The naming of trees

Again, from the poet who loves trees, W S Merwin:

Native Trees

by W. S. Merwin

Neither my father nor my mother knew   

the names of the trees   

where I was born

what is that

I asked and my

father and mother did not

hear they did not look where I pointed   

surfaces of furniture held   

the attention of their fingers   

and across the room they could watch

walls they had forgotten   

where there were no questions   

no voices and no shade

 

Were there trees

where they were children   

where I had not been   

I asked

were there trees in those places

where my father and my mother were born   

and in that time did

my father and my mother see them

and when they said yes it meant

they did not remember

What were they I asked what were they   

but both my father and my mother

said they never knew

Poet Laureate living green

Poetry can begin with trees. From this profile of US Poet Laureate, W S Merwin:

In the 1970s, Merwin moved to the island of Maui to study Buddhism, and in 1980, he bought the land on which he lives now, on the slopes of the volcano Haleakala, with a small inheritance from his mother. He built a tall stilt house, living off the grid with a rainwater catchment system he’d copied from the house in France and solar panels on the roof. He’s already got a grave prepared there too, next to six of his dogs.

 He and his wife, Paula, are still out here every day, where he has been for 30 years, like the shepherd in Jean Giono’s book “The Man Who Planted Trees,” reforesting a formerly barren 18-acre stretch of pineapple plantation. But now he is also the next U.S. poet laureate and he has a lot of his plate.

“I’ve never believed that the imagination, the thing that made poems, is separate from the rest of life at all. It’s a part of it,” Merwin says. “But we have a tradition as a society that is saying the rest of life is there purely for us to exploit without any concern about the consequences of it. It’s very short-term and in my view it’s suicidal.”

Don’t we love like oil?

The poet Chris August, found here:

OIL

America, don’t we love like oil?
Don’t our slippery arms
Pave the pores of those who need us?
Don’t we suffocate with our embrace?

Hasn’t our sheen of pink slips
And half-hearted hand outs
Sucked the air from blue collared lungs?
Aren’t cardboard boxes as porous
As dollar bills?

Don’t we infiltrate?
Isn’t our heart amorphous?
Aren’t we a slow build
And a tight grip?

Don’t countless dumb animals
Struggle their way from our grip?
Doesn’t Europe’s fur still glisten
From the crude of our aid?
Doesn’t the Middle East smell like us?

Aren’t we just like oil?
Is it any surprise when it leaks from our bowels
Into once pristine oceans
Don’t we muddy the waters?

Don’t we smear our babies’ asses
With petroleum jelly,
Don’t we air commercials for coal
On CNN?

Isn’t oil us?
Isn’t it slippery
But insistently vital,
Isn’t it the only black thing
We’re not afraid of?

Isn’t it us?
Isn’t it symbolic how it slips out,
How it once was life,
How we need it,
How it kills us?

Don’t we love symbolism?
A great white nation
With no control of dark things,
Dirty things, moving things

Isn’t it what we know?
Isn’t it what believe in?
Two press conferences too late,
A wellspring of good intentions
Strangling the seascape,
Isn’t it angry,
Isn’t it unstoppable,
Isn’t it us?

Frida Kahlo, triumphant

The poet Pascale Petit, writing about how Mexican artist Frida Kahlo transformed disability and trauma into magnificent art. Frida Kahlo had a near-fatal bus accident as a teenager which left her in constant pain for the rest of her life. As well as suffering multiple fractures, a handrail pierced her abdomen and tore through her vagina. She then married the muralist Diego Rivera, whom she loved but referred to as her second accident.:

The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico),
Diego, Myself and Señor Xólotl

When you came back to me –

I painted a green day-hand and a brown night-hand
holding up Mexico, her canyons and deserts,
                 her candelabra cacti.

And we were there, embraced by our land.
You were my naked baby
who is reborn every minute with your third eye open.

Even our dog Señor Xólotl was curled
on the wrist of evening,
ready to bear our souls to the underworld if he had to.

