OPEN-ENDED POEMS

I never write open-ended poems meant

to be all-encompassing, or accessible to all, 

replete with striped wheelchair on-ramps, 

and neon-vested service dogs sniffing the luggage.

You’d think a poet would make it easy 

for the reader, but that’s never the point, is it? 

However, I suspect those little poems harbor dreams 

of grandeur to titillate the psyche, perhaps stretch 

the intellect, or maybe even surprise the emotions. 

But my poems are naked weather balloons of truth 

stretched taut over the throats of escaped lines. 

So, picture these words, vapid little mouth-breathers, 

up late at night, and drooling, gathering like zombies, 

shuffling from grave to yard, in search of spare brains, 

an easy fix, limping clichés circling a Hallmark card, 

not a divine spark of meteoric brilliance among them. 

No two tinder stones rubbed over the cold campfire.

They are no Rhodes Scholars seeking status.

Call them cowards, cheap floozies, and shapeshifters—

they’re not ambitious seekers of fame,

nor do they want to take a stab at redefining 

the great I am that haunts us all. 

5/31/23 Write On! with Susie Terence , forthcoming in Spectrum. well, I guess the poem is not forthcoming. After all it is the editor, Dan Campbell took down the blog, so now it is once again unpublished.

Ancestor dream

Moonlight fell like slivers of light on the sea, as the ship circled the island. She gathered up her carpetbag to disembark, not that she had very much by way of possessions to begin with. She had with her a sewing kit, and Irish lace to earn her keep. Luckily, she wasn’t alone. Her brother Joe looked after her, but he soon he would leave her  to ride the train from New York to Battle Mountain, where her uncle and cousins would meet her with the wagon. He would work on the boats and come to her by way of Galveston months later. She clutched the old carpetbag to her chest, the stars overhead wheeled a brilliant mantle over the desert sky. She wanted to sing about the halo she saw around the sun. That sundog of music filled her with wild dreams. Then the low lying fog that muted all sound, spoke of other futures, and no one would hear her silent screams tinged with fire, her earthly inheritance, or the lyrics of blood coursing through the generations that she would beget.

5/24/23 Write On! with Susie Terence

Leave-takings

I was born with wanderlust. When I was a child, I would traipse off into the woods and hike up the ridges of Mt. Barnabe to see Elephant Mountain and Tomales Bay cleaving the land like a saber shining in the distance. Since then, I've traversed many landscapes the world over and for that I am grateful. 

One summer, when I was working in a small village deep in the Swiss Alps, I involuntarily threw my arms open wide as if to encompass the sublime majesty that left me breathless. Whenever I am overwhelmed by raw beauty, I open up my arms as if to embrace the landscape.

To anchor the self in place and time—if only just for a moment—that is my one true religion. I’ve done something similar with my own childhood landscapes, my ritual involves greeting the landscape as well as saying goodbye. Perhaps it is also a form of gratitude.

I once taught an old lover how to embrace the land. It was so exhilarating and liberating to acknowledge the intangible like that. As we hiked the long ridges that traversed the coastline, we opened our arms wide with impromptu hugs, kissing the vast landscape, saying I love you. I love you. A ritual that he continued to cherish long after we had broken up. 

When a Soviet friend had to return to the USSR when his visa expired, I was surprised to find there was also a Ukrainian custom of leave-takings—or saying goodbye to places you’ve been—which included bidding adeiu to my little cabin. 

It was somehow a fitting reminder to acknowledge the importance of departures. When you say goodbye to a house as if it were an old friend, you acknowledge its hospitality and shelter. It doesn’t need to be your house, it could be a place you've stayed, a place where the walls have protected you from the vagaries of the world.

And the house offered us refuge from our ourselves. Yes, I know, a house is an inanimate object, but it both shelters and cradles us in its arms like a mother. In that moment, it becomes not a house, but the idea of home. Something I learned while living in the USSR—and it seemed a fitting ritual. 

