Wounded

Jade  East ( dresses so spiffy)

&

Dew West (slippery when wet)

     Wound up together

laid up

under wraps

& restraints

in St. James Infirmary

( a pastel framed on the ward wall

displays a water tower riddled

w/bullet holes

pouring blood out into a watering can on wheels)

T.V ever on channel 2

anti-bodies flow through tubes into both characters,

trying to quell big diseases

but the medicine of man

is not strong enough

to dress Jade down

nor dry Dew West out

nor stop the screams along  hospital halls

nor still the sirens wail

as remote ( like 12 thousand miles away)

CONTROLLED

   WEAPONED

       DRONES

circle villages

hunting for bad guys ( who pray five times daily)

Update, Catching Up, Catching Down, Downdate

What is a poem and not a poem? I'd say life as it unfolds and furls. 
I've been absent from posting of late. What has corresponded with
this time is a non-working computer. Well, it's now working and
logging in poetry has returned with it. I just posted a poem on my 
blog site, Contemplative Fire, only to realize it was a poem from 
the Meander prompt from back in July:

It's called Laid Open ~ http://wp.me/pWMwh-hW

Please take a read, if you wish and perhaps some other prompts

will come through, bleed through, show up into the current flows. 

Nice to be back,
Janice

Queron to Morpheus

!

Glass

gardens!

Morpheus

dreamed of Eden,

arose in Shiraz—

Figs that ripened ripen,

and each branch listens—I swear!

Every iota, a silken

ear blooming, choosing—daring to hear

these praises and promises all at once!

Sing the gardens of earth lush beyond compare

where tallest blues meet tiniest burrs to reveal

the moments in a lifetime of pain when the barrows

cradle your cells—and even in letting go you may see

those unreachable places—through moaning birth pains—reached again.

The clowns, saints, doctors, waters and figs you take within you deeply—

they heal you by weaving you tight into the whole—the great tapestry.

***
Sonnets to Orpheus
by Rainier Maria Rilke translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

Sing, my heart, the gardens you never walked,
like gardens sealed in glass balls, unreachable.

Sing the waters and roses of Isfahan and Shiraz;

praise them, lush beyond compare.

Swear, my heart, that you will never give them up.

That the figs they ripened ripened for you.

That you could tell by its fragrance

each blossoming branch.

Don’t imagine you could ever let them go

once they made the daring choice: to be!

Like a silken thread, you entered the weaving.

whatever image you take within you deeply,

even for a moment in a lifetime of pain,

see how it reveals the whole — the great tapestry.

***

This plantzilla poem is an attempt to cross-fertilize Rilke's translated poem into the queron form with additions of my own experience from meditation and journey spaces. 

Song of Earth Refulgent

(Plantzilla poem form: Scooter's "plants songs of earth arise" intermixed with Whitman's "Song of the Rolling Earth")

because we are all one being,

A song of the rolling earth, and of words according,

as we are all one being,

Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?
those curves, angles, dots?
No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the ground

are hummingbirds mitochondria, brimming with life,

They are in the air, they are in you.

we are layers and heaps of life on life making new living

The workmanship of souls is by those inaudible words of the earth,

these organza and burgundy velvet layers of life on life, like flowing living altars

Amelioration is one of the earth's words,

piled high with the most exquisitely beautiful variety of things

The earth neither lags nor hastens,
It has all attributes, growths, effects, latent in itself from the jump,

…who cannot write every poem as a praise song to creation, to life,

The earth does not withhold, it is generous enough,

to evolution unfurling? How cannot each in breath or out breath also say:

The truths of the earth continually wait, they are not so conceal'd either,

Russian kale, black quinoa, amaranth arms upraising; blue corn

They are calm, subtle, untransmissible by print,

Artemisia, clematis, clary sage sturdy trumpets unfurling tongues of scent,

They are imbued through all things conveying themselves willingly,

Round nasturtiums glutted on soil so rich each leaf is as big as my palm

Conveying a sentiment and invitation, I utter and utter…

We try the attemptless, matchless activity of visualizing Life

I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall
be complete

And arrive at plant and animal snaked two and four legged creatures, winged

Because that is who we are, and that is wonderful

The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains
jagged and broken.

