Three decades of poems by Ernest Lowe
The Nineties
go to The Voices of Children
Paradise
Where is Paradise?
Is it here
in the face of a
Spanish woman
enjoying each phrase
of the deep song of pain
she sings?
Here in an electronic eternity
revealed through
my VCR?
Ay! just clap
clapping now
in her
gypsy family circle,
smiles and olés
celebrating
the rhythmic art of our hands.
Where is Paradise?
Is it here
in my heart, eyes and ears?
In the resonance my mind finds
with
La Niña de las Peñas
Pastora
Pavanne
who 35 years ago
began to teach me
the joy of life well sung.
She sang during the Spanish civil
war
. . . especially then.
Where is Paradise?
Is it really at the end of history
outside of
life on this Earth?
May 4, 1990
Complexity on Bloor Street
On a trip between trips
to Arcosanti
a journey of synergy
we walk along
Bloor Street
warm June evenings
savoring the urban effect.
Costumed Morris dancers
waving white kerchiefs
in the air
before the Future Bakery
and its Ukranian sidewalk cafe.
A pattering artist
peddling his micro-murals --
"They have magnetic personalities
to stick
to your fridge."
A Jamaican blowing blues on his harmonica
before the ice cream
shop
in a first floor apartment.
A little bent woman
straight out of an old English cottage
exploring trash cans
in an alley.
Peruvians in the door of the Longhouse
--
far from the blackness
of the Shining Path --
smiling their dancing
plaintive music.
And the Audience!
Diverse colors and cultures,
angles of view
alternative realities
and true delusions
strolling together
interfolding
enjoying
this intense complexity
swirling past
the Future Bakery.
Toronto, June 1990
The Alba Madonna
I sit meditating
before the Adoration of the Magi
--
Fra Angelico and Fra Filipo Lippi
together captured this
joy
of Christ's birth
in a wonder
filled circle.
An echo of hands rise up in Hallelujah
here
. . . and here
. . . and here
in the crowd of shepherds.
Blacksmiths shoe the Magi's horses.
Children dance
on a wall
to better view the new child.
I sense another, also unable to break
away,
from this vision of the
brothers.
We exchange
glances but remain silent.
Galleries later I am caught by the same
scene,
this time by Botticelli --
Magi bowing to Child and Virgin
amidst Classical ruins.
"Look, the Magi
are the three ages of Man.
This one mature
. . . him aged
. . . and here
the young one."
It is my companion of the first Adoration,
speaking a gentle brogue.
We explore together, quietly noting
Joseph's sweet smile,
a Magi's horse rearing
with excitement.
I say, "Isn't this human nature too,
not just Auschwitz?"
He is Father Sean from Ireland,
here on a Sabbatical of
prayer and study.
I walk on alone.
Then another painting glows so intensely
I cannot break away --
Dosso Dossi's Aeneas and Achates on
the Shore of Libya.
The crowd of Trojan sailors,
two tall trees,
and the curving shore
all an Impressionist dazzle,
with the two heroes alone
still living in Renaissance clarity.
And again Father Sean stands besides
me.
"Father, I am so baffled
by evil!"
My hand sweeps around the bright scene.
"How,
when we have such beauty in us,
how do we choose
to do so much evil?"
"That's a hard one, son.
St. Augustine
wrestled with your question.
His answer,
Evil is a state of deprivation.
You
can only understand it
in the context
of the good.
It can't stand alone."
Then I come finally to Rafaello's Alba
Madonna,
again a circle,
a painting
I thought I knew well.
The Christ Child's translucent nakedness
reclines against
Mary's thigh,
holding a toy in his right hand.
His mother gazes serenely at the toy.
Young
John the Baptist,
clad already in animal skins,
looks up at the toy.
They sit upon wildflowers.
Orchards and fields,
farmhouses and forested hills
stretch off behind the three.
The Christ Child
is total peace
flowing
in a circle
of total peace
and the toy He holds
is
the crucifix.
July 1991, at the National Gallery
Theodore on the porch of the National Gallery
Forty-five minutes to wait for Allen
--
who never did plant trees for
the White House --
sitting on a bus stop bench
facing Constitution.
Homeless black guy approaches and I
stand.
"Don b'fray."
Face of a monster! Fire?
Nam?
One eye gone.
