ENDLESS JOURNEY

Some journeys, I believe, are endless
For what the mother does not find
One hundred years later
The great-grandchild discovers.
Such is the nature of the animal.

Within the soul there is an endless journey also :
In search of love that lasts ;
Trying to find forever in one moment.

But, if I must speak, my years will say
Do not rely on pleasures of the flesh ;
Less on affairs of the heart.
Create what you can
But do not be disappointed by your losses ;
For what some men and women have lost is great.

The most precious thing you have is your soul,
And the dignity with which you pass on
To those who come after
Your knowledge of the value of  life and love
And above all, humanity's vision and age's realization
Of the absolute tyranny of Time.

IN THE DENTISTS

They said,
he was here,
he was here.
i said who ?
The father you never knew.

They said good-bye
for me, I guess.

In Ghostly Twilight

The canine creatures run
Back and forth in yipping celebration ;
The smallest gath'ring around a
Half rain-filled pail,
Lapping up the afternoon.

The darkness creeps in
With black-faced raccoon pups
Their mother biting at the heels of night
Whose wildness replaces domesticated day.

STAKE

This pen is the stake I pull out of my heart ;
Your words, the poison I took.

I have already forfeit my place in heaven for you.
Now that you are gone, my heart is homeless.

I vomit out your promises
Your word and deeds will burn a hole in both our hearts
on the pyre that was our life together.

SONNET

When first I glimpsed you I was only two
Sister Peg and I were playing our spinning game.
Forty years later when we met I did not know your name.
I could barely talk I felt so blue
But from one deep searching look of yours, I took my cue.
I had heard no mention of your artistic fame
I myself was lost in past years' gathered pain.
In your eyes I saw all would be good and new.
I perceived a renewal of all possibility.
You grabbed my lifeless soul and gave me hope :
I felt love before me and in your eyes I saw it ---
Through this darkness I no longer grope
Now a great dark world is relit.
Discovering in you the glow of each day
My path joins yours as we walk together and together lay.

AT NINE WE OPEN THE DOOR

I flip on the sewing machine switch at 7.
My husband has been up since 5.
In the Fall, customers with coats   
Which must be dry-cleaned immediately (if not sooner!)
Pour in, leaving the dirt of their days
The spillage of their meals,
And some small portion of their earnings.

This is our store ---
We sacrifice for it.
Morning, like the nursing Mother Earth
Gives us both a few minutes of serenity.
My brother-in-law, a cop on the night shift in the South Bronx
Brings us tea and the most delicious corn muffins in Queens!
Sleep and meals are catch-as-catch-can:
No breaks here.
I cook at 11 PM, for myself, and hopefully my husband.

The boy who helps us brings us tea in the afternoon;
We are too busy; By six it's cold.
The milk in the tea is curdled
We must pour the remainder down the sink.
("We can afford another cupful,
Some can't," my husband points out.)

A murmur long unheard, within me now
Like a pure spring beneath a mile of stone
Wonders silently if I can afford to spend another year this way.
The thrust of my life has been dulled,
My pen all but stilled ---
My real thirst unassuaged.

CONFRONTING LIFE

poets write with a trail of blood from the cosmic womb of time
conceiving and giving birth, in seconds though it takes years
in cold sterile rooms---
only avoiding the Grand Inquisitor
by feeding him snacks of imagined memories
until his probing fingers of pain
cause us to confront life.

THE HASIDIC MEN

They are happy together---
Perhaps, thinking of the chanting
And the dancing they do to praise God.
But facing the world alone :
One Hasidim on his way for groceries
Is alone on a street of bantering South Americans.
He is something different, even hateful to them !
He knows this.
Whether it be the fear of pogroms or the Holocaust
Or a simpler, more general angst---
A loneliness for God and prayer
An outsider cannot know !

