Belief

The first time I heard my father pronounce,

"When we die, we're meat for the worms,"

I was about ten. He repeated the wisdom

occasionally. He thought "preachers"

were hustlers. Ma ran away from her 

evangelical minister father when she 

was 18. He was a bigot and a creep. 

She never worshipped publicly again,

thought of Heaven, I think, 

as an earned vacation. She gave me

her leather-bound Bible, Oxford U.

Press, all of Jesus's words in red. 

I joined the Catholic Church

at age 45, but my "worship" consists

of giving food to the parish's

food bank and trying to be kind. My

wife's the real Catholic and prays for me,

in both senses of "for." As to God,

who knows? Believing isn't knowing.

Nor is atheism. I'm too busy fearing

humans--of every belief, including

atheism, to fear God.  It never surprises

me to see that another American 

Christian has turned out to be evil.

Sometimes evil and popular.

After my college

History of Philosophy class, taken

at age 17, I never stopped thinking

Spinoza had it right: God equals

everything there is, but probably

no more. A cold view, true. 

Of course, the Jews expelled him,

the Christians condemned him,

and Leibniz envied him. 

Spinoza made a living grinding lenses. 

It's a true fact, as we say

in the American West, 

that the body disintegrates.

Aging gives it a head start. 

The universe is too big, 

dynamic, and complicated

for us to understand

all the way, but I say to science:

keep trying.

We should concentrate on peace, 

equity, and care of Earth. Make these

our primary worship. Keep it

simple-like, you know?

hans ostrom 2022

Rondeau of the Sowing

Old adage says, Reap what you sow.
What have I sown? That's hard to know.
I have been selfish, that's for sure
But not, I think, cruel by nature.
Effects of how one lives are so

Untraceable. Search high, search low:
My net effect must be zero
On those, on them, on him, on her.
And who am I to say, you know?

One certain fact--I'm no hero.
Fall short. Fell short those years ago.
What's up with this accounting--why?
Self-centered guilt, I cannot lie.
Applause or boos before I go?
A useless review of the show?

hans ostrom 2022

"Ode to Hope," by Pablo Neruda

 Reading and video for Youtube of Neruda's poem:

"Ode to Hope"

The Poems Will Keep Arriving

 

. . . and arriving. Poetry is something some

people must write or speak.

Some people, including poets,

must make distinctions about poems

and poets, for society’s a place

of endless distinctions,

which make for a lot of noise

and lists, walls and squabbles. 

Imagine someone standing on a beach,

making distinctions about waves,

saying which are good, which are bad,

which are great, which must be dismissed

and scorned.

Note that the waves keep coming.

The poems keep coming because

They must. The moon drives the waves.

What drives the poems? A trillion

Different moons, that’s what.

And one of them is language itself—

that great mystery in the brain,

in the air, in the squares, in the ears

and eyes, in the everywhere we live.

The poems will keeping arriving.

Some of them belong to you.

hans ostrom 2022

 

Splooting

 (I had observed this squirrel-behavior over the years--when they lie on their bellies to cool off--but the term "splooting" was new to me.)

Yes, squirrel, your body's
covered in thick gray-brown fur.
You don’t have a word for summer
but your body does. All day,

you run up and down trees,
driving upward with thick thighs,
clinging downward with sharp
fore-claws. One tree

holds your nest, where you
go to check on the kids. Otherwise,
you search madly for nuts,
hold them in your mouth

(oh, jaw-ache), bury
them for later, forget where
you buried them, search, smell
them out, dig them up, move them,

on and on, dawn til dusk.
Sometimes you stop for a snack,
and chew through a hard nut-shield
(oh, more jaw-ache) and eat,

all the while glancing
anxiously around for killers
including the beastly Tall Ones
whose fur could be any color,

who drive great hideous clouds
which have murdered and
flattened friends you mourn.
When the heat wears you down

and your jaws and legs ache,
you find cool grass, lie down,
spread your arms and legs,
and, ah, let the lovely chill

pass through your belly-fur into
your body. Squirrel, you have
earned this a hundred times over--
this rest, your time of splooting.

hans ostrom 2022

Sonnet XXVII: "Naked, you are simple as one of your hands," by Pablo Neruda

 Reading of the shorter poem plus a video, text from allpoetry.com:

"Naked, you are simple as . . ."

Allpoetry.com

 About a year ago, I started putting some poems up on a site called allpoetry.com. It hosts poets who may just be starting to write poetry, those who've been at it for a while, and experienced ones. That's one "half" of the site. The rest is dedicated to well known poets worldwide, with most of their poems in translations. How fantastic that must be for those just getting interested in poetry. I would have loved such a ready compendium when I was, say, 17. At any rate, here's a link to my "page," where one may then spring to the whole site and check out a favorite famous poet or start to put up poems of one's own--and received supportive criticism:

allpoetry.com

Overnight at Haypress Creek

We hiked into the deep ravine

of a quick, cold creek, High Sierra.
Found a place to camp and caught
a couple trout to eat. Evening:

lit a small fire to cook the fish
and heat some beans. Ate, then
doused the fire and slipped
into sleeping bags. Night:

wilderness became immense,
swallowed any sense of self-importance.
A world of creatures came alive,
bears and bobcats and bats,
deer, raccoon, rodents, and night-bugs.

