LAST POEM by Ted Berrigan

---

Before I began life this time
I took a crash course in Counter-Intelligence
Once here I signed in, see name below, and added
Some words remembered from an earlier time,
"The intention of the organism is to survive."
My earliest, & happiest, memories pre-date WWII,
They involve a glass slipper & a helpless blue rose
In a slender blue single-rose vase: Mine
Was a story without a plot. The days of my years
Folded into one another, an easy fit, in which
I made money & spent it, learned to dance & forgot, gave
Blood, regained my poise, & verbalized myself a place
In Society. 101 St. Mark's Place, apt. 12A, NYC 10009
New York. Friends appeared & disappeared, or wigged out,
Or stayed; inspiring strangers sadly died; everyone
I ever knew aged tremendously, except me. I remained
Somewhere between 2 and 9 years old. But frequent
Reification of my own experiences delivered to me
Several new vocabularies, I loved that almost most of all.
I once had the honor of meeting Beckett & I dug him.
The pills kept me going, until now. Love, & work,
Were my great happinesses, that other people die the source
Of my great, terrible, & inarticulate one grief. In my time
I grew tall & huge of frame, obviously possessed
Of a disconnected head, I had a perfect heart. The end
Came quickly & completely without pain, one quiet night as I
Was sitting, writing, next to you in bed, words chosen randomly
From a tired brain, it, like them, suitable, & fitting.
Let none regret my end who called me friend.

BUDDHA ON THE BOUNTY by Ted Berrigan

---

                                      for Merrill Gilfillan

"A little loving can solve a lot of things"
She locates two spatial equivalents in
The same time continuum. "You are lovely. I
am lame." "Now it's me." "If a man is in
Solitude, the world is translated, my world
& wings sprout from the shoulders of 'The Slave' "
Yeah. I like the fiery butterfly puzzles
Of this pilgrimage toward clarities
Of great mud intelligence & feeling.
"The Elephant is the wisest of all animals
The only one who remembers his former lives
& he remains motionless for long periods of time
Meditating thereon." I'm not here, now,
            & it is good, absence.

Art & Lies, Jeanette Winterson:

“Speak Parrot…In order to escape the arbitrary nature of existence I do what the artists do, and impose the most rigorous rules on myself, even if, inevitably, those rules are in turn arbitrary. Language, musical structure, colour and line, offer me a model of discipline out of their own disciplines. What liberties they take are for the sake of a more profound order, the rules they insist on are for the sake of freedom. How shall I learn to discipline myself if not by copying the best models? The paradox is that the artificial and often mechanical nature of the rules produces inexhaustible freedom, just as the harsh Rule of the early monasteries was designed to shut out every inessential, but to fully open spirit and mind.”

Wislawa Szymborska from "Starvation Camp Near Jaslo"

"Write it down. Write it. With
   ordinary ink
on ordinary paper: they weren't
   given food,
they all died of hunger. All. How
   many?
It's a large meadow. How much
   grass
per head? Write down: I don't
   know.
History rounds off skeletons to
   zero.
A thousand and one is still only a
   thousand.
That one never seems to have 
   existed
a fictitious fetus, an empty cradle,
a primer opened for no one,
air that laughs, cries, grows,
stairs for avoid bounding out to
   the garden,
no one's spot in the ranks.


It became flesh right here, on this
   meadow.
But the meadow's silent, like a
   witness who has been bought..."

Wislawa Szymborska from "Starvation Camp Near Jaslo"

Wislawa Szymborska from "View with a Grain of Sand"

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor
   sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean
   nothing to it.
It doesn't feel itself  
   touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from
   falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has
   finished falling
or that it is falling still.

portion of "View with a Grain of Sand", Wislawa Szymborska

Buffy Sainte Marie's ''Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee'' Lyrics

Uploaded by NativeAmerican4Life on Sep 28, 2008

Buffy Sainte Marie's ''Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee'' Lyrics

Indian legislations on the desk of a do-right Congressman
Now, he don't know much about the issue
So he picks up the phone and he asks advice from the
Senator out in Indian country
A darling of the energy companies who are
Ripping off what's left of the reservations. HUH.

I learned a safety rule
I don't know who to thank
Don't stand between the reservation
And the corporate bank
They'll send in federal tanks
It isn't nice but it's reality

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Deep in the Earth
Cover me with pretty lies
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee. Huh.

They got these energy companies who want the land
And they've got churches by the dozens
Want to guide our hands
And sign Mother Earth over to pollution, war and greed
Get rich... get rich quick.

