April 2013 ≈ Number 20

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The crocuses are popping out and so are the writers.

Our April roster includes Bree Switzer, Clayton McCann, Tea Preville, Mark Mealing, daen davidson-couch, Brian d’Eon, Paula Hudson-Lunn, Volker M and Doug Wilton.

Feel free to join the farrago. Send your verse or creative prose, flash stories, postcard novels, either as an attachment (word, Google doc, or direct email) to doug@elephantmountain.org

EACH YEAR WE MAKE A SELECTION OF THESE SUBMISSIONS FOR OUR INK AND PAPER JOURNAL THE ELEPHANT MOUNTAIN REVIEW.

We also welcome writers & readers of any age or genre to our

OPEN MIC AT BOOKSMYTH. Each reader can read up to nine minutes of prose or verse or just listen and enjoy our hilarious conversations, tea and high calorie snacks! The open mic is always on the final Friday of the month. This month:

Friday April 26, at 7:30 pm.


 

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paula hudson-lunn ≈ memoir

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Forgive Us Our Trespasses

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I thought everyone had left the table as I headed back into the dining room to pick up the last of the dishes, but he was still sitting there at the far end, staring at his plate. “Is everything OK?” I asked, knowing if I had to ask that it couldn’t be.

I’m sorry,” he said without looking up. I followed his eyes to where his dinner, mostly uneaten, was swimming in salad dressing. “I thought it was one of those squeeze bottles with the little hole. I’ll buy you some more tomorrow.”

There had been five of us at the table that night enjoying Christmas leftovers, bantering back and forth about the previous night’s holiday feast, the weather, the company, the condition of the roads for their drive home the next day. None of us noticed he’d gone quiet. If we had, we would have seen him trying determinedly to pull bits of lettuce and tomato to the side of his plate to drain them enough to eat. We would have shared stories of our own inept encounters with stupidly designed plastic salad dressing bottles… and it might have eased his pain. But we didn’t notice and one by one, we drifted away, oblivious, to other rooms, leaving him alone with his flooded dinner. My return interrupted him and when he finally did look up what I saw in his eyes humbled me. He was at once a 60 year old man and a 2 year old boy, embarrassed, confused and sorry. I had known this man for more than 40 years. I had known him angry. I had known him irrational. I had known him outraged. I had never known him vulnerable.

We first met when I was 15. According to my teenage diary, I “loved him” intensely for about six weeks until, with the flip of a page I suddenly loved some other boy. Ten years later we met again at a party. I joked with friends years after we divorced that I hadn’t ever expected our marriage to last, given that I’d won him in a Backgammon game and married him for a blender. It was unkind of me to reduce him to that. We’d had what’s called a ‘tumultuous’ marriage, the end result of which was an equally tumultuous divorce. Like many divorces ours was complicated and compounded not only by issues of custody, finance and emotional pain, but also by underlying and, at the time, unrecognized issues of sanity. With four young children affected by every brandishing of our swords, we awkwardly negotiated a shared parenting agreement. For the next 20 years my ex-husband and I lived our lives totally distanced from each other within the same few city blocks. We scheduled who would be at whose place and when, attended separate parent teacher interviews and limited joint ventures to unavoidable crisis. On the surface we treated each other with icy tolerance. Underneath, I feared and despised him. Though he had never been physically violent, his ever-present anger at me flared out of nowhere. During our marriage it kept me isolated from friends and family. During our divorce it fuelled my resentment and cemented my resolve to stay as far away from him as possible.

And thus the distance was maintained, reduced only when one of our children asked me to “please invite daddy”. Birthdays, Thanksgivings, Christmas dinners – I was uncomfortable having him over, but the kids loved him; I couldn’t deny them their father. I am no Saint. It took years of therapy and sage counsel to keep me on a path of reason. While I didn’t want to hurt my children any more than I had by getting a divorce I sure didn’t want to have to help maintain or support my ex-husband’s relationship with them.

In spite of my intentional efforts to the contrary, he increasingly accused me of parent alienation. He’d leave letters under my door detailing his beliefs and citing examples of things he thought had been done. In recent years he apologized to the kids, now adults themselves, telling them he never did the things they’d heard about. They told him they’d never heard anything, but he dismissed their objections as further proof. I had no idea.

A couple of years ago, with the kids grown and gone from home, I moved to another province and settled in a beautiful mountain town I’d been to in my youth. Every year at Thanksgiving some version of the kids makes the trip to see me and brings their dad with them.  With the extended physical distance between him and me our relationship had softened. I no longer felt anxious and at times, even relaxed in his company. When I went back to see the kids I often went over to his place for coffee. I thought we’d come through to the other side of something. I was wrong. We were, all of us, in fact, barely stumbling through the door.

Things started to go increasingly and alarmingly awry. Timelines and details jumbled together. Important information, previously ignored, resurfaced. The effects of a tanking economy, provincial budget cuts, skyrocketing rents and lack of family doctors converged and we almost lost him. One day he was who I thought I had always known him to be and the next, on the verge of homelessness, he was finally (though in retrospect, not surprisingly) diagnosed as schizophrenic. His diagnosis was compounded by the additional presence of a brain tumour. Further MRI/CAT scan images also revealed through mapping of damaged brain tissue that he’d been suffering ‘mini’ strokes most of his life, likely since infancy. I remember him telling me during one of our coffee chats that he felt like he had a Harpy sitting on his shoulder. He said if he could ever show it to me, he would. After the diagnosis he did just that, pointing out its shadowy presence on the MRI. Everything suddenly made sense. Made sense? No, so much time had passed; there was no sense to be made of it.

All those years I had dismissed him as an angry alcoholic asshole. All those years I hated him and wished he would disappear and leave me alone. All those years ago the boy I’d crushed on back in high school, the talented writer, the pre-med student, the journalist, the world traveler, the loving father… was already gone. He’s been gone now another 30 years more. I remind myself every time I see him that I didn’t know what I was dealing with – cold comfort for him and me alike. As his capacities diminish I struggle to organize family and help put into place the necessary resources to address his increasing disability. I secretly pay his phone bills. I consciously buy Mental Health awareness stamps from Canada Post. Underneath everything I struggle to come to terms with and accept my culpability.

sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris.

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Brian Deon ≈ The Chicken Thief (excerpt)

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I’ve just completed my novel Big Ledge, which tells the tale of the murder at the Bluebell Mine back in 1885.   The story is told from the viewpoint of three principal  characters in the saga. First and foremost, however, is the viewpoint of Robert Sproule, American miner, and the man convicted of the murder of Thomas Hammill.  The novel begins with a memory from early in Sproule’s childhood, long before he was a miner, and long before he ventured into the wilds of the Kootenay.

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Weeks Mills, Maine

Summer; 1851

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Both boys stood at the edge of the cliff, looking down, Robert E. Sproule with a chicken under his arm.

“Come on, Bobbie, we gotta jump!”

The water was twenty feet below and roiling.  Bobbie wasn’t much of a swimmer. “How do you know it’s deep enough?”

“I’ve jumped down there lots of times. It’s plenty deep.” The chicken thief wasn’t convinced. “Besides old man Palmer’s gonna be along any moment with his dog. We don’t wanna be around for that.”

Bobbie didn’t care for old man Palmer’s dog, but for jumping into unknown waters, he cared even less. He glared at Theodore Patterson with all the scepticism his eight-year-old eyes could muster. Theo was nine, almost a foot taller, and his face and back full of freckles. “This your idea of a shortcut?”

“Well, it is! Just one with a river in between.”

“And a cliff.”

“You’re not afraid of heights, are you?”

“Never said I was.”

Then they heard Buster.

“He’s just a dog,” Theo kept reassuring him, “and an old one at that.” But how old, Bobbie was wondering. Last time Bobbie saw Buster, he was chasing down a rabbit. It could be his days of ‘busting’ things weren’t over yet.

“What’re you waitin’ for?”

Bobbie almost didn’t answer. “If you’re so hot on jumping, why don’t you go first?”

“We’re blood brothers, ain’t we? We should jump together.”

It’s true, they’d used Theo’s knife and each boy had scratched a little cut into his palm and then they’d shaken hands.

“Damn!” Bobbie cried out. “That chicken just pecked me!” In spit of the fact that, as a mark of respect, Bobbie had christened the creature. He had named it ‘Charlie’, not taking into consideration its gender.

Theo rolled his eyes at this diminutive companion in crime. “It probably don’t like the idea of meeting up with Buster any more than we do.”

Bobbie continued to wrestle with his charge. “How come I had to carry it?”

“It’s part of the initiation. I’m already in the club and you ain’t. You can’t get in unless you steal a chicken. We already discussed all that.”  Theo began to take off his shoes, intent on tying them around his neck.

“Damn it! It pecked me again! What are we gonna do with it anyway?”

Theo looked up, sighing and getting nervous. Buster and old man Palmer were getting close. “Eat it, what else? Now let’s go.”

“What if it don’t wanna be eaten?”

Theo put his hands on his hips. This was getting ridiculous. “You just gotta wring his neck is all… like my papa says he’s always gonna do to me!” Theo was bossy and unreasonable but had the heart of a lion when it came to jumping off cliffs. “Are you comin’ or not?”

“What am I supposed to do with Charlie?”

“Who?”

“The chicken!”

“How am I supposed to know?”

In the distance they could hear old man Palmer’s wobbly voice. “They got no place to go, Buster. After them, boy! Bring ‘em down!”

“You jumpin’ in like that, Bobbie Sproule? You’re gonna get your shoes all wet.”

Bobbie had no idea what was down there nor how deep it was. He had only Theo’s word and Theo was known to get his facts muddled. There might be piranhas down there, for all Bobbie knew, and it might be only a puddle, not a pool. At best it was gonna be freezing cold and the chicken might peck his eyes out on the way down. Obviously Theo had considered none of this.

“Here we go then… One…”

Bobbie clutched Charlie harder. The dog barked louder. Old man Palmer cursed as he tripped on a root.

“Two…” Theo stepped right to the cliff’s edge and lifted a foot. The idiot was actually smiling. “Three!”

There was a pause; nothing happened… So much for jumping ‘together’. All along, it had been Theo’s intention to make Bobbie jump first, but now that it was clear he had chickened out, Theo shook his head in profound disappointment. His protegé had failed to thrive. “You can forget about being in the club, Bobbie.”

There was a final rustle in the bush. A great black dog was suddenly upon them, growling and slobbering. All that was between Bobbie and a painful mauling was old man Palmer with one hand on the dog’s collar.

“So… you’re the thief who stole my chicken.”

Like a deer, Bobbie froze, knowing neither what to say or do. He knew only that he liked open places way more than closed. All his senses were keen, and he could hear the sound of Theo’s splash behind him and the insane clucking of his feathered hostage.

Gasping, Bobbie called upon his last reserves and stepped towards the cliff and empty air. At the same moment a huge wrinkled hand grasped his shoulder. “Where do you think you’re going?”

Then, to Bobbie’s utter astonishment, the tormented chicken broke free. Instead of plummeting into the flood below, like a resurrected creature, Charlie scrambled up into the branch of the nearest tree

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Brian d’Eon ≈ Eta Carinae

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Eta Carinae

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Brian d’Eon’s novella, Eta Carinae, is now available as an e-book, readable on a Kindle, from Amazon.com It’s a quick read and costs only $2.99.

If you don’t have a Kindle, you can download free software from Amazon which will allow you to read it on your PC as if you did.

The Amazon page describes the content of the book and even lets you read a good portion of it for free.

Want to know even more about the novella? Check out Brian’s website:

http://www.briandeon.com/eta-carinae.html

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Bree Switzer ≈ Two Poems

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Eleven at Night in Norway

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Tonight the sky changed colours

over and over

and the colours changed places

and shapes in the sky.

Now they are behind the trees

and I am behind the trees.

You might come looking for me here.

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But I am not hiding,

just standing, watching

not for the stars of course, for

they will never come out

on this north summer night –

but for the swallows,

who dip and dive, soar and plummet,

and suddenly turn.

The swallows,

and the ever changing colours

of the sky.

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The air is cooler now.

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The peach colour has spread itself out

like a gentle body

behind the black of the trees.

It will not say good night,

it will just lie down

and become lighter

and bluer,

until there is nothing

but a light blue night.

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Good Night Thank You

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Moving towards sleep

I light a candle in my room

to make the moving slower

to make the light low enough

to rest by.

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Every night

I close my eyes and tell myself

the things I’m grateful for. Or

I tell God.

I do not know who God is

or even if he or she or we exist

yet still, I tell God. I say

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Thank you

For the scent of flowers in darkness

as I walked across the yard tonight

For my parents.

For my sister whom I so love, even though it’s hard at times

and I sometimes wonder if she’s judging me

for not laughing when something’s funny

and I wonder if she knows how fucking tired I am, I say

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Thank you.

For my ability to stop there

and remember the way she hugs me: solid, warm.

how beautiful her face in evening light.

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Thank you

I say

for this last week of working

with a group of children who are no longer children

Singing their way through a play I’m teaching them,

as they drink in the sunshine of their very last days

as this group, with no idea

of how they will look back on this time

full of light and music

and the energy that only fourteen-year-olds have

that love for each another, that excitement for the next open door

those feelings

of I love you, I hate you, good bye, I don’t need you. I say

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Thank you for these last few days.

And please,

help me to remember

when they are giggling , shouting, running,

slamming bathroom doors instead of

in place on stage saying their lines

How I love them.

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Thank you

I say,

For this place I live in,

where summer seems to never come

then suddenly it’s here, upon us

gobbling us up, embracing us,

the green

the blue

the happy rushing water

soaked in sunshine in early morning.

People always say,

Canada, isn’t it really cold there?

I like to say

Yes, but not always. Sometimes it’s like this:

Heavenly.

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I say Thank You

that this morning I was full of enough energy to ride

a forty minute bike ride to work and make it in thirty-five

panting and happy at age thirty-five.

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Back to that night scent of flowers and the candle I lit in my bedroom –

it’s bedtime.

I say thank you every night to me,

I whisper it to God, I pray it.

Thank you for this life,

Bless my sleep, my waking too,

Good Night.

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Clayton McCann ≈ Dear Children

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Dear Children: your parents killed the Earth

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1. yes.

the ones you live with.

yes.

the one you live upon.

and when these parents

decided to give you life

they were expressing a belief

in the future,

the future of the World

—you are that belief, made flesh.

yet in every thing they do

your parents

push us one meter more

over the cliff,

the end of all that is human.

in the toxic sludge

with which they clean the house,

in the gas and oil

they pour in the family car,

in the garbage bargain food

they feed you and themselves,

in the rich white man

they voted for in Ottawa…

your parents killed the Earth,

so why bother about it now?

they strangled the birds, the fish,

cut down every tree, made deserts where once were forests

—but the deeds are done

so why talk about it now?

let me tell you a secret

—you know what secrets are,

your parents have many

and secrets are like monsters,

much too wild and dangerous

to keep around the house.

so if i tell some secrets,

i’m setting those monsters free

—they’ll return to the Cave of Dreams,

back to monster heaven,

and be with their friends again.

i will tell it:

we can still save the planet Earth

but we must begin today,

this very moment must we begin.

and it won’t be recycling

or cleaning up the schoolyard

—you kids are smart

and have seen through those jokes already—

it won’t be your parents

making you take out the trash,

no,

your parents have flat-out refused

to help in saving planet Earth.

you could ask them

if what i say is true,

but they will reply

they didn’t know they were killing the World.

they will say something like,

“we have to work to feed you,

we have to work, it’s the law;

we just work on heater coils,

a faster way to melt the cheese,

to move the trains, to make the water boil.

we simply sold the real estate, the research,

to pay our many bills,

production was our temple

—we’ve had no time

to kill this Mother Earth!”

and they will probably get angry

at this point

and send you off to bed.

let’s tell another secret

—we’ll set this one free together—

EITHER:

your parents knew

they were killing Mother Earth

they knew

and did it anyway

living in denial

and LYING to you

(and what do you think of that?

didn’t they warn you to never lie?)

