Monday, January 1, 2024

Poetry Letter No. 4 of 2023 - Part I: Poems by Ehret, Harvey, Saine, Habra, Escoubas and Khalsa

to my father by Maura Harvey

 IN THE WINTER GARDEN – 

FEATURING CSPS POETS SAINE, EHRET, & HARVEY

We started honoring “our” poets working as volunteers for California State Poetry Society with the previous issue of the Poetry Letter, featuring our Monthly Contest Judge, Alice Pero; Annual Contest Judge in 2022, Frank Iosue; and the newest Editor of the California Quarterly, Nicholas Skaldetvind.  This time, we are saying farewell to three former Editors of the California Quarterly: Life Member, Margaret Saine, as well as Terry Ehret and Maura Harvey; the latter two continue to assist us on the CSPS Board. Since Maura is a painter and Margaret – a photographer, some of their artwork serves as illustrations. The issue also presents one of the Honorary Mentions from the 2023 Annual Contest by Gurupreet Khalsa, too lengthy for our journal, an ekphrastic poem by Michael Escoubas, three poems by Hedy Habra, as well as three book reviews: two by Michael Escoubas – of No Matter How It Ends by E.J. Rode, and of Genica by Neth Hass – and the third one by Joan Leotta, of a new book by Hedy Habra, Or Did You Ever See the Other Side? Did you? No? So, enjoy! 

The book reviews will be posted in Part II. 


FEATURED POET - MAURA HARVEY

MAURA HARVEY is a bilingual poet, author and artist who has lived in California since 1950. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature from UC Irvine. Her poetry in both Spanish and English has appeared widely. Dr. Harvey is a founder of Taller del mar, a monthly poetry workshop with members from Tijuana and San Diego. She feels very proud to have published a poetry anthology in Barinas, Venezuela, in 1993 and to have been able to meet Venezuelan and Cuban poets personally while travelling in those countries. She has exhibited her art in many venues in California and had a show in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2006. She joined the editorial board of the California Quarterly in 1999, editing many issues and serving for years also as Secretary of the CSPS and as the CSPS Annual Contest Chair. Most recently, she edited the second issue of the CQ for 2017 (Vol. 43, No. 2). In September 2023 she stepped down from the role of the CQ Editor and become a CSPS Director-at-Large.


TONY BENNETT SINGS FOR MY MOTHER

           
he croons a dream crescendo
better days swell with joy

Tony sings to the crowd
     yet I feel he sings
          just for me
his eyes lock with mine

but you
     Mother
you see
the kid
     who likes art best
tries extra hard
     stays after class
to clean brushes for Dad

you and Dad invite Anthony
for dinner  
      a museum

     the opera          

 

Anthony Domenic Benedetto

ripens into talent

khaki G I  songster

he becomes Tony Bennett

 

tonight

     Mother

     you hear

the voice of the kid from Astoria

Tony tells the audience that this night is special

his Julia is here

in dazzling white you wave from your seat

your smile sings an old love song

     you give him back

     his dream

 

Maura Harvey

July 7, 1997 and August 28, 2023  
 

Ethiopian Guardians by Maura Harvey


THE LIGHT IN GUERNICA

 

Spain                   bombed

numbers of dead

ciphers burned into horseflesh

brother against brother

mi hermano ya no es mi hermano

 

Picasso paints

in black                white-hot slashes

His stallion rages against his master

a soldier cremated alive

light of interrogation cross-examines

battle nightmare crucifies the canvas

 

La bombilla   burning bulb of war          

illuminates a small pueblo         giant

on the map of war

house ablaze

burning bodies heap into a pyramid of flesh

families joined again     in death

 

Pablo paints the darkening

eyes that look                 but

do not see the oil lamp’s small flame

hands that grasp                            but

cannot reach the white blossom

brothers in blood

carnales

White bull stares ahead to a world

beyond mourning 


LUZ EN GUERNICA

España                bombardeada  

suma de los muertos

cifras quemadas en carne de caballo

hermano contra hermano

mi hermano ya no es mi hermano

 

