IMUNURI Prompt: Dirt Glory

When Her Activism Goes Blind~ for K.N.

Trauma  brings on the fervor of belief
Insidious virus of an ideal
Looking over her shoulder
Hiding her core, unbearable shyness
The condition of shame
Driven to do the good that will bring her 
Some paltry imitation of Fatherly love
Her reward for the stalwart habit of turning away 
From genuine touch 

Preferring the practice 
Of cunning and slippery skills
Masked betrayals that bring glory
Among the cheering tribe 
Riding the momentum of  One True Cause
Powering the hopeful back and forths across
A Common  human fear :
The terror of not belonging.   

All Adds Upwards

Hear now: musicians transcend maya 
 (the illusion of self we each have).

An orchestra gathers its mana,

and song rises from the nascent hive.

Harmony: honey of the many.

To fuse in unison is to live.

To lose oneself is life’s best honey,

oozing into a pool from a line

of woven sweet. The whole great world hones

its taste on this music. It’s zany:

the swarm of cells inside a bee’s bones,

the million details that make a home,

all your memories dropped from boxes—

from mess, a lucid lyric will come,

the chaos looped and closed in a link,

fit into a geometric comb,

the sweet cellular soul of a womb.

Belly Brain~for Greg Sarris

Some say if you you adopt a sitting place in nature / say by a creek / and visit it regularly / alone and in silence  

A first note may be offered to you / on any random inhalation  
( easily missed )
The re-routed red signalling of rock and moving water store the ancestral Holdings of the spot
Some say songs are embedded there for preservation / bestowed on a few
And only the most patient listeners of voices once eroded and damned.  Now Testifying.
Revealing a * "storied landscape.''

Some say that chapters are held in layers of soil
Parables buried in sand silt and clay
Indigenous memory ( when we were all indigenous )
Of story-song that comes from the intrinsic 
Inclusiveness of the "particular place" / the "every place" in all directions.

Some say our deep listening will act like a fertile Delta of reclamation
Present like the presence that redeems it's past / the future that sees itself  Unborn
The thrum of live elemental tapestries
Knotted to the well-being of individual~ family~ tribe.

 * "storied landscape": a term used by Greg Sarris, Chief of the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria in response to my inquiry about an area of Miwok land in West Marin.

Hum

Hum

300 yards from shore

 atop my board

a swarm of bees suddenly

 surrounds me

I am that flower

 that branch

queen alights upon

thousands of workers tend her beside

We hum above ocean’s waves

I dare not move less

 I spill sweet honey

  into salted waters.

Prompt: Swarm

What do the poems (lived or written in honeycomb even) of collective entities sound like? Cloud... Bee Swarm... Ant Colony... Devic Oversouls of Plant Species. 

Polyphonic synchronies or singular harmonic? 

Write a poem sparked by storm, swarm, hill, deva.


Four tags: poem, swarm, epic-earth, <poet's moniker>
 
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...


Image: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons, Jjor, 2009

dirt weather (terra gaudium)

tickle the roots

shoestring massive

how can the walker relate to the toedeep rooted

treefolk whose span is mirrored

at the deep top of earth?

stretching to the sky of dirt

inverted persevering

worm clouds, slug rain

tempests of fungal alliance

let’s steady this earth climate

that girds us firmly in terra gaudium

The Hazards of Diving

I know a man who dives for abalone.
He tells me of its hazards,
how it's possible to dive too deep,
remain too long in the seductive dark
like a gambler who can't break
from the spinning roulette wheel
because he feels too lucky.
Depleted of oxygen, a diver's brain
might mistake up for down, down for up
and with impaired judgement come to distrust
his own exhaled bubbles' ascension
and choose rather to swim down
in search of mermaids
like the poor fool who tosses
his life savings on the gambling table
in order to win back his Lexus.
Those few who've survived
affirm the ecstacy
of confusing down for up
loss for gain
dark for light
the mermaid's embrace.

In Tide

A day

when the wave

broke beneath the fog

& when staying aboard meant

sunlight felt (close to shore)

& golden hills seen adrift in cloud

& salt the taste on skin & tongue.

Up was moving fast past

Down was moving wet ahead

In between me & my board

licking both

in tide out tide

inside outside

up to down from

foam into blue on white

curled together,

toes grip wood & eyes wide open

hands spread wide

signal safe at last...

following the water butterfly

i.
i know i weave like a sauced friend under one flickering light late at night
more like a spirit-led jerked inebriate than a whimsical caper
if my life path could become like the cartoon paths of infants, clarified, looped,
a kind of skipping cursive
spelling out words over life terrains, "peace" "joy" "wonder"
or what my friend says are the three prayers we need: "please" "thank you" "wow"

ii.
if i am following the water
butterfly
of synchronicities,
                        capricious clarities,
read from life's braille
by someone still learning
and unable to distinguish sometimes
the nubs of my digit tips, fingerprint terrains
and the universe's particular guidance
divined from ripples in happenstance
the poetry of moment's juxtaposition
a kind of dada ditty sensed by spirit fingers








iii.
wanting to be more like the still body of the mariposa
wings slowly liftfloat liftfloat while stillpausepeaced
on the open flowershowers of rainbow garden
(goldcrimson blanketflower, lavender scabiosa, silver of wormwood quilted by mints)
during the festival of first fruits

iv.
i know i told you i'd always be here
near the dark moon, a sentinel to peace
but lately my limbs fly loose, whether from encounters
with hurtling metal (never a good moment for the water butterfly)
or just because grief has made them slack, yawning,
unable to shutter to a close, just a long loose rolling meander
of possibilities
mind and muscle slackjawloose
somewhat like the queens who fly the cylon starships
muttering poemwords in an endless cadence
following stars

v.
i know i told you i'd always be present
to this immense incarnational beauty
but just now, after keeping on receiving the tower card,
part of me curls in, defended, unsure
when the next cloud will fall to earth
and also, opening up in a wide expanse
as if the land folded out flat and i'm a river
slacksun days of flattening out
part of me, now that you're dead and passed
over to whatever waits
i think i've learned it's safer to stay open even
when the sky falls, opening out, lazy almost in trusting
defying fear with leisure, river meander a kind of
statement of faith

vi.
past the rats capering near the compost
past the slight overtone of rot in the humid still air of the gloaming
(when what i'd rather include in this poem would be something more suffused
with rose scent or the night scented jasmine, evening primrose, honeysuckle -
if i promise i'll make a scent garden for you in this amazing space of
possibility, will you come and visit, or still stay as far as the ring nebula
finding you like finding a telescope, scanning sky, spotting the miracle
beauty presences through long eye pieces because you've become space itself)

vii.
past all that is known and unknown, all that is clear and all that is fuzzed
fused in mystery, past all that starlight, even the bucket of spilled milk
our bright sun beacons within, a spot of crystal on the velvet
galaxy fabric glittering with spilt glitter bottles
furled and unfurled
past the starts and the stops, the breaths and the emptiness,
the quivering humid night air rushing in from the cloud cloaked west
past all the flavors ever touching our tongues in these long sun days of
every earth spin this body will suck air past all that

see us still, lift float liftfloat, following (being) the water butterfly