[ARTS]: Big and Little Poetry--free verse, any verse.

[Tai Shi]

Today I sing for others
May we sing compassion
As the Buddha sang
His whole life in matter
Of days at 80, lingering
Beyond the Great Beyond
Sung memories
In this song of empathy
I sing, I sing in this moment
Let me but in my tenor
Voice unwind this day
In memory of my mother
Who like the Buddha passed
Away in silence for it is
Ultimately in silence
Our lives are gone,
But memory, yes memory
Lives on, in silence
Nothing stops the Buddha,
Our Christ in hallowed
Walk to Gethsemane
Gathered strength to die
In strength, as eighty
Years flashed before Buddha
Eyes, Jesus lay down his cast
Lingering no more on wring
Remined every day we all
Live on, not so much
In memory but in life of our song.

Gassho
sat / lah
Tai Shi

[Kokuu]

That's beautiful, Tai Shi!

[Shawnzen]

Huh?
Oh, that's right!
I forgot what it meant to be unhindered.

The lingering taste of sparkling water
Sits on my tongue--
The lingering tingly-ness of a 25-minute Zazen
Slowly fades away from my leg.

I must apologize to everyone
For the nervous-wreck I have been these last few years.

I have been unwell.

Gassho
Sat today

Shawn B. M.

[Shawnzen]

Anger greets me
'Round every corner
Of every street
And every avenue.
Seeking, seeking, seeking,
But never finding.
Moments pass me by;
And, blinded by my own delusions,
I do not notice as they slip away from me.

Gassho
ST

[Tai Shi]

ARTS: Big and Little Poetry--free verse, any verse.

Shawnzen, I appreciate your poetry and understanding what I was doing with you tonight as I get ready to go to bed. I understand your little gifts. Your big gifts. You made me care and look again for your name.
Gassho
sat/ lah
Tai Shi


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

[Tom A.]

I love this verse because it reminds me of “the silent Zen verb” Jundo is always raving about. It’s a verse from ‘Elegía del silencio’ (July 1920) by Federico García Lorca

en Espeñol:

Huyendo del sonido
eres sonido mismo,
espectro de armonía,
humo de grito y canto.
Vienes para decirnos
en las noches oscuras
la palabra infinita
sin aliento y sin labios.

In English:

Fleeing from sound
you are sound itself:
ghost of harmony,
smoke of the cry and of song.
On dark nights you come to us
to whisper the infinite
word without breath,
without lips.

And one from me:


When just sitting
The bottom falls out
Nothing left
But everything
Whole and complete



Gassho,
Tom

SatLah

[Tai Shi]

Gift of my Buddha Nature

He held in right hand, pen of left hand escaped then gone,
Years before. fingers of tight, left hand useless. Pressure typed,
He vowed to Compose no lines in bones. Instead in fine relief
With this precious gems, his poetry washed of dead ash,

From splashing wounds which crippled his great mind,
When Darkness left, she created her own brilliant ideas, great
Blackberry Winter, then his daughter born of travail, another work
Husband's blessing spoken infinity of love for one to need life

Silently much Greater mother for child, she carried quietly
Little girl in quiet stillness brought motherhood to wonder
Where baby would grow, how stillness she would be in his arms
Lives given to books, gift for child who escaped with difficulty,

Family final relief, both ways with words figured into details,
Man with sobering thoughts, clean Rocky Mountains climbed,
Woman with work monuments of motherhood, flowering motherhood
In solitude as her child grew while she became thoughtful mother

Gracious for her sober husband who decades together expected
In more quiet manly, piety loud acts into air, days growing
He slowly found his sight. Motherhood was beautiful. Careful
He showed more than comfortable clothing with meaning

They finally aged together after time wore on, singleness
Together one family incarnation, realized with intention desired
Her uncut flowers grew everywhere. laughter, perennials yearly
Mothers Day Stylized in Joy, freedom to care for girl's life,

Child's mind grew, he lost anger in him lost slowly to one,
Habitual requirement of lost his in adulthood petty emotion
from deftly drawing his mind lost in sixty-eight years
With his own Mother, he worked day by day, was finally

Father, never loneliness again, partner restored to lead song
Not false wisdom, anguished in tranquility regained step by
Step, money saved at his age ceasing death while she labored.
Words Resumed full momentum in poems, serious laughter,

Delight of Fourth Quartet days without his ratcheting stigma
Power in sanity, ever mindful of his ways always, returned instead
Of Wonder in St. Louis capturing lands where delicious gardens,
Vineyard grew while French didn't weep when Tathagata's
Kind word was quiet below his Bodhi Tree bringing stillness,

Like morning stars, earthly touch. Then beams of The Sutras,
Resurrection so Truthfully not endured, but combined, completed,
These men and women naturally, Four Nobel Truths a gift
Which husband embraced in arms distant like truth free, one's

Simple eight fold path never stated, river crossed daily, implied
Peacefully in precepts providing path undertaken instead
Of delicate forced thinking. Companionship working today,
With gratitude of joy, loyalty rising before simple work creations

In glorified Haiku thinking scribbled words tumbling without books
Forgotten like eight spokes of wheels rolling forth where Asoka
Relived his battles in these publications forgotten earned degrees
Charged every flame, every deftly wrong word edited out of suffering.

Never where he sought found purity in writing, where are forms
From his mind given to younger friends in gaining no fame. left
To one dying of fatal fatigue syndrome or rheumatoid spine, rituals
Of light for work, Freedom in spoken verses never silently made, lead

Into ignorant of blue Skies, Pearls where Appassionato played
Centuries before visions without distortion, they always wrote fine
Poems of Loveliness, friendship secured his lines of surety, younger
Played Brandenburg Violins, Gifts pf Alpines he passed on meadows,

Mountain Trails traversed language where lupins fell, petals on shoulders.
Wrought purple, blue lupins in memorized Deer Park, in Plumb Village
In fall gold, red trees, another wise trees in Vermont, where spring days
She played with owners friend, daughter finding self, different trails

Her words greater Populated from free of daylight, each Discovery
In great Criticism of Women in Literature wrong, long poems helped
Hidden Deep social media meaning fear of lost meaning soon disappearing
Gone after purge, nothing reached she found their when lines

Divided The Heart Sutra lost enlightenment inspiration flooding
Rivers, computers wrong, purged of intensive books gone, panic
For posterity, each year, final gifts destroyed greatest lines, stories
Prose, all Literature brilliant Daughters writing books, she saved this art.

Parents gave life to their daughters greatest wish to write, their wish
Finest rubies, daughter freedom Forty years after marriage vows,
Parents aged, Laurel wreath, her own words of magnitude ageing now,
To uncover young Japanese poems, prose more stories, completion.

Then they could comprehend, daughter's gifts of equanimity realized
More than desire above childish thinking, her own Shikantaza, Tai Shi's
Poetry gifts of white flowers, great seeds, food of poems with hooded
Certainty in honesty, transparency, words with blue translucency.

Gassho
lah/ sat

06/14/2021

[Seikan]

Beautiful verse Tai Shi! I love this.

Gassho,
Seikan

-stlah-


Sent from my Pixel 4a (5G) using Tapatalk

[Tai Shi]

Prairie before Dawn

Poetry respects
Lilies of the rain
Naturally scattered
Blue nature, as more
Of Buddha's linage
Delicate music night,
Mindfully Diurnal
Life of conifer touch
Self, green mornings
In stories monogamous
Found birds in domes
Near waterfalls
Renbourn as wrens
Most secretive of Fire
To never destroy,
Insectivores destructive
Not upon Earth
Or other creatures.
They hide or show
Varieties play
In touch together
Flowers of birth
Twenty pairs
Soft petals
Only baby
Felt good four
Months difficult birth
To end all time,
Eyes, children
Choices for none
Gentle trees could fall
Like Mother bird
She could provide
Never Four,
Three their gift
To girl, Laurel
Baby presented

They could build
Poetry fruition,
Why his lights,
Look at reflections
Look at forest pines
Of his heart turned
Carefully prairies
Grow crops, gain
Food to help both,
Sadness their way
Mountains gone,
Dispelled War, peaceful
Guns never caried
Away, more tears
He could be taken
From evergreen
Sliced into pieces
Insane, not insanity
Regained selfhood
In fatherhood,
His tears
His solitude.

