Welcome to RPP
looking for truth and reconciliation
looking for truth and reconciliation
Cures are Facts; Healing is Poetic
Myth, Mirth and Meditation: Free;
Medicine for what it’s worth
I spent my Salad Days in Cambridge as radical dandruff in the long hair of Harvard and now I seek with meanders of poetry and prose paths to share with kindred spirits.
Not much yet, but I hope to grow on you. For now contemplate Mariangela Gualtieri's poem.
Elegy for Henry Braun
Any man could imagine this:
three friends and you around
a fire, reminiscing, telling
back-then stories and now
ones too. Y’ all know one
another deep as the bones,
your shadows playing
on the trunks of old oaks.
Then the silent marauder’s
there and you are three,
and now the woods move
in as if – though not yet
doing it – to engulf the fire.
Still, the stories are strong
as oaken roots.
And then you are two.
The woods are darkening
deeper. Love hasn’t vanished
but it’s grown more ghostly.
On some plane it’s true
that you‘re still five, though
the wind’s whistling through
your bones.
Somewhere bereft, children
weep in the night, and wives
toss in beds abruptly unfamiliar.
You two, though more fragile,
feed the fire, until you are one.
This you is you, or – say it –
I, somehow reading silent stories,
as if dead friends were candlelight.
© 2018 Bert Stern
From What I Got for Dollar, Off the Grid Press, Boston, Massachusetts
05:30 am, 10/28/2020
Dear Readers,
I have missed you over these last 46 years.
I apologize for my silence. I had a lot of growing up to do; I was way too full of myself and too stoned to continue, so I got myself fired from the Real Paper. In about a decade I'd made enough progress to graduate from medical school and enter the real world where I was given the opportunity to pronounce teenagers dead from gunshot wounds and then tell their mothers. Because of this diet of reality I hope I sufficiently metamorphosed from a self-righteous hip lefty into a practical evolutionary so that I may start looking for ways to get off the head spinning hamster exercise wheel of revolution/counterrevolution and look to my heart to decide, not what the rest of humanity needs to do, but if it's okay for me to have coffee in the morning as long as it's organic, fair trade, and songbird friendly?
I have been developing a habit to look for answers to that and similar questions so at about 06:00 I am going to stop this scribbling and mediate upon my heart for a while, which is something that I have spent somewhere between 10 to 20 X103 hours doing since my last missive.
I think this by Didi Delgado is worth checking out :
https: https://thedididelgado.medium.com/im-voting-for-breonna-taylor-for-president-and-you-should-too-6da954d22b92. While I have not voted for Breonna Taylor and wouldn’t even if I had not already cast my ballot, I must applaud her reasonable and persuasive argument.
This evening I am going to be taking a “Choose Democracy Training” lead by George Lakey. I realize that most of you will come across this too late to join but next week on Nov. 1 and 5 at 8 pm EST they will be offering another on the topic “At the Brink: Getting Ready to Stop a Coup.” You can find out how to register for either at: https://choosedemocracy.us/trainings/#.X5xzw1l7nOQ.
I hope that by this time next week I will have something helpful to say about:
· re-watching “the West Wing”
· setting up my cold frame for winter
· planting garlic
· implicit bias and misuse of editorial power in picture book production
· unpasteurized cider and bread baking
· or who knows what.
With luck I'll get a good email and I won't have to write anything at all.
Love,
uu
On which I try to twist brain worms onto a fork of reason. If the sauce seems meager supply some of your own.
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