From an Upper Floor

Again, in that conference time when all is quiet, you cannot go back to not knowing, once having attained what it is you know.  Quantum, sumus, scimus.  You are what you know. 

And what you know is yours forever.  The talents, the Master spoke of,  no one understood to teach.  What moth and rust do not destroy you take from world to world because life is everlasting, but he taught that also.

They said we danced with the devil when we multiplied the silent talents of listening with our hearts and talking silently to minds that pleaded for help. 

We were burned at the stake for this.  When our eyes spoke the understanding of what was written on their hearts, it was peace surpassing this world.

It was compared to giving him a drink of water knowing that the world would be satiated.  What is done for one is done for all.  It is doing for one’s fellow so that the act will one day be everyone’s act.

It does not come easily nor without its pain.  But having attained it,  you are there.  You speak a language most hunger for and know to be true. 

And without doubt know that we are accountable forever and have but one face, truth.

Ordinary but  Real . . .

There is question surrounding
the not so fair exterior of one who chides
the meaning from the leaves of the trees.

To say in truth the sun should shine
a bit more on the Maple to the north,
readying sap for nourishment.

Or the mushroom to elevate its wattage
with the feel good serum designed
to lift one up. . .

And what about the water in the bog
needing a bit of air to allow
the simple life to get on. . .?

All this is mine I hear, but I’ve
known it all for so long,
since first I fell in love with life.

Dragging a foot still wedded
to the firm stuffs holding me,
yet not willing to give me up,

since incomplete was the knowledge
to ferret out, but I said it was the best I could do.
And was affirmed to have held nothing back.

I hugged the life with all the strength
remembered from the time before;
from lives loved and loves, loved,

mistakes made good and wounds healed
and to write poetry from a world
not of this one.

I keep moving thoughts like furniture,
as I did the evergreens and the mock orange,
like summer loungers for the lawn.

And when there are no other
room arrangements peaking,
I will create another world.

With another house to make a home
to live in for life to be an example,
to teach the connectedness of All That Is. .

An ordinary person, real in this world
of ordinary days. . . . .
is never just ordinary it seems . . . . .

Word reaches that there are issues with some of my  posts that  are unreal;  that perhaps I don’t know how the real world works.  I write what I know, not  hope or pretend.  As Lawrence O’Donnell commented on  President Biden’s Inaugural, experience is  something you cannot teach.  We always knew it, I think,  just never applied it to ourselves.  Seldom are we lauded for our experience, mostly they say that  we are simply old.

When I say we go to an earned place when we die, I know it.  It has taken a long time for me to be upfront with memories and no, some of them are not good; have even put me in cardiac arrest. 

Since  teaching we are in the world creation business  by the late Robert Nozick, contemporary philosopher, I would create a heaven dispensary if it were already not so.

If life were not everlasting, I would follow the daffodil or if hard pressed, even the mushroom because they come up year after year forever.  It has taken many lifetimes to learn what little I know.

I understand that heaven’s remedial classes are now instituted to get a head start on Dr. Jonas Salk’s Conscious Evolution. This is evolution not to just survive but to evolve to a higher form of human potential, with the spiritual aspects of more compassion, empathy and the heart elements like love and the more stingy,  sharing.

I  came dragging a foot from a world where learning was held sacred and  have lived a functioning life for almost a  hundred years. Not easy .  but doable.  But thinking I should wear a hazmat suit for protection from cynicism which may yet do me in.

The  Poet’s Memories

Torn from an event
with memories still alive
and placed in an incubator to breathe,
are poets expected to live.

Leaving a world incomplete,
they wander in vegetation
totally unfamiliar  and expected to survive.
And give rise to credence
in a world with no root,
where trees are shades
of others more vivid.

Whose flowers whisper their names
in a forgotten language,
whose people are ghosts of livelier images,
all crowding the nimbus.

Where horizons are vast
and what eyes behold are stark lines
dividing two dimensional realities
pretending a depth that fools not a one.

Where snow sheds its stars
on a crystal night and the night becomes
a holy night eliciting unexpected
extravagances bestowing grace.

All grasped in a moment’s vision 
to linger through worlds creating ulcers
by gnawing the viscera with dreams not completed.

The poet’s pen translates worlds
of mean existences from memories held
long in the heart’s pocket.
Translates the colors of those other places
where winds caressed and sun bathed 
a skin unlike his own.

In another place and time he walks
and because he does 

his memories give rise to an Other’s dream.

poem written January 1988

photo by Claudia Hallissey