♥
our Cassandra’s agony
torments
in poems of prophecy
and breaks our hearts
upon the stone of her insanity
she calls on death to visit one self-appointed night
and we, her guardian angels, wearied by the fight
still
we soldier on with all our might
©2012,poem,Jamie Dedes,All rights reserved * Painting/Cassandra by Evelyn De Morgan (1885-1919), U.S. public domain.
the unconscionable dance in the canyons of power,
lined with megalithic buildings, the edifice complex
of the spin-meister’s lie, that the demigods can do
anything – anything – walking this asphalt valley
a parade, flailing lemmings trussed and trusting their
die-cut dreams to the pitiless whim of the military/
industrial/medical alliance, whose war-cries are of
greed and arrogance, believing they’ll live forever,
today’s sovereignty, tomorrow’s guarantee. But it’s
all delusion – cultures die and the hope-crushing
architects of cuts and austerity measures are like
the rich man in the Lazarus story, there’ll be
some kind of backlash, some kind of hell to pay …
“I believe terrorism cannot be won by the military action. Terrorism must be condemned in the strongest possible language. We must stand solidly against it and find all the means to end it. We must address the root cause of terrorism to end terrorism for all time to come. I believe that putting resources into improving the lives of the poor is a better strategy than spending it on guns.
Peace should be understood in a human way, in a broad social, political and economic way. Peace is threatened by unjust economic, social and political order, absence of democracy, environmental degradation and absence of human rights.Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society. For building stable peace, we must find ways to provide opportunities for people to live decent lives..” Excerpt from Poverty is a Threat to Peace, Muhammad Yunus, Noble Peace Prize speech, 2006
© 2013, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; photo credit, 1930 breadine sculpture at the FDR memorial courtesy of Peter Griffin, Public Domain Pictures.net
Honestly, there are times
when the taste of baklava
finds my tongue and speaks to me
in the language of my grandmother’s hands,
when the honey and fresh mint in tea
vitalizes my very being ~
and I remember everything
. . . . . everything
even the scent of you, your eyes
the way we lingered over dessert,
tapered candles flaming wisps of hope,
your red roses wilting in a crystal vase,
dropping velvet petals like dreams
on the white damask of our forever
– Jamie Dedes
© 2012 poem and photograph, Jamie Dedes, All rights
A Man sleeping …
A Butterfly flitting…
Zhuangzi, dreamer of Butterfly,
ponders what joy there might be
in that tiny Butterfly brain, so subtle,
too subtle to be perceived by I or eye
Is it dreaming me? he asks.
Imagine the Universe engaged,
he thinks to himself, inside that flutter.
– thunder, a Cosmic Belly Laugh – Ho! Ho!
Then Zhuangzi knows: He is silent,
flitting from flower to flower in eternal spring.
– coming and going, going and coming –
This is called the Transformation of Things.
I love this allegory from The Book of Zhuangzi, one of the two greatest books of the Chinese mystical Tao. (The other book is the I Ching.) The allegory is about chi (qi), the energy of creation, which some might call God.
©2011, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; illustration courtesy of About Qigong.
after Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
January is on the wane
leaving behind early dark and champagne hopes
for the genus Rosa. Wild or tame, they’re lovely.
Garden roses need pruning, solicitous cultivation ~
Layer shorter under taller, drape on trellises
and over pergolas, the promise of color and fragrance,
climbers retelling their stories in ballet up stone walls,
an heirloom lace of tea roses, a voluptuous panorama
rhymed with shrubs and rock roses in poetic repetition.
Feminine pulchritude: their majesties in royal reds
or sometimes subdued in pink or purple gentility,
a cadmium-yellow civil sensibility, their haute couture.
Is it the thorned rose we love or the way it mirrors us
in our own beauty and flaw and our flow into decrepitude?
They remind of our mortality with blooms, ebbs, and bows
to fate, a noble death to rise again in season, after Lazarus.
Divinely fulsome, the genus Rosa, sun-lighted, reflexed ~
And January? January is ever on the wane.
