Poem about reparation (I think)

OVERDUE


I have sorely neglected you my friend,
Cut you out of my will, stopped the letters
Between us by stopping the ones on my end.
How have you been all this time?

Has your penchant for beauty flagged?
Has your rage subsided or vanished?
Have all your photographs been tagged?
Do you still compose in rhyme?

I am languishing here in fetters it seems,
All my better dreams seem banished
To after thoughts and day dreams.
I am caught in the clutter and grime

Of sorting through pennies for silver collection,
Facing the ancestors, aping my betters,
Making repairs--there's natural selection:
Can sweeping be some sort of crime?

But still my garden remains for me
My dearest, deepest sanctuary.
Here I'm always on the mend,
Here my photographs are tagged,
Here are all my better dreams
Sorted out in perfect collection.
Here all comes together for me.

The Being of Being

In his recent blog Being and Heidegger Frederick Turner questions the existence of "being," seeing poetry does well in China where the verb to be does not exist. One response to him was by someone who questioned the motives of professors in college who won't accept papers written with to be, or "helper" verbs as we used to call them. I wrote:

Professors who are not accepting papers with to be verbs in them are just trying to be followers of scripts given to them forty years ago which in essence stated all to-be verbs must be suspect, because we want our language to be expedient, and not necessarily merely human. To be or not to be, Hamlet couldn’t decide; but he meant live or die, or both and surely more too. Can being stand for everything, and when missing from a language stand for nothing? Its absence from language is only slightly limiting on reality--that which exists in a human being's mind.



BEING

Being human is to be human
But are human beings to be
Or to just have been, forever amen?
I am that I am that I am
By any tense just was just for then
And only then, and not again.

Observation on myself in the 3rd person 1973

After that she learned to steward her supply of otherworldly emotions, learned how not to spend them wantonly at the slightest sight of something beautiful. She cultivated a certain stirring calm and peaceful feeling within which she alone could enjoy moments of inexpressible exuberance. Still, she never ceased wanting to share a vision of beauty with someone, only discovered a better way of waiting until she could have it. She pledged herself to an appointment in the future, building on the contingencies with her past, learning from them she told herself, always preparing. The security blanket she wove for herself out of these caccooned her through a cyclical passing of seasons patterned in pain and lose: her home, her marriage, two of her children, several of her best friends. She not only survived, she very nearly succeeded in bringing the future so close she could see it and feel it all around her.

Haiti

HAITI

You were the place I chose to make my book
Be about--love in Haiti, not in Maine.
I went to you in a traveler's handbook,
Studied all your flowers, soups, and history,
Studied your Iron Market, Port-au-Prince
Where all my characters, or most of them,
Walked, picked wildflowers, bought art
From native artists, fell in love with love.
Though I really, really never went there,
I know your white streets, and mixes
Of races, all shades of humanity.

Your forests were abundant then, it said,
My handbook did, which in the cold winter
Of Fryeburg, Maine I read, then wrote of you.
Haiti with its long road to The Citadel--
I had my lovers picnic in its shade,
The trip by mule they took up to it--
It was a lovely country, my handbook said.
The people all made music, grew coffee,
Worshipped voodoo gods, were gracious, and poor.

Now your forests are gone to help your own
Cook breakfast in the morning, your concrete
Is weak and crumbling. Now your harbors
Are sickened with fish-thickened sewage,
Your shores have become the dump of the world --
And this was before your earthquake came.

Haiti, home to all who know and love her,
I bow to your heart and perseverance
And wonder at your long endurance.
And if your tale of woe is our own warning
Let it teach our Haitian hearts to sow
The seeds of love upon your shores
Where once again a paradise might grow.

Can anyone tell me what this poem means?

STRANGE RUE

Marinated with your rue, and intellectual
Two, not one in primacy, that being gorilla,
I fall into our morning evening ritual
And with my teeth tug out the flotilla.
Oh you make me tow a heavy line,
With cashmere sweaters, invisible cloaks--
I nightly imbibe your stash of French wine,
Morning tea; the aura Earl Grey tea evokes
Encircles my head as well as my nose,
Bringing in the yacht of dream to woo me.
Your garden produce, promises of rose
With walks in hand and travel on the sea
Are things I both desire and need:
I respond to them as water to a seed.

Time and the world

Time is anything but constant. Only the arbitrary measures of clocks make it seem so, and all our cyclical calendars plod on against the rising and falling of the sun--that alone seems constant. When I was very young it seemed to me the world was more than up to date. It seemed full of things which were perfected, being passed on to me, given into my care. I had to learn how to fit in with them, and that seemed natural. But when these things which filled the world into which I was born were no longer made, some of them, and other things in their place were invented, time began to speed up and the perfection of the world began to fray a little, and its imperfections began to show. Eras which then seem to have occurred eons and eons ago when I was little slowly came closer and closer to my own era. Now I think 'Why, Shakespeare lived almost yesterday!' And once when I was very small I was shocked to learn he had lived only four or five hundred years before the present time; I thought it was a thousand years. Experience warps time perception, and clocks and calendars try to keep it constant. Time, it turns out, is highly personal.


In the No Direction Home cd release, the liner notes Dylan (my age) remembers hearing about Elvis joining the army. It was a big deal, he is right remembering it. It was a huge media event. In 1958 or 59, whenever it was--maybe earlier?--I was a young teenager, fourteen or younger. Maybe Dylan was sixteen. There were fewer events in those days but they stirred much more excitement than anything the news can now. Now we hear of the three wars we are in regularly, climate change, diet, regulations, emotions, sports, from a million different sources through multiple devices--and none of it is as exciting as Elvis getting drafted was to everyone listening to radio or tv back then. Imagine--for Dylan and me back in 1958 or '59, yet to come was the Vietnam War, the assassination of the president, integration, plastic everywhere, the war on poverty, support groups, supervised children, rock concerts, gay rights, the decline of baseball, the rise of football, warmer weather in the winter. The world I lived in still sold Dr. Lyon's tooth powder, had no malls and no safety awareness or mission statements in schools. Women's rights were assumed synonymous with human rights only by the upper (meaning educated) classes. There was just the war with Communism (later they called it the cold war)--Russia and China were the enemy. The catching of the Spy Plane U2 over Russia made much bigger news than anything does today. Today the universe of news is like a bang, bang crash crash movie, filled up with constant violent drama which has little effect on the listener and beholder in its too constant bombardment: over time it dulls the senses and the sensibilities. The meaningful things in our lives are not the ones reported, but the ones we personally respond to.

The mystery of Ignorance

Ignorance may be paradoxically applied in one important universal sense. We are all profoundly ignorant of each other--and yet profoundly knowing too. We each individually see, and all universally recognize, the patterns of human behavior when we see them in each other. Our individual particular manifestation of common humanity is unique--God's gift to himself--us! Or vice versa. The knowing and not knowing each other's uniqueness is as important as knowing and not knowing each other's universality.

It is a mystery!