I GIVE YOU TO RIVER, a poem for National Poetry Month

Like my ancestors before me, I love rivers. The peace of running water always calms me, watching it ripple past slowly, hearing the murmur of the water over rocks and branches and the swish of it against the banks, spying the many lives that live along the river--fish, turtles, snakes, muskrats, beavers,   hawks, and eagles. For millennia, my people have always chosen to settle near rivers.

When I was growing up, I was taught to go to water when troubled or ill. Running water is strong medicine, good medicine. We pray next to it, and then use it to wash away whatever is troubling our hearts, minds, or bodies. Sometimes a creek or brook will work for me, but if I'm truly heartsick, I seek out a river.

This poem is another in a series of poems that I have posted to celebrate National Poetry Month. It is an exploration of this practice of going to water when troubled. In the worst kind of pain and grief, sometimes only a river can provide any release. For a healing ceremony, one needs to build a fire, say the right prayers, make an offering, but sometimes in the worst straits, it can be simply you and the river.

I GIVE YOU TO RIVER

Turning to the water for release

from my troubles, from you,

I write your name in my palm with my finger,

then brush off the invisible letters

into the river currents passing at my feet.

I ask River to carry them out of my heart and mind,

carry them away from my life, remove all that darkness

that is you infesting my mind against my will,

replaying memories that were nothing

but playacting on your part,

though my heart tries to find excuses,

for all the deliberate pain.

I have to face it finally—there are none.

Hard to believe, but even harder to find

I still long for you.

This stubborn heart won’t give up.

So I barricade it, keep it safe from its stupid fidelity,

while I wait for River to carry out magic,

carry your name and games far from me,

set me free finally with the power of moving water,

my own inborn element,

which carves memories of trauma from the earth itself

and leaves wondrous scars.

Published in Dark Sister (Mammoth Publications, 2018)

SPELL FOR BANNING A BOOK, a poem for National Poetry Month

We are living in dark times. We are living in times when lies are elevated above the truth and fantasies and “alternative facts” are elevated above fact and reality by our leaders and those in power over us. We are living in times when children kept in cages after being torn away from their parents are said to be in “summer camps.” We are living in times when the free press is called “the enemy of the people.” In fact, we are living in times that become more and more reminiscent of the rise of Nazi Germany than we would like to believe or experience.

We are living in times when the president of the United States tweets out his desire to censor newspapers, television news programs, entire sections of the press, and published books. So far, he has not succeeded in this, even though he daily tweets out his condemnation of “fake news” and his desire to change the libel laws to undercut the First Amendment, but the situation looks grimmer every month and week and day. It reminds me forcibly of the book burnings of the Nazi regime.

One of the earliest and most important steps a dictatorship must take is to seize control of the narrative. Thus, we see the multitude of lies and the constant accusations of fake news. The next step is censorship, which grants so much control over what the populace can know, and after censorship comes the destruction of books and magazines which contain the truth and not the regime’s propaganda. Along with this, we always find persecution of journalists and writers and poets who are not willing to spout the regime's line. Unfortunately, history gives us all too many examples of this through the ages. In the photograph at the top of this blog, Nazis are burning books in Germany.

This poem is about this process of banning books, which continues to be a threat down through history. Not too long ago, we had books by Latino and Native and Black authors banned in public school districts in the Southwest, which led to a band of activists gathering those forbidden books  and smuggling them across multiple states into those school districts to educate those children. This was called the Librotraficante movement and led to the courts reinstating those books in the school district. Vigilance is the price of freedom.

SPELL FOR BANNING A BOOK

First, find a censor.

This will be hard—

not that censors are rare,

but they are adept mimics.

Do not be fooled. No matter

how benevolent its disguise,

a frightened censor is dangerous.

Approach with caution.

To safely capture it

for your spell, you must circle

the censor chanting soothing

nonsense syllables.

It is meaning that terrifies

censors.

Surround the stupefied censor

with charms made from advertising

photographs of a mythical golden age—

smiling mothers

in high heels and aprons, silent fathers

keeping sentinel on horseback, sexless

children never asking

questions. Sacred to the censor,

such charms have power

to blind it.

Select the book

you want banned.

Set it outside the circle

of charms, and carefully

remove the charm nearest

so the censor can detect

the presence of an attempt

at meaning.

Protect yourself.

Enraged censors have been known

not only to ban books

but to burn them

and then press on to people.

