Fast Day 217 July 30 2011 {Broken Statues}

Broken Statues


holy child with broken arm,
please keep me away from harm,
as far away as you were close
to bleeding head and broken nose,
victim of man
help me if you can!

sweet bambino on holy card,
victims of exploding shards!
divinity of spattered ink,
keep me from the fears I think
from my tomorrow,
road of sorrow!

Mary, jogger on bloody feet,
walking barefoot on the street
in the night of early dawn;
apocalypse decathalon,
now in training,
dark and raining.

oil discovering crucifix,
wellspring of our politics,
keep the candles til the end,
obscured,unlit, and never spend;
geology's
doxologies.

Joseph of the chipped paint,
father, carpenter, and saint
joiner with wooden pins,
let Him now forgive our sins;
treaty our days
in heaven's ways.

who will be the alpha saint
to cudgel us, box, and feint;
leading unruly canonized
in their daily exercise:
for fool's gold
our souls are sold.

little babe with broken nose,
broken arm and missing toes,
dropped upon my bedroom floor
soon to be killed hardcore:
the end of Lent,
all Passion spent.


--
notes

The religious icons of my childhood come pouring forth in a time of discord. I have a statue with a broken arm and this is Nuestra Senora del Brazo Roto, and it is the arm of the Christ child that is broken.
My frame of mind in this week of Washington and Norway.

stanza 1
keep me as far away from harm as you were close to it; i.e., being beaten by the Roman soldiers, etc.

stanza 2
road of sorrow = via dolorosa, the route of the Cross carrying.

stanza 3
Mary was in training for pain from early on. Private and searing pain in the darkness.

stanza 4 crucifix
in the old days, people used to have crucifixes in their houses in which were stored the oil for the time of death and the candles to be lit at that time. The top of the crucifix slid back to uncover these things.
Politics of death and unlit candles, faith buried so deep that true belief (doxology) is only discoverable by deep geology through time.

stanza 5
St. Joseph,, father of Jesus.
treaty - make agreement between two things.

stanza 6
today... saints and men fighting to be the Alphas and beat their chests in holiness, yet beholden only to power and money and the currency of their unenlightened minds.

stanza 7
prayer to Jesus, soon to grow up and to be killed in the liturgical period of time after Lent and three days before Easter.
--

Welcome: Rifatcoui and Ligia Guerra

Gardens are a form of autobiography.  ~Sydney Eddison, Horticulture magazine, August/September 1993

So are friends, I would guess.

My dream garden is prairie grasses, short and long, with native sedges instead of lawn. It is not a manicured lawn that needs constant watering and attention; it is an organic growth and comes about with some planning and attention, but affects an insouciance while its grasses bend in the wind, like people tossing their hair in the breeze to dry it off, not mindful of anything but that turn of the head.


Welcome, Rifatcoui and Ligia Guerra

Fast Day 216 July 23 2011 {The Price of Apples and Pears}

The Price of Apples and Pears

God was a good gardener
who knew the price of apples and pears
sold in Covent Garden,
planting a plantation full
of pippins in the county Eden
whose produce formed  no small and unimportant part
of the economy of that remote district,
providing fruits for the markets and
making the heart-cheering local
liquors, cider and perry.

Pomological, we the world
are in debt to such a grand gardener;
who taught us soils for the borders of Eden
be light rich loam, friable and crumbling,
such as is met on old sheep-downs,
calculated to grow fine trees and husbandmen
sprung from small portions of
the hereditary deeply laid sands
that form the beaches of blessed
isles within the seas!

There is a season for all fruit
which germinate and wax under the sun:
avoiding extremes, flourishing
between sun and shade, wet and dry;
hardy apples, rich and sweet,
golden pears, sugary and perfumed, ripe and gritty;
berries cockscomb shaped with
pale scarlet flesh and cinnabar
thorns, autumnal bergamot;
all gathered in flat-bottomed baskets
plaited from fragrant reeds.

