Dark Garden

          Dark Garden

                       Amherst, 1864

Night falls fast, the colors flee.

The dark trees stand like sentinels:

Against the stars the evergreens.

The new stone church across the way

Looms like a huge fortress, just

Black against the radiant heavens.

It is witching hour and the people

Are in motion, fleeing to their

Homes, to read the news on paper

And not see what the next train

Will bring. “Why on Earth do we fight?”

She asks in her kitchen while baking.

Through the abolition grapevine she

Had heard that southern women have

No cheap flour. “There's not much

To say about it. The war could

Have been fought a different way -

More clever.” Then she spoke of

Plan Anaconda, the scheme of old

General Scott, how to embargo

And strangle those slave-killing

Cotton producers. “And must not

Great Britain enforce her just laws,

And bring slavery to its knees?”

But no, the war rages like a fire,

Wiping out whole settlements.

A woman's life becomes a fatal term,

To bear the boys and watch them die.

And we, of all people, to ever fight

To expand state and church, after all

We had been through in Europe. No!

North America is a fabric of many

Colors, the scarlet thread being

The English that we speak to each.

So I make that my foundry and beat out

My poems. I, too am a refugee from

Tribe and church. Why trust a human

Thought? I'll not fight for a human myth,

Still less for a narrow, mean state or sect.

The Bible is superb literature.

But not a blueprint for further

Conquest. By the sword we seek peace,

But only under liberty.

                                              By J.P.M.

Outlandish Expectations

The sick man expects to get better.

The slave hopes to be free someday.

A soldier expects to go home.

Such hopes may not be rational

But they sustain the person.

I too believe in blessed outcomes.

A rose can bloom in the winter -

If put under glass. Look up,

At the top of your time-body
And see there, a rose blossoming.

Further Notes on Her Enlightenment

At last she turned on herself, laughing
Like a hyena that found a fresh carcass.
The vultures had not yet arrived and
The flesh of the ego was there for the eating.
No more idle grazing on grass and hay.
No more blaming others for the faults
Attending lack of consciousness.
No more lying, stealing of style and faith.
No more boozing at the public house.
The rattling carriage of her totality halts.
A passenger gets down and walks away.
But not before she had noticed who it was.
She grew ever more curious about herself,
And preferred above all else the quiet mind.
After all that work, what does she get but
An angelic chance to eat herself.

A butcher am I, defined by my slashes.
I cut at the joints and drain the blood.
I burn the bones and eat the ashes.
Only then do I taste my food.

Further Notes on Her Enlightenment

THE BLESSED CITY


Once inside the limits of this city,
One drops everything. The lion at the gate
Takes your bags. No welcoming committee
Asks questions, but goat girls wave recognition
And whole caravans slump on signal –
Like vertebrae on divans – to dump a freight
Which, threaded through the eye of the needle,
Is deemed too precious to be merchandise,
Being the very stuff of paradise.
So no custom or duty entrammels
The wry indifference of the camels
Who, after a journey of a hundred moons,
Across a desert more barren than the mind,
Come to a place like this, where no beast is driven,
Where sheep lead the shepherds to the manger,
And even the rats are kind.
Here the beggar deserves no pity
For to him here everything is given.
Nor need the noble stranger any introduction
For he finds here the same invisibility
He knew alone in the desert. He sits
Here as he walked there, in the shade
Of the wall as in the shadow of the beast.
And he who his own body so inhabits
This city opens its arcane court
Of noiseless laughter and eyeless sight:
A metempiric harlequinade
Of seer and seen in the House of Being.
That House is the refuge of every sort
Of thing: thought here has no center
But mind serves as exchequer to the king.
And tonight features a timeless masquerade.
Rich merchants and their wives, chiefs
Of every tribe and nation, surrender their beliefs,
Shell out, then enter, to be unmasked.
The oos and ahs of quiet recognitions
Are as the coos and cahs of doves and pigeons.
But he who doth alone in shadows sit,
Who waits regardless of pain or pleasure,
He his own life stands to inherit
And with it, this city’s heritage and treasure.
So let him enter last, when the room is empty:
Door ajar, a table set for one or two,
A single picture of the wall – a portrait
Of the king – but without a face.
So too is Man the frame for every trace.
In this first moment of just solitude,
Naked, muted and unmasked,
Stand ye here like a question asked:
And not hope in time his stake to seize.
There is time to drink at every tavern,
Time to reflect on the stone-carved frieze
That purls the gate. Look, there is Eve
Born from the tree, and Adam dignified.
Here is Abraham, knife at Isaac’s throat,
And there in the thicket the wayward goat.
Here Elijah wrestles with an angel
And there the barefoot carpenter is crucified
Again and again. Here, the ruins of the temple,
And there, the stone. See how on a night of power,
The last prophet rides al Buraq right up to heaven!
Where the Muslim and the  Jew,
And where crusading Christian pilgrim?
This is the city of light, a fortress
For the uncommitted, the unidentified.

RIDDLE


What am I that all beasts and men
Search me out in times of famine?

They see me even when I do not exist,
A mirage shimmering in the mist.

But note the present congregation:
All of the species in gestation.

Counted amongst the spectators
Are white ibis sitting on alligators,

Deer strolling with cheetah
And lions sleeping with zebra.

Here, the animals are no longer wary
Because here humans are not so scary.

Watch as the people trek in from afar,
Seeking respite from a relentless star.

They sit in the glade of a grove of palm
And there contribute to the on-going calm.

Seeing this fountain which never dries up,
Some take both hands and make a cup,

Then kneel and bend, dip and drink.
Perhaps they sense the deep karmic link

Which led them 'just in time' to this place.
They are confused as to time and space

But I argue that Spacetime curves
As energy is threaded through nerves,

And they sense that. Body and mind collected,
They peer at the image now reflected,

And see their eyes, and behind their eyes,
They see Sight itself, the one who scries.

And such vision thought so undistorts
That fresh water becomes flowing quartz.

Yea, in my shaded precincts one might find
No further destinations for the mind.

Yet, at every moment, caravans leave and arrive.
In my clear pool, one can breathe in and dive

And spot my sourcing secret – a bubbling spring
That unstrings the nerves from conditioning.

So much for mental discriminations.
So much for personal infatuations.

What am I? A noman's land for refugees?
Come, reader, sit in the shade of my trees,

For in this quiet I give greater scope
Than e'er surveyed by the lord of hope.




`By John Paul Maynard

DE RERUM HOMO SAPIENS SAPIENS


If we were not fundamentally rootless,
We’d still be bottom-dwelling
Filter feeders.

Our ancestors were trekkers who had sense
To live by the Season, wandering
Over sacred land.

All humans derive from that small groups of humans
Who chose to pack up and go north
With the great beasts.

The large mammals followed the grass which
Followed the rain, which
Followed the ice.

You who live your lives in cozy boxes
Might look out the window sometime
And see the herds.

Or might observe the migration of spirits
Hauling their tents on sleds
Pulled by the dog people.

For now it’s enough just to know the truth, that
The conditions in which we live today are not
Those in and for which the species was fashioned.