Picasso pinta

en blanco y negro           al rojo vivo

Su semental patea

brama contra su amo

un soldado incinerado vivo

luz de contrainterrogación

batalla pesadilla crucifica el lienzo

 

La bombilla       luz quemante de guerra

ilumina un pueblo chico             gigante

en el mapa de la guerra

casa en llamas

cuerpos ardientes en una pirámide de carne

familias unidas de nuevo            en la muerte

              

Pablo pinta la penumbra

ojos que miran pero

no ven la llama pequeña del candil

manos que buscan         pero

no alcanzan la flor blanca

hermanos en sangre

carnales

El toro blanco mira hacia un mundo

más allá del duelo 

~ Maura Harvey

THE DETANGLING

 

In the ivy I found a string of white lights,

it was the shortest day of the year.

Hill Deer, I did not see you,

I barely know you.

 

The lights looked like leaves,

frozen in the long frigid night.

 

You had snagged your antlers

in the long braid of Christmas lights,

but you freed yourself

and left a trail for me.

 

Garden Squire, subjugated

by festive lights,

slave of a calendar that isn’t yours,

you ascended the hill to rest

in your thicket.

 

Deer, you are a gift.

 

Every day and every night

the deer climb up and down,

their ivy route.

 

Messenger Deer, today

I follow your quiet path.

 

~ Maura Harvey, Dec. 2023    


Blue Flower by Margaret Saine


FEATURED POET - TERRY EHRET

Terry Ehret has published four collections of poetry, most recently Night Sky Journey. Literary awards include the National Poetry Series, California Book Award, Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, eight Pushcart Prize nominations, and an NEA Translation Fellowship. She is currently working on a project to translate the collected poems of Mexican writer Ulalume González de León.  Volume One received the 2021 Northern California Book Reviewer’s Award for Poetry in Translation. From 2004-2006, she served as the poet laureate of Sonoma County where she lives and teaches, and in the summer, she leads travel programs for writers. 


WAKING IN FIRE SEASON

 

Remember when you waken to be still.

Whatever dream you have been wearing

in the dark body of sleep

still lies near, a deep fold

of pleasure, a sleeve of old trouble,

a name on a grave. Leave the dream-clothes

under your skin that now you wash

and lotion and paint. Dress slowly for the day

just dawning in the smoky east. Remember

from time to time to touch the prayer fringe

of dream-fragments as you walk

down the path under the falling sycamore leaves.

Remember the sound they make

rattling all night in the wind.


~ Terry Ehret

Published in Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Volume 8, 2022, 
Contest Edition. Reprinted in Interlitq, Californian Poets Series VI, 2023



MUSTARD BATHING AT HALF MOON BAY


After “let there be new flowering”

by Lucille Clifton

 

First blue in weeks and the flowering

mustard sings its sweet seduction in the fields

all along the ragged Pacific edge.  Grown men

have pulled onto the shoulder of the highway, needing   

the tender touch of yellow. They walk in slow time,

arms outstretched, smiling as if our long war

were over. As if all sides had won.

Come, walk the deep paths to the sun. Be

ready. Something inside wants to mend.


~ Terry Ehret

          Published in Reverberations II: A Visual Conversation,    

           Sebastopol Center for the Arts, 2022. reprinted in Women

           Artists Datebook, Syracuse Cultural Workers, 2022

 

INTIMATE IMMENSITY

The world is large, but in us

               It is deep as the sea.

—Ranier Maria Rilke

 


Say the sky.

Say the wind galloping across the grass.

Say the grass by the sea by the sea waves

and their own rising and falling

 

eternity. Say the turning planet.

Say the fall of the most recent evening.

Say lie down now and say

much sooner than you thought

 

the stars have all re-arranged themselves in the

     night

while I was --  What was I doing? What?

