Solid Quarter

Visit Trembling Pillow Press for poetry books, broadsides, chapbooks, and Solid Quarter Magazine.

Visit New Orleans Poetry Fest for the annual 4 day poetry festival directed by Bill Lavender and Megan Burns.

Megan Burns' Poeticsofbone&city project on Tumblr



Thursday, August 20, 2020

What is the sacrifice?

Day 20

the magical act of the poem/ is you thinking we are getting somewhere/ with language/ when there is nowhere to go/ there is nothing but emptiness

strange always was our time among each other/ the strange lights we are /or how we hide from one another

********************************************


Process Notes: 

inside [redacted]
there is a story, all the way down
we know best stories we build here
in one lifetime, mine the story
it has everything you need, and the stories
interlock, so you have to know the story of where
you came from in order to read the code
you have to access generationally a coding
complete inside you and where it lacks, you
are searching for a matching in code
to translate back to you what is forgot
for there is no separation of family to other
we are all traveling the same paths
on different time lines

time is a problem


maybe we fear love

because it makes us invincible.


Photograph: 

Live Oak near Canal Outlet on Robert E. Lee Blvd.

"The first existence of the universe was brought into being by hearing and its last will be brought to an end by God through hearing." -Adonis

In Buddhism according to the The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which in the original Tibetan was named: The Great Liberation by Hearing in the Intermediate States, at death the dying person will be presented with hallucinations of sights and sounds as the body's senses deplete and withdraw. These images of the Buddhas, both wrathful and beneficent, are said to be "projections" of the original Buddha nature of our being. Not truly projections as they are us. They are the reality of what we are that we forget in the samsara of illusion which is our reality. The book is called Liberation by Hearing as the text is to be read to the dying being to remind them not to panic during death but to recall their teachings and to understand what is happening to them.

It's a shame we don't value life in this culture so much that we would prepare not only our own deaths but be prepared to know what to do when those we love die.

What will you do when those you love die? Will you know how to ease their fear. Will you have eased your own to such an extent that you can hold it. And your own death, how much of each day do you devote to sitting with that reality. Do you know how you will hold yourself in death.

What is it you wish to achieve in dying as there is truly nothing in this world to achieve.


Plague Journal:

6.8.20

the macrocosm of standing together will seep into the microcosm of all of your relationships

when you realize there are an abundance of people who will feed you, you don't have to rely on poison anymore

we recreated templates of power and control in our relationships because we were modeled abuse and control as normal, as ideal, and told it was care taking and love. What we need to normalize is standing besides one another, the next/ to model. We need to learn to stand next to anyone and care take. We need to learn to care for who is besides us, not who we pick and choose. These practices are the antidote to the poison.

We sow the seeds now with every choice- for what grows next.

We are asking for more and will ask for more as we value ourselves.

Learn here in this disaster to stay the course, be consistent, to navigate terror, to survive -- keep going all the way to the other side.

Fixed continuums and fixed models are fantasy. All is birth and death, growth and decay. Do not despair your time here, no matter where you fall in the fluid motions of its sweep. What is low, rises and what is on top must always descend below.

The universe is exact even in spite of all our failure.

Try to hold on to the balance of all that spools out before us.

I am keeping you in sight.


Resource: 
New Orleans' Urban Forest Survived Katrina
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9773202/ns/us_news-environment/t/new-orleans-urban-forest-survived-katrina/





No comments: