I am the leafless winter tree:
My leaves I shed reluctantly;
An autumnal gale just set me free
To shiver and long for eternity.
I am the damp crepuscular cloud
That hovers, dark, heavy and proud,
That dares to defy the solar shroud
In whose fabric all life is endowed.
I am the lone and lonely light
That, shining, gives sight,
Yet remains, for all its might,
Blind to the eyelid’s plight.
I trace the border of sea and shore
To keep at bay that endless war;
Yet the battle’s ceaseless roar
Says I am all this, and nothing more.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 8:20 AM
Written on a train to New York City
Monday, August 15, 2011
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Wednesday, July 27, 2011 11:30 PM
Today on the radio I hear talk of President Obama’s coming speech regarding Afghanistan, of protests in Syria, elections in the Bhutan and unemployment in the US. Sound waves laden with wrongs not yet righted, carrying the words of those that have been slighted, berate my ears with their incessant cry of “wake up!” I reply, meekly at first, then with all the strength I can muster, that everything from my blood vessels to my synapses have arisen, have thrown off the sheets and showered, and still I pause at the door, uncertain, peering out at a landscape transmogrified by precipitation.
I feel feeble in the presence of so much hunger, poverty, corruption and pollution. The injustice hems me in, a kind of negative New York skyline laced with vertigo. In every direction I turn there is work to be done--more work, to be sure, than can fit in my two hands, but even worse, more than my mind, that wonder of physics, can lift with the pulley of ingenuity or the fulcrum of planning. Everything tells me that the rational thing to do is to focus on one thing, conquer that, and move on, but each injustice cajoles me as fervently as the rain forces life to bloom. On my hands and knees in the midst of a deluge of atmosphere and emotion, I cannot choose between reason and passion. The ancient sorrow trapped in my heart like an insect in amethyst can neither be dismissed nor dislodged, and for all my awareness of the intelligent course of action, sorrow has a way of reaching out to sorrow, and love to love, so that I am forever compelled to be that worst of individuals: concerned for all, unfocused, and doomed to defy logic and obey the dictates of a sadness that predates me, my ideas and the injustice against which I fight.
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O watch that won’t run, day that refuses to break!
What infernal flaw ground your gears to a halt?
How do I weather the sorrow foaming in your wake
Or, tired and alone, ward off your relentless assault?
Like a wayward meteor, I tumble through a sky
That resents me, subject to laws I never chose;
Yet that inner law of anarchic love belies
The empty sheets made empty by a lover’s woes.
O Lady Justice, come see what has transpired!
Surely you will listen to my appeal,
And restore to life a bliss that had expired,
Lest the eternal law of lovers be repealed.
Monday, June 13, 2011 8:45 PM
Thus the rain advances, with its silver
Uniformity, its blanketing cloud
Of war, its ubiquitous watery
Domination, its soldier-drops
That pounce on the soil
With the impact of a blinding mission.
And the city of this life, ablaze with city-lights,
Grips its collective weaponry with the fury
Of impending defeat, the rage of intrusion,
And the sorrow of death.
Centuries of armament have given the citizens
Hearts of stoic anger, eyes narrow as turrets,
Hands open only to triggers,
Torsos accustomed to crouching,
Feet tattooed with the pigment
Of trampled flowers.
But this is not a city of fear.
Fear blew up like an enemy
Beneath a grenade, and now
Only a crater of fear remains
In the citizen’s heart,--
The fantasy heart that glows cold
And distant like the moon.
Men have banded together--
Men that, since the dawning of the city,
Have hated and fought one another
With the desperation of a prisoner
Trying to escape his prison and his sin.
Now a massive army marches behind the fabled gate.
Commanders speak of peace after this final stand
With such eloquence that the soldiers
Sit, and their guns begin to tremble.
Prayers are offered towards the heavens.
The sky chokes with pleas for justice,
For peace, for victory.
Then a prayer fell from the sky
Like a warning of rejection.