Say then the darkness behind the stars,

wherever it is going. Back to the first moment

 

the tiny weight shifted toward

my body or yours, and the intimate

explosion of love. Say, in all this immensity,

 

who.

 

 

 ~ Terry Ehret,

from Lucky Break, Sixteen Rivers Press, 2008   




ON THE GREEN ROAD, COUNTY CLARE

 


Out the back door and over

the cattle guard, down the walled lane,

past the abandoned farm house

 

with its rambling sweetbriar,

through a stone stile where evening

opens to the silver rock of the Burren,

my only company the cows in their caramel coats,

one leggy hare, the call of a mourning dove,

and the bells of the church away in the village.

Oh, the relief and comfort

of setting out alone!

My thoughts keep turning

 

widdershins. I might try the Irish

remedy of wearing my coat

inside out till my mind

 

rights itself. Or walk far from anyone’s

eyes or judgment, far from troubles

and their urgencies, or questions,

 

however kindly meant, that tug at my sleeve,

leaving me thin as milk on stone.

Solitude, they say, is an art, a gift,

 

a hand reaching over the old stone fence

to pull me through, one shoulder at a time,

like a foal or calf, into a new story.

 

At the crest of the hill, the wind

tears with an ancient chill, like secrets

in a box blown open, and the herald

 

of an about-to-rise moon

fanfares the eastern clouds, casting smooth stones of light

across the bay of Bell Harbor.


~ Terry Ehret


RAIN WOMEN


           after Robinson Jeffers

 

I saw them once off the coast of Monterey.

The rain women, walking above the horizon

in a slow procession, each carrying

the low and heavy sky.

Each carrying an urn of air and ash.

I saw them again in the Canyonlands of southern Utah.

Miles away out over the New Mexico desert,

the sky a black hand of approaching storm,

the air between them singed with blue light.

Their long, gray dresses billowing,

shifting, disappearing, reforming high above the Escalante.

The walking rain, someone called them,

carrying on their heads the dark and weighted sky.

Carrying in their arms the memory of their dead,

the ashes of what wants to be born.


~ Terry Ehret





Photo by Margaret Saine


FEATURED POET - MARGARET SAINE


MARGARET SAINE was born in Germany and lives in Southern California. After a Yale Ph.D. in French and Spanish, she taught languages, literature, and culture in California and Arizona, while writing and translating poetry in five languages.  Her books include Bodyscapes, Words of Art, Lit Angels (Moonrise Press, 2017), Gardens of the Earth (Moonrise Press, 2018), and six haiku chapbooks.  In 1991-2021, she has been a board member of the CSPS, serving in the roles of Secretary, Annual Contest Chair, and the CSPS Poetry Letter. She was CQ Editor in 1994-2020. Saine was honored with CSPS Life Membership in 2021. Her poems have appeared in many journals here and abroad. Three books of poems and a Postwar childhood memoir were published in Germany – Das Flüchtige bleibt (The Ephemeral Remains), Das Weite suchen (A Yen to Travel), Atem der Stille (The Breath of Silence), and Das ungeschickte Kind (Awkward Child). Searching for Bridges is a bilingual English-Arabic book of her poems edited by poet and critic Nizar Sartawi. Several books are awaiting their publication.



NEW YEAR’S EVE


 

In the snowy blankness

figures dissolve into words

with rain as runoff

 

All of the stars shine

heaven drones blue and for a while

leaving us deathless                                      

 

All of the women

and all of the men move in

violent antics

 

When death surprises

our only swan song will be

engraved on silence

Margaret Saine

From A Curtain Call of Desire



VOYAGE


 

The feeling of rivers inside

feeling them unite

as they wrap us

into their smooth flow

carry us entwined

beyond ourselves

far along and far out

to the seas

to other lands

where we long to be

bodies

to know and love

embracing the world

and being embraced

 

Margaret Saine

From A Curtain Call of Desire





LANDSCAPES UNDER THE SKY

Rivers

               vertical hands

 

                              branching with

 

                                             fingers entwined

 

                              in gestures of supplication

 

Stillness of thought

 

               passed through by a wind

 

                              embedded in the scape

 

                                             of rivers and mountains

 

                              a world of houses

 

               of rivers and forests

 

Lying seemingly eternal

 

under the sky

 

                                                             Margaret Saine, 

From a Curtain Call of Desire






MIDWINTER EARLY SPRING

 

              C'était un jour / A la gloire de l'herbe.