Published in Dark Sister (Mammoth Publications, 2018)

COMING AROUND AGAIN--a poem for National Poetry Month

It has been almost 5 years since I began my battle with breast cancer. This poem for National Poetry Month looks back on that time and on other times before that when death was a possibility for me. One advantage of becoming an elder is that death is no longer the boogeyman, the monster in the closet.

This poem speaks to that love for life that keeps us clinging to the mortal realm, even as different aspects of our bodies weaken or begin to fail. It becomes possible to take the long look, and when that becomes possible, fear dissolves.

COMING AROUND AGAIN

Three years ago—three years of poison and desperate

positive thinking—they cut off my breast,

carving out the lymph nodes

of the underarm as well.

They left me with an ugly, puckered scar

14 inches long and 3 inches wide,

raised one-half to one inch high

along its length, and another

incision 3 inches below that scar

where a length of tubing inserted

into the chest drained

blood and lymph into an attached bag

for 3 ½ pain-filled, sleepless weeks.

Death has come looking for me before this

several times. I have always tricked her

into leaving me to my life a little longer,

Scheherazade putting the random scenes

of daily living into dramatic narrative,

heightening conflict and tension,

generating suspense, embellishing

dull parts to create more spark and excitement,

adding touches of humor to lighten the mood,

a story playing out in front of her

to which she needs to know the ending

before she brings down the final curtain.

I’ve grown familiar with Death’s face,

can read it to tell if I need to spice up the story

because she’s losing interest. Old friend

and familiar, she bears no horror for me any longer.

I have seen the long view through her eyes,

the sacred labyrinth of galaxies

spinning out of control throughout the universe

pulling apart in spiral motion, eternal

dissipation of energy rippling outward

with magic like the violent change brought

by tropical storm clouds seen from the air,

galactic snake coiling around stars and planets

and black holes whirling like water

down a drain, sucking all matter and energy

within reach, voracious maws, widdershins,

sunwise, ears of creation cocked

for the song, symphony, story, vining

through the nebulae, gathering tension

and force, the vast’s giant spring pulled taut,

ready to snap back into the kaleidoscope,

force of tornadoes, whirlwinds,

passing into the still eye surrounded

by the stomp dance of the stars,

Creator’s medicine wheel, coming,

going, bringing, leaving, giving, taking,

moving up and down around the spiral

of time, infinity’s tilt-a-whirl.

Remaining attached to this life, these loved people,

I have no wish to join the stardust spiral dance

of destruction and creation before I must.

I’ll stay here in this incarnation as long as I can,

loving this insane world’s dark and light moments

and the people, trees, birds around me, clinging

until the last to its chiaroscuro, yin and yang.

Still, I won’t fall screaming into the void

when my time is up. I’ve seen the wheel of fortune

that is the cosmos. Life is circular, grinding all of us

into crumbs of creation, raw material for new wonders.

I’ve promised myself and lovely bony Ms. Death

I will embrace my ride on the celestial merry-go-round.

But the story’s not over yet—there’s at least one more chapter

before the spectacular, mystifying, completely satisfying climax.

Published in Dark Sister (Mammoth Publications, 2018)

WHAT CROW SAYS--a poem for National Poetry Month

I have a strong propensity for crows. They're birds that don't get the love and respect that other birds do because they're not as flashy in appearance and their voices are harsher, even though they are classified as songbirds.

Crows are intelligent, can make tools and remember the faces of those humans who have been a threat to them or their community, even have rituals to mourn their dead. They often bring us messages of wisdom from the Creator and show us the way when we need guidance.

This poem is the first in a sequence of mine called "First Cousins Speak." In these poems, some of our relatives in the larger world discuss humans, those troubled, puzzling late-come additions to Creation.

WHAT CROW SAYS

This is how gods are made.

The land is wild and free,

soil just beginning to cover the warm rock.

One day, the stone lights up

with the dreams of animals.

Out of the shining,

something other awakens.

These things happen so easily.

Nature is crowded,

everything intent on being warm.

Who knew what damage dreams could wreak?

This furless, clawless thing created

from whatever’s wasted or not wanted in us,

we watched it arise

walking on two feet like Bear

but so weak and slow.

Bear can outrun a horse,

kill a deer with one blow.

It should have died but didn’t.

Some tenacity kept it alive

and breeding and changing

the very world around it

We all spoke the same language

until that changed, too.

Now we’re left with consequences.

Now we are the other,

everything other to this being.

We are the constant target in the crosshairs.

Now we live with the burden of being seen,

living into our observed death.

Great plans never work out.

Chaos is forever seeping in.

All it takes is a crack in creation

like this to ruin everything.

Here is a wound no spell can heal.