Together, we stared out beyond the picture, saw
in the dark window a small woman in a wheelchair
cast out in a workshop far beyond the moon,

desperately mixing the colours of love
            until they vibrated –
watermelon greens, chilli reds, pumpkin orange.

She hurriedly drew the shattered arms
of the universe –
                             holding us all up

as if we were a mountain dripping roots and stones.

The mosque within

Reading Poetry Foundation on Islamic poets from here:

Poem by: Forugh Farrokhzad
Translated by: Sholeh Wolpé

Sky
The Wind will Blow Us Away

Inside my little night, alas,
the wind has a rendezvous with the leaves;
inside my little night, there is fear
and dread of desolation.

Listen.
Hear the darkness blow like wind?
I watch this prosperity through alien eyes.
I am addicted to my despair.
Listen.
Hear the darkness blow?

This minute, inside this night,
something’s coming to pass. The moon
is troubled and red; clouds
are a procession of mourners waiting
to release tears upon this rooftop,
this rooftop about to crumble, to give way.

A moment,
then, nothing.

Beyond this window, the night quivers,
and the earth once again halts its spin.
From beyond this window, the eyes
of the unknown are on you and me.

May you be green, head to toe—
put your hands like a fevered memory in mine…
these hands that love you.

And cede your lips
like a life-warmed feeling
to the caress of my lovesick lips.

The wind will one day blow us away.
The wind will blow us away.

The deluge and its aftermath

 

From Yash Tandon writing in Pambazuka:

It is times like this that it is necessary to critically reassess the priorities of political leadership in Pakistan and its allies. Nobody minimises the complexity of the war in Afghanistan. But the whole war has been fraught from beginning to now. The militarisation of the war belittles any claim the contestants make that they are trying for a political solution. Their actions belie their words. Billions of dollars are spent in fighting the redoubtable Taliban in a war that looks increasingly hopeless. A mere fraction of this gargantuan military expenditure could have built ramparts and barrages and canals to contain surging rivers of Pakistan within their shores, or at least not far from the shores.

Our civilisation has got its values upside down – profits before humanity, and military security before food security.

The Pakistan tragedy, like the Haiti tragedy early this year, has brought to the fore another disturbing aspect of our civilisation. Why is it that only the poor should be the ones to suffer the most from natural calamities? That Pakistani President Zardari should have gone to Europe in the middle of the calamity is not just a cruel joke. It is also symptomatic of the class aspect of natural disasters. As in the case of the earthquake that struck Haiti early this year, it is always the poor who take the brunt of nature’s wrath. Are natural disasters so class-conscious that they kill the poor and spare the rich?

Full moon in Pisces

And I dreamt I was making a moon paste, stirring together herbs and white petals with a pale malleable clay in an obsidian bowl. At my side the luminous Ishtar and  standing in the shadows near the hearth, Chron, the wounded healer. The paste like a silky pliable salve, fragrant but bitter.

Woke up and looked at slivers of moonlight piercing through curtains and then recalled the Sabian symbol: A squirrel hiding from hunters. Closed my eyes and thought about dying blue cranes, the lack of sanctuary for so many wild creatures. Thought too about neighbours held up at knife point, the need to keep doors locked and to be vigilant. How hard it is to live like this, always wary and ready to dive for cover. Mercury entering the retrograde shadow: the need to reclaim what is obscure and hidden in shadow, what is wounded within..

The Green Corn Moon, as it is sometimes known. And in Pisces, we each become edgewalkers, exploring what is unknown, what flickers in and out of consciousness. Diving into the wreck once again, into the watery depths, dreaming deep below the surface, planning the descent. Unlearning surface knowledge, taking on risk and daring. Remembering Adrienne Rich and the androgynous merman, the diver, the explorer of archeological traces still written on the body.
First the air is blue and then

 
it is bluer and then green and then


black I am blacking out and yet


my mask is powerful


it pumps my blood with power


the sea is another story


the sea is not a question of power


I have to learn alone


to turn my body without force


in the deep element.

