Tag: Death

On the Radio: Jim Morrison

On By dorahakIn Poems14 Comments

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

William Blake

In Café De Flore and Les Deux Magots
I met him, an actor on an oneiric screen,
a phantom disappearing into a Rimbaud
like an atavistic Lizard King.

Parades of strangers peered through windows
to see this prophet of apocalypse from thin air
construct intrusions of fireflies in the soul
to scatter the camera’s malodorous viewing.

Like an auto-da-fé hissing sparks, or a flambeau
through a swamp, short-lived, threatening night
demons that in Blakean chambers claim abode,
he rose Eden’s loss to sing.

” -Hypocrite lecteur, -mon semblable, – mon frere!” I cry, to see my sorrow
as evidence of becoming, infinite desire in true Desire finding, the Word.

Continue reading “On the Radio: Jim Morrison” →

The Blind Detective

On By dorahakIn Poems22 Comments

On terra damnata,
the rind of a moon over
history’s purgatorial waste,

she traces the scarred earth,
the braille of ocotillo,
lizards, whinstone, curvature

of monoclines, a geologist
of cemeteries, cairns,
listening for hollow bells

marking Cain’s passage
towards nuclear holocaust
with soulless eyes.

Search and see if this does not ring of someone who’s lately been immersed in Dante and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. It’s obvious Dante continues to influence the best of our contemporary writers, especially McCarthy, who critics have called America’s greatest contemporary novelist in a class with Hawthorne, Melville and Faulkner.

Continue reading “The Blind Detective” →

Something’s Broken

On By dorahakIn Poems16 Comments

A babe sat in the green grass bright
Fast held in a predator’s sight.
Is it that of a man or that of a beast?
One’s intent is murder, the other’s a feast.

In what universe would a mother bereft
Of her bonnie babe by its sudden theft
Feel her piercing grief constrained the less
Were it a man for its death to so confess?

Something’s broken, someone’s dead
Something’s taken, innocence fled.

Then is there no evil, no good to pursue
Just the surreal, “to thine own self be true”?
Don’t lose the story, oh, don’t lose the plot
It’s death that’s the enemy, one thing we’ve all got.

Nature or nurture, priest, pagan, or not
Don’t you see we all share the same rot?
In a cave or in a palace, the calling card’s the same
One way or another, we’ve lost the grand game.

Something’s broken, someone’s gone
Something’s twisted, death has won

Death robs us of meaning, or would were it the end
Since deep within we sense something round the bend;
Death is still the crucible, our evil we can’t mend
Till upside down is right side up and earth made new again.

Continue reading “Something’s Broken” →

Expectant Hope

On By dorahakIn Poems23 Comments
Photo by Fiona Murray on Unsplash

She was still swaying as the last honey-laden tunes
Of sweet summer faded away like fragile baby’s breath—
Her eyes were closed, a shawl lightly over shoulders
Under the net of stars that had become a shroud
As one by one they died silent into the pale light
Of a clouded dawn, and all the guests had gone
In a whispered goodbye, like the twinkle in his eye.

But the womb still has its memory as does the heart—
Heart over heart, head over head, eight months bodied
Though autumn breezes steal him away like a changeling,
Like a changeling into winter’s overcoat to fleeting summer’s loss—
I will not speak of spring, she said, breathing gusts of prayer
Aware at last of the chillness in the air, but of tombs, oh LORD, empty
Oh, my God, in that long-expectant day, birthing him to eternity, holy.

1 Corinthians 15:51-52 (NIV)
Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.

Continue reading “Expectant Hope” →

I wonder where the lost have gone

On By dorahakIn Poems25 Comments
Dante and Virgil Penetrating the Forest 1824-7 William Blake 1757-1827 (Tate Gallery)

I wonder where the lost have gone
Lost to wonder, lost to touch
When sense is taken, sight is gone
What is found, and what is won.

I wonder if they’re all alone
In the darkness, in the gloom
Or in the sweating ground alone
More is said, and more is done.

Spinning earth no justice takes
For lying tongue or stiff-necked pride;
Warm her microbe-seethed embrace
Of oneness wrought, forgetfulness.

The bodies claimed by coffins lined
Or watery depths or funeral pyres
Souls unearthed new moorings find
As exiled prophets, poets divined.

I wonder where the lost have gone
Apart from mercy, love, and grace
And in their wake what’s left undone
Too late—their choices sealed in stone.

Continue reading “I wonder where the lost have gone” →

This is not a show:

On By dorahakIn Art, Poems, Prompts33 Comments
“Adoration of the Magi” tapestry (1890) designed by Edward Burne Jones, woven by William Morris et. al.

