Poetry

[Magical Realist]

"Reincarnation" by Wallace McRae

https://www.google.com/search?q=reincarn...NX0Ag,st:0

[Magical Realist]

"The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;
And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.
But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;
And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
For self is a sea boundless and measureless.
Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth."
Say not, "I have found the path of the soul." Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path."
For the soul walks upon all paths.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals."
~Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931), The Prophet

[Magical Realist]

Thebaid
By Robinson Jeffers

"How many turn back toward dreams and magic, how many
children
Run home to Mother Church, Father State,
To find in their arms the delicious warmth and folding of souls.
The age weakens and settles home toward old ways.
An age of renascent faith: Christ said, Marx wrote, Hitler says,
And though it seems absurd we believe.
Sad children, yes. It is lonely to be adult, you need a father.
With a little practice you’ll believe anything.

Faith returns, beautiful, terrible, ridiculous,
And men are willing to die and kill for their faith.
Soon come the wars of religion; centuries have passed
Since the air so trembled with intense faith and hatred.
Soon, perhaps, whoever wants to live harmlessly
Must find a cave in the mountain or build a cell
Of the red desert rock under dry junipers,
And avoid men, live with more kindly wolves
And luckier ravens, waiting for the end of the age.

Hermit from stone cell
Gazing with great stunned eyes,
What extravagant miracle
Has amazed them with light,
What visions, what crazy glory, what wings?
I see the sun set and rise
And the beautiful desert sand
And the stars at night,
The incredible magnificence of things.
I the last living man
That sees the real earth and skies,
Actual life and real death.
The others are all prophets and believers
Delirious with fevers of faith."

[Magical Realist]

[Image: IaEzwoJ.jpeg]

[Magical Realist]

"Epistle to Be Left in the Earth"

..It is colder now,
There are many stars,
We are drifting
North by the Great Bear,
The leaves are falling,
The water is stone in the scooped rocks,
To southward
Red sun grey air:
The crows are
Slow on their crooked wings,
The jays have left us:
Long since we passed the flares of Orion.
Each man believes in his heart he will die.
Many have written last thoughts and last letters.
None know if our deaths are now or forever:
None know if this wandering earth will be found.

We lie down and the snow covers our garments.
I pray you,
You (if any open this writing)
Make in your mouths the words that were our names.
I will tell you all we have learned,
I will tell you everything:
The earth is round,
There are springs under the orchards,
The loam cuts with a blunt knife,
Beware of
Elms in thunder,
The lights in the sky are stars—
We think they do not see,
We think also
The trees do not know nor the leaves of the grasses hear us:
The birds too are ignorant.
Do not listen.
Do not stand at dark in the open windows.
We before you have heard this:
They are voices:
They are not words at all but the wind rising.
Also none among us has seen God.
(...We have thought often
The flaws of sun in the late and driving weather
Pointed to one tree but it was not so.)
As for the nights I warn you the nights are dangerous:
The wind changes at night and the dreams come.
It is very cold,
There are strange stars near Arcturus,
Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky”
― Archibald MacLeish, New Found Land

[Magical Realist]

In Praise of Darkness

"Old age (the name that others give it)
can be the time of our greatest bliss.
The animal has died or almost died.
The man and his spirit remain.
I live among vague, luminous shapes
that are not darkness yet.
Buenos Aires,
whose edges disintegrated
into the endless plain,
has gone back to being the Recoleta, the Retiro,
the nondescript streets of the Once,
and the rickety old houses
we still call the South.
In my life there were always too many things.
Democritus of Abdera plucked out his eyes in order to think;
Time has been my Democritus.
This penumbra is slow and does not pain me;
it flows down a gentle slope,
resembling eternity.
My friends have no faces,
women are what they were so many years ago,
these corners could be other corners,
there are no letters on the pages of books.
All this should frighten me,
but it is a sweetness, a return.
Of the generations of texts on earth
I will have read only a few-
the ones that I keep reading in my memory,
reading and transforming.
From South, East, West, and North
the paths converge that have led me
to my secret center.
Those paths were echoes and footsteps,
women, men, death-throes, resurrections,
days and nights,
dreams and half-wakeful dreams,
every inmost moment of yesterday
and all the yesterdays of the world,
the Dane’s staunch sword and the Persan’s moon,
the acts of the dead,
shared love, and words,
Emerson and snow, so many things.
Now I can forget them. I reach my center
my algebra and my key,
my mirror.
Soon I will know who I am."

--Jorge Luis Borges

[Magical Realist]

"My DNA results came in.
Just as I suspected,
my great great grandfather
was a monarch butterfly.
Much of who I am is still
wriggling under a stone.
I am part larva, but
part hummingbird too.
There is dinosaur tar in
my bone marrow.
My golden hair sprang out
of a meadow in Palestine.
Genghis Khan is my fourth cousin,
but I didn't get his dimples.
My loins are loaded with
banyan seeds from Sri Lanka,
but I descended from Ravanna,
not Ram.
My uncle is a mastodon.
There are traces of white people
in my saliva.
3.7 billion years ago I swirled
in hydrogen dust,
dreaming of a planet overgrown
with lingams and yonis.
More recently, say 60,000 B.C.
I walked on hairy paws
across a land bridge
joining Sweden to Botswana.
I am the bastard of the sun and moon.
I can no longer hide my heritage of
raindrops and cougar scat.
My mud was molded with your grandmother's tears.
I was the brother
who marched you to the sea
and sold you.
I was the merchant from Savannah
and the cargo of blackness.
I was the chain.
Admit it, you have wings,
vast and crystal,
like mine, like mine.
You have sweat, dark and salty,
like mine, like mine.
You have secrets silently
singing in your blood,
like mine, like mine.
Don't pretend that earth
is not one family.
Don't pretend we never hung
from the same branch.
Don't pretend we do not ripen
on each other's breath.
Don't pretend we didn't
come here to forgive."

Poem "Ancestry" by Fred LaMotte

[Magical Realist]

"For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid"

William Stafford

"There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot–air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That’s the world, and we all live there."

[Magical Realist]

"Saturn's Rings"

Ellen Bass

"Last night I saw the rings of Saturn
for the first time, that brilliant band
of icy crystals and dust. Mirrors
shepherded the light, collecting it
like pollen or manna
or pails of sweet clear water drawn
from the depths of an ancient well.
The gleam poured through my pupils
into this small, temporary body,
my wrinkled brain in its eggshell skull,
my tunneling blood, breasts that remember
the sting and flush of milk.
Saturn, its frozen rings fire-white,
reflecting the sun from a billion miles.
Maybe there’s a word in another language
for when distance dissolves into time.
How are we changed when we stand out
under the fat stars of summer,
our pores opening in the damp night?
The earth from Saturn is a pale blue orb,
smaller than the heart of whoever you love.
You don’t forget the poles of the earth
slowly turning to slush,
you don’t forget the turtles
burning in the Gulf.
The Burger King at the end of the street
is frying perfectly round patties,
the cows off I-5 stand ankle deep
in excrement. The television
spreads its blue wings over the window
of the house across from mine
where someone’s husband pressed a gun
against the ridged roof of his mouth.
This choreography of ruin, the world breaking
like glass under a microscope, the way it doesn’t crack
all at once, but spreads out from the damaged cavities.
Still for a moment it all recedes.
The backyard potatoes swell quietly
buried beneath their canopy of leaves.
The wind rubs its hands through the trees."