torstai 27. helmikuuta 2014

A human being is one
who loves humanity
and the world it lives in,
never forgetting
the individual
and her struggles.

Sees the crowd
and the individual in the crowd
and respects
and honours
and loves them all.

Looks around
and sees the world
shaped by human hands,
sees the destruction wrought
and marvels build,
loves the good
and works to change the bad,
not sacrificing the world
to humanity
nor seeing humanity
as ir-redeemable.

Love makes
a human being,
the ability
to see the big picture
and the small
and their connection
makes her wise.

27.02.2014

tiistai 25. helmikuuta 2014

the human way


the blood spilled around the spinning globe today

has not been excessive
just ankle-deep
the newly dead
with their eyes that saw the sun set yesterday
now looking into eternity
our daily sacrifice
to our flaws as a species
the weak among us say
monuments to this day
but that is normal
this is after all humanity
we have to spill blood
walk with knives between our teeth
decapitated heads in our hands
or we would start feeling
we have gone soft
the apex predator
hunting itself
blood and steel
is our way
humanity's way

25.02.2014

maanantai 24. helmikuuta 2014

Pool of melted water
in the ice covering the front-yard,
reflecting the clouds
that cover the sky.
The origin and the end.

24.02.2014
D. H. Lawrence

The middle-class desperate to
stand above you and sneer
are bad, the upper class
in their inbred arrogance
are worse, but the miner's
son who made it big,
he's the worst of them all
in his desperation to
separate himself 
from his peers and kin
and stand among those
who stand on their shoulders.

24.02.2014
These days, they just
repeat themselves,
one after another
the same,
only in sleep
the nightmares change.

24.02.2014

sunnuntai 23. helmikuuta 2014

Great Transformation

I, the living, have the "pleasure" of watching
climate change in action behind my window
as my computer screen holds the picture
of what is, so I am told,
"Green jasper heart scarab of King Sobekemsaf."
17th dynasty, from Thebes
along the Nile that no longer floods annually.
The heart-beat of the river gone,
water droplets fall from the eaves, again,
and the snow on the yard
becomes water
and flows down the road.
Thus pass the years
and the living become dead
and those undreamed of
are born, live, wither
and become dust.

