
it detaches from each
world the peripheries of relent give
mark give stone give
the vapid liquor of gray –
ii,
the thread of beginnings is
taught the how of
howl & the hum of
humans – lost in the sunsome
day, the riverbed
listens it trades
secrets – what morning knows
it secretes while the
thrum of nettles bakes –
iii,
the fulsomeness of each torn leaf
voids the argument of
dark touch the
thorn of thunder & it will silence
your need reach into
the budless sun where
creatures of light scatter into
a priestly muttering
of the whoness of wonder –