He ran away to Asia
His mind, his vocations
Of Bill Everson found
In his poetry, encouraged
In letters, Advisory
of Writing good verse
This woman bore child
Shown brilliance
In great sadness
Slow mind thinking
Sixty-nine years
Word fortifications
Gone, what takes
Place as she closed
Her perfection
His Lotus Sutra
Both remain
Human for child.
Child accidental
They Knew
Their poverty
Give today
Never to child
Childhood seen
Not found this work
Away his Drink,
Quietly taken.
More than three
Decades Now each day
In sober thoughts
Great balance
This wheel sown
Earth inspired Reality

Understood wars
Closed nothingness
Shown wide awake
Not romancing,
Enhancing parenthood
Faces never wayward
Notes, invisible
Painfully Risen
Held bodies
Found what cared,
Their safety
In child's life.

Gassho
sat/ lah
Tai Shi

[Tai Shi]

Poet and teacher
Everson was an influential member of the San Francisco Renaissance in poetry and worked closely with Kenneth Rexroth during this period of his life. Throughout his life, Everson was a great admirer of the work and life of poet Robinson Jeffers. Much of his work as a critic was done on Jeffers's poetry.

Everson registered as an anarchist and a pacifist with his draft board, in compliance with the 1940 draft bill. In 1943, he was sent to a Civilian Public Service (CPS) work camp for conscientious objectors in Oregon.[1] In Camp Angel at Waldport, Oregon, with other poets, artists and actors such as Kemper Nomland, William Eshelman, Kermit Sheets, Glen Coffield, George Woodcock and Kenneth Patchen, he founded a fine-arts program in which the CPS men staged plays and poetry-readings and learned the craft of fine printing. During his time as a conscientious objector, Everson completed The Residual Years, a volume of poems that launched him to national fame.

Everson married poet Mary Fabilli on June 12, 1948,[2] and influenced by her religious devotion, converted to Catholicism.[3] Everson joined the Catholic Church in 1951 and soon became involved with the Catholic Worker Movement in Oakland, California. He took the name Brother Antoninus when he joined the Dominican Order in 1951 in Oakland. As an initiate in the Order, he printed the unfinished Novum Psalterium PII XII, an acknowledged masterpiece in American fine press printing. A colorful literary and counterculture figure, he was nicknamed the Beat Friar. The central motif throughout all of Antoninus' Catholic poetry is Incarnation, the central symbol of the Christian mystery. In 1956, he met an English Dominican, Father Victor White, at St. Albert's Dominican priory. White, of the English Dominican province and a longtime friend of Carl Jung, with whom he maintained a voluminous correspondence, was resident lecturer and theologian there. It was through this relationship to Victor White that Antoninus learned to look at his dreams from an in-depth religious angle for meaning. He devoured the Collected Works of Jung and began his psychological analysis of the unconscious as well as the analysis of many individuals who came to him for counseling. Antoninus wrote the first draft of his long erotic poem River-Root / A Syzygy, which he considered to be his most prophetic work. As Everson said in an interview for Creation magazine, with its founder and editor, the theologian and Episcopal priest Matthew Fox, he saw it as a complete re-writing of the Song of Songs, bringing frank Eros back into the Psalms and undoing Christianity's longstanding separation of the sexual from the spiritual for purposes of modernity. Jung's writings influenced the contributions Everson made to post-religious poetical thought in America. After leaving St Albert's, where he had practiced as a lay monk, poet and spiritual counselor for 18 years, Antoninus left his religious habit after a reading at the University of California at Davis campus on December 7, 1969. He left the Dominicans in 1969 and married a woman many years his junior, Susanna Rickson. At this time, he became a step-father to his son, Jude Everson. When Antoninus wrote The Rose of Solitude, he saw it published in many magazines. However, when he wrote The Veritable Years under William Everson, having left Antoninus behind, he couldn't even get his work reviewed. He then assumed the mantle of a poet-shaman to replace his religious habit. The 1974 poem Man-Fate explores this transformation from Brother Antoninus into William Everson, the West-Coast poet-shaman. Everson was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1972.

