Category: Poetry

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2020 Term 2 Poetry Sand Talk Study Group

Home, in a time of plague

By ~ Sally Mackinnon

I’ve felt a stuck muteness and poet’s block since 6 September 2019 when the first of the shocking Spring-Summer 2019-20 bushfires devoured the sweet neighbourhoods and subtropical rainforest that I call home – at Beechmont/Binna Burra in South East Queensland. Since then there has been too much news and too many logistics going on in my world.

On an evening walk with my dog recently, as we rounded the top of a steep hill and stood on the edge of the forest in the dark, I had a little yarn with the cosmos…”I miss writing poetry so much; I would love to write again. Please can you help me?” There is such power in intention and asking for help isn’t there? The next morning as the sun streamed into my bedroom, I sat up in bed and gliding through the ether came a poem…

My mother’s pyjamas hang lifeless on the washing line.
From the kitchen window, speckled with webs,
I watch them – inanimate – without her flesh,
as the sun reaches from the east across quiet sky
to light up new leaves on red cedar
like Christmas.

Today I will walk without the dog, into subtropical bush.
Like a whisper of invisible breeze I will drift past
those busy roadworks that deliver
engineered restraints across this mountain
after wildfire scorched us all.
It’s calling me again, that forest.
Any chink in the manmade armour and I’m in;
asking permission to enter only from the Old Ones and the sea of green,
answered by the keen of black cockatoos and shy butterflies.

In this time of plague and serious news from cities,
I pay attention to the way the ground rises to meet my feet;
how earth surface and sole, step-by-step connect.
This is no monologue,
it’s a dance, it’s a song, it’s a deep-time songline and I pray that
simple walking will mind this life…

It’s also this sweet home on the top of the hill that
anchors me here.
Nothing is straight or orderly but the way
the sunset glows through the kitchen to
ignite every facet in my grandmother’s cut glass bowl is an afternoon aria.
After almost a year, we are all home again in this study of light and shade,
pyjamas and forest,
black cockatoos and rising earth.
Nothing is straight or orderly but
at sunrise and sunset we sing.

Today is exactly eleven months since the fire. The study group is reigniting my capacity to lean into more than grief – to be open-heartedly curious and light again; and to feel I am becoming a student of Zen.

I’m so grateful to you all.

()

Sally

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2020 Term 2 Black Lives Matter Online Zen Group Poetry Sand Talk Words

Squares and Circles

~ By Ali Cobby Eckermann. From her book: ‘little bit long time’ (Picardo Press)

I was born yankunytjatjara my mother is yankunytjatjara her mother was yankunytjatjara my family is yankunytjatjara I have learnt many things from my family elders I hace grown to recognise that life travels in circles aboriginal culture has taught me this

When I was born I was not allowed to live with my family I grew up in the white man’s world

We lived in a square house we picked fruit and vegetables from a neat fenced square plot
we kept animals in square paddocks we ate at a square table we sat on square chairs
I slept in a square bed

I looked at myself in a square mirror and did not know who I was

One day I met my mother

I began to travel I visited places that I had already been but this time I sat down with family

We gathered together by big round campfires we ate bush tucker feasting on round ants and berries we ate meat from animals that live in round burrows we slept in circles on beaches around our fires we sat in the dirt on our land that belongs to a big round planet we watched the moon grow to a magnificent yellow circle that was our time

I have learnt two different ways now I am thankful for this that is part of my Life Circle

My heart is Round ready to echo the music of my family but the Square within me remains

The Square stops me in my entirety.

Categories
Miscellaneous Poetry

Singularity

by ~ Marie Howe

   (after Stephen Hawking)

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money—

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.   Remember?
There was no   Nature.    No
 them.   No tests
to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels pain. Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up   to what we were
— when we were ocean    and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all — nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All   everything   home

Read by Roshi Susan Murphy…

Categories
Miscellaneous Poetry

You reading this, be ready

by ~ William Stafford (1993)

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? 
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry 
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life – 

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

Categories
2020 Term 1 Covid-19 Eco-Dharma Online Zen Group Poetry

Swept away…. the hummmm of the earth

by ~ Lizzie Finn

on a day of human crisis 
sweeping fallen pollen,
a carpet of yellow 
on the ground  by  the tree
……waking  up  slow-ly 
to the vibrant  buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
of  hundreds of  bees 

swept up… swept clean away
in this sound of  rapid wingbeats 
a doorway to our shared home
where time stands still
just buzzzzzing ….
full and complete
the deep hummmm of the earth

no crisis here for bees 
serving the tree that  serves them  so well
gentle visitors moving deftly 
each twig and leaf lightly touched, 
each one working  with single purpose
no effort or complaint
Just This….. collecting pollen for the queen bee’s nest
obeying  the careful law  of mother earth
my heart is warmed
….all is well  in this endless  bee  moment

and now as I return,
a great tenderness and curiosity
I wonder where they live….? 
….it must be nearby………

Categories
Images Music Poetry

Folds in the sky

Dear Sangha,

This is a slideshow of images and haiku I recently made into a little film.

