TO B. -RESCUE DOG : A Poem

A poem from and old friend TO B. -RESCUE DOG

When I learned the true extent
Of misfortune in your tale,
I knew then I must consent,
And that mercy must prevail.
Consent to bring you home at last,
Your family finally found,
Never more to be out cast
Your anguish run to ground.
I hear you snuffle in your sleep
And I wonder what you dream
I trust you know I’ll always keep
The promise I made to you.
Peculiar tastes, this little guy
Like french fries off the street
Or nasty bones we might pass by
Not slowed by missing teeth.
Yes, I know, you are a little fat-
They say I spoil you rotten-
But for everything I do for you-
So much more have I gotten.
Those cloudy eyes, you’re older now
But the gaze still love-driven
You’ve taught me well, the why and how
Of devotion freely given.
And devoted will I stay to you-
Companions till the end
Daily rites of mutual need
God, to me, did you send.

W.S.H. -3/1/2020

A Dog and a Man Walk Into a Bar...

Outline re-write #1

Fundamental misunderstanding about all of society:

• You and I are not separate.
• My (and your) personality is not you, not me, it is a collection of attributes, but it is not you, not me.
• The not you/not me is just now.
• Just this moment that is still now. There is no past or future, there is only now. Only not separateness.
• But we just don’t realize it.
• By our very existence we only live now. All of us living now, together in this present NOW.

From this basic misunderstanding comes rating these created differences.

By assigning values to everything, then we can then DE-value those that are not like our pasted on personalities.

Once we have valued everything, then we can desire attributes and objects and things of all variety.

And from desire we learn cruelty, suffering, envy and all that stuff.

Although conjured out of fictional separateness the pain and suffering is real.

A monk asked Joshu, a Chinese Zen master: "Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?"
Joshu answered: "Mu." 

My take:
The dog and me and you are not separate.
Buddha nature is not “having”

Ode to Trumpland, the land where I reside...

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

- - - - - - - -

This part intrigues me...

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Emotional Unpredictability

Sometimes I wonder about myself. From one view I suffer from emotional apathy where I just don't get why people get so upset about such little things, or big things..I mean as some point the Sun will consume our earth so all is doomed in the end.

Then I read a poem and I am a weepy eyed little girl.

Here is the poem that overpowers me...

---

Traveling through the Dark
By William E. Stafford

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car  
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;  
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,  
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;  
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;  
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,  
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

We must love one another or die !!

I don't know what to make of this poem. It might "mean" something totally different from what I think it does, but i "think" it is saying something I understand. But I just don't quite understand what I understand.

September 1, 1939

W. H. Auden, 1907 - 1973

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright 
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can 
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return. 

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire 
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

...a sordid boon!

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

– William Wordsworth
- The World Is Too Much with Us - (circa 1802)

Breaking up to help memorize parts
= = = = = = = = = =
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

In a Mood..a poetry mood

III. The Seasons
Summer Moods
John Clare (1793–1864)

I LOVE at eventide to walk alone,
Down narrow glens, o’erhung with dewy thorn,
Where from the long grass underneath, the snail,
Jet black, creeps out, and sprouts his timid horn.
I love to muse o’er meadows newly mown,
Where withering grass perfumes the sultry air;
Where bees search round, with sad and weary drone,
In vain, for flowers that bloomed but newly there;
While in the juicy corn the hidden quail
Cries, “Wet my foot;” and, hid as thoughts unborn,
The fairy-like and seldom-seen land-rail
Utters “Craik, craik,” like voices underground,
Right glad to meet the evening’s dewy veil,
And see the light fade into gloom around.

Encounter a Poem

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

- Czeslaw Milosz