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  May 2018 james nordlund
Emeka Mokeme
Even if your heart
is breaking ;
Trust me.
Even if you
no longer feel
my presence,
It is because
you didn't notice:
I am there.
Only in stillness
and quiet understanding
Can you know
me as I am.
My silence is
my way
of strengthening you.
It is my way
of encouraging you
to take that
bold step of
faith toward me.
Only my touch
can ease
the pain you
are feeling now.
Even if your heart
refused to be encouraged,
Take hold of my hand
and walk with me
And let me love you.
Let me teach
you to love.
Let me teach
you to laugh
And be happy,
To forget everything
that has passed.
You are mourning
for what is not
worthy of grief.
Let me teach you
to build on what
you have experienced,
Instead of bending
under the load of it.
© 2017,Emeka Mokeme.
james nordlund May 2018
I shudder to think, for your poem decries "being under anothers power".
Yet, are we not born by the power of another, grace, and that of our mother?
Is it not our solutioning with the Earth becoming more concentrated,
The power of another, that realizes us becoming, potentially, you, me?
And when the vitality, rigors of youth are supposedly betrayed by the wisdom
Of middle-age, are we not also more so for that, our doings not more real?
And when old age seemimgly takes our senses, not the sixth, our muscles,
But ..., the sinew, our bones strength, but the marrow's, do we not still be
More so, alival instead of survival, outstretching an arm to lend a hand,
By the power of another, betwixt an Earth, Sky, with a Sun, a Universe?
Aren't we also to cherish life no matter what, strive to be alive, thrive?
And after we, "Do not go gentle into that good night, and rage, rage against
The dying of the light" (Dylan Thomas), will we not finally, again, join in
The Cosmos' eternal 'dance of spheres', it's cacaphony, symphony, as stardust
Sprinkled from above or petals dancing on the breeze, by the power of another?
A poem in response to a fellow poet's depressed one on this website; he appreciated it.  "Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”" and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
BY MARIA POPOVA: “Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire,” Adrienne Rich wrote in contemplating what poetry does. “Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock,” Denise Levertov asserted in her piercing statement on poetics. Few poems furnish such a wakeful breaking open of possibility more powerfully than “Do not go gentle into that good night” — a rapturous ode to the unassailable tenacity of the human spirit by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (October 27, 1914–November 9, 1953).  Written in 1947, Thomas’s masterpiece was published for the first time in the Italian literary journal Botteghe Oscure in 1951 and soon included in his 1952 poetry collection In Country Sleep, And Other Poems. In the fall of the following year, Thomas — a self-described “roistering, drunken and doomed poet” — drank himself into a coma while on a reading and lecture tour in America organized by the American poet and literary
critic John Brinnin, who would later become his biographer of sorts. That spring, Brinnin had famously asked his assistant, Liz Reitell — who had had a three-week romance with Thomas — to lock the poet into a room in order to meet a deadline for the completion of his radio drama turned stage play 'Under Milk Wood', Dylan Thomas, early 1940's.  In early November of 1953, as New York suffered a burst of air pollution that exacerbated his chronic chest illness, Thomas succumbed to a round of particularly heavy drinking. When he fell ill, Reitell and her doctor attempted to manage his symptoms, but he deteriorated rapidly. At midnight on November 5, an ambulance took the comatose Thomas to St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. His wife, Caitlin Macnamara, flew from England and spun into a drunken rage upon arriving at the hospital where the poet lay dying. After threatening to **** Brinnin, she was put into a straitjacket and committed to a private psychiatric rehab facility.  When Thomas died at noon on November, it fell on New Directions founder James Laughlin to identify the poet’s body at the morgue. Just a few weeks later, New Directions published The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (public library), containing the work Thomas himself had considered most representative of his voice as a poet and, now, of his legacy — a legacy that has continued to influence generations of writers, artists, and creative mavericks: Bob Dylan changed his last name from Zimmerman in an homage to the poet, The Beatles drew his likeness onto the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Christopher Nolan made “Do not go gentle into that good night” a narrative centerpiece of his film Interstellar.  Upon receiving news of Thomas’s death, the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote in an astonished letter to a friend: It must be true, but I still can’t believe it — even if I felt during the brief time I knew him that he was headed that way… Thomas’s poetry is so narrow — just a straight conduit between birth & death, I suppose—with not much space for living along the way.  