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| untitled mixed media 30” x 22” (Mo‘o) |
Poets Job Description
Paint an iridescent metaphor, build magic with words.
Articulate, tell us what you mean.
Enough of this ho-hum, maybe this, maybe that.
Put on the tragic mask and have us all in tears.
Can you enrage us, move us to mob action? Any action . . .
Don the comic mask and proclaim the absurdity of life. When else can you strut and storm if not now? The leaders lie and lie about lying. Make us laugh as if it doesn’t matter.
Hold up the mirror, force us to acknowledge the mask we wear. Reflect our truth, positive or not. Make it okay to go on living. Reclaim our humanity.
Yours is an immense task, perhaps impossible.
The mask will help.
4 HAIKU
covid-19
Here, proof positive
no us/them division, all
interconnected
****
a poem always says
slow down, wait, pay attention
I want you to see
****
My long life only
mastered the mapping of my
own limitations
****
Just change one letter —
when compromise is good
compromised not so
****
AOD — adventure of the day
(I ‘translated’ from youth to old age a poem published in December 30, 2019 New Yorker by Phyllis McGinley titled Portrait of a Girl with Comic Book)
77, it is no age at all.
It is nothing.
At 77 you are invisible. At 77
you have secrets from yourself
and friends you despise.
You admit none of the terrors that you feel.
Owning half a hundred masks but no disguises
At 77 you are nothing
AOD
June 13, 2020
Emily Dickinson knew about so much,
and she communicated her thoughts so well,
from her isolation she wrote —
“Let us strive together to part with time more reluctantly, to watch the pinions of the fleeting moment until they are dim in the distance and the new coming moment claims our attention.”
Be Well, aloha
