Tag Archives: poetry

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100 Thousand Poets for Change

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As a core team member of The Bardo Group, I have been invited, encouraged, challenged to participate in the 100 Thousand Poets for Change event.  For more information about this event, and to be stirred and prodded in you own artistic lethargy, click here. 

I yearn to be a poet, an artist, a musician.  I often find a piece that seems so right, so seemingly effortless, so fitting that I think it can’t be hard to craft a work like that…it simply lays over its theme like a glove.  Not so.  Listening to music on my way to work yesterday, I heard a poet’s frustration: “I don’t know why I spend my time / Writing songs I can’t believe / With words that tear and strain to rhyme.” (Paul Simon: Kathy’s Song.)

I feel this theme of Peace and Justice coursing through my life, my thoughts, my work, my hopes, and I wonder how hard it would be to write a poem about it.  I talked to a young man half my age who has studied forensic justice and just interviewed for a position as a mentor, a parole partner, someone who will help perpetrators and victims get together and talk, face to face.  I thought it was a great idea, for both parties, for all parties.  Here’s my attempt to let that idea percolate:

Let’s Face It

Behind the veil, the dirty shroud, the black burka, the white Klan sheet,

the knit ski mask, the heavy gas mask, the transparent oxygen mask, the impenetrable death mask,

the dense fur, the redwood bark, the shiny scales, the matted feathers,

the protective shield, the official badge, the repeated slogan,

the coarse beard, the perfect make-up,

the injections, the implants,

the scars, the screen

 

There is a face, a viable being.

 

When eyes recognize

kin and skin, then peace begins.

Face to face is the starting place.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Between

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The Weekly Photo Challenge prompt invites us to interpret the theme “Between”.  This response is dedicated to my oldest, Susan.  When she was a little girl in Kindergarten, she memorized a poem by A. A. Milne (the author of the Winnie the Pooh stories) and performed it for the K-3rd grade Speech and Oratorical Contest of her elementary school.  Here is the poem:

Before Tea by A. A. Milne

Emmeline
Has not been seen
For more than week. She slipped between
The two tall trees at the end of the green…
We all went after her. “Emmeline!”

“Emmeline,
I didn’t mean —
I only said that your hands weren’t clean.”
We went to the trees at the end of the green…
But Emmeline
Was not to be seen.

Emmeline
Came slipping between
The two tall trees at the end of the green.
We all ran up to her. “Emmeline!
Where have you been?
Where have you been?
Why, it’s more than week!” And Emmeline
Said, “Sillies, I went and saw the Queen.
She says my hands are purfickly clean!”

 

Susan did not perform this poem ‘purfickly’.  As I recall, she left rather a long pause between the second and third stanzas, perhaps for dramatic effect, perhaps to indicate that some time goes by in that part.  The audience began to applaud too early.  Nevertheless, her memory was perfect, and she finished in her own time, in her little 5-year old lisp, “Thillieth…”, and I was, of course, inordinately proud of her. I still am.  I visited her this past Sunday, and we went for a stroll in the UW Madison Arboretum, where she slipped between the branches of trees — like this:

between

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Poets Revving Engines

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NaPoWriMo!!!  It’s SPRING and it’s POETRY and the world is a wonderful place!  I feel the excitement, the bloom of emotion, the fascination of symbol and script!  It’s romantic, pedantic, nostalgic, elegiac, existential and full of potential.  WHOOOOOT! 

Okay, with all of this enthusiasm, you’d think I was about to bust out a whole anthology of poems that I’ve just written.  Sorry to disappoint, but it’s also Spring Break month (because, really, no two school districts plan this for the same week) and things at Discovery World Museum are pretty hectic – meaning that after being indoors with 600 school children for 7 hours, my ears are ringing and my head is aching and I haven’t been in my quiet, creative place all day.  Still, I have looked up the prompt from the NaPoWriMo site and consulted the Bibliomancy Oracle.   It has led me to a wonderful poem called Parable on Fish & Fire.  Coincidentally, I made tilapia for dinner tonight, and after sitting down and offering my thanksgiving for fish, I recalled the saying by Kabir, “I laughed when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty.”   We are thirsty fish, we are celebratory poets.  We celebrate the mundane, the environment of being human.  Love, life, beauty, truth, concept and experience…we make it up and tear it down.  We’re social animals with big brains, but we’re only minimally distinct from all the other carbon life forms on this planet.  Isn’t that a riot?  Sure it is.  So let’s riot…but stay a little aware. 😉

