under a wilting sky (for One Shoot Sunday)
'he never calls' photo prompt by Rob Hanson
notes you left on a wrinkled sky
that’s never blue always a heartless hue bruises
no sun can stand
shifts eternity imposes: no mere pauses—
your convenient absence these slashes
on tender paper you tore off the back of my palm
excuses I proffer—my veins throb so
in your presence—you deride lips smacking
on listless air my shroud
under a waiting sky, wilting
no one knows why
who but the heart
that knows knows when a smile
alights on a voice
who among the spaces senses
a smile as it wings its path to the heart
that knows
a flight quite swift aboard a voice still quite
mute its ring a sound only when it alights
on the heart that knows knows
what that smile knows knows its birth in the heart
only the heart that knows knows
why waiting
wilts the sky
Posted for One Shoot Sunday at One Stop Poetry from an image prompt by Rob Hanson in this inimitbale gathering place of poets and artists.Cenck us out. Better yet, hop in!
Toward the unknown (One Shoot Sunday)
*composed from a photograph of Feininger, Andreas 1906-1999
The journey slices
into our landscape:
masses of time shaped
into probabilities
a curve of doubt teetering
on the side of smoothened mounds
–a solid time our past–
veering off its mirrored likeness
the now
careening to a zipped line
the unseen our eternity.
Our heartbeats stall
among fissures of rock
the chasm in our feelings.
Scarred we cease at thought
–the beat pulses unfeeling.
Our fears swarm as
sounds in our being:
a rhythmic splicing
a phantom hand cutting
in swaths its mode a sharp embrace.
We drive on into the now
to the unknown cruising
the air a fragile silk–
if we could but leap
this landscape among clouds
would be but maps frayed
in the edges as maps to nowhere:
our unknown
the only now we know
is infinity in our journey.
I posted this poem for One Shoot Sunday at the One Stop Poetry blog.
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Nothingness: A Reflection
For this epiphany, I wrote myself a check of $800. What do you think?
I struggle through pain and nothingness with bouts of happiness and calmness of mind everyday. Maybe, I, too, suffer from some kind of mental illness I haven’t dared to find out. What’s certain is my constant search for peace that at times seems to end only for the battle to begin again. Here are some whiffs of calm wind that had helped:
“Restless until my heart rests in thee”, thus, St. Augustine simply puts what ails man. All Truth seems poured into these seven words, truths that Jesus lived and died for. He showed us and taught us what these truths are but why did He seem to make peace such an impossibility, indeed?
Why is life impregnable? Why is living a crucible? Jesus had a consistent answer—because to walk with God, to go home to Him in eternity is to shed the world at every single moment with every thought and every act. Otherwise we, who have wakened to this true path but have not really given in or have not learned to will what God wills or to simply break our will and turn it over to Him, will never find rest.
Until we ‘die to ourselves’ and be nothing in this life, as Jesus says again and again, our journey back home will be wrought with pain. “Die to ourselves”, how do we do that? Not to seek comfort or consolation for what we do, and to deny ourselves of that, which makes us happy (a momentary lift), perhaps? Pain is in the nature of this life, Jesus assured us. If He knew of another way to peace and salvation, being Truth Himself, he would have shown it certainly, shown something else other than having been impoverished, derided, betrayed, and crucified by this world in this existence, this finiteness.
No wonder, as St. Teresa of Avila once chided Jesus in all her humaneness, He had so few friends. Maybe, if we acknowledge our nothingness we could be considered among the few.
Posted in jendireiter.com
About
autumn wind
wondering about lilies
in a mountain pond
Tell me a writer who really gets a satisfying jornal, in Spanish a daily wage or its equivalent, and I’ll bare a spirit in constant bouts of doubtfulness. Does a writer earn more because of what he writes and how he does it? Or is a writer paid more or less because of who he is? Is it money or honor he expects to receive?
Ahhh … but money as wage, and praise or honor as reward would be too predictable, too common as Job lamented in the Book of Job. It is in these lines that read: “Is not man’s life on earth nothing more than pressed service, his times no better than hired drudgery? Like the slave, sighing for the shade, or the workman with no thought but his wages, months of delusion I have assigned to me, nothing for my own but nights of grief. Lying in bed I wonder, ‘When will it be day?’ Risen I think, ‘How slowly evening comes!’
Restlessly I fret till twilight falls. Swifter than a weaver’s shuttle my days have passed, and vanished, leaving no hope behind. Remember that my life is but a breath, and that my eyes will never again see joy.”
Not money but joy is the ultimate wage as the passage implies. And joy is not hard to earn for it is in everyday life if we have eyes to see, a nose to smell, fingers to touch, ears to hear–a heart beating. This to me, is how a writer earns a daily wage. His wages then take the guise of treasures his heart can transfigure into a universe of thought that taps into other hearts, that causes a swirl in the depth of other souls, or that makes wings to sprout on leaden heels.
Sometimes not joy but rueful, poignant moments are my pick. Take what I earned once: On my walk home in my neighborhood, I caught two clumps of snowdrops–such tiny blossoms smaller than fingertips that do not look up but shyly droop close to black patches on the ground winter has frozen. That afternoon in the frosty wind, they trembled as if ready to turn away and run but how could they? For that poignant moment on seeing the wintry rain beat on the fragile snowdrop–as if pushing it to go home now, go to sleep–I earned my jornal, my daily wage.
Once on summer walk, the crackle of dried leaves just hit me both like the laughter of children and sobs long suppressed. Neither one of them would resolve the dryness, but I recalled how each does bring tears: laughter for joy, sobs for healing that comes with the release of a dammed-up pain. My jornal that day came as two haiku.
Fall has since shortened the day and the heart begins to crave for lost space that it doesn’t even recall which or where. I feel that most treasures have turned into mush so much so I wouldn’t be able to sift them off the ground. Yet I caught the dying day yesterday–so glorious in the gold of autumn it opened a flip side of serene heaven. Blades of grass coated in diadems of rain that carpet the lawns render royal walks poor by imitation. A burst of red maple against an inky blue sky humbled me, a soul bragging about her skill to recreate beauty in words.
I suppose I’m taking Job’s reflections to heart. I’d rather not gloss over each day and look beyond what’s there, right before me, or else fragile as is my breath one day “my eyes may never again see joy” to write. With what then will I compare the eternal joy, the ultimate wage I await?
Yet for now, as other eyes hanker to make the invisible visible, I put a tag on some moments of joy. Like on seeing the snowdrops, I paid myself $200 as my jornal.
What could have been yours?
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