© 2013, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved
Photo courtesy of morgueFile
The work that was the jumping off point for my poem is one by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1551-1695), who lived during the time when what is now Mexico was a part of the Spanish empire. Sor Juana was an ambitious writer, self-taught, and a Baroque poet. She belonged to the Order of St. Jerome. I am enamored of her work and find her life interesting. She was brilliant, independent and nonconforming.
Sor Juana was hungry for learning and was self-educated. From childhood, she set her own demanding educational goals. Unfortunately, the parochial male powers could not put the power of her mind together with her femininity. She suffered for that.
These three famous quotes of hers are telling:
“I don’t study to know more, but to ignore less.”
“One can perfectly well philosophize while cooking supper.”
“…for there seemed to be no cause for a head to be adorned with hair and naked of learning…”
For those who might be interested, here is her poem Rosa in Spanish and in English.
Rosa divina que en gentil cultura
eres, con tu fragrante sutileza,
magisterio purpureo en la belleza,
enseñanza nevada a la hermosura.
Amago de la humana arquitectura,
ejemplo de la vana gentileza,
en cuyo ser unió naturaleza
la cuna alegre y triste sepultura.
¡Cuán altiva en tu pompa, presumida,
soberbia, el riesgo de morir desdeñas,
y luego desmayada y encogida
de tu caduco ser das mustias señas,
con que con docta muerte y necia vida,
viviendo engañas y muriendo enseñas!
Rose, heaven’s flower versed in grace,
from your subtle censers you dispense
on beauty, scarlet homilies,
snowy lessons in loveliness.
Frail emblem of our human framing,
prophetess of cultivation’s ruin,
in whose chambers nature beds
the cradle’s joys in sepulchral gloom.
So haughty in your youth, presumptuous bloom,
so archly death’s approaches you disdained.
Yet even as blossoms soon fade and fray
to the tattered copes of our noon’s collapse –
so through life’s low masquerades and death’s high craft,
your living veils all your dying unmasks.
– Juana Inés de la Cruz
Illustration and poem in the public domain. Source of translation unknown.
each lively soul
worlds contained
a galaxy of one
our gases, our dust
our gravitational pull
our weak wills
our strong compulsions
our stark shadowlands
our gaudy stars
dancing toward infinity
– Jamie Dedes
© 2014, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved
we live on Turtle Island and turtle is my totem ~
she speaks in the easy way only turtle can,
as one who is at home in herself, at home between
her plastron and carapace, wisdom in her measured
gait, her introversion a model for freedom, for cutting
the nets spun of wars and deceptions . . .
she is the everyday re-enchantment of my solitary
cosmos, my solidarity with life, i read her pastoral
letters in green on green, the sweet grasses and seas,
she speaks of connectedness, the basic constituents
of enigma, wizardry; and in the insanity of the times,
how best to journey and retrieve this world’s soul . . .
she is the unrushed cure for nature-deficit,
that consuming affliction, the spawn of culture’s
back-lighted screens and advertising of every bilk
turtle healing is simple peace and master lessons in
self-containment, she draws me into my meditations
and back along the first path of Maka Ina, the forgotten
primal path of earth ways and feminine energies and
the rhythms of grandmother moon whirling me heavenward.
– Jamie Dedes
© 2013, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved,
Illustration courtesy of Gretchen Del Rio, all rights reserved
Her fate was set when she fell under the spell of his kind eyes and bigger than life personality. For his part, he loved her gentle ways, the fluid dance of her hands at work, the sensual swing of her hips as she walked to the market with basket in hand.
And so it happened that in 1948, with her father’s permission and her mother’s tears, they were wed in the old adobe iglesia where uncounted generations of her family had been married before her. Not many months after the wedding, she kissed her parents and siblings goodbye, took a long loving look at her village, and she followed her new husband north to los Estados Unidos de América. She was already pregnant with Clarita.
****
As the days and years passed, they settled into their routines. Sunday mornings were her husband’s quiet time. He stayed at home while Señora Ortega and Clarita were at Mass. In their absence he would occasionally put down his newspaper and stir his wife’s frijoles simmering fragrant with pork, a few bay leaves, onions and garlic. Last night: their Saturday ritual, she and Clarita had sorted and then washed the dried beans in cold water and left them to soak until morning. The child – fast becoming a young woman – took the time and care to do a good job of this. El trabajo es vertud. Work is virtue, Señora Ortega encouraged.
