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January 2019

First Snowfall

First Snowfall

 

It’s a muffled Sunday morning

That started late last night

With the first snowfall of the season

I brushed off the car as best I could

And started the slow drive back

From friends’ to my apartment

It’s the kind of snow that gathers as it falls

The kind that quiets everything

Except reports of shovels on the walks

Especially at night, these are louder

Once inside, I heard them for a while

Counting out the measure

Of a post-lapsarian world

 

C L Couch

 

 

Kairo Kiitsak‏ @kairokiitsak

Moderate snowfall in parts of #Estonia this evening 19.03.2018. #libetee #lumi

 

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Good Morning, Teacher

Good Morning, Teacher

 

A wizard without a monarch

Spells to cast for no one

Lessons offered in an empty room

So Merlin retires

 

A teacher in an empty classroom

Someone standing on the shore alone

Where is Miranda

For Prospero to teach about

The wider world?

 

We need learners

We need to serve the cause

In animated bone and blood and flesh

Mentors require mentees

Can you imagine Mister Chips

Without someone to say good-bye?

 

I can’t

I don’t want to

It’s not a crave for audience

The universe is crowded

It’s someone who comes into the room

Asks a question

Just right for a leading answer

An educator’s reply, meant for

Engagement

Let’s begin

 

C L Couch

 

 

Helen Mirren as Prospero in The Tempest

https://theiapolis.com/movie-2SSZ/the-tempest/gallery/helen-mirren-as-prospera-in-the-tempest-2010-1043899.html

Source: The Official Trailer

 

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Invoke the Fool

Invoke the Fool

 

Sometimes a fool is needed

A clown of God

Call the fool

We are foolish in the wisdom of the world

These parts are nothing new

But I don’t like the notion

Of my own foolishness

 

I trained in clowning once

Wore the clothes and make-up

And took my act out there

You know, where you are

 

It was all right

It didn’t hurt

And I didn’t hurt anyone else

Maybe we did some good, together

But it’s a squeamy feeling, all the same

 

Not to talk

Not to eat or drink

Were not the hard parts

It was the openness to whatever:

 

I might be laughed at

Though that was the point

But, depending on the working preposition,

With or at?

 

Then there was

The brittleness, the fragility

In scorn

 

But faith is something funny

Faith in me, faith in you

Faith in God

Faith in humanity

Faith in Earth

No evidence required

But that we cannot sense

The more we demand material,

The more we lose the energy

Lopsiding the equation

 

Fair is foul

And foul is fair

But it’s not that even, either

For faith finally

Is not a seesaw, evened out

But requires all

All we have to risk

For something evidenced so poorly

 

Who would believe this anywhere,

Anyone

But a fool!

 

C L Couch

 

notes

 

There is a sad and beautiful story by Tomie dePaola called The Clown of God.

 

Fair is foul, and foul is fair:

Hover through the fog and filthy air.

—the witches in Macbeth

 

 

(image)

By ingawh, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45210850

Stratford Upon Avon

 

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Western Movie Theatre in Oxford, Ohio

Western Movie Theatre in Oxford, Ohio

 

There was a summer when

I felt especially alone

I was at school

Everyone else was gone

So I went to the movies

Two dollars for admission

 

For two dollars, I saw The Last Starfighter

Then on another night, Highlander

Music by Queen

Sci-fi reigned, I guess

Taking me somewhere I wasn’t,

Which at the time was really

Needful like coal

For an empty furnace

 

It’s no longer there

The theatre or the summer

I got an X from the marquee

Before everything shut down

 

C L Couch

 

 

By Michael Gäbler, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31083077

Rodgers Theatre in Poplar Bluff in Missouri. This Art Deco-style theater opened in 1949.

 

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Taking Turns

Taking Turns

 

It’s dusk

Dark on a windy winter day

The branches want to articulate,

But they can only screech against the sky

Upon my window

Maybe the trees want to come inside

But better they are where they are,

And I don’t open to their world

To bring the season in,

So we’ll each remain

 

But for now I’m glad the cold is here

My thanks to Persephone

Whose story rings my mood

 

The seasons are a find

Who would have thought of them,

Four for temperate climes?

