No Riverbanks left clean

The mouth of time is swallowing me
Along the borders of sorrow
That pieces sweetly, I awake
From another night of white gull dreams

To find my head and land
Has been given away to emperors
This is the future, though it feels like the past
Songs of the wild rice, tossed above

The lotus pond, between the places
Where birds travel over old fishermen
If there is heaven high, it’s not circling here
The once headless two trillion trees

Are undoing claims to paths, man-made
Frustrated, I abandon my cup of leisure
I am someone’s guest, in this sheet of skin
I am in someone’s womb, my mother here

And I may see Spring bright and delicate
But autumn is in my heart, dark-red
West of the river water, rotten-peach.

Extinction Moment

This soul does stand half ajar
For this world of greed and troubling hours
I have to remark on all the beauty
That stands so close to death

In the materialism of this place
Before machines are born
And remake you into an everlasting race
Enjoy mortality, while you are alone

Lording over nature, poisoning oceans
Depart, before the sun languishes
Over meteors, before you are replaced
In extinction’s calm embrace

Nothing is ordained but time’s lack
Of ambivalence, each thing in
Its rightful place, prone to embark
Upon evolution’s touch and hand

Where immortality is a long next
Of the tribes that once sung
And now are mere skeletons and fossils
In another time and place.

Environmental Terrorism

The Hollow Planet

The Hollow Planet

If all language deserts me
All vice of verb and adjective
Then pardon my Divine feeling
That shall remain, in my silence
Like the voice of the forest

Before the logging trucks came
Like the sound of the ocean
Before the harbour and ship-horns
If the voice of a planet suffers
Who will hear her lost password?

Who will know the centuries
How many springs and summers yet
Till those virgin fields come back again?
While men and women breed
The world which has offered so much

Prosperity to them, suffers still
Their economy a scaffolding of allure
And the disconnection with nature
The urgency is for the physical basis
Which humanity has lost touch with

Evolution labored to drive us into cities
Green cities are the orgasms of the Earth
The hide and seek of skyscraper gardens
Wrapping towers of glass with gushing water
Will the city gardens prove that the beast

Can cohabitate with corridors of the future
Or shall we bring them droughts, famines,
Antibiotic resistance infections, floods.

Salt In the Wounds of the Earth

Salt In the Wounds of the Earth

Eun Ji, the rain is coming down
Like the mirror’s play of cloud-flow
Not too different like time
We cannot force our way
Sometimes the path must invite us

To feel a salty waltz of breeze
And surrender to what must be
While our hearts remain private

In the abode of crows and lovers
Who leave us, while we must
Find freedom against the four sides
Of the world, I will wait
While the two Suns

Of my Soul and Spirit cool
O’ save me, that I have been executed
For my deliverance unto eccentricity

The hotter sun will be frozen first
While this Earth raises her temperature
Many a state will go without water
And I will be not quenched by mortality
Nor the little words that the galaxy

Echoes in our voice, so sublime
What famines I have known
And such spiritual ambiguity

I have traced in what I write
The living trunk of fear and procrastination
So much of the human condition
That is fresh, unearthed, with roots
That craves more life than one mere star.

I Pass Death with the Dying

I Pass Death with the Dying

Has anyone supposed they are
Lucky to be born?
In this corner of the Universe
With this kind of a spark?

I watch the nature of my generation
Go extinct, the species
Have their last autumn
While the corporations thrive

And I have to wonder
Where is the gratitude
One of a dominant species
While we spend billions

On military to protect ourselves
From the threat of each other
How shall these worlds
Protect themselves from us?

Has anyone supposed
We disgrace the Earth
In a self-centered kind of dream
Where to profit and have families

Exceeds all other cause?
Has anyone supposed we are
Luck to be born?
And that living is about learning

To give back, I suppose not
We are pragmatic opportunists
More interested in sex, comfort
The survival of our genes

While our institutions like democracy
Have become so corrupt
Half of all people refuse to vote
Has anyone supposed why it is
There are no revolutions anymore?

Begetters of children are busy surviving
Consumers are tricked into buying
For me lips that have smiled
But not for ignorant cities

Built on the destruction of nature
Has anyone supposed
We are lucky to have been born?
In a time of so much change

That machines and supercomputers
Might turn us upon a more righteous path.

