From an Upper Floor

I’ve Been Before To Paradise. . .

I was told that you cannot wait for anyone else to do what is yours to do.  They do not have your particular understanding nor your vision.  The future  will be turned one page at a time and you will find your name on it.  But do not scythe every blade of grass with one fell swoop.  It cannot be done.  You will do those things closest to your heart.  This is all the universe requires.

This time in March memory appoints itself guardian of a time that forever changed us years ago.  This was the quickening time for our David’s departure toward the month’s end.  I don’t  need journals to freshen conversations because I do not forget those.  By rote I did the maintenance of body and house and mercifully have forgotten the dailyness of driving to the hospital and the visual encumbrances.

There were hot months preceding and the cold months succeeding.  On the way to the hospital in the  city,  Michigan Ave. separated the poor, the destitute and those with no hope on either side.  Nothing to ease  their days and not a fresh towel to dry themselves.  Not a bath of water to ease the hurt body nor a clean pair of underwear.  Such was the poverty.  Not a hot meal in the winter nor a glass of cold something because the refrigerator did not make cubes.  It bogged down my thinking and there was no separation between what surrounded me and the even bigger loss awaiting me.    It leaked through my skin and my blood circulated my misery.

The skyline with its new buildings and skyscrapers seem no more than makeup on an aged skin filled with lines and creases.  There was not a time lapse but a raging against what pushed us all.  It was the quest for immortality that one expects from one’s children.  What I was then involved with on a daily basis as a parent should not have been in my frame of reference.

I do not function alone.  I am privy to the minds who have linked history of man to his future.  But I am mother to those sons who considered themselves a triumvirate.  When one sneezed, another withdrew his handkerchief and the third said God Bless no matter what part of the world they were in.  To watch this dis-rupture in this union was to watch this union disrupt.  It should never be part of a mother’s bank of memories.

Yet never were there those who were far enough into the perplexities of modern times where the questions arose, even subliminally.  And where I know now that there are no answers anywhere , except in our Self.  I make my peace with that.

Where Are You Going Absalom?. . .

‘to where the moon
can melt the sun,
the cactus blooms at high noon
and the darkness bids good morning. . .

where cowled thoughts
and taut skin need never cover
hot bones and the cactus
no longer pricks. . .

to fly wingless to the mind’s ankh,
taking only me, only me,
and find that I suffice. . .

I’ve been before to Paradise,
but forgot.
Reaching in, I reach out,
touching my own nimbus.
I’ll not be gone long.’

David wept.

Photo by
John Holmes

No Place To Go. . . .the children have to grow up. . . .

As I look back on things,  as we are apt to do when we wish to make sense out of a life that at times held little,  I find more things connect.  Yet small incidents were crucial  for the larger events to play out.  When I think back on the arguments that have taken my energy,  I still have difficulty understanding where sacrificing one life so that another can live is fair or rational. Religions have been based on this principle.  I put myself in the time of the Nazarene and think as I did when I wrote the poem,  Day of Decision,  and he said He has sent me to

‘proclaim release to the captives and recovering
of sight to the blind . . .
and to set at liberty those who are oppressed.’

And I think you idiot!  My lungs gasp an
intake of air for it will be my last.
He has hung us all.
You sell yourself to a hungry multitude
and you will never be free.
They will clutch you to them
and never be the wiser.

My friend you are crazed.
They will never buy what you give away.
Better were it for you to go away
with knowledge baking your brain
and rotting your heart.’

It was never self  sacrifice to me when a child was concerned.  One’s child of course had a lifetime to live and there was no question whose life was more important.  But a world of big bodies who refuse to grow up and be accountable learned nothing when all they had to do was never to sin  again because there was a god to forgive them who let them off scot free.   My upbringing had the hymn in the Methodist  Hymnal,  What A Friend We Have In Jesus ….
all our sins and griefs to bear.
What a privilege to carry
everything to him in prayer.

And 2,000 years later,  the same wars are being fought, ancestors’ anguish they say never appeased.  For all we know, we are killing our mothers and our fathers and who is to say we don’t?   Jesus fulfilled the old testament by giving people what they wanted.  His life.  He mortgaged himself to fulfil the readings.  Do the people grow up to be accountable?  They hang on to the child in them for they believe as the Book says,  such is the kingdom of heaven.  And the forever little boy and girl go to the end of their days the way they came in.   Childish.