In the tradition of Señora Ortega’s own madre, la cocina was a place of teaching – about food, about life, about being a woman, about being human. “!Ten cuidado, hija!” Be careful, she would say as she demonstrated her almost sacramental sorting of the dry beans. It was an opportunity to teach Clarita the dichos, the proverbs, of her mother and grandmother and all the grandmothers before.
“Los frijoles son nuestra fuerza.” We get our strength from los frijoles, she taught Clarita just as her own mother taught her. Certainly the beans give the strength to our bodies, but also the strength to our character. There are lessons. “¡Aqui!” Remove these. Remove the wrinkled, the broken, the discolored or malformed. Remove them as you should remove flaws from your character. One bad frijole will ruin the whole pot. Taparse con la misma cobija.* … You will be judged by the company you keep. Be cautious in your choice of friends. Even the norteamericanos have such a saying: one bad apple spoils the bunch.
“Mama,” said Clarita, rolling her eyes after her mother’s latest speech. We are North Americans.” Señora Ortega’s brow furrowed when she heard this. She was given to worry about such reactions from her daughter. What of the child’s values? It is true after all. My daughter is American. What does this mean for her future, for our relations, and for us as la familia?
****
Soon Señora Ortega had to put her concerns aside. It was springtime. Easter was upon them and with it a visit from her husband’s sister with her two small children. Señora Ortega and Clarita were busy with preparations. The air in her house smelled of poblanos roasting and cookies baking. They put fresh linens on the beds in the guest rooms. They picked flowers from her garden and set them in vases around the house. She gave in and bought chocolate Easter bunnies too, the silly convention of this country, but the children loved them and looked forward to them each year.
Finally the honored guests arrived and the house was filled with the cheerful noises of los niños. The boy and girl were now old enough to learn to prepare beans and, on the eve of Easter Sunday, Señora Ortega gave Clarita the task of showing the children how to sort los frijoles for cooking. She looked on as Clarita explained the process. “!Ten cuidado, mis primos. Aqui! Remove these. Remove the wrinkled, the broken, the discolored or malformed. Remove them as you should remove flaws from your character. Remember one bad frijole will ruin the whole pot. Be cautious in your choice of friends. Taparse con la misma cobija. You will be judged by the company you keep. “Los frijoles son nuestra fuerza.” Los frijoles are our strength.
****
At some point, Señora Ortega’s husband had come to stand by her side. She realized he was watching her as intently as she watched their daughter. He put his arm around her and held her close. “You see, mi querida, she is a good girl and you are a good mother. It’s gonna be okay …”
“Am I that transparent,” thought Señora Ortega, but she sighed gratefully. All will be well. My mother was right. “Los frijoles son nuestra fuerza.”
* Taparse con la misma cobija – literally: to cover yourself with the same blanket, i.e. likely the same meaning as our expression “birds of a feather.”
– Jamie Dedes
© 2012, short story, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved. This story is a fabrication and not meant to depict any specific person or persons living or dead.
Photo credit ~ Schnobby via Wikipedia under Creative Commons Share-Alike 3.0 unported license
the memories have little substance
they flit and fly, pollen on the wind,
like the quick passing of a joyful birth,
the school years, the sweet trysts ~
a waving bridal veil . . .
. . . the way your love drained you
of your dreams just to fill yourself with him
. . . . . the epitaph of tears
only when yesterday becomes a story,
once upon a time, do memories
become memorial, a mourning brooch
forever warm upon your breast
©2013 poem, 2015 illustration, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved
“I always had this notion that you earned your living and that poetry was a grace.” Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), Irish, poet, playwright, translator, educator and Nobel Prize winner
I’m sure my friend, John Anstie, poet and renaissance man, The Bardo Group core team member, and editor of and contributor to Petrichor Rising (eBook and paperback), a 2013 poetry collection of The Grass Roots Poetry Group (GRPG), would prefer that I focused on the poems and the collection. The former feature-writer in me still loves a good story though. (Forgive me, John!) The coming together of this group and the publication of their collection is as good a story as any and better than most … and hence, I break my usual self-imposed word limit on posts. Read on … You may recognize yourself in some of this …
“I do accounting. I am a writer.” an employee corrected me when I introduced him as an accountant.