OR:

really they didn’t know

that they were involved

in the killing of planet Earth

in which case

YOUR PARENTS ARE DANGEROUSLY

           STUPID

(and what do you think of that?

did they not always urge you to study and grow your brain?).

Maybe

your parents

(the ones who are killing Mother Earth)

will say something

like

“things aren’t as simple as all that,”

or,

“children just don’t understand.”

but

—another secret, here—

this is exactly what

LIARS

say when they start to tell you

they

are

not

the ones

to blame.

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2. Dear Children,

your parents are keeping slaves,

and they starve them

and chain them hard as iron

and they hide them

in factories

prisons

and ghettos, special camps, and hovels

all around this planet Mother Earth.

Your parents are keeping slaves

to make machines

to grow the food

to knit the clothes

to build the roads

to sing slave songs

(your parents like these best of all)

to stay behind bars

in torture cells and Death,

to stand ignorant and ill,

to be shipped

at your parents’ leisure

half way ‘round this Earth of ours

to drive the cabs

to pick the fruit

to fill the shoes of other, dead slaves

and should these poorest poor

the slaves your parents keep

should they displease or fail or fall

off to prisons go

or back to war zones sent

so your parents can get fresh new slaves

and go on killing Mother Earth.

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3. Dear children,

HISTORY

is a story

written by your parents

(mostly your Dad—HIS-story, don’t you see?)

and your parents’ parents

and their folks, too

about the past

of long ago

and not-so-long-ago,

a story from which

they erased a lot of stuff

like voices they didn’t like the sounds of

like violence they were ashamed of

like women who said “no,”

like how your parents and their friends

sailed and flew and marched

to nearly every poorest place

and murdered the leaders there

(you see how happy

your parents are with blood?).

and in this story

written by your parents

(who still are killing Mother Earth)

they added lots of stuff

(stuff that isn’t true—

you see how comfortable your parents are with lies?)

they added lots of stuff

like

GOD TOLD THEM TO GO

AND KILL THE LEADERS OF THE POOR

AND STEAL ALL THE WATER

STEAL FOOD

THE FISH

THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR

(yes, children just like you).

or maybe your Earth-murdering parents

will tell you

they didn’t know

they did not hear nor see

the poor being shot and robbed

the poor being given disease

and dying on the dirt floors of their huts

“we didn’t shoot them,

we never pulled the trigger!”

but the secrets keep escaping,

and here is another loosening her bonds:

if your parents don’t know

that they sailed half way ‘round our Earth

and strangled some old woman

who dared keep back some grain

and hanged some young black man

who dared suggest that his people and land were slaves

—well, but how do they find their way home

from work each night?

from the market?

how can such silly people raise up children?

i’m not so sure

about these parents of yours.

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4. Dear children maybe you’ll be grounded

or given extra chores

but if you get a moment

maybe over supper

ask your parents just what does “Democracy” mean.

i can’t imagine what they’ll say

but keep asking

even after they finally whisper

“we don’t know”

or when they tell you

to be quiet and eat your food

remember:

there’s a rich white man

who lives in Ottawa

and he sent some poor Canadian soldiers

to parts of Canada

and other places, too,

who killed the poorest slaves of all.

and remember:

this is one of the biggest lies ever told

we call it “Democracy”

and it is similar

to a big pile of broken telephones

and it is like

a large crowd of people

who have nothing to think and nothing to say

except what Television tells them

and it is like

a rich man who points a gun at your head

and it reminds me of the time of kings

and it sounds like a poop landing in the toilet

and it means “Same thing again” in Greek

or “Worse than before” I can’t remember

but the rich white guy in Ottawa

he knows what it means

something about

him being allowed to do whatever he wants

(and he’s an Earth-killer, too).

if you listen, children,

you’ll hear those broken phones

they’ve piled up almost to the sky

and no one uses them

not your parents

they won’t call the rich white man in Ottawa

they could easily call

or write

but they won’t

they say they are too busy

—go ahead and ask them—

and what would they say,

if they used the phones,

but “please do not kill the poor leaders of the poor”?

and what would the rich white man in Ottawa say, but

“things aren’t as simple as all that,”

or,

“you are like children who just don’t understand”?

i think you are starting to understand

what “Democracy” means.

and if your parents are too busy

—you tell me…

do they have time to play with you anymore?—

then they are just as much to blame

as the poor Canadian soldiers

who poisoned the well

in the village

in the desert

in the mountains

in the poorest lands of all.

and if your parents are guilty

and if your parents are LIARS

and your parents are KILLERS

who go on KILLING MOTHER EARTH

well,

just WHAT KIND OF PARENTS ARE YOU LIVING WITH?!!

are these the kind of folks you want

to teach you

how to be a grown-up?

how to live with others?

how to be a parent?

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5. Dear children it’s time to leave

go and pack your bags

bring your wildest imaginings

of what the World can be

bring your hearts so pure

and wipe the sleep from your eyes

so you may see the truth of Earth

stow away your childhood things

cast off the ropes and chain

we’ll set out at once

we’ll leave after dark

and we’re going past the moon

beneath the deepest ocean floor

we’ll hang new starfish

upon the old comet’s tail

we’ll paint a poem along the eyelid of the universe

and it will shine each night

and it will set the planet

in an organic garden

somewhere near Ursa Major

and it will be a poem full of wisdom

and it will go like this,

“Dear parents: … ”

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tea preville ≈ haiku

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Sons

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They walk their paths of

no return       as I sit and

watch the bamboo grow

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daen davidson-couch ≈ two poems

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poets throw away what is most abundant
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in the universe

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love in words, gathered by the

hungers that call our names

by the seasons that pierce our hearts

and their we banquet knowing each other’s

heart, we have sublimed life, to serve love

love in words, that are wired

to the mechanism of speech patterns

a free for-all, hum of meanings dwelling

colors wheels raging in sweet caress from

suns that live and die, give and take

on the abandoned streets of the mind’s

sensate experiences, we are collectors

of cold dreams, and mean phrases

that we architect into a flow of

tones spewing them across a line of

the plains arriving at innumerable cities

that dance thru long nights calling distant

stars to give birth openings to the light ignited

in the poet’s distillation for all to drink

long and deep for us the physical world is not

enough and passions are too beautiful to shun

to slight, word-smithers work all night repairing

roads to the heart thru heated days tasting the water

in the love’s parade

words far too meaningful to resist we are also

the garbage-poets pulling over allegories left

frozen or rotting in a book’s closet

recycled mirrors untouched for centuries

the poet pulls and pushes till every single

pearl has found a home has been heard by the souls

that look beyond and raise themselves in their solitudes

to laugh at a dark treason to giggle cause the cruel can’t

dancing in our naked dress called year, we will strip it

down to size as midnight nears, and throw it into a wind

laughing thru and thru knowing how hard and far we

have tried to love the word our selves in each other

in the bliss of fine poetry

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this cold, passionate moment in time

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when the cold dart of a fading sun, mirrors the wanted rest of

young oak trees; a blanket of calm for a season

the white winds of time’s charm strengthen the bark

from within, in a motionless dance, necessities` sisters

will spin webs of charity thru the

insects’ symphonies; whoa to the beetle and spider

bright

the clouds form as if in, service; to the young oaks;

if you have noticed; the grey rose-blue of the winter

skies lay gentle patterned shadows of sweet white

light; for me to feast my spirit.

in the morning, slowsleeped ragged light

like a beggar clothed in a poet’s dream

young oaks shake off the black-buttered

solitude; sucking like piglets, or young

owls the milk of the day from the sun’s

opal nippled glories.

i rise, and walk among these young oaks

not yet forcing rhymes of wood art into

my soul’s afternoon; or gleaming tools

of intricate beauty; to house my memories

and eternity’s cry

still young oaks are climbing grounds for

young children and squirrels nibble, like

deer; the soft beginning; which will

develop into scars on the chest of

the barked elder oaks; that poets

and painters, will delight in.

02/19/2013

VOLKER M

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Amalekites

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this is small change, frank

kollars & sleeves are separated by the neck & the arms of the ‘bawdy’…
the fabrik up held by flesh honed eyes that hear onli watt the glass throws
back at tit from klear unsilvered lines trikkeling away through the nales
of the leaves that hang lowest from the bough like lamp bass ted hours
strung out on a wire from ‘this’ surgerie rhume to thee ‘udder’ one till
even eugenspiele runs out of bars & wails & hungers & longs for that
time when the water & the fish ‘should’ have bin an ‘oeuff’ but wernt…

ashmoles running amok over pasteurs & fields plukking the eyes outta
daisies & roses grown wilde…
a kamel snoozing karelessly betwixt the legs of the bass akkwards sitting
sun riding the rales from here to auschwitz with a letter sealed & signed
by the uber meister hisself sitting winded on the throne as the rolling
thunder throws its last harpoon at the last lite burning in the last dome
left to die…

the tie & the chi, frank, the last kamel to pass thru the ‘i’ of the
‘kneadle’ before the tent burnt down, remember that, burne? onli ewe &
eye & the whole karnival before us – my father, in his howse, on the
kouch in the tb rhume, klapping his hand – gertrude, schnell, schnell,
du must das sehen – ur mother, at her kitchen table – hi rick, hi frank -
playing solitaire, a butt in the smoke tray, a half glass of johnnie walker
red & all her ‘panties’ on the showerbar, on top of towels in their
holsters, on the radiators in every rhume – remember that, frank -
i slept under ur bed that nite bekaus she didn’t want me staying over…

kut to kubler-ross:

“Our concern must be to live while we’re alive… to
release our inner selves from the spiritual death that
comes with living behind a facade designed to conform
to external definitions of who and what we are.”

– Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

an odd kinda synchronicity here bekaus i’ve bin mulling this very thing all
day long – onli in my partikular thought formation i was using the terms
‘ideal’ & ‘real’ rather than death & life as kubler-ross does…

spess-if-iklie eye was waxing playtoniklie on the aulde chicken & the egg
thing: which kame first – the reel or the eye deal – & with that aulde saw
that sez ‘u’ve gotta work with what ur given’, i – this far along the whey,
at least – have opted for the eye deal – bekaus – in essense, eye live from
the inside out & ‘will’ the ‘reel’ to rite its self to my ‘longing’ which is
in its true beingness the babe of my inner self…

then karl marx komes along & says that ‘a people’s consciousness is
determined by their situation’, which, taken on its own akkord, is a
truism – But – with a big be – is a ‘people’ knot made of many ‘i’s’ & each
of those eyes have their own seeing & when the individual eyes are
lumped together like this – in the word ‘people’ – willknot our individual
inner selves get lost in the translation from the inner to the outter
text…

a little learning kan be a dangerous thing, i know, but did knot the
‘amalekites’ infiltrate the ‘people’ of ‘Israel’ at the time of the Exodus &
didn’t gawd hisself komand the eradikation of the ‘Amalek’ from the ‘faith’
of the earth…

who are the ‘amalekites, who is gawd, who is the ‘i’ that writes this…

larium halakha

Doug Wilton ≈ running out of time

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DSC04433

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we’re always talking about time

and the consensus is that there is never enough

time

(or money, sex, power, love etc.)

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meanwhile the crocuses are raising their wee yellow heads

in the brown gardens

and the skunk cabbages are upping their innocent thumbs

in swelling creeks amid the last patches of snow

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but we’re running out of time, we have so many deadlines

and if we fail to meet them we’ll miss all the boats, planes, trains

to the party, the war, the last hurrah,

we won’t have children before our biological clocks

melt

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everyone who is anyone will be right on time

dressed to the nines, watching the command performance

or grandly sweeping the floor, having arrived

just at that moment in time when the prettiest wench

turned to look for a dancing partner

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and we’ll be left to sit beside the other wallflowers

wondering what they’d look like in linens

without those horn-rimmed glasses and bow ties

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yes, we’ll be left behind in this vast space reserved

for those who have run out of time

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still the planet will timelessly revolve

April will unveil her lovely treasures

but no one will be here to really see them

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except me (and maybe you)

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March 2013 ≈ Number 19

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This issue features Jennifer Lount-Taylor, Tom Hardy, Radha Paula Neilson, Doug Wilton, Ellen Burt and Pippa Bowley.

Feel free to join the conversation. Send your verse or creative prose, flash stories, postcard novels, either as an attachment (word, Google doc, or direct email) to doug@elephantmountain.org

EACH YEAR WE MAKE A SELECTION OF THESE SUBMISSIONS FOR OUR INK AND PAPER JOURNAL THE ELEPHANT MOUNTAIN REVIEW.

We also welcome writers & readers of any age or genre to our

OPEN MIC AT BOOKSMYTH. Each reader can read up to nine minutes of prose or verse or just listen and enjoy our hilarious conversations, tea and high calorie snacks!

The open mic is always on the final Friday of the month. This month:

Friday March 29, at 7:30 pm.


 

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Ellen Burt ≈ Book Review

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DSC04371 orange bridge

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Book Review – Dreams Laid Down – Poems by Janice Notland (Little White Publishing, 2011)

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Janis writes with the voice of one who has a deep connection with nature. She knows not only each individual tree, but the light which passes through it. Most of the poems in this book were written on or about her land in the Kootenays where she lived for six years before moving to the Okanagan. The book is divided into sections, beginning with “In Praise Of” and followed by “the Wild Within.”  Despite the astute descriptions, I found the first three sections lacking in subtlety and contrast. It was not until the section entitled “Troubles” that the poems began to grab me. In this section the voice acquires an edge, addressing life on the street, the experience of a runaway youth, and the death of lover and family. In the poem entitled “Angel” the author describes  a woman on the street:

“No new ager this

no Rumi that,

no incense and meditation.”

In “the Best of Days,” the experiences of this hitch-hiking teenager alternate with the peace of the later poet. I held my breath as I read.

 “When I clawed my way out of the ditch

night air iced my bruised mouth”

The last poem in the book is entitled “Meeting.” Truly curious, the author follows natural images to a spiritual conclusion, guiding the reader to a satisfying wholeness. If this book initially seems trite, skip ahead. In the course of the book the author matures as a poet and dares to reveal an intriguing contrast in her life experience.

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Ω

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NEWS FROM LINDA CROSFIELD

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Linda Crosfield
Feb 25

to bcc: me

Hi there,

I’m ridiculously proud of this. I was paired with a book artist from Maryland…I had to write a poem based on a picture of her work and she had to create new work based on one of my poems. Here’s what happened!