And suddenly, a millennia of philosophy,
Religion, debate, politics,
Hatred, ideas, intent, poetry,
Began to fall twice as violently
As when it left
The mouths and bodies of the dead.
The sky had been spying:
Clouds caught the curses,
Stars watched the plotting,
Suns illuminated the torment,
And now the rain hurled
All of it back at the city.
Nothing escapes itself.
Of course, the rain swiftly
Overwhelmed the walls,
Submerged the soldiers,
Filled the silence of onlookers,
Absorbed the hidden and fleeing,
Flooded the lowly and sick,
Stranded the high and mighty,
And swamped the Insitutions.
This victory was not celebrated.
One could hardly call it victory.
The rain had orders only to rebuild.
Now a hyacinth grows from the heart
Of a dead leader,
And the roots spread through his body
And the bodies of every former citizen.
Monday, April 14th, 2003
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Who doesn’t want peace?
Who doesn’t prefer
A white jasmine wind,
Or an amber dawn
To the black unveiling
of bombs?
Who doesn’t love to love
And be loved by saline lips?
We are strong as magnets:
In order to hold together
We divide until a no-man’s land
Fuses our disarray,
And to surrender to the center
Is to die.
Who doesn’t want peace?
We disagree, opine, demonstrate,
Raise arms, palms, prayers, shouts--
We agree, unite, stare off into discontent,
Drop bombs, flags, clothes, lies and truths.
And now I ask you, as a poet
Caught between your truth
And my truth, my lies
And your lies,
What will become of my poems
After we damn the last river,
Destroy the last forest,
Culture, life?
Who will read my work
When the last soldier dies
In the name of peace?
What will happen to
Our disagreement
If mankind kills itself?
When all was said and done,
Who did not want peace?
monday, march 23rd, 2003
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O, but how the poet longs
To mingle with your lips,
To plunge into the throngs
Of mysteries between your hips!
For neither sorrow nor deceit outweigh
The truth those mysteries convey!
Time, that marauding force,
Has yet to plunder my home,
Though history ran its course
And added to its mighty, darkened tome;
Alas, the warmth of the future
is to the alluring past but a feeble suture!
The edifice crumbles, but does not fall;
Empty space remains empty for you;
Together we sleep, curled into a ball
Of hope that bounces out of view.
Thus I ask: can I possibly be sane
So long as you, the departed, still remain?
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
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O leaf, whose drops of fire
Point their fingers at the sky,
Whose vibrant sinews seek the ire
Trapped in eyes that blink, but do not cry,
What passing cloud, what swirling star
Can return your lover from afar?
I am the leaf, I am the flame,
And I am the snow
That makes anonymous my name;
For only the true lover knows
That time heals not wounds
Else the sanguine sinews cease to swoon.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
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At present I am seated on a train. The wheels are humming along the tracks just
as the earth seems to hum as it whirls around the sun, for there is a great joy to motion
that infuses the traveler with the very buzz of existence. Outside my window the curtain
of dawn has begun to lift, revealing the bright orange costumes of actors eager to
astound the audience. What wonders will transpire today? What discoveries? What
ideas spawned and loves consummated?
Of late the pain of being alive has galloped like a ferocious horse to overtake my
sense of bliss. Where once my heart was a tremendous vase containing the freshly cut
flowers of happiness, it had recently become like so many pieces of jagged glass, a
mosaic in whose discord could be seen the very nature of existence. The Sufis say that
a sack of sugar must be sliced open that the sweetness may spill forth, for whoever is
brave enough to seek bliss must also know her by her other name: despair. So many of
us open our arms to beauty thinking that, once she is within our grasp, we can close
ourselves off to everything else. . .yet beauty and bliss are fickle lovers. They refuse to
be confined or defined. They dwell in the spaces between our fingers and only cease to
slip through them when we cease to grasp for them. John Keats said it best when he
wrote that “Beaty is Truth/Truth Beauty/That is all ye know on earth/And all ye need to
know.”