Mouth so burnt
his words are a puzzling blur.
"I'm not afraid. Here, Sir."
I hand him a ten
He holds it up to
his one dim eye
and smiles.
We shake hands.
"Hello, I'm Ernie."
"Mm Thrrrrr."
"Pleased to meet
you. Say it again, your name?"
"Amm Thdrrrr."
"Theodore?"
"Ssss, Thdrrr."
Rain starts falling
so I move to the porch
of the National Gallery.
"Don' bfray!!"
"I'm not afraid. Just wet."
He offers me his
bottle
and tells me his story
on the porch of the Gallery.
I understand one word in ten,
looking into his
one dim eye,
asking him to say it again
and again.
From time to time
fear does flit through my mind.
I might misunderstand
say the wrong thing to him
trigger an
attack.
I tell him my story
to relax from
the stress
of listening to words from a
ruined mouth
I can hardly understand.
Then he seems to tell me about
a man and a lie.
I look at the valleys down
his face
and hear
about a man and a bottle of lye.
He offers me his bottle.
Little white flecks of spit hit my blazer.
I move
to the side, out of range,
and tell him how Ely, my bro
in Atlanta
was a freedom fighter in the Sixties,
freedom fighter even now.
Theodore
points to his chest,
"Freem fire too."
He waits with me, telling his story.
I understand
one word in ten,
and look into his
one dim eye
wondering when was the last time
anyone had looked into his face
or listened to his words.
Allen's car pulls up and we shake.
Theodore holds on
tight to my hand,
telling me one more story.
I pull loose.
He offers me his
bottle.
June 8, 1992
Jellies
"This existence of ours is as transient
as autumn clouds.
To watch the birth and death of beings
is like looking at
the movements of a dance."
The Buddha, as quoted by Sogyal Rinpoche
Tiny clear Crystal Jellies,
Purple-striped Jellies
moving with slow, undulating
grace
through bands of light and darkness
and outside the glass, a young couple,
faces close, share this dance.
Comb Jellies, delicate diamond spheres,
release their long fronds
to gather plankton.
An older woman remarks
to no one in particular,
"That's so amazing!
You know, they have no brains, no hearts."
I think, her life too, from egg to grave,
would move with such grace
if I had eyes
of long vision.
Sea Nettles,
saffron diaphragms, pulsing -
plumes and threads
swirling through
the water
as they slowly descend.
A father tell his young kids
about the painful
stings
of these jewels,
but the youngest
dances smiling in
a circle,
her coat overhead as a mantle
fingers
undulating in the air,
quietly
singing,
"I'm a jelly baby.
"I'm
a jelly baby."
Grace & Ernest Lowe May 13,
1993 at the Monterey Aquarium
Seeing through the smoke
Monday morning Martha called:
"Turn on CNN. They're
burning Mt. Carmel!"
Winds swept the flames through the gray
compound in twenty minutes,
tanks circled the firestorm as 17 children and 60 adults --
some believing they were with the Second Coming --
burnt in a
manmade hell.
The smoke from their bodies filled my
mind all week --
my metaphor for the time:
craziness governed by insane logic.
The smoke from Mt. Carmel swirls into
the smoke from Sarajevo,
Kabul, Malaysian rain forests . . .
Winds of breakdown sweep the flames around our blue Earth.
I spiraled down out of creativity and
compassion --
the only anchors for my sanity --
down
into the infected space in my inner ear
where fifty-six years ago I lived in fear and suffering,
believing this pain will never end,
believing I can do nothing to stop this pain.
Then I slowly staggered back up the steep
slope of awareness
speaking to students on Earth Day
with
a ten inch redwood seedling as
my metaphor for the time --
a time stretching forward one hundred generations,
the life span of this little plant
with light green new needles bursting forth,
this little plant that could still be living in Thirty-nine ninety-three
if we learn
again how to live in Nineteen ninety-three.
After the talk I bought a honeycomb.
Grace and I read Rumi, Li Po, Rilke . . .
And finally I remembered
I am a poet who writes to gain vision,
eyes clear enough to see through
the smoke of my time.
April 26, 1993
Dance all night, trouble-maker
My dad, Virgil, died of lung cancer in
1973.
My mom, Esther, died of pancreatic cancer
in 1982.
Now Laurence, you bastard,
you come at me with a cancer
they haven't even identified
yet.
