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Paul A Moon Jul 2016
Which is my church with its green leaves, brown grass
and pine’s bark, all foresting in one motion.
I shall forest rituals of sacrifice,

but without Catholicizing faces drawn
from dark Crusading and my exiling.
Annaling to mark the sun’s solstice for Eastering
and holying days, the dew
coalescing upon the darkening and browning grass
at midnight and cooling air
arching constellations
and the mooning of the night: the cue
to lying for rest
by the small pool in this placing or
to strike, savaging at prey.

Owling as it does, darting as it does,
from a bed of branches, crying,
soundlessly shooting at a forest mouse, leaves
rustling for this night’s Nativity,
this one lifts its butterflying wings
like the soul’s silhouette
taken by an angeling force to heaven.
After owling, angeling, butterflying,
one must create Jesus as a verb.

Having witnessing these things,
limits are paining, as are knowings and doings.
The mouse must have been distracting
this owl from its offspring, thus it was Christing:
sacrificing itself for its children, thus fathering.

Seeing angels fluttering under the moonlight,
Hairshirting is my Church after living here,
after travelling through East of Eden in daylight.
  
Simplifying the Word---so heartwrenching---near
dawn or dusk, being as a penumbra’s cusp
I am Giotto’s halo in human form, keeper

of the haze, smoke, storm, and most of all, cup
from my own despairing.

Always there more to God than pain.

Churching myself is my work, thus by expressing
this foresting, owling, angeling, butterflying,  
I narrate my life’s kingdom.
Only beautiful words for my Beatrice, Florence,
and re-Edening.
Paul A Moon Jul 2016
Though you lose, thus becoming an intimate as a lover or friend, brother or sister, parent,
you will always lose through attrition or accident.
We know that 9/11’s are attrition and
love is always an accident, because
we reap what we sow, and never choose whom we love.
Attrition is the rain, forming
from pressure within the skies,
high and low temperatures at Armageddon:
yin and yang becoming earth’s tears.

Accident is the rain, vilifying
the evil of being from these two lessers of the skies,
love is sought but never found or found at odd places:
yin and yang becomes earth’s joy.

Thus, rain is a lie, liar, lying, saying
joy and love at the same time.

But love is not from this world. It is
not recognized, but named… “No” to the world’s belligerence.
We know love is expressed by this action, yes…
Thus, it’s not a lie. Love cannot be otherwise

or we would’ve never crucified the Savior
or our true loves for the world…

Love cannot exist naked.
It is always ready to be whipped, strangled, maimed
as Jesus or a twice victimed Iraqui,
the third world or as Salvadore Allende.

But I love the rain despite my self.
It is within the reach of definitions
but not confirmations. So, love
like rain cannot be held hostage
by human view nor divine postage.
I love as it rains, I rain as I love.
From here, in my prayer, let my love of rain be love.


Found in Voices of a People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, and the now canonical historical work of the United States by the same Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: “Watergate had made both the FBI and the CIA look bad---breaking the laws they were sworn to uphold, cooperating with Nixon in his burglary jobs and illegal wiretapping. In 1975, congressional committees in the House [of Representatives] and Senate began investigations of both the FBI and CIA…It was also learned from the investigation that the CIA---with the collusion of a secret Committee of Forty headed by Henry Kissinger—had worked to ”destabilize” the Chilean government headed by Salvadore Allende , a Marxist who had been elected president in one of the rare free elections in Latin America.” (pp.554). For a more balanced view on the complicity of Kissinger and his role in U.S foreign policy, moreover his role in the death of Allende, see or read the acclaimed movie or book: The Trials Henry Kissinger.
Paul A Moon Jun 2016
I. Double edged swords

Every evening, spring keeps its marriage
to winter. Twilight is crazily quilt
in orange as purple with scattering grays, sage

stars calmly coalescing and being built
into constellations… The twilight air
imposed winter’s silence. People slit

these pavements as capricious walkers. There
is a squirrel within and out of trees, or cat
eating a rat in a squeaking swallow. Are

the homeless equal to BlackWater’s scrounging what
state alms exists? No…Night’s misery
is never silent, so unseen more---that

is civilization…****** of industry
are its captains. Blood subsidies, ****
ravage and revile Eve and Mary:

our Mothers in regret over humanity. Keep
Palestine’s Olive Tree in heart…
Eastern Star, and Western Constellations, weep

for the nameless and defenseless ramparts
of refugees: Moses again… Here in Queens,
Manhattan’s gaudy skyline rapports

a look of 11th Avenue’s Rahab’s face. Scenes
of red and blue, white broken teeth buildings
from too many *******, and pained spleens

of her here and there, everywhere, “It’s a living…”
Ugliness has a pretty face, it progresses…
Winter’s chill will soon be here, not forgiving

those who are homeless from God, homeless
from being brethren’s keepers. We are quick
winter. Death is us, and we are death, endless

because of our need for a monied physique .
Poems are for poets, sing. As you were silenced,
your song was written in winters oblique

in their endings, its prayers against the NKVD
KGB and un-repenting CIA, a spoken
covenant to the people, and the words rhymed  

against the powerful from Stalin to Reagan…
We’re blessed for the verbal and intellectual
knife of verse. We must sing against state’s sin.