— A Poem I Wrote sometime before 1997 —

God is a poem

Infinite in meaning

Economical in expression

Clothed in symbol and harmony

A breathing Word

Engaging all perception

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Writer’s Fourth Wednesday: Second Person Poetry

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Victoria Slotto’s prompt post invites me to share a poem written in the second person.  She says, “It is less rare to encounter poetry in the second person. As poets, we love to address our “audience,” celebrity figures, other poets or teachers who have an influence on us, people we love (or hate), God, mythological figures, people from our past.”  I went through the book of poems that I self-published back in 1997 and found one that I like.  Back in that decade, I was extremely rooted in a Christian identity and was rather prolific in my writing to God.  These days, I do not identify myself as Christian or even theistic per se, but I still have a great sense of appreciation.  The world is an amazing place; the beauty of it often makes me weep.  My brain is accustomed to seeking a source for manifestations, but I now realize that is more about me than it is necessarily about the way Life is.  I often find myself wondering, “Who do I thank for this?” It’s more likely that there are myriad contributing factors to the conditions that arise, the harmonious conjunction attributable to all of them simultaneously without hierarchy.  So I simply say, “Thanks be,” and leave it at that.

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The Sky

 

Did I ever thank you for the sky
      spread far around like an open field
           piled high with moods and structures,
                a playground for my soul?

This space above bids my thoughts expand
      to climb the heights of an anvil-cloud
           and teeter on the edge of a dazzling glare
                or slide down the shafts of the sun,

To swim to the center of its lonely blue
      where I find no mist to hide me,
           and lie exposed to the western wind
                like a mountain braced for sunrise.

Or clad in the shroud of brooding gray,
      it coaxes me to musing
           far removed from the minutiae
                that chains me to my life.

I search for light and openness
      to shadow the bonds of earth,
            exploring the vault of heaven
                for its meaning and its truth.

Thanks for this cathedral speaking glory through its art.
Thank you for these eyes admitting You into my heart.

© 2014, words and photographs, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved

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My Personal Titanic

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From manic to panic

to sinking, slowly,

letting go, breathing with the flow,

the end of woe,

the bliss of weightlessness,

the natural company of fish.

It’s been kind of a crazy week inside my head. Steve admitted to being a little scared of me.  It started out on a real high – Valentine’s Day.  I was full of positive energy, on my biological upswing, energetic and eager to communicate my passions, my dreams, my optimism.  I went face-to-face with Steve’s downswing and asserted my intent not to be the killjoy in his life or the cause for his anxieties. “Go ahead, follow your bliss and don’t worry about explaining it to me!  I’d rather come home to a mess in the living room and you deep into an exciting project than be greeted by restrained order and depression.”  I went face-to-face with a family issue the next day, emotionally charged and endlessly repercussive, feeling open to multiple possibilities and honestly vulnerable. My karma was kickin’, I thought.  My vibes were sure to cause some awesome progress in the near future. 

The next day was a Federal holiday, but I was at work at the museum and anticipating starting lessons with a new student directly after my shift.  Families with kids home from school opted not to venture out, however, because of a huge snowstorm in the forecast.  The staff was dismissed at 2pm because the place was so empty.  I drove 2 co-workers home in a complete white-out and was barely able to maneuver my car into the driveway through ankle-deep snow.  I decided to cancel my lesson, hoping my new client wouldn’t mind.  She never called me back.  I began to doubt my decisions. 

