I have been lucky to know and to be around great poets and poetry. I know my poems wouldn’t pass muster for what is considered by many to be good poetry. But much modern poetry and fiction does not resonate with me. I have a bit different idea. I love what might be called heavyweight art. Not that my poetry is heavyweight, I don’t mean that! But much of what people think is heavyweight art, I find to be, well - not that. I feel that I might find a good poem in Reader’s Digest.
Listen Well
Sometimes in the smallest things
life’s true pleasure may be found.
Each smile is a bit of light
to ease the weary work of day.
Listen well, hear within the still small voice.
Listen well, hear within the voice of love.
And when the world feels harsh and cruel,
and greed and meanness all around,
then to yourself some kindness show,
and you will come to find,
there in the dark of night,
a light will come to shine deep inside you,
and loving kindness will make the
hard world good again.
Of a kind so all are we.
In kindness we ourselves do see.
Listen well, hear within the still small voice.
Listen well, hear within the voice of love.
About Listen Well
I was one of those people, who, when the events of the country became so alarming in 2015, constantly monitored the news all day and into the night. I wrote Listen Well in 2019, to address feelings that I, and I think others, were having.
The text for Listen Well is actually lyrics for an a cappella anthem, which I intended to be in a simple style similar to the Shaker Hymn, ‘Tis a Gift To Be Simple. No chorus has performed it yet. I will include the audio score below, played by strings.
I then thought it might be interesting to try to write an extraverted version of it - in a sense the upshot of the meaning of the poem, regarding the outer world. The result was “The Triumph of Truth & Time,” for Trumpet & Organ - the same music, with an obligato trumpet line added.
I felt that the lyrics, their meaning, was perhaps over the top. But I believe and have experienced every word of it, so I’ve let it stand as it is.
My friend
why do you confuse things so?
Behind every face God lives
while no face is God.
Some faces, for each,
are more God than others.
Seek the keys to the Kingdom.
Journey the locks.
No one knows God
until with God’s eye’s they see
and with God’s hands, they work.
God loves the sense of feel
and what is it, we touch?
A New Music
Solomon, we concede to you
your endless days’ sun of backward turning.
They were glorious days.
Too few have even yet heard the sound
of your ancient trumpets,
old as the mountains,
and great as the sea.
Yes this night, in the taut place
between the shifting earth plates
a new music is itself singing.
The deer has wandered from the forest glade
and moving out into the unknown chaos,
offers sinew and vein to the Lyre Maker,
and fingers reach between the strings,
and music never yet heard
is forming beneath that pale moon.
I wrote this for a troubled friend in the 80s. And of course it is also a note to myself.
For decades I have been trying to fomulate what I have come to realize is actually a kind of theology. I loved Rilke’s, “Inside us is where God learns.” As a child, I distinctly remember a thrill when I opened an orange and realized that no one, no one in all of human history, not in the history of life on the planet, had ever seen the inside of that orange. It was an experience of newness unique to that moment, and impossible to repeat. This poem occurred when I was able to advance the idea a little further, some time in the 80s.
Puzzled friend
wherein do your many parts fit?
Whirling pool
you condense to blackness
the humanness you take is fear
But hands there are still
that you might for a moment
reach out to grasp seashell and reed
and toes sunk deep in sea foam
so that little fishes
might play about your ankles
and remind you of other piece
so little
they only fit big
Tree tops are whirling
so are mountains
and rivers too dance
to river place
Process unfolding
heart and mind-shape whirl
dream stuff dives deep
where lies this most precious pearl