• Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Introduction
    • Chapter 1
    • Chapter 2
    • Chapter 3
    • Chapter 4
    • Chapter 5
    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
    • Chapter 8
    • Chapter 9
    • Chapter 10
  • collected works
    • 25th August 1981 – count Up
    • askance From Hell
    • Batman
    • The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford
    • Bob 1995-2012
    • Edward Hopper: Poems at an Exhibition
    • David Bowie Movements in Suite Major
    • Eglinton Hill
    • FLOORBOARDS
    • Granada
    • in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …
    • Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters]
    • Miller’s Batman
    • mum
    • nan
    • Portsmouth – Southsea
    • Spring Warwick breezes / over Bacharach fieldwork and boroughs with / the occasional shift and chirp of David / in the pastel-long morning of the sixties
    • through the crash
  • index
    • #A-E see!
    • F–K, wha’ th’
    • L-P 33 1/3 rpm
    • Q-T pie
    • U-Z together forever
  • me
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mlewisredford

~ may the Supreme and Precious Jewel Bodhichitta take birth where it has not yet done so …

mlewisredford

Tag Archives: cave

the simple prayer // the tattered poem // the bitter lament

14 Saturday May 2022

Posted by m lewis redford in embroidery, poems, reflectionary

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

2022, 8*, action, architecture, balance, black, blindness, Boris Johnson, Bowie, cause and effect, cave, daughter, desert, Donald Trump, female, God, gods, heart, history, internet, invisible, king, land, lies, Life on Mars?, love, male, Manjushri, market, noise, notice, others, people, plateau, Plato, poem, power, prayer, proliferation, propaganda, quiet, resource, rhetorical interrogative, Russia, science, self, serendipity, slave, smile, soap, soap-opera, springs, stranger, sword, throat, time, tragedy, truth, Ukraine, value, Vladimir Putin, war, windows, wisdom

the simple prayer

may quiet springs of
value-in-other always disperse
the black and grimy history
of power-over-other
like soap



—~~~\\\ ” sp ” ///~~~—

                                                                      the tattered poem

                                                  may …

                                        over millennia
                                        between peppered millions
                                        at surprise times and sad

                                        across rolling lands
                                        and conserved desert
                                        and steppèd plateau

                                        quiet springs
                                        everywhere
                                        serendipitous

                                        hand-cupped chin, lipless
                                        smile, no-halt act, surge
                                        `tween heart and throat

                                        unnoticed invisible
                                        daughter stranger slave;
                                        the black and grime of

                                        history of power over other
                                        storeyed and high-
                                        windowed, cacophonous

                                        and market-squared
                                        rhetorically interrogative
                                        aside truth:

                    … may they disperse
                    this impossible tension
                    like soap

—~~~\\\ ” tp ” ///~~~—

the bitter lament

“may” is a petition – to a god, to God or to ‘let it be’, it doesn’t matter as long as it is beyond ‘self’ – a directing of hearts (the only armaments that don’t cost a nation), a massing of resource (as-yet untapped and unexploited), a manoeuvring of cause and effect (the only true use of science), a discernment of love like the sharpest of flaming swords; “other” is anything or anyone which is not “myself” and, like a tragic farce played out on the widest of stages, cast of a thousand-thousand “myself”-s (hurry – for one aeon only; apply for auditions here), proliferates inponentially to the power of blind-folded distinction; “history” – I don’t want to know the history that led up to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, it is a soap-opera that I have seen “ten times or more”, not sure if “I’ve wrote it ten times or more”, “it’s about to be writ again” and I’ve long since abandoned any hope that an original line is to be found anywhere in the entire web of the universe; “power” is male, but male woefully out of balance, to act, to control, to make, to command on the basis of a wobble-board, the king of the castle chanting empty rhymes, unbalanced with respect to “other” and with respect to what-is without blindfolds, a spoilt child who smirks what he wants, a Johnson who dares what he deceives, a Trump who deceives what he wants, a Putin deceived by empty rhymes, so involuted that even before they think to open their mouths have been lying for generations within centuries; “prayer”, “poem”, “lament” is “female”, which is never mentioned, it is “wisdom” (which is never used), it is the balance to male (which is never considered – ‘too impractical’), it is the reference to “other” and the reference to “what-is” (whether “what-is” is blind-folded or not), it is not the replacement of male (that would make it … male), it is the heart-surge of care empty of all self-reference which, unfortunately, has been left in a cave, somewhere, some say in chains, and entertained with flickering lights on the back-wall, for millennia …

