Two Women Sharing a War: Why Do We Have To Still Keep On Doing This?

For the last several months, I have been corresponding with a woman in North Africa who speaks Turkish, French, Spanish and lastly, the kind of English, she, I suspect, does not dream in. I’ve been told, if you don’t dream in a language, you don’t know it well enough to grasp the intellectual overtones, and under currents and I have found this to be true for my own self. I have dreamt in French, and alas, not understood a single word I listened to in the dream. Almost comic relief, I know. So we are almost, not quite, but almost able to discuss the political issues I know we are both going through. She has exhausted my French, my Turkish is limited to two poets, and so we are stuck with a kind of English that inquires daily about each other. As time goes on, I see we ARE learning to talk deeper and deeper to each other and that feels really good. We both are furious about the way the Palestinians are being treated and I'm married to a Jew and consider myself both Christian and Jewish, practicing the traditions that Y'shua grew up with. And she is a Muslim. The deeper we delve into the outrage and grief we both feel, I can tell the closer we are coming into friendship. I can tell from just the little we have discussed, that this is a anger we both share. She is just as frustrated as I am.

There were a few weeks there when we couldn’t communicate at all, and it wasn’t until this late night that a message came through in French which I often find myself sending on to a friend in Montreal for a translation with some depth, but this one, I could, after a few re-readings, get the gist of, as we say here in America. There is often no explanation for her silences, or at least no explanations she can write down for me. And I worry that much more about them.

But here are two women who long to sit at a small café table on the patio of a North African coffeehouse drinking good thick coffee and discussing our daily lives, our dreams, our inability to reach through that door of language and touch each others’ hearts with our concern.

With men and boys, they can ‘tough it out’, ‘suck it up’ as they say these days, while we women and girls are left stoic, but uneasy inside, fretting about the fact that America has become a third world country, that there are people, not just women anymore, or for the most part, who are tortured, starved, cold, wearing rags and needing medical attention, because of men, whether they be soldiers or not. It is mostly men in congress and they are not voting with humanity in mind it feels to me. It seems to me to be the money game. And my men friends: some of them know exactly what I’m talking about and don’t think I have this hidden agenda of men-hating and others are so impatient with me and ask me when I’m going to get out of the Sixties and stop fighting all the time. I tell them if they think striving every single day for communication between the sexes where at the end of a conversation, there are big smiles and long hugs is fighting, well, I don’t plan on ever stopping. Because I believe in working it through to the bittersweet end. I long for those moments, hours, days and years, oh god yes, give me the years, where men and woman can fight bigotry, poverty, disease and shameful acts of torture on one human being from another until finally these acts are disappeared completely.
My friend is rabid about the Palestinians not having enough to eat or items to stay dry or warm with, and I am that way with my small town and other small towns in American and inner city ghettos, only because I can’t reach out any further than that. The Europeans and Mid-Easterns have an easier job of helping each other in some instances I’ve noticed, because they live so much closer to each other. I saw that when I was reading political poetry in Europe. I could skip out of one coffeehouse and pass through a bar to actually get on a train I wanted to and therefore into another country for another reading if I were willing to travel so light , the heaviest item in my medium-sized backpack would be a seven pound maclap as I call my snow leopard. (We haven’t known each other long enough to introduce each other by name and of course that’s a girl thing to do. My last laptop was named after Don Quixote’s boney horse and when she blew up, I mourned deeply, grateful the week before I had used those little magic sticks to save the tirades and love poems to a nation.) Of course it was a woman who lent me this lovely thin MacBookPro, knowing full well I was going to “shake the dust from my feet, cuz the times, they are a-changin’ and move on, always a column ahead written by someone else about what’s happening in YR neighborhood…

That’s what my friend in North Africa and I do for each other and for the world we hope. We write essays and articles about the outrages we see in other places or in our backyards and how can we change them, and when we see each other getting dark and despondent, we send each other little gifts like Patti Smith singing “Power to the People”, and enclosing a vid of her just reading the words so my friend can understand them better. And she sends me Jacques Brel who I love, shouting out against his war, and it makes us both feel better. We are the cornerstone for each other sometimes without a syllable of language between us. The one or two consonants that get by our ignorance, become our machine guns of poetry and the warmth of our belief in each other, becomes a strong piece of cloth that can be used to do so many things with from drying our asses after bathing, tearing strips for binding wounds, strips for sewing on the rip in jeans, for tying back a braid of hair because the metal on a hair tie can sometimes glisten like a compass to the enemy about our whereabouts. Make no mistake: we use words like bullets. Music is our gun. Poetry is our soup kitchen.