I can’t say there were many places in the Ukraine I wanted to embrace. The vast breadbasket was flat as a pancake all the way to the horizon and beyond—except for the desecrated kurgans, tumulus mounds punctuating an ancient landscape carpeted with sunflowers and wheat. 

At the steep ravine of the Bibi Yar, Stalin’s secret burial chasm, I wanted to weep even before I knew the backstory of the atrocities that had happened there, what was inhumanly possible. I said a goodbye racked with sobs for the eroding debris—bones of the unnamed dead hidden from the world in a mass grave.

Ditto that in Iona in the Hebrides as well—for entirely different reasons—the holiness of St. Columba's abby was graced with filtered light. I was letting go of something so profound, it was nearly nameless. It was as if I were shedding a lifetime of grief. The death of my grandmother, my mother. The absent father. 

Maybe it's a form of hiraeth or saudade. An overwhelming homesickness, more than nostalgia, it’s a longing for a place you cannot return to—the soul harboring equal parts of grief and love. As sobs racked my body, I was grateful that the holy community of Iona tactfully looked away, they understood the personal conversion of psyche.

The idea of leave-taking dates back to the 12th c., to receive permission from a liege lord to formally depart, as in fare thee well—I’m off to the holylands. As I made ready to leave, I was reminded of a saying I coined as a form of closure while on the steep slopes of Huayna Picchu, where I had left talismans: a lock of hair, and milky quartz from our hill in Northern California. For my grandmother, I said, as if bearing witness.

I instructed my friend, Always remember to say goodbye to the places you've been. Cherish them, say goodbye, for you will never pass this way again. 

And with that, I kissed the landscape goodbye.

5/18/23 Mill Valley Library non-fiction workshop with Sarah Broderick

A MEADOW OPENS

Here, a meadow opens with arms outstretched, 

where the meadowfoam and field iris 

paint the eye into carpets of color. 

The cattle work the grass and low to each other, 

they are far from the police state of cities and self. 

They peacefully graze, while we plan and strategize, 

ever vigilant to dangers, perceived, or otherwise.

5/17 Write On! with Susie Terence

Pandemic freewrite

Ghosted, we were lost. A splash of blue on the canvas of the sky. The birds took to the air, the raiments of spring, so much relentless beauty in the midst of all this darkness.

We clung to our sanity in any way we could. We took to our minds. Our inner sanctum. Our inside worlds flourished in a hostile world where the faceless enemy waited, ambush at every encounter. 

Despite everything, I needed to take care of Sam. I was rich in responsibility for his safety, my care provider job knew no other boundaries, and so we persevered. 

Which saved us was ourselves, alone. The psyche explored new boundaries and took no hostages, only ourselves. The floor of darkness waged with open borders, we were refugees all.

Life during a time of COVID

We all erred on the side of caution from this unknown disease that arrived from a distant shore. We were unschooled astronauts suiting up to face an invisible foe shining in the dark. We relied upon caution, where every encounter could prove to be fatal. We experienced stranger danger and friendly fire. Suddenly ordinary actions were potentially lethal. We could not see the enemy, it was unnamed and faceless. We saw danger everywhere. The gas pump, doorhandles, cardboard boxes, even the mail was suspect. We hunkered down and hoarded toilet paper. We came to selfish blows over our own asinine priorities. The fear was palpable, it was like the time Chernobyl blew, and we all hid indoors. Only that danger could not be avoided. The late April rains brought lethal isotopes to our doors, and as we watched the rain fall, we knew that the eaves of our houses or the metal roofs of our car offered no protection from the invisible fallout. Then, there was the nightmare of Fukushima. But despite everything, we survived, though we couldn’t see the enemy glowing from within the cellular walls. During Covid, we didn’t know the face of the enemy. It too was nameless, though it had an acronym and a number. We also learned that the enemy was us. I knew it would be a long time before the world as we know it would be safe to return to, some semblance of normality was beyond reach. It was a long wait. During the barrage, we turned inward. We examined the star charts etched on the cave walls. We didn’t realize that the tools of resilience were embedded within us, and as we explored the unplumbed depths of our collective psyche, we arose like singed phoenixes, and then we turned our dark isolated realms into global villages, and the airwaves created an electronic renaissance studded with starlight. We thrived in that limelight, despite everything.

