Ed Meek

AT THE END
By Ed Meek

He was so old his bones seemed to swim in his skin.
and when I took his hand to feel his pulse
I felt myself drawn in. It was as faint
as the steps of a child
padding across the floor in slippers,
and yet he was smiling.
I could almost hear a river
running beneath his breath.
The water clear and cold and deep.
He was ready and willing to wade in.

I wish I wrote this poem. I had a aunt who was dying, and it was exactly as this poem described it, every word as the poet put down. When I have been around relatives who were ready to go, it is like so. She was so afraid for so long. She was afraid that death would be cold and uninviting and empty. Then towards the end, she was willing. Many are. I hope I am. The imagery so clear and concise, "as faint as the steps of a child padding across the floor in slippers..."Yes, it was like that, exactly like that.

Wu Men

The Great Way
By Wu Men

(No translator listed)

The Great Way has no gate;
there are a thousand paths to it.
If you pass through the barrier,
you walk the universe alone.


Should there be a reader you wants to know the truth about the above poem, you won't get it here. It is located within you. Each of us knows the Way. The poem says "a thousand paths" but I suspect there are many more as there are grains on all of the beaches of the universe and all are valid. Push through and you do walk alone.

There has been many times that I knew the truth about something but could not put it in words. I used to think that English just did not have the right words and that may be true. It may be that words cannot contain it, cannot surround it with meaning enough to describe it. It is like the definition of "Zen" and the "Tao". It cannot be defined but I know what it is. Here, within...

It is so easy but so hard. It is like the nothingness of meditation. I have experienced it on very rare occasions. It is unlike anything I have ever felt. It took so many years of training to obtain those few times. It was worth it. I still remember. Pressing the foot beyond the barrier is easy to do but not many do it. It is the attachments that bind one to this side and the unwillingness to give them up. Still, I remember.

Richard Eberhart

The Eclipse
By Richard Eberhart

I stood out in the open cold
To see the essence of the eclipse
Which was its perfect darkness.

I stood in the cold on the porch
And could not think of anything so perfect
As man's hope of light in the face of darkness.


I did not know about Richard Eberhart before. He lived from April 5, 1904 to June 9, 2005. He had helped bring attention to the Beat Poets by writing about them in the New York Times in 1956. What drew me to this poem was the recent eclipse. It was an experience that I did not see directly since I was here in rain-bound Northern California but it was echoed on Twitter. The pictures were fantastic.

Years ago, I remember sitting in an apartment complex watching a partial eclipse and the slow trail of the Comet Hale-Bopp in another part of the sky. I think it was one of the most exciting cosmic event I ever saw. There were a bunch of us residents all sitting in beach chairs gazing up at the black sky and feeling amazed. I felt as if I was part of the human experience, a feeling of togetherness that I rarely feel, and it had to be something that was happening in space that induced that feeling in me. It was similar to what was happening when the pictures and information went out on Twitter except I was smug in my bed looking out at the rain but seeing the sun and moon on my computer screen.

I don't know about "man's hope of light in the face of darkness" for I felt the connection to humankind. I felt the proximity of standing shoulder to shoulder to people and all of us looking out from our small planet into the dark and cold universe at something that we had no control over. Many of us stopped running around, carrying our packages and children, and just looked out in one direction at the cosmic event in amazement. I wonder in wars if soldiers stop fighting and killing to look at it as well.

This last time it happened, it was on the day of Winter Solstice. The top of the planet was tilted away from the sun. I will not be around when it happens again, not in this life, not in this identity. Just think, it is summer in Australia. They are not standing in the cold. Well, I have gone too far with this poem. I wonder when this happens on the next Winter Solstice will there be a twitter and what form will it be? Or would Global Warming fried us all up by then?And on it goes....

Sara Teasdale

The Crystal Gazer
By Sara Teasdale

I shall gather myself into my self again,
I shall take my scattered selves and make them one,
I shall fuse them into a polished crystal ball
where I can see the moon and the flashing sun,
I shall sit like a sibyl, hour after hour intend,
Watching the future come and the present go -
And the little shifting pictures of people rushing
In tiny self-importance to and fro.

I can understand the scattered selves and the desire to see them gathered into one. I had that wish for a long time until it was accomplished, so that I could see the world as one person. I am not writing this to say that was the poet's meaning here is the same. I don't know. The meaning can be anything the reader wants it to be. I know that I had the vision of watching the world go around me thinking that everyone was running around in their smug little worlds little knowing the Hellfire that I was in. That was then and not now.

One time, I connected with a man who I knew in junior high school and high school and he told me about many of the people that I identified as those smug well-adjusted people. It was one of those websites where you could re-connect with those you knew in high school. He had paid his dues to the site and was connecting with those he remembered. He told me that many of them were not so happy. One woman who was a straight A student who I thought would be a very successful intellectual somewhere had committed suicide shortly after high school graduation. Another young man who I was not surprised had done the same. I remember talking to her. She had taken an interest in me, but I was sure it was not real and ignored her. Others he told me about had been going through similar situations. I guess I was egotistical enough to think I was the only one. He thought I was well adjusted. I had to laugh.

