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Newsflash:

Starpoet Newsletter Vol. VII, No. XLVIII

Sunday, 26 November 2006 07:57 Last Updated on Sunday, 26 November 2006 09:59

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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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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