TO LOOK FOR SALT
by Meg Campbell
'The Way Back' The Kotare Press, New Zealand 1981

For a long time -
for a thousand births and deaths
I have dropped pebbles
at the edge of the world, dear heart,
but never a sound returning.
The centuries of waiting have been terrible.
You sent me here
in the beginning
to look for salt
(or it might have been gold)
because it would heal us:
we had no water on our planet.
It is so long ago that we have forgotten
where we came from.

Wars and a poisoned earth
make us afraid.
We are at the outskirts of the farthest galaxy -
I was the little sister, do you remember?
You sent me furthest because I had the bravest heart.
I need you to remember me now.

"A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time to love, a time to hate
A time for peace, I swear it's not too late"

Pete Seger

THE COMMON WOUND

We have come so far,
yet we have so far to go,
before we will see the road
that brought us here,
with true eyes
and open hearts.

We cannot be whole until everything is owned.

We can keep the book of our journey,
on a dusty shelf,
in a back room,

or, . . .

we can liberate ourselves,
and most of all,
the children.

We must look starkly
into the face
of our own darkness.

Bring the book of our days,
into the morning light,
approach it as you would a tender wound.

Approach these wounds of our history,
gently,
as if coming upon sacred pools of wonder.

Look back in silence and see freshly:

See the Christian thrown to the lions,
for following the prophet of Nazareth.

See the woman of Salem--
who would not bow down before the image of Christ--
but only to the moon and to the stones--
who, because of the magic of herb and incantation,
suffered a similar fate as He.

See the day when the skin of a Huron man
would fetch half a dollar,
and see the night at Sand Creek,
when men in blue
rode in on Black Kettle's camp,
the dying of babies
still in the womb,
never to see the light of day.

See the Black man,
hunched over,
picking cotton,
the tell-tale signs of the bull whip upon his back,
only to keep going,
only to keep going,
for his dreams of Africa.

See the Irish
wandering
across a soggy landscape,
burned from their homes,
tongues stained green
with the grass of hunger;
the sacred earth
withholding her harvest.

We have come so far,
and yet we have so far to go.

---

Close the book of our days for now,
and return it to rest.
Look into the future,
the book of days we have yet to write,
for the Golden Age is ahead,
not behind.

See the Indian, the Buddhist, the Sufi, the Hindu,
the Jew, the Muslim, the Pagan Witch,
the Protestant, the Druid, and the Catholic,

joining hands and hearts,. . .
paying homage to the sacred trees. . .
converging upon a site. . .
coming together in peace. . .
anointing one another with prayer.

See a rain of a thousand days,
washing away the blood and the hate
from different lands,
cleansing,
cleansing,
cleansing Gaza Strip and Northern Ireland,
Bosnia and Vietnam,
south central L.A. and Baghdad,
Buchenwald and Hiroshima,
cleansing Tiananmen Square,
and Wounded Knee.

I long for the days when we will see
all the earth as our Holy Land,
all peoples as the Chosen Ones.

We have come so far,
we have so far to go.

from BUILDING FENCES IN HIGH WIND: POEMS OF LONGING

by Frank MacEowen (c) 2000
(copyrighted, unpublished)from Building Fences in High Wind: Poems of Longing,
(c) 2000 Frank MacEowen
(copyrighted, unpublished)

Hello friends.

I pray that the pen is truly mightier than the sword:

www.poetsagainstthewar.org

Click on the link for Index of Poems

Search under: M

Three of my poems from Building Fences In High Wind, by Frank MacEowen

I also encourage you to submit your own. I believe it was Seamus Heaney who once said, "Everyone has at least one poem within them."

Recommended Reading:
In Absence of the Sacred, by Jerry Mander, Sierra Club Books.

From TRIBUTE TO THE ANGELS
Offered by Gearr

Invisible,
indivisible Spirit,
how is it you come so near,
how is it that we dare
approach the high-alter?
we crossed the charred portico,
passed through a frame--doorless--
entered a shrine; like a ghost,
we entered a house through a wall;
then still not knowing
whether (like the wall)
we were there or not there,
we saw the tree flowering;
it was an ordinary treee
in an old garden-square.

H.D. [Hilda Doolittle, London, 1944]

EVERYONE SANG

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-greem fields; on--on--and out of sight.
Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun;
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away...O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done...

