UNICORN RISING
UNICORN RISING
grazing on green violets in spring
we hear with gentle hearts
the soft sounds
of new music
from green gold reeds
as the sun warms a new Dayrose
on slender vines
strong enough to weave new clothes
for the Emperor
born from the breath of the Unicorn.
–Barbara Smith Stoff
ANOTHER CAT : ANOTHER CHRISTMAS MEMORY
REFLECTIONS IN UKAIAH’S GOLDEN EYE
This cat you rescued from the night
has grown sleek and shiny black.
Here in my lap she wafts her tail
in contented response to my praise
and looks at me.
Sunday is quiet now, before Christmas.
Vivaldi deepens the sheen of tinsel
and from such a glow I admire
tall Eucalyptus against scudding clouds
and turn to light the candles. I remember
a time upon time of blonde curls
and bright blue eyes, sheer joy, perfect grace,
flesh from mine, heart’s utter devotion
in red corduroy elation and royal ruffles
beneath fragrant fir. Benedictus…bene…
bene…child crystaling gaze. Rarest gold.
Such alchemy offers immortal loveliness,
and Ukaiah is my witness to this truth.
–Barbara Smith Stoff
ICELAND BECOMES FIRST WESTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRY TO RECOGNIZE PALESTINIAN STATE
ICELAND BECOMES FIRST WESTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRY TO RECOGNIZE PALESTINIAN STATE
I am pleased to read this. Oh so many years ago, when my children were in high school, we had an exchange student from Iceland, for a whole year…what a wonderful experience that was…and we all learned so much. I also believe that Iceland was the first country to use fuel cell cars as municipal vehicles…it’s worth keeping an eye on Iceland! They have wonderful poetic legends also!
This is from a letter I wrote to a grandchild…one of my favorite stories about Iceland: “I am thinking of you so much up there is the Norse world…have decided to lurk around Norse history websites just to be near you…in my imagination anyway. You might enjoy this (below) which I posted at 12:38 p.m. December 19, 1999, on the poetry forum in the New York Times. I think it says a lot about the power of writing, and especially of poetry.
“ There is a wonderful story in the Icelandic Sagas which tells of a king whose son drowned, and the king laid himself down on his bed and refused to eat, to die of a broken heart. Saying that she would go with him into death because she was devoted to them both, she came to sit silently beside his bed. After a while the king asked, “What are you chewing on?” “Dulse,” she said. “It makes you die faster.” “Then give me some too,” he said.
After another while the king found that he was thirsty, so she gave him some water to drink. Then he asked again and again, because the seaweed had made him very thirsty. She then told him that she had been putting milk in the water, and thus they would not die so soon after all. She said that while they were waiting to die, it would be a good idea if he made a poem in memory of his son, and her brother, whom they both loved. “I will carve in runes the words of your poem, as you say them to me,” she said.
The king agreed, and he began to speak to her of all his sorrow over the loss of his favorite son, and all his fury against the seagod. Then he began to feel better. When he had finished the poem, he got up, made the funeral feast in accordance with the ancient custom, sent his daughter back to her home with handsome gifts, and took up his ordinary way of living. He lived to a great old age.
This fascinating lady would be Thorgerdur, associated with the Goddess of Fate, in Icelandic myth, and daughter of Egill, the great poet.”–Barbara Smith Stoff
ICARUS REMEMBERED
ICARUS REMEMBERED
By Barbara Smith Stoff
And we are here again to honor and to remember. I see Paul Sonin’s photo of the Pentagon memorial benches, those benches, each one cantilevered over water. To me, those benches look like the wings of Icarus downed—ever so many wings reminding us of earthly flights suddenly cut short in the splintered morning of what started out as just another ordinary day.
I am reminded of Bruegel’s painting, “Landscape with the fall of Icarus” where only the white clad legs of Icarus can be seen sticking up from the water, if one looks closely. Those wings, crafted from imagination, inspiration and courage, have not served.