23.02.2014
Selected US of A poets from Poemhunter.com: One sentence from each biography

Homage to Kari Aronpuro

Her father helped invent the X-Acto Knife.
She is considered one of the most important and original poets of the 20th century, as often hailed by the noted critic Harold Bloom.
He was serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which he joined before the United States officially entered the war.
He and his brother were very close, but very different.
He spent 1942 to 1946 in these work camps and was paid $2.50 per month for assigned duties such as fire fighting, soil conservation, and building and maintaining roads and trails.
She had poor health for most of her life, and it was only at age 14 that she was well enough to begin school.'
He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York and is the Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute, Florida.
This was also where she developed into a first-class fisherwoman.
After an interval spent at Lombard College in Galesburg, he became a hotel servant in Denver, then a coal-heaver in Omaha
Collaborated, in 1943, in the musical comedy, One Touch of Venus '
At school, he was an avid outdoorsman, and active in the school's literary society.
Growing up, he faced the anti-Semitism embodied by the pro-Hitler radio priest Father Coughlin.
Three years later, he wrote home and asked his parents to allow him to attend art school.
He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959.
His parents, in the middle of divorce proceedings, were upset.
While at times whimsical and possessing a sly humor, there is an underlying sadness in much of her work.
He is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston.'
He is equally well known for his tender depictions of the bleak landscapes of the post-industrial American Midwest.
He was born in Maryville, Tennessee, earned his Bachelor of Arts from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and received his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Goddard College in Vermont.
They considered him a racial chauvinist.
His mother was of Scottish descent, and his father descended from Nicholas Frost of Tiverton, Devon, England, who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634 on the Wolfrana.
It brought her international recognition, and was nominated for a National Book Award.
Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence.
He spent much of 1872 caring for his mother who was now nearly eighty and struggling with arthritis.
He was held for 17 days in Philadelphia's Moyamensing Prison. 
During high school, he was both the editor of the school newspaper and class president, as well as the president of the school literary society.
He believed strongly that traditional formalist considerations were archaic and did not apply to reality.
This abuse was refuted in interviews with her mother and other relatives.
Her physician reported that she had had a heart attack following a coronary occlusion.
She struggled to support herself and had completed a second volume of poetry, but no publisher seemed interested in it.
However, less than two years after the birth of their first child the marriage disintegrated.
She moved to New York City, whe she wrote during the day and earned money at night playing the piano in a dancing school.
Both parents' ancestors had emigrated from England in the 17th century.
The two homes they built on Long Island Sound, along with several cottages, became known as Bungalow Court, and they would hold gatherings there of literary and artistic friends.
These four schools gave her a perspective on racial dynamics in the city that continued to influence her work.
He became more popular in spite of the bad press he received, and as a result extricated himself from poorly negotiated contracts that limited his earnings; he quickly became very wealthy. 
He studied philosophy, psychology, and flunked English three times before dropping out. 
From that day forward, nearly all of his writing was in meter and rhyme.
She currently teaches creative writing at New York University.
Despite his difficulties with mathematics and Greek, he stood at the head of his class in preparatory school.
He is buried in Amesbury, Massachusetts.
He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received many other honors.
The following year he earned a master's degree at Harvard.
He died in 1972.
He suddenly felt sick to his stomach, which was nothing unusual, and headed for the bathroom.
Later in life he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University.
He believed meter was imposed on poetry by man, not a fundamental part of its nature. 
She smoked cigars constantly, claiming that they lasted longer than cigarettes.
He died the next day of a ruptured liver.
He serves on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions.
A few days later he was stationed at Fossalta di Piave.
The coarse poem ridicules the failed attempts of Billy to woo girls.
A nearsighted boy, he was often ostracised by his peers and was excluded from many physical pursuits.
He left a suicide note that simply read: "Messy, isn't it?".
The expedition proceeded by horseback and wagon from Omaha, Nebraska, arriving toward year's end in San Francisco, California.
All of her books share a focus on women's lives.
In 1974 she held a Fulbright Scholarship from Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany.
She also received the Radcliffe College Distinguished Alumnae Award.
He was a slave his entire life, and the date of his death is unknown.
Although his manic depression was often a great burden (for himself and his family), the subject of that mental illness led to some of his most important poetry, particularly as it manifested itself in his book Life Studies. 
Her father was a railroad executive whose investments in streetcar lines and real estate made the family wealthy.
They were sent to a military detention camp, the Dépôt de Triage, in La Ferté-Macé, Orne, Normandy, where they languished for 3½ months.
He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, then earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1951 and a B.Litt, from Oxford in 1953.
He was either born in New York, Baltimore, or Lexington, Kentucky, with his widow being convinced he was born in Lexington.
At the time of his death he was a professor of English and director of the creative writing program at City College of New York.
His career there, however, did not last long.
In 1981, and after six years of study at Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, she became a research graduate there.
There he formally joined the Quakers and began to withdraw from society. 
She suffered a series of strokes thereafter, and died in 1972.
Her ashes were returned to Bethlehem, and were buried in the family plot in the Nisky Hill Cemetery on October 28, 1961.
She is also an important forerunner of the Zionist movement.
Until this revelation, little had been known of his religious affiliation.
She was the sister-in-law of the Chicago architect John Wellborn Root.
He was also in a significant long term relationship with the Beat poet Laura Ulewicz during the fifties in San Francisco.
He was educated at Yale University and the University of California - Berkeley.
They both spent hours on the phone and the initial forgiveness displayed in the film became a living reality.
The son of a grape grower, he grew up driving a tractor, picking grapes, and pruning vines of Selma, California, a small fruit-growing town in the San Joaquin Valley.
He was killed in action at Belloy-en-Santerre on July 4, 1916, famously cheering on his fellow soldiers in a successful charge after being hit several times by machine gun fire.
His interest in the work of Federico García Lorca, especially as it involved the canto jondo ideal, also brought him near the poetics of the deep image group.
His honors also included grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
At fourteen, she found work as a seamstress.
In 1866, his body was moved to his family plot in Frederick at Mount Olivet Cemetery.
In the private sector, he practiced law and was as a senior executive at several biotechnology companies.
The work remains a classic of Native American Literature.
He married in 1944, and after the war, having earned the rank of first lieutenant, returned to New York with his wife to complete his first book.
Any feed back is welcome, including constructive criticism.
He later lived in Truro on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, where he directed the Fine Arts Work Center and was a mentor and teacher to younger poets for decades.
Though publicly discreet, their correspondence reveals an exalted intimacy.
He is a distant cousin of poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, e. e. cummings and T. S. Eliot, as well as playwrights Thornton Wilder and Tennessee Williams.
The epic poem, part of large but unfinished work, reflected the view that the frontier was the dominant force in American history.
He wrote about humanity's relationship to nature in alternately comic and solemn tones.
He is buried on the grounds of the Santa Barbara Cemetery Association overlooking the sea, and while all the other graves face inland, his alone faces the Pacific.