Siegfried Sasson 1919

BROTHER FIRE

When our brother fire was having his dog's day
Jumping the London streets with millions of tin cans
Clanking at this tail, we heard some shadow say,
"Give the dog a bone"--and so we gave him ours;
Night after night we watched him slaver and crunch away
The beams of human life, the tops of topless towers.
Which gluttony of his for us was Lenten fare
Who Mother-naked, suckled with sparks, were chill
Through cotted in a grill of sizzling air
Striped like a convict--black, yellow and red;
Thus were we weaned to knowledge of the Will
That wills the natural world but wills us dead.
O delicate walker, babbler, dialectician Fire,
O enemy and image of ourselves,
Did we not on those mornings after the All Clear,
When you were looting shops in elemental joy
And singing as you swarmed up city blocks and spire,
Echo your thought in ours? Destroy! Destroy!

Louis MacNeice, London, 1944

ISIS WANDERER

This too is an experience of the soul,
The dismembered world that once was the whole god
Whose broken fragments now lie dead.
This passing of reality itself is real.
Gathering under my black cloak the remnants of life
That lie dishonoured among people and places
I search the twofold desert of my solitude,
The outward perished world, and the barren mind.
Once he was present, numinous, in the house of the world,
Wearing day like a garment, his beauty manifest
In corn and man as he journeyed down the fertile river.
With love he filled my distances of night.
I trace the contour of his hand fading upon a cloud,
And this his blood flows from a dying soldier's wound.
In broken fields his body is scattered and his limbs lie
Spreadeagled like wrecked fuselage in the sand.
His scull is a dead cathedral, and his crown's rays
Glitter from worthless tins and broken glass.
His blue eyes are reflected from pools in the gutter,
And his strength is the desolate stone of fallen cities.
Oh in the kitchen-midden of my dreams
Turning over the potsherds of past days
Shall I uncover his loved desecrated face?
Are the unfathomed depths of sleep his grave?
Beyond the looming dangerous end of night
Beneath the vaults of fear do his bones lie,
And does the maze of nightmare lead to the power within?
Do menacing nether waters cover the fish king?
I piece the divine fragments into the mandala
Whose centre is the lost creative power,
The sun, the heart of God, the lotus, the electron
That pulses world upon world, ray upon ray
That he who loved on the first may rise on the last day.

Kathleen Raine, 1948

MERU

Civilisation is hooped together, bought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality:
Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye Rome!
Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest,
Caverned in night under the drifted snow,
Or where that snow and winter's dreadful blast
Beat down upon their naked bodies, know
That day brings round the night, that before dawn
His glory and his monuments are gone.

W.B. Yeats, 1934

Call and answer

by Robert Bly

Tell me why it is we don't lift our voices these days
And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed
The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?

I say to myself: "Go on, cry. What's the sense
Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!
See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!"

We will have to call especially loud to reach
Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.

Have we agreed to so many wars that we can't
Escape from silence? If we don't lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.

How come we've listened to the great criers - Neruda,
Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass - and now
We're silent as sparrows in the little bushes?

Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.

Posted at http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/

UPRISING OF THE SOUL

We Are Here
Because the world we imagined,
the one we’d always counted on
is disappearing.
the sun has become cancerous
and the planet is getting hotter.
children are starving in the shadows
of yachts and economic summits.
there are already too many planes in the sky.

We’ve come to tell you
there’s something else we want to buy.
What we want, money no longer recognises,
like the vitality of nature, the integrity of work.

We don't want
cheaper wood, we want living trees.
cheaper engineered fruit,
we want to see and smell the food growing in our own neighbourhoods.

We are here
because a voice inside us,
a memory in our blood, tells us
you are the blind tip
of a dark wave that has forgotten its source.

We are here
to defend and honour
what is real, natural, human and basic
against the rising tide of greed.

We are here
by the insistence of spirit and the authority of nature. If you doubt for one minute the power of truth
or the primacy of nature
try not breathing for that length of time.

Now you know the pressure of our desire.
We are not here to tinker with your laws.
We are here to change you from the inside out.
This is not a political protest.
It is an uprising of the soul.
Brit Eckhart

IF THERE IS A LIGHT SOMEWHERE

If there’s a light somewhere,
Turn it on;
If there’s a lantern to be held high,
Strike the match;
If there’s a candle near the bed,
Let it burn through the night,
For the Forces of War march
Hand in hand
With the Soldiers of Lies.
The talking machines blare untruths
As they pretend to unearth secrets,
Which are the corpses they have buried themselves.

