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Poetry

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry  is just the ash.    — Leonard Cohen

Charge to a House Not Yet Built

12/31/2018

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Picture
​This is what I’ve asked of houses in the past:
Keep out the cold.
Keep out the rain.
Turn aside the creatures,
The ones who favor crumbs and jam,
Those that lust for cashmere and merino,
The others who flit through torn screens
Alert to my breath—and how can I stop breathing?
 
Keep out the singeing breath of a Santa Ana,
The damp fog rising off the lake.
Keep the sun from stealing the colors
Of the carpet for its own glory.
 
Give me solitude, stillness.
Keep out the darkness.
Make of this place a sanctuary.
 
Now, of this house, the first of my own making, I ask:
 
Be at ease on this small
Parcel of ferns and moss
Under fir and madrone.
 
Bring me the noises of the night,
Soft scitterings that let me know I’m not alone.
Let the browsing deer keep me company.
 
Breathe in the fragrance of tannin
Distilled by gentle rains.
Hear the heavy winter winds
Churning the waters of the strait
To foamed brine.
 
Let in the light
Straying through a scrim of needled branches.
 
We will both bear our scratches
And not fret over their deepening
With time.
 
But grow more imperfectly perfect.

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​Encounter with a Black Adder on the Path of the Gods (Bomerano, Italy—May 2018)

5/29/2018

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A black, silk ribbon
     of an adder
          slipped
               down
                    the stones
                         ahead of our procession,
a black remmant
     fallen
          loose
               from the sleeve of a mourner
or a streamer
     on a somber hat
          I’d wear in the church.

I’d watch
     tears
          slip
               down
                    the cheeks of some.

Mine would be dry
     as these stones
          under
               our feet,
                    worn smooth by a
thousand moments of grief.
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Switch Pass Pass

11/29/2017

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Lord Herbert Horatio Kitchener, member of the British cabinet,
was a compassionate man.

You can imagine how discomforted he was
at the sight of a soldier’s toes
bloodied by the twist of a woolen seam,
wire-like in a trench-soaked boot.

Lord Kitchener, a British general, was a compassionate man.

Late night, eyes burning, he sought a strategy
to obliterate the enemy,
a line of seamed stitches, wool spun from 
the impervious fleece of stolid Hampshire sheep, 
that cut like an entrenching tool into damp flesh. 

How to bridge the gap?  Seamlessly close ranks?
Eliminate the casualties?

A general, so compassionate, to concern himself
with the blistered and bloodied toes,
once so small, so pink.
Toes scrubbed, counted, tickled by mothers.
Toes that had traced the slender calf of a sweetheart’s leg.
Toes that trod on the foot of a patient sister teaching the foxtrot.

General Kitchener was a compassionate man.

Imagine his discomfort, chastising the mothers, sweethearts, sisters
who spun the Hampshire wool, knit the socks, seamed the toes.
“Ladies, to save our soldiers’ feet,
you must follow orders.  Follow the grafting sequence for a seamless toe.
The grafting yarn is switched forward,
passed through the next loop,
switched to the rear and passed. . .
In sum, ladies, the six steps are
Switch-pass-pass, switch-pass-pass.”

Deft fingers followed orders.
How comforted they must have been--
to know a compassionate general.

How then was it,
Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener?

British ordnance would not be switched
from factories, not passed to lorries, to ships,
to the front where men waited in trenches
while mortar sounded without cease, 
and the sky rained shells.

Men waited in the furrows of blood filled trenches,
lines of misery stitched across the French countryside.

After relief came, medics wove their way through
French mud, rain, blood, and excrement
to find the bodies, bloodied stumps, legs.
And body-less feet and toes— still swaddled in seamless, woolen socks. 

Lord Herbert Horatio Kitchener was a compassionate man.
British Lord Herbert Horatio Kitchener (1850-1916), first Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, was a decorated career military officer. His ruthless treatment and imprisonment of civilians during the Second Boer War (1899-1902) led to the use of the term “concentration camp.”  

He was appointed Secretary of State for War in 1914 by Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and launched an aggressive recruitment campaign, enlisting more than a million volunteers in the army. During the war, trench foot, a medical condition that led to many cases of gangrene and amputation, became a crisis. Soldiers needed to keep their feet dry and change socks frequently because the condition was caused by long submersion in the water of the trenches; the conditions was exacerbated by harsh, bulky socks that caused blistering of toes. Kitchener is credited with developing a method of seamlessly grafting the toe of the sock closed. The Kitchener Stitch is a technique many knitters master by memorizing a rhythmic memonic of alternating stitches.   

In the spring of 1915, lack of sufficient artillery shells was cited as the cause for a major British defeat at the Battle of Aubers Ridge. The official British historian recorded more than 11,000 casualties, while the Germans estimated British losses at 32,000. Public opinion blamed Lord Kitchener.  He died on a mission to Russia in June 1916, when his ship, HMS Hampshire struck a German mine off the Orkney Islands.
Picture
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Seed Stitch

11/22/2017

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Picture
She holds the yarn in fingers
Slim and white as birches lining the shore.

The yarn, a twist of colored strands,
Forest duff,
Spruce green,
Brown, scaled cones,
Russet lichens,
Gray, water-worn granite,
Bitter-yellow beech leaves,
And silvered blue of the lake’s wind-swept mosaic.

She knits the colors into a forest fabric,
Soft purled hills like ever-traveling swales that ripple inland from lakeshore,
Knit stitch vees, crotches of forked aspen and elderberry where orioles nest.

She shapes sinuous sleeves
And a windbreak collar deep as the cedar copse.

A dandelion seed, piloting the wind,
Lights on her wrist.

Deftly she grasps it between moon-white nails of forefinger and thumb
And plants it in the next stitch, one furrow from the finishing.

She’ll wait for the first rain and,
In the meadow, slip it over branch-boned arms.
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Rib Cage

11/15/2017

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Rib Cage

I tend them carefully, these broken ribs.

In the bath, a warm amniotic fluid,
I’m no longer heavy as stone,
but buoyant--
empty as a broken cage.

What remains are shards of songs,
faded feathered dreams,
clipped wings--
all that could pierce the heart--
vanished now.

And the ribs?
Better broken than ossified.

After all, what can escape an unbroken cage?
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    Picture

    Norma Bishop

    Poetry releases a stream of words, wrapping around rocks, scouring the bank—revealing. 

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