Yom Hashoah

Today is Yom Hashoah, The Jewish Remembrance Day of the Holocaust. I wanted to write a little background on the poem that's below. I'm a Newfoundlander. Our province was an independent state until 1949 at the close of the war when we joined Canada. The main industry has always been fishing. At the outbreak of WWII many Newfoundlanders volunteered (there was no conscription in the state), in a lot of cases because it was a good paycheck at a time when our economy was in bad shape (still is today). People actually signed up because it meant that they'd get a new pair of boots, a luxury very few Newfoundlanders had known. Some of the first Allied soldiers that helped liberate the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen were from my home and it left quite an impression on them and on the collective memory of our people. This poem is based on accounts I've heard of that experience. This piece was posted a little over a month ago but I was inclined to repeat it today, and was encouraged to do so by a friend of mine, Lynn. I hope anyone who stops through here today will take a moment to think about lessons that we should learn from a terrible time in human history, and how we can all be more aware of atrocities that persist up until this present moment.

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BERGEN-BELSEN

We were fishermen
from a quiet place.
Poor, but strong --
we'd seen holds
bursting with the catch,
snow-shoe hare
snared, wrenching,
begging for a cracked neck.
We'd seen remnants of caribou,
paunched, quartered, putrid.
We'd seen Normandy,
been butchered and exploded,
smelled detritus in our nostrils,
heads leaning to the hail
raining down
like lightening zippers.
We crossed country
wearing half-khaki grime.
We saw bombed out cities
painted Kilroy.
We died and we cried.
We killed and we died.
That our journey should end
with so grisly a sight
writhing before our eyes
like cod below deck,
how can we go to sea again?
We were fishermen.

A Path by the Water -- for B.B.C.

Waves rolling on the shore; simple, unashamed
of etching arcs and curves on the coast.
Its language is all its own,
different from mine;
not full of conjecture;
meaning no harm
and no good by
lapping shanti,
lapping shanti,
shanti.
Cresting
air and sea spray;
a flowing infused mist
rolling seemingly gently like
hundreds of horses on cobble-
stone paths the high water mark
lined with beached driftwood and twine.
Waves rolling on the lucid shores of time:

shanti, shanti, shanti.

Spare Change

I walk down the streets and hear the same words repeated day after day, “Spare change?” I dig deep, coming up with quarters, nickels and dimes. I take them with me from the dish in the porch at home, the place everyone drops their coins on the way in the door, what was left over from coffees and bus fares, from the bakers and butchers, the pay phones and vending machines that for some reason found them unacceptable – the weight was wrong. Some of them faded. Some new. The taste of a thousand hands and machine oil, the million miles traveled by the penny to become...

“Spare change?” I dig deeper. Beneath the sods and sewers and subway lines, beneath the sleeping bags in the alleys, the shopping carts rattling with bottles leading shoeless Joes down unnamed streets. Beneath the woman in front of the liquor store who claims she wants bread. Beneath the kid on every corner with a cardboard sign saying, Made a mistake... just want to go home. Under the junkie who turns down a free sandwich, seemingly ungrateful for your great act of charity, his stomach too withered for solid food now can only accept Ensure shakes and...

“Spare change?” I run my fingers along the seam of my pocket, coming up with flakes of tobacco set free from the pack, some lint. I have nothing more to give for the cold hard fact is that change comes only from within, and not from the beggar, not from the down-trod and homeless, not from the ones who've slipped through the cracks, but from you. You who are rich in happiness and in health and in gold. You who feel a vain form of pride when you lower yourself to the level of those you think are beneath you because they sit on the sidewalk, your brothers and sisters, your forgotten family. For in this life we are all one and truth be told it is they who are loved by the God and you who must dig deep for... spare change.

Hier j'étais riche en bonheur et aujourd'hui je suis pauvre en l'or.
Hier j'ai suivi la mèche du vent par l'air et aujourd'hui je marche avec les ailes cassées.
Pardonnez-moi.
Laissez-moi ne pas vous trahir.
Laissez cet esprit venir à moi.
Mais envoyez-le dans la paix ou pas du tout.

Choose your own adventure -- take 2

The thing with this form is that there are only two options at the end of each section so it's not fully inclusive... basically you would have to be invited to write a section... that's why I asked that one of the two choices links back to me... so that I could invite all of you in due time... the way I envision it as long as the links run to the particular post for each section, time shouldn't be a problem...

I asked Human Being to write the choice ASK THE BOY WHY HE'S ON YOUR MOUNTAIN... I made the mistake of asking BBC to write a section based on option 1 -- EAT THE BOY FOR BREAKFAST... thought it might appeal to him...

I can see from the comments that this is going to be quite tricky... I'm open to suggestions on how this could be smoother and more interactive... I'm going to ask Debra Kay to write the first option (EAT THE BOY FOR BREAKFAST)... once the first few links hit I think it may be a bit more clear... basically, once the writer completes each new section they will have to let the previous writer know where it is so the link can be set... give me one of the two options they've come up with... and invite someone else to participate...

