There's No Forgetting (Sonata)

If you should ask me where I've been all this time
I have to say 'Things happen.'
I have to dwell on stones darkening the earth,
on the river ruined in its own duration:
I know nothing save things the birds have lost,
the sea I left behind, or my sister crying.
Why this abundance of places? Why does day lock
with day? Why the dark night swilling round
in our mouths? And why the dead?

Should you ask me where I come from, I must talk
with broken things,
with fairly painful utensils,
with great beasts turned to dust as often as not
and my afflicted heart.

These are not memories that have passed each other
nor the yellowing pigeon asleep in our forgetting;
these are tearful faces
and fingers down our throats
and whatever among leaves falls to the ground:
the dark of a day gone by
grown fat on our grieving blood.

Here are violets, and here swallows,
all things we love and which inform
sweet messages seriatim
through which time passes and sweetness passes.

We don't get far, though, beyond these teeth:
Why waste time gnawing the husks of silence?
I know not what to answer:
there are so many dead,
and so many dikes the red sun breached,
and so many heads battering hulls
and so many hands that have closed over kisses
and so many things that I want to forget.

Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were brine-rose, topaz

Ah, I haven't stored my Neruda collection.

I do not love you as if you were brine-rose, topaz,
XVII From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

I do not love you as if you were brine-rose, topaz,
or barbed carnations thrown off by the fire.
I love you as certain hidden things are loved,
secretly, between night and soul.

I love you like the flower-less plant
carrying inside itself the light of those flowers,
and, graced by your love, a fierce perfume
risen from earth, is alive, concealed in my flesh.

I love you without knowing how, whence, when.
I love you truly, without doubts, without pride,
I love you so, and know, no other way to love,

none but this mode of neither You nor I,
so close that your hand over my chest is my hand,
so close they are your eyes I shut when I sleep.

Pablo Neruda

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

Road Song

At the big traffic signal, you stop, as usual, resigned to the long wait, this is a daily morning ritual. And then you hear someone singing, in a strange echoing voice. You look to your right, and you see this man on a bike, singing to himself, inside the closed-stereo-system of his helmet with visor.

He's completely immersed in the song, swaying - you see wires going up, probably he's listening to music, and singing with it. And he's not a young kid either, looks like an office worker. And he's singing on his way to work.

You remember that you used to sing on the bike too, a long time ago. And you try hard to sing again, searching for old familiar songs, within your own helmet-stereo. It is ages since you have heard yourself sing, who is this person you had almost lost?

And you also remember Mathias Duplessy, the French singer, who said that he used to practise Mongolian throat singing while on his motorcycle, the helmet serving as a private studio.

Road song, an antidote to Road rage? Is anyone listening?

Exhale

"Bhikshu, empty your boat! It will go faster." - 'The Dhammapada'

Yoga stresses a lot on the act of exhalation. On emptying. On letting go. For we tend to exhale less efficiently than we inhale.

We want to keep, to store, to hold. We think possession, owning, keeping - spells safety, security, happiness.

And we learn, again and again; that it does not.

Positive news. Happy Stories. Unsung Heroes.

The Better India
Positive news. Happy Stories. Unsung Heroes.
http://www.thebetterindia.com/about/

"On a day to day basis we have been reading the Indian newspapers and magazines. Almost all of them devote their prime space to negative stories. Stories of murder, arson, scandals and gossip. However, we found that hidden inside, in the deep annals of these publications are the happier stories. Stories, to use a cliched phrase, that kindle your heart and tell you that all is not lost.

The Better India is an attempt to bring out those happy stories, those unsung heroes and heroines, those small good deeds, and showcase them to the world. Over here, you will be able to read about the incremental progress being made by the industrious people of this country, the developments happening on the social and economic front. We hope that by showcasing these here, we might be able to inspire at least one amongst you, the readers, to do something that leaves an impact. Small or big. But, an impact.

The spirit of The Better India is kept alive by Anuradha Parekh and Dhimant Parekh, a Bangalore based couple."

Use Google Reader to keep track of updates to this site - www.google.com/reader

To My Son's Girlfriend

I'm tempted to ask
what you see in him.
Although you probably
see the good that I see
I wonder if you realize
how much he is my handiwork,
or which of the qualities
you daydream about in class
are the ones that I take pride in,
his cordiality, for example,
or love of silliness.

It's uncomfortable for me
to think of anyone else
loving him the way I do,
possessing him in a way
that only his mother and I
have ever possessed him,
and I can't deny being jealous,
not so much reluctant
to share or relinquish him
as resolved to remind you
that he's been around
longer than your love,
under construction if you will,
and that each cute trait
or whatever occurs to you
when you hear his name
I feel proprietary about,
like a woodworker
who makes a table
intending to sell it
but prays that no buyer
will recognize its worth.

"To My Son's Girlfriend" by Michael Milburn, from Drive By Heart. © Word Press, 2009.

Rough Road

From this cd that a Rasta man recommended to me in an under-the-staircase, hole-in-the-wall, Marley-curio-and-possibly-dope shop in Kensington Market, Toronto, one zero-degree Spring evening in April 2006...

Warrior King: Rough Road

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp_RwpWCM90

Actions result in other actions

"I’m majoring in physics and see many parallels between physics and Buddhism. I like how Buddhism is very logical. Karma is like physics—actions result in other actions.”

Lisa Kolde

http://www.volunteerglobal.com/blog-100329-guest-post-welcome-to-the-jungle-of-peace

Purple to Red

After the pink and the yellow, now the purple - and the beginnings of the red, announcing impending May. A flower calendar I follow.

