terra incognita, terra pericolosa
We run from shadows
to shadow
without explanations.
We are here:
for a moment;
to wait,
to watch,
to worry.
Yet, here now,
light flows
in shadows
only here.
So, be wary,
be warned, and run.
(October, 5, 2025)
Category: courage
-
Despite the despots,
despite the collapse
of oceans’ currents,
despite the anger
flowing through the streets,
the iris push up
though the garden mulch,
and roses burst into bloom.
(April 6, 2025)
-
“What shall I say, because talk I must?”
-William Carlos Williams
Perhaps if I gnaw
off my tongue,
I could drown
in unvoiced blood.
I have no insight,
no words as balm
beyond my silence.
It’s easier, safer,
to be polite
to watch the end
and say nothing.
I am dumb-founded,
when I should scream
against all decorum.
(April 5, 2025)
-
Poems of witness. Too bad they must continue to be written. These were written by a 27 year old woman in the dying Soviet Union’s gulags. Carved into soap with a matchstick, then washed away after being memorized.
And then they’ll torch the cattle, houses with napalm,
measure the children with wheels of a tank,
level walls to the ground.
But maybe they won’t touch the crazed old women—
and don’t keep bringing up the schoolbook: the condemned
know the histories—
time’s worn thin above the place of execution, begins to leak.
God grant you don’t learn what the wife of salt will see:
a PPSh machine gun or a short Roman sword?
—23 July 1984
Irina Ratushinskaya
-
This morning, I pulled a book of unread Russian poetry
off of the shelf. It was contemporary when I bought it
forty years ago. The Soviet Union still had a few years
left to force its tight ideological voices to sing together.
The poet had been condemned to prison for being
a poet — the audacity! Standing there in front of full
bookshelves, I read a few of her poems. She spoke
of silences, talking through walls at night, friendships,
fear, love, and hope for a future, vague and undetermined.
Outside the light changed, it grew darker and forty years
vanished within the pages of the slim book of poetry
I held in my hands. Beneath the deafening drum beat
demanding one voice, one monomaniacal lie, I heard,
through our fears, a hope begin to scratch at our walls.
(February 4, 2025)
-
I read once when I was young, I believe
in the I Ching, that a tall stone tower
on a hill is a great defense in war;
except it draws the enemy’s attack.
One can run, but not hide from an attack;nor run away while hiding. Paradox.
Yet there is a third option. Wherever
you are is the ground upon which you stand.
You stand openly, steady like a tree,whose roots have coiled deeply into the earth.
Allow the time’s darkness to surge through you,
yet again, in long slow pulsating waves;
until the latest storm’s violence abates,and you find yourself right where you have been.
(March 26, 2024) -
I finished Prophet Song by Paul Lynch over the last couple of days for my book group (RFB). It is hard to put down, even when you want to look away. An intense, disturbing read. Great lit! Ireland turns toward fascism and civil war. The story follows Eilish and her family as she struggles to keep her family intact and survive. I was paranoid inside of the first 30 pages, and stayed that way to the end 275 pages later. I was always expecting the worst. So many echoes of our current political situations, as well as genocide around the world. I imagine it will stay with me for quiet a long while. Read it. Seriously.
-
Do you see the hope, the longing
that waits always unfulfilled
like despair upon a bridge
unwilling to stand balanced
upon the rail, to watch the flow
of the white river through the rocks;
unwilling to decide
which ecstasy to embrace:
the ecstasy of hope—
to fly unimpeded into the sky
as the wax our father shaped
into wings softens with the setting sun;
or the ecstasy of fate—
to accept the freedom the plunge offers
in the froth and blood far below?
(January 20, 2024)
-
Ikkyu Reiterations: and which part of that is now
by
acceptance, chance, change, courage, happiness, ikkyu, meaning, meditation, perspective, poetry, time, transition, zen
Having returned a cow
with my horns clipped,
I chew my straw sardonically,
as my sad-brown eyes survey
the undulant fields.
The cow herd pats my neck,looks across the open field,
and asks me, a mere cow,
with a casual disregard,
“What’s this?” then walks away.
I have no language to unlockthis moment from time now.
Each song ends with desire,
a flutter of a solitary bird
falling from a tree.
(August 10, 2022)
-
An old man smirks
at the wet blood
splashed about
the broken frame
as a charm
against it all.
It is Fear, of course,
who lingers there
like a sycophant
tracing the edges of a room;
for Fear is ubiquitous,
a breeze which clings
to leaves fluttering
against a cottonwood’s branches.
So, you hesitate
to turn the latch,
to take the step
to pass you through,
as if one empty space
differed from another.
(April 3, 2022)
-
“what I lack is myself”
—Susan Howe
The door’s full like words
in an open mouth,
blotting out the space
it opened onto.
An entrance becomes a wall,an allowed space disallowed,
as keys and locks
become ritual.
Such small sacrificethe tongue becomes,
burning clear
any lost syllables.
Nothing’s left to say;everything’s unsaid.
subtext 