happy labor day . . .

When I was just a little thing
I used to love parades.
With banners, bands, red balloons,
and maybe lemonade.
When I came home one May Day,
my neighbour’s father said,
“Them marchers is all commies.
Tell me kid, are you a Red?”

Well I didn’t know just what he meant-
my hair back then was brown.
Our house was plain red brick-
like most others in the town.
So I went and asked my momma
why our neighbour called me red.
My mummy took me on her knee
and this is what she said,

“Well ya ain’t done nothing
if ya ain’t been called a Red.
If you marched or agitated,
then you’re bound to hear it said.
So you might as well ignore it
or love the word instead.
Cuz ya ain’t been doing nothing
if ya ain’t been called a Red.”

When I was growing up,
had my troubles I suppose.
When someone took exception
to my face or to my clothes.
Or tried to cheat me on the job
or hit me on the head.
When I organized to fight back,
why the stinkers called me Red

But ya ain’t done nothing
if ya ain’t been called a Red
if you marched or agitated,
then you’re bound to hear it said.
So you might as well ignore it
or love the word instead.
Cuz ya ain’t been doing nothing
if ya ain’t been called a Red.

When I was living on my own,
one apartment that I had.
Had a lousy rotten landlord
Let me tell you he was bad.
But when he tried to throw me out,
I rubbed my hands and said,
“You haven’t seen a struggle
if you haven’t fought a Red!”

And ya ain’t done nothing
if ya ain’t been called a Red.
If you marched or agitated,
then you’re bound to hear it said.
So you might as well ignore it
or love the word instead.
Cuz ya ain’t been doing nothing
if ya ain’t been called a Red.

yes, we fight for bread . . . we fight for roses, too . . .

yes . . . we want bread . . . and yes, we want roses, too . . .

song and singer saving the seventies . . .

It's Not the Uke Blues

I was so sad and forlorn I was going to sing the blues.
So I pulled out my Ukelele and tried to pay my dues.
I pulled up a few minor chords just because.
But...then ...what I didn't know was...

You can't play the blues on a Ukelele.
No, you cannot play the blues on a Uke.
You should try a mouth harp, a guitar or even a banjo,
But. you shouldn't play the blues on a Uke.

I mean how can you be sad thinking of Hawaii?
With those palm trees and the ocean all around.
How can the plink tink of a Ukelele.
Do anything but get rid of your frown?

You can't play the blues on a Ukelele.
No, you cannot play the blues on a Uke.
You should try a mouth harp, a guitar or even a banjo,
But. you shouldn't play the blues on a Uke.

Well Jake Shimakaro plays “while my guitar gently weeps”
But he's known for doing the Ukelele impossible.
Picking up and singing with my Uke makes me sappy.
I suddenly forget all the reasons to be unhappy.

You can't play the blues on a Ukelele.
No, you cannot play the blues on a Uke.
You should try a mouth harp, a guitar or even a banjo,
But. you shouldn't play the blues on a Uke.

Geneva Fry
used with permission

soaked in wine . . .

I'll admit that I enjoy a myriad of things soaked in wine . . . certainly home-cooked dark breads of almost any kind, the crust of Italian bread while eating pasta and a good tomato sauce (or probably a white sauce as well), and of course, the finger-tips of my beloved . . . but this was new to me until I saw it in Anna Nicholas' book Kitchen Garden which A. and I both enjoy browsing while waiting (in the kitchen) for something to reach the correct temperature:

Fennel seeds when soaked in wine
Revitalize a heart that love makes pine.

Ecole de Salerne,1500

Joseph Priestly and mouse poem

He was just an ordinary mouse, nothing special. He lived, very briefly, 237 years ago, in the laboratory of a great chemist, Joseph Priestley. Here he sits, in his cage.

OH! hear a pensive captive's prayer,
For liberty that sighs ;
And never let thine heart be shut
Against the prisoner's cries.

For here forlorn and sad I sit,
Within the wiry grate ;
And tremble at th' approaching morn,
Which brings impending fate.

If e'er thy breast with freedom glow'd,
And spurn'd a tyrant's chain,
Let not thy strong oppressive force
A free-born mouse detain.

Oh ! do not stain with guiltless blood
Thy hospitable hearth ;
Nor triumph that thy wiles betray'd
A prize so little worth.

The scatter'd gleanings of a feast
My scanty meals supply ;
But if thine unrelenting heart
That slender boon deny,

The chearful light, the vital air,
Are blessings widely given ;
Let nature's commoners enjoy
The common gifts of heaven.

The well taught philosophic mind
To all compassion gives ;
Casts round the world an equal eye,
And feels for all that lives.