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

architecture wormhole: despite all / depiction
balance wormhole: the balance necessary between
black wormhole: nowhere / that can be seen
daughter wormhole: looking ahead
history & time & war wormhole: mirror
love wormhole: ‘she shook the sweets…’
others wormhole: ‘the practice &…’
power wormhole: eyes like petals
quiet wormhole: – creak –
resource wormhole: the Apple
smile wormhole: light of all interaction
windows wormhole: YOUNG WOMAN AT A WINDOW by William Carlos Williams

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Staffa Fingal’s Cave, 1832

08 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by m lewis redford in poems, poeviews

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

1816, 1832, 2019, cave, cliff, Coleridge, depth, growth, height, Industrial Revolution, light, passing, sea, seagull, ship, sky, society, sun, Turner, waves, weeds

                the cave was as high as the sky
                the light at the mouth too bright

                to bear, the weight of cliff; in from
                the light, a retching steamship with

                stacked funnels polluting, intent
                on direction across a dim and

                sunlit sea fathomless to man, where
                only seagulls wing clarity over weedy waves

 

berthed out of the cave by Coleridge‘s ‘Kubla Khan‘, 1816: Staffa Fingal’s Cave, 1832 by William Turner

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

life wormhole: Batman: Oddysey
passing & sun wormhole: Vue de Pontoise, 1873
sea wormhole: prose piece 2 from POEMS 1927 by William Carlos Williams
seagull wormhole: travelling / back
sky wormhole: Entry to the Village of Voisins, Yvelines, 1872
society wormhole: there will be ovations
waves wormhole: allowed all gain

 

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hello, luvvey, do you want a cup of tea?

09 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by m lewis redford in announcements

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

1992, black, blue, brown, cave, cliff, clothes, coat, doors, echo, eyes, falling, green, grey, groundlessness, growth, home, house, identity, Joe, kitchen, light, mauve, mist, mother, path, pink, planet, pointlessness, quotidian, red, school, searching, silence, sky, sound, story, streets, tea, time, voices, waves, world, wormhole, yellow

every day David would come home from school, and his mum would ask him how it went and he would say it was fine although he always wondered to himself what it would be like if he had a day at school which was worthwhile, and whether he would notice it if it happened; then he would have a cup of tea which his mum made him and he would do a hundred other similar things until he went to bed that night; and he wondered why it was that he had been doing this for years without any change when he noticed that the path leading to his front door didn’t in fact lead to his front door anymore but ownwards like a cliff-path, under the house and curling away into what seemed like a great underground cavern which was so big that it was like a world and the celing was so high that it seemed like a sky, although you could see it; his house was just there on a ledge on the side of a huge cliff, the street where he lived just wasn’t there, anymore; “do you want a cup of tea, luvvey?” sang his Mum from the kitchen window; “in a minute, Mum, I’m a little, busy, at the moment, I’m looking for the town where I used to live”; “OK, dear, but don’t stay out too long”; “Aaaaaaaargh!!!” said David, for quite a few minutes when he missed his footing on a pebble and fell over the edge of the path and down, a surprisingly long way without bumping into the side of the cliff at all, when he started realising that it was pointless – and a little silly really – him saying “Aaaaargh” when there was no one in possible sight anywhere around in this huge cave, what was the point, in saying anything?, so he stopped, but, as he looked below him, he could see, gradually, more clearly, a great blueness coming into sight as he fell, as if clearing through mist, with green patches, here and there, and yellow and grey streaks, and some more waves if you really looked; and David began thinking how pointless it was to describe the sea as “blue” when if you really looked you could see all sorts of colours in it, and he set himself the challenge of trying to find, really different colours that you wouldn’t expect to find in the sea, and after a while – as he fell and fell for ages as if he had jumped from an aeroplane – he saw a pink which quickly turned into a bit of red then mauve then blue and then the sleeve of the old man shifted as he took the pot off the fire to serve up the tea and the colours of his coat changed again in the half-light so that David couldn’t tell if it was black or brown or blue, anyway he was looking forward to his tea because it smelt richer and thicker than he had noticed it before but the man wasn’t offering him any and poured himself a cup only, besides David noticed that the man was growing larger but that the room wasn’t getting cramped by him; the man was now, probably, fifty feet tall and the sounds of his moving coat and his supping of the tea were starting to sound echoey; oh, no, it was David! he seemed to be shrinking, faster and faster, his clothes had long since ceased to be on him but around him and then he was lost in a huge valley between his shirt collar and the shoulder of his shirt and then there was a small hole at his feet which grew quickly so that he clung to one side of it to stop himself falling in but the edge of the hole became thicker and flatter so that it was smooth and there was nothing more to hold onto, so he wasn’t holding anymore, and he expected himself to be falling, but everything around him just seemed to be going away from him in all directions into blackness, when from out from nothing something seemed to come towards him, huge, with great speed, that he expected it to make a great rushing sound but it didn’t, it was totally silent, it was a planet, a planet so big that it make his legs wobble, coming straight for him, getting larger and larger so that it filled everywhere around him but it never seemed to hit, so he closed his eyes; after a while he told himself that he may as well see the End so he opened his eyes and the planet was gone, there were just dancing lights zipping round and round him so quickly that if he looked back along where they came from they would whip round so quick that he would see them a hundred times every inch he moved his eyes and eventually they went so fast he could just see bands of light surrounding him; as he travelled toward the centre, and the front door opened, the sun, which was low and had caught in the glass in the door and sent a dazzling piece of light straight into his eye, whizzed halfway around the horizon and disappeared behind some trees and the houses opposite and his Mum’s face, “hello, luvvey, do you want a cup of tea?”

