31
Memories of My Mother
Another one of
life’s ironic moments—
my
curmudgeon neighbor across the street
with his long-handled
dandelion weeder
hunched over like an ogre on the hunt
for
the pesky yellow
flower, and me on my front deck
reading in my Saturday’s Globe & Mail “What
you can do to help
bees,” featuring the new attitude
adopted by Hog Town, Toronto the Good now
dubbed “Bee City,” urging
Torontonians to convert
their lawns into habitats for
pollinators, rallying a
cry to all city gardeners
to forget the pesticides
and let the dandelions sprout. I put my paper
down
and stared at my snowbird
neighbor in his baggy
shorts and loose-fitting Florida shirt
ogre away
on our resplendent spring
flower, summoning long
forgotten memories of my mother hunched over
in our yard and neighbor’s
lawn with an old kitchen
knife and brown paper bag gathering fresh
dandelion
leaves which she would
rinse and sauté with olive
oil and garlic for our dinner, but which
I liked best
in a thick sandwich with
mom’s freshly-baked
round crusty Calabrese bread.
32
My Journal
Where do you go when
you need comfort?
To your partner, mother,
father, brother, sister, or good
friend who will
listen to your woes and offer you kindness
and understanding;
and if you have no-one to turn to,
what do you do?
Life never runs
smoothly. We would like it to,
but on the whole
life is all about transitions; and when
we’re lulled into
believing that life is going smoothly, out
of nowhere we’re hit
with a new transition, and we’re
off to the races
again.
That’s what happened
to me yesterday, picking up branches
and twigs from our
yard from our long winter’s passing,
my heart just wasn’t
up to the task and I exhausted myself
much more quickly
than I expected; so I sat on my deck
to catch my breath,
full of apprehension.
I so miss the use of
my body, the never-ending stamina
that kept me going
from morning till night, and I so miss
my long distance
running that turned rotten days into
good ones; it’s just
a memory now, but what a glorious
memory, and I thank
God for my endeavor.
I’m aware of life’s
transitions, and I never fight the march
of time—that’s
foolish madness; but all the same, it’s nice
to have someone to
talk to when the hammer comes crashing
down; that’s why I
turned to my journal this morning
and poured my heart
out for a little comfort.
My journal is my
best friend, always there to hear what I have
to say; and, at the
risk of revealing a secret, my journal always
talks back to me.
The voice that speaks is not my own—I know
my own voice, surely;
and as I pour my heart out, my journal
always comforts me
just by listening.
33
That’s Poetry.
I picked up Keats
this morning,
and then Shelley, but I wasn’t in the
mood
for either; and I
picked up Immortal Poems
of the English
Language, but I decided to
make coffee instead;
and as I waited for
my coffee I browsed through a word book:
30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary—
the more words we have, the better we can
express ourselves,
indispensable for a poet;
but my heart wasn’t in it. I poured my
coffee
and took a sip and pondered
my situation:
words, words, and more words. Knowledge,
knowledge, and more
knowledge, and “to the
making of many
books there is no end and
much study is a weariness of the flesh” said the
Preacher in Ecclesiastes, and we’re back to
where we started. I
opened my book on the
immortal poems and read Shelly’s Ozymandias
to give clarity to
my feelings: it’s not how
many words we know, it’s how we put
them together. That’s
poetry.
34
The Old Gadfly’s Mission
The Old Gadfly of
Athens had an Oracle,
the sign of a voice that he called
divine,
and it came to him
when he was a child
to tell him what not to do. It never
told
him what to do,
because he had free will;
his Oracle spoke to him only when he
strayed too far from
his mission to free
soul from its prison. I, too, have an Oracle
that speaks to me;
but it never tells me
what to do or not to do because my Oracle
is my own free will;
and the more I exercise
my free will, the more my Oracle speaks
to me. But when I
get myself into a pickle,
I curse the gods like an errant boy and
get myself on track
again to bring more
clarity to the Old Gadfly’s mission
of freeing soul from
its prison.
35
An Old French Proverb
FREQUENCY is the world’s new TEACHING,
And INTUITION our new teacher; no more
willful intention to
manifest desire with
the Law of
Attraction—yesterday’s guarded
secret; ATTENTION will
suffice to materialize
desire into being.
And if our world suddenly
falls apart, we can
piece it together better
than ever with a
higher vibration; but raising
our frequency is the
new mystery, and when
everything is said
and done the new TEACHING
is no different from
the old, the same wine in
a new bottle. As the
French are fond of saying,
“Plus ça change, plus
c'est la même chose.”
No comments:
Post a Comment