Earth is the forcing garden,
built of deal timber oleaginous
and filled with resin, disposed with
dovetail joints of paradise:
here we live our accidental lives,
our derangements, hermetically warmed by alembic
alchemy of atmospheric
moistures up and down:
fire above, ashes below;
soon buried in dry sand.

Heaven is a good fruit room
with seven levels of stacked shelves
where lay the apples and the pears
wrapped in dry straw or canvas.
We are all electrical attractions:
walnuts, pine apples, acorn-crested nonpareil,
free from injury by agency
of wasp or moth or ant,
nor flying birds frugivorous
and quadrupeds injurious.

--

perry - liquor made from pears

pomological - adjective of the science of fruit or fruit trees (pomus)

frugivorous - fruit eating
--

Fast Day 215 July 16 2011 {Longwise Jean}

Longwise Jean

La pluie tomba latéralement à ma naissance;
elle ressembla à des arbres pliés par le vent
qui poussent sur ​​les hautes montagnes:
la pluie, presque parallèle à l'horizon;
on s'accrocha toujours au chapeau,
alors on perdit de nombreux parapluies!

Ohé! Il y eut un fleuve le long de l'horizon,
et mes parents m'appelèrent Longwise Jean:
je vois le monde à ma manière privée.

When I was young, I was a hunter
and one day I traded my skins for whisky;
when I awoke, I said
Oh, friends! Where is my gun?
They laughed, said "You drank it!"
I said then
Oh, men! Where is my knife?
They said I used it to buy drink.
I said then
Oh, devils! Where are my furs...
my wife's furs
my children's furs invested...
my shirt? my cheman... canoe?

Il y a un nouveau dieu en ville, m'amis.
soleil caché, lune cachée,
enfin un Dieu caché...
combien de temps faut-il
pour réussir l'archéologie?


--
The rain fell sideways at my birth;
it looked like trees bent by the wind
that grow on high mountains:
rain, almost parallel to the horizon;
people always held on to their hats
and they lost a number of umbrellas!
Hey! There was a river along the horizon,
and my parents called me Longwise John:
I see the world in my own way.

(english)

There is a new God in town, friends.
hidden sun, hidden moon,
and finally a hidden God.
How long will it take for
Archaeology to succed ? 
( i.e., in recovering the old, previous God, sun, moon, etc.)

--
--
notes
I wrote this in the Passe Simplé tense of the verb in order to give an archaic and stilted sound to what is apparently a spoken discourse. The actions are old and long finished.

Fast Day 214 July 9 2011 {Homecoming Into Mist}

Homecoming Into Mist

they await us
they await us at home,
they await us when
we have gone away by water.
they await our canoes

they read of us
they read of us in books
they read of us when
the dances are no longer danced
and no songs bathe newborns

they fall in love
they fall in love with us
they pant like summer when
they see our buff, painted bodies
they finger our coming

they look for us
they stand like trees on hills
and look for us when
there's nothing but the river mist
crestfallen are they

they will fight us
they will fight us at home
and will fight us when
we have come with peaceful gifts
they await with knives

--

Fast Day 213 July 2 2011 {My New Pickup Truck}

My New Pickup Truck

My brother has a pickup truck,

and I will have one, too;

I will take my reel lawnmower

with a wooden handle

to the casa of my girl friend

to  cut her long, long grass;

afterwards we will both relax

and drink some black coffee;

she may smoke a  long charuto…

that girl is very much wi-fi.

I will take my new picape

and go to my parents’

to fix the roof of Friday’s storm

when fell their neighbor’s tree:

to tie the wood up in bundles

and set it out for trash;

maybe they could visit downtown

and I could drive them there;

then I will drink only iced tea

and radio my filial love.

My dog goes in the new pickup

sitting in the truck bed

with the Dee Zee silver tool chest

right next to the lawnmower;

I shall drive to my best friend’s house

to go fishing today:

there’s Corona in the cooler

and my feet in the sun:

and I may smoke a cigarro

that I have rolled myself.

--

notes:

Late posting since I was at my parents' where there is no internet, etc.
Written for a birthday in July.

casa:  house

picape:  pickup

charuto:  cigar

cigarro:  cigarette

Dee Zee:  brand of tool box