The Writing of Words

What is this writing of words,
this stringing of sounds?
Symbols abound, clashing out,
striking, piercing,
awakening the adrenalin,
alerting the mind;
as the siren before the raid
resurrects the sleeping
from their slumber.
Linear lightening,
then the thunder of the sight:
full bodied bombing.

What is this war of words,
battling for position, for rank?
This foot-soldier advancing, retreating,
bunkered down by the bazooka blow of critics.
Holding hope like breath
because once there was victory at Normandy.

What is this writing of words,
but the old tank warrior in his rocker
slowly rolling forward like a sigh.

One More Poem: Up, Up, & Away

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Am I glutting the world with just one more poem?

(creative litter is still litter) - Like the helium balloon

in the child's hand; it seems to be such a good thing,

until the young poet lets go,then what do you have but

pollution. Yet it is so celebrated - that letting go,

"Do you still see it, way out there above the trees?"

What a gift to see something grow more faint

and then disappear forever...but it doesn't, it

gets caught in a wind, carried to the nature

preserve - hangs in a tree, limp and

shriveled, year, upon year,

upon year

a

dang

ling

re

mi

n

d

e

r

.

.

.

Poetry

a cinquian
Listen,
sound is in your
ear - movement is in your
mind and it wants you to respond -
now live

The Milky Way

Here I am inside it
looking there upon it

In the words of my five-year-old elder, "Oh dumb it."

"Why is water wet daddy?" my younger child once asked
as his brother counted to eleventeen in the background

I wondered at it all; this wetness of water
and all the counting we do with no addition of something new

After My Meeting With Jill

I am no longer content
with the poem written promptly

stuck into a self addressed stamed envelope
marked: RETURN TO SENDER

then the letter
read aloud in front of the mirror upon opening

qoute from Letters To A Young Poet

"Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all -- ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it." Rainer Maria Rilke

quote from The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

"Push it. Examine all things intensely and relentlessly. Probe and search each object in a piece of art. Do not leave it, do not course over it, as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength...Admire the world for never ending on you--as you would admire an opponent, without taking your eyes from him, or walking away. One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."

all moments are key moments...quote by Frederick Buechner

"Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. A journey, years long, has brought each of you through thick and thin to this moment in time as mine has also brought me. Think back on that journey. Listen back to the sounds and sweet airs of your journey that give delight and hurt not and to those too that give no delight at all and hurt like Hell. Be not affeard. The music of your life is subtle and elusive and like no other—not a song with words but a song without words, a singing, clattering music to gladden the heart or turn the heart to stone, to haunt you perhaps with echoes of a vaster, farther music of which it is part. The question is not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God’s things because, of course, they are both at once. There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak—even the walk from the house to the garage that you have walked ten thousand times before, even the moments when you cannot believe there is a God who speaks at all anywhere. He speaks, I believe, and the words he speaks are incarnate in the flesh and blood of our selves and of our own footsore and sacred journeys. We cannot live our lives constantly looking back, listening back, lest we be turned to pillars of longing and regret, but to live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fullness of the music. Sometimes we avoid listening for fear of what we may hear, sometimes for fear that we may hear nothing at all but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement. But be not affeard, says Caliban, nor is he the only one to say it. "Be not afraid," says another, "for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." He says he is with us on our journeys. He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began. Listen for him. Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the sound of him…
…Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace…
…But I talk about my life anyway because if, on the one hand, hardly anything could be less important, on the other hand, hardly anything could be more important. My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually. "

Frederick Buechner from The Sacred Journey, Now & Then, and Telling Secrets

articulation...quote by Henri J.M. Nouwen

"[We must] enter ourselves first of all into the center of our existence and become familiar with the complexities of our inner lives. As soon as we feel home in our own house, discover the dark corners as well as the light spots, the closed doors as well as the drafty rooms, our confusion will evaporate, our anxiety will diminish, and we will become capable of creative work. The key word here is articulation. Those who can articulate the movements of their inner life, who can give names to their varied experiences, need no longer be victims of themselves, but are able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering. They are able to create space for Him whose heart is greater than theirs, whose eyes see more than theirs, and whose hands can heal more than theirs. This articulation, I believe, is the basis for spiritual leadership of the future, because only they who are able to articulate their own experiences can offer themselves to others as a source of clarification. " Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer