Dianes’ Blessings….

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

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