23.02.2014

lauantai 22. helmikuuta 2014

Sound of falling rain
like someone
would be caressing
the mind.

22.02.2014
Global Warming

Drops of water falling from the eaves,
melted snow from the roof.
It snowed last night,
the winter's belated appearance
among this season of which one
can't say if it's still autumn
or already spring.
Now the snow is transforming
into water, the dead grass
of last year again
appearing on the yard.

22.02.2014

perjantai 21. helmikuuta 2014

To expect a poet to a have a
unified view of the world,
existence and the human place
among the stars and flowers
is to deny the change
that is the one permanent
feature of existence.

Before your mind ebbs
and empties into the void
you have been reborn
again and again.

21.02.2014
Life is not a mystery

The universe, the cosmos -
it's not something
in which we are,
it is us.

You are as much
the cosmos
as the elemental particles
that make up you
at this moment,
as the supernovas
blazing through
millions of years.

To understand
that we are not separate
but one with the one
is not a revelation,
it is the existence
as it is.

21.02.2014

torstai 20. helmikuuta 2014

Epitaphs

There's a little poem
hidden in each moment,
essence of that
fragment of time
to capture and cherish,
an epic in each day.

20.02.2014
A Little Mystery

How one raindrop
on a green leaf
captures our sight
among millions
of others
that fell
in the same morning
rain...

20.02.2014

Everything will die,
it's the essence of existence,
knowledge of
the non-existence
before and after,
the mystery that is no mystery,
the lack of all
that mind so struggles to comprehend.
But with this fate given
we must make best of
these fleeting years
in a universe
fated to die.

20.02.2014
20th of February

The day came, I was 37.
The years keep piling up.
But no more of that.

I'm not alone on this day,
I share it with three of my kin,
three people I remember
each time this day comes
to add weight to my shoulders.

The birthday of my great-uncle,
the one who drowned in a well
aged seven. So
long have you slept, Väinö.

The day of death of his father,
my great-grandfather,
who died when his son
would have turned 47.
Jaakko, he survived the civil war
through cunning and bravado.

The day of death of my grandmother,
my great matriarch of a grandmother,
aged 77 on the day I turned 19
and did not go to the hospital
to see her die. Katri,
Kaisa, the one we all looked up to.

20.02.2014

keskiviikko 19. helmikuuta 2014

Melancholy

Bleak morning, no Sun,
just gray-white clouds
above dark forests
and the melting snow
covering the fields,
the roads mix of ice and mud
connecting loneliness.
Thus the day starts,
as the one before;
we know how it will end,
in darkness, no stars
but electric lights flickering.

19.02.2014
Life shows most of it's possibilities
only after we have
passed the paths
which could have taken
us to them.

Looking back,
we are amazed at how much
we could have seen and done
if only we would have realized
that they were ours to reach.

So many opportunities
slipping to "what could have been",
wasted without knowing.

In the end, bitterness
and sense of loss mix
in that poisoned chalice
which holds our memory.

19.02.2014
All your mistakes will be erased,
given enough time,
and so will be your successes.

When the last human
has died,
your story is finally over.

19.02.2014
Ukraine

Tires burning in the night,
flames and smoke reaching up
in the darkness of Kiev.

Burns the Independence Square,
Burns the House of Trade Unions,
Burns the State,
Burns Ukraine.