5/10/23 Write On! With Susie Terence

San Geronimo Valley Spring arts show, May 6- 21, Mercury in Retrograde

I’m not sure what year I am on now, but I have created new art for the San Geronimo Valley Community Arts Center Spring Arts Show every year since at least 2018. It keeps me in the game in a manner of speaking. 

Besides, the SGV art center is my auld alma mater. Literally. I went to third grade in the art gallery, once part of Lagunitas School before it was decommissioned as the Spanish style building wasn’t earthquake proof. Tuesday was both Bank Day and Hot Dog Day and hotdogs cost a nickel. I saved up my pennies to buy those nitrate-laden dogs, but they didn’t love me—I remember a bout of midnight projectile vomiting.

Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald tune was from an Irish dirge

Yesterday, on Beltane, Gordon Lightfoot died. When I was writing an blogpost about Bobby Sand’s songs Back Home in Derry, I took a lot of flack for saying that he did not steal or copy Gordon Lightfoot’s melody, Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, because that old Irish tune already existed. Bobby Sands was in solitary confinement during the time he wrote that song, he would not have had access to Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad, but he certainly would have been familiar with the County Clare slide, most often used as a fiddle tune jig, The Road to Lisdoonvarna.

In several recent articles, I found that Lightfoot had acknowledged his use of the Irish tune. “I already had a melody in my mind and it was from an old Irish dirge that I heard when I was about three and a half years old.” Why couldn’t I find that information back in 2013 when I was writing the Bobby Sands story?

Finally, I found a quote from Gordon that supports my theory. I wish I had found this quote when I was writing my blog post, Old Tunes, New Licks. It would’ve saved me a lot of grief. I wrote:

The melody of Canadian folksinger Gordon Lightfoot's The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, recorded in December 1975, seems to suggest a similar pattern. What came first, Lightfoot's melody of The Wreck of the Edmund FG, or the Irish melody associated with Bobby Sands' Back Home in Derry?
I think what happened is that the melody itself (not Gordon's fabulous song lyrics) was based on an older Irish dirge—after all the ship had an Irish name, Fitzgerald, so an Irish melody was fitting. Also, many Canadian folksongs are from the Irish and Scottish folksong repetoire.
During the 1960s and 70s folksingers were raiding traditional music wholesale—Irish music was the hardest hit—most North American singer-songwriters did not credit their sources. At least two of my folk heroes Judy Collins and Joan Baez noted their folksongs as "traditional," but as Behan noted, Bob Dylan was among the most arrogant of songthieves.

The Lightfoot obituary went on to say: 

“The biggest came in 1976 after he [Lightfoot] read an article in Newsweek about the the sinking of the bulk carrier SS Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975. He called the epic maritime disaster song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

“It was quite an undertaking to do that. I went and bought all of the old newspapers, got everything in chronological order, and went ahead and did it because I already had a melody in my mind and it was from an old Irish dirge that I heard when I was about three and a half years old….I think it was one of the first pieces of music that registered to me as being a piece of music.” From Gordon Lightfoot, Canadian Folk-Rock Troubadour, Dead at 84 , Yahoo

After I wrote this piece, I found out from Mudcat the name of the Irish fiddle jig was The Road to Lisdoonvarna. Old melody. Full circle. Someone else said that Christy Moore set the poem to music, not Bobby Sands. Now that is ann angle I have not thought of as I understood it to be Bobby Sands’ melody as well. All the Google links suggest that Christy Moore borrowed Gordon Lightfoot’s tune. Egad! Circular file. Either way, it was an Irish tune shared across the sea. RIP Gordon Lightfoot. Safe passage.