If mind, as ancient sages taught,
A never dying flame,
Still shifts thro' matter's varying forms,
In every form the same,

Beware, lest in the worm you crush
A brother's soul you find ;
And tremble lest thy luckless hand
Dislodge a kindred mind.

Or, if this transient gleam of day
Be all of life we share,
Let pity plead within thy breast,
That little all to spare.

So may thy hospitable board
With health and peace be crown'd ;
And every charm of heartfelt ease
Beneath thy roof be found.

So when unseen destruction lurks,
Which men like mice may share,
May some kind angel clear thy path,
And break the hidden snare.

my life has been the poem . . .

My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.

by Henry David Thoreau

cornbread and beans . . .

This world, with all its rooms, is my only home.
No one leaves without returning.

We always meet again, so oil the front-porch swing;
prepare the cornbread and beans.

But keep it simple - no flagons of champagne.
No lengthy discourses, no long sighs of farewell.

No need to come in out of the sunshine and rain
until we sit down to the cornbread and beans.

Bill K. Boydstun
used with permission

Independence Day Service

By invitation, I read (actually sang some of the lines) this "untitled" sonnet of e.e. cummings at an Independence Day celebration at the Unitarian Fellowship of Houston yesterday. I did not actually read the last line of the poem but instead drank from a glass of water and departed the pulpit.

"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than those heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

e.e. cummings
used without permission

And again from the folder marked "drafts"

Poem for Andrea

Of all the dreams I've chased --
Those caught and those missed --
You're the only one I sought more than once.
The only time I wanted a second chance:

Roses bloom again after an early freeze;
Peaches sometimes grow on stubborn trees.

bkb
used with permission

Again from the folder marked "drafts"

Poem

A woman stands at a window looking out.
The window measures from her middle thigh
to six inches above her head.
The frame's width is four times the width of her body.
She is about to turn to her right, but has not moved.
Is there a frown?

Is she about to turn to her right?
She frowns.

Or maybe she should merely sigh
and lean against the white frame of the curtain-less window.

bkb
used with permission

From the folder marked "drafts"

Der Schmetterling

Angular,
yet grace so unexpected
I wince at the raw,
randy beauty of such symmetry:

Her dance is an invasion of sorts
like an assault on Guadalacanal,
the total commitment
but there is no loss here.
Quark to quark,
she slices to the quick.

There is not so much surrender
to such an assault
as a dawning -
a primordial sun
bursting upon a new day
filled with colors
as subtle as a gauguin landscape.
The sky filling
with a rainbow of moons
waxing
strutting -
a pungent
earthy air,
the mixed metaphors
of horny bare feet
and the lusty lemony nectars of venus.

bkb
used with permission

My Grandfather Ben

The American Immigration Council announced the winner of its
14th Annual Creative Writing Contest:

From China sailed my Grandfather Ben.
He came to America when he was four plus ten.
His Guangzhou village was small and poor
And he helped his mother with farming chores.
Every morning he gathered bits of firewood
And drew water from the well as much as he could.
From morning to night he slaved like an ox.
But it was never enough to fill the rice box.
So his parents said, "You'd better leave home
And go to America where you can roam".
Until you find a great place of your own.
America, Gold Mountain, is the place to go
Big and wide, and high and low.
Everything is yes, and there are never any nos.

The complete poem is on their website here. It is well worth the read!

April is the coolest month

Blustery dawn breeze
Andrea's cinnamon coffee
Yellow Iris and yawning sun

bkb
used with permission

Sometimes,

I can almost grasp what it may be like to fly like a crow.

spring and all (again)

April's porous earth,
fecund, awaits the amorous probe
of sprouting root.

bkb
used with permission

俳句

inside the egg a pond;
its shell
a continuous shore.




damp rain soaked soil,
a pine-cone spits
a tree into the wind.





wearing top-hats of damp mud,
mushrooms
assemble in a solemn circle.


Truett Hilliard
used with permission

To Li Po from Tu Fu

Milord, how beautifully you write!
May I sleep with you tonight?
Till I flag, or when thou wilt,
we'll roll up, drunken in one quilt.

In our poems we forbear
to write of kleenex or long hair
or how the one may fuck the other.
We're serious artists, aren't we, brother?

In our poems, oceans heave
like our stomachs, when we leave
late at night the 14th bar,
I your meteor, you, my star.

When autumn comes, like thistledown
we'll still be floating thru the town,
wildly singing in the haze,
I, past saving, you, past praise.