Yeah, so you hung out with the Monkey-wrench
gang,
laying plans to blow up the dam
across Glenn Canyon.
Yeah, so you were headed out to dance
all night
when I called to be compassionate
last Saturday.
I know you're not any where near
finished
with the trouble you've
set out to make.
But we talked last night and you sounded
tired and scared
and I kept going around being
silent,
my tongue tied up with other cancers I've lived with
and they died from.
Damn it, cyberbro, look at all the trouble
you're kicking up
for this poet with his
loaded baggage.
I'm afraid my healing for you isn't
getting out of the gate,
so I've invited Herman, an avatar
in Colorado, to pray for you
and Peter
and Trudy in Portland
to work
in the higher reaches of groupware
and Ed here in Berkeley --
who once set out to heal the holocaust
and make peace in Israel --
I know he's
got room in his heart,
even though it just attacked
him.
"Om Laurence is healing Om", is
spinning around
two hundred and sixteen thousand
times an hour
on the prayer wheel of my hard disk.
Shit, man, I'm even planting
some redwoods
so the wind in their needles can sing you well.
I know you're not any where near finished
with the trouble we've set out
to make.
You ready for some
new assignments, Coyote?
February 16, 1993
The next January Coyote was howling at the moon and still dancing all night!
He was a down-winder, growing up under radiation plumes from the Nevada weapons test site and from the Hanford and Idaho reactors' "experimental" releases.
The cancers returned in multiple sites late in 1995. Even then, in one period of remission he was roller-blading five miles a day.
Laurence Evans died in March, 1996.
Coyote lives!
Between coyote's jaws
Poking through dry coyote shit on the
desert with you
pulling out the bones of his prey
. . .
Coyote leaped
and crunched
and a desert
rat's life was complete
between his jaws.
But we squatted there
reflecting upon his life and his
bones
and here they show up again
complete but
continuing on
in a poem to a coyote
who's struggling
to feel his life complete.
Coyote leaped and crunched
your life there
complete
between your
jaws.
March 6, 1996
p.s. I've heard that completion and death
are two very different things,
especially for coyotes.
Ruby My Dear
Birch bark
shining white
against the dark
night.
Sesshu . . . Sesshon
Tales well told
passed hand to hand
warmed this heart
healed
it’s world around hurting.
Sesshu . . . Sesshon
Monk
in an airport
dancing in circles
his black fingers
playing blues
in the air.
Sesshu . . . Sesshon
March 12, 1994
Coming home from Brownsville
A long dry patch it’s been,
months with no poems,
just industrial prose
trying to green a world
that may be dying
(dying for humans that is,
Gaia will survive us.).
Below me, west of Odessa,
mile after mile of oil well drill sites
weirdly strung on straight dirt roads,
a giant’s grid upon the land.
Here’s a milky green lake,
some sink hole for the wastes.
Coming home from Brownsville.
Talked with good souls
trying to clean up the border:
Jackie and Marie, weaving a web of people.
Miguel, a young Mexican architect,
his padre, Antonio, thrilled to think
the factories they design
could live and breath with the Earth,
not against it.
Will it happen?
Now the pilot says we’re going over Almagordo,
White Sands where we first tested the
bomb,
tested without knowing for sure
how far the chain reaction would go.
Coming home from Brownsville.
Wandered through a remnant yesterday,
thirty-two acres de boscaje con las
palmas,
Sabal Palms, Texas Ebony, healing David’s
Milkberry,
Armadillo, Jaguarundi, Chachalaca .
. .
hundreds of beings who once
lived the banks of the Rio, mile after
mile.
Wind was blowing hard above,
palm fronds whirring and clacking.
On the ground the forest so thick
there was barely a breeze.
“. . . all similar areas along the river
have been cleared for agricultural use.”
There, in that tiny fragment,
I felt the rip in wholeness we made,
I felt the good souls patiently preserving,
restoring, extending this precious patch
of life.
Coming home from Brownsville.
We fly over the foothills east of Sacramento.
Everett Butts lives there
and back home I find he said,
“What nature is doing on its own
I’m doing with it.
I tell people I have an affair with
the land going here.
It’s damned important to me.
It’s part of my substance,
my living and breathing.
What I feel here is the earth
and what flies and walks over it
and burrows under it.
