bruorton | Entries tagged with hope

In the news, the wars rage on.

The terrible and the duped

strive tirelessly to make the world

worse. The world, tired herself,

seems to be complying. But while

the stakes do seem to go nowhere

but up, history would suggest we
have always lived under this pall.

Meanwhile, our attention snags

like a bare foot on every jagged nail

of aggravation. This morning the coffee

spilled. The cat made a mess as you

rushed to get out the door. You hit

every stop light. One of those awful

starts that inevitably heralds, perhaps

manifests, an awful day to come.

It's a survival instinct, I suppose,

to focus on the worst things. But

what is survival, these days? Last

weekend I somehow forgot until

evening the medication I must take

every morning to stop my body

from destroying itself. Behold, a

tiny miracle: I am still here. This

morning I didn't notice until after

rinsing my contacts under the faucet

that I hadn't closed the sink drain

first. A terrible start to the day

that never manifested. And now,

walking across the yard, a raven

is making a hilarious ratcheting

noise with its throat, like those

wooden toys designed to simulate

a croaking toad. Juvenile robins,

summer's first brood to the pair

nesting in the old wreath on the

garage, are flitting about to test

their wings. After two solid weeks

of rain, the sun is only partially

obscured by clouds.

That tree was part of me, or I was part of it.

I'm not quite sure. Four feet thick at the base,

with grooves in its bark I could wedge my hand into,

it was a mainstay of my early years. Its climbs,

its views, as intimately known as family. The games

I played, dancing in and out of its dappling shade

with a certainty that never countenanced

the storm-wracked day it fell upon our home,

shattering the ridgepole, chimney, windows.

Were it not for the house's rugged post-and-beam

construction I'd have been part of it for good;

the main trunk crashing to rest mere feet above my head.

After the rain, we opened the door to find its canopy

snapped off into the yard at the far end from the jagged

stump: the lawn, become an upside-down jungle.

The next day, gazing up into the blue cavity

where it had stood, I saw a bird circling, bewildered.

It is that bird I think of now, when she says

she's not feeling much of anything exactly,

the week after her husband of six years moved out.

She's sitting on a stool at her kitchen bar,

turning her water glass in circles, counter-clockwise,

and achingly it comes to me that nothing I can give

could fill the breach she's standing under.

But once upon a time,
some anonymous worker

knocked an oak peg
through a hemlock tenon,
anchoring it in its mortise socket.
A momentary, forgettable gesture,
that allowed me to walk out

into the sudden jungle of the world.

A sub-zero trudge two miles before dawn,
my knee stiff, aching, I stop cold
on the bridge. A riveting cacophony
rises up from below,
a susurration and hum:
ice battering ice in a fast channel.
Downstream, somewhere
far out in the gloom where
this river flows into the larger
comes an ominous snap,
a seismic shift amid
intractable glacial shelves.
There is only the slightest
smudge of light in the east,
nothing you can hold on to.
Yet high above the freezing fog
an invisible crow announces,
raucous and undaunted,
the rebirth of the world.

[this story is a follow-up to this concept piece]

A brief summary of the primary genders of the First People:
- Pneot: attuned to air and sky and things that breath; usually hunters
- Geot: attuned to the earth and water; usually foragers and fishers
- Hleots: attuned to sun and fire; keepers of the camp, teachers, crafters, raising of children
- Praots: anyone changing from one gender to another, or bridging or in between genders; attuned to change, esp. birth and death. Most often those who bear children.
- Rmaots: rare, attuned to strange and unusual things, like time or dreams. Typically seek out their own unique calling.

Children were considered genderless until one clearly expressed itself.

~

Tsaki was in prar sixth hour of labor when Chele became hopelessly bored and wandered off. Chele had come along in the first place due to delusions of grandeur -- which, being so young, had proven easily dispelled. Wone had recently become a midwife at only 15, and Chele had overheard two adults discussing with admiration how Wone had been observing births for about as long as hle could walk. Thus inspired, when the midwife group, the payen, had gathered to accompany Tsaki to prar chosen birth site, on what passed for a mountain near the village, the eight-year-old Chele could not be dissuaded from going along.

( Read more... )

For months -- about 8 months out of the past year -- I canvassed for Warren in NH. I'd never done that before, not for any Presidential candidate: knocking on the doors of strangers, trying to figure out how to assess in about 2 seconds what sort of approach might keep them from shutting the door on me, could just maybe interest them in opening up and considering what I had to say.

