The new language. I speak it.
Not with my fingers. I speak it with my eyelids. It is the eyes.
The new language is a blinking of the eyes.
To create fhe fiction, the reflection, the movement by blinking.
To translate the language of solid clay forms
and the melody of pebbles into words-reflected-in-the-water, songs of fictive images.
Other beauty. Another sign. Language of the eyes. Moving your lips is useless.

--Miguel Angel Asturias

Only the sky

Is pretending

To be still.

That soft fever

I get in these woods

Wells up blue

And slow

In my body. Its thump

Is only a piece

Of the life

It is going to be. A dead tree

Goes into its afterlife, a branch

Casting into the land's

Humming body. A bird stills

In the green hum,

And my body goes soft,

Still fevered

And slow,

Greening up into

That pretending

Sky.

lks 7/3/09
 
I wrote this by remixing the content of two of Dave Bonta's Morning Porch posts. You can access these daily posts, which are a lovely and often funny part of my reading each day, here:

http://www.morningporch.com/

Paradoxical. Historically it's been a real challenge for me to live with another person, at least in the past five or so years. It seems to be part of my nature to need solitude almost fiercely at times. But of course solitude and independence are far from the same thing. I often worry that I need people much less than others seem to. This is not to say that I don't need them at all, that I don't value conversation and the intimacy of close friendship and the sharing of meals and fears and music and passions and basketball games and being in the breath of the world with others. I do, and sometimes it's revelatory to me how much. I couldn't be happy as a teacher without that tug, that capacity to enlarge my scope of self and consciousness. (Of course, teaching wears me out, too. Part of the deal. ) Still, this realization of my need for others seems to be a sort of temporary epiphany. I value the detachment of observation very much, but I often find myself planning how I will relate what I experience to my friends and family and other folks too. I suppose I always will come back to the circumstance of needing friends who will, as Nanci Griffith once said, "endure my solitude."

Roger Commiskey's James Joyce themed art is beautiful.
Here's a link:


http://www.flickr.com/photos/artroger/sets/72157620230603255/

http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/

http://afghanistan.phrblog.org/

(Two poems by Denise Levertov)

The Secret

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

--Denise Levertov


Stepping Westward

What is green in me
darkens, muscadine.
If woman is inconstant,
good, I am faithful to
ebb and flow, I fall
in season and now
is a time of ripening.
If her part
is to be true,
a north star,
good, I hold steady
in the black sky
and vanish by day,
yet burn there
in blue or above
quilts of cloud.
There is no savor
more sweet, more salt
than to be glad to be
what, woman,
and who, myself,
I am, a shadow
that grows longer as the sun
moves, drawn out
on a thread of wonder.
If I bear burdens
they begin to be remembered
as gifts, goods, a basket
of bread that hurts
my shoulders but closes me
in fragrance. I can
eat as I go.

-Denise Levertov

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

- Paulo Freire

The most fearful people in the world are Americans, because they have so much to lose. And never has there been a people with so much who are still afraid of not having enough.

- Richard Rohr in Job and the Mystery of Suffering

Imagine the orginal question
Of grace.
Observe the wild white why
Of almost.
See how empty
Ink can be.
Use that canvas of dust
To weld your raw shimmer
Into song.

lks 7/24/09

(this is something I put together in a very impromptu, playful way from my haiku word magnets.)

It's his birthday.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves -- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying _What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

On horseback half-asleep,  
     Half-dreaming the moon far off,
        Smoke for the morning tea.

--Basho

I'm always interested in other translations of poetry--anyone know of one for this?