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The
Starpoet Newsletter
Volume IX, No. II
If the north wind turns
Rushing to battle
Our bedroom walls
I know
You will check the windows
Double the doors
Then hold me in your arms
Until the sun returns
Lisa Jain Thompson C. 2008 C. E.
Words are not actions,
As beautifully presented and passionately felt as they are,
They are not action.
-- Hillary Clinton
January 08
Sometimes love
Another Loverly Love, Love
Love,
Like a headache,
Lingers,
Like an empty stomach,
Grows hungrier over time,
Like a song,
Love can be happy or sad,
Complicated or quite simple.
But like the sun,
Love is constant
And remains so
Despite the storms
That might momentarily
Obscure it.
Love knows no distance,
No quantum uncertainty,
Lightspeed forms no barrier
For 2 hearts in love.
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2008
Sir Edmund Hillary
Conqueror of Mount Everest
when it meant something
Dead at 88
in New Zealand
poetically anthropological
Humans In The Mist
We left the rain forest before we were human,
Generations ago lost in memory,
Before we learned of our own mortality
And invented elaborate explanations
About life and death;
Before we honored our own
With ritual burials and mourning songs,
We escaped our cradle jungle,
Leaving behind our common ancestor
And all those easy answers to creation.
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2007
For newborns today in developed countries
Their mean time to failure
Is in the range of 75–85 years.
Rolling with history
Director's Cut
The smell of gunpowder pervades this campaign
Which threatens to drain the old blood
From their positions of power.
The response of patricians,
When faced with loss of influence,
Has been constant long before
The Gracchi and Julius Caesar
Dared speak for the people.
The rich, the whitest white,
Find satisfaction with the ancient status
--Why change what serves you so well?--
Their god is happy, and they are happy,
And all is right in the world.
If only this rabble rouser,
This low bred, ill educated pretender
Would take the hint and remove himself,
Stop strutting across their stage
As if bloodlines meant nothing,
And power was something
That could be bought with a few votes
And general elections.
Bobby,
Spread eagle on the hotel floor,
Rosary in hand,
Blood pooling beneath his head
As his eyes grow forever vacant.
The dream ends, Nixon wins,
All else follows ever after.
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2008
Communication in the field of biogerontology is a minefield because all of the commonly used terms have no universally accepted definitions. In a series of five annual meetings called in an attempt to define common terms, the dozen or more experts who attended could not agree on the definition of almost all of them, including “aging.” The committee disbanded and the communications dilemma remains.
The continuing absence of agreement on basic terms results in communication failures and produces numerous erroneous interpretations of research results, illogical allocations of research funds, and misdirected scientific, economic, social, and political policy decisions.
Theology
Choosing
I choose not to believe.
Who made us?
The earth and sun
if you must insist.
Who made the world?
The universe,
The first generation stars,
Our sun.
Who is God?
The question is unneeded
And assumes an
A priori existence.
What is man?
A primate, a mammal, an animal,
A fish, a bacterium, a pool of chemicals,
The earth, the sun, the galaxy,
Starstuff.
Why were we made?
Random chance, inevitable evolution
-- either answer will suffice –
If nothing exists long enough,
Something will,
If something exists long enough,
Life will,
If life exists long enough,
Humanity will:
Here, there, everywhere.
What must we do to gain happiness?
Love one another,
Explore the world,
The universe around us,
Understand ourselves
And life's limitations.
How do we know what we should believe?
Believe only what can be disproved,
What cannot be tested is not believable.
Fables should be taught as fables,
Myths as myths,
And miracles, by definition, as poetic fancies.
How do you distinguish God from a sufficiently advanced technological civilization?
Any sufficiently advanced technology
Is indistinguishable from magic:
Any sufficiently flashy magician
Is indistinguishable from a god.
Why do you hate God?
I do not hate
Any god that might exist,
I refuse to kneel
To their magic.
If they do exist,
I wish to talk to them
About their methods.
Are you an agnostic or an atheist?
I see no reason to believe.
I see no reason to disbelieve.
I see no reason for the question.
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2008
Tell the truth, tell the truth, always tell the truth.
-- John McCain
January 2008
continuation of our religion page
Proportion
In a world filled with hate and war,
The most important moral question
Is whether gays should marry.
Without a heterosexual monopoly
On weddings, marriage, and divorce,
The western world will crumble
Like some carefully constructed
Elaborate sand structure
When the tide comes in at night.
So Benedict would have us believe,
He the cover for lusty priests
Grown fond of virgins, boy and girl,
Joined in chorus by randy televangicals
And wide-stance suited congressmen
Advantaging themselves of their position.
The men speak loudly of marriage,
And a woman's place within in it,
Promulgating doctrine and restrictions
Over who and what, and who
Will benefit, and who will not,
By birth, by sex, by God's manly will.
