The Mystery Of Poetry: Abortion And Christmas 2008

 

Saharan Cypress at Tassili N'Ajjer

Sometimes poems are mysterious, but become domesticated as time wears on, as if a wild lion raised in the belt of civilization becomes as docile as a fat tabby cat.
But sometimes they remain mysterious and wild, running like wild children who are lost from their mothers - or who are cast out from their villages - and are raised by a troop of ghazelles in the Tassili n'Ajjer desert in Algeria; awesome youth,  remote, untutored and unkempt, yet bearing all the lineaments of humanity - and overwhelming in their beauty.
Not that I know anything about such existences. I was born into wealth and royalty.

This poem below still haunts me years on.
There is a line: 

Then from a tangled thicket
I grasped a ring of lapis lazuli,
the joint of 2 bones, and pupil
of the brilliant eye, and was born...

It still makes me faint-headed; it is as if God let me perform the miracle of life, and from nothing came wonderful being...and - when I reflect - I realize that is true, and I did have a child: I am a father.
Yet sometimes the creation and nurture of life strikes us as so mundane and pedestrian; we even give up the lives we consider superfluous; sometimes we think "father" or "mother" a really poor job description, and we pass on it for something better.

I never speak of abortion. Of course, there are many things I do not speak of.

The past and our grandsires do stand behind us, pushing us, and other beings-yet-to-be stand in front of us in our futures, pulling us, and that we are in the eye of a Present Immediate of a vastly baroque and byzantine creation... yet often - so often! - we stand squandering the magic, throwing away the baraka...
Such is life in the present. I am not a judge, for I am not learned nor am I saintly.

To grasp a ring and 2 bones, and thus to be the focus of the greatest mystery...life!
To be born!
Let me live, and let me be born to the ferocious mothers of the desert, coming to the rivulet to drink in the wasteland where an oasis is a singular olive tree. Let me live, and let the wilderness teach me, and let me learn nobility and honor East of your Eden.
Let me live with troops and pods and packs, then, if cities are not to be my home. Let me run naked, if I am not to be swaddled in mankind's cloth.
If your societies have degraded life, send me to the badlands, where every force alive strives to increase life and well-being in the face of great odds!

Let me crown the earth. Let me be happy to have been born, and let the earth be happy to have borne me.

"You see these bananas. May your life have no bruises either."
Mother Of George

CHRISTMAS 2008

The Trees

I used to be a tree,
and grew upon a hill;
I used to be arboreal
and deep roots immobile
I thought imprisoned me.
Then from a tangled thicket
I grasped a ring of lapis lazuli,
the joint of 2 bones, and pupil
of the brilliant eye, and was born
my parents most loved fruit
in a storm of heat at
the rising of the Pleiades.
Now...O, now, I see...
and I shall be
soon again a tree,
maenad queen of windswept hills;
pastor triumphant of animals
that flock the virginal
nativity's flash of light!

--

reworked from 2008