From an Upper Floor

Previous Harvests

Scribed on the fine parchment
of memory are the summers
of previous harvests.
Long tables are full of heaped bowls,
breads baked to a fine crust,
jellies and jams wobbly in the best dishes,
a must for the farmers;
men who had come
to levy up the huge bales of hay
or to harvest the acres of golden corn
with brown silks clinging; husks
to be decided upon.

Year after year,
orchards with apples ready to yield
their crisp skins to children
eager for their first bite
of the autumn’s first fruit.

I watch the years unfold the details
of life requiring care,
in the midst of families
sidelining their needs and interests
to the dark hours when no energy is left
to work into the night.

How hard to be human and make a life
when to make a living
takes all one has to give
and leaves one’s soul,
at times seemingly, bankrupt.

We now sit at a dinner table
and rolling like script before me
are the farmers hoping to get in
just a bit more of what they work
before weather will take away any profit.

We eat the good food from the kitchen
from the hands of ones who already
tire to support by other means
a way of life no longer sustainable.
Civilized life still depends
on the grunt work
of those who love the land;
on the hard work of hearts
whose love of family and ritual
will one day provide a strength
when strength is nowhere to be found.

This Earth classroom demands tuition
for instruction in the art of living.
And fees are incredibly high.
Life is this circle we live in
and meet end to end.
It is with sacred breath we work to keep

the circle intact.

art by Claudia Hallissey

Moments

Our moments were tender,
those moments over coffee
and whatever cheese Danish
I could find. . . .

We loved those times,
free wheeling we said,
as if cares of the day
had faded from our lives. . . .

No need ever to apologize
for  moments stolen
from life’s busy encounters.
They were the most important.

They cemented our past
into a foundation
our beloveds counted on
to build their futures. . .

To have run away would have
left orphans in our wake.
We laughed and reveled in the little time
as we pretended no ties other than
when we had our last coffee

and knew our let’s pretend was. . . .pretend.

Painting by Claudia Hallissey

          Born To See

You ask,

how do you do it
to see what you see?

And I say,

my heart pools in my eyes
and I weep with the poignancy of love.
I see the generations who have worked
the fields and the August sweat that poured
off brows to be wiped by the long sleeves
on blue shirts. . long sleeves helped keep
the shards of thistles from piercing the skin.

And you say. . . . .

why work the sweat jobs that others can do
when you have money in the bank?

And I say. . . .

money in the bank is for the lean, cold months
when the fields do not produce.

You say. . . . .

I would find something else to do.

I say. . . . . . .

when you love the land and the peoples
who worked it before you, it is a requisite
to have that love primary.
Otherwise, you work for no thing, nothing.

Arguing, you say. . .

that old wreck of a plough needs replacing.
You need equipment and you need money.
What do you see?

I see. . . .

how wealthy I am.
The old plough sits with acres behind it;
I see bushes with thrushes, ponds with live waterfowl,
I see huge windrows of bundled hay,
and I think that feeding the peoples
is a good way to pay my way on this Earth.

You say. . . .

so you see what went before to form the picture now.

I say. . . . .

my heart sees the love that went into
the building of this dream.
And the dream puts food on the table
for the children in the final picture.

And you say. . . .

I cannot see it that way at all.

Then I conclude. . . .

perhaps we need to be born with eyes that see;
and we see what our hearts deem to be ours to see.
Perhaps you need to talk to the Potter.

photo by Kathy Qualiana

A Journey of Note

With these, the words of my language
and pieces of my heart, are memos of
this journey to the top of the mount.

It was not easy and I cannot say for sure
how long in years the trials have gone.
It consumed a private life as dogma
was pulled out of folds of memory,
housed by many lifetimes of discontent.

I knelt as if in prayer on the tiled floor
as the tenets from childhood into maturity
were raped by thoughts pulsing
the rotted gut of my thinking and expelled
into the enameled pot and fixtures
in the only private room in the house.

It is hard even now to bring to mind
the fears which left me cold and wet
in rising high temperatures
of the hot summers and sent me
for the flannel robe to simply wrap
a terror stricken body shaking to death.
And all the while I held posture over
the children’s growing years.
They would not know what went on
when I bid them good day as they
went out the door while I secretly wished
for any reason for one to stay home.
It would then be a blessed relief,
from an ordeal that was an imperative.

