Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Prompt: Radix


An ongoing series of earth-related prompts as part of an Imunuri experiment to dwell repeatedly on a theme and its riffs, and/or the possible poetry challenge, bit by bit, of producing an epic or body of poems...


Mango tree roots, image from Quickiwiki
As you may know, the root of radical is radix/root. Plumb the depths in this week's poem, write from your toes, from your beet roots, from the deep recesses from which all life springs. Be like the maple which has roots down as far as its branches rise up. Some plants mostly reproduce by root rather than fruit. Root the roots. How are your roots springing up? How is earth sourcing your sources? What is radical in you, in us? How are we sourced from earthdepth? What promise groundswells below our surface?

Tags: radix, poem, <moniker>, epic-earth

from the mother trunk, i sing hoo hoo hoo

[performed at a doctoral graduation with ~400 folks, simultaneous chants each inspired by earth patterns ]


from the mother trunk, i sing hoo hoo hoo


we have given     us      the strength


carry it deep / carry it deep / carry it deep


may the river of life flow in you


whirl and dance; shake it / whirl & dance; shake it


bless bless bless         bless bless bless        

Monday, June 17, 2013

(Tree Speech)

Whh-- whh-- whh-- is a rhythm.
Whhhhhh------ is a drone of all things.
A singleness is the same
as the everything. Stretching.
A braiding stream. A tremble.

Pattern. A meandering.
Bubbles in capillaries
roll by sunning and raining.
Such outerness grown between
endless sky, bark and serum.

Whh-- whh-- whh-- the harmony!
Oldest up. Tenderest down.
Among the flitting beings.
They go heavier by pound
than most knots in the greening.

Apparitions. Faces. Crowd.
Petals on a wet black bough.

Monday, June 10, 2013

50 Steps to Thicket


There stirs an edge where bindings,
something so innocuous, falter
that the relief of stepping beyond
surprises and stuns in the gentling

The living cascading with every
open space, wallow, and weft
nothing here confines, demarcates
except where hand has led

What something has brought me 
to this place, the thicket,
measure as I will at times 
the distance that now dissolves

Tremulous whatever that was
that stalled and pressed so
firm as hardened heart
neatly savaging my own wild

It is as if I have traveled 100
miles to arrive at this place
(not just 50 and counting steps)
and in no time bowering down

This less than tangle more than
epiphany surmounts the ease 
of every confounded convenience
siphoning us to slumber in our ways

 


Prompt: Treespeech

An ongoing series of earth-related prompts as part of an Imunuri experiment to dwell repeatedly on a theme and its riffs, and/or the possible poetry challenge, bit by bit, of producing an epic or body of poems...

Freespeech. Threespeech. TREESPEECH. 
An Ent tree-being from Lord of the Rings

It's not just the Ents who know how to talk. Read this article on W-waves from trees and write a poem of treespeech. Get yourself hither ear-to-trunk to listen in and scribe for the your local arboreal wonder.

Extra credit: Are the fungal symbionts serving as a communications network broadcasting treespeech?


Bonus -  Explore: Do trees favor certain poem forms?

Tags: treespeech, poem, <yourmoniker>, epic-earth

Related link:  Simard, Suzanne. (2011). Do trees communicate? [Online video]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8V0IJ11CoE&feature=share

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Moving Parts

Someone welds a pipe on a metal stand
between a highway and a granite cliff.
Pull over and put your eye to the end
of the pipe. There. Can’t you see the profile
of Perry Mason? His eye, the square chin?

Years pass as life on earth and your own life
move you into the digital city.
Here any pipe you looked through would be filled
with straight edges, themselves celebrities.
So you start to keep rectangles on hand,

small totems of faces and vertices—
everyone has at least one, like passwords.
Everyone grows to have many, like teeth.
I climbed Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower
so my pulse testifies that the land lifts,

and from this view, the low parts look like swords
raised by a phalanx issuing a roar.


Tuesday, June 4, 2013

mount tabor (a land curve poem)

CALDERA
the wisdom seeds held in 
geotechnical kernels until a
future plume of humanatural blossoming
can funnel the explosions of creative
dense symbolic unfurling like biocultural
popcorn and maybe our future kin and their
mutualized animal plant fungal allies can remember
patterns of connection (kin-action) to thrive in copresencing
delight
the fire at the belly of the mountain a taproot to earth
being earth