Linda…they also serve who only sit and read

Pippa Bowley ≈ Poem

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Pip & ellen at paulson-04354

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Child’s Eye

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My Mother was strong.

Cigarettes
made her strong.
She laughed
at almost everything.

Laughing
made her strong.

Once,
she was reading Kipling’s Just So Stories
to us in the bathtub
and the word, “Limpopo River”
made us all laugh so hard
that her water broke
and my little brother
began to be born. 

My mother
was stronger than god.
and I was afraid
she would come to know
of the terrible crimes i kept hidden.

i crumpled myself up
like the stolen
money in my hand,
held my breathe
and waited for her to go away.

My mother
is still strong.
She had not one but two heart attacks;
and still she lives.

My little brother makes films
near the Limpopo River in Africa,
but returns home often
to make my mother laugh.

and I begin to uncrumple myself
to laugh again with her;
because she did not
go away

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Tom Hardy ≈ Two Poems

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SCAT

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There we have it: the red-chested dog
Smudged and gasped: Golly golly:
Teeth of treacle seize the sugar inflight
Enjoying the brassy bark of atmosphere
Every square metre was wet
Paws merrily tapping the raised platform
The dog-gone pronouncement
Compressed for fifty years.

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TICK

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Quiet and quit

Reasons unrestrict

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If all to

Exorcise glorious

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Associations flick

With just as well

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Things rocks and company

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Jennifer Lount-Taylor ≈ Remember Me

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Remember Me

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when I cannot ─

 

when I muddle

the same questions

until my mouth drools dry

and choke

crying out

for your repeated reply,

for any sound, any touch

that hints of you

that assures me

you’re still near

that I’m still here ─

 

when I break

away in search of me

of who I used to be,

limbs floundering

for direction

eyes frantic

for connection,

oblivious

to how pathetic

I will appear

to you ─

 

when the clumps

and tangles

stick and strangle

my brain

into final forgetfulness

and my wild eyes

lock in a stuporous stare,

no longer knowing you

no words, no way

of showing you

how deeply I still care ─

 

until then

until it is all too much for you

please remember me

 

when I cannot ─

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Doug Wilton ≈ Zen taxi: a dialog with dorjebo

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zen snow twigs-04343.

Dorjebo was a taxi driver I first met when I rode his cab in Ulsan, South Korea. I was struck by something in his composure and noticed the meditation beads hanging from his rear-view mirror. We began to talk and our talks continued on other days over many cups of sake. Dorjebo was not the name on his taxi licence but a private name he had adopted during travels in Tibet and Japan. Seon is Romanized Korean for Tibetan samten, Japanese zen.

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A VIEW OF TIME & SPACE

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* This Universal Moment

Dorjebo says: In common thinking we assume we will still be alive a moment from now, but in seon we see that we don’t live after any moment but now.

In common thinking we assume we were alive just a moment ago, but in seon we see that we don’t live before the moment we are living now.

The moment we’re living now is the first and last and only moment we can live: seeing this we naturally practice the Way. Forgetting this (as we all do) we fail to practice the Way, regardless of how outwardly enlightened our useless thoughts and deeds may appear to be.

* The Memory of Space

Then what, I ask, is the past?

This is a very old moment, says Dorjebo, 13 billion years, they say, maybe older. And where are those thirteen billion years? Nowhere. Yet their traces are engraved in the three dimensions of space. Every object, whether tree or hand has only three dimensions. But the rings in a tree tell us that it was once much smaller and the wood of the inner rings is decadent. The core may have rotted away. The wrinkles in a hand tell us that it was once larger. The flaking surface skin is dead and we know that the bones beneath are older than they were. So a popular conception says that the tree and the hand we see are the three-dimensional surfaces of a four-dimensional continuum. Three of space and one of time. I would replace time with ‘the memory of space’.

The visible hand is said to be the surface of a 4-D continuum of hands that no longer exist. Where is the hand of the infant you, of the adolescent you, the young adult you? Where is that whole continuum of your past selves? It no longer exists but its former existence can be mentally reconstructed from the memory of space.

We can speak of present forms with some certainty, at least the ones that change slowly, but our reimaginings of the past get fuzzier the further back we try to see because they are only extrapolations from decaying traces in the shifting structures of the present.

We imagine that the past never changes but it’s an extrapolation from traces in the changing media of the present; the traces themselves decay and are replaced by new traces and when all traces of the earliest past are gone it’s replaced by a newer earliest past.

But disappearing evidence is not the only means of knowing the past. Just because a woman can’t remember having sex does not mean that her baby is the result of a virgin birth. Just because a murderer manages to erase all evidence of his crimes does not mean that they never happened. Just because the fossil record is not exhaustively complete does not mean that The Origin of Species is a pipe dream. Because we know the past not only from evidence but also from reasonable inference.

 There’s also something called intuition. It’s right to say that only the present moment of physical form really exists but this moment bears the imprint of a beginningless continuum of moments past. As an entity separate from this moment, the past does not exist but it may be that every detail of this changing moment is subtly imprinted with its vanished shape. Sensitivity to such subtle imprints could be the basis of intuition.

* The Flow & The Arrow of Time

Why do we perceive the world as moving thru time? I ask.

Everything’s in motion, says Dorjebo, and when something moves from A to B we say it has also moved thru time from an earlier state at A to a later state at B. We justify this by saying that it’s now later because the sun is higher or lower in the sky and the clock hands have moved from 5 to 6 but there’s an assumption that the motion of the clock measures the flow of time. What it really measures is the movement of the sun or the rate at which we digest our food or expend our energy and grow sleepy. Clocks measure the comparative rates of changes in and movements thru space but there is nowhere in any of this some stuff called time.

All of these movements and transformations are simultaneous. They are all happening at the same time because there is only one time in which things can happen—now. At the same time they leave traces in their environment, altering the immediate memory of space, including that portion of it that is your brain. The perceived flow of time is really the flow of forms from potential future configurations of the present thru this vivid phase of actual things that are decaying into disappearing remnants and memories that also disappear. Forms are like waves that emerge in the ‘substance’ of space and pass thru those three phases of potential, actual and the phase of impressions in the memory of space.

Why did you put ‘substance’ in quotes?

Because any substance examined turns out to be just forms within forms that are empty of any permanent self-nature.

What about the immutable laws of nature?

There may be things that don’t change for the life of the universe but when the universe disappears so do its laws. Both space and time disappear.
So absolute space is also a myth?
Yes, but it’s easier to kill time first.

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Why does the memory of space change?

Think of memory as a layered ball. The top outer layer is immediate memory. Below that is ‘recent’ memory and way down at the bottom are the ‘oldest’ memories. As immediate memory changes new memories displace recent memories which then displace older memories. So the whole continuum of memory is constantly changing and the imprint of the nonexistent past is more and more weakly preserved as it gets pushed further down. The reason that memories have to move is because there is not enough space in the top layer to contain all the new data and not enough energy to organize it. This applies both to the brain, the earth and the universe because all three are finite in mass/energy and spatial extension.

So earlier states of memory are states of lower energy.

Yes. That’s why the immediate past/present is so vivid. As mental records are pushed down they give up some of the energy that bound them on the surface and as they go down from recent memories to older memories they give up energy again and again. So as memories descend they find less and less energy to bind them and become progressively less coherent. In the human brain, and possibly in space at large, functionally significant memories are preserved at all levels but at the lowest layer insignificant memories are simply digested to provide energy to the layer above. So the entire record of our nonexistent past is not preserved in every detail and probably the universe does not preserve every detail of its nonexistent past either.

So the memory of space is constantly changing all the way down?

Even while it preserves those records of its evolution which are, for one reason or another, necessary or indigestible, he says. (Like the laws of physics, I say.)

Yes, and factors that support the survival of animals or stars.

* The Future of The Present

So we have a description of time that eliminates the famous ‘flow and arrow of time’, I say. The past does not exist except as a record of events that we view as no longer existing. But what of the future. We say the future does not yet exist, so there can obviously be no record of the future.

He adjusts his seat.

Human beings talk about the immediate future and the near and distant future, says Dorjebo. Obviously the immediate potential present is already here in a sense, at least in the sense of probability. If a speeding train is only an inch away from a stalled car, it’s fate is virtually inevitable. A 99.999 percent probability. I think the future is about the shifting calculus of probabilities of change in the composition of immediate space. The immediate potential present is almost 100 % identical to the real present. Just  as immediate memories displace older memories, the immediate potential present displaces older versions of the potential present.

So there’s no need to speak of a ‘future’? 

No it gets replaced by the potential present, which is  like a mirror image of memory and like memory it already exists in the depth of present space. At the lowest energetic levels, where memories are fading and incoherent, they recombine to shape very weak configurations of potential reality. This happens in space at large and also in the brain. Memories reconfigured in the brain are called imagination so these reconfigurations are dim imaginings of reality with almost 0% probability of shaping the real present. Such dim possibilities may die or they may not have enough energy to attract conscious attention but they may attract the attention of the next level up.

When a rising configuration of the possible present reaches nearly 100% probability of forming part of the immediate present it’s  commonly called the immediate future and it’s inseparable from the descending immediate past. It’s like the top of a wave where water is neither rising nor falling and we might as well call it the immediate present. A coalition of configurations cooperate and compete for survival on the vivid crest of the present. And the forms of the immediate potential present displace the forms of the actual into remnants and memories.

* The Disappearing I

It seems to me, I say, that you offer a complete description of how the entire present contains both the future and the past as well as the apparent flow and direction (arrow) of time. The apparent flow of time is really just a movement of impressions in space, and in the brain, from the depths to the surface and back again. The movement from potential to actual is what we commonly call the flow of the future into the present: the movement from actuality to memory is what we commonly call the flow of the present into the past. And If we measure these movements with a clock we may see that they coincide with the movement of the clock hands from one position to another but clocks only measure how fast things move or change in space. They don’t give evidence that there is something called time that has either flow, direction or extension.

We’re silent for a spell then I say I still have a sense that I existed and that I will exist.

Someone like you exists in memory and remnants of him persist in aspects of your form. And you are already leaving them, as you disappear, to someone much like you who is just arriving.

It might help to see space as the cosmic triad of memory, womb and ultimate consumer. Our surface form continually disappears as it is consumed by universal space and it is replaced by a similar but not identical form that continually arrives as it absorbs mass from the food you eat, the water you drink, from universal space.

All of space is memory, consumer and womb. When we see how forms are conserved we see its memory. When we see how forms vanish we see the ultimate consumer. When we see how new forms arise we see space as a womb.

* A Mind Like Space

But what, I ask, is gained from seeing things in this way?

This view eliminates the hypostatized concept of four-dimensional ‘block time’ thru which time travelers go trooping back and forth. We can’t jump into the far future because it’s just a set of dim possibilities and the far past is just a residue of faint traces. If we want to keep the idea of the past as a fourth dimension, it’s mostly empty, nothing in it but imaginary extrapolations from those traces of the past that still exist in the three dimensions of the present. And the further back you look the emptier it gets. Likewise there are no actual things in the fourth dimension of the future, just extrapolations of current trends that get less and less probable the further ahead you look.

So we’re stuck in the present, I say.

That’s like saying your heart is stuck in your chest, says Dorjebo. Granted it could be transplanted into another chest but there are no past or future times into which you could be transplanted.

This view eliminates time and leaves us with the simplicity of space as maintainer, destroyer and creator: like the Hindu Trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, I say. This is like saying that the universe is God.

Emptiness precedes its metaphors, he says.

This description of space as having both a memory and something like an imagination: that’s close to saying that the universe is something like a mind, I say.

Or that the mind is something like space, he says. That’s what you gain (or rather regain): your original mind, a mind like space.

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* The Death of Absolute Space

 .

What about space? You said that the concept of absolute space is also unreal. At best infinite space is a metaphor for the unknowable source. In reality interexistence is its own womb. At each moment our potentiality becomes our actuality as our actuality becomes our memory. There’s no need to invoke some absolute space beyond the triad of PAM (potentiality actuality memory).

But actuality and memory occupy space, I say.

True, but not absolute space. Just the space between the nucleus and the outer shell of an atom, between molecules, between you and me. There’s no need to posit some kind of space beyond the interuniverse of relative spaces like this.

Like dark energy, I say.

The Daoists talked about a dark source. Einstein said that mass and energy are two modes of the same thing. Mass normally means matter occupying space, but how much space does a calorie occupy?

Quite a bit, I say, patting my belly.

We laugh.

 

Thing is, he says, energy changes into matter which occupies space but when matter turns into energy that space disappears. So there is no absolute space that’s always present. Or in other words space/spatiality is not the primary form of interexistence.

 

The primary form, I say. I had a friend who once told me he was looking for the primary form.

Did he ever find it?

I expect so, he meditated for a long, long time.

 

It seems that the primary form is this triad of potentiality (potential mass or energy) actuality (actual mass or energy) and memory (the tendency of forms to hold their shape until all their mass/energy is gone).

 

Stones are good at that, I say.

And molecules of dna.

And objects moving thru space tend to keep moving in the same direction, at the same speed. Inertia, I say.

The two constants of form are its tendency to change and its tendency to stay the same.

Progressive and conservative.

 

So it’s not especially space, I say.

Yeah, if there were no volumes of form in relation to other volumes there would be no need of space, just as if there were no changes that could be compared to other changes there would be no need of time.

And when everything turns into energy, both space and time disappear, I say. How long would that last?

More sake? asked Dorjebo, extending the flask.

 

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In honour of dharma brother Paul Warwick

and all the rooms in which he continues to breathe.

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Ω

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Radha Paula Neilson ≈ Prose & Verse

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Too Many Pockets

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In response to a friend’s inquiry about my well being, I try to explain how overwhelmed I feel. I find myself saying “my life has too many compartments.” It is like a coat with too many pockets. There are those pockets which are stuffed and overflowing, constantly requiring attention and those completely neglected; ones you feel guilty about for not having reviewed their contents, and ones you long to dive into and hide. There are quite a few you didn’t know were part of the coat at the outset. Who could have known; a simple twist and you have another pocket to attend to. I think ” if only I could be more organized” but wouldn’t that just be more pockets within pockets all lined up in pretty rows? What of those deep and cozy pockets you can thrust your hands into as you inhale slowly the natural world and exhale into true bliss ? There are never enough of those, amongst the torn and frayed-edged pockets and ones not yet completely sewn on. Always there is at least one hidden pocket, deep and dark, where you never venture; pockets you pretend are not part of the coat.
My spinning head attaches to a new idea, a revelation; maybe
, just maybe, this coat needs some alterations, some attention from a tailor with a needle and thread and even (a radical thought ) a pair of scissors

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Another Death

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Another death on the hospital ward.

Death is part of life. It’s part of the job.

No attachment. Professional detachment.

 

But how do you detach a heart ?

 

This one died quietly and alone.

The curtains are pulled.

Loved ones have been called.

I ask to know when they arrive, so they don’t go in alone.

 

But work carries on just down the hall. The clock ticks on.

 

What I don’t understand is how the world keeps going

The world should stop – at least for a moment

We need time – time for respect

A being has died, departed, gone … from this world.