Auden’s poem “Musee Des Beaux Arts,” describes that painting…pointing out how the world turns away from disaster and private suffering and moves on. In another poem about that same painting, this one by Charles F. Madden, “The Fall of Icarus,” we read “none has seen the silent fall of Icarus/ through the riotous wind and the shadows of the coming evening light/nor do they hear his sigh, both of pity and delight/of his remembered waxed and winged flight.”
As I gaze now across the landscape of benches, it is comforting to see those ethereal feathers of hope made concrete, anchored in earth, yet hovering as if in flight over the waters…the soul flies on, but leaves a reminder for us.
And we have not turned away. We remember in public the private sufferings. With these wings we remember and we may pray, as individuals, for our collective humanity to continue. We may pray as with James Joyce, as he stands on the shore contemplating his own flight over the waters toward maturity:
“Amen. So be it. Welcome, O Life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race…..Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”
Each of us privately forges some contribution to all life. Perhaps in those concrete wings, something of the essence of each departed soul has been distilled and offers back, for all to see, a symbol of hope for humankind–a more benevolent evolution.
THE SUNDAY TIMES MUSEUM OF FINE ART
By Barbara Smith Stoff
I see too,
remembering Auden’s Icarus,
that when it comes to suffering
they are seldom wrong
these reporters and their cameras,
the way they catch tragedy on the human face,
and yet sometimes they fix for us
in their instants and afterimages
…something achingly beautiful, incandescent…
so human, so human rising up.
Take this picture of Redgrave for example.
I have kept it here on my desk,
for weeks now, have studied her expression…
hand gesturing for some ideal, tender,
perhaps clear only to her.
I have met those eyes, the lips
pursed to appeal from her side.
I know little of sides and battles,
but I know that face.
Here are the poems which inspired me and my students:
MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS
By W.H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears,
Executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden.
This one is from DOORS INTO POETRY, by Chad Walsh (Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1962)…
THE FALL OF ICARUS (From Brueghel’s painting)
by Charles F. Madden
The bulging sails by a riotous wind caught
pull the ships and their rigging nets toward shore
to be emptied. The sailors quickly will calm their floors
and their houses in the evening light will melt into the mountains.
And on the hill with one foot planted in the earth
his plowing almost done; his eyes cast down and fully shielded
from the sun which now is growing shadow, the farmer
turns in soil and toil the final circles of the day.
Below him a quiet pastoral: on lichen bearing rocks
the feeding sheep, the quiet watching dog, the silent shepherd
so stalking with his eyes the homing flights of birds
that neither he nor the intent fisherman closer to the shore,
none has seen the silent fall of Icarus
through the riotous wind and the shadows of the coming evening light,
nor do they hear his sigh, both of pity and delight
of his remembrd waxed and winged flight.
–Charles F. Madden
POETRY IS THE RICH CONSERVE
POETRY IS THE RICH CONSERVE
Ultimately the voice in the whirlwind says
I am this love
which drips like honey through earthly caverns
…to the high altar…
poetry is the rich conserve—
the talisman for transit
through all comings and goings
moment to moment
aeon to aeon
music from the great organ
always othering to itself
but yet comes home.
–Barbara Smith Stoff
HIGH WITNESS
Meister Echkhart
“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”
HIGH WITNESS
as we are camped out here
on this more often and indeed very darkling plain
Djwhal Khul tell us to be the high witness
we have our electronic campfire
we sit facing the television
we move through the ceremonies of Kennedy funerals
through the ceremonies upon the death of a princess
we bear high witness
we bear high witness to war after war
there is Desert Storm
the Towers fall
oil explodes in oceans
earthquakes come
tornadoes come
and then the fires
Netanyahu speaks to Congress
Obama speaks to Parliament
in 1939, a ten year old boy writes
of the terrible scar of war
and pleads for leaders to sit down together
sit down together and talk things out
work together
this scar is a terrible thing
these wars…
long deceased now,
that ten year old yet watches
still keeps watch for these children
we sit facing the screen
we watch and listen
all the world speaks now
cries out in pictures
the grandson of a Kenyan cook in the British Army
stands before the British Parliament
as President of the United States
and says “It will be years before
these revolutions will reach
their conclusions”…
and says, “We have a say in how this story ends.”
he quotes Churchill: “…wherever the bird of freedom
chirps in the human heart…”
there is the eye that sees
–Barbara Smith Stoff
BIBLIODYSSEY – NERUDA’S ODE TO A HUMMINGBIRD
BIBLIODYSSEY – PABLO NERUDA’S ODE TO A HUMMINGBIRD
From scarlet to dusty gold,
to yellow flames,
to the rare
ashen emerald,
to the orange and black velvet
of our girdle gilded by sunflowers,
to the sketch
like
amber thorns,
your Epiphany,
little supreme being,
you are a miracle,
shimmering ..