010

The next day, I bundled up boxes of books for shipping and headed out the door for work, running a little late in order to get the last package included.  Sitting in the driver’s seat, I noticed there was still snow crusted on the windshield wipers.  I pulled the door handle to pop out and clear them off, but nothing happened.  I thought perhaps the door was frozen.  I pushed with my shoulder.  Nothing. “I’m trapped!” I phoned Steve in the house.  He told me that he had a similar difficulty the night before when he returned from shoveling at his mom’s house. “Just roll down the window and open the door from the outside,” he suggested.  The window is frozen.  I finally squeeze my way out the passenger door into a snow pile and meet Steve in the driveway.  “When? Why? What do I do?” I’m late to work, and I don’t know if my window will thaw in time to let me collect a ticket and enter the parking garage without parking the car and climbing out the other side.  What if the gate closes on me?  And I REALLY have to pee!  I arrive at work late, flustered and cramped.  I wonder why Steve didn’t mention this door issue to help me prepare.  Is this a small fire?  Why am I feeling angry and unsettled?  We talk at dinner, and I tell him my plan to slow down, breathe and concentrate on my bliss the next day. 

My shift starts slowly, sun streaming through the windows, small family groups perusing the museum.  Suddenly, the school groups arrive.  I will be calm and proactive.  I will greet them all and give them information and safety rules and smile.  But they’re arriving one on top of another, and not listening to me!  I whirl around and lunge at a girl going head first down the ladder and drive my knee into the boards of the ship.  Ouch!  Can’t think about that now, I’m still talking to this other group…and I realize I’m talking so fast that I can’t breathe.  My chest is constricting.  Asthma? Heart attack? No, you’re still talking.  Stop talking and take a breath, you fool! 

I am panicked.  I am going way too fast.  Where is my Willy Wonka detachment? “Stop, don’t, come back…”  I am addicted to my thoughts (as Eckhardt Tolle would say), to my ego, to my responsibility, and it’s causing me to suffer.  I need to let go and get grounded once more.  My knee throbs.  I can’t walk.  I must slow down now.  I have no other option. 

I had my first lesson with another new voice student last night.  It went very well.  I rang the wrong doorbell initially; I don’t think it hurt my client’s first impression too much.  Steve and I had planned to go to Madison to take a class at the arboretum this morning, but with a “wintry mix” of snow, sleet, and rain on the roads, we decided to stay home.  Initially, this was one more disappointment in my Manic to Panic downfall, but it dawned on me that I could choose to look at it as an opportunity.  An opportunity to really slow down.  To sink.  Like the Titanic. 

It’s a very real, natural environment down here.  Nothing is “good”, “bad”, “successful” or “progressive” among the fish.  It simply is.  Things happen.  Fish eat fish, waves come and go, and any drama is simply in my head.  I meditate on plankton, sucking in and gushing out, enriched by the flow, going along.  I’m staying here for a while.  I’ll let you know when (and if) I surface.

© 2014, essay and photographs, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved

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Relationships: Why U R Doin’ It Wrong

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Steve brought me a book we’d sold. “There are a few light pencil marks in the quiz section. Could you please erase them before we ship this out?” I glanced at the cover. Getting To “I Do”: The Secret to Doing Relationships ‘Right’ by Dr. Patricia Allen.

Oh, dear.

I breathe a sympathetic sigh. I grieve for our culture, for social creatures with neuroses fueled by the media, insecurities about whether or not we will be loved, cared for, valued, mated and saved from personal extinction. Our fears are inflamed, and then ‘experts’ step in to tell us the magic or the scientific formula that will save us. Just take a look at the Yahoo! “Dating Tips & Advice” section: How to Stop Falling for Ms./Mr. Maybe, Happiest Couples, Tips to Get the Love You Want Instead of Settling, Traits Unhappy Couples Have in Common, etc. I imagine it’s big media business. How many of these articles simply recycle the ‘statistics’ from identical studies which probably report varying results? We are in a research culture that strives to control and predict, a desperate attempt to apply a balm to those neuroses that we irritate with obsessive attention.

Let’s take a step out of that arena, shall we? Let’s take the relationship out of the Petri dish and place it back into the organic garden. How do you learn about a growing organism? Attention, observation, action and response. Over time, the bloom becomes less a ‘specimen’ than a personality. It is unique. It is dynamic. It is not ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. It IS. And the more honest you are in your interactions with it, the more you trust it…to be itself.

And where do we find guidance in this garden of real relationships? In stories. There are billions and billions of relationship stories out there. Some are fact, some are fiction. Many of the fictions center around the magical or formulaic as well, but the ones that really inspire are the ones that are singular and sincere. They give us the hope that our own inimitable story may be just as satisfying.

delicate

I have relationship stories of my own, and they are very important to me. I have a yearning to share them, with my children and with anyone else who may be listening. Why? Because I hope that my practice of observing and appreciating the slow unfolding of a delicate bloom will spark the same in someone else, that our posture in relationships will become less that of a victim on the couch, more that of a poet in the garden.