No moment of silence or celebration of life

at least not now.

 

The clock ticks on. Work carries on.

 

No prayers, No remembrance, No last respects

Just a body to move.

An empty bed on my team is what it will mean.

A new client there by the end of my shift.

No sign to say … Somebody died here today

I feel his presence remaining in the room

I talk to his lifeless body

I talk to Him

of his courage in these last days, of his character, of the rest he has earned..

We move him gently zipped in a bag marked with his name.

 

 

A cider a day can’t hurt, I reason,

but it might be a 2 cider night tonight, after THAT day.

She was only my age and the look of pain in her partners eyes, I’ll never forget

his incomprehension of what to do next

 

A crack in my heart to join other cracks.

What of MY heart? How much more can I take?

 

Even so, I am there to help the next family through.

They stand stiff and awkward in the room.

Their mother lies dying , beyond them now.

A raspy breath No voice

Eyes closed, focused far off.

Put down the side rail I say, sit close, hold her hand.

Say what you need to. Hearing is last to go.

 

But I need to leave them.

 

The clock ticks on. Work carries on.

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ELEPHANT MOUNTAIN ≈ February 2013 ≈ Number 18

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SONY DSC

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This issue features Helen Esther Blum, Mark Mealing, Robert Banks Foster, Phil Mader and Carlo Alcos.

Feel free to join the conversation. Send your verse or creative prose, flash stories, postcard novels, either as an attachment (word, Google doc, or direct email) to doug@elephant mountain.org

EACH YEAR WE MAKE A SELECTION OF THESE SUBMISSIONS FOR OUR INK AND PAPER JOURNAL THE ELEPHANT MOUNTAIN REVIEW.

We also welcome writers & readers of any age or genre to our

OPEN MIC AT BOOKSMYTH (pictured). Each reader can read up to nine minutes of prose or verse or just listen and enjoy our hilarious conversations, tea and high calorie snacks!

The open mic is this Friday Feb 22, at 7:45 pm.

 

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Carlo Alcos ≈ Poem & Story

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SONY DSC

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What It Will Take

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What it will take
Is a resistance to the system that we’ve come to embrace
For no other reason than just because it is
For resistance is to question what we’ve been led to believe
Not necessarily lies, but stories
Stories that have become truths in the synapses of our minds
Bonds so tight that even though we recognize them we still
Can’t break free.
But recognition is where it all begins
When questions and childlike innocence form the stem that grows up and out
Piercing through convention and unimagination
Like the roots of a tree busting through concrete sidewalks and building foundations
The story has an end, like all stories do
But this story ain’t a fairytale
The princess doesn’t get the prince
The frog stays a frog
The witch eats the kids
And this is OK because coming right behind it is something new
Truth, love, honesty, connection, vulnerability
Words that have lost meaning amidst
The six o’clock news, Facebook, and pornography.
These words are on the lips of a new generation
As well as an old generation
Because wisdom has no age limitations
The awakened spirit is not exclusive to an esoteric crowd jockeying for position
They’re on the lips of teachers, doctors, and bus drivers
Construction workers, soldiers, and the unemployed
Those who get scowled at to, “Get a job, hippie!”
And, even if they don’t know it yet, they’re on the lips of
Those who do the scowling.
Because there is no “us” and “them”
Imagine:
Lakes vs. clouds
Flowers vs. mountains
The moon vs. the earth
The separation is causing annihilation
We must reconvene on the scene
Where community is the top priority
And where we stare in each others’ eyes
With understanding and compassion
And fashion for ourselves
A new reality.

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Lessons From Seat 47B

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47B. That’s me. Aisle seat. On a 17-hour flight, I made sure to take an aisle seat.
I was flying from LA to Bangkok and was seated next to a short 50-ish Indian man wearing bright
yellow Bermuda shorts. His eyes sparkled behind big gold-rimmed specs and his moustache stretched
across his face as he smiled.
We didn’t introduce ourselves but we exchanged our stories. He was a business man working in the
textiles industry in Southern India and was returning to Asia after some business meetings in Mexico
and the States. I was a travel writer (although he insisted on calling me a journalist) on my way to
Bangkok.
“There are others of me on this flight, but I’m not even sure who they are. I’ve never met them,” I
told him.
“You know, I’m a business man, but I’m very creative. I write poetry,” he said to me. Unsure what to
do with this information, I smiled, nodded politely, and said something like, “Really? That’s great,”
before pressing play on my headrest movie.
We cut in and out of conversation, enjoying each others company as much as we enjoyed our own
solitude. He was rude to the flight attendants, always making very particular requests as if we were
in first class (“No, I said no ice.”). He also made a noise like a cow every once in a while, which I
later realized was him burping. Once, while I was waiting patiently for the bathroom, he came over
and rapped on the door. When the lady came out and sat back in her seat, I embarrassingly
whispered to her, “just so you know, that wasn’t me who knocked.”
At some point — time means nothing when flying across fourteen time zones — I noticed him writing.
I looked without trying to look like I was looking. At the top of the page was scribbled For Honey
Bee. Words and sentences followed but, respecting his privacy, I turned back to the movie.
Earlier, he’d told me that his wife died three years ago; this poem must be about her, I thought. I refocused
on my movie, Green Zone. While Matt Damon was yelling orders to his men at a weapons-ofmass-
destruction site, I noticed my new friend had stopped writing and was wiping his eyes with a
tissue. Through the sound of gunfire in my earphones I could hear him sobbing. I kept watching.
Later, while Greg Kinnear was sending his Pentagon thugs to kill the Iraqi army general, my seatmate
again paused in his writing, looked out the window and wiped away tears. His sniffling made it
through the noise of a car chase. The movie was reaching its climax.
Somewhere over an ocean, sometime between meals and restless napping, he put his pen down,
picked up the paper, and turned to me. “My sister-in-law, my wife’s elder sister…she died last week.
While I was away on business.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It was a gas explosion. She must have forgotten to turn off the gas at night, and when she went to
light the stove the next morning…”
He told me her husband smelled something and was trying to tell her when she lit the match. It was
like a scene from a movie. In my head, Matt Damon was playing the husband.
“She was like my elder sister. She helped and supported me when my wife died. She was always
there for me.”
He pushed the paper into my hands and asked me to read his poem. It started on the right half of
the page, had some things crossed out, arrows to change the sequence of some lines, then it
continued on the left half of the page.
“Honeybee. That’s what I called her.”
I was moved. Not only because he chose to share such a personal thing with me, but because of the
pain and suffering he has gone through, first with his wife, now with this. I felt compassion. My
personal relationship issues suddenly seemed so unimportant. Other than the moments of sobbing,
he was remarkably happy. I saw him as a testament to how resilient we can be in the face of tragedy.
“It’s beautiful,” I told him as I handed it back. He smiled that moustache-stretching smile and then
turned to look out the window.
I put my earphones back in and selected another movie.

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Helen Esther Blum ≈ Poem

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REMEMBER THE SIXTIES

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They say old hippies don’t die they just move to Nelson,
and it’s true the Sixties spirit is alive and well
 here but it’s not like truly dwelling
in the days that were a haze
of sex and drugs, when the birth control pill
changed the role of women and gave us the freedom to
plan not to have a bun in the oven,
to act like a man, to rebel against the double standard.

You remember the Sixties and all that free love!
The one-night stands that landed
you in Morgenthaler’s hands—and  an abortion that wasn’t so free.
The grand love turned out to be casual and you never again forgot
the birth control pill although the thrill
was gone from  the love that was not as free as you once thought.
Not so hot, those communal houses with the mattress on the floor and no
door on the loo and no toilet paper too,
just graffiti on the wall that said “Make love not war” and your sore
back from your yoga class
and weary of your parents’ message to  succeed
you paid heed to the slogan of Timothy Leary
and you dropped acid and other drugs
which left you seeing bugs that weren’t there
and giving hugs to strangers on rugs.

And how can you forget the spliffs, the reefers, the joints, the lump of hash,
the stash, the pipe, the smell of patchouli mingling with the smoke of
the hash oil and the many uses of tin foil,

the head of the pin with the glowing chunk
being siphoned off by an empty pen
top and you can’t stop
your paranoid thoughts of the cop,
the narc, the pig, the bust, the raid that burst the bubble,
turned it all into rubble.

You remember the Sixties with its communes and karma,
hippies and the Dharma, the new age without the garbage
of the old rage.

The Sixties was all about freedom, the freedom to wreck yourself,
to deck yourself in satin and velvet, skirts that were above your thighs,
or below your ankles, granny glasses and Gandhi shirts, army jackets that didn’t show
the dirt, the freedom to flirt, as long as you didn’t revert, become a marriage convert.

The Sixties was all about freedom: freedom for blacks to attack
the institutions that stabbed them in the back while asking them
to die in Vietnam on a deserted jungle track.

The Sixties challenged the hypocrisy that defined the lined
faces of our leaders who denied that they lied, who relied
on votes from the silent majority to feed their greed.

And where did it all lead.
To terrorist attacks, and wars in Iraq.
Yes, its true there is Barack, a black man in the White House
But he’s been stymied by his opponents, hogtied, tried and retried.

It’s been fifty years since the tear gas and the mushroom cloud fears.
But it’s clear that the baby boomers have taken over the steering wheel.
So let’s all hope that we can cope 
with the wages of old age
and turn over a brand new page.

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Robert Banks Foster ≈ You Know The Facts

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You Know The Facts

Forestry Notes For

Arundhati Roy

……….The new earth is coming, on a quiet day I can hear her breath.

and

Jack Layton

……….Always have a dream that’s longer than a lifetime.

With thanks to Michelle Mungall  for inspiring Part III

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Part I

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Forest still green

end of September the whole way to the coast

but back of the hills in my mind

Roundup readies the forest for harvest.

Memory knows loggers broken

begged in the streets

too many accidents to call them workers

no WCB because

Run it just like an insurance company

Take no risky business

just like fishers just like rain

Reduce uniqueness to utility.

The dark wood becomes the poisoned wood.

We might as well get something for it.

Woods getting dark around me was a childhood dream.

One friend saw

checker boards sprayed

in public parks

2 x 2 foot squares of herbicide

blow at swing and slide children

Who cares about the dead

when dead money grows.

Zombie multiplication.

You know the facts, I know the facts:

as the puddle fills with poison

at first the tiny bit around the edge

hardly shows for the longest time

when at last you notice

well it’s only creeping inward

then well, it’s crept more

you turn around twice and it’s half full

& you blink or stammer

all dead, all gone.

But does it change mind

this sustainable last death?

The table the chair

the floor the wall

the lamp the frame

the library the books

the book cases the pictures

and if not made of wood

made of oil

the former life of the earth

Get fat at the table and complain

there isn’t any more.

But Mom said, “You’re too fat, you’re too fat,

have some desert or dessert.” I did.

We hear when buildings

fall, not trees.

Our members need open

access to timber;

that’s what we call sustainable.

The dark wood becomes the poisoned wood.

Reduce uniqueness to utility.

That’s what we call sustainable.

Look here on my cell phone.

That’s what they left: 5 foot stumps

where we could walk among life.

Worse than the meteor at Tunguska.

The coast is toast.

Mother nature strikes back.

Hell hath no fury like a forest scorned.

A door opens on stumps.

I’ll build you a home in a meadow

and if there isn’t a meadow

I’ll build you a home out of

what will be the meadow

and if ever I should leave you

before it’s done

your door will open on stumps.

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Part II

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Half though the journey of our life

I lost my way in a dark wood.

At the rally someone said, “We are the forest.”

The leaves of the trees are for

healing of the nations. 

At a mountain lake an hour from my door

We bounce on an ill kept road;

old growth forest beside us.

Cool high air breaks a hot day.

Less than half an hour around

the lake seemed larger than

our minds or world allow.

Teeth of some sort, rough, untried, high up mountains

rugged tree ring between

hanging lichens covered dying trees.

When the rhetoric dried away

I knew how much I wanted to be there.

This is the era of

superficial formations

. . . . . . . . . . . not

that one leaf differs from another

and a chorus sings of multiple voices

the voice of waterfall or forest

grass that folds in the compost

junk stored in the hut

purple leaves each about to fall

their own way

weathered roofs and fading paint

nowhere the same as another

and the mountains, not only their

outline not the same but their sides

logged or not in regular and irregular

patch but clouds casting transforming shadows

the glimpse of change in and out of the mind

grays, greens, browns

never the same

wind, motions of branches, never the same

the noise of expectations

the fractal dimension

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Part III

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What can I do?

. .  Gather.

. . Listen.

. . Study and listen.

. . Hear the wind in the leaves.

. . Wait.

. . Share.

. . Wait until you and others must speak.

. . Hear the wind in the leaves.

. . Become visible so all see you.

. . Become vocal so all hear you.

. . Share, study, and listen.

. . Hear the wind in the leaves.

. . Feed others, share, study, and listen.

. . Hear the wind in the leaves.

. . Begin.

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A two page version of this poem will shortly appear in Jack Layton: Art in Action, edited by Penn Kemp.

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Phil Mader ≈ Incurable

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-Hello, I said, turning round on a high stool at the busy counter of an even busier bistro in the busy heart of Paris.

- What do you want, she asked with a ‘deer in headlights’ look, followed by a raising of inquisitive doe-like eyes, in a voice well marinated in alcohol.

- I don’t know you from a slug on the street.

- You’re right, I chuckled.

I’d been quietly observing her in the bistro mirror for the last half hour. She was the kind of woman with enough femininity, vitality and sex appeal that I was ready to swear on the bible that at least 6 men in her lifetime had asked to be her next husband if the current one dropped dead. She was chatting in English with a neighbouring gentleman.

A very tired strange looking bag, like a sack of weary laundry, sat at her feet. She did her best to ignore it. Also, at her elbow, was a business card, with the name of Sheik Mohammed Albalak on it.

- Does this card belong to you? I inquired with genuine inquisitiveness.

She hotly turned round from speaking with the man on her left, and frostily tossed a look of impatience smack into my face.

- Yeah. It’s my husband’s business card, if you don’t mind.

Soon the gentleman she’d been chatting with got down from his stool, kissed her on both cheeks, according to the French style and left. She turned round to me again.

- Sorry. I was rude.

- No need.. but your husband, this Sheik Albalak, where did you meet him?

- I met Maurice, that’s what he calls himself in France, in a coffee shop in Cairo.

- Are you Egyptian, I asked.

- Not at all. I’m Croatian born , from the town of Sisacko-Moslavacka, on the border with Bosnia.

- Some day I’d like to visit Croatia, maybe visit your native town. I’m sure it must be as lovely as you.

- You’re not missing anything, trust me. I mean the town. Anyhow I was raised in Cairo where my parents emigrated.

- So, what kind of guy is Sheik Albalak, your husband?

- He needs irrational amounts of personal privacy, wears disguises, wears false moustaches. Otherwise, he’s a really decent guy, and yeah, I married him for his money, if you want to know. My former husband was a smut peddler, but a smut peddler who cared. Only, money ran away from him. He scared it off. We lived in misery.

- So you jumped at the opportunity of marrying a rich Sheik.

She shook her head in disagreement, in a capricious, erratic way, that spoke of too much drink.