Pablo Neruda – Ode to a Hummingbird [w]
<http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2011/05/hummingbirds.html>
ON THE DEATH OF OSAMA BIN LADEN
- PAUL SONIN’S PHOTO OF PENTAGON 911 MEMORIAL BENCHES – I CALL THEM ICARUS WINGS
May 2, 2011
Watching the news this morning about the death of Osama Bin Laden, I remember these memorial benches and the very first blog piece I was moved to write as I watched the memorial services on September 11, 2008 (see below). Bruegel and his Icarus, and the poems that painting has inspired in ensuing years, have been coming to mind a lot lately as I become more aware of the turbulence of our times. Osama Bin Laden was most certainly not Icarus…and the world is watching closely…as James Joyce said “…in the smithy of the soul.”
As millions offer prayers from the heart, the world awkwardly strives toward a live birth for a new age of peace and the most benevolent outcome for all. Let it be so. –bss
Thursday, September 11, 2008
ICARUS REMEMBERED
By Barbara Smith Stoff
Today, as I watched the news with the extended coverage of the 9-11 memorial services, I saw many views of the memorial park with the benches, each one cantilevered over water. To me, those benches look like the wings of Icarus downed—ever so many wings reminding us of earthly flights suddenly cut short in the splintered morning of what started out as just another ordinary day.
I am reminded of Brueghel’s painting, “Landscape with the fall of Icarus” where only the white clad legs of Icarus can be seen sticking up from the water, if one looks closely. Those wings, crafted from imagination, inspiration and courage, have not served.
Auden’s poem “Musee Des Beaux Arts,” describes that painting…pointing out how the world turns away from disaster and private suffering and moves on. In another poem about that same painting, this one by Charles F. Madden, “The Fall of Icarus,” we read “none has seen the silent fall of Icarus/ through the riotous wind and the shadows of the coming evening light/nor do they hear his sigh, both of pity and delight/of his remembered waxed and winged flight.”
As I gaze now across the landscape of benches, it is comforting to see those ethereal feathers of hope made concrete, anchored in earth, yet hovering as if in flight over the waters…the soul flies on, but leaves a reminder for us.
And we have not turned away. We remember in public the private sufferings. With these wings we remember and we may pray, as individuals, for our collective humanity to continue. We may pray as with James Joyce, as he stands on the shore contemplating his own flight over the waters toward maturity:
“Amen. So be it. Welcome, O Life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race…..Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”
Each of us privately forges some contribution to all life. Perhaps in those concrete wings, something of the essence of each departed soul has been distilled and offers back, for all to see, a symbol of hope for humankind–a more benevolent evolution.
–bss (And please click below on “The Sunday Times Museum of Fine Art” for poems and image of Brueghel’s painting)
PAUL SONIN'S PHOTO OF PENTAGON 911 MEMORIAL BENCHES - I CALL THEM ICARUS WINGS
THE SUNDAY TIMES MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, now seen as a good early copy of Bruegel’s original
THE SUNDAY TIMES MUSEUM OF FINE ART
I see too,
remembering Auden’s Icarus,
that when it comes to suffering
they are seldom wrong
these reporters and their cameras,
the way they catch tragedy on the human face,
and yet sometimes they fix for us
in their instants and afterimages
…something achingly beautiful, incandescent…
so human, so human rising up.
Take this picture of Redgrave for example.
I have kept it here on my desk,
for weeks now, have studied her expression…
hand gesturing for some ideal, tender,
perhaps clear only to her.
I have met those eyes, the lips
pursed to appeal from her side.