As you did scrawling on soap bars habitual,
writing, with burnt matches, ritual.

II. Your Legend

Called ***** and nun, there’s a price
for being a poet: never sequestered
in black and white terms, clerk or captain
king or peasant, Christian or pagan:

our stamps earned in civilization.
By seeing things in gray, a poet intuits
monsters we knew as children are
real as warheads once aimed at one another.

Our hands, their lingering fingers and palms,
can either be nailed on a martyr’s arms,
or holding a scythe or Wesson. Your wishes
were fists wounding your heart---your anguishes.

Why did subtle music bloom from your lips?
Why hadn’t your tongue expressed bitterness
from the Muses of lonely Siberia
or **** bombs---destroying statues of Maria

in Saint Petersburg?  Why did your voice remain?
There are only questions about you, for
your  pain and joy seemed the same: you cried.
It surely seemed both should have died.

Drinking ***** was surcease from bureaucrats,
to your son’s exile to Siberia, these cruel cascades
of the state. Watch the platoons, and
see their eyes in long ceremonial parades

for the state’s saints: dying from heart attacks before
your mourned demise. Did one shed a tear?
Only posterity knows. As the present can infer,
veterans are always “was” and “were”, never now here…

In here, where the written word was a noose,
and sentences were genocide, thus a paragraph,
a stanza, or even an essay was inconceivable
horror people receiving an order’s end.

In here, where order promulgates,
where time is counted by snowflakes
where space is counted by snowflakes,
why is never asked, it’s just struck with, “Do.”

But, it was when despair was thick withered
winter branches, without hint of leaves or spring,
love needed anguish to show its strength
love needed this psaltery against death.


III. The seen and unseen

Thinking of you Anna, ah this world.
Then, as the world lives and does
as just bearing witness,
the guts to live and bear pain
is in the poet’s voice,
in the saint
the seemingly graceless soldier
******, Matthew, Saul, Romero.
Song found, song lost
Song of Songs,
the poet names the names
of all to give monsters and empires
a voice
to be seen and unseen,
with a cold lunar heart,
and to let prayer
come as souls decapitated from this Palestine,
this Armenia, this Navajo nation,
with a left-handed signature, tear written.
Paul A Moon Jun 2016
(In commemoration of August 9, 1945)

The tree will follow Hiroshima
and Nagasaki* winds by its hearts.
“Yes” if
winds wade up and down
“No” if
winds whip across and crosswind.
The tree’s will is in the leaves…
All leaves are hearts by having
ventricles and atriums in their own ways---
even in the cactus and pines---
just watch carefully and listen astutely
to their bristly rustling…
All
leaves sway, sigh, and sometimes, sing
because they are the tree’s hearts:
open to sunshine and rain pour; blight and moonlight----
the true meaning of love!
Here, my love, I’m just a servant of
your branches, bark, and most of all
your lovely and deep roots.



*Nagasaki was the center of Japanese Catholicism by early Jesuit missions
Paul A Moon Jun 2016
Alien and unwanted, my smile
always singed my lips. Platitudes
polite and civilization vile…
Many times, I longed to prelude

my burdens to him, my husband.
But, love is no longer the case…
What a woman gives up for an end
to live happily ever after…  

An access
to be one with another’s world…
I felt a freedom
in slitting my brother’s throat
as seasons ebbed
and eddied with each part of him
was discarded for my love’s
need for an empire.

I felt the moment, the freedom
of Fatherland.
Lived within this foreign land
of endless lies, Amen.

A wife-time of anguish for a man… I’m resplendent
Eve: noting wishes beyond Adam’s and God’s assignments.

Jason: husband, an end, has been…
I’m slitting our children’s throats
on this dark continent as me, an alien
for one thing you to see: making my own exile’s scene…
Paul A Moon Jun 2016
I’ve learned to love a blade’s edge…
I am nobody and somebody
with nowhere to go: the border between
Manhattan’s East and West Streets
ground and stone
reason and faith
mother and father,
the Father and the Son.

I’m the Holy Spirit, the shadow always
mediating between phrases “Serve me” and “Agape”…
I am this sentence. I want you, for this moment; this sliver
between life and death, this Mississippi cutting through
a continent. I was in Adam, after his expulsion:

Let the green apple be lodged in my throat
while washed in the image of Eden
before I leave, so in cursing my fate
and love what is…

Sharp and dangerous, always ready to use conscience
and **** according to judgment,
the thrill, the second where happiness
and sadness is satisfaction, I am there.

Nothing ever gets done without me.
I am a peninsula, imparting
land to waters and seas
divinity to mortality:
Pentecostal.

The blade’s edge ready to cut and be cut.
In the name of the Father and the Son
and me
Amen…
Go to heaven
if you cannot accept hell.
Go to hell if you cannot accept heaven.
As any mediator, I am a nation
unto myself, my fate, my exile.

— The End —