O Lady
the hem of whose garment
is the sky, whose grace
falls from her glance, who gives
life from the touch of one finger
O Lady
whose hair is the willow, whose breath
is the riversong, who lopes
thru the milky way, baying, stars
going out,
O Lady whose deathshead holds a thousand eyes
eye sockets black imploded stars, who trails
frail as a northern virgin on the mist,
O lady fling your bright drops to us, emblems
of your love, throw
your green scarf on the battered earth once more
O smile, disrobe for us, unveil
your eyes.
~Diane Di Prima
Just a quick one….
Diane Di Prima, one of my faves… Enjoy!
Gwyllm
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Diane Di Prima – Lunch Poems
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Diane Di Prima Poems….
The Belltower
the weighing is done in autumn
and the sifting
what is to be threshed
is threshed in autumn
what is to be gathered is taken
the wind does not die in autumn
the moon
shifts endlessly thru flying clouds
in autumn the sea is high
& a golden light plays everywhere
making it harder
to go one’s way.
all leavetaking is in autumn
where there is leavetaking
it is always autumn
& the sun is a crystal ball
on a golden stand
& the wind
cannont make the spruce scream
loud enough
—–
Rant, from a Cool Place
We are in the middle of a bloody, heartrending revolution
Called America, called the Protestant reformation, called Western man,
Called individual consciousness, meaning I need a refrigerator and a car
And milk and meat for the kids so, I can discover that I don’t need a car
Or a refrigerator, or meat, or even milk, just rice and a place with
————-no wind to sleep next to someone
Two someones keeping warm in the winter learning to weave
To pot and to putter, learning to steal honey from bees,
————wearing the bedclothes by day, sleeping under
(or in) them at night; hording bits of glass, colored stones, and
————stringing beads
How long before we come to that blessed definable state
Known as buddhahood, primitive man, people in a landscape
together like trees, the second childhood of man
I don’t know if I will make it somehow nearer by saying all this
out loud, for christs sake, that Stevenson was killed, that Shastri
————was killed
both having dined with Marietta Tree
the wife of a higher-up in the CIA
both out of their own countries mysteriously dead, as how many others
as Marilyn Monroe, wept over in so many tabloids
done in for sleeping with Jack Kennedy – this isn’t a poem – full of
————cold prosaic fact
thirteen done in the Oswald plot: Jack Ruby’s cancer that disappeared
————in autopsy
the last of a long line – and they’re waiting to get Tim Leary
Bob Dylan
Allen Ginsberg
LeRoi Jones – as, who killed Malcolm X? They give themselves away
with TV programs on the Third Reich, and I wonder if I’ll live to sit in
————Peking or Hanoi
see TV programs on LBJ’s Reich: our great SS analysed, our money exposed,
————the plot to keep Africa
genocide in Southeast Asia now in progress Laos Vietnam Thailand Cambodia
————O soft-spoken Sukamo
O great stone Buddhas with sad negroid lips torn down by us by the red
————guard all one force
one leveling mad mechanism, grinding it down to earth and swamp to sea
————to powder
till Mozart is something a few men can whistle
or play on a homemade flute and we bow to each other
telling old tales half remembered gathering shells
learning again “all beings are from the very beginning Buddhas”
or glowing and dying radiation and plague we come to that final great
————love illumination
“FROM THE VERY FIRST NOTHING IS.”
—–
My Lover’s Eyes Are Nothing Like The Sun
for Sheppard
These eyes are amber, they
have no pupils, they are filled
w/a blue light (fire).
They are the eyes of gods
the eyes of insects, straying
godmen of the galaxy, metallic
wings.
Those eyes were green
are still, sea green, or grey
their light
less defined. These sea-green
eyes spin dreams on the
palpable air. They are not yrs
or mine. It is as if the dead
saw thru our eyes, other for a moment
borrowed these windows, gazing.
We keep still. It is as if these windows
filled for a minute w/a different
light.
Not blue, not amber. But the curtain drawn
over our daily gaze is drawn aside.
Who are you, really. I have seen it
often enough, the naked
gaze of power. We “charge”
the other with it / the leap
into non-betrayal, a wind
w/ out sound we live in. Where
are we, really, climbing
the sides of buildings to peer in
like spiderman, at windows
not our own
—–
Rant
You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology
a cosmogony
laid out, before all eyes
there is no part of yourself you can separate out
saying, this is memory, this is sensation
this is the work I care about, this is how I
make a living
it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole
you do not “make” it so
there is nothing to integrate, you are a presence
you are an appendage of the work, the work stems from
hangs from the heaven you create
every man / every woman carries a firmament inside
& the stars in it are not the stars in the sky
w/out imagination there is no memory
w/out imagination there is no sensation
w/out imagination there is no will, desire
history is a living weapon in yr hand
& you have imagined it, it is thus that you
“find out for yourself”
history is the dream of what can be, it is
the relation between things in a continuum
of imagination
what you find out for yourself is what you select
out of an infinite sea of possibility
no one can inhabit yr world
yet it is not lonely,
the ground of imagination is fearlessness
discourse is video tape of a movie of a shadow play
but the puppets are in yr hand
your counters in a multidimensional chess
which is divination
& strategy
the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it.
the ultimate famine is the starvation
of the imagination
it is death to be sure, but the undead
seek to inhabit someone else’s world
the ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism
the ultimate claustrophobia is “it all adds up”
nothing adds up & nothing stands in for
anything else
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT
There is no way out of a spiritual battle
There is no way you can avoid taking sides
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher
you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
you have a poetics: you step into the world
like a suit of readymade clothes
or you etch in light
your firmament spills into the shape of your room
the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves
A woman’s life / a man’s life is an allegory
Dig it
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
the war is the war against the imagination
you can’t sign up as a conscientious objector
the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance
it is a war for this world, to keep it
a vale of soul-making
the taste in all our mouths is the taste of power
and it is bitter as death
bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself
the war is the war for the human imagination
and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you
The imagination is not only holy, it is precise
it is not only fierce, it is practical
men die everyday for the lack of it,
it is vast & elegant
intellectus means “light of the mind”
it is not discourse it is not even language
the inner sun
the polis is constellated around the sun
the fire is central
—–
ALBA, FOR A DARK YEAR
the star, the child, the light returns
the darkness will not win completely nor will the green dragon entirely devour the sun
what is this softness that will not take no for an answer
that penetrates and masses like love
in an empty heart?
Buddha has seen the morning star dawns purple and then gold in the snowy mountains
your hands flicker like sunlight among candles
children
sit down in the streets they buy peace with their blood
it shines on the gloomy pavement
our prayers
envelope us like a crystal sphere in which we all are moving