 

Hers is an old story

And behind all the bittersweet

Action and parable

An older story waits

Untimely resolution

All our chapters realized

 

C L Couch

 

 

CC0 Public Domain

https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1109482

 

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For Those Who Wonder if

For Those Who Wonder if

 

For those who wonder if

There is a problem in old stories

That only those with blood

Can advance

You are the monarch because the blood

Of ancient times

Of your unknown kin

Goes through you

 

And that’s it

The magic works in you

You are on the way toward

Predetermined greatness

 

And those of us with water in our veins?

We can read

We can live in hope

But this is not for us

Our bloodless stories will not

Turn into magic

 

Except they can

 

Read the stories, like them

Don’t worry about unmatched inheritance

From Hemo the Magnificent

We have a better calling

Of a truer generation

We are here

We are now

 

We inherit the wind and the whirlwind

That is a real way

We make the present world

Of our lives

We are now

 

C L Couch

 

 

Abbazia di San Galgano

Abbazia di San Galgano

 

 

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Shadrach

Shadrach

 

They traded in vacated virtue

What was left of righteousness

 

Goodness rusted through,

Only a thin semblance, molecules-narrow perhaps,

Which was all right

They decided who could touch them

And how deep

They wouldn’t let me rest a finger

Tied my hands away

And bound my feet

Blindfolded me as well

And did so in a way that, while I could no longer

Move, I still thought I was free

 

I had no skill

I simply wanted to live

God gave me something, maybe

But a yen for freedom is what mattered most

God hurt those who bend the youth inside,

Who masquerade as truth

But mentor lies

 

But, worse, I must ask

That God judge

In perfect love

Remembering all parables

All messages and motives

Manifest

God judge me, too

For collaboration

And anger when the mask burned off

 

C L Couch

 

 

File:Fiery Furnace, Arches National Park.jpg – Wikimedia Commons

 

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Twelfth Night or

Twelfth Night or

(6 January)

 

What You Will

A modest title

For a late, great play

Did he mean the pun about

His name?

 

What you will, Will

Will who was not the starving

Artist or

Unknown in his time

 

It is twelfth night

Or the twelfth day of Christmas

Christmas, in fact, in the east

In may (and maybe your) liturgical

Calendar, Epiphany

 

In some parts I know, there will be

A boar’s head festival

A Christian way to say

We remember our English

And European roots

Deep down as they might be

Unseen for an age

 

What is epiphanous today is

What is found and realized in the

Christ story

 

The magi come to visit with the family

Of Joseph

To leave gifts for the child who

They discover is

The one they were searching for

The sky was writing them about

That was the ink

They were the page

The message now fulfilled

 

No return to Herod

The last part

 

There are other matters of

New knowledge in new light

Years after,

He comes to his cousin John

Whose voice speaks to

The wildness in the wilderness

He splits the world in truth

Those who will believe the one

Those who will believe the other

A parable one day applies

Of sheep and goats

 

Repent

Turn around

Follow his way,

Says he of the one he must baptize

Because deep knowing says they must

Do this

 

A dove descends

The Spirit is involved

To have a litany of three

Whose echoes elicited the start

Of everything from nothing

 

What happened to the gifts

Sometimes I wonder

Over-obsessed, they would become a movie

Like the subjects of both arks

And a spear of destiny

Maybe they were covered in a box kept by his mother

As was her way

To have her son and all that followed, after

 

The season before the season

An ending and beginning

It truly is

A new year

Time for decisions

Whom to follow

In the drama that our forms reflect

The play between all things

The material our due

The cosmos in the universe

Play on

 

C L Couch

 

 

Andrew Atzert from Mesa, AZ, USA – Family of DovesUploaded by Snowmanradio, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11044215

A Mourning Dove parent with two chicks in Mesa, Arizona, USA.

 

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Please Change the Sun

Please Change the Sun

(that’s all)

 

I saw the ocean first

Off Fenwick Island

On a family vacation

We stayed in a house that had

Loud screen doors,

And at nights the ocean visited

Everywhere in our room

 

But after a year of Pacific sunsets,

Helios descending into water

I now think there’s a problem

With the Atlantic,

Maybe primally

 

A Freudian might say

It’s something womblike or umbilical

 

Anyway, I’d like to have my eastern ocean

Catch the sun at night

If you could arrange that

I would be grateful and obliged

One thing made better

 

C L Couch

 

 

Sydchrismom – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51434595

 

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