Jottings while we hover on the edge

My friend D emails me from Beijing in China and describes The Fog, the PM 2,5 measure staying at ‘Very Unhealthy’ or “Hazardous’. A dreamy drifting stinging haze of tiny particulates 2,5 micrometres or smaller that cause severe respiratory ailments. The sunset is the colour of drenched blood smeared across the skyline. Trapped in a suffocating city, she believes she can hear that thick black cloud at noon breathing like a sick ox, choking. gasping, helpless, rasping. Pawing the ground in desperation.

Out here there is crop spraying from dawn to dusk and the lovely endangered blue cranes collapse in wheatfields and lie struggling in the new green wheat, poisoned by invisible toxins. Blue cranes mate for life and the surviving partner often will not leave the dead crane, keeping vigil until overtaken by starvation.

What matters is to keep fighting, resisting.

Dreaming of some of the Seven Wonders of the World, paltry but memorable, pointing back to the vanished ways of life before civilisation:

Just think of them, or better said, the drawings of them in a children’s book. The Pyramid at Giza, that obvious one of power, already as famous as the country of Egypt where there was the Sphinx too. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon was so much more to me because we heard in school so much about the “fertile crescent,” the rich dark land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, where these walls and terraces held and nourished fruit and flowers that grew on them like ivy. There was Zeus in Olympus. a godman made of gold, so big his head bumped the ceiling when he took this indoor throne. There was the Colossus of Rhodes on the Mediterranean, his feet planted on two land masses so that boats would have to go under him like a bridge. There were two in Turkey—the Temple of Artemis, who was the mother goddess of the wilderness, guarding the wild animals and nature, and the Tomb of Halicarnassus, which maybe was only another version of a pyramid, but to me was more a monument to death, the Big Grave.

Reading Lierre Keith, now blogging at Mother Earth News

Take the detail of prairie dogs, who, along with the bison (of which there are only 1,500 pure-bred left), are the keystone species of the North American grasslands. Something like 160 species need them for food and shelter. Their towns, which can get as big as 25,000 square miles — an extraordinary feat of both social and structural engineering — increase, well, everything, from the protein quality of the forage around them to the number of other species that can live there, too. Golden eagles, magnificence in flight, with their gold-glowing crowns and 7-foot wingspans. Kit foxes, who may mate for life. Horned larks, the only native lark of this continent. “Destroy prairie dogs,” says Terry Tempest Williams, “and you destroy a varied world.”

Power and vulnerability, anger and tenderness, the wilingness to endure, the readiness to belong on the outside. Gazing for hours at the art of Anselm Kiefer, the willingness of the artist to bear witness to horror. To hold to the subversive and unconquered source of healing as the moon waxes towards radiance in this month of August.

I wrote a letter to my love, and on the way…

Staying human in an insane culture, creating codes of communication amidst drudgery, reaching out to affirm community.

Steve Fox, 44, a council worker, carves out his thought for the day in the sand on the pavement at Orcombe Point in Exmouth, Devon.

He has now won a loyal following of about 150 devotees who flock to the seafront every day to see his latest message.  When he learned that a woman recuperating from an operation used the Orcombe Point parking meters as walking milestones, he left her a personal message “little by little” to reward her progress.

Poetry makes nothing happen but we need it so desperately.

A wind carrying us to longed-for worlds

Only to connect — the garden thrumming with carpenter bees and wasps in the sudden heat.

Wasp

by Zbigniew Herbert 

When the honey, fruit and flowery tablecloth were whisked from the table in one sweep, it flew off with a start. Entangled in the suffocating smoke of the curtains, it buzzed for a long time. At last it reached the window. It beat its weakening body repeatedly against the cold, solid air of the pane. In the last flutter of its wings drowsed the faith that the body’s unrest can awaken a wind carrying us to longed-for worlds.
       You who stood under the window of your beloved, who saw your happiness in a shop window—do you know how to take away the sting of this death?