If there is a breath of air called peace,
Let it seep from the crack where it is hidden;
If there is a Woman’s Way,
Let women chant it now,
For we grow ever more fearful
As we feed the maw
Of a great furnace of hate.
The talking machines show us pictures of the dying
And say we must kill to prevent more death.
We must use bombs and missiles
To preempt them from using weapons of mass destruction.

If there’s a lamp to be lit,
Give me a spark to carry to it.

Armies amass on the dark plain,
Waiting;
Harness bells and armor faintly ring;
A man shifts in his saddle;
In the darkness there is a sigh.
Along the edges of the dark plain,
Armies amass,
Waiting.
Men swear softly;
Men gird their courage for victory;
Men count the heads of the enemies they will slay
And bless the god who rides with them to battle.

What holds at the center of the circle?
A tree as old as time?
A dolmen older than time?
An infant, newly cut from its mother,
Drawing its first breath
As a million feet set their spurs
To a million blood-red horses?

If there is a light,
Light it now.
Let the Hermit come out from his cave
Aglow with it.
Let the Avatar come in from the desert
Burning like a bush with it.
Let the Infant stand and raise his hand
In a blaze of holiness.

Momma,
If there’s a lamp to be lit,
Bring an ember from the hearth…
Set it to the wick…
Breathe softly as the darkness creeps away
Taking all these ghouls and madmen with it.

If there’s a lamp to be lit,
Spark me.

RoMa Johnson 2002

THE MAGIC FIDDLE

--for William and Anne
and all the others
who left the land they loved--

A hidden place exists
beneath the planks;
the planks of wood
that made up our floor.

It was there,
in that hidden place,
where father would hide his fiddle,
his magic fiddle,
from the "black and tans."

They would storm our house,
strip us of the colors that made us,
take the pipes,
stop the dance.

But on a certain eve,
when they were known to be far away,
Da would lift the plank.
He would lift the well-worn wood we walked on,
and remove the heart of our home
to let it beat again.

Under a gentle touch,
the mastery of fingers
that ached with longing,
the young-man-spirit
within the old man,
broken by both control and high rent,
would stand liberated,
for just a fleeting time.

A tear in his eye,
a smile on his weather-cracked face,
he would remember. . . .
He would remember his freedom.

Then,
with the smooring of the fire on that night,
the magic fiddle would descend again
into the silent hold beneath the floor,
keeping our secret,
our life,
his joy.

The planks are what we walked on.
The fiddle is what held us up.

from Building Fences In High Wind: Poems of Longing,
by Frank MacEowen (c) 2000
(copyrighted, unpublished)

A WALL AT CRAWFORD RANCH
--in honor of Jingonsaseh, the Iroquois Woman of Peace--
by
Frank MacEowen
www.celticwisdom.org

Nah-now-see-muk,
the old woman,
sits quietly,
nibbling on old bread crusts,
sipping tea.
She eats
like the birds of winter.

A burning in her heart,
she looks out
at the vista of the world.
It is her view,
soft, and powerful.

From a tar-paper shack
at Akwesasne,
crow's feet
around her eyes
usually reveal
the spirit of joy;
strawberries and clover,
birchbark baskets,
laughing children
skittering along gravel roads,
dogs in tow.

Today
the light
has faded
from her face.

Her weather-worn hands tremble
beneath an invisible weight.

Nanna's house,

like Jingonsaseh's before her,
is a house of peace.
Resting between two warpaths,
it is a site
where warriors long ago
observed an ancient code.

'When in the land
of the Woman of Peace,
leave all your weapons outside;
leave all your weapons behind.'

On crooked feet,
aided by a crooked stick,
Nanna ambles to the fire.
Cedar needles tossed onto open flames,
and her eyes turn to see visions
in the unseen horizon.

She falls silent,
the antler of a deer in one hand,
a 'belt of knowledge' in the other.

A prophecy spirals forth:

O Great White Father in Washington;
go to war
without the Women of Peace behind you
and
seven generations yet unborn
of your own seed
will curse your name.

Act,
without the Good Mind
and a wall,
bearing many names,
will be built
upon the land
you call home.

IN A DARK TIME

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odd with circumstances? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks--it is a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Theodore Roethke, 1964

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