But the Earth, capital E, is so much huger than this, on such a different scale,

I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those
of the earth,

immortal on the scale of billions of years

There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborate the
theory of the earth,

beyond our own droplet of consciousness momentarily

raised from this river of Life.

No politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account,
unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth,
Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude of
the earth.

She/It will persevere after the cleansing waters released by her

            I swear I begin to see love with sweeter spasms than that which
responds love,

to detoxify the current poisons have washed away our buildings, and—sadly—our grandchildren. She-It will persist and thrive beyond our reckoning, though our form of worship and praise has been in places inadequate to the beautiful offerings life has made with us,

It is that which contains itself, which never invites and never refuses.

compañera praisesongs momentarily raised, unfurling, then composting, each species, some untimely quenched by the poisonmaker greed

Of a culture and time too late coming clear to the incompleteness of our vision and the scale of our folly.

All merges toward the presentation of the unspoken meanings of the earth,

But a longer faith breathes me, knowing the freshness of time, of She-It-Earth, four billion years young.

Say on, sayers! sing on, singers!
Delve! mould! pile the words of the earth!
Work on, age after age, nothing is to be lost,
It may have to wait long, but it will certainly come in use,
…You shall be fully glorified in them.

So nimble, lithe, creative.

Of the interminable sisters,
Of the ceaseless cotillions of sisters,
Of the centripetal and centrifugal sisters, the elder and younger sisters,
The beautiful sister we know dances on…

Able to hibernate for 100 million years of rebirth. Able to boil oceans to get a bath.

So many sistren solar systems, galaxies, and universes await.

The beautiful sister we know dances on …

Plantzilla form Poem Notes:

July 10, 2009 Some lines from “plant songs of earth arise” by Scooter Cascadia (previously published, excerpted in Groundswell: We'Moon 2011: Gaian Rhythms for Womyn, p. 34.)

mixed with

Some lines from Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Rolling Earth”, (available here: http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/wwhitman/bl-ww-rollingearth.htm ) which I first or at least re-encountered this week, September 2013

Transplants

Alhambra Alyssum
Field of whited scent
Permeates sweet herbed sunshine
Outside.
(Inside)
Captive tiled mosaic walls contain Elysium.
Spring water flows between both
"Jardin y dolor".

Two gifted redwoods
Rise straight above all
Red bark readily apparent color
In Spain as California .
Imagine seedling surprise
Growth in another continent, climate, collection of neighboring trees
Alone together
Transplants
Sidekicks in arboretum.

Imunuri Prompt: Strange Breeds / Plantzilla

 an illustration by David Catrow for a children's book called Plantzilla. 

 we all hate GMOs. but it's ok to crossbreed poems 
 (hand-bred GMPs? - More like Mendel, less like Monsanto):  
find two poems you already have written, 
 (or write two separate ones),  
 (or find two written by others), 
 each of which has a plant or image from nature in it, and interbreed them:  
 post the composite.  

 tags: plantzilla, epic-earth, poem, <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...  

Dirt Balm

Rock tumbled against rock

produces dirt

(of no mind)

sifts

  onto

   steel plate

               below.

Dirt pile begun,

 to be sacked up

  emptied into

    elephant's pen

 to be sucked up

  inside  that curling long grey trunk,

Dirt

 to be blown out,

  sprayed across that large grey hide

 to keep flies down

 to hide hide from sun

 to cool

 to feel better

ah...dirt on skin

mixed with straw

becomes balm.

Sermon On The Pile

“The morning will begin with an educational orientation.”

Says the farmer,

As she tries to convey the difference 

Between topsoil and compost.

Attempting to answer their bewildered questions.

Becoming visibly surprised when someone asks :

“Is dog poop compostable or should I throw it in the trash?”...

Congregations of people are surrounding their mounds.

