with her oceans and her smile
who I crave
The other (and hers) not so far
With her burden and her prayers
I can’t save
The one (and hers) right here
With her pages and her wall
Never was
The one (and ours) who is gone
With her suffering and her joy
Always loved
Sixteen in all, yet not enouh
I want never again to explain
Deep, deep music
Sweet, sweet cherries
Fresh, fresh water
Perfect, perfect words
Ripe, ripe watermelon
Silent, silent touch
She’ll just know
But she’s so far away
As the orchids bloom and wither and bloom again
We grow
we work,
we specialize
we speciate
no longer able to create new life
with those once our own
no longer blood
I walk a fine line between creation and extinction
Passion, another word for suffering, is universal
Ears, unlike eyes, have no lids
So we cannot un-listen to the beat of the drum
As long as our ears are not un-listening
We cannot not dance
sweetsalty kate
| 12-Jun-07 at 10:19 pm | Permalink
this is gorgeous.
jase
| 12-Jun-07 at 10:21 pm | Permalink
Thanks Kate. I almost didn’t post it once I started comparing my writing to yours in my head. You are truly an inspiration to me via the written word.
Thinking of you and Justin and Evan and Ben and Liam often…
bine
| 13-Jun-07 at 4:34 am | Permalink
dear jase, i started to comment on this twice already and gave up each time. words didn’t work for me yesterday. let’s see if i can make it this time.
i love it. i’m not sure if i understand, but i love it. i try to grasp the full meaning but feel i don’t know enough to be able to. not having to explain is bliss. very hard to find, but blissful if you do. i especially like the last idea, about not being able to un-listen. i feel very much at home there.
something completely unconnected to this … i walked across the square in front of my house yesterday evening on my way to the food store. there’s a market there earlier in the day and bits and pieces of it keep lying around after the vendors have left. a little pink scrap of paper caught my eye and stopped me short - it had the word “passion” written on it. it took me a second to realise it was probably part of a sign for passion fruit (passionsfrucht in german). then i came home and read this post. i wish i had picked up that scrap. i think it wanted to tell me something.
jase
| 13-Jun-07 at 6:19 am | Permalink
bine - I’ve not written poetry before. I do know when I read most amateur poetry, it’s hard to read because there’s too little that is specific enough to grab a hold of and relate to. My goal thus far in my poems has been to be specific enough to provide some insight into what may have been the inspiration for a particular poem, but leave it general enough to still be something universally human. Probably still have some work to do there. When I read Rilke or Whitman (or listen to Lowen and Navarro or Ben Harper) I do find that universal pretty easy to access. They don’t seem terribly concerned about laying out their inspiration in detail. Much more to unlearn…
Pink passion paper - love it. I’m finding myself more open to subtle signs from the universe lately. Saw a dragonfly at work yesterday and I swear it was trying to talk to me. I’ve always had a thing for dragonflies.
bine
| 13-Jun-07 at 7:29 am | Permalink
a dragonfly trying to talk to you - i can imagine that. they have a way of hovering in front of you only moving back and forth a little, then suddenly whizzing away, you really get that feeling. they probably wonder if we’re dumb that we don’t understand them.
a friend of mine who’s a musician swears every time he’s been sitting around alone on tour somewhere, missing his girlfriend terribly, he was visited by a butterfly or a moth or another fluttering bug (she loves them, so there might be a connection). i think it’s a beautiful thought.
keep the poetry up. you manage to get so much emotion into those lines it gives me goose bumps. and i can relate to it, even if i don’t know everything that inspired you to write it. thank you.
jessica
| 13-Jun-07 at 11:37 am | Permalink
Lilting and lovely.