Tonight, ashes eve.
Tomorrow, ashes drawn
feeling them there
where I cannot see them.
Not this year. This isolation.
No one will spread oily ashes
in the sacred sanctuary.
I will remember them –
ashes of yesteryears –
gritty scrape and black
and find myself, again,
looking to the saving season.
Lent. Remembrance, remorse
for the sick and the dying.
Salvation out of suffering –
born of darkness, like life
escaping the jaws of death.
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Portland, Oregon – February 16, 2021. Eve of Ash Wednesday in the Catholic liturgical year.
Pandemic
The Dead
At the end of the year I shall think about the dead –
death and the dead, thousands of thousands
who should not be dead but alive but are not.
They are not here. We have lost them
and they will not return to us, not in this land
in this realm of creatures moving among shadows.
What do they see, the dead who lonely died
in sanitized sick beds, surrounded not
by their family or friends but tubes and screens
pulsing beeping whirring digital machines;
by sacred scared nurses who little knew
of the lives they led in these exhausted wheezing bodies?
And what do they see who, without tender care, lay
in their homes, trembling and confused, and then go away?
What do they see, now that they are no more with us
no more living in the lovely and fertile land of home?
They look back, moments on their death beds,
and on their away journey, to where they lived
to see the heartaches of who walked with them,
sang or danced with them, and even, even
birds on branches who saw them through windows.
Now they see with death’s eyes the consoling beauty,
the inconsolable transience of frail human life
passing by as if on sailing ships and night trains.
They have another journey ahead of them.
Their hearts, the hearts of the dead, feel
the weight of their passing away and know
there is nothing more they can do but love,
hold dear all they knew or forgot or never knew.
It is the land of the lost they leave as they go
into the swirl of the planet’s swing among the stars.
Yet, all is not lost to them. They know and remember.
More even than love perhaps, they forgive.
What more can they to do but forgive – all of it!
Let it slip slide away into the jeweled dark night –
the imperfections, injustices, violations
inflicted by everyone who little understood
though they tried and tired themselves in trying
hoping for their own moments of sweet love and grace.
Even the blue and green world confounded them
for they could not possess or fathom how gracious,
lovely, and holy was the place that held their crib and coffin.
They see what in life they could not see.
Overwhelmed in death they mourn for the living,
contemplate suffering – all they loved,
who loved them not, each day seeking to become real,
to heal what in them was lost and was broken.
What more for the dead but to see and in seeing
to stretch disappearing hands to all –
all who gave them life, who came before them,
generations of souls who stopped a moment
to look back and wept for those who remained,
comforted them in their heartsick grieving
and breathed on them one last breath
their final gift, their last token of life and
breathless, walked off into the shadowless light.
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Portland, Oregon – December 30, 2020
“…and all such things must be utterly clear to the dead. They have finally left the problematical cloudy earthly and human sphere. I have a hunch that in life you look outward from your ego, your center. In death you are at the periphery looking inward.” (Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, p. 10; Penguin Books, 2008.)
Cessation
Cessation.
A road into deep wood
becomes a faltering trail
ending in beds of thick moss
under forgotten clouds
floating soft.
We are pulled
beyond memory and knowledge
into indigo blue
ferocious blackening night.
We will wake.
To what shall we wake?
Portland, Oregon – June 22, 2020
I am at a loss to describe what is happening in the world and especially in America right now. This is the best I could do, for now.
Viral Morning
Morning rises in day speckles
multifaceted green hue and blend.
Trees tall of evergreen break
the blue sky into silhouettes –
pointy pine needle etchings
carved into patches of bright sky
still cold from the chill night.
All in a spring morning –
bird call, little girl scream
delighted bike riding fast
leaving parents behind on the road.
Verdant vegetative bursting, virus
spreading, water seeping down
to seas and shadowy depths.
Morning and the green filtered
sky cannot hold the silence –
waiting and fear falling as rain.
I hold these in my own green life
through this lovely and cold
viral spring morning.
Portland, Oregon – May 6, 2020
Earth Day
It is time to know
our place in the world.
We can see it now as it is,
as it has always been.
We hid it from our eyes –
it’s wild and stormy reaches,
it’s vast and empty spaces
the land, fertile and deep
in eons of undisturbed soil.
We held up a mirror to our faces
and saw a world filled with us
and it seemed good.
Now it is the eighth day
and the world is calling
us back to what it was
and has never been other.
It is closing it’s green
enfolding arms around us
and we will empty ourselves
in the roots of the world
that is being born again.
Portland, Oregon – April 22, 2020. Earth Day
Shifting World
When the world shifts
I must shift
or walk along the road
where time has gone.
My tasks and the world
shift under pressure –
when a small thing,
a stone in a shoe,
stops the big things.
Tasks remain to do
when the sun rises.
When night comes
I lay them down
to sleep and dream.
Portland, Oregon – April 8, 2020
We Bloom
In cold springtime
we poke up sun reaching
drink frosty rain
bloom with flowers.
Other live things bloom
grow across the world
become part of vibrant life
cause sickness and death.
Little different we
from viral living beings.
We infect the world
cause sickness and death.
Before me the horizon blooms
with life never imagined.
Oh, to bask in the light
before sickness and death.
Portland, Oregon – March 24, 2020
The worldwide pandemic (Coronavirus, Covid 19) is currently ravishing the world.
Silent Spring
This will end. We will be.
Closing doors, still spaces, spring
streets abloom with children.
The world is slowing silent
into layers of contemplation,
stillnesses of reflection
we had lost, unexperienced
in our futile failed flail
against the scourges of history
read as “Black Plague”
as wars others fought in and died.
It is our plague now, our war.
We do not know who will live
or die but all will suffer –
this, our common grief.
What will be if we pass this time
without insight, humility, or will
to make of closing doors
entrances to a transformed world?
Portland, Oregon – March 19, 2020. Vernal equinox.
In Cascadia 