This is not a show
Don’t let it fool you
This baby escaped a tyrant’s slaughter
Not a carpet of flowers

Jesus knew hummus before kosher
At Egyptian tables to eat (Rimbaud yawns!)
These wise visitors bore gifts for an exile
Oh glorious! for the King of kings

We beg/steal/borrow tv Santa’s wigs
Play jolly, play Marley’s ghost
Turn engines of Christmas to erupt
Merry, when Jesus was born for sorrow.

Count His bones on the tree, no beauty
This mother will see, only a sword piercing
From cross to myrrh-anointed shroud

An ocean, an ocean of darkness to bear
A birthday for a Man whose death will be the death of Death
Erupt in hallelujah! Turn nuns into acrobats!

This is not a show
Don’t let it fool you
This baby escaped a tyrant’s slaughter
Not spring weather on a tapestry

Design for the “Adoration of the Magi” tapestry, Edward Burne-Jones, 1887

Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”
When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him; and assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born.
They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet: “‘And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.'”
Then Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star had appeared. And he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.”
After listening to the king, they went on their way. And behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them until it came to rest over the place where the child was.
When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy.
And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh.
And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way.
Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.”
And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men.
Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.”

Matthew 2:1-18

Who has believed what he has heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned–every one–to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people?
And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the LORD shall prosper in his hand.

Isaiah 53:1-10
Shay/Fireblossom's "Word Garden Word List #5 (Gregory Corso)"
"What we do here is this: write a poem using at least 3 of the twenty words on the following list. Your poem need not have anything to do with Corso except for the three (or more) words. The list is a springboard."

When Daddy Hollywood Died

On By dorahakIn Poems31 Comments

When Daddy Hollywood died
They harvested his organs
His heart from Marilyn Monroe
His brain from Jerry Lewis
His lungs from John Wayne
His eyes from Bette Davis
His liver from Humphrey Bogart
His bones from Rita Hayworth
His soul from Citizen Kane

They put him in the same coffin with Lenin1
To ward off decomposition atheist-fashion
A resurrection team of doctors and make-up people
And an engineering crew to keep Daddy cool

The day the summer lilies bloomed
we went to visit him:
the empty head
the caved chest
the refrigerated pump
the sightless sockets
the rotting fingertips
the foaming skin
the mouth whispering “Rosebud”

In the souvenir shop
they sold snow globes
and Jayne Mansfield t-shirts
next to the exit
and the Dr. T. J. Eckleberg sign2

1“The job of maintaining Lenin’s corpse belongs to an institute known in post-Soviet times as the Center for Scientic Research and Teaching Methods in Biochemical Technologies in Moscow. A core group of five to six anatomists, biochemists and surgeons, known as the ‘Mausoleum group,’ have primary responsibility for maintaining Lenin’s remains.” Read more here and here.

2The billboard eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg in The Great Gatsby seem to symbolize many things, including the loss of moral vision:

But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground… I followed [Tom] over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare… “Terrible place, isn’t it,” said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg.

F. Scott Fitgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
Shay/Fireblossom's "Word Garden Word List #2 (Plath)" asks us to write a poem using at least three words from a list of words taken from Sylvia Plath's writings: I chose to use "Daddy," "exit," and "lilies."

Media Vita

On By dorahakIn Photography, Poems61 Comments
image ©dorahak

Media Vita

“In the midst of life

we are in death” sang fair

Notker the Stammerer


whose spoken words

when they emerged

wingless apart hobbled:


but when he sang

Notker’s sodden eyes

gathered gold like wheat


till we fared as kings

upon the bread of angels.

In the year 912, Notker the Stammerer, a monk of the Abbey of Saint Gall, is said to have written what became the Gregorian chant below, the English translation of which is a poetic adaption from the Book of Common Prayer (1549).

Media vita in morte sumus
quem quaerimus adjutorem
nisi te, Domine,
qui pro peccatis nostris
juste irasceris?

Sancte Deus,
sancte fortis,
sancte et misericors Salvator:
amarae morti ne tradas nos.

In the midst of life we are in death
of whom may we seek for succour,
but of thee, O Lord,
who for our sins
art justly displeased?

O Lord God most holy,
O Lord most mighty,
O holy and most merciful Saviour,
deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.

2 Samuel 14:14
We must all die;
we are like water spilled on the ground,
which cannot be gathered up again.
But God will not take away life,
and he devises means
so that the banished one will not remain an outcast.

Image for Cee's Flower of the Day (FOTD), November 15, 2021
Linda at dVerse: Quadrille#140 asks us to use some form of the word "fair"
in a poem of exactly 44 words. Click Mr. Linky and join in!

