| Starpoet Newsletter Vol. VII, No. XLVIII |
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| News - Newsletters | |
| Written by Lisa Jain Thompson | |
| Sunday, 26 November 2006 | |
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The
Starpoet
Newsletter
Vol. VII, No. XLVIII
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^^\/\/\/\/^^ <><><><><> This fall respite
From frost and rain
Has fooled a daffodil
Into bloom
I will place it
In our bedroom
Before winter
Kills all
Life is good
We shall find more
This spring
And rejoice together That we still breathe
Lisa Jain Thompson c. 2007 C.E.  __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ Survived Thanksgiving we have: two days of cooking, two days of washing dishes and recovering. A grand success that left enough time to go see Happy Feet at the cinema -- snow and ice and dancing penguins. Love springs anew at the bottom of the world.
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^^\/\/\/\/^^ parents and nations have obligations: you don't walk away from your kids, you don't leave a mess behind that you have made, carry out what you carry in.
Canticas
in the middle of our country's journey
the future continues to reinterpet the past Go Big
Go Long Go Home That about covers it
Sorry If you don't like The choices We've broken Iraq
Now we own it W has screwed up
More than the budget We should have gone big
Instead of shock and awe But Bush's braintrust Preferred quick and glamorous And then forgot about winning
The rest of the war We cannot walk away
Too much blood is on our soul If we walk away
Thousands more will die
In the civil war
Our president has instigated The country and the President
Has never committed Our nation to this war
Leaving the hard stuff
The bloody body grunt stuff
To an army of volunteers While The People themselves Get off scot free Without taking responsibility For the consequences
Of their unconcern Deny all
Blame others Accept no liability For what we have done Dante did not imagine
Any circle that is deep enough To hold our collective sins God help us all Lisa Jain Thompson
November 2006 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ warning and admonition
Gods' Chosen Messengers
Presidents wrap themselves in troops and honor,
Kings call upon gods; rebels, the rightness of their cause, Ignoring their own blunders and the war that kills the rest of us. Presidents and generals hide behind the shields of others, Seldom willing to lead from the point -- Spokesmen, false arguments, and our bodies, not theirs, Are their usual and preferred choice of weapons. Lisa Jain Thompson
November 2006 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ More than a millennium ago,
when Baghdad reigned as the intellectual center of the world, a history fossilized in the night sky. The names of the constellations are Greek and Roman but two-thirds of the stars have Arabic names. Sometime around 1100, a dark age descended.
Mathematics became seen as the work of the devil, revelation replaced investigation and the Islamic intellectual foundation collapsed. Perhaps a century from now in the fourth millennium,
the names of new planets, stars and galaxies will be Chinese. Or there may be no one to name them at all. __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ some starpoet
Beyond The Rim
Beyond the rim,
Where stars are rare And scatter systems lie hidden,
Golden cities rise,
Unseen by human eye, Whose histories are written
By another's hand; Planets whose giant beast
Are crawly things at the water's edge, Glittering worlds, Alive with boundless energy, Where poets win prizes With their clever theories And time and space are open windows To a universe unimagined By brains grown smart
In the open savanna. What might lie there
In those places we do not dare? Who might answer
Those forbidden questions That we refuse to imagine? And when the moment comes, What will they make of us When they find this pale blue dot And the carefully argued ruins Of our once proud species? We shall never know, will we?
Lisa Jain Thompson
November 2006 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ Shall we bash religion with a crowbar
or only with a baseball bat? -- Anonymous
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^^\/\/\/\/^^ just yesterday
Enjoying The Ride
Saturday morning, before the house stirs,
Just sun, the trees,
And the sound of your own breathing
Broken by the clatter of waking birds
And the distant passing of a freight. The early squirrel finds no nuts,
The yard long searched
By cardinals and occasional small varmints,
A hawk circles overhead,
Hoping for a pre-meridian kill. Decades from now, after I move on,
The sun will rise, the birds will sing,
And the hawk and squirrels
Still search for breakfast,
Someone but me will rise early To watch the morning unfold. I would continue as long as our star,
Until this good earth is worn and burnt,
The poet's words would reach through spacetime Long after the body departs to dusts; Whose eyes wil see, whose lips will speak,
Only the goddess will know,
I will be gone except for these.
Lisa Jain Thompon
November 2006
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^^\/\/\/\/^^ Too old to be an overnight sensation,
Too young to make an album of standards -- What more can a poor girl do If the world no longer cares For what she's selling? -- LJT
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^^\/\/\/\/^^ Time
We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones. Six Muslims traveling from a religious conference were thrown off a plane last week in Minneapolis, Minn., even as unscreened cargo continues to stream into ports on both coasts.
Which risks get excessive attention and which get overlooked depends on a hierarchy of factors. Perhaps the most important is dread.
For most creatures, all death is created pretty much equal. Whether you're eaten by a lion or drowned in a river, your time on the savanna is over. That's not the way humans see things.
The more pain or suffering something causes, the more we tend to fear it; the cleaner or at least quicker the death, the less it troubles us. The more we dread, the more anxious we get, and the more anxious we get, the less precisely we calculate the odds of the thing actually happening.
-- Jeffrey Kluger
Time full article available at
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1562914,00.html __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ coming full circle
Enough to Pass Around
Now we are engaged in a bloody civil war
Where each side's noble cause Maims and dismembers the other's.
We should never have been here
-- But that's our fault for voting
The damn fool in in the first plafe --
Now that we're here, we can't leave
-- And that's his fault for his arrogance
And delusional self-confidence --
But here we are
And here we should remain Until we unbreak what we broke With our collective blind fear.
Lisa Jain Thompson
November
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^^\/\/\/\/^^ tighter circle
Sleepy Hollow
Old Blundermouth keeps stumbling on,
Eyes closed, mind shut,
Hearing no evil as he goes.
Failed at oil,
Failed at baseball,
Failed at governing
And waging war,
The headless horseman
Keeps racing through
The china shop. But he prays nice,
If you are white and heterosexual,
And worship a protestant baptist god
Who never travels outside His inner circle. Lisa Jain Thompson
November 2006 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ A poet without substance,
A knight without the grail, May show glints of polished flash When called to the tournament, Only to fail when the lady's favor Requires them do battle with the gods.
-- LJT
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^^\/\/\/\/^^ Peace
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^^\/\/\/\/^^ Send your letters and postcards to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it © Lisa Jain Thompson 2006
Further distribution of this newsletter in its entirety is authorized. |
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| Last Updated ( Sunday, 26 November 2006 ) | |
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