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2008
Women generally fare less well in the [British Army] fitness test, a fact that Maj Colclough explains as just a physiological artifact of being a female. Most women have lower levels of aerobic fitness, smaller lung capacity, a smaller heart, they're smaller in stature, with a smaller muscle mass, and so a smaller percentage will qualify.
Why does it seem the deck is stacked?
once more the lyric poet
First Month
Dark early after the federal holiday sabbatical
Caught firmly in the grasp of a Canadian blast
Sending long shivers past
Liberty Island
Deep down into the
Florida orange groves:
January reminding us of the three slow months
From the winter solstice until the equinox
Once more slips us into leaf filled spring
And the never ending promise of good bottom land.
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2008
Political reporters are superficial sportswriters.
Covering the campaign is almost like joining a cult,
with a cocoonlike bubble as you travel from event to event.
There's a lemminglike quality.
-- Mark Feldstein
George Washington University Journalism Profesor
food and growing up sicily
Losing Tony
This aging Mafia princess thing is interesting
(albeit with no current direct affiliation)
-- I feel as close to Sicilia as my childhood
Surrounded by my olive tanned aunts and uncles,
Reminisces of the 'Frisco Seals and the DiMaggios,
The unwhispered connections to guns and drugs
And bodies found floating come spring in
Lake Tahoe:
Second generation born, I am an American
Who still prefers her pizza thick with anchovies
Makes Grandma's lasagna with veal and pork,
Whole milk ricotta, and two or three other cheeses,
And does her fresh artichokes steamed
So she can peel the leaves with fingers and teeth,
One by one, down to the hidden heart.
If I had hooked up with some fast rising Sicilian,
Who knows where I might now be?
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2008
Spatially Enabling Enterprise Asset Management
-- I have no idea what it means, but I liked the sound of it.
I might use it in my next job description.
Past to present, I am all that I am and ever will be
Bal'harm
The screams of dying moors
Linger in my veins:
The conquerors of
North Africa,
The Sicilian Emirate, and
Spain
Rush through both my bloodlines,
Tinting my father's skin,
Darkening my native olive
On my mother's side.
My grandparents were baptized
At the Cathedral in Bal'harm,
A mish mash of architecture
As eclectic as my genes:
Built in six-oh-four by the Roman Church,
Facelifted by both Moors and
Normans,
Verses from the Koran decorate
The columns that flank its entrance.
If I were to choose a block for a census
Indicating my ethnic background,
I would check all or nothing
And claim my birthright
As merely human, one of many,
A carrier of earth's bloodwork
Without tribal flag or tattoo flourish
Marking my lineal humanity.
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2008
This is the age-old curse of pack journalism.
These conversations that used to be held in the bar late at night,
about who's going to win or lose,
now play out on the air
because there's so much time to fill.
-- Tom Brokaw
notes, hastily scribbled
Notes for a Poem
A twisted jigsaw of pimply, alienated gunmen
And self-obsessed wide-standing politicians
Who turned schools and churches into killing fields
While the cameras roll and vapid reporters
Ask their endless interminable questions,
Providing answers filled with menace and implication
But no action, no solution, no suggestion of resolution,
Only this constant torture porn of victim and perpetrator
As if we are nothing more than upright lambs
Being led to slaughter by fathers gone horribly awry.
American idiosyncrasies writ large and projected
On the species at large, so hungry for connection
That we ignore the imperfections of living,
Preferring to pretend that life is a televised stage play
Flush full with heroes and villains and Shakespearean jesters
Who provide comedy relief between the tragedies
While at night Catillian dances in a rain of bullets
That splash noisily off the asphalt's blacktop puddles:
People are injured, hurt, killed, the face of high def pain
Flashes off the television in thirty second intervals.
In the sacred places where women are raped,
Across the ocean, lives go on outside of camera range,
Disappointments with the church people rage:
Nuns inside convents helping Hutu murder Tutsis;
Priests manning roadblocks, identifying people to be butchered,
Then fleeing to safety, washing the blood from their hands;
Masses celebrated besides mounds of decomposing corpses,
Pushed aside to make room for the crimson soaked altar cloth;
Stain glass shattered, scattered across the sanctuary floor
Where rosaries of the dead lie gathered in a bowl.
Failure to act during genocide, failure to act, failure,
The sin of omission as mortal as if our own hand held the gun,
Pulled the trigger, reloaded the weapon, and moved on;
The sin of singular self-obsession that gluts our collective will,
Impoverishing us and our ability to recognize our mutual humanity,
The sin that deadens us to death and torture, unable to distinguish
Between what is on the screen and what is real, freezing us in place
Without a competent scriptwriter to compose the final, climatic scene,
The fifth act where all is resolved and the cavalry arrives auspiciously,
The king finds his vanished horse, and we all are saved before the curtain falls.
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2008
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