Apple-spent (A Compound Word Verse)

On By dorahakIn Poems32 Comments

An inch the moon moved, me eyeing
through sleepless lids I lay dying:
apple-fed.

Dim my sight, breath weakening
death’s poison ever strengthening:
apple-cursed.

Whispered prayers, hurried words of flesh
plead soul’s deliverance afresh:
apple-damned.

Darkness now floods the mind distraught
I would, I could, but I cannot:
apple-bent.

God’s Son whose flesh my guilt impaled
On cross for me o’er death prevailed:
apple-freed.

Photo by Tom Fisk from Pexels
Grace at dVerse challenges us today to write a Compound Word Verse, an unfamiliar form to most ous I daresay. She writes: "The Compound Word Verse is a poetry form invented by Margaret R. Smith that consists of five 3-line stanzas, for a total of 15 lines. The last line of each stanza ends in a compound word and these compound words share a common stem word which is taken from the title. (In the first example below the stem word is “moon” from the title “Moonlighting”; the compound words related to the title are moondust, moonbeams, moonsongs, etc.)

The Compound Word Verse (3 lines) has a set rhyme scheme and meter as follows:

Rhyme Scheme: a,a,b
Syllable/Meter: 8, 8, 3

Click on Mr. Linky to read more and join in!

Not Our Will, But Thy Will Be Done

On By dorahakIn Poems29 Comments
For with You is the fountain of life; in Your light do we see light. (Psalm 36:9)
Not Our Will, But Thy Will Be Done

Silvery strands, hair falls in brush-fulls
one saint’s covering glory thread-bare
every thread-count, hair-count numbered
tears bottled, not nameless
not in a warehouse,
but in the house of the Lord, O En-hakkore,
on Zion’s mount, where nations stream
one day, El-Shaddai, that day
don’t delay, Yahweh, that hour
cry the faithful weeping from hospital beds
prison cells, beside mass graves,
the suffering martyrs, broken families
soldiers and civilians mere fodder for power,
numberless babes murdered in wombs:
hear our prayers, O LORD our God,
for the coming of Thy Son.

For today's dVerse Poetics, Ingrid asks us to "try to complete the poem as far as possible without writing it down. Think about the devices discussed above: regular rhythms, repeated phrases or ‘motifs’, alliteration and rhyme schemes – anything to aid the memory and help the words to flow....Make an audio/video recording of your poem and post it to your blog and/or transcribe your poem, so we can read the finished version." Click on Mr. Linky to join in and read more poems.

A Better Life

On By dorahakIn Poems, World12 Comments

“Poetry makes nothing happen: it survives”¹
unlike young Icarus² who would fly to freedom
under the belly of a giant whale ascending
but he plummeting, free-falling, down to his death
while a world watched, still watches in horror
through that silver screen of the mind’s eye
as of an oracle that survives in the folds of memory
forecasting doom, like the poetry his heart sang
of a better life, a New World of winging hopes
now a land in chaos helmed by venal fools
where yet survive as in the Ark the few
whose hope shies not away
in whom Life supplants death
to whom Bread is provided and thirst quenched
whose city is built not with human hands
whose cornerstone is the Lamb that was slain.

1From W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”

2On Monday, August 16, 2021, seventeen-year-old Zaki Anwari fell to his death after clinging to a US military plane taking off from Kabul as he tried to flee the Taliban takeover. He was one of several Afghans who rushed onto the tarmac of the capital’s airport and desperately held onto to the side of the C-17 aircraft before takeoff, captured in a widely-shared video that encapsulated the chaos of America’s exit from Afghanistan. A member of Afghanistan’s National Youth Football Team, Anwari was described by a spokesman for the sports federation as “kind and patient. He had no hope and wanted a better life.”3

You Were Four

On By dorahakIn Poems25 Comments
Her father died on June 27, 2021 of covid.

You were four with a Daddy
when you laid out dancing colors
of pink, blue, green and purple

When you were four and a day
the colors went orange viral
of corona, corona everywhere

You sat half-hidden in shadow
your diamond father stolen from you
with black words like ICU

Now pink, blue, green and purple
have fled a world of frightening red
your mother widowed in white

And you are four and counting
looking back at days of gray
a rainbow shining over you: we pray

Reena at Xploration Challenge gives us an update on the four-year-old pictured above: “I came across a heart-wrenching picture of a drawing by a 4-year old, whose father [was] battling lung failure due to Covid in hospital. When asked what was it she had drawn, she said “Corona, Corona …. Everywhere Corona.” The entire family was infected, but all others have recovered…. She lost her father today. Her mother, whom I see as an exceptionally strong woman, fought till the end, staying afloat with her Buddhist beliefs and chanting “Nam myth renge Kyo.” It kept her going, if nothing else. She is totally deflated now, after the incident. She, who led a fatherless life (her father being a drug-addict), just uttered the words ‘My daughters will meet the same fate.'”

