Without Lifting A Finger

My fourth book of poetry, The White Bird, is now available at Amazon. Thus far: only the Kindle eBook is available (the paperback is still in the oven but will be out soon). The eBook will be free to download from Friday, March 21 to Tuesday, March 25. Thanks to Jen Webb (Meniscus) for the blurb: She's described The White Bird to a T. Note: Just checked: The paperback version of The White Bird is now available at Amazon (3/19/2025). #rlswihart #thewhitebird #poetry #newbook #3/18/2025 #Amazon.com

Yes you do. You know how to say thank you. The boy sat staring at his plate. He seemed lost. The man was about to speak when he said: Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff. We know that you saved it for yourself and if you were here we wouldnt eat it no matter how hungry we were and we’re sorry that you didnt get to eat it and we hope that you’re safe in heaven with God.

They stood on the far shore of a river and called to him. Tattered gods slouching in their rags across the waste. Trekking the dried floor of a mineral sea where it lay cracked and broken like a fallen plate. Paths of feral fire in the coagulate sands. The figures faded in the distance. He woke and lay in the dark.

He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke (The Road)

This compulsion for transformation is still with me today, as if the decay of everything in existence were simply the other half of the world, without which nothing could be imagined.

“Abravanel was never impressed by nationalism. At all. Anywhere. He was totally unimpressed by a world divided into hundreds of nation-states, like rows and rows of separate cages in a zoo. He didn’t know Yiddish—he spoke Hebrew and Arabic, he spoke Ladino, English, French, Turkish, and Greek—but to all the states in the world he applied a Yiddish expression: goyim naches. Gentiles’ delight. Statehood seemed to him a childish and outdated concept.”

The neighbors called him an Arab-lover. They called him Haj Amin, the Grand Mufti. And some people called him a traitor, because he justified, to some extent, the Arab opposition to Zionism and because he fraternized with Arabs. And yet he always insisted on calling himself a Zionist and even claimed he belonged to the small handful of true Zionists who were not intoxicated with nationalism. He described himself as the last disciple of that Zionist visionary Ahad Ha’am. He had known Arabic since his childhood, and he loved to sit surrounded by Arabs in the coffeehouses of the Old City and talk for hours on end. He had close friends among the Muslim and the Christian Arabs. He pointed to a different way. He had a different idea altogether. I argued with him. I stuck to my view that this war was sacred, a war of which it is written, ‘Let the bridegroom go forth of his chamber,’ et cetera. My child, Micha, my only son, Micha, might perhaps not have gone to this war had it not been for his...

  A bit of a tease: you'll have to go to the Poetry Foundation to read the whole poem (see link below). PF has posted two of my poems now ("Totem" and "Completely Possible," both previously appearing in Quadrant Magazine). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/1578897/completely-possible #rlswihart #poetry #completelypossible #poetryfoundation #previouslypublishedinquadrant

Judaism and Christianity, and Islam too, all drip honeyed words of love and mercy so long as they do not have access to handcuffs, grills, dominion, torture chambers, and gallows. All these faiths, including those that have appeared in recent generations and continue to mesmerize adherents to this day, all arose to save us and all just as soon started to shed our blood. Personally I do not believe in world reform. No. I do not believe in any kind of world reform. Not because I consider that the world is perfect as it is—certainly not, the world is crooked and grim and full of suffering—but whoever comes along to reform it soon sinks in rivers of blood.

“There’s no such thing as women’s mysterious preferences. Where did you hear such nonsense? I have no idea why couples separate, because I have no idea how they get together in the first place. Or why. In other words, it’s no use asking me about women’s preferences. Or men’s, for that matter. I have no womanly insights to offer you. Maybe Wald—maybe you should talk to him about this. He’s an expert on everything, after all.”

‘Now, Sir,’ quoth he, ‘have friars such a grace, That none of them shall come into this place?’ ‘Yes’ quoth the angel; ‘many a millioun:’ And unto Satanas he led him down. ‘And now hath Satanas,’ said he, ‘a tail Broader than of a carrack is the sail. Hold up thy tail, thou Satanas,’ quoth he, ‘Shew forth thine erse, and let the friar see Where is the nest of friars in this place.’

Just the part of "At the Seashore" that delighted me (first strophe): The pain-people think that God is the god of joy, the joy-people think that God is the god of pain. The coast-people think that love is in the mountains, and the mountain-people think that love is at the seashore so they go down to the sea.

He was a shepherd, and no mercenary. And though he holy were, and virtuous, He was to sinful men not dispitous1 1severe Nor of his speeche dangerous nor dign1 1disdainful But in his teaching discreet and benign. To drawen folk to heaven, with fairness, By good ensample, was his business: 1But it were1 any person obstinate, 1but if it were1 What so he were of high or low estate, Him would he snibbe1 sharply for the nones2. 1reprove 2nonce,occasion A better priest I trow that nowhere none is. He waited after no pomp nor reverence, Nor maked him a 1spiced conscience1, 1artificial conscience1 But Christe’s lore, and his apostles’ twelve, He taught, and first he follow’d it himselve.