              It was a day / In the glory of plants.

                                                  ~ Edouard Glissant

 

Now the garden receives

the explosive winter sun

green jewels break out

on each twig and leaf:

 

A new green spring air

erupts in our hearts

what appeared already dead

gains a new lease on life

 

And I’m inclined to think

I experience a miracle

sprung from that sudden rain

that inundated us yesterday

 

A water bluer than any lake

or river, a water blue like

a piece of sky washed by the sun

 

after the tempest is over

I gratefully view the life

that wasn’t there last night




CLIMBING ROSE

 

               El silencio profundo de la vida en la tierra,

               nos lo enseña la rosa / abierta en el rosal.

               The profound silence of life on earth,

               the rose open on the rosebush teaches it to us.

                                                                                                    Lorca            

Time

a song sung to us

a ballad of simple

and complicated life

phrases and lapses sustained

on a ferry boat of feelings

on the river of days

 

With pauses

for the banal

the eventless

the trivial not powerful

yet reaching at times

for the poetic

 

Time

a song to consciousness

the climbing rose

that twists and turns

and in the end

carries the roof


~ Margaret Saine



Photo by Margaret Saine

ACCORDING TO NATURE

Introduction to Gardens of the Earth - According to Nature by Margaret Saine

 Gardens. All humans love gardens. They exemplify human well-being in nature, a nature made by plants that is evidently joyful and at ease, and eminently pleasing to the eye. My title may be ambiguous to some, those who perceive gardens as cultivated alone, and nature would then be the antithesis. But I want to stress gardens as the synthesis they are, of ambient nature and of human nature.  Gardens represent a nature cultivated and beautified to human tastes, they are nature on a human scale, in a human measure.  

       But one learns with regret that gardens don’t last forever. First they grow and are arranged, with large empty spaces still in between small growing plants and trees; then they have their heyday; but soon they may almost imperceptibly fall into neglect and alteration. They may go wild, haywire, go to seed, during one of those long trips one takes, or they may be downright abolished by others, the authority. Bulldozed, paved over.

       So, true to their etymology of being “guarded”, being the “ward” of someone, gardens need to be guarded in order to exist, to perform and provide their “guarding” function of human well-being and happiness.

       A garden is ever-changing, I say. Someone may object that this is true only of nature herself, nature always changes, and they conclude that, because a garden is subject to human agency, it would change less. Or perhaps change more, arbitrarily, beyond rhyme or reason! This thought suggests a truth that may once have been valid, but strikes me as facetious today. First of all, as far as nature is concerned, we now know-- unlike Enlightenment writers, who believed they knew— that as a whole, nature is beholden to ecological changes, including those wrought by humans in the last five hundred years. And before someone suggests that changes of any kind are all bad, let us examine the paradox that several formerly rural species now live in cities. The countryside with its high-efficiency agribusiness has wrought disastrous changes that make badgers, owls, robins, coyotes, raccoons, opossums and hedgehogs seek refuge in formerly inhospitable urban places, but which are now relatively more tranquil, its green spaces not exploited for maximum efficiency. A garden that leaves a lot to the plants’ devices, such as mine, also qualifies as such a sanctuary. What with all my travels, the plants in my garden sometimes have to fend for themselves.