Most of the time, the doors stayed closed. No one was home, or at least not answering. (This is what writers call "a metaphor.") And every time that was the case -- every single time, I am not kidding -- this introvert who felt deeply uncomfortable about doing this at all, would feel a little rush of relief, followed by a surge of guilt at my own relief.

( Read more... )

Late, late, mid-October and only now

the cold begins to come. White lines

trace the grain of boards on the porch

and the grass is hoary, a beard turned

abruptly grey.

Overhead the sky is cloudless, blue,

blue, and five crows wheel overhead,

harbingers of the dawn, inscribing

their aerial prophecy in looping words

I cannot read.

The rising sun, obscured behind a
steel seamed roof, gleams on the leading

edge of their wings, bright, bright, as if

new-sprung from the forge of heaven

and not yet quenched.

(published in Albatross #28, Fall 2018)

Do you remember the the other night

walking home in the dark

because we'd thought the moon would be up

so we didn't bring a flashlight

the squnch squnch of fresh snow under our boots

but still warmed by the glow of neighbors
chatting around the table of wine and munchies
discussing the weather, kids, housing travails,

and despite the inevitable dark turn to politics
the lyrics still in our ears

If there's hope in this house I'm gonna find it

If there's hope in this house get me rope

I'm gonna ride it

while in the clear night the train is sounding

all the way down the valley from the next town over.

In the moonless black you say Taurus looks more like a fox

and I point out Castor and Pollux, the twins over Orion,

and our path home is apparently due north

because there is Polaris, beckoning us on.

Gold, the treasure of kings
was never put to grander purpose;
chosen here not so much for symbolic value
but something much more timeless:
a chemical resistance to corrosion.

Bombarded now by its first few decades of cosmic radiation
it sails out beyond the realm of mythological titles
and into the vastness beyond, labeled more often
only by alphanumeric codes, and onward
to a lonely existence expected to last
at least a billion years.

And what have we effectively immortalized
on this truly golden album,
this longest of long-playing records?

A musical selection, of course,
everything from the second Brandenburg Concerto
to mariachi, Australian aborigines to Chuck Berry.
(Also, naturally, the Queen of the Night’s aria.)

It has sounds of home: bird song, whale song,
crickets, frogs; a thunderstorm with falling rain.
Crackling flames. Rolling surf.
The sound of wind; a wild dog, howling.

And of course, the sounds of us—
a horse-drawn cart, a train, an F-111,
a handsaw, a tractor, a jackhammer.
Footsteps, laughter, a crying child, a kiss.

The idea was to be a sort of auditory ambassador
in the event this artifact one day fell into alien
hands (so to speak) which is why it all starts
with words of peace and greeting in 55 human languages.

Imagine, all of it cobbled together
in what was surely a feverish year of conferring
among artists, scientists, semioticians
and science fiction writers.

But what glorious foolishness was that, anyway?
Who ever imagined it would really be recovered,
or, despite the astronomical odds
that it still was worth a try?

Which can only mean it was a long-shot message
to ourselves. Esperanto:
“Ni strebas vivi en paco kun la popoloj
de la tuta mondo, de la tuta kosmo.”

We strive to live in peace with the peoples
of the whole world, of the whole cosmos.

Now, out beyond the heliospheric bubble
Blind Willie Johnson’s bottleneck slide guitar
and mournful gospel hum are passing into eternity.
Dark was the night, and cold was the ground.

The jet engines go from low hum to a roar
while for a moment we sit deafened, unmoving—
before a sudden lurch becomes
a drastic rush of faith
toward the end of the tarmac.

Yet the wind somehow lifts us at last,
still true to a long-standing promise.
I close my eyes, swallowing my doubts,
hoping to bear the increased weight

of this extravagant gift of flight.
When I do look out, I am dazzled
by the racing shadow of our plane
traced on the ground below,

the feather-weight of its darkness
flitting across highways and towns,
trees and green farmland,
and I begin to understand

that this is some unaccountable extravagance
that does not ask for something in return.
But that is not to say I am prepared
when the first wisps of cloud pass by

and there is no longer earth beneath us
but only sea, to behold the tiny white sail
of a solitary boat
unfurled amidst the unmitigated indigo—

as if I were all at once not looking down
but up, watching it set forth
across the vast and hazardous night sky,
at its helm a celestial mariner

dedicated to her course
for the sake of waiting civilizations
and the coming dawn,
bearing her glimmering light

safely to the shores of day,
picking her way
among the sharply pointed stars.