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She called upon her invisible Saints After the honey of summer- And the Sun oh… Africa. Can you save us now… has the womb abandoned the world The yawning wide expanse jungles of neon glares, blinking mascara Still, elephants walked in darkness swollen stomachs growling night Invisible Saints hid beneath
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©Peteskid http://allpoetry.com/Peteskid
That Kind Of Rain
I.
one that deserts heaven
to leap to a prayer-tipped, face
and mixes with tears, like watercolor
brush to wet canvas
that kind of Rain
II.
one that slides slowly to a new slant
in order to give a newly budded blossom
its first kiss
that kind of Rain
III.
little bit that fills a rain gauge
after a long dry spell
and that one last drip
runs over the quivering lip
that kind of rain
IV.
let me heaven heaven-spiral,
blue on blue, to colors’ cup
it sips to nourish new ways of being wet
but never down
that kind of rain
a high sung carol
dropping note by note
Reply from Orean:
Orean http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-KlP9VAsrab_njRKB86w-?cq=1&p=139#comments
A tiny raindrop…
One of millions: insignificant
A face in the crowd: unnoticed
It has no meaning,
There are more from whence it came.
No future: No past
Nothing matters: Nobody cares
Who am I?
Who are you?
Does anybody know: Really
Does anybody care: Sincerely
Who cares if it is gone,
There are more to take its place.
What makes me so special: Honestly
What makes you stand out: Realistically
Have you left your mark?
Will you be remembered?
Or will you be like the raindrop: Forgotten
Be more of the same: Indistinguishable
©Orean
Thank you, Orean,
I want to be that raindrop that leaps to a lover’s face. I want to be that raindrop that gives a blossom its first kiss. I wish to be that raindrop that fills the gauge…. what a wonderful poem. Thank you for sharing it. Carol.
Shewolf
What luminary essence lifts my pen to breathe again,
tongue to drip,
beyond the wave of man and kingdom,
friendship,
come to drum the beat of Nature
in she-wolf,
howling closer canyon.
She will always blow in winter,
distant noise caressing moon,
calling pack to gather poetry
in worlds of river, flowing spirit.
Soul of fur, circle round me,
in wiser wave of rustic embrace,
Maine’s lost face,
syllabic alpha, panting education,
you are huntress,
a wilder creature holding secret,
to bare my witness in feeble manifestation,
raising limb in wistful progress
to know its place in herd of hunted.
Invite me now to join your following,
crying lunar lungs to open,
for I am grateful line of star shine,
when night is right
to grow in wisdom,
this silver solitude, exploding,
to feed this ache of earth eroding.
© Kaibab at Allpoetry http://allpoetry.com/kaibab
Knowing A Kaibab’s Keening
Creative spirits conceived of shooting stars,
womb-taught language of this earth
and music of words, phrases, stanzas;
his cells remembered hearing
heavenly verses and images
strung on lines that leaned onto each other
like best friends, like lovers, like soul mates’
breaths that were layered upon him before he breeched
waves of unqualified time between there and earth.
There is sunlight in his poetry; a greening of thoughts
that spring from near-dead trees that lean hard
towards heaven and wait for a dew-drop of his design
to soften her tough skin.
There are luminaries on dark nights;
pinpricks of hope, scattered on black velvet
provoking a poem of passion about how moon-sighs
move the earth…and me.
Sands of desert are shaped into lines of beauty;
olive oil, honey and slow wine of his study
waken taste buds for truth and testaments.
I am a forest, a plain, a rolling hill of refinement
when riding a frenzy of his writing about how lovely
a billowing dust storm can be when taken to task
by his pen that journeys a thousand thousand nights
to reach that exact moment when what is shaped
In his mind is scrolled to its end line.
He is sound of water; lake, stream, river,
ocean lapping at salient shores for new ways
to define themselves at his tutelage.
Oh, Kaibab, what wisdom flows from your fingertips
is but a drop in seas of silent coaching
Creator bent your hand to. We are your students,
your mentors, your friends, who hang on to your thoughts
as if they were the last lines attached to heaven ;
the very strands of light that nourish us
and cause us to put our own insignificant etchings
at your feet and ask that you consider them
poor as they are, as tokens of our gratitude
for teaching us the sounds of things we may have missed
while scratching our thin thoughts on tarnished paper.
©Carol Desjarlais
Real Poet
Staring at a page, blank of all except the word “TITLE”
and that meticulous calligraphy my best writing in weeks,
I try to find words in this perfect square, four walls
lined ceiling to floor with shelves filled with books
of poems, and books about poems, and books about what the really smart people
think about poets and poems.
Time taunts, but the sheet stares back at me, more blank
than that lonely feeling I get anymore, each time I hear
a hymn or a church bell toll; burns hotter than hands reaching in
to sneak out a piece of Sunday roast before supper.