We’ve tried them all.

Not even Spider can weave us whole again.

Spoilage creeps over the whole land.

Cherish your wildness.

It’s all we have left.

Live close to the edge.

Published in Dark Sister (Mammoth Publishing, 2018)

Tallgrass--a poem for National Poetry Month

One of my favorite places on the planet is the Flint Hills of Kansas. The Flint Hills is the largest surviving Tallgrass Prairie in the country, 4.5 million acres of bluestem and wild animals and cattle and tough people, all survivors. I went to school there, and my parents are buried there.

My computer operating system keeps showing me scenes of landscape from around the world that are supposed to be breathtakingly beautiful, and they often are. Still, I know people who drive I-70 west or east through the Flint Hills and insist that the Kansas landscape is just flat and boring. I insist that they must be lying or blind. The Flint Hills inspire me so much that I've written a number of poems about them, and I thought I would put this one up for National Poetry Month to remind us all of the quieter beauty that often surrounds us while we are seeking after what we consider the exotic or fashionable.

TALLGRASS

The prairie is a tough place.

Formed when the Rocky Mountain

rainshadow killed off the trees,

millions of buffalo grazed its big bluestem,

turkeyfoot, sideoats, switchgrass, grama, Indiangrass,

sweetgrass, prairie dropseed, buffalograss,

for millennia, but, big as a nightmare

when you encounter one up close,

the buffalo never defeated the prairie.

Summer in tallgrass lands is harsh—

blazing hot sun, only occasional rain in torrents.

Summer turns the plains into grassy desert,

But those grass roots plunge deep, deep into the earth,

some twelve or more feet under the surface.

The soil under a prairie is a dense mat

of tangled rootstock, rhizomes, tubers, and bulbs.

Those roots hold out against drought

and preserve the soil against thundering

gullywashers and toadswampers.

Summer never defeated the prairie.

Sometimes lightning strikes,

and fire races across the landscape

like water poured out on concrete,

spreading out with amazing speed and inevitability.

The prairie compensated by making seeds

that need to pass through flame to germinate.

Fireproof seeds, what an invention!

The tribes learned to set controlled fires

to bring back gayfeather, blazing star, prairie clover.

Now, ranchers burn the prairie each spring.

Fire never defeated the prairie.

As for winter, the waist- and shoulder-high grasses

triumph over the snow, spreading

large swathes of sun-colored grasses

across the scene, only occasionally punctuated

by a spread of snow along the meandering paths

where animal and human feet have trodden.

The prairie just absorbs the snow,

swallowing it down to build stronger, deeper roots

to withstand summer’s hot, dry onslaught.

Winter never defeated the prairie.

Buffalo, white-tailed deer, antelope, pronghorns,

gray wolves, coyotes, bobcats, cougars, red foxes,

black-footed ferrets, badgers, shrews, skunks,

raccoons, possums, black-tailed prairie dogs,

jack rabbits, prairie chickens, bull snakes,

and the occasional human for centuries

made trails and paths through the grasses

by trampling them down or cutting their stems.

If paths are not continually maintained

by a great deal of manual labor,

they disappear like smoke.

The prairie will always take them back.

The only thing that ever defeated prairie

was a man with a steel plow.

Published in Dark Sister (Mammoth Publishing, 2018)

AWAKE AT THE END OF NIGHT--a Poem for National Poetry Month

As National Poetry Month begins, I am still battling with this shattered right shoulder that has a destroyed rotator cuff. The good news is that I have finally recovered from the awful illness that help me and its grip much of this winter.

For my first National Poetry Month poem, I thought I would post “Awake at the End of Night,” in part because I am spending so many wakeful nights right now and have in recent months. The wonderful thing about the end of winter is that, during the worst wakeful moments late in the night as morning is approaching, now I can hear the cacophony of bird songs, and it is so welcome.

There is nothing so lovely as listening to a northern mockingbird sing in the dark. You will find that such an image or sound shows up in the number of my poems, simply because this bird is so important to me. I wish you all a month of marvelous poetry. I am enjoying all of the Poetry that is being posted on Twitter and on Facebook. I hope to post poems several times a week throughout the month on this blog, but I am teaching a pretty intensive class right now in writing the novel with lots of written assignments for the students, entailing lots of written feedback from me, so we'll have to see how the month goes.

AWAKE AT THE END OF NIGHT

Praise the mockingbird singing farewell to night.

Praise the owl flying home with its mouse-feast.

Praise the beetle scurrying from sudden light.

Praise the moon sailing down to sleep.

Praise the branches whipping the house in the wind.

