I haven't posted since quite some time. I've been immersed in my own private kind of death. There is some life--I see  green shoots sprouting up here and there. Some days I even think this might be the best time of my life and I have so much freedom to be creative. To be happy. It's in my hands, really, to turn the thoughts around from death to life, from going out to rebirthing in. It isn't always about other people's opinions, what they think of me, how they perceive me.

And clearly, my own private perception is warped. It isn't always about how thin I was or whether I feel light on my feet. There is a certain fear that the heaviness on my mind might really cloud my vision, that what we call "ill will" in Buddhism will prevent me from enjoying the joy of others. It seems obvious that I can find no one to share the little moments of joy that I find. Yet, it is incumbent on me, as an elder, to promote the joy in others anyway. It's my job. I am a teacher.

I said recently that teaching is like being a student in reverse. I once said that dying is like being born in reverse. Reversals are hard. The coming in is so filled with wonder and hope, the sense of the child; seeing everything with new eyes for the first time. The reversal is about helping others to see things for the first time.

And yet when I face the students I teach in the inner city of Chicago, college students who represent the underclass of our ethnic culture, some of whom are uncertain of their language whether English is their first or second tongue, many of whom have had the wonder and sense of newness knocked out of them at a very young age by drug addicted parents, abusive parents, no parents, grandmothers, aunts and neighbors beleagured with too many children, no money, no room, no hope; violence, chaotic homelives shuffled around from house to house, relative to neighbor to stranger, leaving home at fifteen. chaos, uncertainty and cynicism seeping into their skin from birth on--I know for certain this is another group of people we have forgotten, left behind, turned away from. Our American Ruling Class is small and they don't have time for the disenfranchised. 

These are not your boomer kids, like we were--the world brand new like a penny ready for us to change. These are not the privileged children of the middle class, or the Millenials or the Generation X and Y kids--they don't have iPhones and Zip Cars--they don't have home computers or iPods. They aren't the consumers the new society is pitching to.  These are twenty-five year olds with two  or three kids and the reading skills of a twelve year old. They have no confidence in their ability to read, write or think. They have no historical, social or political context. Some of them do not know who Thomas Jefferson was. Most of them have not heard of the Holocaust. The largely African American student body have never heard of James Baldwin or Angela Davis or Black Power or Malcolm X or Langston Hughes or August Wilson. They are fighting the battles of the 1950's underclass in 2010. I am in the front lines endeavoring to contextualize their lives so they do not have to continually re-invent the wheel.

Somedays all you can do is write poetry.

I received a post from someone about a couple of poems I posted almost 2 years ago. It gave me hope. Perhaps I am reaching someone somewhere. Like SETI--I feel as if I am sending signals out into the vast space of night looking for life on other planets, only this is my so-called "home planet" and I am looking for life on earth. Perhaps I will find it. I decided to write a new poem and re-post the old ones. 

                                          Today Was Not The First Day

Today was not the first day I lay in bed much later than I should, roaming the visual memory of the past, terrains and places I've loved--
the desert sunsets, driving along Broadway Boulevard in Tucson looking
at palm trees and thinking of how happy the sun is on my shoulders.
Those visual snapshots make me wander the past like a hungry animal
waiting to devour beauty as a starving soul devours love from a stranger.

I see me swimming in Whitefish Lake, Montana, the water cold and clear
surrounded by mountains and watching small children play quietly on the sand. I see me standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon speechless, or driving down to Patagonia from Tucson past vineyards and desert and Saguara.

I see the hard glint of steel and sun crackling off the waves of Lake Michiagn, the sand white, filled with shells, bottle bits, garbage and people like me, barefoot and wondering, jumping into the warm water and dreaming of staying inside the waves.

I see the drive from Park City, Utah down to the Heber Valley, the Wasatch front like electricity filling me, those mountains filled with the energy of ancient wisdom I can never really grasp. 

I see Chicago from my window in Logan Square and wonder why and how I got here.

I see my father taking me ice skating in the days when the park was frozen from late November right through most of March, no talk of Global Warming then--those snows piled up like mountains around the rink, my father placing me in my little white skates on the hard, clear surface of the ice, and me
wanting to fly on that ice like a snow fairy.

I was light on my feet.

I read Rachel Carson at ten and wondered:
would the birds stop singing?
In our neighborhood of Oaks and Pines and Maples, Birch and Elm, the fortress of trees looming above my smallness,
birds and even a Cardinal in the winter, red against the deep white snow.

The birds still sing sometimes in Logan Square along Wrightwood and Sawyer although we never hear them in the winter, and the squirrels seems to know, as harbringers of the warmth, that any day now, birds will be back to give the music to the early dawn.

Now it is quiet. The only music is the garbage truck, the street cleaner and the clicking heels of young women dressed to the teeth and going to work
down town.

I am writing this poem.

Sometimes poetry is all you can do. 

                                                                 -

                               Ottowa Song

We were not young

It was massacre

But the end was coming

Later.

We are still here.

There cannot be the original

Sweetness—it was given over

To the moment of blood.

Those whites know of what
I speak,

But I am still here.

Once

While picking through the small

Fields I saw a white egg smashed

And turned, speckled, tinges of blue,

A dead unborn bird slipping out in

Sinews of grayish film.

For that bird

I would have written

this poem.

                                           Knife Song

yesterday I heard someone’s song.

it came to me like a knife

ripping my insides into tattered pieces.

the song was wide and long and took

me apart—like cleaving open the

skin of a fish you have just caught.

fish, gasping for air, no longer in the

broad soft water, dipping and gliding

with friends, but slapped on the dry

hard ground, wet with dew still, shoots

of green grass prickling up through the

gasping fins, opening and closing, opening

and closing

looking for water and finding nothing but

fat air

to kill the life.