Hands have closed calloused around my pen. Poet eyes
are long too dim to search out that face–
the visage that first shoved words into my soul
until it was so full up that fingers ached from squeezing
them out again–the face of the scrawny little Blackfoot girl, so bent
on tasting mud through every pore, that essence matted into her hair in clumps
as she rolled about in the bank of Otatso Creek,
daring Old Chief Mountain to lean further down to scold her poem,
knowing by his sloping grin he never would.
Page still empty,
the sun resurrects and glares through my library
blinds; settles again like dust on Eliot’s The Waste Land,
catalogued there, by some gross mistake, upon the shelf of books
with my name on the spine, behind an ornately framed
piece of paper also bearing my name, deeding the shelf
to me.
In that moment, I realize, the girl is now grown
and has my words tied up loosely in an old red bandanna
dangling out of her back pocket. But at least I know
she is still running–letting them slip out on the wind
and never, ever trading them for deadlines of a publisher.
©ten thousand cicadas http://allpoetry.com/ten%20thousand%20cicadas
Bruised But Bent To Paper ©Carol Desjarlais
While real poets were pouring pale-skinned sonnets
over smooth paper, I was skinning my brown knees
on my mother’s prayers. While they wrote
long letters to wise professors, and waited for replies,
I was rolling in green grass, watching clouds
take flying lazy leaps off Old Chief Mountain.
When their fingers were stained with ink,
mine were busy molding clay in half-dry river banks.
I was transcribing songs of birds while they practiced
perfecting their calligraphy. I lay sweating in shadows
of leaves, trying to see if God was peering through
woven branches and they were whittling words
to thrum of church hymns. Diverted passions pulsed
like water surged from a fresh spring, on my father’s ranch,
and phrases muddied my body as if I had rolled in them.
They drank from fountains of bookish breasts
their mothers placed before them like a fine Sunday meal.
They weakened in glare of God’s staring face,
while I grew strong and tan and tendered
by running through sprinklers on Sunday’s lawn.
I may never be a real poet, but I know what poetry feels like
when it skates on a pond. I know how a fine poem,
about horse sweat and cow manure, can fling me
into orgasmic ecstasy in remembrance of a rancher I loved.
I can wake in dark night and pen a poem about how it sounds
when a house breathes about death lying next door.
I can tell you, I would rather die, myself, than trade
a beating for a violin bow when my song might just be lovelier
because I know how to print bruises on paper.
He has gone to his woods;
a quest for truth that cannot be found
in city’s round and round
it takes a crooked walk and brush
of reaching branches that caress,
or sting, to find such authenticity
and form for such language
that only bards can access.
He has gone to the woods;
where ancients dance in delight
at his approach: there wait is longer
than our wait for his return,
down the mountain, down the rutted trail,
down his well-worn path
carrying out his renewed strength,
like scroll, like tablet, like a cleansed warrior
crawling out from sweat,
to command such audience that knows
the sacred tick of tongue and pen.
He has gone to the woods;
to speak for us, to plead, to pray
for those of us who can not walk ourselves,
nor decipher precise psalms,
nor, perhaps, be worthy of such climb
and so we wait, like hungry children, on curbs,
on couches, at the cusp of clouded screens
for his return; a more refined man, comes,
in ways the world has no babble to explain.
He has gone to the woods.
For Richard Doiron http://www.spiritsinpeace.com/
I know a Kaibab where Paiutes pummeled ground
with their paints, soft soled ponies with hand of warrior
on their shoulders. Creation’s canvas canyon
whispers rise to remembering ear as ancient echoes
from beneath hushed skirt and ponderosa’s hem,
there came a son with language scrolling river rush of words
that winged on feather-sharp slope of colored stone
drawn up like mist to rainbow make
an arch of hope on further lands
where dry lips crack and breasty mounds
slump in wait for such recompense
as slurries from a prism’d sky.
Horse-sweat climb and shadowed lace on journeys taken,
metronome drop of hooves to mark the meter
of soliloquy formed like gem deposit in mind of man
soft-handing reins so path is purchased by holy fate;
sight and sound, of revelation’s ancestral hum
that makes sense to this man’s gathering
of the holy and the harbored that is unearthed
to be spread out on buckskin plied
by patient scraping of his hunter’s trove.
Poetry is revealed through cleared sight, and by means
of sifting through the common and the clumped is separated
from its overlooked commonness
to become testaments, even treasures, when handed to us
who wait for Moses who know what path to take,
what bush to sit beside, what exact phrases we have need to know.
From spectacular rim of canyon’s drop, the Phoenix rises
with wisdom clung between its claws; not commandments, rifling
in press and push of wingspan, but poetry to feed a multitude
of dry-mouthed protégées who wish for ways to embellish
the changes in geography through soulful rearrangement of senses.
©Carol Desjarlais
Written as tribute to an amazing poet
Kaibab Plateau’s meadows and forests of dense ponderosa pine and mixed conifer to the brink of the spectacular north rim of the Grand Canyon, 1,000 feet higher than the south rim. Kaibab” as the Paiute Indians called it.