Praise thunder shaking windows and walls.

Praise sheets of lightning flaring across the sky.

Praise the seeds in darkest soil uncurling.

Praise the tendrils of root and stem reaching out.

Praise the worm that leaves riches in burrows behind it.

Praise the rain coursing down the brick walls.

Praise the blanket wrapping in our body heat.

Praise the sound of your even sleep breathing beside me.

Praise the body I wrap my leg around.

Praise the heavy arm thrown over me.

Praise the breath moving in and out between my mouth and yours.

Praise the spirits of the sun and moon that live within us.

Praise all things silent and hidden.

Published in Dark Sister (Mammoth Publications, 2018)

Poem for Maya Angelou's birthday and National Poetry Month

Today would have been the 90th birthday of Maya Angelou, the great feminist poet, essayist, memoirist, and activist. As part of my series of poems posted for #NationalPoetryMonth, I thought I'd post one for her. 

This poem was not necessarily inspired by Angelou and her work, though it very well could have been. It shares many qualities with her work, an optimism, a desire to celebrate women, a belief in the triumph of the human spirit. It was, however, created during the immediate aftermath of having to leave, for medical reasons, a longtime career of running a university women's center and working extremely hard to help women empower themselves.

One day during this period of adjustment and grieving, as I wrote in my journal about what I missed most about my work, I reminisced about the extraordinary moments when women I had worked with would finally step up and seize their own power and take charge of their lives and their dreams. This poem came out of those memories.

SHE TAKES HER POWER IN HER OWN HANDS

and pours it over her body,

drenching hair and face,

standing in pools of herself,

dripping excess. She takes up her power

with strong hands and holds it close

to her breasts like an infant, warming it

with her own heat. She draws her power

around her like a hand-loomed shawl,

a cloak to keep the wind out,

pulling it tighter, tugging and patting it

smooth against the winter.

She pulls her power from branches

of dead trees where it has hung so long

neglected that it has changed from white to deep

weathered gold. She wraps her hair

in power like the light of distant stars,

gleaming through the dark emptiness

in and around everything. She lets her power down

into a dank well, down and down,

clanking against stone walls, until

she hears the splash, a little further

to submerge it completely, then draws it

hand over rubbed-raw hand, heavy enough

to make her shoulders and forearms ache

and shudder with strain, pulls it up

overflowing, her power,

and drinks in deep, desperate gulps

out of a lifetime of thirst. She weaves her power

into a web, a cloth, a shroud, and hangs it

across the night where it catches the light of stars

and refracts it into a shining glory,

brighter than the moon

and colder. She holds her power

in her hands at the top of the hill

in the top of the tree where she steps out

onto the air and her wings

of power buoy her to ride the thermals

higher and higher toward the sun,

her new friend.

When she returns,

she folds her power over and over

into a tiny, dense pellet to swallow,

feeling its mass sink to her center

and explode, spreading throughout to transform

her into something elemental,

a star,

a mountain,

a river,

a god.

Published in Heart's Migration (Tia Chucha Press, 2009)

National Poetry Month Begins on Easter, Passover, and April Fool's Day

April is National Poetry Month, and as usual during this month, I will be posting poems to this blog throughout the month. In 2018, however, the beginning of National Poetry Month is also April Fool's Day, Passover, and Easter, a powerful concoction of influences.

This first poem for National Poetry Month, then, is one that plays with the history of Christianity, Judaism, and the basic concept of the Holy Fool or the fool for God.

LAMENT OF A FAILED ACOLYTE

Desperation can come from having nothing but God to love.

                                         --Michael Heffernan

Desperation I’ve a long acquaintance with.

Desperation and hope

have been the twin pillars

between which I’ve sailed,

trying to avoid being eaten alive

or sucked in,

aiming at the narrow gate

sometimes called Jesus

who’s run me aground on hope.

Unlike despair, hope’s not a sin

against the Holy Spirit but only

against logic and forty years’ experience

wandering in this hungry desert,

waiting for white wafers of grace

to descend and bring another presence.

If I sound mad, it’s no wonder,

in this shaggy, lice-ridden skin

with blood of locusts on my tongue.

My big mistake was asking

I AM

in for company.

Avoid divine guests, I say

now, drowning in painful, terrifying love.

There’s been a mix-up somewhere.

I put in a request for ecstasy,

not passion.