In the course of days I learned that only when one views this world as the only world does it seem insane that one would sacrifice one’s life.  In the larger scope, knowing this is but an instant in a universe of many worlds, does giving your life for your brother  take on nobility.  Physicists already give credence to parallel worlds and quantum physics heralds others.  Life balances itself so that nothing is ever lost,  including self,  then the following I wrote  makes sense in. . .

Old Friends Breaking Bread. . .
Everything gained they agree.
Lives lived splendidly
according to script.
Lives mortgaged knowingly
so that the Other could know
their moment in the sun.
They needed to learn they were worthy.

 Also in the poem. . .
You Must Not Think. . . .
It’s useless to have trudged
the overgrown path
to make a road
easier for the one to follow.
We must develop discipline
to house the night’s pleasures
and discipline to work our days.
Evolution is the name of the game,
but it really is life;
a way station only to the stars,
On the way home.

And in the poem, 
You Stayed the Course. . .
And the ancestors will rest
and man will look forward
to what he can accomplish.
And the world will blossom;
all worlds and all times.
The path in the jungle has been cut.

And finally in, 
A Great Gain. . .
It showed me true
that life is everlasting.
Where else to have learned that?

Has it changed much in 85 years?  I learned that the smallest incidents were necessary for the larger ones to be played out.  I learned much, but to make a difference?  Only in myself.  Only.

Photo by
Joe Hallissey Jr.

The psychiatrist sat at his desk in that small office and said tell me what you see when you go down Michigan Avenue.  Everything?  I asked.  Everything, he said.  I closed my eyes and began.  When I was finished he whistled through his teeth.  You know, he said, others don’t see what you see.  I was too frightened to ask what others saw.  My world had crashed and we were trying to put it together again.

I remembered when my senior class in high school was having difficulty in social studies not understanding how all men were created equal.  Mr. Kane was hearing us out.  Everyone agreed we were not created equal.  Different status,  different talents, cultures, education , some with no talent and no money, and the list went on.  Come on think,  he pleaded, think in what way we are equal.  Silence.  In God’s eyes? I ventured, because that was my upbringing.  Only in our humanity he said.  Only in that we are human, and I was to learn differently because I was already searching and learning the twig is already bent apriori,  a history arrives.

So many differences that even my mother questioned why I had to be different.  I was too young to know that I had the freedom of a decision. I was who I was.  Why can’t you be like your brothers and sister?  Who put the cry in crisis for me and the said in the unsaid.  We have heard you can’t stay home from school with another stomach ache.   A child was told you have to take your ulcer medicine before school , yes.  Another headache?  Familiar?

Before we can have a world at peace we must accept the different ones at our table before we send them out the door.  Wars are waged within the family before they are taken out in the streets.  Every child must have the right to be wanted by parents who have loved wisely and well.  It should be a sacred obligation we have as parents.

Many years ago I wrote the following poem,  Detrevni. . . inverted spelled backwards.  I tried to show how the varied world appears to some of us, as an introduction to differences in approaches.  There are more planets circling around that are being discovered with a different sun.  Years ago Frank Herbert had his Reverend Mother in ChapterHouse Dune say what would people think if they truly thought they were the only life in the Universe?  Or if they were not?   Truly thought it through.  Think on it.   Different life elsewhere will one day have to be dealt with.  No matter their size, the children must be prepared.

Detrevni  (Inverted)

or sometimes called a learning disability

It is a world I see where ‘was’ is ‘saw’
and ‘eht’ is ‘the’
and everyone speaks this peculiar language.

The trees grow leaves
cushioning sturdy trunks,
blossoming with sturdy roots.
Daffodils bury their golden heads
while bulbs, transparent,
shoot hairs out of themselves.
They are beautiful.

Men stand on heads
with toes balancing words,
and eyes are located in their belly buttons.
Hands helplessly try to manipulate a world
and that is the same everywhere.

I do not speak of this other place
because you would think me even more peculiar,
though my eyes and nose and arms
are appropriately spaced.
What it is I see and hear you cannot measure
because I cannot see what you want me to see.

‘Evol’ is love in any language
because love shines from the heart
and arms embrace from any direction.
Sometimes it is called a learning disability
but there are places I know
where I fit right in.

Make this world one of them.

Painting by
Claudia Hallissey

(I am ever grateful to Jane Roberts and the Seth Books who let me know I was part of the world.  And Frank Herbert who reminded me of worlds I could not forget.)