The night,
heavy as the black soil of the steppe
upon a coffin,
devours the flames
as they rise.

19.02.2014
Your mistakes
make you into
who you are.

19.02.2014
When you are gone,
the parts of your life
you shared
with others
remain,
each
holding a piece of you,
still influencing
the world.

19.02.2014

tiistai 18. helmikuuta 2014

sunnuntai 16. helmikuuta 2014

We deconstruct ourselves
mistake by mistake
and in the end
what is left
are the mistakes.

16.02.2014
close your eyes
flow with the cosmos
the slow turning of the milky way
the expansion accelerating
the human lifespan
gone in a moment
never open those eyes
whose lids keep the void out

16.02.2014
Only good liars
make great writers.
Honesty kills
the imagination.

16.02.2014
Conscience is a cross
in which you nail yourself.

16.02.2014
The only good thing in a war
is that it teaches those
who experience it
that there are no
good things in wars,
no good wars.

16.02.2014
Syria

There is no katharsis
at the end of a
real life tragedy,
bloodshed, massacre.
Only mass graves.

16.02.2014
Happy are those
who never understand
their own
evil...

16.02.2014
What a fate
to be a monster
without a Frankenstein...

16.02.2014
Remembering Daniil Kharms(1905-1942)

Even the funny people
get killed and often
they are the first to go
before the executioners.

Perhaps it's a kind of joke,
by the rulers with cruel hearts,
by the Fate ruling over that
blood-drenched moment in time.

Or perhaps it's just
humanity thinking
that no laughs
belong among tears.

16.02.2014
To make justice to others
you must consider yourself
guilty.

16.02.2014
Fall

One day
the worst person in the world
is looking you into the eyes
and smiles,
from the mirror.

Are you smiling?

16.02.2014
Life is a lesson,
but we never live long enough
to put it into practice.

16.02.2014
To regret is nothing
without an attempt to make amends,
without a will to change.
Regret must lead to transformation
to be worth acknowledging.

16.02.2014
For crimes against
the integrity of one's own character
there can be no forgiveness.
The injured person is gone,
the guilty has taken his place.

16.02.2014
To forgive is not to forget.
That word uttered,
that sentiment held as true
erases nothing.
All remains
except a bit of the pain.

16.02.2014

lauantai 15. helmikuuta 2014

Did we live?
Or was it all a dream
and, unborn,
we still wait -

or if we tasted
the pain of birth,
the last breath
are these echoes

of a life lived
reaching us
frozen on some
event horizon of existence

where we wait
tangled in cosmos
void rebirth birth
annihilation

15.02.2014
Instead of the crowning jewel of the cosmos
intelligence should make it
the human species in its greed and madness
in its bloodshed
is more like the faeces
of long dead species.

15.02.2014
We of dust, we of water,
seed thrown through time
by blind ancestors -
dance of atoms
painting mirages of consciousness
on the canvas of the cosmos.

15.02.2014
Hope is for those
who have not seen
the end of the road.

Thus when you climb
high do not look far
for the end is there.

15.02.2014
Optimism is a crime
with endless victims
sacrificed to naivety.

15.02.2014
Everything we achieve in life
we owe to others,
for every failure
credit is ours alone.

15.02.2014
What do we deserve
from life?
Everything we have done
to others.

15.02.2014

lauantai 1. helmikuuta 2014

Two versions of Ein Hijleh

Ein Hijleh

listening to commercial for brain training
drinking coffee with milk
waiting a football match to begin
knowing will fall asleep during it
waking up in the middle of the night
migrating back to computer
to read about ethnic cleansing
going on under the same distant Moon
as consciences sleep in minds awake

#EinHijleh

reading tweets
listening to commercial for brain training running on Youtube
between Glenn Miller's songs
drinking coffee with milk
waiting a Premier League football match to begin
knowing will fall asleep during it
waking up in the middle of the night
migrating back to computer
to read about ethnic cleansing
going on under the same distant Moon
as Occidental consciences sleep in minds awake

01.02.2014
In the fading light
I find you,
under a snow covered tree
sleeping
headstone's gold letters
fading away

01.02.2014