You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Chief Seattle, who appears in the Grilled Salmon section of this poetry collection, is an elusive figure in American history. Whether he pulled a fast one is another question, but he did get a major city named in his honor.
As for his role here?
I enjoy his company. I hope you do, too.
~*~
For your own copy, click here.
I keep thinking about the stories children are taught, especially here in America. Carol Bly once wrote of the Scandinavian tales the descendants in Minnesota never heard, unlike the mass-media mishmash they were served. I’m left wondering if Ohio ever had anything like Kokopelli or Coyote from Native American lore and wisdom. I can keep hoping.
The fact is, most Americans are estranged from their roots. We don’t even know where we live, not really.
Forget the Zombie Apocalypse, we rarely know how to select the healthy wild berries. Leave it at that.
As for the hornpipe? It’s a Celtic dance, faster and more complicated than a jig – or gigue, if you insist. But I also like the vision of a pipe carved from a horn and played.
Care to join me for a dance?
~*~
For your own copy, click here.
As I contend in my latest book release at Thistle/Flinch editions, the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden goes much deeper than the traditional children’s telling or, for that matter, the conventional interpretation that focuses on disobedience and a teaching imposed much later, the one known as Original Sin.
The surprisingly short Creation story – the second one in the Bible, actually – is one of those texts that just won’t let go of me, and the new layers of understanding just keep on surfacing.
The other morning I was struck by a consideration of what the Forbidden Fruit might be in our own time. Nowadays we could consider things like global warming (more accurately, climatic instability), overpopulation, or nuclear arms proliferation, just for starters – things caused by our own curiosity and consumption, one way or another. Each bears an ultimate warning, “and you are not to touch it, lest you die.” Each one is a negative consequence of advances that seemed good at the time they were introduced.
So here we are, in a situation very much like Adam and Eve in the aftermath, looking for direction and restored balance.
For my earlier musings on the original text, take a look at Eden Embraced. I’d say it really is all about the timeless human condition.
Some of us have backbones. And some don’t.
We all breathe in some fashion. And eat.
Protozoa, echinoderms, annelids, mollusks, arthropods, crustaceans, arachnids, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals.
Welcome to the club.
~*~
For your own copy of my animal nature poems, click here.
What may appear to be a lazy river meandering amid its wooded isles deserves consideration and room to run wild.
Passions arise and freeze over. The flow dwindles to rock. Rats run along the shoreline of factory brick at the dam. A few miles on, either direction, the dairy herds gather.
All of it reflecting my soul when I lived there.
~*~
For your own copy, click here.
Living in a temperate zone where green returns after gray slumber, I always find the leafy proliferation a wonder. It’s a festive temple, of sorts, and a comfort.
Restore your soul in its abundance.
~*~
For your own copy, click here.
Rarely do you stand at the summit. It’s a lesson of life.
Even on the trail, the climax awaits, somewhere overhead.
We need something to look up to, from infancy on.
And then there are clouds – or the surrounding range.
Or the streams, threading together, below.
~*~
For your own copy, click here.
The lessons remain:
Not a bad model for a poem, either. Or a whole collection to pack along the way.
~*~
For your own copy, click here.
The Olympic Peninsula is an extraordinary extreme in continental United States. It juts out in the far upper left-hand corner, surrounded on three sides by ocean and inlets and featuring a jagged mountain range in its center. Much of it is lush and tangled, and there is relatively little human habitation.
It could be a land of the gods, as its very name suggests. Or as the Native Americans, with their stories still intact, will relate. Forget Zeus and Hera, then – this is a panoply arising from American roots and its westward focus.
Come along into the rainforest and then camp just in from the beach. As I did, collecting these poems.
~*~
For your own copy, click here.
More than zoology prompts these poems. The human imagination runs wild across the range. Up the mountain. Into the sky. Down in the sea. Under the earth.
To run along, fly along, swim along, sing along, crawl along, click here.
It’s all in our nature, too.
~*~
Jnana's Red Barn 