        What I was trying to point out is that in the garden, the mix of elements—sun, light, rain and watering, wind, hot and cold, soil amended or self-amending, insects and birds, and many more—is just as unpredictable as elsewhere and therefore transforms the garden’s entire appearance, its “feel,” as it were. I don’t think I exaggerate when I say that the different growth of plants creates a different garden every year. Sun and shade are of special concern in the summer, when changes are more noticeable, especially at noon, for the more extreme conditions might benefit or harm plants that were, only last year, out of harm’s way or growing indifferently along, whereas now they are truly “blooming” and “blossoming,” providing light or shade, providing color. Or their opposite, glorious last year, they are now floundering, flopping, and dying.  

        My garden is my sky lab, made up of star dust. It is an adventure that does not entirely depend on me, but has its own—always surprising—dynamic. After I set it up, give it the basics, it begins to follow its own rules and laws and continues to surprise me. Each interference by me—ripping out and putting in, weeding, pruning and shaping, coaxing and tying up, lowering and stretching—is minor compared to what looks like the garden’s own will, and which is none other than the interaction of all elements of this ambience according to nature. Including the plants themselves, who affect other plants and the environment, and are affected by them in return.

        I like it when my garden does so much better than I had thought, or at least when it does unexpected things, in an intriguing, overall good way. But when the emperor vine or morning glory, which blooms on its white shelf when I wake up, begins winding across the stone path like a snake and crawling over other plants and strangling them, I have to interfere and strangle the strangler, so to speak, limiting her to her place.

        I live, we live, on this earth. Flowers are a gift, they seek and elicit beauty in us and from us. Gardens are always “according to nature,” environmental nature as well as human. There are no human beings who don’t like gardens. And all gardens like and welcome humans.  After all, we and the plants are each other’s fondest breath.

~ Margaret Saine

Published by Moonrise Press, https://moonrisepress.com/saine---gardens-of-the-earth.html 


 

First snow, free image found by Michael Escoubas on the Internet.

FIRST SNOW BY MICHAEL ESCOUBAS

An ekphrastic poem inspired by an image found on the internet


FIRST SNOW


It began while we slept,

and continued as we awakened . . .

softly falling

as if sifted from a sugar-shaker

by Heaven’s unseen Hand.

 

Feathery flakes fastened themselves

to branches shorn of leaves

by a recent wind. The branches

welcomed them as flake after flake

settled in its own predestined place.

 

Standing amidst the changing season,

I am reminded that few things

in life remain the same.

For in life, as in nature, the unseen

Hand in charge of change, changes me.


                                                                                ~ Michael Escoubas





THREE POEMS BY HEDY HABRA



OR DID YOU EVER SEE THE OTHER SIDE OF THINGS?


                                                                             After Disturbing Presence by Remedios Varo


 

Seated at her table, her fingertips run over

               the knots where branches

                              once grew, feel the crevices

of the aged oak’s grain, its porous surface

               about to peel open

 

like the pages of a book. She watches wavy

               lines swirl and burls’ eyes

                              sprout in threadlike tendrils ...

Does a tree feel pain in its phantom limbs?

               Could the table remember

              

the carpenter’s hands that carved it with love,

               the many times it was stained

                               and rubbed with oils, would

these hands erase the memory of trees

               pregnant with bird trills?

              

And what of the movement of her pen, her

               unanswered questions, the songs

                              she sang to herself? A heavy

breath in the nape of her neck rarefies the air.

               The chair’s damask fabric,

              

woven with fleur-de-lis disintegrates, scattering

               petals wet with tears. Her open scars

                               exposed, she feels the pull

of a body against hers, her hunger unveiled as

               the moment recedes.

 

 

Hedy Habra, first published by The Bitter Oleander

From Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? (Press 53, 2023



OR WEREN’T WE ALWAYS TOLD TO REMOVE OUR MAKEUP AT NIGHT?


                                             After We Had Many Faces by Juanita Guccione

                             

On certain evenings when the sun turns ebony, my heart becomes an obsidian pendant hanging between my breasts, conjuring old lovers’ touch, my newborn’s avid lips. I can then freely perform, peeling off face after face the masks that haunted me all my life, each dangling from a strand of my graying hair, caught within a self-woven web of conflicting feelings brimming with sap and dew. I become a puppeteer pulling threads of time, braiding throbbing heartbeats with the stillness of empty silences. That’s when I realize how much care was taken in recreating myself as though with stage makeup. Or else how could I have coped with the different roles allotted to me at every crossroad, each gilded with a false sense of free will?