GUR EMIR : KING'S GRAVE

I can only see Samarkland in a picture book
One of the great cities of Central Asia
Where ornate gold and lapis stucco decorate the mosques and mausoleums
Great kings and thousands of slaves
Labored centuries to build.
A flourish of color in a mosaic faience
---like a tree that falls in the forest---
Unseen by western eyes.
Timur, a fierce conqueror
Builds himself a mausoleum with yellowish green onyx tile on the walls waist-high.
The railing around the tomb is finest alabaster.
The slab covering the grave is one great piece of nephrite jade.
One conqueror tries to lift it---it breaks in two ;
Then on the day Hitler invades Russia
The soviet archeologists lift the great Timerlane's
crumbling corpse from his grave.

A JAR OF WORDS

I must pause
Survey the work I have done
In this season of menorah and crib beneath cross
Approaching the worldly new year
With what I have won.

Certainly I have not pierced the Veil
But I have fought some devils and won
Housed the little children within, whose wandering has ceased.
I have grasped the lonely year :
A few tales have I spun.

The year brings nourishment
For the poet I have become :
An education of night terror's cries
Frees the lovely new year
Word by word, as if from a jar of letters, my craft finds a course to run.

ALL LOGIC CANNOT QUIVER

All logic cannot
Justify the end of life.
End is but a word, a creation.
Always is the more of time : forming men with a finite spark

To ponder
the wide loving, girth of hours
ride this collective rollercoaster yet, comprehend only in flashes

knowing but the reach of existence
And doubting the truth of forever
Which squirms
Beneath the All of Time

Pausing, beginning again, quite real
Incomprehensible
The unborn that forms

Tomorrow, already glowing.
The touch of Cannot be Known
Quivers awake

Out the revered darkness
the glorious surprise of light :
Rebirth, slumber

The stupefying imperfection
Of words and our vision
For a God without eyes

Excepting in we
in whose wanderings of Being
Is understood Only

In darkness that bears light
In sleep that rises again
and again, yet cannot know
Something so huge as all.

So we rise and smell flowers
Pink and blue --- the sunset
Oh ! the glorious fortune of life !

UNSEEM CIRCUS

At the unseem circus
Eternal life is the door-prize
The invisible clown saves us all
Everyone ! Laugh at disaster !
The booby prize is love.

We all get certificates of Normality
Which Emmet Kelly wears in his hat.
The acrobats dance in the air :
We all continue until the Highwire collapses
And we adjourn until tomorrow.
Again the elephants  walk !
Another night, until they are ready to sleep.

FOREVER

after our kiss the moment extends
forever in never-ending line
the trees of my homeland america
like the cypress of france and spain
reach out on the horizon
into the mellow golden
yellow lake of receding afternoon
pines gathering for worship
and the rippling waters
of the lake of the Great Spirit
where the island of the turtle -tulipitmenipit
sits like a maiden
upon the waters of our grandmother
the whirling dancer
that is our earth.

THE SUN RISING

Like a lump of soft yellow butter
On my toast, waiting to be spread
I devour this day
Experience crisp and sweet
The slight taste of salt
Tantalizing my mouth and nostrils
The jelly reaches my tongue
My brain is alive
With the always newness of Time
Reaching to a shout
The full taste of each hour puckering
Washed down with fresh juice---
The fruit of this bright world !

I SIT AND WAIT

For the dawn of the storm night.
I will canoe these lakes.
I am no one's
Child.
I am every woman
I am glad
I am alive
I have held the cup of death
Always cast it aside
I abandon abandonment.
I am reborn.
Each day renewed. I am !
I am ! I am !

Forest of Pure Light

No longer running away from the bright rays of the sun
Remembering only the honor of those who stand strong and firm
Before the sometimes brutal and ugly trials that are a part of some of our lives

Each day we abandon yesterday
We give ourselves to the creation of each squeaky-clean new morning
With the rights and honors good only can ultimately achieve for us
We stand together now in the beauty of our real humanity
In the ultimate joy
Of the worlds we have found, and
Each minute, hour, day, and year
Stretching before us
In pristine splendor - A forest of pure light

© Copyright, 2006, Mary Barnet.
All right reserved. Reprinted by permission