Riff On A 1918 Sarah Teasdale Pacifist Poem Reworked
As A Centenary + Two Years Pandemic Homage
Again come the hurricane-force winds
and flash-floods to Gotham New York,
And 3 am mockingbirds imitating cats in distress,
avians blown over from Long Island's North Fork;
In my yard I see achromatic 'possums wading
through puddles accumulating overnight,
And 70 plum tree friuts lie waiting
a nocturnal forager's delight.
Well-fed raccoons break some tines as they
amble atop a white picket fence-
they've even knocked out bottoms, and if possums,
or skunks are the culprits- a more forgivable offence.
And not one will know of this near civil war,
this incivility, this threat of extinction, not one
Could care diddly-squat insouciant
when the whole damn thing is done.
The licorice-nosed koala, lyrical lyre bird, neuro-genius octupi,
powerful, thoothed hippopotamus, and revered pine tree
could care less if humans took a hiatus permanently.
Sarah Teasdale said it over a hundred years ago,
and although I don't like her poetry
that's all you need to know.
-F.T. 08/27/21
Teasdale's 1918 poem is called "There Will Come Soft Rains", and was a reflection on World War 1 and the 1918 flu pandemic.
Mikaela In A Concave Geode Has A Revelation
Once in Wisconsin, a fresh water river nymph cautiously hid. She was a Potameides of the Naiad clan, and her name was Mikaela. She would remove freckles from the faces of young girls who bathed in her bubbling waters. She disappeared when vociferous men caused auricular tumults near the sloping river's banks.
Mikaela loved when a beauty-emanating geode, birthed by the mineral rich river's flows, occasionally cracked open against another rock. She especially cleaved to the purple and turquiose sea green colored ones- their vibrational frequencies soothed her so. It was her place to climb and curl into, then lay skyward in that little safe cup in a receptive state, arms folded across her chest like American trance seer Edgar Cayce. Then she waited, patiently waited.
She knew, she saw, that the people who kept eating severely tortured and butchered animal friends and saints in Usanian factory farms had a psychological dilemma to solve. They did not want to change their ways borne from entrenched habits of cultural tradition, so they made up a strategy not known to their very own selves
They decided to accuse and blame other people in their country of cooking and eating human children. They were unable to see that they themselves were cooking, broiling, occasionally stamping on, electrocuting, suffocating, and ingesting Great Spirit's other tribe's beloved offspring.
Mikaela knew the truth from her hypnogogic trances now, floating so closely above that mirky, unconscious river. This is why she often hid until innocents arrived. She beheld a milleniums-long mass habituation that was very violent. Except when young girls with freckle problems came to bathe. This she ministered to with sublime calm, peace, and sororal ease.
-F.T. 09/04/21
This is a poem about projection, and about our inability to see what horrific abuses we are continuously inflicting upon defenseless beings from other tribes by our shopping habits, borne from deeply entrenched, culturally-influenced alimentary and lifestyle habits. I am particularly thinking about conspiracy theorists, the currently cult-like Republican party in the US and the influence it has on the kinds of intellectually weak, spiritually bankrupt, frightened and programmed people who have lost the ability to think and constructively dialogue. A Hopi elder I was listening to said that people are currently without the instructions on how to live on Earth. Also, Thomas Merton once said that animals are saints because they are true to their own natures.
Tender Biker
He moves with a muted elan that is
as faint as the colors in a moonbow,
or like the pastel confectionery scent
of violet baby cologne.
He offers a paper plate holding
rainbow sprinkled red velvet cupcakes
to share with his daughter.
His eyes shine washed white mushroom bright
reflecting back the burst of glee
on her four years old face.
He cleans her hands smudged
from smeared icing with a
cucumber and green tea scented wipe
then puts her and the apricot poodle
into the motorcycle side car bedecked
with metallic pink and purple pinwheels-
just for her.
They take off, that revving a reprieve from
the stoned neighbor's bass boost
invading the street's bungalow houses.
From my front stoop, I glance
beetween reading texts then pages
from a Zbigniew Herbert poetry anthology.
I just now found the moxie
to go sweep up and flush
the dead water bug in the basement.
-F.T. 07/31/21
The inspiration for this poem came after I watched a few hour-long news specials on the January 6th hearings, as well as some clips on the new book that came out by the award winning Washington Post journalists Leonnig and Rucker, entitled "I Alone Can Fix It", highlighting the former president's authoritarian and "Stong Man" delusional ideal, it's effects on our democracy, and the fact that he is increasingly being recognized as an American war criminal. The tender biker depicted in this poem, for me, illustrates authentic, constructive, and healthy masculine strength that is very attractive.
Undersong Frequencies Against
The Demons Of Our Undoing
That's what I must sometimes
sound like to God when I pray-
a droning beseecher
with supplications on repeat
yet part of limping creation's fallen beat.
My spiritual coexistence
is a conjoint condition
with the trap door of prayer
hidden in twilight's hideaways.
What deflects the physics law-bending
supernatural light from flooding and freeing
are the malignant offspring of our harmful actions.
They are yoking demons, torturers meant to awaken.
To unclasp these spirit leeches from your neck,
start with accepting your status
as a pilgrim deuteragonist.
Ignorance is letting your
14 year old daughter
accompany you to a wake in
daisy dukes and a crop top.
I had the pleasure of beholding
this future, discount residustrial strumpet
in a Greenpoint funeral parlor.
Sadness can barely appreciate,
and is bummer Debbie Downer
monotonously dressed in somber brown.
This is a condition that is not depression.
Before the disruption of the planetary ecosystems,
It was considered the most harmful of spirits.
Self-indulgence. Laddie, do you really need
40 pairs of Nikes stacked in tangerine boxes
we can see in your room on Zoom?
Lust. Once on a Peter Pan bus stuck
in traffic on I-278 over New York's Triboro Bridge,
snug, daydreaming out of a window seat,
I glanced down to see a male driver in his car
wanking himself. Everyone on the bus could see it
if they looked over to the left.
Maybe he was an objectumsexual and
got excited by his close contact
with the car in front of him.
Injustice. Thousands of California Black,
Latina, and Indigenous women became
victims of forced sterilization in that state's
eugenics program in the first half of the last century.
It gave the Nazis the idea to execute it.
Greed. “Everyone’s greedy,”
Bell assistant city manager Angela Spaccia's
defense attorney Harland Braun argued at trial,
defending her $564,000 a year salary.
“There’s no crime in taking too much money.”
The double-chinned ex-mayor Anthony Rizzo
could barely button his jacket over his bulging
belly at his own trial. That button was so ripe to pop
and go flying any minute, across the room.
Deceitfulness. Gaslighting your spouse,
with "I'm not having an affair".
Or the vet ripping out all of your
sick senior cat's teeth for one grand,
when he really was dying from brain cancer.
He missed it in his mom and pop shop
local clinic, lacking the necessary equipment
to make an accurate diagnosis.
There is also deceitfulness through silence.
Craving. Here's one you're targeted for
by sociopathic psychologists and advertisers
using military psychological operations tactics.
They make you want to have things that you
don't really want or need
by implanting the desire in your mind,
that keeps appearing like pop-ups on your lap top.
Or Kraft Foods Group staff marketing meetings, they
celebrate their food chemist's flavor enhancers
that make sure you can't stop eating once you start.
"Betcha can't eat just one!"
Fraud. You were beyond credulous
to have bought this one. The levitating
Indian "guru", concealed in a tent before and after
actually becoming suspended in the air,
seated on a metal plate hidden under his robes,
secretly attached to his staff
firmly anchored into the ground.
Bless me, godman!
Anger. The spirit of wrath.
Not the PTSD-generated mindful anger that has snapped
out of its denial of planetary suicide,
is no longer willing to be stuck in ire,
is facing its stage of grief, and is uploading
its new-found energy towards salvaging work and giving.
Haste. What memes that flew
when that lone black fly landed and sat like a monk
on Mike Pence's head during the 2020 VP debate.
The attack on the working class, the gig economy,
the squeezing, the stress pressed upon those buckling
under unliveable wages have upticked anxiety disorders
like never seen before in this collapsing America.
There is no need for "Work Shall Set You Free"
signs above death camps anymore. Just be a member
of the working or splinter-sized, remnant middle class.
A few corporations are taking out
a dead peasant policy on you, anyway.
Ill Will. Once I was called for Brooklyn jury duty.
Some Black lady put out her foot to intentionally trip me.
I nimbly tried to hop over it at the edge of
our wooden bench row as I went up to the judge
to beseech excusal for religious reasons.
I think the tripper judged me because I was Land's End and
L.L. Bean dressed-for-social-worker-job white.
I am sure of this.
The Mennonite oath forbiddance and
a music minister gig there near Washington Square
sent me home to continue helping poor
Black and Hispanic poeple uninterrupted.
The city has gotten rid of excusal
for conscience reasons since then-
one step ahead of us clever.
- F.T. 07/25/21
This poem is a melange of religious guiding principles drawn from various ancient and Gnostic scriptures illustrated in 12 experimental codas.
Editor's Note: F.T. is a pen name for one of our regular attenders; if you read carefully you'll know which one. If you are looking for a connection to Quakerism, that was it. We publish each other's poetry just to share with each other as a community. No other alignment with our values is intended or inferred.