- Not at first. I’ve always been very independent. My mother raised me in the tradition that says that a man stands tallest on his knees. You see if you don’t say no to the man the first time he asks you out, he’ll treat you lightly, he’ll leave you for another at the drop of a hat ; so you say no; you say you can’t go out with him. So you wait. You wait till he asks you again, and you hear a pleading in his voice, a kind of wobbling pain, though he tries to cover it up. And then you’ve succeeded; you’ve succeeded in proving to yourself that he truly wants you, and quietly sown a fear in him, that one wrong move, and he’s out the door. And he won’t forget it either.

- I see you don’t take these things lightly; you’ve given them some lingering thought.

- I’m not as independent as I used to be. I’ve had to compromise. My husband’s rich friends are all conservatives. I could if I wanted to, close myself off in a conservative echo chamber, like them. They all reinforce each other’s divorce from reality. It’s not me, but, I admit, I have had to compromise, she uttered slowly and plaintively with a great slow-going sigh.

- Sein oder nicht sein: das ist die Frage ..to be or not to be ..that is the question. Shakespeare…Shakespeare understood everything. I attended a private German run school in Alexandria. In 12 years of school, I fell sick only once.

- Admirable, I kicked in.

- In grade one I contracted an incurable disease from which I’ve never recovered..

- And what was that?

- Boredom. Unutterable boredom. I need excitement, lots of it. And excitement costs money. I’ve already travelled around the world three times with my husband, staying at 5 star hotels. No one is forcing me to live this way. It’s what I choose, but I’ve had to compromise.

Suddenly a car horn began to honk interminably, followed by my companion of conversation leaping off her stool and fiddling in the sack below her. She promptly took out a long voluminous piece of black fabric from the bag and slid it over her head. It was a burqua.

With the car horn blaring out front, she nervously, in a panic, shook my hand. In spite of the speed of things, I was sure I saw a flicker of worried smile break out from the eyes beyond the slit.

The door of a black stretch limousine opened to her. She scurried in. One could see Maurice with his relaxed princely grin graciously helping her into the leather paradise.

At that moment the waiter jolted towards the bistro front door with a book waving in his hand, just as the car sped away. She had forgotten it on the counter. Thinking I was a friend, he turned the book over to me. It was Shakespeare Quotations. I opened it up at the page holding the book mark, and read the one at the top. The fault is not in our Stars, but in ourselves…” For a moment, I paused.

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Mark Mealing ≈ Two Poems

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Standing

Standing

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Without A Poem

Without A Poem

January 2013 ≈ Number 17

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This issue features Margaret Hornby, Stuart Ross, Mark Mealing and Yours Truly.

Feel free to join the conversation. Send your verse or creative prose, flash stories, postcard novels etcetera, either as an attachment (word, google doc, rtf) or as a direct email to doug@elephant mountain.org

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THE ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING OF THE HORSEFLY MAGAZINE SOCIETY BOARD OF DIRECTORS WILL BE HELD ON FRIDAY JANUARY TWENTY-FIVE AT BOOKSMYTH FINE BOOKS. ALL INTERESTED PARTIES ARE INVITED. JOIN THE BOARD AND HELP US LAUNCH THE 2013 ISSUE OF OUR INK AND PAPER JOURNAL THE ELEPHANT MOUNTAIN REVIEW. 6 pm SHARP AT BOOKSMYTH.

After the meeting we’ll have a break then regroup for our monthly open mic at 7:30!

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Editorial ≈ Gun Control: Some Simple Math

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The current rate of gun homicides per 100,000 US citizens per year is 2.97 persons. This equals the combined total of gun homicides per 100,000 in nine developed countries:

The current rate of gun homicides per 100,000 per year is: Italy .71, Canada .51, Ireland .48 Sweden .41, Northern Ireland .28, Greece .26, Germany .19, England .07, France.06

If you take 100,000 people from each of these nine states you have 900,000 people of whom there will be .71 dead Italians, .51 dead Canadians, .48 dead swedes and so on for a total of 2.97 homicides.
In other words it takes about nine times as many Europeans and Canadians to produce the number of gun homicides that occur in America at the current rate.

If you live in the US your chances of being killed by a gun are almost 6 times higher than in Canada, almost 11 times higher than in Northern Ireland and about 45 times higher than in England or France.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homicides-ownership-world-list

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Stuart Ross ≈ New Year 2013

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Dear friends, colleagues, relatives, & heroes —

I wish you all health, happiness, comfort, good reading, and the things you wish for in 2013.

Here’s my poem for this year.

All best to you,

Stuart Ross
Cobourg, Ontario, Canada

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POEM FOR TUESDAY (January 1, 2013)

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It is 2013. We are returning to old values.
It is 2013. Cats are taped carefully to their dogs.
It is 2013. Clothes are self-cleaning, like dishes and ears.
It is 2013. There is a white man in the Black House.
It is 2013. Commander Snout has arrived to offer us the option of a second nose on our face or in a convenient nose purse.
It is 2013. The clouds are shaped like apologetic codfish.
It is 2013. When I try to shave, the mirror plays games with my face.
It is 2013. This has never happened before.
It is 2013. The prime minister is a sociopath flapping his arms in a vat of blood pudding.
It is 2013. Facts have been replaced by fast food.
It is 2013. A woman awakes to find her son climbing a birch tree outside the living room window, then getting unsteadily to his feet on a precarious branch and holding up a sign that says: “I want to be an appliance like my father before me.”
It is 2013. You hang like a brilliant moon over a field of grateful cartographers.
It is 2013. The weather has made poetry unnecessary.

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KLC Award’s Ceremony and Celebration

Awards Night! 

Shine your shoes and pick out your party dress because this year’s KLC Award’s Ceremony and Celebration is going to be lit-tastic. Along with the presentation of the KLC and KYCWC awards, readings from the winners, and a chance to mix and mingle with Kootenay authors, there are some highlights you def don’t want to miss:

The Host With the Most! – Nelson’s Cultural Ambassador & performing arts legend, Lucas Myers, will be this year’s Celebration emcee. Known for his hilarious one-man shows, including the Hello Baby series, Randy from Creston and, most recently, Cromoli 4 Supreme Leader, Myers brings his super-charged personality to the KLC stage.

Spoken Word Wow! – Special guest and keynote speaker, Sheri-D Wilson, returns to Nelson for another round of unforgettable spoken word poetry. Prepare to be awed and inspired by this dynamic, award winning artist who was named one of the top ten poets in Canada by CBC.

Sweet Treats and Sweeter Sounds – What’s better than nibbling on a selection of sweets from Starbird Bakehouse? How about listening to the LV Rogers Jazz Sextext while you nibble? Come early and enjoy both these sweet treats.

Kootenay Literary Competition Awards Ceremony and Celebration
Friday, January 18  7:30pm   (Doors open at 7pm)
Prestige Lakeside Resort
Nelson, BC
This is a free event that is open to everyone.

Visiting from out of town? The Prestige Lakeside Resort is offering discount rates for our guests. Visit our website for more details.

Off the Page - Sheri-D Spoken Word Workshop

Sheri-D Wilson will present a three-hour workshop on spoken word do’s and don’ts, as well as facilitating responses to your own work (so bring along samples of your own spoken word pieces you would like feedback on).  Whether you’re a neophyte or a veteran in the spoken word world, there is still much to learn from the one-woman literary phenomenon known as Sheri-D.

*Space is limited for this popular workshop, and pre-registration is required. Sign up now to guarantee your spot!

Date: Saturday, January 19, 2013
Time: 1pm – 4pm
Location: Kutenai Art Therapy Insitute
191 Baker Street, Nelson BC
Fee: $35
Contact us to register and guarantee your spot.

Spring Scribble – Youth writers workshop with Angie Abdou

Coming this May: The Spring Scribble, is a three day youth creative writing workshop! This intensive weekend workshop is for teens in grades 7 to 12 who are serious about their writing. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, no matter where your passion lies, you’ll learn from the best and take your writing to a new level.

Award winning writer, Angie Abdou, will lead a weekend of creative writing exercises and scribbling fun. Participants will also get the inside scoop from four industry insiders who will talk about various facets of professional writing and how to make a living putting pen to paper…or fingers to keyboard.

Local hotels and B&B’s will be offering discount rates for workshop participants and their families, look for more details in the new year.

Registration opens in January and space is limited. For full details, visit: http://www.kootenaylitcomp.com/spring_youth_workshop.html

Location: Hume Hotel, 422 Vernon Street  Nelson, BC
Dates: Friday, May 24 – Sunday, 26, 2013
Fee: $165

Visit The Website

Stay Tuned to Sign up for the 2013 Competition and find out about all the fabulous prizes and workshops we’re offering thoughout the Koots at The Kootenay LIterary Competition

Mark Mealing ≈ Four New Poems

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Clowns

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My longhaired cat is a clown

usually quiet & grave

now & then

he stalks slow, slow

after the keen & queenly Siamese

or pounces from behind a chair

pawing slowly & feebly

his own length from her

then rolls on his back & grins

playing with harmless paws

Our clowns here are not like that

they mock pain & anger

mimic greed & pride

they bless madness

behind their bleached still faces

There is a desert land

where the clowns are holy men

they mock dull habit

they mock ourselves

Let us be mocked

by merry beasts

or holy men

& not by those who bless madness in the city streets

their mouths shouting from the bleached faces of the dead

25/11/12

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Coiled

 

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I saw the World

as the shell of a tremendous Snail

 

When everything is black or white

one can walk in & in

down through an ever-shrinking

an ever smaller & narrower space

until one comes to the smallest, narrowest place

where everything stops

& there’s no turning about

Nothing left to do but die

 

Or one can already face the other way

or turn about after a few steps

& walk out & out

up through an ever-wider

an ever larger & more open space

until one comes to where there is no more shell

where everything is revealed & alive

& all in rainbow colours.

17/8/12

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Threnody

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Your love is better than wine

Behold, you are fair, my love

yes, pleasant; also our bed is green

you have ravaged my heart

my sister, my spouse

you have ravaged my heart

with one of your eyes

with one chain of your neck

How much better is your love than wine

Who is she who looks forth like the morning

fair as the moon, clear as the sun

& awesome as an army with banners? Song 1/2; 4/1, 9, 10; 6/10

The green of your hills & dales

the blue of your seas

the gold of your rolling sands

the white of your clouds & snows

the rich darkness of your moonless nights

the strength of your mountains

the bright fire of your days

The meadows that open in the mountain woods

the deep pool beneath the chiming waterfall

the wild deer, wand’ring here & there Auguries of Innocence

the osprey crying above the lake

the summer star Capella blazing in your sky

A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse

a spring shut up, a fountain sealed

a well of living waters & streams from Lebanon Song 4/12,15

closed, closed to those who will not see nor hear

Set me as a seal upon your heart

as a seal upon your arm

for love is as strong as death

jealousy is cruel as the grave

its coals are coals of fire

that has a most vehement flame

What shall we do for your little sister

in the days when she shall be spoken for?

If she be a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver

& if she be a door, we will enclose her with boards of cedar Song 8/6, 8, 9

We will wall you with blocks of stone

we will build our palaces with silver & gold wrung from you

& heap them upon your living body

For we are jealous

we are as strong as death

& we will posses you utterly

we will take away & cut down your branches Is18/5

hew down the tree & cut off its branches

shake off its leaves & scatter its fruit

let the beasts get away from under it

& the fowls from its branches Dan.4/14

This is our mother

who nurtures & cherishes us

who feeds us & makes us a home

for all our lives

therefore we will destroy her

Arise, & let us go by night

& let us destroy her palaces Jer. 6/5

we will set her in her place

she is our mother & not one of us

How then shall we stand? II Kings 10/4

We shall stand alone

there is no power like ours

& we will wield it as we please

For we are jealous

we are as strong as death

Is this not great Babylon

which we have built

for the house of our kingdom

by the might of our power

& for the honour of our majesty? Dan. 4/30

its coals are coals of fire

that has a most vehement flame Song 8/6

No doubt but we are the people

& wisdom shall die with us Job 12/2

The heavens, being on fire shall be dissolved

& the elements shall melt with fervent heat II Peter 3/10,12

11/9/12

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Without a Poem

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Yesterday

I puzzled what

from the word’s I’m given

to say on Sunday to my friends in church

& also

spoke with other friends

one of whom is my wife

about problems that puzzled them

I walked to the waterfall but

came back without a poem

Today

I go

with my eyes open

& see how

the new snow

like a strong drug

casts a great glamour

over the land I know

trees, rocks & shore

exactly & at once

as it seemed before the light flakes fell

& wholly different

There are poems everywhere

All I have to do

is find the ones that seek me out

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14/12/12

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Doug Wilton ≈ The Occasional Xcerpt

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The Crumbling Monument

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One of the most exciting moments for Holman was the moment he found a shelf in the library that was loaded with reams of blank paper. He made a fine brush from squirrel hair and began to cook pine sap, water and black stove ash to make a serviceable ink. Soon he began to record his thoughts in a barely legible calligraphy that was gradually becoming more transparent. The most calli calligraphy is invisible, the ink delivering the mind directly to the pine or portrait of a child standing at a balcony on a world.

So he began to record whatever came to mind, sometimes a cloud of conflicting ideas that could not finally agree on a joint statement but were willing to let various voices have their say. Every word had to make its way thru a bath of acidic attention. He found he could simply ignore the critical watcher by paying attention to the motion of the sun so that he could paddle his humble raft of art through the waves of pessimism and despair in a more or less constant direction.

Conflicting ideas can tear the mind in contrary directions. But the strongest ideas are those which value survival more than supremacy and they will find a way to collaborate with opponents who place the same value on survival.

Boredom is of course another possible resolution. Opposing ideas so stalemated that nothing happens. But stalemate only paralyzes the mind for so long. Gradually it loses its fascination with the whole business and leaves the opponents locked in stasis like a crumbling monument to a vanished state of mind. In other words that moment in the library was the moment he began to forget to be bored.

Li Yin brought the broken robot back on the blue toboggan and he could see that she had been weeping. Now she had not only lost an older, feminine companion or a reasonable facsimile of same but she had also lost her music teacher. Whether Mirayeva II was human or not was irrelevant now. She had value to her and Li Yan wanted her back.

The robot had not been that important to Holman but he liked having her extensive library of music which the robot could reproduce verbatim on a real violin, something which no ordinary digital or analog record player could do. He had to admit it was the stuff of science fiction, a genre he had never been fond of since it mostly seemed to be an escape from reality, sometimes disguised as a commentary on said reality.

The robot could also spell him off on the task of reading books to Li Yan. She was reading at a juvenile level now and the books they had been able to find so far did not interest him that much. This was another reason for him to take up writing. He thought he could probably write stories that she would like and which would also advance her vocabulary. But he couldn’t just sit around and write all the time: he had a job to do.

He had worked as a maintenance tech in a robot repair depot so he would have a look at the control panel in Mirayeva’s chest. It was just a matter of cutting a razor thin line along the breast bone then pushing up on a button underneath it. Then a portion of the rib cage sprang open and he considered the battery of lights and switches inside.