Please let me know if you're interested in writing a section... and any criticism/ideas would be appreciated...

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Incidentally, I think I found a way to work this that is more accommodating... if you read through the story and find an option that's not written yet and you'd like to write it up just leave a comment after that section... I'm just going to keep working away at the story over time...

Choose your own adventure -- a community writing project

You remember those neat books you read when you were a kid? The kind that asked you to make a decision and told you to turn to a particular page depending on what you choose? I think it would be a fun project to run on-line. I'm going to write up the first section and then throw it out into the blogosphere and see what we all come up with. I've been thinking about it for a couple days now and have come to the conclusion that there will need to be a few rules if this is going to work.

1. If you participate you MUST offer the reader TWO options at the close of your section.

2. ONE of the options MUST link back to me (I've started a new blog to keep track) and one MUST link to a new participant.

3. Sections should be no more than 1000 words.

4. No profanities or explicit content.

I think it's necessary to have one link back to me so that I can keep track of the content and add new bloggers from my end. I won't necessarily write up the next section but may simply link on to another blogger. I'm not sure that this experiment will work as I envision so I reserve the right to change rules and add new rules. Please leave a comment if you'd like to participate and I'll try my best to include everyone (don't see this being a problem at all). It may be a problem keeping everything updated in a timely fashion so if anyone would like to be a team member on the new site and help me that would be greatly appreciated. Hit this link to read the first section.

Reckless Burning

When I look back I see flames licking up into the night, stretching behind me for years and years like a string of watchtowers -- places where a phoenix came to rest and thought for a moment of going to sleep. I'm in a park collecting kindling and leaves, but they're still too damp from winter to take my spark, and so I throw in some books, some words I've held for too long, all dried up, because I'm tired of making a pyre of other peoples hearts. I want to walk in the daylight again, where I don't need reckless fires to show where I've been.

Ordinary Life

It's hard some days to find meaning and see a beautiful world. You could amble through the city on weary feet with a weary heart listening to the same sad song on repeat. You could love someone who doesn't love you back and, no matter how much you tell yourself not to, you still see their face in the faces of strangers pushing past like a tempest among the buildings, pining away over old flames like a burnt out tree. But that's nothing more than ordinary life.

And you're stuck in the hustle of the rat race, trying to catch a rush hour train, when you trip and fall on the stairs. You're the prophet at the bottom selling sign language, begging for change. You're the people in the cafes talking about other people in other cafes and how so and so said what-not about who. You're the man clipping articles from the paper announcing the death toll, holding a placard saying, The end is near. All of us seemingly so alone -- all leaves on a tree, one by one falling away to the last end. It's hard to find beauty in it all. But that's just ordinary life too.

Ordinary like how everyone says they want peace, but it never comes. Ordinary to be too smart for your own good but too stupid for others. To tear people down and to diminish. To doubt and envy. To be strong and consistent and never be able to say, I don't know. To see all of life as just the everyday in the face of such mystery and coincidence. Ordinary as the lightening that there's no worldly explanation for.

But it's also ordinary to see that nothing joyful can come without some pain. To take time and step out of the death you're born into. To breath. To watch the moments pass by. To learn that the quietest word you can say in the language of the deaf is, Listen. To see that though we all meet our final ends alone everyone suffers that loss, even if the departed was unknown. When we realize there's two sides to every person: them as we wish them to be and them as they are, more than only the sum of some parts. And to remember that there's nothing I could do about lost love, that I couldn't have given you a reason to stay. That life is lovely. That happiness is a choice. That the world brims with possibilities and that ordinary is so much more than everyday.

I hear a million different voices speaking in tongues,
their words just empty vessels I fill with meaning.

Pipe Bomb

Everything serves.
It's when some claim to serve a higher purpose I have to see a sort of ignorance hard at work.

That's a verbal detonator cap. Now let's look at the shrapnel, the chunky, crude rumblings of a servant. Important words like hope, divine, truth, right, fire, piss, dirt, time, life. Those nuts and bolts of the serving meander. The sense of light and dark in a winter forest where a man hangs from a maple tree, his hands bound behind his back with rags, a mucky bile oozing from his leg to a puddle in the snow.

A pound of very high velocity plastic explosive, also known as C4, asks: Why does the tree have to suffer the weight of his body? Must the tree also serve?

Well I don't know. I never really thought too much about the tree before now. That's a good question. But rather than answer it let's just put the pipe bomb down by the tree next to the puddle and set it for thirty seconds or so and obliterate the tree and Judas and everything around in one big shebang -- turn them to confetti and letters meshed with the screaming, snowy air.

Now I'm going to take off and you can observe this on your own. I've seen bombs go off before. It served no purpose.