The more I see and feel and understand,
the more I like it.?”
(I quote Everett Butts from Louise Lacy's excellent newsletter, Growing Native. LadyLFAB@earthlink.net )
February 4, 1995
Connections
She sees the connections
and because she sees, she is the
connections.
Praises and blessings must be buried
somewhere deep in
there,
though the
story knits together so much
I cannot stop hating.
She sees the connections . . .
Cyanide stuns rare fish
so nouveau
riche Red Guard industrialists
can dine on the lips
of the fish (200 bucks a plate).
Their factories are poisoning air, land,
and sea.
The reefs of the Philippines and Indonesia
are mostly dead.
And because she sees, she is the connections.
Atmosphere and oceans are warming.
Red tides, cholera,
malaria, aids, ebola . . .
A record year for
hurricanes.
The futures markets discount all futures.
Derivatives drive all values in all
markets.
Gene's angel
gives his investors
fifty per cent return each year,
gambling in a bubble
of money,
a global bubble.
She sees the connections.
Praises and blessings
must be buried
somewhere deep in there.
Our deck is green with Tanbark Oaks,
Madrone, Manzanitas,
Redwoods, Weeping
Needle Pines . . .
all in their pots,
depending for now upon me
to water them and to find a piece
of land to reach roots down.
Some may live for centuries.
Seeds of Mariposa
Lily, Fritillaria, Trillium, and Brodaiea
are sprouting.
Five, six, seven
years before they'll bloom.
Because she sees, she is the connections.
November 5, 1995
In our canyon
Here in our canyon
first light shows through high fog.
The birds' dawn chorus
ripples and eddies through
Redwoods, Monterey Pines, Madrones,
and Eucalyptus.
Martha tells me the singers include
Morning Doves
Great Horned Owls, Spotted Towhees,
Stellar Jays, Western Fly Catchers .
. . and more.
Out back Coyote's Grove,
thanks to El Niño's double dose,
has grown to twenty feet.
(1993 when he first said "cancer"
and I planted those Redwoods
for him in the yellow clay
. . . and in a poem.)
Rattlesnake Grass circles Sheenas's gravestone,
a stepping stone,
and the Monkeyflowers
white, orange and deep brick red
are showing their faces
next to Coyote's Grove,
his last erection!
The voices of children
Beginning in the summer of 1998 I started letting myself write poems in the voices of children, some that I know, some that I simply imagine. Here are a few of these poems.
Like only a woman
Fourteen years old in South Central
Don't come at me
with your jiveass social worker
"child mother" bullshit.
That pain cut through me
sharp as any woman feels.
I cried joy
like any woman cries
when they put Msthune
on my breast.
I love my babe,
like only a woman
can love.
I'll Grow You Some Monkeys
Seven years old in San Pablo, California
I planted a pinch of seeds like fine
pepper last week
I watered them and now look, look!
There's teeny dots of green all over
the peaty top
hundreds of them!
I'm growing monkey flowers
for my schools new forest.
Mama tells me we had monkeys back home
in the hills of Laos.
She gets tears on her cheeks
and I pat them away
I'll grow you some monkeys, Mama.
Don't cry.
Wings fast still
Nine years old in Surrey
I know this place
so quiet
I lie down on green moss
so still
the sun sees green into me
through alder leaves
so quiet
the moss soaks through my dress
soaks green into me
so still
hair across my eyes shines green into
me
so quiet
Anna's hummingbird
hovers above me
wings fast still
my green throat shines
my long beak sips nectar
from white honeysuckles.
You can't buy me
Thirteen years old in Bangkok
I float here
safe on the ceiling
smelling blossoms
like sweet orange spiders
a scent piercing my brain
holding me happy happy
up here
away from him
down there.
Sweet orange spiders
flowers climbed on the vines in our forest
all around my village
far away from him
down there
I can't feel him
I can't feel him
Safe on the ceiling
I can't smell him
Sweet orange spiders
You can't buy me!
The time before time
Eighteen years old in Alexandra
My brother was my hero,
my champion, my chief.
Nights he ran through the township
organizing our bras
setting the moment to toi toi
to strike
even to bomb.
But then Tshemba our story teller,
I loved his tales of the time before
time,
we suspected him.
We thought he storied in Voerster Square
police recorders catching every breath.