The beauty of this morning has shattered my heart. Splinters of love, kindness
and passion have become lodged in my surroundings. It is infinitely painful to know, as
William Blake wrote, that “if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would
appear to man as it is, infinite.” Yet as I look around me I know without a shadow of a
doubt that anything is possible, that “the arc of history is long but it bends towards
justice,” that poetry blooms from despair like a lotus from the mud.
We have to be brazen in our beliefs and insolent in our actions. It takes a certain
amount of anger to overcome the status quo, to uncover new possibilities and to refuse
to accept received wisdom. We have to think about our weakest moments, when
sadness, death and pain appear before us, not as apparitions, but rather as distinct
realities; and we have to think about who we are in the moments. . .will we be
adventurers, poets and lovers? Will we live up to the dreams we had as children? Will
we uphold the highest and most noble elements of humanity and, in so doing, create a
better world? Oh, I have fallen from my bicycle and nearly died. I have opened my
heart to the vagaries of the world and the doubts of a woman and seen both bliss and
agony come and go like visitors at a grave. I have felt the loftiest and the lowest of
emotions. And yet I can say to you, now that I am 26 years old, that I will never turn
away from my quest; I will never ignore the stirrings in my heart; I will never be anything
other than who I am.
Let us move forward with this feeling, in honor of those that have died, those that suffer
and those that will die at the hands of injustice and indifference.
Nothing is ever lost;
Love that filled my life,
Love whose gloss
Resembled a ring for my wife
Now, seeking a hand and finding despair,
Makes poetry of this familiar pair.
But nothing is ever lost;
Even as a wave
Collapses and is tossed
Upon the shore, brave
Forces bring it back to sea
Where clouds and lovers forever be.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
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The Lover’s Creed
Beneath an uncertain sky I stand,
Facing the direction from which
New seasons weave together strands
Of memories formed from the twitch
Of muscles: hearts that yearned and found,
Listless lips that fell in love and ran aground.
I hear in the rustling of trees the sound of a dress;
The morning air smells of water caressing skin;
O trickle of time! O moment just lost! Will you not bless
My heart and save me from that worst of sins:
To love so fully as not to see,
To see so clearly as not to love?
Evening dawns, and with it strange gusts
Of color fill the sky. Alone, I face
The sanguine cheeks of moments past, and lust
For the kiss that became an Eternal embrace;
Yet though the night be long and hard to read
No despair can break my allegiance to the lover’s creed.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Written in Ixtapa, México
Poets fight fiercely against the constraints of physics and biology (let’s remember that Dylan Thomas wrote about how we should “rage, rage against the dying of the light) and, on rare occasions, they succeed. The words of Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca and Robert Frost emanate from their throats and make the earth upon which we stand tremble with their passion; that they are buried deep within that earth only serves to amplify the effect. And so it is for this reason that I, too, think, and feel, and write, for to take the violent passion that makes my flesh shudder with love and transform it into the sweet music of poetry, of entrepreneurship and of justice, is the greatest of endeavors.
I refuse to act my age. I vehemently oppose the idea that poverty and pollution are inevitable. I subscribe to no notion other than that which bends towards Truth. I laugh at categories, yet categorize all the same. The words of my elders reach me but do not affect me. Experts may speak their mind but I mind only the expertise given to me by experience, thinking and practice. Politicians lay claim to the boundaries of what is possible and attempt to codify it, but when I show my passport to the world it reads only “I belong to no one and everyone. I do not request passage across your border for I am a force that recognizes no limitations and is unstoppable.” My heart does not beat 60 times per minute: it thunders, it roars, it berates my entire being until I move my arms and my lips in accordance with the rhythm she sets down. It is not enough to say that I “march to the beat of a different drummer,” for I am the drummer, the beat and the march.