 

Hedy Habra, first published by The MockingHeart Review

From Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? (Press 53, 2023


 

OR CALL ME A HOARDER IF YOU WILL BUT TRY TO UNDERSTAND


                                                                       After Harmony by Remedios Varo

 


Each and every object in my drawers has a story of its own.

When I revisit the selves I once was, minute black silhouettes

Align themselves over the power lines of my mind as on a score

Until the outline of an alter ego irrupts, adding a silent note.

 

When I revisit the selves I once was, minute black silhouettes

Rub over every object's skin, absorbing smells and vibrations

Until the outline of an alter ego irrupts, adding a silent note

And would they engage in a dialogue in the utmost darkness?

 

Rub over every object's skin, absorbing smells and vibrations

Like the rosary stringed with pearls my mom loved so much

And would they engage in a dialogue in the utmost darkness

Map the vestibules of memory, run fingers over shining veins?

 

Like the rosary stringed with pearls my mom loved so much

Boxes of left-over yarn, her crocheted creations tucked into drawers

Map the vestibules of memory, run fingers over shining veins

Call it a bric-a-brac fit for those of us prone to engage in bricolage.

 

Boxes of left-over yarn, her crocheted creations tucked into drawers

A bleached sand dollar that might become your grandson's treasure.

Call it a bric-a-brac fit for those of us prone to engage in bricolage.

Nothing is what it seems, only the meaning invested in its arcane language

 

A bleached sand dollar that might become your grandson's treasure

And just the sight of a handwriting triggers the deepest emotions

Nothing is what it seems, only the meaning invested in its arcane language.

I keep digging as I become the archeologist of my own experience

 

Hedy Habra, first published by The MacQueen Quinterly

From Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? (Press 53 2023)



Purple Flower by Margaret Saine


ANNUAL CONTEST 2023 - HONORARY MENTION BY G. KHALSA

The 2023 CSPS Annual Contest, adjudicated by Anna Maria Mickiewicz of London, England, had four winners: Sharon Chmielarz (first prize), Susan Wolbarst and Claire Scott (two equivalent second prizes) and Mark G. Hammerschick (third prize). Their poems were published in the California Quarterly 49, no. 4 along with two Honorary Mentions, by Mark G. Hammerschick and rg cantalupo. Other Honorary Mentions will be published in the next CQ in the spring (Claire Scott, Christine Horner, rg cantalupo), below is the Honorary Mention by Gurupreet K. Khalsa, long for publication in the CQ, exceeding its allowable line limits. Congratulations to all the winners! 

WANDERING BRUME TO SPARKS

by Gurupreet K. Khalsa 

1. Young Juan wander’d by the glassy brooks/ Thinking unutterable things…/ …so pursued/ His self-communion with his own high soul. Losing track of time in wanderings, wanting, restless, dissatisfied, seeking, reflexive thoughts about the nature of science and man/woman/all variations in between, metaphysical elements, such as are angels male or female or neither, the nature of the world, the nature of love, all pondered in wanderings in nature (Thoreau’s absolute freedom and wildness), wanderings and wonderings of soul. Paratactic: where meaning germinates in the spaces, peripheral shadowed niggling (trapdoors that when triggered propel one down a chute into something unknown – is it a field of flowers, a cave of spiky quartz crystals upon which to impale oneself? A mirrored fun room with a rubber floor? The depths of Lake Baikal where the Rusalka lurks?). One must know the correct texture in which to commune with high souls. 

2. A walkway in Amsterdam glows Starry Night when trod upon. No one who wonders what the night contains, where the stars go, could ever be lost because the path glides on ahead.