My brother himself hung the tire
'round Tshemba's neck
lit the petrol.
I was there
I screamed, tuned to
Tshemba's shriek of terror.
I can't remember his stories
his tales of the time before time.
My brother
he was my hero
my champion
my chief.
Life for Life
fifteen years old in Edmonds,
Washington
I watched
with
my Dad
a film on the elephants
and the poachers,
killing them for their tusks.
I cried, "I want to see them
before they're all gone!"
and my Dad said, yes.
I came home
knowing
I'd give my life
to save the elephants
the tigers.
Since then
I've planted trees
in South Africa . . .
Vietnam.
I'll give my life for life.
Five-fold woodland star
Put to sleep by terror
a child is waking
a child is calling
waking to cooling bodies
waking to blood
waking to the wake
of terror.
He calls his
mother and father
lying dead and cut beside him
his call rising to a piercing
scream
like a tiger in a Chinese cage
being cut alive
for its
healing parts.
Sword fern and poison oak
along this path I walk
with Martha.
Awakened to terror
the child preserves himself
holding this terror
deeper than memory
a shriek in his marrow
a false knowledge of who he is
or can ever
be.
The child maintains the Universe
pivoting around this tiger's scream.
Two kinds of Forget-me-nots by the path.
They say this flower
first sprouted
from Mother
Mary's tears.
The child is alone
more alone
than a shocked
and battered prisoner
in solitary
the shriek in his marrow
veiled and veiling
the Self of the Universe.
False Solomon's Seal
in bloom below the path.
The child is a man
burning like a Brazilian forest
burning the lianas
the orchids
burning all
that veils his self
his self
deeper
than the shriek in
his marrow.
Amazing Grace!
The man who was a child
put to sleep by terror
the man who was a child
waking and calling
the man who was a child
screaming like a tiger
in a Chinese cage
this man knows now
he is the height
of the blue sky
reflecting from the still surface
of the
deepest sea.
Oceanspray
Star-flowers everywhere
and five-fold Woodland
Stars!
May 3, 1998
Collecting a life
i In Bogies Café
Ten years to go, maybe fifteen?
Sixty fourth birthday last week.
Just went bankrupt,
a small pop in the global bubble.
Backyard is blooming,
Poppies, Monkeyflowers, Lambs ears,
Farewell to Spring.
Me and the squirrels
have planted enough trees there
to make two or three forests.
In 1961 I took a photo of a farm worker,
one among thousands,
a Japanese woman planting grapevines
on the West Side,
a pearl-gray sky shining upon her,
home country straw hat and scarf bowed
to her task.
That picture is on the wall behind my
computer
where I answer e-mails from South Africa,
Japan, Austria, Brazil . . .
where I send a poem singing of the birds
in our canyon,
the plants and trees of this place.
In 1989 I sent a poem protesting and
grieving
the slaughter in Tiananmen Square.
A day later an online Finn nailed it
to the door
of the Chinese Consulate in Helsinki.
In 1956 I married my Amazing Grace,
in 1958 miraculous Martha joined us,
in 1998 the marriage still gets better,
our daughter is our deep friend.
ii On our deck
Surrounded by two hundred or more native
trees and plants --
Pallid Manzanita, Leather Oak, Weeping
Needle Pine, Silk tassel,
Doug Fir, Red Bud, Big Leaf Maple, even
a bonsai Redwood --
I think 'Now's the time to find the
school to plant a California forest.'
Landlord came by this morning, may have
to sell the house,
can't afford to keep it. (This was his
wife's childhood home.)
We can't afford to move.
Maybe its time to throw away a bunch
of my life,
the debris of visions and dreams that
stayed immaterial
except for the boxes and files full
of dust --
the ecology-based R & D action tank,
the psychedelic run-amok amusement park,
Viable Systems International! Global
Advantage Corporation!
But maybe there is no waste if all my
unhatched visions
are the compost for my three books in
print,
(fifty thousand diabetics learning to
live well, from one)
compost for the sustainable town business
plan going out to investors,
compost for the hundreds of poems moving
through the internet.
Back in the early sixties I taped the
farm workers too,
Grace working with me late into the
night, editing and mixing voices,
Martha asleep in Studio A with Hyskie
Bear.
We let them tell their own story through
radio montages.
