StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XI, No. XXXVIII

I am not Juden,
Not that I would complain;
I can be a recovered Jew
As easily as I can a Catholic.
I will admit I find the calmness
Of their belief inviting, but God is gone,
Lost in the continnum and time's passage;
What once were miracles is now
Only physics and technology,
The ancient rules and regulations
Are only explanations and structure.
As I am an upright ape, my birthright lies
Beyond any near-earth heaven
In the stars and galaxies of eternity.

As few of word as I can do this,
Without unneedful ornamentation,
The more readily crafty artifice
Is constructed to slip unseen between
Your neurons and seize control.
A poet operates by necessity in the black,
A dark agent of emotion and manipulation,
Calling upon memories once thought forgotten
To connect sweet timeless words
With the common humanity shared by all.
If I were to do this above the lines,
Make visible my heavy-handed instrusion,
This world, this stage would fully collapse
Beneath my graceless arrogance.

At the Renaissance Fair
I'm just another wandering poet
With flowers in her hair,
A fairer sexed Bard
Who courtseys to Kings
And banters with couriers,
Smiling bemusedly at each M'lady
And innuendo; 

An upper class poet is a fine thing to be,
But a lady must have children
For her husband to succeed,
And childbirth, in the Renaissance,
Is seldom a prescription
For a long and prosperous life
When you are the one
Pushing all the babies out.

Dinner with the kids, two legal assistants
And an Out of Corps Marine
Working on his college education;

Sharon cooking the barbeque,
Me, the chips and appetizers,
The two daughters, potato salad

Cole slaw, cornbread and dessert
(Our son brought his appetite, of course,
And his dislike of vegetables);

We all like to talk, so talk we did,
We ate and talked and talked some more
As we have for generations on Labor Day.

Summer is gone, over, kaput
-- It says so on the calendar
So it must be true,
No sleeveless blouses
Or white heeled shoes:
Dark pants, tailored skirts
In Autumn shade hues,
But you knew all that, didn't you,
Assuming your mother taught you
Everything she was supposed to.

Let us go into the autumn,
The festivals and Octoberfests,
We shall visit Harper's Ferry
To watch the apples pressing
And sip fresh cider from paper cups
While the trees shift color
In preparation for the snowfall.

Soon we shall see bright daffodil
Rising between the crocus,
Ravenoius spring deer,
Lean from the cold winter,
Cruising for budding tulips
To fill their three month hunger.

But for now let's enjoy
The cooling autumn breeze,
The rain that is not yet snow,
The green, unfallen leaves,
There will be time enough for winter
When the geese have flown Virginia.

Where there was anger and frustration
Calmness exists without the need to cover
And pretend she is something other than she is:
The poet no longer hides her strange quicksilver weirding
Or the warp and weft of the gray matter in which
All else and time resides.   What the world sees
Is what the poet eye sees;  what the world hears, it hears
through the poet's ears.   The anger has become art,
The art, a cry for immortality with the knowledge
That the poet is, at last, unbound and free.

Three hundred times the speed of light
-- That's what the scientists claim
They can pulse light up to.
At that speed time itself
Must give stop,
If not tumble backwards
Towards some previous existence.
Such things should be measured in warp speeds
Not published as papers in Nature:
How are we to make sense if some inpenetrable barrier
Is suddenly no more than a measurement stick?
Warp Seven, Mr. Sulu, give me everything she's got,
How much more does she have in the engines, Scotty?

Perhaps Einstein isn't god,
And Heinlein and Asimov, Clarke and Smith
Were more right in their guts than all the universities.
If light, why not matter? All is one
In the beginning and the end.  The great barrier disproven,
The walls come crumbling down and we shall build
Bright bridges to cross the darkness and great spires
Of migrant humanity on ten million starlit planets
As we spread, world by world, across first our galaxy
And then, our universe.

Even at Olduvai our gaze was on the stars above us,
From Afarensis to Sapiens to Astralicus, we've stood upright,
Grown our brains to magick our transluminal dreams
Until we made each of them real one footprint after another.

Venus on the left, Jupiter over head,
Mars, a red eye on the right,
Mercury is probably there someplace too
As I suspect is Saturn if I knew where to look;
The rest are not quite visible to a human lens
Until you check a star chart and determine their location
And view the heavens from some dark sky mountain summit.

When I was seventeen,
I spent my summer nights
Along the American River,
My liberty delineated
By the western slope
Of the Sierra Nevada
And the ragged Pacific edge.

Love was meant for
Beauty queens and girls
Who spent their days
Gossiping about boys
And Junior Prom dresses
As they washed and dried
The holiday dishes.

In that time before ,
The parties and the movies,
The family and the games,
The boys who never called,
The friends who never knew,
The river always flowed
And the poet always wrote.

No one ever questioned
The colour of my blood,
Or the direction of my thoughts,
I was who I must be
Because it must be so,
The banks were set and dredged
Long before I was born.

Down river, after the flood,
Among the ever present bayous
And the twisting, forgotten sloughs,
The tules still grew wild,
Summer shifted to fall
And herons patiently searched
For their afternoon catch.

The autumn moon rises
Over the valley, above the ridge,
Wild thyme and violets grow
Along the water's edge
Beneath the hunter's eyes
The poet dances as she has
Since the world began.