© 2014, essay and photograph, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Beginning

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Winter illumination

Winter illumination

 

Weekly Photo Challenge

My New Year’s resolutions have been made and clearly stated.  First, “Stop shaming myself”.  (read my post “A Cup of Kindness” for more) Second, “Stop spending so much time playing Solitaire”.  I realize that organizing cards and Mahjong tiles is not a bad thing necessarily.  I get a certain satisfaction out of putting them all to rights or trying again until I do.  But it’s kind of an OCD thing, too, so I don’t want to get sucked into doing it when I could do something else.  Like bring chaos to order.  I’ve been researching right brain/left brain behavior a bit (I recommend Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk “My stroke of insight”), and I’ve decided that I need to exercise my right brain more.  My creativity — expansiveness, inclusion and collage-thinking.  Here’s an exercise I came up with:  take a familiar, well-known and memorized quote and mix it up.  Use the same words in a different order, add new punctuation.  Voila!  Chaos out of order poetry.  Here are a few:

“What twilight’s proudly gleaming light,

Early hailed by the dawn’s last ‘Oh’

We can see, so say at you.”

 

“The forefathers, four score and seven, conceived new, created and brought forth years ago,

dedicated in proposition to all men on this continent that a nation are equal – our Liberty.”

 

“No other shalt have me, before thou gods.”

 

“The beginning: the word, the word, the word.

God was God. And was. And was with.”

My daughter Emily tells me that Facebook provides a random generator to make something new of words you’ve posted, too.  Hers are quite poetic.  So maybe it’s not an entirely original exercise, but it’s a start.  A beginning.  A way to set off on a new adventure, to shed habit and convention and embrace the unpredictable nature of life unfolding.  Stepping off into 2014 — we can create and uncreate a new beginning.  What will chaos bring to you this year?

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Came home from work with a poem in my pocket…

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Ever had one of those days?  Decidedly moody, unable to focus, liable to shed tears at any moment.  It started as I was driving in to work.  By lunch break, I had a poem scribbled on the back of a museum map in my pocket.  By afternoon break, I had texted my children just to tell them I missed their dad.  Lovely souls that they are, they reached back immediately with cyber hugs.  (thanks, kids!)  So here’s the poem – no title came with it.

What can I do?

                 — it’s October

the sumac is red and my poor, backward head

is flooding nostalgia like liquid amber. 

If I picked up guitar and a blues-country twang

                — and sang

it’d be you in the sunshine

white overalls, your shirt as blue as your eyes

walking me home from school

sweet, musky sweat

your warm, solid arm

the newness of the world in the flash of your smile

               — Hell. 

Now 35 Octobers gone

I’ve aged like a maple leaf

Fall-ing, as once for you,

now with you, in spirit

falling, scattering, lifting

like ashes in a sunbeam

like milkweed in the wind

Shouldn’t I settle in the present?  How can I?

             — in October

when you’re long gone…

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Wednesday Words: for Steve

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Your fragile skin is smooth and taut, a drum head.

Shadows surround your bones.

Your waning flesh a cry for mercy.

You dream 

a hermit’s life

of walking at a slower pace

unburdened.

Steve in profile

* Steve became a City Carrier Assistant for the US Postal Service in April.  His sister and his father have both had long careers in the P.O. Steve has left a lifestyle of self employment in the online bookselling business in order to make fast money with overtime and extended hours walking a city mail route.  This is a temporary solution designed to retire some debt.  At six foot two inches tall, he now weighs only 155 lbs – less than he weighed in high school.  In the sanctuary of his home office, surrounded by stacks and stacks of used books and melodies of Handel, Beethoven, Schubert and Mahler, he is a happier person.  Scholar & Poet Books is his personal work.  Walking the footpaths of Wisconsin is his preferred route.  He longs to return to this Walden by the time he turns 50 years old. *

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Shine On!