"Sometimes you work a day. Sometimes
you don't work nothin'.
That's how we get our food. If you
work a day you can get your money --
a few cotton. If you chop beets sometimes
you don't find any.
If you don't find any you just come
home and you don't get nothin."
iii Sipping from a crackleware cup of vodka, middle of the night
In the 70s, early 80s, I was a transpersonal
counselor
til I worked myself out of a job giving
my clients their own fishing poles.
Hell, all I ever did was meditate with
them anyway.
About to take on hundred billion dollar
megamergers
just because life is so precious, life
is so sweet
we don't need to engineer it! Damned
fools!
In 1968 Grace gave me an astrological
reading for my 34th birthday.
Bill Farthing saw in my chart
a cup turned on its side. "Watch
out," he said,
"Everything that flows into your
life
flows right back out. No seed held
back
for the next season."
Thirty years later I've still not learned
that lesson
or is that turned cup simply the form
of my life?
Not one cent for retirement or even
next months rent
yet a Redwood I planted a year before
he saw that cup
is now sixty feet tall.
Bill tends garden in a Tibetan monastery
on the coast.
This afternoon Martha and I planted Mimulus
cardinalis,
Scarlet Monkeyflowers, along Sausal
Creek.
A Girl Scout troop came along the trail
above the banks
and my daughter told them about these
plants I'd grown
and about stream restoration in the
city.
Some of them will come back to help.
Martha will have her Masters next year,
her thesis not some theoretical enquiry
but a master plan for guiding Sausal
Creek closer to its true form.
I guess this is a poem without end, just like the cycle of water.
June 1998
The Banquet ---- a Sunday in Autumn
Steel-cut oats with Monuka raisins and
Moroccan apricots
Golden Dragon oolong
Bach cantatas, Ein'feste burg ist
unser Gott
Wie schön leuchet der Morgenstern
Monserrat Figueres singing a Sephardic
song
Por que llorax Blanca Niña
Sunday's NY Times online describes the
World Bank's Annual Meetings as--
"The banquet across the river from
the burning village"
The Chieftains in Galicia
Toasted multigrain sourdough
with extra sharp Canadian Cheddar and
Stilton
Madrone, Coffeeberry, Liveoaks, Bay Laurel
at the interface with second-growth
Redwoods
The temperate air soft and hazy
Scarlatti harpsichord sonatas magnified
by Avison into Conceri Grossi
The Brazilian brothers Assad with Scarlatti
on enhanced guitars
Calachortus, Brodeia, Tritilea, soap
plant,
brought out from their Summer drought
Capellini, fresh tomato salsa, chicken
sausage, fresh basil,
steamed cauliflower with lime juice,
chocolate mousse with apples
Telemann trio sonatas
Haydn's quartet op 77 #1
Bartok's 6th quartet
Handel's Crudele Tirrano Amor
Atlanta takes the fourth game from the
Padres after losing the first three
Bare-staged Lear enunciated very poorly
with great passion
Alvaros Mutis' Maqroll, the Gaviero,
crosses the barrens on muleback.
In Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit
John Stink's ghost wanders Indian Territory
Eastern hunters shoot 327 eagles to
be stuffed for collectors
Belle Greycloud rages and weeps
Kissing, caressing, and coming, the love of 42 years together
Amber brandy and this list
The banquet across the river from the
burning village.
October 1998
I want to be there again
I asked Sally "Do we need to work
through despair?"
speaking of Honduras
where
the waters of that abstraction
"global climate change"
washed away
six thousand people
twenty years
of "development"
Dole's and
Chiquita's banana plantations.
Two years of
rain fell in four days.
Honduras where those waters
tore Louisa Isabel Arriola's son from
her arms
and swept her out to sea.
Louisa lashed together a raft from roots,
wept day and night
for her drowned family
pleaded with a duck
"Little duck, send a message that I'm alive.
Take me to my people.
Take me to the shore.
Why don't you take me
so that I can fly somewhere with you."
Sally answered my question about despair
"I lost my son, two years old.
That year was holy.
I lived in the spirit.
I want to be there again."
November 10, 1998
Louisa's words are from an AP story by
Ken Guggenheim, datelined November 9, 1998
Defy the dark view
The dark view of man, easy to argue
not just from the killings outside my
door
but from the will to kill
I find within my gentle, tree-planting
hands.