Published in Heart's Migration (Tia Chucha Press, 2009)

Final poem for National Poetry Month--JOSEPH SLEEPS

For this final poem of the month, I was drawn to a poem from my book, Heart's Migration, a poem that was written when my youngest son was still little. To show how long ago that was, he's now Dean of Humanities at a nearby university, and the George Bush mentioned in the poem is the first President Bush, George H. W. Bush.

Poetry can capture a moment for us so that we can always re-experience its emotions years later. I'm glad I wrote this poem because, even decades later, it brings that long-gone child back more clearly and intensely than any photograph.

JOSEPH SLEEPS,

his eyelids like a moth’s fringed wings.

Arms flail against the Ninja Turtle sheet

and suddenly-long legs

race time.

Awake, he’s a water-leak detector, a recycling ranger

who bans Styrofoam and asks for beeswax

crayons, a renewable resource.

He wants to adopt the Missouri river,

write the president

to make factories stop polluting.

They’re old friends, he and George Bush.

He writes and scolds

the president, every month or so,

about bombing the children of Iraq

(he made his own sign to carry in protest),

about the plight of the California condor and northern gray wolf,

about more shelters and aid for the homeless.

The lion-shaped bulletin board in his room

is covered with pictures and letters from George,

who must be nice,

even if he is a slow learner.

Joseph is a mystery fan, owns 54 Nancy Drews.

Nancy’s his friend, along with Jo, Meg, and Amy

and poor Beth, of course, whom he still mourns.

He also reads of knights and wizards, superheroes,

and how to win at Nintendo.

The cats and houseplants are his to feed and water,

and the sunflower blooming in the driveway’s border

of weeds. He drew our backyard to scale,

using map symbols, sent off to have it declared

an official wildlife refuge, left a good-night

note on my pillow, written in Egyptian hieroglyphs.

In my life, I have done one good thing.

Published in Heart's Migration (Tia Chucha Press, 2009)

National Poetry Month in a Dark Time

It's a dark time in the U.S. right now. There's little doubt about that. Every day, news of several new scandals erupts. Possible Russian agents or assets in power in the White House, entire departments of the federal government essentially wiped out, bans against Muslims, the wholesale rounding up and imprisonment of Latinos, attempts to wipe out health care and health insurance as we know it today (seriously, health insurance that doesn't cover hospitalization???), attempts to wipe out all programs that help the poor, the elderly, children, the disabled, the disenfranchisement of ever more American voters--the list goes on and on. 

Just yesterday, an airline lost almost a billion dollars in share value after it beat up a paying passenger because he refused to leave a seat he'd already paid for to make room for spare airline employees. Then, Eric Trump, the inconvenient, inadvertent truth-teller in a family of pathological liars, told a reporter that the President of the United States sent 59 missiles flying into a Syrian airbase because Ivanka, his much-too-beloved daughter, felt sadness over photos of dead children and told him to do something--and, Eric added, this should prove that his dad, the President, is not beholden to Russia. And finally, on this first full day of Passover, Sean Spicer, the presidential press secretary, said Hitler never used chemical weapons--at least, not against his own people--well, against innocent people--no, he meant against his own innocent people in their homes because he took them off to Holocaust Centers to gas them.

And yesterday was a light day in the dark news department, compared to what has happened lately. Oh, I almost forget in the press of the other dumpster fires, also yesterday, we saw for the first time the FISA warrant obtained against Carter Page, foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump's campaign, stating that the FBI had reasons that the FISA court found credible to believe Page was a Russian spy.

When we have possible Russian spies running our government, determined efforts to destroy said democratic government, and a President who wants to become an actual dictator and is rapidly stripping away our rights and protections against that, we live in dark, dark times. In the words of beloved children's book author, Susan Cooper, "The dark is rising." We have never needed National Poetry Month more. So here is a poem for the dark times.

BLESSING FOR THE DARK TIMES

Creator reminds us daily

through the fragrant winds,

the re-leafing trees,

the dark-of-morning bird chorus,

the taste of rain on upheld faces,

that this world was built in beauty,

made for harmony and wholeness.

We must remember

it is we humans

who break what is shining and whole.

It is our species that creates dark times.

We must learn to live

in tune with creation once more. We must sing

balance back into this bountiful earth.

As we work together

to mend the broken world—

against the forces among our own kind

choosing destruction over grace—

may we keep in our imaginations

the ancestral memory

of this world as it was created to be.

May we will it into existence

again. May we move always toward healing

and wholeness. May we never forget

the force of willed action

and words of power.

May we create a blessed light

in these dark times in which we find ourselves.

May we know

deep inside our bones

that, no matter how broken,

our world is always

worth the labor of mending.

© Linda Rodriguez 2017