An etude in misplaced desire

To His Mistress the World Going to Bed

I have no license to touch
Your soul, if a soul had qualities to touch
No permission to enter your sanctuary
No heaven’s zone of glittery
I have no intimacy of the variety
That which my state could renew

No pass into the beauteous state
Of harmonious chime of feeling
I have no novelty in this condition
Of incessant repetition
Only hopes and sensations private
Like an imprisoned youth in an older body

It’s hollow here, beneath this flesh
This kingdom called my life, the sameness from
I have no insight into the women
Whom I admire, I used to have female friends
For they go on, like a lifetime of having children
Becoming full with roles

But for the men, they are wild in another way
Hair in their destiny, alone in their temple
Of peculiar tastes and defied responsibility
I have no license to touch these lives
Who are so full with duty, so unlike my own
We cannot truly coexist, only perhaps

Exchange a passing smile on our way
Until I labour, I in labour lie
A foe of women, a foe in sight
And I only have the power to observe
And it’s a hollow temple
Not to be able to touch the world more.

Ode to Rabindranath Tagore

Ode to Rabindranath Tagore

The butterfly counts not years, but minutes
The rose counts not months, but moments
So what is beauty in another time?
Love is the only reality

The stars repeat it as light’s mantra
And if trees are the earth’s endless
Essay to speak to blue heaven
And if the oceans are the planet’s special

Way of finding uniformity in origins
Think then that your love cannot
Claim possess over these things
But give freedom and sustainability

Because for your love, the world
Has suffered cruelly, so your families
Could be born other species have gone extinct
That you might have airplanes, internet and cities

A lot has been lost from this place
And your children will not see those birds
Science and corporations of profit
Government and institutions of measure

Do not always care, it’s the artists
And the children that know how to count
The important matters of humanity
Be like a mother and a philosopher in all that you do.

Scarcity of Silence #FreeVerse #poems #micropoetry #silence #amwriting #NationalPoetryMonth

Scarcity of Silences

Silence isn’t depressing
It’s being with yourself, oneself, myself
That’s quality time
I knew it perfectly well

Nature is always present
Like when I used to walk in the woods
I wasn’t alone, I was surrounded
By trees, the forest, the snow melting

There weren’t windows, buildings noise
It was silence glittering and blinking
In terrible moments that were
Beautiful because they felt innate

Flat as a poster I walk this city
Without silence, or a clear mirror
Perhaps without silence, we
Find ourselves wanting everything

And everything we cannot have
I blame too much breeding
As the cause of the scarcity of silence
Dare I say it’s gone extinct?

Poetry takes me back to nature
When all the nature has been stripped
Searched, and taken, sort of how
The world treats a young woman
Who once knew what silence was.

Who wants to Save the Planet #Environment @TimHemlin

The Profit Ethic

Shall I come to see
How your planet ruined
Biodiversity for the eternity
Of your small memory?

If your species goes extinct
What will it say about evolution?
That your God didn’t care
That you wanted to profit

More than you deemed to protect?
You wanted nuclear families
And you did it a billion times
Shall I come to see then

How you are accustomed to live?
How you consume a flowerless land
And build cities as ugly as winter
No, no I don’t think so

The Earth is your experiment
As the Spring reminds you
That nature is bigger than man
I heard rumours the oceans are dying.

The Problem of Extinction #Poetry #Environment #Transhumanism #Amwriting

Atlantis Returned

In the algebra of burning suns
I witnessed days
Like a blaze

From language, technology, culture
Species upon species going extinct
I was alive when this happened
And I felt the mourning

Of evolution, the transgression
Against God, unity in diversity

Extinction is sometimes
The only punishment nature
Has left, after the singularity

Some might flee into augmented reality
Decide not to travel
To other planets, busy in their

Immaterial gamification of reality
With their smart watches
Immersive glasses, fake telepathy
Levels of community

You told me of the setting hand
Of life and the hour when
Humanity would be judged

In the soul of Dead Mayans
I knew even global civilizations
Could destroy themselves
It wouldn’t be the first time.

