New Poem in Bear Review: Ancestors, Awakening...

 

A new poem,

Ancestor, Bringing The World Continually Into Being;

from the manuscript The Next World,

is in the latest issue of

Bear Review

(Issue 10.1)

 

Cover art: "Reclamation Nights" by Mason D. Arnold

(along with a wonderfully excessive bio – mine are usually pretty short, and with this one apparently I threw in everything

AND the kitchen sink)

 

The poem is part of an "ancestor" series in the manuscript, exploring the idea, the mythology, the experience, from different angles.  

 

This particular ancestor appeared in a dream: a woman painting in a cave by torchlight (20,000 to 40,000 years ago…yesterday, tomorrow?). It brought to mind the Buddhist conception of all beings, throughout the many worlds, vowing together to liberate (awaken) each other mutually, at the same instant.  

You can find the poem here.

 

The rock/cave and the painter are awakening each other, together, at the same instant.

 

“We are not the whole. We are part of the whole. Our own liberation is bound up with the liberation of all. And liberation is the destiny of all.”

(Judy Roitman, from the article  All Beings Liberating, Together, At Once in the journal Lion’s Roar: Buddhist Wisdom for Our Time).

 

I was trying to say something like this in the last several lines of the original draft and the editors of Bear Review kindly suggested eliminating it - and the poem is the better for it.

 

There is also an element of my experience of making art in this poem that is related to this way of approaching “awakening.”

 

You can find the poem here.

 

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I am obsessed with cave painting, have been for probably twenty-five years. A couple of books that helped expand my knowledge of cave paintings are:

 

Juniper Fuse by Clayton Eshleman

 

What is Paleolithic Art? by Jean Clottes

 

You can find the poem here.