A Poem I found While Cleaning Out a Large Cardboard Box

And God, the mast of my ship:
tall, thick, true, leads me straight
on, by eye, to the North Star,
His Son by mouth, the allelujah
of starboard! And by dream,
pulling rope hand over hand
in a measurement of heaven,
I reach into my pocket of infinity
and pull out an anchor.

c. 2009 Robin Rule
*************************
Juliet, I realize this might not be yr spiritual path , but I want to ask you and anyone else, a question from a purely literary position: After looking at the poem that I wrote dec 2, 2007, I want to change it to "...I reach into my pocket of infinity..." because my relationship with the Holy Ghost is forever (since I was eight), but is
"I reach into a pocket of infinity and pull out an anchor..." (I left it "an", so you could see how I was originally thinking/feeling when I wrote this poem, but I am an intense editor, re-drafter and like to know in the end, that the poem is as perfect as i can make it. What say you, matey?

juliet's purple poem

dear juliet, i didn't know where to put a comment, but nevertheless, i felt the poem deserved its own blog. You made it come alive. when i saw the assignment, i groaned. I didn't think it could be done without being silly, but you even through in the ecology there which i'm a sucker for. bravo!Robin

How Birds Are Made When God Is Busy

How bright the gates look from the great inside;
how tall from out beyond the world.
We children play, then sleep
and in our sleep, we dream.
We sew the feathers real birds leave behind
to the shoulders of our shirts;
rub mud into our glorious faces;
and sing the sun hello.
We tell each other all our dreams
and comfort those who’d none.
This is how birds make themselves,
if they haven’t come from eggs.

All That White Stuff

It's snowing for the first time this year! Now that I live almost in town, snow has returned to romance. When living in the cabin a half an hour from town down and through a muddy pot-hole-y road all slippery and slide-y, I am so glad to be loving snow again as when I first moved to my String Creek cabin when I was a teen. At first, it was frightening, being all alone if I had to do something outside, because I knew if I slipped and fell and broke something, I could easily be snowed over and smothered with a white blanket.
Sitting next to the fire with a hot cup of tea, reading and even watching the snow fall from a window was far sweeter; but firewood had to be brought in and when I raised one goat for milk, she had to be fed and brought in, so these chores had to be started the moment I saw the first flurry of snow and finished definately before dark if it were an afternoon storm. Then I would run inside to load up the wood stove and fill the kettle up with more water. (I always kept water in it when there were a fire, so that humidity filled the air.)

Now, with this in-town snow, there was little to do. My pipes were long ago wrapped. Any plants that were delicate had long ago died back until next spring. Now it was simply time to enjoy all this white stuff.

I lie in bed and slipped the glass curtains to one side (which I thought looked like snow the way I had arranged four layers of them and crocheted lace pieces tacked to the wooden part at the top of the window itself when I first moved into the caboose) and admired the way the snow had fallen on the heads of my stone girls and filled their baskets and some had fallen in the criss-crossed arms of St. Francis and from a distance looked like he was cradling a lamb. It was a holy card in assemblage.
I have been in bed all day and watched the sky grow dark until I thought it was going to rain, but the thermometer kept dropping and dropping until I suspected it was going to snow and it is.

I love weather. I love to watch the garden transform itself with the changing of the seasons. Except now, I am so lonely. I couldn't even go to church this morning. I had sat up all evening on Saturday at the art opening and I think the metal chair did my spine in. I hope by tomorrow I can walk. When it hurts this much and even the morphine doesn't help, I am such a crybaby. Oh, it's all inside. I'm silent, but the pain is like snow on the hands for too long. And now it's dark and I can't see the lovely white stuff lying on the roses and the bricks, so I think I'll close.

The River I Carry In My Bones

The bones of my body lay long under the water
in summer, a trickle of creek so quiet it says nothing,
just the way my parents taught me to be: silent.
The anger in my blood is cooled by the silk flowing slow
over me. But in winter, the creek is a river and I can't stay in long
where the song is the roar of the current almost frozen.
Sometimes I lay on the long grass whitened by ice
and put my face under the water until my eyelashes freeze open.
I see steelhead fry suspended in animation, hanging in the water
like puppets held by strings as invisible as fishing line,
as invisible as my own child hands who could not help or prevent
the violence done to my brothers and I.

I have not been taught how to carve weapons from my tears,
my bruises, welts, broken bones.
I can only hope before I die, I learn to speak out loud
and let the silence drop from my flesh like unwanted clothes.