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Margaret Hornby

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 Ride the Wave

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I learned to love the water watching your sure and

slow stroke breaststroke across Cultus Lake

to ride the wave without a board

To love the world

To know grief—

It’s not what I would have chosen

I would have been a dancer

I could be a runner and have a whole stadium sing, Waltzing Matilda

Come from Ethiopia and win every race

A poet … who brings a singer to her knees

A sailor on an Emerald sea.

Become Elmo in Baghdad and get on a hit list

This year in the Kootenays

wrote so hopefully

of leaves letting go

of Gai holding on

like you, like me.

Dr. Mel Reasoner says,  “Our Grandkids should have the opportunity for as comfortable life as I have had.”

It has rained for forty day and nights,this year of the Lord 2012 in spring

The water is rising near the lake

by the rivers, creeks

The flowering maple trees left too soon

The wooly blossoms of the Cottonwood trees fall like soft snowflakes

Mountains Ash— pale lush spring green

The Chestnut’s candelabra, each blossom a painting of spring and peaches,

a butterfly woman fluttering by on the stony street in Sana

The day is warming a sky so blue I can almost cry

A wilderness where we have made our mark, embrace life, face it full on

a miniature sky    dark evergreens floating in a lake

Like the wind going against me the morning I crossed over

A plethora of green, the trees reflection in a lake green, green, evergreen.

the lake waits and you return, I swim a few strokes, rise up and shout, scream,

My body tingles, its alive, it shouts and shouts

I step off the rocky ledge

I’m over my head; begin to dog paddle back to you

My Mom watches from the beach on Salt Spring Island

Why didn’t you save me? I sputter,

I knew you could save yourself.

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December 2012 ≈ Number 16

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This issue features Pippa Bowley, Phil Mader, Mark Mealing, Vandana Shiva, David P. Ball, Volker M and Doug Wilton.

Feel free to join the celebration. Send your verse or creative prose, flash stories, postcard novels etcetera, either as an attachment (word, google doc, rtf) or as a direct email to doug@elephant mountain.org

Mike Meagher is looking to start a workshop for writers who wish to discuss the challenges of writing and offer mutual support. mikemeagherpi2@yahoo.ca

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Pippa Bowley ≈ Poem

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Please click on image to expand.

photopoem Lake

David P. Ball ≈ Poets rally their verse to keep Langley forest from development

December 8, 2012 05:10 pm

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McLellan forest

.Children tour the woods in McLellan Forest. Photo by Erin Perry.

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Hundreds of poets are putting their verse together to keep a 10-hectare forest slated for development by Langley council intact, and they’re hanging their work from trees with ribbons.

The initiative — inspired by an ancient Chinese hermit-poet’s eccentric scribbling of lyrics on rocks and trees — is part of an effort to stop the McLellan Forest from being sold. It goes before Langley decision-makers on Monday, and activists have been given a Dec. 17 deadline to raise $3 million they need to purchase the land under a protective covenant.

Activists say there are more than 100 species living in its habitat, as well as trees up to 240 years old, they estimate.

“McLellan Forest is a community forest,” poet Fiona Lam (and sometimes Tyee contributor) told The Tyee. “It is public land, and the community and public of Langley and many others in the Lower Mainland are against it being developed.

“The council is supposed to represent the community, the public and the public interest. In facilitating and approving the sale of McLellan Forests, whose interests is the council truly representing? The council represents its constituents, and the constituents have spoken. The answer should be clear.”

Those supporting efforts to keep the McLellan Forest from development include poets Lorna Crozier, Patrick Lane, Don Domanski, Stephanie Bolster, and David Zieroth, and at least 140 others. Last week, painter Robert Bateman toured the tract and lent his support.

Langley poet Susan McCaslin told The Tyee she has grown personally attached to the tract of woods, and felt that poetry and the arts were a powerful way of sending a message.

“It is stunning,” she said of discovering the property with her husband. “It’s not technically old-growth, but there are big, mature trees, some of which could be as much as 240 years old [...]; there’s a big cottonwood tree that’s enormous, and three species of owls.

“It is an integral ecosystem. We fell in love with it. I’m a local poet, and it just occurred to me that having arts and activism would be a good way to raise attention to the issue.”

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McLellan forest with poems

Poems hung in McLellan Forest. Photo by Erin Perry.

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The town of Langley declined an interview request with The Tyee. Mayor Jack Froese has stated publicly that selling the municipal property would free up funds to be used in other local investments, such as a recreation centre.

When a group of locals banded together in the group Watchers of Langley Forest (WOLF) to protect the small tract, Langley council offered them two months to raise $3 million to buy the property and turn it into a park; that deadline was extended by a month, but ends this week. So far, WOLF has raised $50,000.

“Frankly, it’s unrealistic,” McCaslin said. “As WOLF themselves have said, they don’t have fundraising experience, they’re a small group, and the time frame is just too short [...]. It’s always possible some multimillionaire will donate the money, but right now they only have $50,000 and the deadline is impending. This land belongs to the public; it’s one of two rare jewels that should be saved. They have other less valuable lands they could sell, but everything’s behind closed doors so we don’t know what their options are.”

Victoria poet Lorna Crozier said that making local residents fundraise to protect a publicly owned wilderness is unfair.

“How ridiculous, to think they can so quickly raise that amount of money!” Crozier told The Tyee. “It’s an absolute obfuscation of what the real intent is.

“Langley is such an urban nightmare — it needs every little bit of nature it can hang onto with desperate fingers!”

Crozier, a Governor General’s Award-winning poet, told The Tyee she hopes her contribution of an original poem to the WOLF efforts will help council see the wisdom of turning the forest into a public park.

“Does poetry change anything?” she asked. “I think poets are wonderfully optimistic that the words they write might have power and change people’s minds and hearts.

Fellow Victoria poet Patrick Lane explained the significance of hanging the poetry from trees. The poem he wrote for Langley’s environmental campaign is dedicated to the project’s inspiration: Han-Shan. Believed by Zen Buddhists to be the re-incarnation of the Bodhisattva Manjusri, who represents transcendent wisdom, Han-Shan’s eccentric but reverent dispersal of lyrics into the forest inspire activists today to speak out for wilderness preservation.

“Han-Shan was a Buddhist monk-poet,” Lane explained. “In a time of hermits all over the world, he lived up in the mountains, and he was kind of a mad monk.

“He would leave poems on rocks and trees. Gary Snyder years ago wrote a long series of poems dedicated to Han-Shan — a laughing, wild, crazy old hermit poet.”

Soon after putting a call out for poets to support her forest-saving efforts, McCaslin said she started getting contributions from further afield — Australia, Turkey, the UK, the United States, and Mexico.

“It’s interesting to me the way that this little microcosm — our local forest — parallels issues people were feeling in their own communities,” she said. “People wrote and said, ‘We lost our little green space, but we wish you luck and want to support you.’ Others said, ‘We did a campaign, and we won and now it’s a park.’ It’s moving to me, the quality of the poems, and the sense that we’re losing our green space for our children and future generations. There aren’t that many of them left.”

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David P. Ball is a frequent contributor to The Tyee. Used by permission.

Nelson Poetry Slam

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Slam Poster Dec 12

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submitted by Samuel Stevenson

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(A note right off the bat: December’s Poetry Slam will be on the THIRD Sunday of this month, rather than the SECOND Sunday. We will be gathering at SelfDesign High on December 16th at 7pm this month. SelfDesign is hosting a FairTrade fair on December 9th, which sounds like a beautiful event, but there WILL NOT be a poetry slam between those walls that night).

Onwards: December is just around the corner, temperatures are dropping below freezing more and more often, the sleet is flying and the snow is coming. Heat it up? Let us slam.
Performers (ie: anyone with some poems to perform): bring along two poems which must be no longer than three minutes. Audience: just come. The slam starts at seven, and you’re more than welcome to come a wee bit early and help set up the chairs an schtuffs. That would be awful sweet, actually.

Additionally, we are going to implement a portion of the slam for anyone who wants to perform but does not want to compete: There will be a Literary Open Mic to warm up the room and the microphone. Poets wanting to perform in the Lit. Open Mic must have one poem that is no longer than three minutes long. Open Mic participants will not participate in the slam competition but will be allotted stage time, regardless, right at the beginning of the evening.

A reminder to poets: no props, no costumes and only original poems qualify.

Prizes from local donors consist of: $25 from Brian Kelsch at Nesbitt Burns, a $15 gift certificate from Grounded Cafe and a $10 gift certificate from Otter Books.

Thanks again to SelfDesign High; John Ward Fine Coffee; Polestar Calendars; Brian Kelsch from Nesbitt Burns; A Course in Miracles, Nelson; Jennie’s Garden Books and Gaia Tree Whole Foods.

Holla, Nelson! Get your word on.

PS: SelfDesign High is on the corner of Victoria and Stanley, right across from the library. Enter through the front door, climb the steps and you’ll be there.

Vandana Shiva ≈ Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Forest

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13204-vandana-shiva-everything-i-need-to-know-i-learned-in-the-forest
Vandana Shiva: Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Forest
Friday, 07 December 2012 11:26
By Dr Vandana Shiva, Yes! Magazine | Op-Ed

My ecological journey started in the forests of the Himalaya. My father was a forest conservator, and my mother became a farmer after fleeing the tragic partition of India and Pakistan. It is from the Himalayan forests and ecosystems that I learned most of what I know about ecology. The songs and poems our mother composed for us were about trees, forests, and India’s forest civilizations.
My involvement in the contemporary ecology movement began with “Chipko,” a nonviolent response to the large-scale deforestation that was taking place in the Himalayan region.  In the 1970s, peasant women from my region in the Garhwal Himalaya had come out in defense of the forests. Logging had led to landslides and floods, and scarcity of water, fodder, and fuel. Since women provide these basic needs, the scarcity meant longer walks for collecting water and firewood, and a heavier burden. Women knew that the real value of forests was not the timber from a dead tree, but the springs and streams, food for their cattle, and fuel for their hearths. The women declared that they would hug the trees, and the loggers would have to kill them before killing the trees. A folk song of that period said:

        
These beautiful oaks and rhododendrons,

        They give us cool water

        Don’t cut these trees

        We have to keep them alive.

In 1973, I had gone to visit my favorite forests and swim in my favorite stream before leaving for Canada to do my Ph.D. But the forests were gone, and the stream was reduced to a trickle.

One of the dramatic Chipko actions took place in the Himalayan village of Adwani in 1977, when a village woman named Bachni Devi led resistance against her own husband, who had obtained a contract to cut trees. When officials arrived at the forest, the women held up lighted lanterns although it was broad daylight. The forester asked them to explain. The women replied, “We have come to teach you forestry.” He retorted, “You foolish women, how can you prevent tree felling by those who know the value of the forest? Do you know what forests bear? They produce profit and resin and timber.”I decided to become a volunteer for the Chipko movement, and I spent every vacation doing pad yatras (walking pilgrimages), documenting the deforestation and the work of the forest activists, and spreading the message of Chipko.The women sang back in chorus:

        What do the forests bear?
        
Soil, water, and pure air.

        Soil, water, and pure air

        Sustain the Earth and all she bears.


Beyond Monocultures

From Chipko, I learned about biodiversity and biodiversity-based living economies; the protection of both has become my life’s mission. As I described in my book Monocultures of the Mind, the failure to understand biodiversity and its many functions is at the root of the impoverishment of nature and culture. Navdanya, the movement for biodiversity conservation and organic farming that I started in 1987, is spreading. So far, we’ve worked with farmers to set up more than 100 community seed banks across India. We have saved more than 3,000 rice varieties. We also help farmers make a transition from fossil-fuel and chemical-based monocultures to biodiverse ecological systems nourished by the sun and the soil.The lessons I learned about diversity in the Himalayan forests I transferred to the protection of biodiversity on our farms. I started saving seeds from farmers’ fields and then realized we needed a farm for demonstration and training. Thus Navdanya Farm was started in 1994 in the Doon Valley, located in the lower elevation Himalayan region of Uttarakhand Province. Today we conserve and grow 630 varieties of rice, 150 varieties of wheat, and hundreds of other species. We practice and promote a biodiversity-intensive form of farming that produces more food and nutrition per acre. The conservation of biodiversity is therefore also the answer to the food and nutrition crisis.

Biodiversity has been my teacher of abundance and freedom, of cooperation and mutual giving.

Rights of Nature On the Global Stage
When nature is a teacher, we co-create with her: we recognize her agency and her rights. That is why it is significant that Ecuador has recognized the “rights of nature” in its constitution. In April 2011, the United Nations General Assembly­—inspired by the constitution of Ecuador and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth initiated by Bolivia—organized a conference on harmony with nature as part of Earth Day celebrations. Much of the discussion centered on ways to transform systems based on domination of people over nature, men over women, and rich over poor into new systems based on partnership.

Separatism is indeed at the root of disharmony with nature and violence against nature and people. As the prominent South African environmentalist Cormac Cullinan points out, apartheid means separateness. The world joined the anti-apartheid movement to end the violent separation of people on the basis of color. Apartheid in South Africa was put behind us. Today, we need to overcome the wider and deeper apartheid—an eco-apartheid based on the illusion of separateness of humans from nature in our minds and lives.The U.N. secretary general’s report, “Harmony with Nature,” issued in conjunction with the conference, elaborates on the importance of reconnecting with nature: “Ultimately, environmentally destructive behavior is the result of a failure to recognize that human beings are an inseparable part of nature and that we cannot damage it without severely damaging ourselves.”

The Dead-Earth Worldview
The war against the Earth began with this idea of separateness. Its contemporary seeds were sown when the living Earth was transformed into dead matter to facilitate the industrial revolution. Monocultures replaced diversity. “Raw materials” and “dead matter” replaced a vibrant Earth. Terra Nullius (the empty land, ready for occupation regardless of the presence of indigenous peoples) replaced Terra Madre (Mother Earth). This philosophy goes back to Francis Bacon, called the father of modern science, who said that science and the inventions that result do not “merely exert a gentle guidance over nature’s course; they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.” Robert Boyle, the famous 17th-century chemist and a governor of the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the New England Indians, was clear that he wanted to rid native people of their ideas about nature. He attacked their perception of nature “as a kind of goddess” and argued that “the veneration, wherewith men are imbued for what they call nature, has been a discouraging impediment to the empire of man over the inferior creatures of God.”

The death-of-nature idea allows a war to be unleashed against the Earth. After all, if the Earth is merely dead matter, then nothing is being killed. As philosopher and historian Carolyn Merchant points out, this shift of perspective, from nature as a living, nurturing mother to inert, dead, and manipulable matter, was well suited to the activities that would lead to capitalism. The domination images created by Bacon and other leaders of the scientific revolution replaced those of the nurturing Earth, removing a cultural constraint on the exploitation of nature. “One does not readily slay a mother, dig into her entrails for gold, or mutilate her body,” Merchant wrote.

What Nature Teaches
Today, at a time of multiple crises intensified by globalization, we need to move away from the paradigm of nature as dead matter. We need to move to an ecological paradigm, and for this, the best teacher is nature herself.