Yesterday, though the tear-drop tree was still covered with dense foliage, and did not show any signs of flowering, noticed a few white flowers on the ground beneath. Aha. I am waiting. The suffocating heat will give way to the rain, and then there will be white tear-drop carpets in the morning, white against black tar.

Hands

My grandfather grew up holding rags,
pounding his fist into the pocket
of a ball glove, gripping a plumb line
for his father who built what anyone
needed.

At sixteen, wanting to work on
his own, he lied about his age
and for forty-nine years carried his lunch
to the assembly line where he stood
tightening bolts on air brake after
air brake along the monotonous belt.

I once asked him how he did that all
those years. He looked at me, said,
"I don't understand. It was only
eight hours a day," then closed
his fists.

Every night after dinner
and a pilsner, he worked some more.
In the summer, he'd turn the clay,
grow tomatoes, turnips, peas,
and potatoes behind borders
of bluebells and English daisies,
and marigolds to keep away the rabbits.

When the weather turned to frost,
he went to the basement where,
until the seeds came in March,
he made perfect picture frames, each
glistening with layers of sweet shellac.

His hands were never bored. Even
in his last years, arthritis locking every
knuckle, he sat in the kitchen carving
wooden houses you could set on a shelf,
one after another, each one different.

"Hands" by Jack Ridl, from Broken Symmetry. © Wayne State University Press, 2006

The youngest

At the orphanage where you go to give your old clothes, little boy walks in, while you are talking to the nun. "Our youngest kid", she says. Orphan. No father, mother abandoned him and ran away with someone. He comes and shakes hands with you, at the nun's behest.

And stays and looks at you while you talk to her. She says that he wants to go out, he's always stuck inside, and too young for school. People keep promising him that they'll take him out, and they don't. And they can't let him go with outsiders.

He doesn't say a word, just sticks to the wall. Watches you with those blank eyes, while you go away, too.

Pushkin

The old cat sleeps
in the newly arrived sun. One more spring
has come his way
dropping a solar bath
on failing kidneys, old cat bones.
I check for the rise and fall of breath.

Once he stalked hares
across the yard, tracked down
chicken hearts with split-lentil eyes.
Fearless, disinterested, a poseur, a demideity.
He and the dog are strangers still
after years of eating side by side.

I remember times of wailing
into my couch, alone
and utterly baffled by life,
when suddenly a cat
would be sitting on my head.

Last week I pulled him snarling
from under a chair in Dr. Bacon's office,
held him while she examined his dull coat,
felt his ribs. Pressed where it hurt.
Eight pounds of fur and bone and mad as hell
but "He's certainly less anxious in your lap,"
she murmured, astonishing me.
I had no idea. Old cat, old friend,
have I reached some place inside,
added to your life
as you have to mine?

"Pushkin" by Marjorie Kowalski Cole, from Inside, Outside, Morningside. © Ester Republic Press, 2009.

Kalyanamitta

From 'Letters from Burma' by Aung San Suu Kyi:

"During the hectic days of late May and early June, when a series of critical political events were triggered off by the arrests of the NLD members elected to parliament, a stream of foreign correspondents came to find out how we were coping with the situation. One of them commented on the fact that we did not appear to be unhappy. "U Tin U is smiling broadly and U Kyi Maung is cracking jokes, " he said. "Why are you not in a state of distress? Isn't the situation rather grim?" I suppose some would have seen the situation as grim, but to us, it was just another challenge; and the knowledge that we were facing it together with proven friends was simple reason for good cheer.

A doctor once recommended thinking happy thoughts as a most effective remedy for diverse illnesses. Certainly one of the happiest of thoughts is one's friends; old friends with whom you have shared youthful dreams of an ideal world, new friends with whom you are striving to achieve a realistic version of that ideal. It is comforting to know that friends you have not met for several decades, leading secure lives in countries where their rights are protected by the law, care as much for your welfare now as they did in the days when the Beatles were young and you argued over Dag Hammerskjold's Markings.

...According to the teachings of Buddhism, a good friend is one who gives things hard to give, does what is hard, bears hard words, tells you his secrets, guards your secrets assiduously, does not forsake you in times of want and does not condemn you when you are ruined. With such friends, one can travel the roughest road and not be defeated by hardship. Indeed, the rougher the path, the greater the delight in the company of kalyanamitta, good and noble friends who stand by us in times of adversity."

Page 132, 'A Friend in Need'

Continuity

"Darwinian evolution tells us that we are incipient compost: assemblages of complex molecules that - for no greater purpose than to secure sources of energy against competing claims - have developed the ability to speculate. After a few score years, the molecules disaggregate and return whence they came. Period. 

 As a gardener and ecologist, I find this oddly comforting. I like the idea of literal reincarnation: that the molecules of which I am composed will, once I have rotted, be incorporated into other organisms. Bits of me will be pushing through the growing tips of trees, will creep over them as caterpillars, will hunt those caterpillars as birds. When I die, I would like to be buried in a fashion which ensures that no part of me is wasted. Then I can claim to have been of some use after all. 

 Is this not better than the awful lottery of judgement? Is a future we can predict not more comforting than one committed to the whims of inscrutable authority? Is eternal death not a happier prospect than eternal life? The atoms of which we are composed, which we have borrowed momentarily from the ecosphere, will be recycled until the universe collapses.

This is our continuity, our eternity. Why should anyone want more?"

 'A life with no Purpose', George Monbiot

And to merge with the earth must be the end of all separateness.. Humus