Pushing clods through their sifting screens.

Pulling out accidental forks, bits of plastic,

Undigested mystery clumps.

”It's like kneading dough”...

Says another in childlike delight.

Then the man who asked about dog poop surprises again :

”I get it!" He shouts.  "Everything is dissolving and coming apart...becoming a part of...becoming the whole!”

His hands absorbing knowledge from the sweet smelling mix.

The farmer is stunned.

Then it seizes her :

The Sermon On The Pile

+++“Friends ... What you see here is NOT topsoil!   Impossible! /// Hear me Dear Ones! /// When those precious top inches of centuries old fecundity are removed / that complexity has truly evaporated /// Sisters and Brothers! / Nothing can replace it /

Hear me now!/// In the nameless name of the source / Of that which we erode and that which we preserve / We do not make the topsoil! / All we can do is feed / protect it // 

This! // Our truest Wealth!

So I say unto you

Give yourselves to the ordinary compost pile / Tend it well / This sacred culture ///  Feel the revelation // YES! / The biotruth // Not available in digital form /// Eternally more complex than your latest computing device /// OH !! /// Forgive us the arrogance that would posit the World Wide Web as superior alternative to the breathing Web of Wisdom encoded in this heaving pile ///  YEAH!// This living compost /// Spread it open handed on the ailing soil /// Lay your salt belly down on it's medicine! /// Commit it's scent to memory /// Sanctify it /// This Holy tributary /  This taste of that most fundamental Darkness ///  Precursor to all Light /// The absence that speaks of an all encompassing embrace // Of verity // Of consolation /// Hallelujah !" +++

Old World Worship

“Is this the baseline, living, living at last, without all of civilization’s tortured overlay?” —Cecile Pineda

The idiom “down with something”

means bring it literally or

symbolically closer to earth,

that is, exalt it with honor.

Revere it beside or within

this precious ground that we are born

to pass upon. Down with our dreams.

Down with the cornucopias

that grace the tables in our homes.

Down with our lives. Down with our deaths.

Up with the zeal that cuts atoms!

Up with spur-and-bridle fever!

Down with resting uranium!

Ionosphere take those monsters

of bodiless information!

Holy is the altar herself,

this flesh of Gaia—down with Her!

dirt haiku

all fruit has grandma

compost fecund ancestor

goo

        slime our mother

i'd rather eat straw

berries than primordial 

stew

         gleet our giver

suckle savories

not pluck rotten cavities

too

        muck our maker

dirt a worm process. 

soils alive! praise be the change

true

         clay our shaker

touching ripe peaches

preferred to swilling earthmold

cruel

         loam our layer

gut of earth, we thank

the damp stagnant mire changing

you

         scat our savior

butterfly swarmsong for humans

butterfly swarmsong for human(s)

{{don't think of it as one voice}}

                                             {{more sibiliant, sussurating

                              a way the air moves from our wings}}

               {{"voice of earth" a speciesist projection}}

{{what strange voicemath from a species who thinks

each one of them is separate}}

                              {{iwe pray for you(all)(each)(all) at times

               while slirpslipgiddying 

                                             on the mothertrees}}

                                             {{this prayer}}

                              {{may you feel the sweet embrace (nectar bellied from

               so many flowerbeings) withoutquestion of your belonging

                              amongst so many sistren wingeds}}

                                             {{embedded in the great mosaic, the tender

                              touch of trunk to leg and hand}}{{the whisper of jubilant

                                             feather bodies warmfluttering as the waterair comes}}

                              {{feeling certain of your direction as youtheyall fly in 

               ancient grooves to eldergroves, 

                                                            knowing with ancestral certainty

                              this is the way to peace,}} {{this is the way

togetherness. to neverbelost, always clear, lifted, companioned

               gentled and provisioned by starbursts of sweet

                              delight, to flit-arc trajectories of wholeness: this}}{{is the 

                                             way, calliopesong of sunrise, 

                                                            of moon}}{[this is the way, peace}}

                                                                           {{this is the way home}}