So why do I defy this dark view,
flaunt a vision of our nature
where we invent gods
from our true depths?
Is that simply my sentimental invention?
A psychedelic flashback?
I heard a Black lawyer today
who saved an innocent man
from Alabama's death row.
He spoke very fast,
passionate for the holiness of each
life
even the lives of we who are guilty.
There's a center in Denmark
where those of us who tortured
our fellow human beings
can go to end our nightmares
heal the rip we made in life's single
web
reinvent ourselves from our deepest
nature.
Is that why I defy the dark view?
December 1, 1998
Black Nativity
From Gospel harmony,
joy shouting,
syncopated Silent Night
to Amen, Amen,
Amen,
Allen Temple's Chantateer Choir,
in African robes
arms
raised to heaven,
they danced
the Joy
our Christmas cards can only say in
glitter.
I say they were dancing to His beat,
swinging down the aisles
to meet us in the lobby
"Thank you for coming,
Brother."
"Thank you for being here, Sister."
smiling the Joy of
Christmas
being the Joy of Christmas.
1998
This was the17th annual performance by
Oakland's Allen Temple Baptist Church of Langston Hughes' inspirational
Black Nativity
No line of sight!
Vision has to be at least a cone,
no, not even that
but a sphere
extending to that space far beyond
our ordinary view.
What a lie
to look out straight ahead
when the possible future
is all around us
though most improbable
to our usual line of sight.
This sphere
of vision and compassion
is the real world.
How else can we survive
the savagery
of our laser cutting eyes.
January 1999
Crossing Currents
"As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
. . ."
Gerard Manley-Hopkins
Round river rocks
striped with bands
of sea-bottom sedimentation
grays and earth oranges
vivid river wet rocks
sedges prick up between them
mist
beads condense
at the tips
focusing sunset's rays.
A red dragon fly
hovers in last light
just
above
the river's crossing currents.
March 16, 1999
The Invisible Dynamic
I can visit web sites in Belgrade
as my "tax dollars at work"
send tommyhawk missiles
smashing into that city
wiping out strategic
vacuum cleaner factories.
I can e-mail the web master
say, "Hi Friend.
Keep your head down.
Cover your ass.
I'm sorry
I have not yet learned
how to control our madmen.
Good luck with yours!"
April 2, 1999
Easter 1999
Every year at Easter I look out to see
how I am enacting the Passion.
This year what I see first is that I
am bombing Yugoslavia and Iraq.
I join streams of refugees crossing
the borders into makeshift camps.
I evacuate a hospital in the center
of Belgrade
as my cruise missiles enflame the neighboring
Ministry of Interior command center
Every year at Easter I look out to see
signs of the rebirth of Spirit.
In this light I offer a new poem, one
reflecting my daughter's lifework —
restoring ecosystems.
The Earth as One's Very Self
Martha walks down Palos Colorado Creek
noting the Happy Woman ferns,
Giant Trilliums, Solomon's Seals, and
Fairies' Bells
Rings of Redwoods where giants once
stood.
She touches the glaucous sheets
where fern spores begin a new lifecycle
with such an unfernlike phase.
She looks up, hearing the call of a
Hutton's Vireo
the clack clack of a Ruby Crowned Kinglet.
"That large patch of Ninebark up there
—
I've looked down on it from Sunset
Trail.
There's Big Leaf Maples along this
side.
I'm starting to see how it all knits
together."
Palos Colorado and Shepherd Creeks
join in Sausal Creek
running on through Fruitvale to the
Bay.
This is Martha's watershed.
She knows its eco-history —
how the Ohlone co-evolved with the land
how the fires they set helped balance
the forests, grasslands and chaparral.
She knows the plants and creatures
the patterns of each stream's course
each site where the Pallid Manzanita
grows,
so rare, so precious!
At the end of our walk
we find a hillside of Checker Lilies,
Fritillaria lanceolata
a new addition to Martha's family.
She does a dance cheering the discovery.
What a gift!
To know the flows of life
through a few wrinkles of the Earth
as one's very self.
April 3, 1999
e-nature
I walk Amy down through Huckleberry
to Skyline trail
then the switchback
all the way to San Leandro Creek
this by phone to her in Seattle.
