Fast Day 342 December 28 2013 Jump, Christmas!

Jump, Christmas!

I am drawing Christmas lights with colored chalks
upon the sidewalk recording hop-scotch dreams:
won't never get to heaven ,
won't never see paradise,
oil, wine, bread, and salt; oil, wine, salt, and bread,
let me jump past Herod, Lord,
and I'll fly my way to Bethlehem,
next to thee to lay my head.

I am spinning Christmas gifts upon my loom,
with the yarn of barberry and holly plants:
will get to heaven soon,
I will sit in paradise,
pass over, red rover, pass over!
let me jump past Pilate, Lord!
I'll serve the Magi three and wise,
their gifts to Thee discover!

Christmas ornaments I sew from a piece of felt,
and sturdy snowmen make for a fine, straight tree!
pines trees grow by heaven!
we climb them up to paradise!
Small limbo, great limbo, and Great Rest!
let me hop-scotch today, Lord!
It is sunny Christmas day... or not!
Carolyn and me... we were best!

--
notes

picture above:  http://topbestappsforkids.com/best-kids-apps-snowrabbit/


many of he expressions are mentioned in the old hop-scotch diagrams

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Dast Day 341 December 21 2013 Scent Of Christmas

Scent Of Christmas

Take your dry palates and make merrily moist
with orange and spice and syrup of the pine tree tips;
take cinnamon and allspice, nutmeg and ginger,
to make the Christmas wine -
that ever wet lips,
fine!

The Magi brought the golden orange, nailed with clove,
and wrote their words with sprigs of holly's vermilion:
a dogma of aroma, zodiac incensed,
silent, scented doctrine
a perfect love like
thine!


--
notes

Instead of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, we imagine a Magi offering of spices and fruit, thus  creating a faith not built on writ and dogma, but on scent and remembrance of sweet smells.

Fast Day 340 December 14 2013 Oracle and Karma

Oracle And Karma

sit no longer, doomed ones, but fly to the world’s ends;
leave your homes and many malls, multiplexed, suburban;
the brain goes topsy-turvy, and genitals retreat:
the center does not hold.

rebels without cause will drive the chickie run panic;
Buzz, the Studebaker driving, leader of the pack,
comes to tear you all apart, no ammo in your gun;
memory towers: gone.

The shrines of your gods, were they not pitiless also
to Emmett Till? Your arbors bore strange fruit, did they not?
The first Thanksgiving gave way to King Phillip’s war,
asphaltic noose and bomb.





--
notes

Reworking the first response of the oracle at Delphi to Athens during the Persian War.

stanza 2 ::  refers to Rebel Without A Cause, Buzz is the god of war in his Syrian chariot, or the Studebaker he drove against James Dean in the game of Chicken or "Chickie Run".

composed of my sapphics of 12-12-12-6

Fast Day 339 December 7 2013 Strategic Irony

Old "Liar!" Wilson

Strategic Irony

the hearts and minds, the minds and hearts
we seek to win most serious,
nation building’s essential parts,
but not to eat: like Syria’s !

we’d love them to death if we could,
save them for a brighter future,
we rarely question if we should,
we just bomb, triage, and suture.

we do not love in Washington,
we have no love fest in D.C.
yet in Kabul and Pakistan
we seek forever amity !


--
notes

The reference to Syria concerns a Syrian rebel - whom some of our leaders think we should support - who published a video of himself eating the heart of a Syrian government soldier.

The irony is trying to win hearts and minds, as we have stated since the Vietnam War, yet an impoverished friendship within our own political process:  we shut down government, yet we expect foreign peoples to live in an extravagant state of peace and love after we have re-built their nations !

Something is quite wrong-headed about that.

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Fast Day 338 November 30 2013 The Yearling

The Yearling

gamhuin ruadh, a yearling deer, we saw;
sitting alone in the back yard,
the neighbors said that they had seen it, too,
alone, with neither buck nor doe.

staring below nuclear warning ears,
warning of the stark orphanage,
pilgrims to the undiscovered country,
awaiting all of parents born.

I saw him once again before we left,
all alone by the neighbor fence,
only the daemon in the root cellar
to protect him now that we have gone.

--
notes

gamhuin ruadh  ::  pronounce as   gahv-ween  roo-ah    "a yearling deer"

nuclear warning  ::  a deer's alert head reminds me of a nuclear warning sign

daemon  ::  the daemon in the abandoned root cellar, which was covered by the tornado of 1984, is sort of the "genius" of the place.

I suppose this marks the end of the year in which my father passed away. I perhaps shared orphanage in a sense ( a state of being without parent) with the deer.