Poets have the gift to re-connect us with our forgotten selves because they are sensitive to the forces that tear our lives apart and cause us so much grief except they can write about it. I suffered in silence. I wrote in my journal but not in any great amount of honestly. I was trying so hard to change things and thought no one else was going through what I was. I now know that wasn't true.

Ikkyu

My Hovel
Bu Ikkyu
Translated by John Stevens

The world before my eyes is wan and wasted, just like me.
The earth is decrepit, the sky stormy, all the grass withered.
No spring breeze even at this late date.
Just winter clouds swallowing up my tiny reed hut.

I remember when I was nine years old. I look in the mirror and see some old lady staring back at me, wan and wasted, hair gray. Who in the hell is that? My skin sags. I could lose weight more but can't lose the years. The woman is wearing glasses. How did that happen? I never thought it would happen to me. Still, it is not so bad. It could be worse.

I look outside my one room and the leaves are off the trees. The grass is withered and there is no breezes and not even a cloud. I live in my small room as I lived in my small apartment in Korea. I have privacy that way. I can see sycamore seeds hanging onto the branches of he trees. They are not giving up for rebirth, not just yet. My back aches as I stand looking outside. There are no birds, no sounds, no children, no one walking on the street. It used to be different when there wasn't non-stop televisions, computers and darken rooms when people sat on couches watching dvds, earphones on heads; but that was centuries ago. Radios are silent. Books stay closed. Do they touch?

Old huts disappear, old houses fall down, lakes flood towns, mountains are leveled for gravel and bombs create new lakes and the oceans grow larger as the ice shrink. Everything changes and the stones multiply until they become buildings.

I was sad in the earlier years but not now. Gray will turn into white and then grass as it does for everyone if we are lucky.

William Shakespeare

Sonnet CXLIV:Two loves I have of comfort and despair
By William Shakespeare

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And, whether that my angel be turn'd fiend,
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell,
But being both from me both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell.
Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

It has been said many times by many people everyone desires to be happy. Every time I see this I wonder the truth of it. There has been too many instances where people have worked very hard at being unhappy and uncomfortable that I have wondered about the so-called truth of that saying.

Another saying that seems to be related to that of people wanting to be happy is the ones in which people blame all sorts of other people other than themselves for their unhappiness and discomfort such as the sonnet above. Some men would say that everything would be so perfect if it wasn't for women tempting them away from God. Men have been blaming women for just about everything since the beginning of human time; and to be fair the blame has been returned. It's just men are free enough to write about it. Women just grumble about it in the pot boiling on the stove or the wash they are pounding on the riverbank.

I know that I am no different. It is so much easier to blame someone for my unhappiness, for my dysfunctional childhood, for my bad habits, for just about everything. And in truth I did have some very bad parents who would probably be arrested these days. I know of a middle aged man who still blames his mother for everything that goes wrong in his life. What a waste. It's my life now and I am responsible for it now. I know of a woman who is angry at her brother for raping her as a child. She should be angry and I am not dismissing her claims that the act did have damages. Its just the man is dead now and she needs to start her healing and get on with her life now. She can't keep blaming him for her life now. If she remains attached to a dead man, her life can't begin.

Many men blame women for their sexual desires so they make the women they have control over wear veils and long dresses. That does not remove their sexual desires. They are still angry at them for having those feelings which are natural extensions of their humanity. They penalized their family members for their own desires. Its a cycle that isn't broken.

Poetry is a wonderful thing in which we express what we feel, hope and want. Few of us have the talent and ability of a William Shakespeare but we can read him and see that with all of his expertise, he has the same problems we all have and need to address some attention to the inner self a bit more and stop blaming people outside of himself for what was inside of him. Considering the cause of his death at a fairly young age, it was certainly understandable. He died of syphilis at the age of 52.

Mark Twain

WARM SUMMER SUN
By Mark Twain

Warm summer sun,
Show kindly here,

Warm southern wind,
Blow softly here.

Green sod above,
Lie light, lie light.

Good night, dear heart,
Good night, good night.


For a change, the sun is out today. It is 45 degrees F. and at the beginning of January. The warm summer wind is not here but I remember it. I remember how it blew in the faces of us kids so many years ago and I lived in San Diego and it was summer all of the time. I took so many things for granted then, but not this poet. Those friends that I knew in those days are in the cemetery now as the memories he was thinking about. I want the wind to blow softly for them too.

Death is the uninvited guest and it was certainly for me too as it was for Mark Twain who lost his wife and daughter. I lost my childhood playmates. They died so young in traffic accidents, some killed by loved ones, some by illness and then I have to think of myself as the poet did, no doubt. Soon he would be there too which is where he is now. I will be gone too. Life is impermanent. We love them and miss them and know we will join them.

There are some Jehovah Witnesses that come to my door ever so often with fairy tales of a life sometime in the future where the devil dies and there is no more death. I wonder if they can visualize what life can be without death. I know I can't. Death is a part of life as much as the devil is a part of a god. It is yang and yin. Still, it is interesting to think about. I miss my childhood friends and our lost innocence as much as the times we had as children. Good night, good night dear friends.