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May your lives go well,

Ron

Categories
2020 Term 1 Online Zen Group Poetry

The grave and wonderful matter of life

A poem I wrote after the recent death of my 92 year old father pre-Covid.

The week before he died I visited him every day
Fussing
turning off the lights
Bullying him into eating and drinking
Until I let him be
He didn’t want the fuss
Sitting with him till he was sick of me
All this waiting
This hard waiting
So what is it you need to say when there is nothing left to say
When your living body is coming to an end
When you no longer care about everything you should care about
What is this life that is memory upon memory laid down
And  those memories hazed
 
It is now time to dig the clods of earth and bury
the black box now lowered into the neat earth hole
 
I pick up some clods
With my bare hands
Pink skin
On bare clay
Throwing this earth onto the black casket
Your shell lying still
Your spirit clean peeled away
We all take our turn in this way

()

Love Maxine.

Categories
2020 Term 1 Images Online Zen Group Poetry

Skin

by ~ Tessa Priest

Paintings which came from koan practice… snake appeared in my dream and then coiled onto wooden boards

Paintings by Tessa Priest

I finished the paintings in the middle of the dark night and the next morning opened an old edition of Resurgence and found this poem.

Spring is coming in many places in the world as we are asked to quieten and be more still.

Our snakes may be readying to sleep in the cold, and yet snake appears – perhaps in our Spring we too may emerge with a lithe newness and a transformed earth body…

Skin

Everything has a voice, even the skin 
the black snake left beside the house
the day the golden tulips bloomed
and overpowered the sun. Never seen,
that snake leaves its skin behind
each spring lie a secret gift
no longer dark or urgent without 
its body. Oh
look at me, I’ve grown
and grown more beautiful, its voice
thralls from the grass, all
its language new and moving
in the skin like thunder
gathering into a noon
yet to form:
Have you heard me
down in the ductwork
of your house
living on mice?
Have you lived yet
a day without fear?
If not skin, what
will you come to shed?

Laurie Kutchins – 
chosen for Resurgence magazine March/April 2009

“powerful poetry sings of the hidden complexity of things”.

If lives are fraught and contradictory, fraught with unexpected turns that result in unruliness…The god Lir (Ireland) created the world by speaking the names of everything in it. Because he had only half a tongue, his words were only half understood. Half of creation, therefore, remained unspoken.

That’s why we need poets: to “sing the hidden side of things” (Andrea Hollander Budy)

Blessings to you in this time of transformation with its quietude. May you wriggle anew as the spring unfurls – here it is autumn 

Warmth 

Tessa Priest

Categories
2020 Term 1 Images Online Zen Group Poetry

Introduction

~ by Anita V

Dear friends,
Greetings from Ashfield / Sydney. 

So appreciate connecting!
A ‘pop-up’ Sangha!

Dharma Doodle …
Reflections on Bright & Dark …

Play of light 
On the windowsill –
In the neighbours’ carpark.

Surprise!Black biro shining bright 

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Categories
2020 Term 1 Covid-19 Miscellaneous Online Zen Group Poetry

Two poems for a pandemic

Pandemic

This poem by ​Lynn Ungar was shared in Roshi Susan’s first talk of Term 1 for 2020.

What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?

Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.

Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Centre down.

And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)

Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)

Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.

Promise this world your love–
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.

Keeping Quiet

–– by Pablo Neruda (trans. Stephen Mitchell)

Now we will all count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth,
let’s not speak any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment,
without hurry, without locomotives,
all of us would be together
in a sudden uneasiness.

The fisherman in the cold sea
would do no harm to the whales
and the peasant gathering salt
would look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors,
would put on clean clothing
and would walk alongside their brothers
in the shade, without doing a thing.

What I want shouldn’t be confused
with final inactivity:
life alone is what matters,
I want nothing to do with death.

If we weren’t unanimous
about keeping our lives so much in motion,
if we could perhaps do nothing for once,
perhaps a great silence would interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death,
perhaps the earth is teaching us
when everything seems to be dead
and everything is alive.

Now I will count to twelve
and you keep quiet and I’ll go.