This physical portion mirrored the
mental onslaught that was unending.
Life went on as terrors surfaced
with life’s crises paralleled
in rigid profusion, family problems,
requiring parental intervention.
And in the narrows of public life
was harrowed a private one to appear
more nearly normal. I manicured lawns
and maintained the premises as
guests and families were entertained
and holy days held their accustomed
rituals and patterns. Life went on
in an orderly fashion and I found solace
in the garden on speaking terms
with my hands in the Earth.

I have been told that many
a muscled man of girth has
turned away from this journey of note,
never to give quest again
to heaven’s knowledge.
Better to leave heaven to their own secrets,
they often said, than to forever cripple
the unsuspecting journeyer.
Wrath of the gods is vengeance
upon the heads of those intent on
simply making a difference.
Life itself ventures on with wars fought
on various battlefields, as cultures
take issue with customs and verdicts,
long held to be what peoples portray as somas.

It has taken a lifetime and still in process
in this the eighth decade of my life.
I still see the first hours of the new day on my clock.
Sitting with my notes and journals and books,
as I did a half century ago, saying this was the time
when my part of the world slept. It was the speaking
time for the gods with me in class.
I see we as humans reflect our Indwelling Gods
as they be in reflection of the Great God.
And the Great God worries in Process as He grows
in wicked splendor to reflect the
ever increasing universes’ wonders. Meanwhile,
I near my journey’s end. . . . .with

the peace as said to pass understanding,
the triumph, the joy in meeting
life’s hardest work of discovering
the core of Me to know
the divine nature bestowed within.
‘Ye are gods!’ the Nazarene shouted from
the book of words pulled through my heart.
I did not know
that to search out the divinity of my God
would be to discover my own.
I would make space for the journeymen,
and lift my arms to catch them should they stumble.
The prime purpose of this, my journey,
was the paralyzing need to know
as much as I could grasp
and not be found inadequate

by those I had borne.

At Her Bedside

 She would not last long, I thought, frail as she was, lying there
with her eyes filling.  She said, they are telling me that the only way to get off
is to step off.   She made circles with her hand while she lay in the bed, as

white as the sheets she lay on. The circles she made in the air, went round and
round and I watched her and then found the courage to ask who ’they’ were.
And she looked surprised at me as if the question was not even necessary for

me especially.  She said the Teacher, the Teachers. They are telling me that
I can get off and another time I will get back on and one would suppose
a roller coaster but this of course was our Earth she talked of.

And I know why now, she said, why my mother could not come back to get me
when she said she would.  She left me at Father Baker’s Orphanage and the
Sisters would not let her back because she coughed with consumption.

We often heard of the Sisters at the orphanage who wore black habits lined
with white and they looked like birds with black wings.  We heard how the
five year old was so frightened that she could not speak.  She told us how

her mother was going to come for her as she promised and I know now she said,
she would have but I always thought she did not want me.  And that was why she
left me.  And my mother, now withered in age, but calmly smiling the child’s smile,

knew that she was loved.    Never knowing a mother’s love, she did not know
how to give a mother’s love to the children she bore.   Never knowing a mother’s
love, I gave to mine what I sorely missed.  The circle closes.

They say, she went on, the Teachers talk of things I do not know and I know I
cannot believe as you do and I told her that there was room and time for all of us.
We had never talked of the road I traveled nor the scythe I worked of rusty vintage.

There was never a place of rest for either of us to talk of Spirit or worlds that
circled mine or even the only one she recognized.  Now I am as old as she was then
and holding me upright are teachings I broke open the gates of heaven for because

of a Need To Know.   I carried my burden to her bedside and I affirmed for her what
the Teachers already did.  And she was my affirmation.   She never knew me and she
wept.  She never knew the head I carried on shoulders folding under the weight of a

soul I bartered for knowledge. She will one day remember a someone whom she knew
who queried the heavens as she will grow to do.   She will also storm the heavens if
need be because of a someone she knew who had nowhere else to go.

Art by Claudia Hallissey