The Life of the Land is Perpetuated in Righteousness

Inspired by the haiku by Esther Ling in Poésie, (See: http://hortusclosus.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/righteous/comment-page-1/#comment-6508)

Is it righteousness or regret that we contemplate? Is there a bucket list or a mere acceptance that the quality of life is so diminished over time that we understand the demise of our physicality? I watch my mother capitulate to the last waves that wash over her breaking body, how we can predict the steps to her final resting place, someone who was once our equal and before that the first beauty to have shown her face, and by whom I measure all lovers.

Tonight, I held the head of a woman with my mother’s skull and I massaged her. I breathed her “essential oils” through her thinning hair and followed the lines of her delicate hands as I traveled them. She leaned against me and I felt my own heart and we looked at pictures of my mother when she was 18.

Sadly, I doubt this woman loves me, and so it is. Death is an acceptance of the truth; and like the arms flailing in the sand, it is a kind of suffocation that we felt when we were born: Ua Mau ke Ea o ka ‘Āina i ka Pono.

And so perhaps you are correct: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Behind the Sun

Blood on the T-Shirt that floats in the
Wind turning yellow as a signal.
Death particulates in the last sound
At recess of the heart.
An eye for an eye leads to a hollow sound and silence.
Each infraction is felt and understood
As a long descendancy in error.
Even as the clouds lift the same hopes
Beguile fate until happiness is granted.
Another day, another time this complexity
Reads of the same cyclical dream
The shirt is taken.
In the hands of a prodigy, the pages turn
In the book, the world is upside down.
So the purpose of life is travel
Down a lane that is treacherous,
“You should follow progress,” the merchant said.
Meanwhile happiness danced on sticks and
Told the children of a circus.
He saw her in the night blowing fire
And swirling flames and there it
Was, he had known love.
She spun it fast and furiously, this
Show to speak the truth of hope and
Promises.
In the night under a half-moon
Hate floated into a mist of tenderness.
Only their destinies were tied to the dry land
Until the gears stuck and the cows fell.
Then they went round by themselves
Faint by the ingrained memory of genes
And the repetitious tasks, a whole life
Of carnage.
Through cactus, under blue sky and white
Clouds, they moved toward Ventura.
You never see the end of this or do you?
And then the face comes to set you free.
In candlelight, “In this house the dead command the Living,” she said.
The beautiful spinning motion of love
Stretches further into light.
She spins for his dreams, a lover’s delight
Spinning wish-fulfilled, the inevitable
Fact of love circulates.
Changing in a voice only they can hear.
In the shadow of daylight, he cannot have
But what he feels.
There is no Ventura for the misfortunate,
All is the subtraction of fate: “One less, one less, one less”
He says of time’s monotone.
I am the servant of day’s unwanted list
A stroke of black lines over a series
Of names.
So he sets his brother to drift in the sky,
The last joy until the bullet comes to spoil
Everything.
They laugh for days as if they
Never remembered.
Joy is a holocaust that hatred promises.