How I Observed the Day of Atonement

If you are unfamiliar with day and its observance,
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur

In a place of perfect solitude,
No crowded synagogue within to hide,
No cantor to intercede on my behalf,
I spoke words of mine own creation
To my creator who wisely empowers me
To judge myself, for knowing, none harsher,

We two,
Old travel companions,
Upon worn grayed, adirondacke thrones,
We overlooked,
A natural prayer place,
Bay and breeze, white-clouded and sun-laced.
Only the full time inhabitants, the animals,
Grayling butterflies to match and contrast,
Eavesdropping on our Greek dialogos, in this,
Palace of Perfect Solitude.

Amiable did we chat,
I of family, this and that.

He, wearied from recent travel,
To Syria and India,
Was glad for a day off,
For he had little to do,
But wait for twilight,
To then close the books.

For us no formality, easy the going,
No prosecutor no defender in residence,
For we exchange these roles intermittently,
The incriminatory, the penance, all deeds displayed,
No adult games of winking eyes, and
Hidden heart, secret chambers,
Rabbinical or angelic intercession.

He does so love his Bach,
Adagio on strings,
My soothing gift to him,
This music more than divine.

He returned this courtesy.

Warming sun to expose my chest,
Cooling genteel breeze offsetting,
The bay emptied of wayfaring skiffs and yachts.

A cooling beverage proffered,
But sighing, he said that he had yet to find
A beverage that his kind of thirst could slake.
For his eyes, tho shining, did not effervesce,
As when we shared this day in years past.

Too much killing, this year,
It tires me so to tabulate human excess,
Spoke not a word, for my critique would
Comfort him less, if at all.

Thanks for Kol Nidre, he plainted,
So I too can disavow,
The best intended oaths I took and take,
For each year, I fail more than the year before.

If only I could sit with each,
As I do with you,
Where what needs saying,
Is said, understood, undisguised as praying.

A schooner to the dock did appear,
For him it attended, for him, it waited,
Sails, both black and white.

He stood to depart, my arms-grasped, taken, he graphing,
Measuring my fortitude, my strengths, my divinity.

I do so love this day in your company.
I shall sit with you again one year on,
Bach sweet when next we meet, please.

Soft spoke, as almost I should not hear,
Your time is nigh, no thing I create is forever.
He spoke with such sadness,
For well I knew, the intent, his meaning.

He, for-himself, saddened, for he loved
Sitting  beside me in this manner,
Since my inception, never deception,

Only He resting easy, when he atoned before me,
And I gave him his absolution conditional,
As he gave me,
mine

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“IF we are each created in His image,
how glorious is the diversity of our deities,
each of us a tiny drop of paint on a tableau
of a small planet, insignificant but
uniquely beautiful intelligent species of godlike creatures,
“deities~human”

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wise enough to know mine philosophical shortcomings,
for they are many,
insufficient wisdom, more than sufficient laziness,
but sometimes even the *o b v i o u s
strikes a rhyming chord,
even so, delving into God’s image
is for the foolhardy,
ergo ipso facto,
I am that,
that fool

but the boundaries of common sense poetry,
offer healthy delimitations,
and as rhe day wanes, eyes go blurry,
I am content to laurels~rest:

I do not count the times,
I’ve called out my beseeching deities,
I do not count the numbers of names,
we have designated and available for them,
or how many I’ve employed, and which replied
or the varied shapes they assumed,
to get my attention,

but this is a poem,
cannot leave you hanging,
if you paid your dues for joining me this far:
the due is due you:


them
(their ONLY pronoun),
keep their answers
short and oft inexplicable,
yet strangely satisfying,
for being a deity
they employ common sense,
and the answers frequently found
on a list of Frequently Answered Questions (FAQ‘s)

the most common response,

“but you already knew that!”

“where time is the fly and age the fisher of men”

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”until I fell forward
into fall where time is
the fly and age the fisher
of men, then when winter
begins all will be forgotten,
where time is the fly and
age the fisher of men”

excerpt from “The Fall” by Rick Richardson

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that words from a different ionic state, jump as embodied ions from screen to the throat, evicting a guttural current of exclamation, you believe even with the half-heartedly palpitations from  remainder of my damaged pumping heart, that these words were always intended, just for me…

boy and old man coexist, the pottage of memories stirred,
and the time is fly, and I drown in the miracle of greenest grass of
Yankee Stadium at age eight,
oasis, heaven, a child reborn in a sea of Bronx concrete,
and the swallowing up of my boyhood is forever marked henceforth, the hook has caught me, and I am of the age
once and forever


not a fisherman, but a fisher of men’s souls,
mine own is my best bait,
hooked line and sinker, and
wisdom and words
elude and delude always, 
 like summer is perpetual and aging a construct,
time does not fly, but slowly laps and waves
eroding our myths and ourselves upon a continuum with
no ends

~postscript~

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yet I believe,
in miracles of
fish and loaves,
and that our individual continuums
will exist beyond the artifice of constraints
of
mortal time and that poems are
the forever chemicals within
our
bloodstreams,
even when our blood no longer spills

yet I believe!

46 years
What do you get
Your way past old
Your pants don’t seem to fit
Your always cold
Like day old bread
Your beginning to mold
Broken Hips
Brittle Bones
46 years
**** that’s old

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”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)

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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…

Where Is Shelter?

depends on the location of the storm…

so oft have I queried the gods and you?

Where is Shelter?

to which, my response, while surrounded so well (!)
within
my moated island circumferences redoubt,
always was a simple:

“Here, Here is shelter!

But so human, thus so prone to delimited vision,
always, we scan the skies outward, fearful of
the hurricane and storm that approach,
from without, appearing, and the brewing
sky’s danger is visceral~visible to the naked eyes,
when,
it is disguised within the chambers of the
body, festering, until it is pestering, and
shelter, sadly, is not injectable, transferable,
easy remedial, and the hunkering down
with four walls not the solution, for the walls
themselves are damaged by decades of
waves of innocuous gently lapping that still
erode igneous granite(1) and fissure the self,
this secretive, enemy insidious…

so it comes to be, that my own daggers have
pivoted, the pointy dangers pointed outwards,
well entrenched in their own defenses, now targeting
the whole of me, my outer walls breached, and
fired upon by cannons of cells, a treacherous
attack, bombardement par l'artillerie et les drones,
of the Fifth Column (2)…

so once more, say no more, but ask the brief of demand,

Where is Shelter?

the answer is as of yet to be decided,
but the forces
arrayed for and against
are equally determined!

W.S.