This is the reason I started the Earth University/Bija Vidyapeeth at Navdanya’s farm.  Because the Earth University is located at Navdanya, a biodiversity farm, participants learn to work with living seeds, living soil, and the web of life. Participants include farmers, school children, and people from across the world. Two of our most popular courses are “The A-Z of Organic Farming and Agroecology,” and “Gandhi and Globalization.”The Earth University teaches Earth Democracy, which is the freedom for all species to evolve within the web of life, and the freedom and responsibility of humans, as members of the Earth family, to recognize, protect, and respect the rights of other species. Earth Democracy is a shift from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism. And since we all depend on the Earth, Earth Democracy translates into human rights to food and water, to freedom from hunger and thirst.

The Poetry of the Forest
The Earth University is inspired by Rabindranath Tagore, India’s national poet and a Nobel Prize laureate. Tagore started a learning center in Shantiniketan in West Bengal, India, as a forest school, both to take inspiration from nature and to create an Indian cultural renaissance. The school became a university in 1921, growing into one of India’s most famous centers of learning.

In “The Religion of the Forest,” Tagore wrote about the influence that the forest dwellers of ancient India had on classical Indian literature. The forests are sources of water and the storehouses of a biodiversity that can teach us the lessons of democracy: of leaving space for others while drawing sustenance from the common web of life. Tagore saw unity with nature as the highest stage of human evolution.Today, just as in Tagore’s time, we need to turn to nature and the forest for lessons in freedom. In his essay “Tapovan” (Forest of Purity), Tagore writes: “Indian civilization has been distinctive in locating its source of regeneration, material and intellectual, in the forest, not the city. India’s best ideas have come where man was in communion with trees and rivers and lakes, away from the crowds. The peace of the forest has helped the intellectual evolution of man. The culture of the forest has fueled the culture of Indian society. The culture that has arisen from the forest has been influenced by the diverse processes of renewal of life, which are always at play in the forest, varying from species to species, from season to season, in sight and sound and smell. The unifying principle of life in diversity, of democratic pluralism, thus became the principle of Indian civilization.”

It is this unity in diversity that is the basis of both ecological sustainability and democracy. Diversity without unity becomes the source of conflict and contest. Unity without diversity becomes the ground for external control. This is true of both nature and culture. The forest is a unity in its diversity, and we are united with nature through our relationship with the forest. In Tagore’s writings, the forest was not just the source of knowledge and freedom; it was the source of beauty and joy, of art and aesthetics, of harmony and perfection. It symbolized the universe. In “The Religion of the Forest,” the poet says that our frame of mind “guides our attempts to establish relations with the universe either by conquest or by union, either through the cultivation of power or through that of sympathy.”

The forest teaches us union and compassion. The forest also teaches us enoughness: as a principle of equity, how to enjoy the gifts of nature without exploitation and accumulation. Tagore quotes from the ancient texts written in the forest: “Know all that moves in this moving world as enveloped by God; and find enjoyment through renunciation, not through greed of possession.” No species in a forest appropriates the share of another species. Every species sustains itself in cooperation with others.

The end of consumerism and accumulation is the beginning of the joy of living. The conflict between greed and compassion, conquest and cooperation, violence and harmony that Tagore wrote about continues today. And it is the forest that can show us the way beyond this conflict.

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a philosopher, environmental activist and eco feminist. She has fought for changes in the practice and paradigms of agriculture and food, and assisted grassroots organizations of the Green movement in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Ireland, Switzerland, and Austria with campaigns against genetic engineering. In 1982, she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, which led to the creation of Navdanya in 1991, a national movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seed, the promotion of organic farming and fair trade. She is author of numerous books including,Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis; Stolen Harvest: The hijacking of the Global food supply; Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace; and Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. Shiva has also served as an adviser to governments in India and abroad as well as NGOs, including the International Forum on Globalization, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization and the Third World Network. She has received numerous awards, including 1993 Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize) and the 2010 Sydney Peace Prize.

Submitted by mark mealing.

Used by permission.

Famous authors fight over comma placement.

submitted by Coyote

from Facebook

Famous authors fight .over comma placement

Volker M ≈ Purchanse To Dream

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it has bin sed that one dreams only when one is asleep & yet i dream
at times with my ‘i’s wide open shut…

& tho sleep may be a reward for sum of us, for others it is a
torture…

ah yes, to sleep, as has also bin sed & perchance to dream – done wud
thimk this was the krem de la krem of existenz -but then again, as i
was taught, don’t believe everything u ‘here’…

konjekture is part & parsel of the kommerse of kommunal kommonality
that all of us share, all of us, all of us, all of us, ad nauseum from
‘hear’ to kingdumb kome…

isadore dukasse’s Maldoror puts a piese of wood between his ‘eye-lids’
to keep awake & protekt himself from ‘god’s spying – dreams which in
their ‘seaming’ illogikality kan be unravelled, interpreted & used as
evidense against the dreamer slipping freudianesquely into the far
reaches of space where he (the dreamer) is bombarded insessently by
weird unkontrolled images that skratch the skreen of konsciousness in
‘his’ ever loving ‘mined’…

when i dream, i am not free in the same way that i am not free when i
sit in a theatre, watching bemusedly or in a state of terror as images
overwhelm the ‘eye’ that ‘i’ imagine my self to be though neither of
those ‘i’s is truly me bekause ultimately i rejekt the passivity of me
a lone, here in the 12th row, after everybody else has gone & the
lights turned low & the last usheress turning off her hand held lamp
to kollapse into a seat two rows from the projektion rhume where the
projektionist, with his hand on the small of a woman’s back, klicks
the door into its jamb while the woman nuzzles his ear so that he
doesn’t hear the whimpering in the silent dome…

Phil Mader ≈ George

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GEORGE

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First it was Garth, the effeminate dog owner who went bananas when George admonished him in his capacity as building manager to scoop up the dog poop on the back lawn; then the schizophrenic on the top floor went into a fury when he was asked to lower his stereo to put a damper on the fire storm of electric guitar squealing bursting through his unit front door. And then he had to hear the man’s usual threat. “Sure, I know who your lawyer is; you’ve told me endless times”, replied George to the man’s yelling, ” actually I forgot , is it God or the Pope?”

But today was different. Today, on his MP3 player, jazz artist, Hank Mobley was miaowing  mellow lines out of a brass Saxophone, and the red sand was hot on his bare bottom, and the pale-skinned beauties on the beach seemed to formally invite him over to examine their astonishingly pink nipples.

Today was different. Today was not the day that Adele promised she would see him next Thursday as long as the sky was pink, her Anglophone unilingual mother phoned speaking Chinese, and her dog broke out singing the aria O Mio Bambino Caro in the Key of B Flat.  George got the picture.

The problem was that George had an over-acute capacity for sadness. Some days the slightest thing could tip the scales. The words of Carl Jung seeped into his brain, “Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble”.  Yet he was well aware that he was sometimes the author of his own life’s tribulations.  Why did he have to tell Adele, who is a dyed-in-the-wool Calvinist draped in a bulky Puritan frock – tell her as a joke mind you – about his sex life with his former wife.

” You see” said George to an already irritable Adele, “she noticed  there was a  Toronto Dominion Bank flag draped over my erect penis.  I told her every time I sprang an erection and draped a TD flag over it, I got $5 off on every online purchase made with my TD credit card.  All I had to do was take a picture of it, have her sign an affidavit to the effect and send it all off to TD Headquarters.” The joke of course flew like a giant lead balloon.

George had held so many building manager jobs that he hoped one day to be inducted into the Building Managers Hall of Fame but doubted it would happen soon.

Things could be worse was the philosophic exit door he chose to enter to avoid lingering hopelessness.

He could be working as a reporter for a left leaning low income citizens newsletter whose obese female editor alternated between being a socialist commentator and a man-eating shark. Indeed, before turning to the career of building manager, he had actually worked as a writer in Montreal, and Sheilagh, the editor, had been his boss.  “There’s going to be a sit-down demonstration in front of some greedy developer’s office who’s planning to tear down beautiful downtown heritage homes so he can put up some profitable monstrosity. Go cover the story”.

And He did. So close was he to the demonstrators that he got rounded up by the Police with the others, thrown into the paddy wagon and delivered up to Parthenon Street Jail, where police removed his belt and finger-printed him while the line-up of prisoners waited their turn. Next he found himself in a dreary, grey, stone block 19th century prison cell with four others. And when the police guard refused to come to the aid of someone who had a diabetes attack with no medicine on him, everybody shrieked incessantly and in unison, “HEEEE NEEEEEEEEDS HIIIIS MEDICINE!!” like in the chorus of the Hebrews in Verdi’s opera NABUCCO. At first, George kept quiet but then someone eyed him with menace. After 5 hours, they were let free but having been all charged with trespass and disorderly conduct, they set out to find a lawyer. As almost all were genuinely low income earners, the group was eligible for Legal Aid.

Legal Aid gave them a nationalist Quebecois lawyer who wore the Fleur-De-Lys on his head band. It was the early 1970s; progressive people and hippies wore head bands back then; it was in style. Is it possible that our lawyer is a hippie? George silently queried and cursed at the same time. The happy-go-lucky lawyer explained his tactical plan while insouciantly feeding lazy looking fish in a huge lush fish tank. George saw himself as the feed being sprinkled into the tank, lurched at by muscular jawfish and fat snappers.

At lunch time in the cafeteria of the Palais de Justice (the court house of Montreal), on the day of the first hearing, their motley group of Marxists and anarchists were munching and moping over hot dogs and French frieds and the like. That’s all they could afford.

Allan, the Marxist was going on and on and on quoting directly from Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, finishing with ” you see, even in the case of simple reproduction, all capital, whatever its original source, becomes converted into accumulated capital, capitalized surplus-value..” when suddenly Oreste, who published a national anarchist review, stood up brusquely, drew himself up large, his finely trimmed goatee twitching, a fiery Socrates with a puffed up reddish face, and let loose a window shaking rage, ‘Is there no way of stemming the tide of your verbal diarrhea? Are we all to drown in the bog, in this quicksand of bottomless doctrine?” Suddenly, the cafeteria turned into a hush from its former clamour. All eyes were on their table.  Those at the table escaped somewhere, anywhere inside themselves, whilst Allan shrank into nullity, the entire cafeteria dumb with shock at the fury of the tempest that had just blown over them.

After three nail biting months, the trial came to court, and George, who was too immature to go through something like this, showed up in a mood of undeniable despair.  As it turned out, the lawyer with the Fleur-De-Lys head-band, was brilliant and got them off the hook after three dexterous hours of splendid fact jousting with the Crown Prosecutor.

With the goal of escaping the inescapable, George eventually moved out West. What he got was Garth, the schizophrenic and Adele.

Doug Wilton ≈ The Occasional Xcerpt

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Boredom

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Holman walked and worked very slowly, trying to keep his organs and muscles in good condition without using too much oxygen. He had to rest frequently and got into the habit of simply sitting in the central room, getting up occasionally to feed the stove, watching the patches of window light glide across the walls, thinking, and watching his thoughts. Gradually he became aware of this watching, of awareness itself.    Unable to waste his limited energy on the past or scenarios about possible futures he found himself trapped in a narrow space called the present, a present that consisted of a strange ghost town in an almost airless forest, this stone house, this room, this body slowly but deeply breathing in, slowly but deeply breathing out… “If this was a story, he thought, it would be boring as hell.”

“No,” said a voice. “Hell is much more boring than this.”

Holman raised his gaze from the intricate weave of the carpet to a dark figure who sat on a cushion with its back to the window, its front and face in shadow. “I lived here long ago,” it said, “in this very house.”

“The resident ghost,” said Holman. “I hope we’re not intruding.”

“No worries,” said the ghost. “It’s nice to have some company for a change.”

“No offence,” said Holman, “but I don’t really believe in ghosts. I think my mind produced you to distract me from my boredom.”

“No offence taken,” said the ghost. “I don’t believe in ghosts either. There is of course no evidence that I exist anywhere but in your mind, and it is possible, as you say, that I am just your mind’s attempt to distract itself from its boring self.”

“Are you saying that I have a boring mind?”

“No more boring than a leaf or a stone,” said the ghost. Anything is boring until we examine it more deeply. You could say that boredom is the mind’s refusal to explore itself and its world.”

“Why does it do that?” asked Holman. “Why choose boredom.”

“Boredom is stasis,” said the ghost. The bored mind walls its life inside a shell, like the meat inside a nut. It refuses to explore what is outside or what is inside that shell. It justifies this stance by claiming that it has nothing more to learn about the world outside or the life, the soul if you will, inside the shell.”

Holman was silent for a moment.

“But when a man reaches a certain age,” he said, “he can see that nothing changes. The more things change the more they stay the same. After a time you see how the same things just keep happening. Every day the sun comes up, every night it goes down. Winter follows summer. People are born and live in a boring circle of desire, aggression, hunger and worry punctuated by fleeting hours of pleasure, the whole insane carousel surrounded by ignorance. And they teach their children to exist in the same way.”

The ghost was silent.

“I don’t choose boredom,” said Holman. “I just recognize the truth. Life is boring.”

The ghost was silent for a moment.

“So there’s no wall between you and the world,” said the ghost. “It’s just that you’ve seen its essence and there’s no reason to explore further.”

Holman was silent.

“And there’s no reason for you to look into your heart because you know that all men have the same sad, hungry, fearful heart and there’s no reason to explore it further.”

Holman was silent then he raised his head to look at the ghost again. But it was gone. He was alone in this room, in a world he knew too well.   

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Mark Mealing ≈ Poem

.

.

Drinking Tea In the Mountains II

.

I recall former times & places;

Island town officials heap laws;
River city merchants heap cash.

Here, clouds hide the East mountains;
Late snow falls, mountain snow.

Early geese delay their northern journey.
Soft waves caress the stony shore.

Drink tea,
& watch the early moon.

Lu Shih

29/3/05

November 2012 ≈ Number 15

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.

This issue features (so far)  Margaret Hornby, Mike Meagher and Doug Wilton.

Feel free to join the party. Send your verse or creative prose, flash stories, postcard novels etcetera, either as an attachment (word, google doc, pdf) or as a direct email to doug@elephant mountain.org

Mike Meagher is looking to start a workshop for writers who wish to discuss the challenges of writing and offer mutual support. mikemeagherpi2@yahoo.ca

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Mike Meagher ≈ Nine Poems

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Tuesday, June 4, 1991

 — In response to Billy Collins’
poem of the same name

I don’t know if it was to a week-
end of street hockey or baseball

or my tenth birthday party
that I was looking forward

if I was in fact looking
forward to something

or if I was going down the high-
way just outside Ottawa

in the back seat
of my parents’ car

watching the great big
signs slowly approach

before zipping by
at the last second

saying quietly to myself
as they disappeared behind us

remember today, Tuesday
June 4, 1991

making mental notes
of all the odd figures

made from the scratches
on the road signs

or studying the day’s date
on the back of my hand

hard enough to not forget.
But I did. And nine-

teen years later
no less on a Tuesday
I try not to make too much noise
in the King’s College library

with all the wrappers and tops of
containers opening and closing

and wiping sunflower seed oil
onto my work pants

wondering if the shadow
cast across the desk

looks like a face I used to know
or something else interesting

or if that little orange book
sitting on the top of the shelf

has a title worth remembering
nineteen years from now.