Challenging myself with some "Modernist" Japanese poetry in translation. Not easy to find (I wanted Kindle not paper), not easy to decide (I wanted a woman poet). Anyway, I hit on Chika Sagawa (translated, somewhat resurrected, by Sawako Nakayasu), and, in reading the intro, I've also learned a bit about the poet and translator Keith Waldrop. From the intro: To this day, I have only taken one formal workshop in literary translation, taught by the great poet and translator Keith Waldrop in the spring of 2002. Beginning to translate can be a fraught endeavor—there is a seeming abundance of potential errors, pitfalls, and failures. There is an assumption that one should be translating “the very best” texts in the most accurate, “faithful” rendering. Waldrop, brilliant iconoclast that he is, eschewed most conventional wisdom and encouraged us to translate what we most wanted to translate, and to “make it better in the translation”—he refused the conventional thinking that a t...

Missed a little Gray Flycatcher by me not long ago, so I had to go after this one at Riverdale Park along the Santa Ana River. I was afraid I'd chosen the wrong day to go because of the wind, but the faithful little bird kept to its favorite "leafless tree by the back gate" and all I had to do was wait for the wind and sun to cooperate. Happy Friday!!!🎈 #rlswihart #anaheim #santaanariver #newyearsstillyoung #gobirding #goforawalk #writeapoem #grayflycatcher #flycatchersofinstagram  #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2025🎈

Allecto ignited in rage. The challenge still on his lips, a sudden shuddering seized him, eyes fixed in terror, the Fury was looming up with so many serpents hissing, so monstrous her features now revealed. Rolling her eyes, fiery as he faltered, struggling to say more, she hurled the man back and reared twin snakes from her coiling hair and cracked her whips and raved in her rabid words: 530 “So, I’m in my dotage, am I? A doddering wreck too spent to see the truth? I and my warring kings— a mockery of a prophet, am I? False alarms? Well, look at these alarms! I come to you from the nightmare Furies’ den, I brandish war and death in my right hand!” With that she flung a torch at the prince and drove it home in his chest to smoke with a hellish black glare. A nightmare broke his sleep and the sweat poured from all over his body, drenched him to the bone.

Let me clasp your hand, my father, let me— I beg you, don’t withdraw from my embrace!” So Aeneas pleaded, his face streaming tears. Three times he tried to fling his arms around his neck, three times he embraced—nothing…the phantom 810 sifting through his fingers, light as wind, quick as a dream in flight.

Here the enormous whirlpool gapes aswirl with filth, seethes and spews out all its silt in the Wailing River. 340 And here the dreaded ferryman guards the flood, grisly in his squalor—Charon… his scraggly beard a tangled mat of white, his eyes fixed in a fiery stare, and his grimy rags hang down from his shoulders by a knot. But all on his own he punts his craft with a pole and hoists sail as he ferries the dead souls in his rust-red skiff. He’s on in years, but a god’s old age is hale and green.

 

But first go down to the House of Death, the Underworld, go through Avernus’ depths, my son, to seek me, meet me there. I am not condemned to wicked Tartarus, those bleak shades, I live in Elysium, the luminous fields where the true and faithful gather. A chaste Sibyl will guide you there, once you have offered the blood of many pure black sheep. And then you will learn your entire race to come and the city walls that will be made your own. Now farewell. Dank Night wheels around 820 in mid-career, cruel Dawn breaks in the East, and I feel her panting stallions breathing near.” With that, he fled into thin air like a wisp of smoke.

Then Juno in all her power, filled with pity for Dido’s agonizing death, her labor long and hard, sped Iris down from Olympus to release her spirit wrestling now in a deathlock with her limbs. Since she was dying a death not fated or deserved, no, tormented, before her day, in a blaze of passion— Proserpina had yet to pluck a golden lock from her head and commit her life to the Styx and the dark world below. 870 So Iris, glistening dew, comes skimming down from the sky on gilded wings, trailing showers of iridescence shimmering into the sun, and hovering over Dido’s head, declares: “So commanded, I take this lock as a sacred gift to the God of Death, and I release you from your body.” With that, she cut the lock with her hand and all at once the warmth slipped away, the life dissolved in the winds.

Rereading Virgil's Aeneid (Fagle's translation). What I remembered is that many of the best parts were related to Dido.;) * Dido, her lips parted, pores over their entrails, throbbing still, for signs… But, oh, how little they know, the omniscient seers.  What good are prayers and shrines to a person mad with love?  The flame keeps gnawing into her tender marrow hour by hour and deep in her heart the silent wound lives on. Dido burns with love—the tragic queen.