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Deep in the Earth
Cover me with pretty lies
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee. Huh.

We get the federal marshals
We get the covert spies
We get the liars by the fire
And we get the FBIs
They lie in court and get nailed
And still Peltier goes off to jail

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee (eighth of the reservation)
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee (transferred it secret)
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee (of murder and intimidation)
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee

My girlfriend Annie Mae talked about uranium
Her head was filled with bullets and her body dumped
The FBI cut off her hands and told us she'd died of exposure
Loo loo loo loo loo

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Deep in the Earth
Cover me with pretty lies
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee

We had the Goldrush Wars
Aw, didn't we learn to crawl
And now our history gets written in a liar's scrawl
They tell 'ya Honey, you can still be an Indian
D-d-down at the 'Y'
On Saturday nights

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Deep in the Earth
Cover me with pretty lies
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.
Deep in the Earth
Cover me with pretty lies
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Buffy
 
• Sainte
 
• Marie
 
• Bury
 
• My
 
• Heart
 
• at
 
• Wounded
 
• Knee
 
• Native
• American
 
• Music
 
• world
 
• music
 
• soul

License:

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3 Questions for Octavia McBride-Ahebee

3 Questions for Octavia McBride-Ahebee

November 2, 2011 — Miriam Sagan from http://miriamswell.wordpress.com/

1.     What is your personal/aesthetic relationship to the poetic line? That is, how do you understand it, use it, etc.

 The themes of my poems are intense and often overwhelming, so I compose my poetic lines to give pause not only for reflection, but to catch one’s breath before diving into the next part of the poetic narrative.  My poems are focused and dense, so my lines-the breaks-provide a needed relief.  Here are the last three stanzas of my poem, The Water God.  A mother, during Liberia’s civil war, is compelled to flee her home with her child and run for her life.  The child is now dead and the mother must bury her daughter in the forest, but she will give her daughter, despite circumstances, a semblance of a dignified burial.
…I waited for nightfall,
for those plants who invite you,
with the ferocity of their opening bouquets,
to bow down  and believe through the dark.

Using the petals of these nocturnal flowers,
I perfumed Fatima’s shroud,
dug her grave with two handless limbs
and pointed her in Mecca’s direction.

  I gave our child
to the season of rain,
the sounds its watery toll awakened
was her requiem
and her ushers into the entry
of a gutted forest floor,
away from a war not at all civil,
were sleepy monarchs
inflamed with life
and so splendid in their silence.


2. Do you find a relationship between words and writing and the human body? Or between your writing and your body?

             For me, writing is as much a cerebral endeavor as it is a physical encounter.  My emotions, when composing poetry, when reading poetry, when orally delivering poetry and when listening to poetry, have physical manifestations in the form of a laugh or a cry or tears or the tightening of my belly or my hands shaking in relief because I am thankful to have reached the end of a poem.  Oh, yes, my body and I are very much cohorts when we meet words.
            Despite being a very short poem What Remains is so packed with emotion and memories and gratitude that when I recite it, and I love reciting it, I am so physically exhausted by this exercise. My mother, a lover of poetry, now has Alzheimer’s and though she has lost significant memories, she still can recall, with an almost physical fervor, her dearest poets.
What Remains
For Mom


her memory
a soup of evaporating dissonance
had survivors
gentlemen with brogues, mouthing all kinds of blues
Yeats & lots of Langston

      

3.     Is there anything you dislike about being a poet?

Identifying myself as a poet has been and is a source of joy for me. I am an elementary teacher as well.  I taught at the International Community School of Abidjan, in Cote d’Ivoire, where more than 70 nationalities were represented in the student body before CI’s civil war began in 2002.  I wrote a poem for one particular class of my fourth graders called Oasis.    And the refrain that runs through this poem is my mantra:

                                                                             1.
                                                                        (continued)    


… I come each day
to the whole of the world,
sometimes five minutes late,
but always with hope.

Octavia McBride-Ahebee is a poet whose work has  appeared in  Damazine; A Literary Journal of the Muslim World, Fingernails Across The Chalkboard: Poetry And Prose on HIV/AIDS From the Black Diaspora, Under Our Skin: Literature of Breast Cancer, Sea Breeze- A Journal of Contemporary Liberian Writing , The Journal of the National Medical Association, Art in Medicine Section and the Beloit Poetry Journal.  Her poetry collections include Assuming Voices  and Where My Birthmark Dances which was published in July 2011 by Finishing Line Press.
Octavia’s blog is Eyes on the World: http://omcbride-ahebee.blogspot.com/