 

round and round they dance in tandem

dance together till their hearts swell

leap in harmony and gladness 

3. Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while. A box: what is outside it, what is inside it (insight and outsight): in systems theory, a closed system, but once opened its molecules and content (Pandora?) interact with other systems. The box as the universe and stars and galaxies and we are all their toys in it and God is counting his marbles as they roll around, and once in a while he will open the box and take one out and roll it outside of the box, or dress a paper doll in different outfits. How do I feel about it? Safe knowing my walls but eager to wander outside of them. And how far could two photons wander when they share a single quantum state, one measured and fixed and thus the other spooky and entangled, according to Einstein? You might think then that no wandering is even possible. Gedanken experiment: breaking entanglement as you shoot off beyond the event horizon and I sit on the fence wondering. 

4. The plain was full of ghosts/ I wandered up, I wandered down. An image at the center of a dream that is symbolic: a doll with its head missing, and now much time must be devoted to searching for it (by glassy brooks), knowing it is important for continuity to restore its head. So the quest for wholeness ensues, propelled by underlying anxiety about how we as a society have not kept our head, feeling the need to proclaim I am this or I am that (as St. Augustine wrote, we pass by ourselves without wondering), as opposed to we are this and we are that, and we need the guiding power of reason, or as the scientist said, like all sentient civilizations we are doomed to failure and extinction in a constant cycle of ego and destruction unless we return to completeness where we can present ourselves as assembled of many parts but ultimately working together (wandering through space together) to move forward because arms cannot shape and legs cannot move forward without meaning and direction from conscious awareness.


tethered by glowing threads
to the record of all being and beings.


I know not how I may seem to others, but to myself I am but a small child wandering upon the vast shores of knowledge, every now and then finding a small bright pebble to content myself with. The child perceives no wide shores, no world beyond the present, little doubt about enduring promises of parents and love, at least if she is a lucky child; fear of meaninglessness has not intruded. In this world of the child, sixty-four is unimaginable, today and yesterday and tomorrow the box containing all marbles and rainbows. Not yet is there a beyond.

 6. Water wanders, you know, but always downhill toward the place where it joins together, unless it wants to work a while to dissolve stone and make art. A conscious wanderer finds herself looking up, to find networks arching overhead, tapping into the Akashic Records (the life-thread of consciousness) where wandering produces an electric thrill of connection to discover that all things are connected, really, don’t argue with me, all things ARE connected, even as I touch your hand and molecules leap one to another and I touch the tree trunk and find that it recognizes me, and I lay my hand upon the water and it caresses, understanding my moisture and grinning in companionship. Why are raindrops not the size of swimming pools, we wonder.

 7. Love is the star to every wandering bark. We wandered once in Mussoorie along the Mall, looking in Cambridge Books and sipping our mango shakes and browsing the Kullu shawl shop at Picture Palace. John Muir said to wander the whole summer and when you do, you find a mirror shard of memory, no destination but that of harmony. Idyllic, perhaps, yet idylls seem to populate the wanderer’s world.

 

I dart up my thread to a glimmer

of light and find your thread

shining, where we meet in a spark.        

8. And where does a demented brain wander? Through misty memories, the fog of stored moments even as faces fade in hollow vacant space, bereft of sparkling gems, rich colors of imagination dimmed, melodies left unsung.

9. In the world of the bat, an umwelt populated with shrieks emitted at 200 times per second – per second – seeking echoes of tree friends and insects that will be dinner. We think evil lurks in darkness but tiny night-flying creatures are not evil as they reflect man-made lights of the Amsterdam walkway stars. I emit a thought of you and my umwelt senses echolocation of your enfolding embrace. All there is to know in my world, in filling the night with light: blue light to light our wanderings as we push back the dark.


                                                                                         ~ Gurupreet K. Khalsa

Honorary Mention, CSPS Annual Contest 202

(a) George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan, I, XC-XCI (713-14, 721-22); (b) William Least Heat-Moon;

(c) Emerson, Dirge; (d) Plato; (e) Shakespeare, Sonnet 116.






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