Sonnet to Catherine the Great

We all pretty much know about Catherine the Great and horses, right? She was into 'em and more exactly, liked havin' 'em in her. Or so we'd learned in high school Russian History. And I have come across coroboration but never heard or read anything which challenged or contradicted this, On checking up on her death, I once read „apoplexy,“ but this would adequately provide a respectable cover to what my high school teacher told us, namely that the chains broke and she was crushed. Roger that – now fast-forward about 12 years to one of my poetics courses at Naropa in Boulder, after having the honor of being instructed and guided by Allen Ginsberg and Pat Donovan, I now had the pleasure of being inspired by Larry Fagin (Don't know them? Don't worry.) One day he told us to go home and write “an animal sonnet“ for the next day. He didn't explain what he meant by that, no one asked, and no one did it, except me. I knew what damned sonnet was, but – animal? I could only arrive at one thing, and one thing only – and I arrived at it pretty goddamn fast and got to work on it – in about 10 minutes flat I had it. Handed it in, never heard a word. But it went exactly like this:

SONNET

ON THE REMARKABLE DEMISE OF CATHERINE THE GREAT

IN HER BOUDOIR
(Boulder, 1984)

Your swaying hips inspired her desire;

And O, such mane! Who was your noble sire?

The light which flicker'd off your bestial skin

Once lit the regal eye to conscience sin . . .

Your muzzle for to fondle tète-à-tète -

To breathe in, ah! That musk all night and day!

“O come my equine lover, tarry not . . .

“Nor yet deny me whilst my passion's hot! . . .“

No Russian prince came close to match your gait,

For one tail's sweep she'd grant you her estate.

Small wonder how you won the heart of Kate,

Small wonder she'd attain'd the name of “Great“:

'Twas no small feat by which she met her fate,

Indeed 'twas hooves and all your handsome weight.

A Different Kind of Lover

(Boulder, 1974)

Becoming Govinda's flute
hollow receptive
of the breath
of God
that Divine expression
may ever flow like the blue river
by which sixteen thousand
Gopi maidens made love
with their hearts' desire . . .
To become a different kind of lover
sowing wild oats of a different nature,
the seeds of inner awakening:
that the world may become pregnant
with the Divine intoxication;
until which moment
the well-being of the beloved
is the lover's only task.

Kindness

Sincerity, Kindness and Basic Consideration
for Others as for Myself:
has nothing to do with "being nice".

Actually it is a carefully practiced,
radical doctrine of guerilla warfare
against a world-wide mentality
of respectable mediocrity and inertia,
insidious barbarism, and redundant cruelty.

Celebrated in absentia

Emilie, 9.1.13

Ein Jahr her, wurde sie geboren,

jeder Versuch nach Verbindung vergebens,

so viel Zeit vergangen, und Chancen verloren,

Reise umsonst, Kontakt verhindert eben.

Ihre Bilder schmücken trotzdem die Wände,

sowie ihr Gesicht unsere Herzen schmückt -

in Berlin warten Oma, Opa, mit offenen Hände,

auf den Tag, wenn sie selber uns näher rückt.

Levi, 16.1.13

Oh Levi you know, you've just reached year one,

your home's there in sunny Santa Barbara;

and soon you'll have started to walk, then to run -

or so I imagine, in warm South California.

Would be lovely to see you, to know you, to hold you,

sing to you, dance with you, and laugh -

but as long as you're healthy, whatever you do:

walk in beauty, authentic – that'd suit me enough.


http://samuelinayatchisti.blogspot.de/2014/05/schwester-des-flusses.html

Weekend of the Aftermath, Newtown Conn.

It defies logic to deny that what happened in Connecticut yesterday or Aurora recently, etc., was perpetrated by other than someone owning guns. I know the statistics, thousands lose their lives in car accidents, in household accidents, or swimming. Right, so we can’t outlaw cars, goes the argument, or kitchen knives or ladders or pools. Anything can be used as a weapon, but “anything“ is not a weapon, it has many various purposes, and can only incidentally serve as an instrument of death. Only guns, however, are designed and manufactured with the one single intent and function of killing, the question of murder aside. And guns are and will remain our most very lucrative business.

