"Embracing the joy of touching hands and letting go of sadness"

Title song “The Boy and The Heron"
directed by Hayao Miyazaki

How to write a poem in a time of war

You can't begin just anywhere
it's a wreck
shrapnel in a house
a row of houses
there's a rat scrambling
from light with fleshy
trash in it's mouth
A baby strapped
to it's mother back
cut loose.
Soldiers crawl
the city, the river,
the town, the village,
the bedroom and our kitchen.
They eat everything or burn it.
They kill what they cannot take
they rape what they cannot kill
they take.

Rumours fall like rain, like bombs,
like mothers and fathers tears
swallowed for restless peace,
like sunsets slanting toward
a moonless midnight, like a train
blown free from it's destination,
like a seed fallen were there is no
chance of trees or anyplace for
birds to live.

No start here, deer peer
from the edge of the woods
we used to see woodpeckers
the size of the sun and were
greeted by chicodees and
their morningsongs.
We started to cook outside,
slippery with dew and laughter.
Aahw the smokey sweet sunrises.

We tried to pretend war wasn't
going to happen, 'till they began
building their houses all around us
and demanding more.
The started teaching our childeren
their god's story, a story in which
we'd always be slaves.

No not here, you can't begin here
this is memory shredded because
it is impossible to hold with words
even poetry.

these memories were left here by
the trees, the torn pocket of your
daughter's handsewn dress, the sashe,
the lace, the baby's delicate de-beaded
moccasin stil connected to the foot.

A young man's note of promise to his
beloved. No this is not the best place
to begin. Everyone was asleep despite
the distant bombs, terror had become
the familiar stranger. Our beloved
twingirls curled up in their nightgowns,
next to their father and me.

If we began here, none of us will make it
to the end the poem.
Someone has to make it out alive saying
a grandfather too his grandson, his granddaughter
as he blew his most powerfull song into the
hearts of the childeren.
There it would be hidden from the soldiers
who would take them miles, rivers, mountains,
from their navel core place of the origin story.
He knew one day, far day, the grandchilderen
would return, generations later over slick highways
constructed over old trails, to walls of laws meant
to hamper or destroy, over stones bearing liberaries
of the winds. He sang us back to our homeplace from
which we were stolen, in these smokey cream hills.
Yes begin here.

Joy Harjo

And darling, do not fear this sorrow, for in all this love you have learnt to live.

Above all, I hope you dare to feel when it’s only raining inside your head.

On Freedom

And an orator said,
“Speak to us of Freedom."
And he answered:
At the city gate and by
your fireside I have seen
you prostrate yourself and
worship your own freedom
Even as slaves humble
themselves before a tyrant
and praise him though
he slays them.
Ay, in the grove of the temple
and in the shadow of the citadel
I have seen the freest among
you wear their freedom
as a yoke and a handcuff.
And my heart bled within me;
for you can only be free when
even the desire of seeking
freedom becomes a harness
to you, and when you cease
to speak of freedom as
a goal and a fulfillment.
You shall be free indeed
when your days are not
without a care nor your
nights without a want
and a grief
But rather when these
things girdle your life
and yet you rise above
them naked and unbound.
And how shall you rise
beyond your days and
nights unless you break
the chains which you at
the dawn of your
understanding have
fastened around
your noon hour?
In truth that which you
call freedom is the
strongest of these chains,
though its links glitter in
the sun and dazzle the eyes.
And what is it but fragments
of your own self you would
discard that you may
become free?
If it is an unjust law you
would abolish, that law
was written with your
own hand upon
your own forehead.
You cannot erase it by
burning your law books
nor by washing the
foreheads of your judges,
though you pour the
sea upon them.
And if it is a despot
you would dethrone,
see first that his throne
erected within you
is destroyed.
For how can a tyrant rule
the free and the proud,
but for a tyranny in their
own freedom and a
shame in their won pride?
And if it is a care you
would cast off, that
care has been chosen
by you rather than
imposed upon you.
And if it is a fear you
would dispel, the seat
of that fear is in your
heart and not in the
hand of the feared.
Verily all things move
within your being in
constant half embrace,
the desired and the
dreaded, the repugnant
and the cherished, the
pursued and that which
you would escape.
These things move
within you as lights
and shadows in
pairs that cling.
And when the shadow
fades and is no more,
the light that lingers
becomes a shadow
to another light.
And thus your freedom
when it loses its fetters
becomes itself the fetter
of a greater freedom.

Khalil Gibran

"Truth can be found in the ignored, the forgotten, and the left out"

Judy Chicago