Is The Ocean In The Bone Vault Only The Bone Vault’s Ocean?

My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum And gazing upon it, gathering and quieting The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt, the actual Appalling presence, the power of the waters. He believes that nothing is real except […]

Eulogy to my Hiking Boots

The time has come for me to live and you to die and we both know which is best. Your waxed form never again to face the thudding Sierra nor the blistering desert. Never again to feel the living earth nor the hellish hail. My friends, your wizened and cracked faces bring comfort, but a […]

Native Moments

Native Moments NATIVE moments! when you come upon me—Ah you are here now! Give me now libidinous joys only! Give me the drench of my passions! Give me life coarse and rank! To-day, I go consort with nature’s darlings—to-night too; I am for those who believe in loose delights—I share the midnight orgies of young […]

In Praise of Depression

I have never understood the American obsession with happiness. It is not happiness that etches us with character but sadness. John Keats (1795-1821), the English poet, understood this. In 1819, suffering from depression, he wrote a poem in praise of it, which he called an Ode on Melancholy. No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist […]

Poetry and Social Change

On August 16, 1819, 60,000 peaceful pro-democracy and anti-poverty protestors met in what is now St. Peters Square in Manchester, England. The square was filled with banners on which were written the words, ‘Reform’, ‘Universal Suffrage’, ‘Equal Representation’ and even ‘Love’. Magistrates panicked and ordered the cavalry to charge the field, which they did with sabres […]

The Answer

I’m travelling over the Easter break so instead of the usual weekly post I’m leaving you ‘The Answer’ by one of my favorite poets, Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962). The Answer Then what is the answer?—Not to be deluded by dreams. To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their tyrants come, many times […]

Shine, Perishing Republic

“While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity Heavily thickening to empire, And protest, only a bubble in the Molten Mass, pops And sighs out, and the mass hardens, I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make Fruit, the fruit rots to make earth. Out of the mother; and through the […]