I know little of sides and battles,
but I know that face.
–Barbara Smith Stoff
Here is the poem which inspired me and my students:
MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS
By W.H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears,
Executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden.
Pasted from <http://poetrypages.lemon8.nl/life/musee/museebeauxarts.htm>
Here is another poem…this one from DOORS INTO POETRY, by Chad Walsh (Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1962)…
THE FALL OF ICARUS (From Brueghel’s painting)
by Charles F. Madden
The bulging sails by a riotous wind caught
pull the ships and their rigging nets toward shore
to be emptied. The sailors quickly will calm their floors
and their houses in the evening light will melt into the mountains.
And on the hill with one foot planted in the earth
his plowing almost done; his eyes cast down and fully shielded
from the sun which now is growing shadow, the farmer
turns in soil and toil the final circles of the day.
Below him a quiet pastoral: on lichen bearing rocks
the feeding sheep, the quiet watching dog, the silent shepherd
so stalking with his eyes the homing flights of birds
that neither he nor the intent fisherman closer to the shore,
none has seen the silent fall of Icarus
through the riotous wind and the shadows of the coming evening light,
nor do they hear his sigh, both of pity and delight
of his remembrd waxed and winged flight.
–Charles F. Madden
THE CUP THAT WE BOTH OFFER AND DRINK FROM
THE CUP THAT WE BOTH OFFER AND DRINK FROM
We are told that in Gethsemane, Jesus had prayed …’let this cup pass from me’…
It’s interesting how the celebration of the Passover, the journey out of slavery, and the Resurrection, the promise of a new kind of life, always come around in the spring of the year, as though coming forth from within the heart of the earth—along with the tulips and the daffodils. Nowadays I think about the internet and its role in the ongoing development of the Noosphere. It was in the early sixties that a friend brought me a book by Teilhard de Chardin [The Divine Milieu] and I began to think more concertedly about the need to ‘monitor my moments’ and try to consistently put loving thoughts into that field which he called the Noosphere, and more consciously about practicing what I called ‘the sacrament of the present moment’…and so on.
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the Akashic Field and how the Noosphere functions within that. We are told that thoughts and actions of individuals are recorded within the Akashic Field, from whence they will blossom forth in various ways. I am reminded again of an ‘insight experience’ I had in the wee hours of a long ago night, during which time I seemed to be a regular member of Thoreau’s 3 A.M. club. Often I would wake, wide awake and alert… so I would go into my study and sit and look up at the tall Eucalyptus trees silhouetting themselves in the early eastern sky.
I would write down my thoughts and feelings immediately, then go back for more sleep, which would then come easily. What you find below is pretty much a first and only draft of a description of a particular early morning experience. I have long used the keyboard to compose, and this entry was created on my old Royal portable typewriter…a lovely turquoise enamel (!) which my granddaughter now carries with her wherever she goes. In January of 2010, I unearthed and unbound it from the old three-ring binder and posted it on my blog.
I thought to put it up here again because once more it’s almost Easter and I am pondering the thoughts Jesus must have had while he hung there on the cross…and how those thoughts must have ‘punctuated the equilibrium’ of the Akashic Field while weaving a new sound into the very web of consciousness…’forgive them…they don’t know what they are doing…’
The Cup…We have Elijah’s Cup and we have the Easter Communion Cup. In the Tarot, The Cup expresses meaning through the heart and not the intellect, depending more upon emotions, feeling and intuition. In Greek mythology, The Cup represents Psyche, the human soul in the form of a beautiful maiden with whom Cupid, the god of love himself, falls deeply in love. The Cup, therefore, represents Psyche, or the human soul. To satisfy the human soul is to fill it with love.
FROM MY JOURNAL – September 20, 1984:
In the occult tradition, the eye that ‘sees’ must be washed in the blood of the heart. –Dane Rudhyar
It’s 3:30 a.m. Through the window in the east study I see the moon, a silver crescent held there like a cup. Oh Moon, night goddess who comes to balance and make round the glinting spears of light from rational day; we, poor creatures, crawling on the earth here, are we abandoned here until we all find the heartpoint…flashpoint!! flashpoint!!? Where the horizontal plane of rationality intersects the vertical plane of emotionality, the heart is born. The heart is born on the cross. And moment by moment I must reconcile myself to that crosspoint-flashpoint-heartpoint, the luminous center.