When I was in High School professors would ridicule my idealism and calmly inform me that upon seeing “the real world” I would become more pragmatic, as though the world they live in--one of poverty, disease, war and climate change--is one that I should accept or admire! Timid, sad souls! Why should I accept mediocrity just because they have? Even then I knew that the problem was not with the ideals that I was espousing but rather with the meek people who could not live up to those ideals. Many are those that can boast of lofty thoughts and feelings, but few--oh, so few!--are those that can pick up those feelings like a sword when the world is swollen with hatred, with obstacles, with hopelessness. Yet the great men and women of the world have always held fast to their hearts in times of difficulty and, more importantly, shown others that they must do the same. Great men and women do not tell others what to do, rather, they demand of others that they do what their hearts are asking of them.
What is “the real world,” anyway? Is it the one in which billions lack access to clean water, health care, shelter and a constant supply of food, while several hundred million waste and over consume all of those? If so, then I fail to see the wisdom of my professor’s words. In fact, I submit that, to be blunt, my professors were frustrated, idiotic and unimaginative people that were trying to squash the soaring imaginations of the youth that they taught. No! All progress in history starts with imagination, is carried forward by diligence and dedication and is brought to fruition by inspired action. I believe that an hour spent daydreaming is more valuable than 100 studying. Why? Because though the 100 hours of studying can produce knowledge, the hour of daydreaming can unleash ideas and wisdom, the most valuable of all human tools. We mustn’t forget that nonviolence is an idea, as is renewable energy, democracy, and even romantic love! Ideas are what allow us to conceive and create the previously unseen and impossible. If I had to worship a prophet I would choose, instead of a single person, the generic innovator--anyone who comes up with something new and valuable to the body, the mind, the soul or the world.
That is why I am so ardent a believer in social entrepreneurship as a tool for bettering the world. One of the most important things to me is the recognition that not only is it inspiring and fulfilling to work on social issues, it is also a hell of a lot of fun. After all, what could be better than to earn one’s living by improving the lives of others? To apply one’s talents and skills towards solving seemingly intractable problems? To invent, to invest and to implement? No longer can we afford to think of the “do-gooder” in terms of Gandhi and Mother Theresa, for that is a model that few can or want to emulate. But everyone wants financial security for themselves and everyone wants to be engaged in meaningful, exciting and challenging work! The great challenges of the 21st century call out to us; they ask that more people than ever before become engaged and link up their daily work with their soul work. The task of earning one’s daily bread must become inextricably linked with the never ending search for meaning and understanding that transpires within the hearts of men and women.
And then there is love. Not just romantic love, which is celebrated as much in popular culture as it is in literature, but also love for others and the world. Boundless, wild, passionate love. Agape. The love that is carried like pollen in the breeze, that brushes our cheeks every time we step outside, that waits for us in the cold of night and greets us through our windows in the morning. The love that allowed Gandhi to free a nation and Martin Luther King to free a people. The love, as Dante put it, “that moves the sun, the moon and other stars.” This is the love that burns within me; it is a candle whose wax singes my innards and then hardens, forming the architecture of oneness the way that volcanoes create new land. Love for the downtrodden and the privileged. Love for the bird that sings and the hunter who silences the bird.
There is a great Tibetan saying: “do not hate the person that hates; hate hatred.” Recognize that within all of us there lies the potential to do good and to do bad, and that the line between the two is often as murky as a stagnant pond. Reality calls us on to be compassionate. We must work in violent opposition to injustice in the world while also understanding that we, too, are unjust. Knowing this, Jesus preached the wisdom of nonviolence and non judgement. Gandhi once said that “if Christians really practiced Christianity (loving your neighbor as yourself, turning the other cheek, basically following the Sermon on the Mount) then all the world would gladly be Christian.”
Great things await us. But they do not wait forever. We must forever let them know that we are on the way. We must seek inspiration and inspire seekers. We must love one another so thoroughly that like a great river, we overflow and let that love spill forth upon our surroundings. In short, we must so thoroughly and completely allow ourselves to be who we are that we thoroughly and completely change the world.
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December 2, 2009 12:00 PM
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