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Walter

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There was a bunch of them that had been leaving work five minutes early without incident since way before I started, and then one day the boss—a young fella that got no respect around the shop—came out of his office with a handful of written warnings. And the next day, two minutes before five—I only remember the exact time because when I heard a commotion from the landing at the top of the stairs, a “go fuck yourself”, the type of  “go fuck yourself” that could only come from a man whose voice was gravel and throat skin worn leather, whose back and hands had been splintered from lifting up and throwing around pallets for the last thirty years—I only remember the time because I was in the lunch room in front of the computer. And when I talked to Walter after his suspension, he said that he was an old man—half seriously; that it took him a few minutes to shuffle his way down the stairs, anyways, at the end of the day, and say goodbye to the guys in the mail room before making his way out the door; that it was okay because he would retire soon; that there was nothing to worry about because it got him a day off.

.

.

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Link Gaetz

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1.

Showed up at the draft
back in ’88
thought I might get snatched up
in the later rounds
when all the crowds
were gone.
And of course
Modano was called up
in the first
but I swiftly followed,
as his bodyguard,
with two black eyes
after a night on the town.

*

It was in a nowhere town, anyways
that I shot out the pane
of stained glass—
I was aiming for the bell.

*

I did get kicked outta practice
which the police report said
is why I threw the TV
outta the fourth-floor window
of that hotel
but that goddamn door
it was that motherfucking door
that wouldn’t open.

*

After picking up a $900 debt from a man’s house

And so, yeah
I said to the cop
yeah, I took his TV
and I took a shit
on his bed, too,
like you said
but your little report
forgot to mention
that I pissed all over
his couch, too.

*

Nick Fotiu, an ex-NHL brawler who coached Link in ’94 when with the Nashville Knights down in the minors:

So Link had been out all night drinking when I got a phone call and went over to a house where he was holding the entire team hostage—without a weapon    and he answered the door with a beer in his hand and I said c’mon, Link, let’s go, grabbing the beer out of his hand   ’cause I could control him when I was around    and he lost it    and so we went toe-to-toe, into the kitchen, over the couches, over tables ’til the cops showed up    and at five in the morning Link comes by my house wanting to fight and I say no    and at eight he comes by again wanting to go for breakfast.

2.

Addiction’s asterisk—unfinished viaduct
devil’s derelict—eden’s error
bluebacked beefhead—coach’s cancer
roid-sauced tabloid—forest of formaldehyde
gestapo’s gorilla—insolent ibex
juggling juggernaut—knock-kneed knuckler
lover’s lobotomy—he-man’s hyde
owner of oedipal’s prick—
x-man,
yielding zilch—

A few catch ups
I wanna get away from
now that I got a wife
and a little girl—
who woulda thought.

.

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Spare Time

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“When you got spare time
you don’t ever wanna make it
look like you got any
’cause not even
the union can protect you
if you’re out parked somewhere
having a snooze or a cigarette. And now
you didn’t hear it from me, but what happens
with some of the guys
is they forget a tool back at the shop
and don’t notice
till they get to the site; that means
they gotta go back to get it
then drive to the site again
before they can start working. Some of them
even got in the habit of
thinking they forgot something
and so they head back, not knowing
the tool was in the back of the truck
all along.”

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.

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Calluses

.

But you’d never get them
between the bases of your
fingers because no matter
how bad the ridge of skin
curls up against the handle,
no matter how hard it’s
pushed on, there’s nothing
—like a muscle—to push back.

.

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Tuesday morning

.

i. bucking a tree

the curled chunks of maple
wood piling up neatly be-
tween my feet—a lazy wisp
of flurries.

ii. after

for lunch, (a few knots
of) walnuts.

Bucking a Tree

Bucking a tree this morning
a lazy wisp of flurries
the curled chunks of maple
piled up neatly
a heap of organization
every couple feet
In the basement
of the library
a few knots of wal-
nuts for lunch.

.

.

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Drought

.

drought summer
three weeks
eight weeks
how long since rain?

*

lazy night
a stream of thought
here it is

*

two a.m.
a haiku starts
and so, too, the rain

.

.

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City From an Airplane

.

Somewhere between
Ottawa and Halifax

after three
hours in the car

outside on the shoulder
smoking, cars passing

so different
from out here

like seeing a city
from an airplane.

.

.

.

Loose Tobacco

.

The loose tobacco
in the drawer

maybe two grams

for a month, now

in need of an
orange peel.

.

 

“Tuesday, June 4, 1991″ was previously published in The Antigonish Review; “Walter” was published in Freefall; “Link Gaetz” was published in Prism International; and “Spare Time” was published in The Prairie Journal.

Letter From Gaza ≈ forwarded by Rob Foster

From: “Heather Spears” <spears.heather@gmail.com>
Date: November 13, 2012 11:31:54 PM PST (CA)
To: “Jim & Eva Manly” <ejmanly@islandnet.com>
Subject: Fw: one child in Gaza
Dear Jim and Eva,

I am adding this to my mails right now: a letter Nov. 11 from Gaza. A father tells what his youngest daughter said – I attach her picture with her little brother.
Please, if you can, make this letter known to more people, it seems to me it should go round the world

Salaam,
How are you today?
Things over her  is very tense ,for the last 24hrs more than 6 been killed
and 40  been wounded 5 are very serious .
Amrea was saying would IDF Stops shelling if I gave them my toys ,or gave
them one Nis, or if they will not agree for that I will gave them 1 kiss ,
especially  last night the kids could not sleep since all kinds of airplanes
and tanks shelling go on all the time.
This this life.
.

 
.
.

Margaret Hornby ≈ Poems

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Basho at Yamadera Station

.               

he  is wearing brightly coloured leotards and a red plaid shirt

wind turns cold
            Basho bends    
removes his sandals puts
his  black tabi stockings on his bony feet
     carefully placing each toe into the proper place -

            his portly companion looks away.

.

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Tone Poems

.

—keepers of this land
 trees, birds and yours truly

The day is warming
Clouds, barely there,

the deciduous trees draw triangles to vie with the Evergreens
on Elephant mountain

the morning I cross over the wind is against me
the dark evergreens reflected in a lake
A minature sky-in this last great wilderness

 we make our imprint

In Mid winter ghost like triangle turn to crosses to
outline the birch and aspen

And one day on Elephant Mountain …  gradually
the softness of green,
    
    *        *        *

Love, trees, birds and yours truly

The day is warming a sky so blue I can almost cry
A wilderness where we have made our mark, embrace life, face it full on
Like the wind going against me
the morning I crossed over
A plethora of green,the trees reflection in a lake  green, green, evergreen
Every spring is the future!
It’s a territory not written in any ledger
Only in the ospreys cry,
The eagle’s watch—keepers of this land

Comes summer’s blaring symphony all around

on every mountain

 A cowboy playing a guitar on Elephant Mountain
 

        if I see then                 I might feel        
read  your face like                   a poem         
            
call you                  
my boatman

.

.

Daniel                

.

         intent on a             distant horizon                 

 eyes                on  me
                
a lovely  lovely, man             floating through my finger

         watching me    as I swim        

I feel your    body

 
                Release me                

   
         to  speak of                           your    grace and beauty    

Of Siddartha,           paddling against the current
                 

.

sadness is a valuable treasure that you only discover in those you love
                    Egyptian proverb

.

.

Riding a wave without a board

.

I’m four or five when
I step off the rocky ledge
I’m over my head
begin to dog paddle back to you
My Mom watches from the beach
On Salt Spring Island

Why didn’t you save me? I sputter,
 
I knew you could save yourself, my Mom says

I learned to love the water watching your sure and slow stroke
breaststroke across Cultus Lake

I learned to ride the wave without a board
To love the world
To know grief—

It’s not what I would of chosen
I would have been a dancer
I could be a runner and have a whole stadium sing
Waltzing Matilda
Come from Ethiopia and win every race
A poet … who brings a singer to her knees
A sailor on an emerald sea.
Become Emo in Bagdab and get on a hit list

.

.

untitled

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1
A singer named K’naan Waves a flag
and we sing along
All over the world

2
Soybeans must love people too for
Over thousands of years they continue to
Survive & germinate
Their secret ?
Soy beans keep changing colours

3
A poet needs a season
a reason to to survive
a desire
to  walk the walk

I learned to march in China

4
Over there-when you cross over

.

      I was America’s man
      President- King of the world
      My name is Richard Nixon now I’m
     Living in the projects with my two little girls

      — Call me Rose by Bruce Cockburn

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Doug Wilton ≈ The Intermittent Excerpt

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The Singlehorns

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There were two animals in the pen and the smaller was under the larger, nursing at teats which were not visible under her long, shaggy hair. The rest of the herd had retreated into the mist spangled with the yellow leaves of the hazel trees that shared the spit with the oxypines. The female was tall and barrel-chested with a long neck, long, forward curving ears and large eyes that accentuated her alert expression. Holden thought she looked like an animal he had seen once in the Biodome but, unlike that one, she was equipped with a short, curved horn that grew from a spot just above her smooth black nostrils.
The calf soon finished its suckling and they both walked over to the edge of the fence to inspect their captors. The calf had just a little nub behind its nose, from which, Holman surmised, a horn would gradually grow. Jin threw in a bundle of breathgrass and a handful of hazelnuts which they immediately began to gobble up. After a few days they would come and eat the nuts from her hand and she learned to reserve them as a reward for good behaviour. (Sometimes the mother would get annoyed and spit.) Holden brought a plastic pail of rainwater, slid it under the gate and the beasts immediately began to lap it with their salt-parched tongues. Spear in hand he eased around the pair (mindful of that horn) picked up the salt block and took it out of the pen.

When the rains changed to snow they haltered the singlehorns and led them into the lower room of the tower where they could stand or cush on beds of hay and dried kelp. Their body heat added to the warmth that rose to their pad in the lens room, along with rich animal smells. Jin was able to make friends with the mother and eventually to both milk her and ride on her back. Riding was much less exhausting than walking though both humans noticed that they could now go longer without sucking breathgrass. Holman thought their lung capacity was increasing (Jin’s more than his) and maybe their bodies were somehow using the available oxygen more efficiently. Or maybe the atmospheric oxygen level was rising? More trees were growing now. Trees like birches, hazels and pines which had survived because they had never been dependent on insects or birds for pollination. He had seen clouds of yellow pollen released from pine boughs by the summer wind. And he had found the following note in the lighthouse keeper’s notebook:

Sneezing like crazy today. Almost all allergenic pollens are wind-borne, including that from the hazels that grow hereabouts.

I remember an old poem:

I went out to the hazel wood
because a fire was in my head
and cut and peeled a hazel wand
and hooked a berry to a thread

(The Celts had a tale that nine hazel trees grew around a sacred pool, dropping nuts into streams that were eaten by salmon who absorbed the wisdom.)

And when bright moths were on the wing
and mothlike stars were flickering out
I dropped the berry in a stream
and caught a little silver trout.

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October 2012 ≈ Number 14

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This issue features (in no particular order) Phil Mader, Helen Esther Blum and Doug Wilton.

Feel free to join the party. Send your verse or creative prose, flash stories, postcard novels etcetera, either as an attachment (word, google doc, pdf) or as a direct email to doug@elephant mountain.org

Thanks to a generous donor there will be a spring/summer issue of The Elephant Mountain Review in March 2013.

Mike Meagher is looking to start a workshop for writers who wish to discuss the challenges of writing and offer mutual support. mikemeagherpi2@yahoo.ca

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Nelson Poetry Slam ≈ Sunday Oct 14 / 7pm

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The time gas cone again for another scintillating poetry slam! Our next
slam will be held on October 14th at 7pm (feel free to cone early to help
set up if you are so inclined) At SelfDesign High, 402 Victoria st. Anyone
wishing to perform can bring two pieces, each under three minutes long. I
would also like to remind performers that props, costumes, and unoriginal
works are grounds for disqualification.

Many thanks to our generous sponsors: SelfDesign High, John Ward Fine
Coffee, Polestar Calendars, Brian Kelsch from Nesbitt Burns, A Course in
Miracles Nelson, Jennie’s Garden Books and Gaia Tree Whole Foods!

Looking forward to seeing you all at the slam!

Alicia

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Kootenay Lit Comp News

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2012 KLC & KYCWC Judges Announced

We’re thrilled to announce our line-up of judges for this year’s competition.

 

Fred Wah – KLC  Adult Poetry

Fred Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan but grew up in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. He studied music and English literature at the University of British Columbia in the early 1960′s where he was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH. After graduate work in literature and linguistics at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the State University of New York at Buffalo, he returned to the Kootenays in the late 1960′s where he taught at Selkirk College and was the founding coordinator of the writing program at David Thompson University Centre. After teaching poetry and poetics at the University of Calgary for many years, he now lives in Vancouver and is Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate (2012-13). 

 

Rita Moir – KLC Adult Creative Non-fiction

Rita Moir moved to Vallican in the Slocan Valley at age 23. She has worked as a reporter and playwright, produced radio documentaries, and written four books of creative non-fiction, including Survival Gear (Polestar, 1994), Buffalo Jump (Coteau, 1999), The Windshift Line (Greystone, 2005), and in 2011, from Sono Nis Press in Winlaw, The Third Crop, about the Slocan Valley. The Third Crop is one of the three selections for the 2012 One Book One Kootenay celebration. Rita has lived and/or worked in Prince Rupert, Vancouver, Lethbridge, Edmonton, Sudbury, Minneapolis, Brandon, Freeport and Fargo.

 

Sioux Browning – KLC Adult Fiction

Sioux Browning is a screenwriter, story editor, poet and teacher of creative writing for UBC. Her produced screenplays have appeared on five Canadian television networks. Her literary work has been published in a number of journals and anthologies and has been short-listed for a Western Magazine Award for travel writing. She lives in an old house near the Rockies with her Sweetpea and some fuzzy quadrupeds.

 

Cyndi Sand-Eveland – KYCWC Gr 7-9 and Gr 10-12

Cyndi Sand-Eveland is the author to two novels. Her first novel, Dear Toni, was awarded the 2010 Silver Birch Express Award and nominated for numerous reader’s choice awards across Canada.  Dear Toni, was also selected by the Banks Street College of Education in NY as one of the Best Children’s Books of 2009 and by the Canadian Children’s Book Centre as one of the best books for children and teens. 

Her second novel, A Tinfoil Sky, was released in January of 2012 and has been widely re-viewed. She has worked with elementary aged children for many years as a teaching assistant and led storytelling and journal writing workshops. Cyndi has also worked as a freelance storyteller, children’s library assistant and sign language interpreter. When possible she takes the opportunity to travel throughout Can-ada visiting schools and libraries to read from her work. She cur-rently lives on a small farm near Nelson BC. Visit her website at: www.sand-eveland.ca 

 

“There’s a tremendous amount of writing going on in classrooms throughout the West Kootenays, and I am both honoured and ex-cited to be part of this event.” 

Reminder: This year’s competition deadline is 5pm, Nov. 10th
All entries and payments are online at www.kootenaylitcomp.com 
.

Liter airy Links ≈ Phil Mader

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Malcolm Lowry 

 

http://www.nfb.ca/film/volcano/   (nominated for an Academy Award, 1976)

 

Irving Layton

 

http://www.nfb.ca/film/poet_irving_layton_observed

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