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One of my followers has awarded me with the Shine On! Award, so I am gratefully acknowledging this compliment with an extra post this week.  The Soul Driven Mind strikes me as a very earnest blog by a man who seems to walk the intersection of hard core systems like the Air Force and IT while keeping his head outdoors or on Mars.  I applaud him for challenging himself to widen and deepen his vision, to keep in touch with his natural, creative self and to let that place speak freely and inform him on a regular basis.  Whether that routinely clashes with his profession, I’m not sure, but I can imagine it would sometime.  I wish him great courage and fortitude in his quest and the ability to make the tough choices with joy!

I am to state 7 things about myself, so here’s what comes off the top of my head:

1) I am currently very excited about my oldest daughter’s wedding next month, and by excited, I mean a little out of my depth and emotionally charged in many ways.  If her dad were still alive, the social roles would be much easier to figure out, and I would be guided and shielded by his very confident, extroverted personality.  As it is, I am forging a new path on my own, not always predictable.  I cry, feeling sad and angry that he’s not present.  I put my own quirky self out there, vulnerable and honest, and wonder if that will be acceptable and satisfying to myself and my family.  But these are people whom I deeply love, and to give myself, however frightening that may be, is the best I have to offer.  So, it’s pretty thrilling all around!

2) I am hatching a huge creative project.  I just bought a 5 subject notebook at Walgreen’s yesterday, and I plan to fill it with all kinds of brainstorming notes.  I don’t want to reveal just yet what it’s about, but it’s an embryo that gives me a secret glow.

3) I ordered a dress from India to wear to the wedding.  It’s waiting at the Post Office for me to pick it up.  Does every woman have fantasies about being radiant for some occasion and fears about being merely ordinary?  What is the Middle Way of beauty?  Seeing myself as lovely and alive and sacred but no higher than any other creature on the planet, I suppose, even the graceful little mosquitoes who may show up at this outdoor event!

4) I love the smell of Wisconsin in the summer: that humid, earthy, rain-soaked fragrance of Girl Scout camp makes me feel like I’m 8 years old again.

5) I love children’s books, and I looked very much like Sal in Robert McCloskey’s books “One Morning in Maine” and “Blueberries for Sal”.  Bobbed blond hair swept to the side in a barrette, jeans with an elastic waistband at the back, sneakers, sweatshirt.  Pictures of pre-school me growing up in Massachusetts are an uncanny likeness of her. 

6)  The last movie I watched was “A Wedding”, the Robert Altman film starring Carol Burnett, Desi Arnaz, Jr., Mia Farrow, etc.  A comedy without a laugh track, satirical and ambiguous.  We don’t have TV and don’t feel interested in the movies that are being made these days, but there are lots of good films in the archives to provide social commentary and philosophical and psychological fodder for conversation and introspection.  Taking on weddings and family dysfunctions seemed like a good project for this week. 🙂

7) I love good food.  I went to the Farmer’s Market on Saturday and bought a pint box of Sugar Snap Peas.  They are so fresh and sweet, all raw and fertile, that I wish it were summer all year so that I could enjoy them more frequently.  But then, I suppose, I would stop paying attention.  The habitual way of putting calories into my mouth is so uninteresting.  I like focusing on something unusual and life-giving.  The last meal I really regretted was a Culver’s butter burger basket.  So much grease!  Never again….

This last part is always the most difficult for me.  I’m supposed to nominate 15 other blogs for this award and link to them and notify them of the award requirements.  First of all, I don’t follow very many blogs because I simply haven’t the time to read them.  The ones I do follow, I’ve already given awards to (if they even accept them).  I also refuse to tell anyone that there’s a requirement for receiving an award.  My appreciation is offered without obligations attached.  That said, I will share the new blogs that I’ve been following:

Jeff Sinon Photography: Nature Through The Lens

Steve McCurry’s Blog (you know the guy who photographed that iconic Afgan woman with the haunting eyes for the cover of National Geographic?  Yup, the same man.)

Into the Bardo: A Blogazine (I’ve actually been added as a contributor to this one, and all the contributors are people whose work I would recommend.)

I hope the short list doesn’t disappoint anyone.  Thank you for contributing to the expressive community of artists, thinkers, and humans that make this blogosphere so interesting and worthwhile!  I am pleased to be among you!