Dilating Suns that Blur the Spring #Poetry #NaPoWriMo

Stripped of Myself

Oh, the pleasure is in peace
In flowers for the spring
In the rain’s soft offering

And hours of flight and calm
The uncertain harvest of nature
About to get into full bloom

That’s beauty, anticipation
Of perfect trees and dilating suns
And stars lost in their orchard of lights

The suddenness of God
As if reserved for only
A few days a year,

In this mortality
Nature is divine
And I am sacred too

O to behold the ghosts
Of love when nothing else is known
And beauty, when truth

No longer has the power
To rectify a life.
Stripped, I’m starting to
Float free, an unleafed
Orphan, a heart
Broken until this moment
I know nothing about
Giving myself back to life.

The Last Nature poem….

And indeed there will be time

Drink deep of quietness
Solitude is the calmer mist
This drunken slumber of nature
Always adapting, always seeking compromise

Delicate eco-systems of the valley
Glimmers of the noises of the night
Margins of the Sea, millions of years
Of history, feverish only for thousands

Of species recently gone extinct
The great human extinction of biodiversity
That’s the real news of this world
Earth, whose primal glory was the mother

Who provided when we were mere nomads
Before cities, before billions, before money
Drink deep of quietness
If the future will be a return to the past

We do not know, or shall it
Be a return to the stars, we cannot say
There are galaxies where we are known
Or, more properly, where our

Descedents are known, they are patient
Not like us, who seek profit only
In the short-term, mere years of instinct
However, there exist also dimensions
Where we have already destroyed ourselves.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Bonjour-Mona-Lisa-525400244

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The Unconditional Will to Live

The Unconditional Will to Live

Say tomorrow doesn’t arrive.
Say tomorrow doesn’t come
Say we don’t make it, what

Would you do, in your last
Year on the home planet?
In your last revolution

Of the Earth around the Sun?
Live like it, like that
From the pit of your stomach
From the top of your lungs
With the moments staring

At your mortal beating heart
Don’t say, it doesn’t matter
Every moment does, we are
As common and rare as stars
With thoughts knitted together

Acts of helping that knit together
Communities, families, countries
Peoples, groups, lovers of
Knowledge, art, cities, humanity

Say tomorrow doesn’t arrive
Say you never get to have children
Say we don’t make it, what
Would you do for real

What really matters, what
Makes you feel lucky, grateful, heroic?
So do that more, and say

We never got a chance to meet
Say you stayed home that night?
Say you want to feel alive, then do.

So intimate have we become

So intimate have we become

Touch me, like twilight
Like the soft moist current of wind
For I can feel extinction
Like a sci-fi novel
Touch my face!

With cool grass fingers
Of Spring, I want to enjoy nature
For we are wounding nature
If that is, even possible
We’ve become hunters

Predators, tyrannical in our greed
Touch me, make me forget
Do the stars witness our disregard?
For life, the very privilege
We were freely given

When we cross Africa’s deserts
Touch me, like sunrise
Like the warm mirth of fire
For I can feel death
Like a time traveller

The algorithms hint
At the end of times
However seldom I am touched
Touch me, for I no longer
Have left any words.

The time of fire

The time of fire

This is the time of extinction
Not meteor or greenhouse
But human-made, ecosystems

Irreversibly dying, that which
Takes millions of years to evolve
This is the time of mammalian selfishness

Who hoard without regard
For other forms of life
They rage with children, billions

The world is young, many countries
Have a swarm of young people
Evidently certain to mimic western nations
And exploit and prosper
The News does not tell us this

That our planet is experiencing
A great drop and loss of biodiversity
In the lightning’s blitz of society’s
Celebration, creatures left their habitats
Unable to cope with the pillaging

The deforestation, the ocean-pollution
The urban sprawl, the short-term rape
This is the time of fire, oil, commodities
For men who would engineer their corn
To be poisonous, so that drug industries

Might profit, weep for the Earth
The Earth who made a bed of love
For our genes from 3.5 billion years ago
All has been passed down
The Earth made a brutal destroyer
Never imagine humanity as civilized.

