May the Force Be with You: A Poem about Meditation
by Diane di Prima
Maybe they are never done with us
the speechless full Moon or the
Force, and how many other hearts ?
Be like a mirror of heaven, & be
with the quiet as it continues.
You pay regular visits to yourself, or
You don’t. You are a diver
with a restless, breathy sound.
Be willing to sit for a brief while, the
Force makes angels jealous !
The minute hand pauses in grief. It
may be Devils shiver at our nerve.
with material from Rumi
The Nature of Inspiration for Philip Whalen
Diane di Prima
Read
It said.
I read.
Then
Write
It said.
I found
the back of
an envelope
& wrote
It down
now Type
It told me
Fuck off
I answered
OK It
said then
I’m going
home
catch
you later
(maybe)
Before Solstice
by Diane di Prima
the mystery in the Brocade
the jewels upon the Tree
wild snatches of Song on the wind
from a mouth Inhuman
how could I turn & turn from these
how did I dare — thinking to
find some other Greatness
wd turn the air
all whiteness, white fire &
crystal & cold stars
sucking blood leaving Ichor
white at the heart
Dreams of Wartimes
by Anne Waldman
There was a time when we were a flat earth why not consider our one dimension
as total, then no one believed.
Not to see around. Her line. His site line.
Planar rather than curved & not to see around.
Euclidian ?
My space is curved.
You would not want to harm a curve.
This was my dream of mapping and holding the heads of others throughout the
universe. Angelic orders to caress and hold the heads of falling, ailing others.
— what to do ?
— to map the others, hold them.
— if you are just my dream why does this page bleed ?
Then: staunch it . . . triage.
Others who are also in dark. Wounded and “on the other side.”
— edge ?
now: surely, edge.
— to war its children ?
Chauvet, Font de Gaume, Les Ezyies. In Aurignacian time. Gravettian time.
What would you not give for the horned skull of the ibex ?
— a world or nothing ? Its shape of dream, smoke out of the skull milky darkness might
enter here, inside a storm in your head.
stepdaughter: My sun’s nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, is so great that 30
million suns fit between the two, two of us, two of all. Two of all. It’s all in the
blink in the end.
How we meld and blow out.
What Whitman knew and saw in starlight overhead tending his boys . . . dictating
their thoughts to him . . . pull up a blanket,
warm a leg, hand to hand, and sorrow (direct contact) of eye, then penetrate the
dream and all its ritual. Painting on the caves walls, a simple sentiment, the black
of our torches. Travel like a phantom back, back . . .. scarring and attack.
Maybe if we re – did the ritual in a cave. Follow the contour of her vertebrae.
The chimerical figures of the lower part of a woman with the upper body of a
bison should stop you in your war tracks.
But maybe that’s the dream, that we devour each other, we hybridize in war.
The war that fails, that the world would know this, the predatory world.
Dark matter an added gravity with a she in its care.
Monster eyes and masks.
The Sagittarius dwarf over head. Who is narrating ?
A war storm building in the sky.
The end of weather.
Our galaxy is no gentle neighbor.
Does the luminous matter penetrate the dark Althea asks.
Or what is a last memory of this ?
Or what is a last memory of this ?
Or what is a last memory of this ?