Has Christ really done it for us? Have we only to bring ourselves up to the ‘risen’ vibration that he has brought in for us? Stretched as he was there, he chose to monitor, moment by moment, his attitude and response toward his pain: He chose love. Father, forgive them. I will not give my soul, even in a moment of despair and pain, over to the power of darkness. Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. I will not give my soul…the existential ordeal of choice. Flashpoint! A new threshold of luminescence glows in the web of existence called earth, vibrating outward from that birthpoint, shaking the web, even dangerously shaking the web.
I am with you all days…and wherever we are in this web, we are henceforth affected by this new vibration. I can choose this vibration out of all others and my attunement begins. Lo, I am with you all days, even unto the end of the world.
Suddenly I am remembering an exercise from our movement group. Working with a partner, one partner says ‘cookie’’ and the other is silent. ‘Cookie, cookie, cookie’…the silent partner listens carefully to the sound in order to learn to distinguish it from all the other intonations in the room. Then everyone goes into motion and the room becomes an arena of movement and varying tones of ‘cookie cookie’ as the task of each of the silent partners is to locate the tone of the original partner and find the way back to the dyad, all this with the eyes closed, attuning to the special sound, a sound which has become special, as a guide. The task is to focus only on that one sound in order to succeed in the exercise. Atonement, attunement.
The existential Jesus whispered “This is possible for me. I can choose forgiveness. This is possible for a human being. This is possible for the human race.” Flashpoint! Flashpoint! The fabric of existence is forever altered. The historical Jesus whispered ‘cookie, cookie’ and that sound vibrates forever through the web of time.
Out of the phantasmagoria of sounds, refractions, reverberations, and echoes, will come those, inevitably, who shape the sounds into words. Saint John says simply, “God is love.” T.S. Eliot says, “Love is God.”
Carlos Castaneda has written six long tales of power and has not mentioned the sound of love. His “cookie:power” permeates our living web of morphic resonance now in 1984 as did the dark tones of William Golding in the 1960s with Lord of the Flies, that darkest of echoes from the great war where power became so completely divorced from the heart…the heartfires of the world had gone out …and then erupted in a great conflagration in the bake ovens of Dachau and Buchenwald. Yet the pervasiveness of clouds seeded by this darkness drifted through the minds of masses of students as they read Lord of the Flies, which was assigned to them by their teachers of literature, to be read and studied and commented upon while their ears were yet full of the drums of war…ears unable at that point to distinguish the gentler sound, “cookie”love.” Into that rumble and din, we now have Castaneda generating sounds, words, echoes into the morphic web and the drums of power drown out the sound of love. The minds of students sift for seeds of wisdom in these dark clouds of words while their ears are muffled by the modern cacophony of television and dystrophic music. Only in the gentleness of the heart can the gentler sounds be heard. Only in the heart. Body, mind, soul, spirit…where is the heart?
“Oh! Beat the world with heart of song!” Where can the sounds of the heart be heard if not through the voice of the poet, the artist, who prays, “O! Mythical father of Icarus, stand me now in good stead as I go forth to forge within the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race!” Can the modern ear be attuned to the voice of the artist?
Hoc est enum corpus meum. The artist makes the bread of life and holds it out to us in holy communion. I will pass by the dark bread and choose that which has more light. I hold out my hand for the white hyacinth. Oh, where are we going with these light bodies?
There are those today who shape sounds into gentler words: William Irwin Thompson says “Time Falling Bodies Take to Light.” Oh, where are we going in this body of light? We breathe in light; we breathe out love. I breath in light, I breathe out love, I breathe in light I breath out love breathe in light breathe out love breathe in love breathe out light breathe in light breathe out love breathe in love breathe out love breathe breathe breathe…and so the heart of the earth breathes and the heart of fire is kindled within.
–Barbara Smith Stoff
leave a comment