Prince of worlds

The world is not conclusion
She rides the glory and tragedy
Leaving us behind no doubt
A descendent divinity

History a symphony of positives
In a life of necessary suffering
We have no shame, generations
Of maladies, cancer of the Planet

We have no guilt, ecological terrorists
To breed into the billions
Imagine the height of arrogance!?
As the oceans die, in a philosophy of next

Permafrost is melted into the atmosphere
The world is not a conclusion
She is a star among trillions
Her philosophy is ancient

Extinction is not worrisome for her
She has seen a million species scar her planet
But none like us, none like when
Mars was once full of life

We’ll do it again in no time
But will we make it to other worlds?
That is the love affair with time
To survive, we do what we do

In order to survive, for this
God does not have to exist
Or any myth in fact, but it’s helpful
To imagine life as an ambush of bliss

Heaven but a moment away
For reality is an expensive privilege
For which I have outgrown in labour
It may be a forgone conclusion that

We die, but in piercing earnest
The life after death must be a treat
It’s hard to be surprised anymore
In jest, let’s believe in what we please.

Sarika’s Anthem

Inspired by http://sarikacullissuzuki.com/

Perpetual nature, would you
Make our lives sustainable
Teach us to live in green-forever

That sweet birds might visit our dwelling
With a clear sky and a loving future
Where energy is fostered

Without waste, pollution or hurting
Other forms of life for our own comforts
Perpetual nature, may we

Be sons and daughters of virtue
To protect you while we profit
From your natural prosperity

Let us make forests grow
And harness the power of the sun
For ecological diversity is your gift

Of millions of years, so do not
Let us take it in a few centuries
Man is selfish, but may we also

Learn to be more kind
To our keeper, our mother, our land.

Ode to Centuries

Sleep thou in the bosom
Of thy tender comrades
And if the world
Did not give you a true friend

Sleep in the divine-open
Where the stars speak with you
While the living water
Knows your name

And the moonlight glimmer
Satisfied the dreaming in you
Sleep thou in the bosom
Of the whispers of mortals
For a day will come
When you will be immortal.

Language of Owls

Fair and listening Owl
Against the black sky
How you soar high
How you spy well

What pretty thirst for silence
On what tree of rest
On which horse ranch
Do you like to spy on best?

Far and listening Owl
Who out on a limb
Does watch the moon rise
And claws tight full of wisdom

An old hoot for a nest from the sun
Who can tell what
Hoot is thinking?
An owl named “Who”

Who loudly repeats the woot
Speaking a language of owls
With eyes to mourn and songs
To sing, ringing in the forests

Extinct and noble Owl
In some dry recess now
Of the museum’s memory
In what fantasy books
Did I see an owl-reading?

For the environment

At the feet of altars
Beneath old trees
At the foot of where
Rivers join, I feel
The sentence of hard labor
Served in me, the words
From the lips of the great sea

The smell of salt in the water
And the feel of grass
Between my toes
All that I can create
Is nothing compared to the world
The world we used so indiscriminately
While we talk of imaginary profit

We harm the thing we love
By how we live, and that’s
The stupidity of being
An animal that cares for self
For nuclear family above
All else, we have been socialized
To be selfish, to hoard, to exploit

Though in the vivacity of time
I know nature will return
The balance, our debts
Grow like burnt forests
They grow like poisoned oceans
They grow like crowded cities
And I can’t help but wonder

Does the rooftop garden
Know which master it serves?
Do the storms know
They are a weapon of karma
Upon an arrogance of man?

Earth-Love

Earth-Love

Oh what an effort it is
To love you like I do!
Or not effort at all
For love of you

Is simple and clean
It is true, this grief as white
This joy as pure
The air is in my heart

My blood is born of sunlight
My handkerchief made of
Ocean, sound reverberating
In my crown chakra

And my cotton pants
A comfort for the dry and green
Days of gratitude and good weather
The Earth, that’s what I love

Her wonderful sustainability
Her waist is slender and her
Seasons are ever young
A tree, a town, a meadow and birds.

Nature 520:1

For I know the plans I have for you
Said Nature, to the beast
On whatever star, of artificial or organic
Intelligence, your design is place

Where energies collide
Plans to prosper and plans not
To harm you, and your descendants
Will be good and just

Plans to give you hope and a future
Taste and see that Nature is good
Blessed are those who follow her laws
And those who hope in the stars

Will renew their strength and soar
Like miracles from their Earths
They will walk on strange worlds
And not faint, for they will be

Custodians of life, protecting, nurturing
As was their true purpose, as they
Once were by me, Said Nature
As the home star burst forth, a red nothing.