Easter Morn

On By dorahakIn Poems21 Comments

Grave clothes left behind
see death’s dominion broken
in an empty tomb

Light the air, so bright
silent glory transpiring
the King ascending

John 11: 25-26
“Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?’”

Reflections on an Un-Natural Decay

On By dorahakIn Novels, Photography, Prompts7 Comments

For Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: This week’s CFFC topic is Special Request: Wilting, dead or aging flowers and leaves.

The topic is fitting somehow. This week I finished the last pages of Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light (2020). I had dreaded what was coming, so thoroughly had Thomas Cromwell and the world of 16th-century England peopled my imagination, a testimony to Mantel’s literary genius (see Well Met, Jude: Mann & Mantel).

Continue reading “Reflections on an Un-Natural Decay” →

Absent in the Spring

On By dorahakIn Luke, Theology2 Comments

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

This morning I read chapters 12 through 14 in the book of Job, the words of a man alternately addressing God and his deluded comforters in the midst of his suffering. Immediately after, I read the first chapter of Luke. The juxtaposition of the two readings left a strange sensation, a net of chiaroscuro, light and shadow, the sunrise of salvation and the nihilism of pain.

Oddly, there came to my mind, Agatha Christie’s psychological novel, Absent in the Spring, and Shakespeare’s sonnet from which it drew its title.

Sonnet 98

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him,
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odor and in hue,
Could make me any summer’s story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew.
Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seemed it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.

Caught in the pain of loss, the poet’s world is colored by it. What used to penetrate his senses with beauty now sharpens the knife’s edge of absence. Everything is a shadow of what it once was or ought to be and he is deeply aware of it.

Not so the narrator of the psychological Christie novel. She is absent to her own loss, that is, she doesn’t know what she’s missing. For a brief time an awareness of her loss, her failure to “be there” for those she claims to love, all of life that she’s failed to see and missed, cuts into her consciousness. Her grief is almost unendurable and she is overwhelmed by regret. She determines to change and make amends. But the moment passes like a mirage in the desert heat. She returns to her narcissistic life “absent” once again, oblivious to the misery of those who need her the most.

The pain of loss absorbs Job’s consciousness. But he engages with God through it all. While his “comforters” try to justify his suffering, Job goes straight to the One who can get him though it. He will not “curse God and die” as his wife advises. He will not absent himself to his suffering. He will neither deny it nor flee from it. Instead, in his suffering he looks for God. He remembers who God is. He knows that whatever the season, the summer of abundance or the winter of loss, God is unchanging, steadfast in love and faithfulness and sovereign in power. This knowledge emboldens Job and shores up his hope so that he doesn’t fall into the despair with which Satan  tempts us during hard times.

It is the first chapter of Luke that puts it all in perspective. This is where Christ’s birth is announced. Zechariah breaks into a joyful song of expectation and Mary bursts into a paean of praise as her spirit rejoices in God her Savior. Jesus’s birth breaks into history, the history of the world and our own personal history. His birth is pivotal to our understanding of temporal loss because His birth is the moment in time when the eternal becomes more real, more true, more present than absence caused by loss, whether the loss of health or loss through death.

His presence overtakes the absence. His reality in history, in the flesh, through His death and resurrection, overshadows everything. Eternity trumps the temporal. And by the word of God through the Holy Spirit we glean it daily as God who suffered here on earth suffers yet with us, making more real to us the glory that awaits us when we see Him face to face.

Praise God for that day!

Job 19: 25 (NASB)
“As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, And at the last He will take His stand on the earth.”

2 Corinthians 4:17-18 (ESV)
For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

Hebrews 2: 14-15 (ESV) 
Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.

The Light that Passed and Shone Forever

On By dorahakIn WritingLeave a comment

In the midst of suffering, grief, pain, and loss, the hope of glory we have through Christ Jesus is our sustaining grace. One day we shall see with our own eyes our Redeemer, when with the beloved ones we are reunited with, we shall hear “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying,

‘To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!'” (Rev. 5:13, ESV)

What a glorious day that will be!

WALLIE'S WENTLETRAP

dragon_guard.jpg

The Light that Passed and Shone Forever (348 Words)

Some people will tell you that when you lose someone, you grieve and move on. They tell you, and rightfully so, that the loved one who passed would not want to see you sad. They would want to see you as they knew you, living and alive. But if you have ever truly loved, and if you have lost, how can you not miss the one you will never see in this world again? How can your soul not be shaken by a separation so sudden, so wrong?

View original post 252 more words