Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
Nat Lipstadt Aug 2023
“and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”  

Walt Whitman

<>

having recently been on standby for a permanent-entry residency visa
to over & just beyond death’s door, Walt’s prescient prescription strikes my broken breastbone even harder much, than the persistent
periodic pains confirming the breaking and the healing
of this man’s mending of the human centric poetic *****

for this warped heart mine, now rejoicingly rejiggered with some threads and wires to deliver a new but fresh bloodied wisdom,
begs me, eggs me to torrent word streams, but Whitman’s wisdom cautions a new slowness, the wisdom of mortality’s hot breath urges careful consideration of every letter that my second chance, consignment shop flesh, eagerly embraces, to both prescribe and proscribe inside-insights tween the deafening sounds of eyelashes beating synchronized to the revived heart rates rapid renewal and
last second-chances….

torn tween minute torso sensations and the running silence of
a new battery’s internal rapid intervals, the silent timing gaps tween beats leaves-just-enough-space to ask over and over again,
from whence will come my richest fluency? (1)

at 300am, I lay carefully caressing and chewing well each transitory
thought, absent the former energetic ability to just spill,
though highly desired,
now requires, like me,
steady re-piecing together

the steady drumbeat of now-nearer-my-god-than-thee Titanic reflections
demands a slowing rapidity

this I thought before and now ken, even and ever better, that our primary endeavor shall always be the giving, the disbursement of the act of love…for therein lies the healing of each, and wet eyes,
make necessarily concluding this poem about nothing and everything
and I comprehend Walt’s dictum:

my very flesh is a poem,
every sensation a lyric,
every breath taken and returned to the atmosphere
so unconsciously
are my oldest
and newest
3:00 AM poetry companions
(1) I lift up my eyes to the mountains— where does my help come from?
Psalms 121:1-4
She walked by on the beach one day at the end of one sweet summer
and found a golden rose tucked safely between the shore and the rocks
She was a messenger of God and so she listened deeply when He said
" its all about fair trade my child, its all about fair trade"  
She tucked it in her pocket and was about to go back home
when suddenly she heard the sound of a seagull's cry.
There upon the beach a loner sat, with a despondent, brokenhearted sigh
She handed her the golden rose without a word, then passed her by
Five silver Angels watched, then fanned the mounting tide  
and turned the shore to shreds of light they raised her off the floor  
" its all about fair trade" she heard them say  
as she found another rose in the sand, and this one, was a lovely
shade of rose*
She tucked it behind her ear then gave Him thanks for one more year  
"No regrets my Lord, no second thoughts, "    
At her age you see, she had finally understood the art of letting go.
So taking one last look behind she just smiled, then moved along.
  Aug 2023 Nat Lipstadt
irinia
the breath of history in unknown bodies
intoxicate my sight I might say
it chokes me with a mystified light
I have to learn how to breath my own life
it's easy to confuse the absent with the real
the incorporation of dread, hidden feelings
and unspoken truths a subtle tyranny
no body carried my body in a mind

I want to spend my life writing love stories I will
forget by midnight and rewrite with laughter

between generations a subtle struggle cause there isn't still
enough space inside for the life of one's boundaries
it's either you or me to suffer but everybody is OK
we smile at each other, we appreciate each other

unbearable life colonizes the body with unbearable silence, signs without symbols but symptoms, drives and confiscated stories
unreachable bodies woven together by force in the fabric of illusion
cast a dimming shadow like the melancholy of an echo heard
by no body
Nat Lipstadt Aug 2023
~for Isabel, Alex & Wendy, Theo & Rose~

be reading Whitman and Hafiz,
adding some Shelley and Frost,
for (no salt) seasoning, might add in
a biblical, King Solomon’s be-loved,
sugared Song of Songs…

won’t need to go far, on my nightstand,
search & reach, to love and preach to
generations next, a lesson last & simple:

read, read, read there by learning,
how to first define, then preserve the
variety of feelings rising from within!

here’s a starter morsel from Walt,
sort of a summary of how to do it,
all well and proper…
poppy

”This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families,
read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,. re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

Walt Whitman

Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855.
Walt Whitman, c.1887.
August 2 2023
readying for surgery
Nat Lipstadt Aug 2023
My Woman, My Partner

we need today it seems identifiers moreover,
as we slice, dissect, and categorize the W’s of our
individual experience,
by defining ourselves as pieces of categories

Today, woke with this title-to-be-poem in my head,
My Woman, My Partner

I like particular, individuating descriptors that distinguish
rather than categorize, summary’s that capture the
roomy broad and small strokes, the subtleties of capturing~
encompassing an image total, and yet intuitively tasting and
comprehending the depths and flavoring of our totality,
a combinatory humanity

my choice was My Woman, which was comprehensive
and distinguished, yet upon consultation with said person,
for pre-authorization approval, it was returned to me with
an engine-heart additive, that was both a word that denotes a
binding, ties, equality, and takes it to another, even ever
highest level,

this essay on how I came to title this poem, well, is the poem
in its entirety, it is the process, the point, the summary and the
minutiae of all I wished to convey.



Sunday Aug 13 8:03 AM
  Aug 2023 Nat Lipstadt
Where Shelter
<>

”To dream by the oak and awake by the sea
when August has ripened and turned Jubilee
you must enter dominion of summer's delight
and live in the rapture of candescent light

Oh to live and to love one must first learn to kiss,  
the kinetics of summer, with eternal bliss.”


~from vienna bombardieri’s poem, “Kinetics Of Summer~
(with her kind permission)

<>

First verse pinpoints accurate, this,
my spot!
by oak and sea,
my precise longitude and latitude, where my summertime
eyes open to receive the gift of morning’s light, observing
the conjunction of land, hard by the sea, the land-ed avian gentry
and sea~sailor birds interacting, sharing the uprising currents,
for sport and observation, travel and pleasured sailing,
these “Masters of the Sky can fly for hours (or days), while barely flapping,” and this verse stuns, and
my shock,

at these, her words
my breathing is gasped and grasped
by oak and sea, for so it be,
this is where
my morning’s operatic scrum, ballet and dance hall hullabaloo,
my diurnal natural choreography is performed,
while slow sipping my very heated first coffee

it was here
that I learned to love more easily,
for the kinetics of summers trio of sun, sky, and moderate breezes,
lulled the turbulence of my disheartened lives into an easier
order, the world~surround, a living, breathing exercise that
warmed the spirit, cooled the soul, and spoke without uttering
a single word,
here dear person, is the where and the when,
the comfort of the natural-blanket
that enwraps, covers, cherishes the atmosphere entire,
containing the healing elixirs and protective ointments,
that remove the
plaque of life’s accumulated injuries, slights and scar tissue

simply put,
here I breath freely,
here I see with clarity
here the infusions of
living in nature, prolongs,
restore, remind, enliven
and enhances,
the intermixture of
body and soul

here in actual deed,
the kiss of summer bliss
upon
my tiring cell’s walls,
are resurrected even unto the nuclei,
by the warm breath of sun life and sun light,
and the breezes of salty sweet caramel air
and under their loving, combined-dominion
am I
resurrected and will yet sense,
one more Jubilee again
as I lay dreaming
by the oak and the sea…
great appreciation to Vienna B. for the beautiful poem she wrote,
and thanks for the inspiration!
Always be dreaming!
W.S.
Next page