Plunderers of Earth

We should die except for death
Our words cannot change
For these thoughts have been
Thought by us since creation

First began, we shall have our day
Is there any secret left
In our lives, these classical habits
Of will and mind and formula?

We should love except for evolution
Our hearts cannot change
For they have been performing
These rites of giving and receiving

Since creation first began
This is what we do, reproduce and kill
And foster a kind of culture
Now we prefer most to consume

And that is why I say
We should leave except for extinction
Our habits that degrade ecodiversity
We take and we offer the cosmos what?

Exactly I cannot say, the greed of children
Who look into the stars
And think “mine, mine, mine.”

To Creation

If yet I have not all thy love
Remember this, I was born
Into your world, strange nature
I breathe, because of you

And your Deare evolution
I shall never have it all?
Being poor, and who made me so
And all my inner beauty is yours

I have nothing to bargaine with
Anymore, time can have me all
I have no great goals for my
Lofty mortality, “it is what it is”

So they like to say, I am tree, river
Stone, and just a bit of flesh
That grew in your womb never
Saying oaths that others do

If yet I have not all thy fortune
Let me be as you intended me to be
I can only love so much, do so much
In the fragile state for which I live

My remaining days, there are no letters
Like my genes to bring me home
Home is the planet I live upon
God’s riddles are for the absurd

Faith is not the kind of jewel I wish
To store in my brain, fruitless hope
Nor was any return love vowed by thee
Life does with me what it wills

I am as a fish in a polluted sea
Or as a tree in the last forest
I am as a world in ruins
For the sake of the greed of a few

Men who could not win your love
Any more than I could make the
Universe be aware of my existence
Love is for those whose hearts are young.

MAN

I shut mine eyes and all the world drops dead
Though gold and silver they never die
Life goes on waltzing with stars yellow and red

Till the dreams run moon-struck
And creation whispers overhead
(I think I made you up inside my head)

Where the oceans rise and forests burn
And planets are corrupted for a few centuries
By Man the destroyer, cities of shame

Where nature hangs her head in civil disobedience
And machines calculate how to
Win back her trust, before it’s too late

I think evolution outperformed God
To make such an arrogant creature as Man.

SUMMER

Summer was another country of forever beauty
That stretched out with a touch
Of air on flesh that was lighter
Than the sweet approval of the Trees
For the light and the breath that was the light

Tasting the sunlit juice of forever beauty
It felt like Spring had harvested
An outrageous beauty of
Landscapes folded in a surreal single voice
The music of a world of forever more
That seemed to adapt to everything

A dynamic return of the divine metropolis
Summer was the Capital of everything I knew
From the fragrance of flowers to the
Moment’s spell of where Spring first became Summer
Summer kept a hundred candles lit
Each time I stepped out into the Sun.

Star Climbers

My lover gave me green leaves
with the mud of longing on them
her fragrance stuck on the flower stems

where her tender heart once plucked them
she gave me the note of what
the river sang but couldn’t put into words

she gave me fire struck by living bolder
and thoughts, like the flint of ideas
she gave me the taste for progress

in my loins and in my heart
the syllables of hope that when spoken
created lifetimes of universal magic

my lover gave me green leaves
that shine from a golden sun
and promise, she set her eyes on stars

and told me our descendents would one day
climb over to them, and I with empty hands
gave a little gasp of joy, because
I could see it all happen too.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Interior-395279497

Gaya’s Peril

I have heard a strange voice
In the heat of Noon
Felt the call of wakeful night
Heard the sunset, felt the wind at dawn

I have felt the chill of darkness
That is now a blessing
A Great Voice of love –
That is a cloak from terrible fear

I have felt the Dawn birds stir within
Wetting the pillow with tears
I felt the dying forests somewhere fall
I have heard a strange voice

In the ocean’s sorrow
A shadow of cities as far as my eyes can see
Their tops were in another world
Unseen by land animals

That ventured dangerously into space
Where no wood could venture
A terror of the skies, with laser beams
This conquered land, unprepared for plastic memories.