It Feels Like Death, But I'm Still Breathing

Beginning September First three people I have loved died and I am so reluctant to also write, I had to kill my cat, Soot. He was seventeen, suffering kidney failure and suffering. I don't pander with people saying "I put my pet down" Down the fuck where? Or with peope, "He made the Great Crossing. Pal, He died. These poetic terms don't make me feel better, they aren't particularly the truth and they don't change the the way I feel inside, so I've decided to just say it like it is. I was too young in the sixties, but now I understand.

First on the list was my first husband the schizophrenic and the father of my first son. I loved him, I worked with his mental illness, we did well until his also schizophrenic brother showed up with a baggie of cocaine. This is a person I wouldn't mind killing. He offers nothing to society and no, I don't feel sorry for him. He chooses to make it worse with self-medication. My husband and I lived in the country, ate vegetarian or the occasional deer given to us by neighbors who I suspect were fearful of our starvation. We lived on $350 a month and I could do this. I grew up poor and I considered myself an expert at it. This was the mid-seventies. We smoked a large-ish ounce of pot a month and had two small jelly jars of cheap red wine an evening. This seemed to stay the demons. I had a secret stash of phenobarbatol the doctor gave me with instructions on how to use it. He rarely needed it. We share a doctor in this small town and the other day the doc said, "You know when you were pregnant out there in the woods, he was not schizophrenic." I was so proud. My methods had worked.He had worked on himself to the ability he could. But the cocaine changed it all and I had to take child and run for my life. He had tried to kill me several times. He moved to town after burning his cabin down around him and almost not making it out. This is what hard drugs do the mentally ill. I cried the first year I was gone, shivered with fear, reconstructed my life around our child's who inherited the genius , but not the mental illness. The night he died he was found outside on the highway naked and acting "strangely" , (police report). They took him to the hospital. There were two mental health workers on the floor. One of them said, "It's clear this man needs to be hospitalized." The other said,"He's fine , take him back to his motel. " He did not wake up the morning. It was days before anyone realized something was wrong. As next of kin, my son had to go into that room, ID and retrieve effects. I hope the mental health worker has a grown child who experiences this sometimes. I hope the parent left is willing to pay for some crisis therapy. Yes, I'm angry. That death didn't need to happen. Yes, he needed to stop using weird drugs (he had in high school been on his way to studying himself into a degree for ethno-botony I was told). He had been drinking copious amounts of alcohol but at the time of his death he had stopped drinking any thing but the occasional glass of wine or beer.He needed to get on a maintenance program, but he should not have been marked a 'useless part of society " and kicked down into the gutter again.

By the time I felt I could handle this and keep my son from grief-anger overdose, I got a phone from my cousin that the father of her daughter had a massive heart attack and died. We speak on the phone as often as I can afford it which is not much, but I email her often. Thanks to the dear friend who loaned me a fabulous laptop. She feels like she can never marry or date again.

There is some distance there. I hadn't seen my cousin since the eighties and she and her daughter reconnected last summer because the daughter felt she wanted to be a poet. And wanted my advice. I came through that safely when one morning, the phone rings and its the daughter of my best male friend. He's a painter; I'm a poet and I had just shown him, at his request how to tweak his poems into real poems. They were damn fine poems when he was done with minimum work. Her voice was off, I have to ask her what is wrong and there is gasping and fast light breathing before I realize I already know what she's going to say and I scream "NO" and the quieter, "when. She says, "This morning." I really cannot bear this. I have to sit down. Then I find myself back in bed, all my clothes on under the covers, the walk-around phone with me, listening to her tell me things I can't bear hearing.

Growing up I had read in books, Autumn is the month of death and I always took that to be a melancholy thing. More poetic than real. But I understand people die from the cold, or poor diets which make for germs to creep in. I have had to put this aside and let my emotions stew, mull around, I've had to let the sharp intake of breath hurt less and now, months later, I'm able to write. I always thought I would be the one to die first. I expect with my heart condition to die early and yet I'm fifty-four. A miracle.

I go outside and stare into the blackness. I always go outside when my emotions get too big for my chest. Slowly, my vision stops looking inside myself. I stop thinking of myself. Stars begin emerging. I give them names. Now, my dead are not lost. On the clear nights I will be able to see them, talk to them and the nights full of white, covered with fog, I'll reach out my voice like a hand and wrap it around a star of someone in particular and pull it into my heart. I'll let the star beat for my heart instead of my pacemaker. I'll let the star become my little/gigantic machine of love.