In another letter to her friend Marianne Moore, Bishop further crystallized Thomas’s singular genius: I have been very saddened, as I suppose so many people have, by Dylan Thomas’s death… He had an amazing gift for a kind of naked communication that makes a lot of poetry look like translation. Dylan Thomas is that rare thing, a poet who has it in him to allow us, particularly those of us who are coming to poetry for the first time, to believe that poetry might not only be vital in itself but also of some value to us in our day-to-day lives. It’s no accident, surely, that Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a poem which is read at two out of every three funerals.  We respond to the sense in that poem, as in so many others, that the verse engine is so turbocharged and the fuel of such high octane that there’s a distinct likelihood of the equivalent of vertical liftoff. Dylan Thomas’s poems allow us to believe that we may be transported, and that belief is
itself transporting."....  Story on Brain Pickings' webite   :)   https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/01/24/dylan-thomas-do-not-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/   Also, whoever has removed all my replies to others who have commented on my poems, please  stop that.   reality
james nordlund May 2018
Lil' Israel, today, scuttled the long struggled for 'Iran ...Deal',
an acheivement of the Obama Presidency, although he failed on his
promises of "...watching the robots..." (20 % of "Bernie Or Bust
'Bots", the "hacker 'bots", and hackers globally, etc., biological
machine parts of 'la machine', mega, mecha, techa vs. orga, soma,
Gaia, which were central to the invisible coup that, with the tug, the
S.S. Tea Party, to the tune of their manifest destiny rag, dragged
'The U.S. Constitution', our Ship of State, into the 'Plymouth Rock'
Of this nation's original sin, imperialism, as they landed on it
while it landed on "...we(e),...", Native Americans, Turtle Island,
derailing democratically directed progress and installing Trumpler in
the klukahouse) and "closing Guantonomo", etc., he kept many, making
him singular amongst the number of the fingers of one hand at the top,
The "Presidents Club".  His legacy includes allowing the intelligence
industrial complex, of the corporate structure's convolution, to
purposely not prevent the hacking of the Presidential Elections of
2016, yet also includes such acheivements as the A.C.A., and the
'Iran ... Deal', it being the best possible foreign policy endeavor
To move forward with Iran.  Yet, Trumpler's feuhrer, Netsenyahoo's,
putting on a show of shiny cd's, old intelligence that didn't even
support his delusional projections, was all the cover 'The Donald'
needed to follow his channeling of his inner-worst yahoo and "scrap",
Racistly, that epitome of foreign policy success, "...because it was
Obama's...", as was Trumpler's campaigning on his desires to
"...update and use nuclear programs and weapons...".  For, it's been
common global foreign affairs knowledge for half a century that any
nuclear war is the extinction of humanity in a can, thus 'containment',
not proliferation', was the eternal order of the day.  So, His Trunc-
ularnesses not understanding why "...a country has weapons if they're  
not going to use them...", was not just a confession of his utter
criminal insanity, it was also one of his intent to break the "Non-State
Agression" part of the Nuremburg Accords that was central to the lessons
learned from WWII, like if you're not taking bullets you're making them,
By globally selling not just unending war, but nuclear ones, discarding
containment for proliferation, 'cause war pays extremely more than peace.  
What do you get when you mix imperialism, materialism, racism, religious
bigotry, patriarchy, oligarchy, notsee Germany before it annexed Austria.
Trumpenstein, blasting the keinder and gentler imperialism of remocrats,
Is warring on dempublicans, voting, women's rights, healthcare, health,
Et al, exterminating non-rem voters, etc., now he is angling for a Sunni
wished for unending worldwide war on the Shiite, Iran, to be nuclear, ****
all non: US citizens, Caucasians, upper-middle-class to rich, supposed
Christians, as our notsee war machine has ever been oiled by the blood
of, for more (like merx for more thru to mercs for unnecessary unending
worldwide war).  Separating the real religion which all religions,
etc., are a front for, avarice, from the State, as is dictated by our
Constitution, is not only a necessity for "a nation and an individual",
like Gandhi said "abhaya, fearlessness", is, it's now a necessity for
the existence of humanity, neigh, all life and the Earth.  He will end
U.S. if we don't protect the vote, GOTV, vote, and impeach him a.s.a.p..
I fear my disgust with presidential politics might be able to be gleaned through the twig of poetree   :)   c'est la unvie; no?   reality
james nordlund Apr 2018
Above..., and beyond, they fly,
Betwixt Earth and Sky,

When the Sun smiles, these beautiful creatures,
Feathers fully feeling the wind, are reality

On high, at once message, messenger,
Relentless, irreplaceable, forward, wild,

As between the profane and sacred,
In the mundane, realism, we walk.
Relentless, irreplaceable, forward   :)   reality
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