Don had e-mailed me
and a dozen others
her quest for
Mimulus cardinalis
the monkey flower
Martha and I found five years ago
on a flat by this creek.
Through the net
we now know
a dozen sites
on both sides of the bay
Amy's doctoral research
the adaptation of two species of Mimulus
growing at different altitudes.
I asked her how she chose
these California natives
"Do you live here?"
"No, but my professor really loves them."
Long before the world wide web
we spoke of the web of life.
Now we've sprouted
this augmented nervous system
(first funded by the war machine)
and we use it to link Amy
to eco-systems along
creeks
where the plant her mentor loves
blooms now in scarlet glory
humming birds with pollen on their throats
sipping its nectar.
August 3, 1999
p.s.
No instructions for this game
For the Wedding Day of Ghette and Frankie
At Christmas in 1997
my Lady Grace
asked for a
computer game
named Myst.
It was just like marriage—
beautiful images,
lots of buttons
to push,
but no instructions!
What a wonderful trip of learning we
had
moving through the mysteries,
the underground
spaces,
the tracks and pathways,
gazing at the stars and
pulling the levers
to find out what would happen.
Grace and I were married
by a judge on his day off,
him wearing levis and tennis shoes,
no cord and veil
bearers in attendance,
just us and our folks
looking out at the blue Pacific.
That was 43 years ago
and we still go on learning this game,
meeting
each other in new ways,
in new places and
spaces of love.
We send magic and mystery to you,
dear ones,
and the blessings of our years
that keep getting better.
Ernie Lowe, with Grace
The shore
Many waves of books
have swept the shore of my mind
poems of Hopkins,
Li Ch'ing Chao, Neruda
stories of Borges, Calvino, and Yourcenar
novels of Mann, Durrell, Morrison and Fuentes
Stafford's cybernetic visions
and
Fuller's tensegrity
holding images, ideals, and seeds
in dynamic
tension.
The dancing words of whirling dervishes
mostly silent roshis
avatars and bodhisatvas
the waves
of their koans
break the shape of the dunes in my mind
all, making me a recognizable chaos
of responsiveness.
Yesterday I repotted new bonsais
a Sarawa cypress, two leptosporum
and a golden
larch.
They'll find their true form
when I am long dead.
September 15, 1999
Constructing Reality
i
I meet a tiger in the jungle of my mind
(jungles were places colonialists pillaged).
The jungle tiger eats me as game.
I meet a tiger in the rain forest of
Borneo,
climb a liana into the tree tops.
I hang with fruit bats,
sleeping until the tiger moves on
so bright in the rainforest of my mind.
ii
Pearl Harbor day and my computers aren’t
Y2K ready.
Yet I e-mailed tidings of joy around
the planet
The dawning of a new age at the top
of a redwood named Luna
in the shoes of Granny D walking across
Ohio.
I constructed electronic hope,
desperately weaving a few straws into
gold,
carefully selecting them for alchemical
elegance.
Shiva is the stage and the scenery
the actors and the audience
the play and the playwright.
Shiva Hum
iii
She walks along the trail to Limantour
Spit
along the base of Mount Vision
rounds a bend
and faces a cougar fifty feet away.
She looks with wonder at the cougar
the live oaks
the manzanita
wisps of fog from Drake’s Bay.
The cat returns her look
and walks on up the mountain.
December 7, 1999
This clear space
Ten years ago I struggled to live in
the clear space
between hope and despair.
Chinese tanks
had crushed the Goddess of Freedom
in Tiananmen Square.
Now, just eleven days from the turning
of the century,
a year short, actually,
of the Pope’s new millennium,
I am filled with hope,
growing feelings of hope
that
we are at a great divide.
I fear I’ve lost that clear space
where true actions flow like water.
But I’ve walked, at sunset and twilight,
the high desert land of San Cristóbal.
I’ve watched Julia Butterfly climb down
from
the redwood she named Luna.
Only two years of her young life up there and
Maxxam bowed to her pure will.
I’ve breathed the perfume
of tear gas and pepper spray
on the streets of Seattle
and I’ve gone home
to campuses and neighborhoods
organizing around the world,
calling my brothers and sisters
to the great task.
I walk the skies
the waves
the rivers and
the fields.
I am the deserts and the forests.
No need for hope or despair.
I am this world
this universe
this clear space.
December 20, 1999