Who wrote this? Carolyn Kizer?
used with no permission

The Rapture

The net is down now
that kept them one or two
to a side.
They flow between the two poles,
ragged with assurance,
and mingle
in a tattered circle:
they expect clowns and lions,
a ringmaster to entertain them.
But there are no dancing bears
and the juggling is crude.
The hoopaballoo is gone.

bkb
used with permission

Two Poems - Winter 1973

For My Wife
Her body is balloon big, huffed
and puffed and growing huge.
Taut with sharing, it protrudes
into her affairs. Awkward, she is
more lovely than the long-legged crane
whose flight she admires. Her tears
are quicker now, her laugh more solemn.
For all of that, she moves
in ways a balloon moves:
a ballet of expectation.


Pairs
She sits ragged
with new maternity,
with a child at her breast,
and those four eyes
share secrets
that a father's do not.

It is a da-da grace
of housecoat and blanket,
mouth and breast:
a total communion
that invites no congregation.

Oh, I am there,
at the table with spoon and fork,
my usual self, but fragmented
by all that hunger,
that grace,
that ragtag purpose.

bkb
used with permission

Diamondback

Down the back steps -
warned by the cadence of his tail
I retreat
then reappear
through the door
jerkily, an imperfect harbinger

I measure time down a smooth barrel

an infinity
of brotherhood between us
even after
there is nothing more
than shattered rubies
and grisled diamonds
scattered
among blades of grass.

bkb
used with permission

Stevens' Picasso

Did you learn this in school,
this blue on blue
of blindness and guitar,

or was it what you saw
bent through your eyes:
that jangled empty sky

of fancy: that blue note
of light below
the shadow of the truth,

and was it always new,
intentional,
bending the strings to fill

our dreams with things that truly are
when played upon your blue guitar?

bkb
used with permission

Sometimes, Wandering

Sometimes, wandering before dawn,
my curtains drawn against the moon,
I have bumped into you
in the long grey hall leading from my bedroom.
You stand huddled into the wall
scribbling in your yellow notebook
as though that could save you.
I wonder that you never warned us,
or was it so enormous
that I in my jerky male youthfulness never saw?
But, Love, your poetry was crude -
as your death:
you were never Sylvia Plath.
When they found you - waterlogged, nude -
that gaping hole through your head -
your parents were embarrased,
prayed loudly for your poor lost soul.
I was not so bold. Oh, I wept,
at home, at night, alone.
I slept before and after,
and only sometimes, wandering,
do I remember you at all.
Why have you not let go?
Why do you huddle and scribble
at night in my long empty hall?
Do you improve your verse?
Do they let you do that?
Sometimes, on dark mornings, I hear you in the hall -
so go to you, but you, preceptor of silence,
busy, bent to your task, ignore me.
Standing over you there in the hall,
paternal and guilty, I wonder that we never guessed
that such a fragile existence
must end abruptly.

bkb
used with permission

Wind Worder
(homage to Theodore Roethke)

Sweet Sir,
master of the minimal,
to meet upon a leaf,
make tea from dew,

talk for days - you talking,
me listening finally -
not as though you were still teaching,
but mere

ly life
upon a leaf,
beneath a white stone:
a moldy earth that holds it all,

heals it all -
I, as pilgrim,
prepared for little - or much,
circling that pale stone,

you, a part of the white air,
the wormy earth,
giving,
explaining over tea

the humdrum
necessary existence - the sufficiency -
the becoming -
life

upon a yellow leaf
beneath a white stone.

bkb
used with permission

On Hearing Belatedly of a Friend's Death

for Ruth Weisner

We grab death at awkward moments,
Friends a thousand miles away:
Pictures and old poems in the mail,
A posthumous volume,
Bitter sweet in its delay.

Byron's Grotto, Portovenere,
An Italian Summer,
8 August 1979,
A clipped clear photograph -
You, brown dress, brown skin, demure.

A heap of broken images,
Bits and bits of desultory things:
February 19, 1981,
Your shadow in the morning,
In the evening, the rush of wings.

bkb
used with permission

Copy of a Copy

Trapped dust on a spider's web:
far northern corner of a woodshed,
I am aware of myself aware:
behind myself I see me stare
at caught dust on a spider's web.

I craft the word intuitively,
mimic madly what I see as me:
bold gift of a balding friar,
I am a universal liar
pretending dust on a spider's web.

Inside a world looking out
I know I know but know to doubt:
self-consciously I touch your face
and smile - such pursuit of grace
as patterns dust on a spider's web.

bkb
used with permission

The Geography of a Poet's Heart

There is a well-worth-reading interview in the Vol. 15 , No. 1 edition of the Raven Chronicles of Peter Ludwin, mostly regarding his book, A Guest In All Your Houses by Christopher J. Jarmick.