I posted this on Patreon earlier, and realize I hadn’t managed to post it here!

Community Altar Sept 2017

This month’s community altar focuses on the idea of harvest, being September and all.
The centerpiece is a line art drawing of a sheaf of wheat, on which I wrote my wishes for us all to harvest this year: peace, abundance, health, love, kindness, joy, and equality. As I colored the art (with my trusty Stabilo pencils), I meditated on these manifesting for us all.

I had hoped to decorate the altar with my personal harvest from my yard, but the heat wave over Labor Day weekend destroyed most of my plants. (The weeds are fine, thank you.) I did manage to salvage a bit of the Spanish lavender, which you can see more clearly in this photo:

Community Altar Sept 2017 Close Up

I’ve also uploaded the line art file, if you are so inclined to do something similar for your personal altar.

Wishing you all a joyful harvest of that which feeds your soul!

Madrid
~ Pai Wei
Translated from Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth and Chung Ling

From “The Penguin Book of Women Poets”: Pai Wei, ‘white fern’, is the pseudonym of Huang Su-ju, who was born in Hunan and as a young girl ran away to avoid an arranged marriage. In the twenties she went to Japan to study and took the poet Yang Sao as her lover. She became a Communist and now lives in the People’s Republic.

She wrote this poem during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Given the current situation with Catalonia, I worry that this poem may become relevant again. I hope with all my being that it does not.

Madrid—
Blood drops, drip, drop, from the child in your arms.
And Spain is kept awake all night
By this novel apparition
That frightens the old-time militants.
You are the splendid future,
The ruthless clean sweep,
That pulls the puppet,
Dragging his black shadow,
Marching towards you from Morocco.

You are a woman in childbirth,
Threatened with puerperal disasters,
Who struggles to protect your newborn baby.
I am afraid that your labor
Will have bled you past saving—
Your labour which has exceeded that of St Mary.

Lines for a Hard Time
~ Gena Ford
There is no website or even a Wikipedia entry for Ms. Ford. If you are aware of one, please let me know.

First published in May 1967, this poem is, sadly, still relevant.

Evil does not go always
by dark ways. On any hot
summer day, cleanshaven
it may stride across
a public place and head
purposefully for high
vantagepoints.
What whisper
hisses in the inner ear

take cover? Ah, and then
the boy is dead, others dead
or dying, and the evil
laps out in bits of hot
lead across the nervepools
of the nation.

We are sick
in our littered streets
and high places. Worms twist
in our labyrinthine skulls.
We are frightened by bland
facades.
The losses are always
personal. A phone, rings;
a father becomes less than
the sum of his grief. Could we
say better than his own words,
And we will die as well . . .
Spiral upward into All Love?
Good man, good grieving man,
all men have lived in evil
times, though few have known it
absolutely. We persist.
We love ourselves as often
as we can. And send our sons
to walk out in open day.

You Opened a Door
~ Marianna Fiore

I don’t know to say why,
my complete friend,
you have opened a door
in the air
of my seclusion,
nor why you make me live
these days
with magnetic joy,
with a fullness
lucid and true.
Perhaps because
you have lips of amaranth
and fingers of hawthorn,
because you have peaches
on your skin and honey
in your blood
or roses for hair.
I only know
that this April
bringes excessive gifts
of vast dawns
and sleepless nights,
heaps up earth, fire and water
and bestows lindens
overflowing with
an intense perfume.
I should like
you to receive
not only flowers
from me,
but have for your own
plants with roots and fruit.
I beg you make me stay
in the needles
of your fantasy,
receive me
in the field of fire,
in the red clamor
of peace and panic
and fill me
with beauty and frenzy:
I am the bee
of your dimension.

Where We Are
~ Gerald Locklin

i envy those
who live in two places:
new york, say, and london;
wales and spain;
l.a. and paris;
hawaii and switzerland.

there is always the anticipation
of the change, the chance that what is wrong
is the result of where you are. i have
always loved both the freshness of
arriving and the relief of leaving. with
two homes every move would be a homecoming.
i am not even considering the weather, hot
or cold, dry or wet: i am talking about hope.