As long as we hold dear our American “2nd-Amendment-Rights“ mentality and its sorely misguided interpretation which argues that “guns don’t kill, people do“ (wrong: people with guns kill), we will continue to see and to suffer more of this. Those who honor and uphold the gun lobby’s enormous clout over govt. and human dignity may also include many “pro-lifers“ who would see in the recognition of a woman’s right to decide for herself over abortion, a license to kill, to murder. And then simultaneously insist that everyone and anyone can just stockpile an arsenal of assault weapons because “the 2nd Amendment says so“… One is convinced that this part of our population actually identify “being American“ with having the “right to own and bear arms,“ just like that. Which is like countless Muslims I’ve met who identify being Muslim with avoiding pork – why it’s that simple.

These friends of the NRA and the firearms industry in general may shed crocodile tears over yesterday’s murder of children, or no tears at all. Sarah Palin never apologized for placing crosshairs over Rep. Gifford’s face shortly before the latter was shot in the head. No remorse can be expected from such elements of our society, these upstanding Americans, nor responsibility.

My Christmas at any rate will be a sober one, mighty sober, reflective and in anguish. I’ll be physically here in Belin, but my heart will be spending the holidays in a certain township in Connecticut.

So Rana and I sat up all evening and late into the night (Berlin time, the service started at 8pm EST) glued to CNN. We recognize that for those broadcasting it's all the business of infotainment, in all its cynical glory - but we had to watch because we are afixed, we are in anguish.

So we watched the memorial with all the nice eccumenical eulogies and then the local town hall rep., the gov. and the Prez. We were enormously and deeply affected by the rabbi who was the first of those invited to get up there. and coming a (relatively) close second was the Muslim imam. there were no thirds. The rabbi put out what was and is most needed. no one (unfortunately) could give what this rabbi gave - his words were sparse and to the point and from the heart with broken voice...and then he sang. Not the Kaddish exactly but a deeply deeply gripping Hebrew hymn tailored for this occasion, and with such a richness of grief and of authentic mourning and sadness and reality. I was already standing at the moment and remained there as he beckoned the hall to all stand, and I wept throughout his wonderful, terrible, blessed singing. THAT was a mourning, which must have brought the breaved infinitely more sense of being understood than all the shit which preceded and followed. thank Jehovah, that the Jewish expression still has it in it to deliver when it comes to something like this.

The Muslim came in 2nd in my book, less for what he said or quoted, although parts were good - I mean that from the standpoint of real spiritual gut-power - but he scored with me on authentic emotion and it was clear to see how broken and stricken he was.

Unfortunately - and here I had to comfort my dear protestant Rana - everyone else, from Catholic to Methodist to Lutheran to Pentecostal to even Baha'i to whatever else, offered with more or less practiced emotions, the awful awful usual victuals of bla-bla-bla, dry, "reassuringly" full of platitudes, colorless, prepared, predigested, and dead. dead words, no music (or nothing which could remotely compare with what Rabbi Shaul from the local synagogue put out). We bemoan that the Christian clergy just doesn't have it any more, or ever so rarely. her priest and pastor from her childhood, he had had it in him in full, he would have brought the house down with the ardent simplicity and co-grieving which was sorely lacking in that parish yesterday.

Well, that was our take.

And I KNOW exactly what I would have said or done on that pulpit had I been there, and in what measure. I know exactly because as I said to Rana, what they don't grasp at all (except the rabbi in this case) is that with people in a bereavement of this magnitude especially, and so immediately after as well - you HAVE to go down into the pain, the SHIT, you HAVE to get your fingernails dirty, your knees have to be covered with the earth of humility, you have to do this first and reach their hearts BEFORE you speak of elevating, ennobling, eternal verities.

