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Poetry || SubmissionsFive poems by Richard FeinTombstoneRest in peace, Risen with the angelschiseled cuneiform in marble. What rude soul would dare snore in the divine presence, keep eyelids closed under a radiant light, be utterly deaf to angelic choirs, sleepwalk past revered prophets? Some exhausted, eager, fearful, hopeful, mourner paid the mason to carve this oxymoron. One certainty, what was set in stone, this alphabet of warring sentiments, is a conduit for countless rains till clarity is eaten away as minerals wash down and ever taller plants rise yearly from their beds. About finding one's rootsOur most ancient and hungry mothers groped for them. Anchors in hurricanes, or crippling dead weights, an ambiguity stems from roots. A tumbleweed is rootless when it wanders, becoming an everywhere twig scraping the sand. Restore the plant to a fertile, damp loam and it explodes into foliage. Soil then can fashion growth as much as roots. Salty soil sucks out sap, shriveling stems into stumps, but a balanced matrix is a dutiful midwife, giving all and taking nothing away. Try stepping barefoot on the ground and the whole business clings to your heels, to your toes--between your toes, hard to scrub off completely. A mote of roots, traces of soil always betray where you've been. Wearing shoes from the moment of your birth would keep your feet clean of native soils, but then all memories would be of walking on hard, uniform surfaces with no remembrance of your soles pressing the warm yielding earth. There is another way to walk rootless, simply hack your feet off. True inspirationNot my inspiration, I hold my breath. The music has a name and composer, Pastoral---Beethoven. A great let down almost sets in. The masterpiece never was my inspiration, but I still hear breathing, though I've paused my lungs. I'm breathless between the fading dream and the reality of the radio. Breathless in a halfway world between a warm blanket and cold seeping through a window. Beethoven and breathing. But even the breaths aren't mine. Am I waking from a dream of my existence? Only shadows are before my now open eyes, a colorless montage of degrees of darkness. Clearly no Beethoven lies here. But the breathing is real---real and rhythmic, primal and soothing like the Pastoral. My son has journeyed back here. As when he was three, when sometimes in the night he found his way to my side. Perhaps this night he also woke in a shadowy room, frightened by a bad dream, or worse--- disillusioned by good one. It's Beethoven that future restless dreamers will remember with their all night radios on, not me. I feel my seven-year-old's heaving chest. Is he too old to be here? Hardly. Someday at 3 a.m. he will be fully grown and alone. He may hear immortal Beethoven---familiar as a best friend, but then also reach out his arm for me. Looming miteSingular mite, red, and very, very small goes up my window; quickly for a mite, and for a mite my window is a Sahara, vast and as empty. So exposed, so determined, why? Perhaps a haj to mite Mecca, but where are the other faithful? A pin propelled by a whim could arrest its ascent, and drag this pilgrim down to the bottom and spear it. But today I have no such whim. Perspective tricks my eyes, for an instant, its red body eclipses a leaf on a distant tree. I should get up, the alarm has rung. Should get up, the alarm has rung. Should get up, the alarm will ring again, and again, every ten minutes. Should get up, the distant el squeaks, must be on one. The mite has made it up the first pane; the windswept leaves applaud. But the fool is crossing the wood, to the second pane. No veering, a plumb line could trace its perpendicular trail as it journeys upwards on its transparent world. Should get up, jacket, tie, briefcase loiter by the dresser. Should get up, but the mite has more panes to cross, Must be going somewhere. Where? I should be getting up; I must go somewhere. Even a mite has a journey's end. Second alarm, should get up, third alarm, should get up. SnowflakeCatch one on a cold slide,lay it out like a corpse on a gurney and pursue the autopsy, focus your squinting eye through the eyepiece while aligning the entity over the hole--- and before the rising light, under an objective lens lies a translucent singularity, a crystalline pattern not quite like the other falling billions. But its unique complexity is brief for the heat of the light and a steamy breath reduce the pattern to a drop, a drop among drops that are all disposed of in a beaker to splash randomly against the clear glass. Richard Fein lives ion Brooklyn and can be reached through bardofbyte@aol.com Today's Situation
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