I spent many years in the employment and training field, serving in sundry positions and writing columns, feature articles and journal pieces ad nauseam about recruiting and job search, chosing careers, assessing post-secondary vocational education programs, structuring community programs for at-risk populations (read the poor and marginalized), as well as writing about labor and job market trends including changes evolving out of advances in technology.
Wherever I worked whether it was counseling, placing executives in career positions or teaching career development and job search to ex-offenders or people transitioning off welfare, I found the same thing. Scratch the surface of almost anyone and you will find an artist. Several of the poets to this anthology earn or have earned their living doing something other than writing. John Anstie talks about discovering his “inner poet.” At core, we are creators. This is a great truth about human beings.
It used to be that most evidence of creativity ended in storage somewhere: dresser drawers, file cabinets, attics or garages … until the accessibility of social networking and self-publishing via blogs, videos, blog radio and other venues. Now creatives have easy means to deliver their work independently and to find their own audiences, modest but genuine. No longer unknown, these poets and artists join the ranks of lesser-knows. They also have a wider opportunity to meet others with the same interests and values. Put the mix together – a wonderous serendipity – and the birth of productive collaborations …
“As far as I recall, it all started with freshly-baked lemon drizzle cake . . . ‘@peterwilkin1: Good Morning. Coffee & lemon drizzle cake, anyone?’ …. One may be forgiven for thinking the GRPG is an international social network-based association for the deep appreciation and virtual consumption of cyber cake and other comestibles. Indeed this is what they do, but they also do something else remarkable – they write poetry – delightful, delicious, scrumptious, tasty, and delectable at that, poetry.” Introduction, Craig Morris
Interview with John Anstie
© 2013, feature article, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved
Artwork and poetry quotes are the property of their creators
what must it be like for you in your part of the world?
there is only silence, i don’t know your name, i know only
that the fire of life makes us one in this, the human journey,
search and return, running through mud, reaching for the sun
like entering the ritual river without a blessing or a prayer
our eyes meet in secret, our hearts open on the fringe,
one breath and the wind blows, one tear and seas rise,
on the street where you live, your friends are all gone
the houses are crushed and the doves have flown
there is only silence, no children playing, no laughter
here and there a light remains to speak to you of loneliness,
my breath caught in my throat, i want to make it sane again
“Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.”
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), American poet, writer, and editor
– Jamie Dedes
© 2015, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; photograph courtesy of morgueFile
“A glass of absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world, what difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset.” Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Irish writer and poet
in the wilderness of those green hours
gliding with the faerie muse along café
walls virescent, sighing jonquil wings of
poetry, inventing tales in the sooty red
mystery of elusive beauty, beguiled by an
opalescent brew, tangible for the poet and
the pedestrian, the same shared illusions
breaching the rosy ramparts of heaven
© 2011, poem Jamie Dedes, all rights reserved
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Albert Maignan’s painting of “Green Muse” (1895) shows a poet succumbing to the green fairy (absinthe). Musée de Picardie, Amiens.
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silent, but for the cunning corvidae,
they of persistent caw, whoop and kuk,
they float on soft whimpers of wind
above the quiet fragrant grass
and all the while the pen spins ~
spins on spring when gentle colors
stir the blooming riot of garden
a fabled coalition of migrant birds
arrives to sit a spell, to catch a breath of
white jasmine on a breeze, it speaks the
tongue of aleppo … while pen weaves
a twine of words in the shade of a ginkgo,
siphoning stories from earth’s green waves
and that blue echo of peace called sky
© 2014, poem and photograph, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved
Writing in a far and broken country, my pen
knows its kinship with the dark forest, asks
direction of its trees, celebrates a quiet amity
over the din of plastic medicine vials, the 40-foot
serpentine specter of a cannula, the hiss and sigh
of an oxygen compressor amid layered silences.
We are named on a long list of regional poets.
The region is the sickroom where the palm and
birch in the courtyard know their meaning and
place. Lend your soul’s ear. The trees will speak
and tell you that we are found. We are here,
not lost in those vials but found in the hallowed
company of this dusty Earth on a shared vision quest.
Call it illness. Call it artful … Strike up the hill. Cry out
for the Sacred Dream, for the purpose of your life and
its confusions. A comforting Infinity breaks through
fierce grievings embraced. The great dream comes
to you. The trees come to you. They speak in God’s
tongue, which is – after all – your whispering heart . . .
Life gives, bequeathing the key to its wide and
wild Essence. Unlock the door. Listen … listen!
The voice is lyrical and trails records in blue ink.
“There is on this earth, what makes life worth living.” Mahmood Darwish (1941-2008), Palestinian poet … An observation as true for people who are occupied by illness or other distress as it is for a people who are living in occupied territory.
– Jamie Dedes
© 2008 poem, 2005 photograph, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved
at the grocery ~
Meeting accidentally in the wine section
you sip me shyly with gentle conversation
and read the label on my selection,
your hand brushes mine, a sensual appeal
It’s for drunken pasta! I explain,
you laugh and say you’d rather drink than eat it
your eyes are Wedgwood blue and hold a wistful smile
you imagine I’m something fine, a vintage port
you’re flushed with the fancied sweetness
I could drink you too, a sturdy Bordeaux
but I no longer deal well with hangovers
© 2012, “Hangover” Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; Photograph courtesy of morgueFile
To the frog at the door
if you kiss a frog, so I’ve been told
there’s a chance he’ll turn into a prince
a frog prince, which means you have
you absolutely have to love him
and i’ve loved a few frogs, at least
i think i have, they never became princes
nor did their love morph me into a princess
i’m still a cranky old crow, we are what we are,
loving frogs and crows isn’t transformative
….why should it be?
one woman’s frog is another woman’s prince
…….as for this old crow
………….she loves flying solo
…….not that you asked
© 2013, “The Frog Prince and the Old Crow” poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; Illustration ~ The Frog Prince by Walter Crane (1845-1915), U.S. Public Domain
there’s a portrait in February of percale sheets
and the tempting rondure of warm shoulders
tucked under a pink duvet and late mornings,
coffee in bed, playing your hips like the strings
of a harp, the lively marl of a true love’s honor,
soft, the whiff of spring, the meadow violets
their heart-shaped leaves and felicitous flowers
promise of summer peace in damask gardens
wealth of silver roses, tart lemons, frisky mint
finger tip the faded hillock of hair on your neck
and let go of all that is false and mean for this –
the warmth of our ardor, the trust in our kiss
– Jamie Dedes
© 2015, poem and illustration, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved
the gentle coasting of a blue dragonfly, and
this, the pulsing peace of a quiet afternoon,
Bach on the radio, dinner simmering
on the stove of my tranquility, my day
chasing night, my night chasing day,
rhythms caressing my face, love-bites
on the leg of my being, heart beating
at one with the ocean sighs and
only gratitude for the gift of life,
no more scandalized by the news of
death, baptism into heaven, whatever
that may be, but the reports center on
Kiev, Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan –
easy to foment flash-points for horror
easier to forget just how sweet it is
to breath with the sun and grow
with the cypress bending by the shore,
obeisance to the seas and sky and
living on the edge of Eternity: time to
give it up, give up strife for Lent, only
celebrate resurrections with steaming
sweet greens, scented with onion,
over shared bowls of rice, knowing the
the ground of being* is a feast-day of the heart
stirred by the breeze of Spirit winging
– Jamie Dedes
* “being” as in Tillich’s third role of being: Christ manifesting as the “New Being,” the acutalization of the work of the Holy Spirit (as I understand it and I’m not a student of theology or divinity except in a most casual auto-didactic sense)
© 2014 poem, 2015, photograph, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved
gentlemen of the old school
those devotees of Mary …
Mother of Christ, Handmaid of the Lord
seeing her in every woman
….. generously
even me – daughter, mother niece, friend –
protagonist, antagonist,
on-again off-again wife
simmering slowly in the broth of the cosmos
never quite done, never quite done
but they were, they were
gentlemen of the old school
© 2013, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved Photo ~ via Wikipedia and in the U.S. Public Domain
The BeZine 