You have to get across to them that their lost ones are here and now and in reality AS in eternity, to get their focus on that love which binds us defnitely and palpably and tangibly and powerfully. You can't embrace or empower anyone with platitudes about any kind of churchy "afterlife," you have not earned the right to do that - unless and until you can feel the snot in your own nose and the choked breath in your own heart, and say what really is, that the loss and the grief and the sadness and the horror and the pain and the sheer torture of living every moment from here on with this knife in one's heart IS REAL. And to BE with that, and to be with that with them. THEN and only then, can one go from there to elevate and bring the thing home.

http://news.yahoo.com/tearful-plea-victims-dad-deadly-rampage-233719408.html

UPDATE, 19 Apr. 2019 and 07 Dec. 2019:

Wolfgang Halbig - Sandy Hook Trial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjfIp4MwizQ 

Psy Ops Goes Mainstream (fixed audio) - (All the world’s a stage, and they want you to believe their story is real. I give you some examples of faked reports that led us to war and then I introduce very unlucky people who were at multiple tragic events. I move on to one example of why they tell stories and then show you a theory as to how they are able to do it. MORE...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMVvjzTMjMI

 

Fourteen: Malala Yousufzai

Fourteen and with the heart of a lion,

fourteen, a girl with the tenacity of an army of women.

God by any name loves her over the viciousness of piety,

God will prefer her defiance of Muslim hypocrisy

and ignorant compliance - shrilly posing as a "model of advancement,"

looking only backwards - whereas she alone is her nation's enhancement.

In her schoolgirl form speaks the voice of our time,

she is the river itself over which the passing flotsam

of her coming or going, or of the Taliban's coming or going,

is carried out of sight to the ocean of unfolding.

We are in her bond, resounding on every breath

is a voice triumphant, victorious over the living death

of one more day with twisted norms in a twisted culture,

a clarion call to us: "Don't be the flotsam, be the river!"

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/newsmakers/books-pens-most-powerful-weapons-heroism-malala-yousafzai-165035081.html?vp=1

I have been asked to pen something on Sufism in light of developments in Mali

Sufism dates back to the first Human Beings, it is neither a religion nor a philosophy, while giving them their life and depth and dimension, as it expresses from the source of both.

Whereas for a believer God is a reality, a Sufi apprehends God as THE reality, and arrives at this through direct experience of God and nothing less. She has donned the mantle of many faiths through the ages, lending each its peculiar form and the scent of love, harmony and beauty. And whereas Sufism is immeasurably older than Islam, which to the uninitiated appears to claim it for itself, the fact is that Sufis alone have given Islam all that is of value in it. Sufism is free and the Sufi belongs to no religion, it is the essence of all faiths.

Sufis may traditionally be Muslims, but Muslims are no Sufis, rather they have persecuted Sufis for centuries into the present, and we will be seeing more of this.

The Sufi can coexist in real mutual appreciation with anyone, embracing all forms and requiring none, but the Sufi cannot coexist with bigotry, racism, all manner of hypocrisy, faking, mass manipulation, supremacism, slothful indifference. Having said that, I have to point out that the Sufi can coexist with every kind of ignorance, as she does this all the time.

The most profound expression in English of Sufism in our time, is in the following invocation, whose value is - as with all things given by Sufism - only in the practice and realization of it:

“Toward the one, the perfection of love, harmony and beauty, the only Being, united with all the illuminated souls who form the embodiment of the master, the spirit of guidance.“

Now the spirit of guidance which demonstrates Sufism as the Source and not the effect of any religion, not the “mystical side-show“ of any faith, as bookish academics so often portray it – this spirit of guidance is most beautifully expressed in the part of this Sufi prayer addressing it:

“. . . Thy light is in all forms, Thy love in all Beings: in a loving mother, a kind father, an innocent child, a helpful friend, an inspiring teacher. Allow us to recognize Thee in all of Thy holy names and forms: as Rama, as Krishna, as Shiva, as Buddha. Let us know Thee as Abraham, as Solomon, as Zarathustra, as Moses, as Jesus, as Muhammad – and in many other names and forms, known and unknown to the world. . . .“

It should be clear by what is happening in Mali, in Pakistan, and certainly elsewhere, that Sufism - which proposes an ever forward movement of conscious Human development, both embracing tradition and yet traditionally, even notoriously breaking with it, both disappearing into any surrounding culture it finds itself sharing a corner of the planet with and maintaining an unwavering position in deference to the truth, to the light, indifferent to and independent of dogmas, institutions and ideologies of every brand or intensity.

What shall be the difference between Islam and Sufism, then, when they both have a penetrating power? Where Islam penetrates with dogma, sectarian warfare, supremacist tendencies – the Sufi penetrates with light, and her interests lie in effacement in God over religion.