 

written for my eldest child when he was young

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

black & mother wormhole: Doctor Strange III – the needs of billions
blue & eyes & sky wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – gull circling out at sea
brown & echo & red & yellow wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Simon Upon The Downs
doors wormhole: El Palacio, 1946
green & mist & sound & voices wormhole: 1967
grey & kitchen wormhole: weight of high sash windows – poewieview #33
groundlessness & pointlessness wormhole: Jericho
house wormhole: tag cloud poem IX – haiku is awkward / the more that is left in / like uncombed hair
identity & world wormhole: lonely and free
light wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Precious Moment
mauve & pink wormhole: my seat // now
path wormhole: 50 mph
school wormhole: Teaching career: much like Monet’s ‘Impression: soleil levant’ or, in the long run, de Chirico’s ‘The Red Tower’
searching wormhole: substance
silence & streets wormhole: Life on Mars? – poewieview #31
time wormhole: even / a second
waves wormhole: inbreath

 

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… Mark; remember …

"... the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful; it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe to find ashes." ~ Annie Dillard

pages coagulating like yogurt

  • Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Chapter 1
    • Chapter 10
    • Chapter 2
    • Chapter 3
    • Chapter 4
    • Chapter 5
    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
    • Chapter 8
    • Chapter 9
    • Introduction
  • collected works
    • 25th August 1981 – count Up
    • askance From Hell
    • Batman
    • Bob 1995-2012
    • David Bowie Movements in Suite Major
    • Edward Hopper: Poems at an Exhibition
    • Eglinton Hill
    • FLOORBOARDS
    • Granada
    • in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …
    • Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters]
    • Miller’s Batman
    • mum
    • nan
    • Portsmouth – Southsea
    • Spring Warwick breezes / over Bacharach fieldwork and boroughs with / the occasional shift and chirp of David / in the pastel-long morning of the sixties
    • The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford
    • through the crash
  • index
    • #A-E see!
    • F–K, wha’ th’
    • L-P 33 1/3 rpm
    • Q-T pie
    • U-Z together forever
  • me
  • others
  • poemics
  • poeviews
  • teaching matters
  • William Carlos Williams
  • wormholes

recent leaks …

  • “…and may the great elements…”
  • paisley // implicitly
  • this pocketed being
  • the inevitable tock // when we close our eyes
  • time
  • the simple prayer // the tattered poem // the bitter lament
  • taking birth
  • mirror
  • long / road
  • ‘in my car I pass…’

Uncanny Tops

  • me
  • Moebius strip
  • YOUNG WOMAN AT A WINDOW by William Carlos Williams
  • 'in my car I pass...'
  • 'the practice ...'
  • 'I can write ...'
  • like butterflies on / buddleia
  • meanwhile
  • 'hello old friend ...'
  • under the blue and blue sky

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