Stirring in the brush, snapped sticks,
owl-hoots and the haunting yips
of coyotes coming through the canyon.
Walls of tall conifers turned black,
their furred edges outlined against
a star-choked sky, where meteors
scratched glow-trails close and far away.

Fatigue smothered awe. We slept....
Woke to a rotated sky and a risen moon
bearing down on us like one mad headlight
from a nightmare. Cricket choruses,
unceasing. Freshest air filling lungs.
And the creek: talking, talking, telling
tales of time we could never comprehend.

hans ostrom 2022

Stillness

Stillness: a mountain lake’s

Sudden surface sheen: no wind—

A minnow  apparent.
The whole lake seems to pause.

Stillness in a city street, early
Morning. No traffic, tram, or shout.
You’re out and about, street surface
Wet and cool from rain. Now a man
Rolls up the metal barrier to his shop,
Gutting the poise with jagged noise.

Unsought stillness in your mind:
How rare. You sit amidst office
Busy-ness or stand away
A moment from manual labor. You
Stare, aware of nothing in particular
Beyond the stillness,
And the whole ongoing shock of
Voices, machines, and stress
Of survival-urge and toil evaporates
From your attention—until...

Until a brute gust
Cross-cuts the top of the lake
With surface tension,
And everything begins again.

Worrier Blues

 Wrote some lyrics--"Worrier Blues"--& Roger Illsley composed some music & recorded the song. Nice job, Roger:

"Worrier Blues"

Names and Us

All of it seemed to have been named before

we arrived—everything from

milk to mountains, trowels

to trapezoids, angst to alliteration;
also blue-bottle flies, faith,
obsidian, and warts.

We did what we could.  We
morphed words so they labeled
nothing except pleasure our mouths
and minds felt saying, hearing:
Bibble the lubble, Mr. Nubble.

We named imaginary friends,
including Princess Her and Eddie.
What was not a fort (a collapsed
shack) we called Fort, what was
not food (mud), Pie. 

They sent us to school to study names
systematically.  They told
stories about their lives.  Names
recurred in these tales.  We listened.
Invisible emotional currents began
to buzz our psyches.  Later we
might name such currents Fear or
Loneliness, knowing such naming to be
not enough. We began to know
and respect the Unnamable, which
seemed to be where all the action was.

Society manufactured alps
of new things & advertising
name them--pills, cars, gadgets,
political cults, on and on. We
learned and bought.

We grew malevolently bored with names
we’d known a long time, with things
to which these names were attached.  Our
world seemed choked by names.
We named our condition Life.  That
was a mistake.

ostrom 2022

Billiards

 

Or pool, as we called it:

sticks and stones. A scrum
of spheres explodes on a
Victorian green. Then all settles
into chalking the rapier,
surveying the solar system,
and hiring geometry to send
numbered balls to Hell.

Kisses and rails and playing it
safe. Running the table til the 8
of noir sits alone in bright light
like the planet Pluto. The loser-
to-be stands stoically. After

the stirring crack
of the break, my interest
always waned. Women
at the bar drew my focus
from English draw, banking,
and the sour spirit of incompetent
competition. A game for
aristocrats, with their cigars
and brandy, for me occurred
on warped tables in obscure
side-pockets of the American West.

I can't recall the best shot I ever
made, but I know it came from luck,
not skill. Years later, teaching
a class on the Harlem Renaissance,
I found Jacob Lawrence's rendering
of a pool room. More luck.

hans ostrom 2022

Elegy for Robert Bly (1926-2021)

Flying white hair, cravats, vests,

panchos. Sing-speaking your poems
as you played the lute. Sixties protest
poems, great leaps to Spanish and French
surrealism, a carom north to Friends, You Drank
Some Darkness Swedes. A farm-boy
Norwegian who went to Harvard (and
dated Adrienne Rich once), a troubadour
who hustled a living on the college tour
but would never get stuck in Swamp Tenure.

Once when I saw you read, a student got
up and left, and you said, "Where are you
going--to masturbate?" You were like

one of those friends I hated to go to bars
with--you liked to start fights (without fists.)

Bless you for trying to unharden the arteries
of American poetry, for riffing like a standup
comedian, for making poems explode
and burying Modernists. Then came
your "Men's Movement," well meant
but tin-eared, and Iron John, a Cinderella
for men. After I became a prof,

you came to campus and got the Methodists
dancing to a Brazilian chant. We walked
across campus and you couldn't help but
skewer other poets. When we parted,
you asked, "Are you fond of me, Hans?"
"Yes," I said, "I'm fond of you, Robert." Needy,
like a three-year old. Brilliant, like a mad
scientist. Big hearted--in defiance of cold
fathers everywhere. Well done and--
literally--good show, Robert. I see you
there, dancing on the moon.