Everson spent most of his years living near the central California coast a few miles north of Santa Cruz in a cabin he dubbed Kingfisher Flat. He was poet-in-residence at the University of California, Santa Cruz during the 1970s and 1980s. There he founded the Lime Kiln Press, a small press through which he printed highly sought-after fine-art editions of his own poetry as well as of the works of other poets, including Robinson Jeffers and Walt Whitman. For the most part, Everson's reputation was based on his poetry, printing, and public readings.

In 2009 Everson's former student Steven Herrmann brought renewed attention to Everson as a shamanic teacher. Herrmann later compiled a series of interviews with the poet-shaman from 1991 to 1993 that were published as William Everson: The Shaman's Call. Everson maintained an adhesion to his Catholic faith until his final days. In 1982, by a meaningful coincidence, Everson was asked to write an introduction to Victor White's book God and the Unconscious. In the final two years of his life, Everson worked on an unfinished autobiographical work titled Dust Shall Be the Serpent's Food. Everson died at his home on June 2, 1994, and his body was buried at the Dominican Cemetery in Benicia, California.

Everson's papers are archived at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA[4] and The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.[5]

Black Sparrow Press released a three-volume series of the collected poems of Everson, the last volume was published in 2000. In 2003, the California Legacy Project published Dark God of Eros: A William Everson Reader.

Found in Wikipedia
In 1988 I corresponded with William Everson.
My Mentor at the time was Bill Hotchkiss friends with the poets of San Francisco.
Dr Hotchkiss was English Instructor and tenured faculty at Sierra College and helped publish The Sierra Journal where over two decades I published many poems. Everson examined a portfolio of five of my poems while I was graduate student at Colorado State University commenting to me in 1988 that I held great promise as a poet. At one Time my friend Bill Hotchkiss maintained a strong friendship. Hotchkiss self published much of his own work. When Bill Hotchkiss passed away in 2008, I took it hard and lost my vicarious relationship with these poets. I had lived with my father in 1972, the time of the Kent State Massacre. My Farther lived in Colfax, and Sierra College is located in Rocklin, California, I was a poetry student of Bill Hotchkiss in 1971, 1872, In the Draft Lottery I held the number 288, and I remember my father rushing in to tell me "Chuck, you missed the draft!" However. it was true that I still could have been taken to fight in the Vietnam, War. That fall, I flew to Amsterdam where I bought a bicycle and bicycled across the Netherlands and into Germany. I held a Student Visa because the end of October I entered the Goethe Institute as a Germany Language student. At the end of December I gained employment at Kaufhof in Munich where I worked until mid spring and took off with two people my age and we toured Europe that Spring and early summer. I flew to Des Moines where I met my mother and reentered Grinnell College io earn my BA in English literature in 1974. I entered therapy the fall of 74 diagnosed with mental illness and for four years I "Got my head on straight." It was not until 2018 I began mental health "with bipolar one, having somehow kept my marriage, and parented with my wife a young woman ABD PhD at this point. She is in Japan doing research on obscure writers found in social media. I do not understand her linguistic research. When she finishes in three years she will be BA, MFA, PHD. In the schools she has attended, she owes $10,000. She has earned every accolade a scholar can earn, and will begin to teach as visiting American Teacher, at I think Wasa University in or near Tokyo. She is now in Tokyo under quarantine for Covid 19 as a precaution for this virus. When she finishes quarantine in two weeks, she begins her research as Fulbright scholar in Tokyo. It was in 1975, after I took General Psychology I first read Zen Mind, Beginner Mind and launched in into my search for this practice called Zen, and I tried every imaginable chemical to try and find satori, and to this day I have not found it. The same comment can be found by Suzuki Roshi' wife. I gave up alcohol, with the help of my wife Marjorie, meaning pearl, July 22, 1987 on the verge of losing all. In December of 1990 I earned my MFA in creative writing. Thank you Bill Everson, and Bill Hotchkiss, and my advisor at CSU who has maintained a lifelong friendship Professor Emeritus Bill Tremblay who has practiced Tai Chi through the Nyropa Institute. I have had a life of lost and found poetry. Workshops where I was awarded As And with MFA in creative writing/poetry I have had a "wonderful life" with my best Friend Marjorie, we were married June 12, 1982. Someday I want to write my novel The Orange Bicycle. Referenced material here from Wikipedia, and my personal experiences.
Gassho
sat/lah
Tai Shi

[Tai Shi]

My brevity is lost in three books, the third underway. Oh Jundo, or Kokuu the poet or the Grandfather of American poetry in the 20th Century, Jewish again, Marvin Bell, the eternal ache.
Gassho
sat/ lah
Tai Shi

[Tai Shi]

Still is air

Some poetry
From silent Douglas Fir
Brother, father, mother
Aunts, cousins, family gone
Cannot see, wife, daughter,
Remain Everlastingly
In stanzas stronger
Than ash or any tree.

Gassho
sat/ lah
Tai Shi

[Tai Shi]

His Lotus Sutra

Life is poetry
Baroque in music
Bach his land,
Decade on Decade,
Joy in Poems discover
Daughter's Japan
Her red sun.

Purple bright,
Delight is new
For all to see
Belgian pearl,
Yet, love is sad,
Mother's Grace
Bestows his pain,

They part again
Their swollen
Sadness grows.
Marjorie JoAn,
Wipe your tears,
Your Laurel Ann
As mother Mary
Knew recovery
His Soto Zen,
Was Universal,
As Unity.

"Your final calm,
Dad Gift of Gatha
On Fathers Day."
Peace in Lotus
Circling dew.
His Sutra azure
Buddha soft
Equality great
Soprano peace.

Taught his spine
Relaxed his pace
His sad Hiroshima
Bones collide
Bright as ocean
Small his spine
His counterpoint,

So real her voice
Crimson Japanese.
No anger wrought,
Daughter shows
Hope he sought
Planed in poetry
Her living trust.

Gassho
deep bows
sat. lah
Tai Shi

[Tai Shi]

I invite everyone; to new people I invite all. Post any poetry, or any art writing; letters, or journal/ diary entries, scratches in old text books, doodles, jotted dreams or dreamscapes, love notes, waste paper notes. Especially your own poems, made here, or there. Your empty space. Little or big. All.
Gassho
sat/ lah
Tai Shi

[brucef]

Billy Collins is an American poet who was born in 1941. This is his poem Picnic, Lightning.

It is possible to be struck by a
meteor or a single-engine plane while
reading in a chair at home. Pedestrians
are flattened by safes falling from
rooftops mostly within the panels of
the comics, but still, we know it is
possible, as well as the flash of
summer lightning, the thermos toppling
over, spilling out on the grass.
And we know the message can be
delivered from within. The heart, no
valentine, decides to quit after
lunch, the power shut off like a
switch, or a tiny dark ship is
unmoored into the flow of the body's
rivers, the brain a monastery,
defenseless on the shore. This is
what I think about when I shovel
compost into a wheelbarrow, and when
I fill the long flower boxes, then
press into rows the limp roots of red
impatiens -- the instant hand of Death
always ready to burst forth from the
sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then
the soil is full of marvels, bits of
leaf like flakes off a fresco,
red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick
to burrow back under the loam. Then
the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the
clouds a brighter white, and all I
hear is the rasp of the steel edge
against a round stone, the small
plants singing with lifted faces, and
the click of the sundial as one hour
sweeps into the next.