Category Poetry

    POEM FROM THE NIGHT

           By Andrew Hidas

No heaven above, no hell below,
Just this, this bliss and thunder.
To dance beneath the diamond sky
(Sing it, Bob Dylan)
With both hands shackled tight
Sightless, deaf and mute,
No maps no roads
Traversing nowhere at all
Because you’re home already.
(With a long way still to go…)

Kindness is the core,
The coin of every realm,
Hippocrates said it once
And it’s worth saying again:
First, do no harm.
His other dictum worth our time:
I will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption.

Yet who are we without our dose of those,
The mischief and corruption, I mean,
Adam and Eve in the Garden,
Knowing not who they were,
Innocent and none the wiser for it,
Dull beyond measure until that fateful bite.

Self-knowledge is a ferocity,
A stare into the abyss of a
Life waiting to be built,
One brick and breath after another,
Be with me Sisyphus...

One of the happy occurrences of blogging is all the tangential roads one comes to in researching a particular topic—and the pleasurable travels down that road as one discovers and delights in the new and unexpected.

And so it has been this week as my intermittent meanderings down a road exploring “faith” led me, link by blessed link (truly, this is a chain that liberates rather than confines) to the wholly new knowledge that two of my favorite literary figures, Walt Whitman and Robert Ingersoll, were not only good friends but that Ingersoll, one of the renowned orators of his or any other time, actually delivered the eulogy at Whitman’s funeral in 1892.

And that it was duly transcribed and preserved for posterity and is now freely available on the Internet as the intellectual feast and profound artistic homage that it is, one great and expansive mind consorting with another in a sacred ritual of reverenc...

The best anti-war song ever written actually began its life as a poem. But like most fine poems, it contained an abundance of musical elements and concrete, vivid imagery. So much so that folk singer John Gorka readily saw the opportunity to turn it into a haunting, masterful song, so plaintive and quietly anguished that it throws off the power of its anti-war outrage under the cloak of a mother’s muffled sobs.

“Let them in, Peter,” implores the first line, and we immediately know which “Peter” the poet Elma Dean was referring to in the dark days of 1942, when the war was going very badly in post-Pearl Harbor America. This is the Peter who does not need a last name. The sentence finishes: “…they  are very tired.”

And the next lines:

      Give them couches where the angels sleep, and light those fires
      Let them wake whole again, to brand new dawns
      Fired by the sun, not w...

Love, love love love love. We are awash in it—or in its absence—at every station of life, in all its forms and expressions. Its four letters creep into our discourse in almost every setting and time, ranging from the mundane (“I love Oreos!”), to the passionate (the murmurings and exclamations of sex), to the intimate (deep interpersonal communication and regard), to the eternal (loving God and Life all that exists therefrom).

Here on the precipice of Valentine’s Day, we are drenched in romantic love, that relatively modern cultural construct that finds such ubiquitous resonance in our media. (iTunes cuts off the listings for the search term “Love” at 500 songs, apparently feeling that can keep their customers quite busy enough while would-be songwriters the world over continue to add to the cache. Love is, indeed, a many-splendored thing…)

Being of essentially romantic temperament myself (...

Robots are all the rage. They will either save or destroy our economy, no one quite knows yet, but we do know that just like the world’s population, they will continue to proliferate and insinuate themselves into virtually every corner of our lives. Robots are building cars, bringing autistic kids out of their shell, vacuuming floors, exploring sunken ships, rolling across the dust of the moon.

And even robots themselves have been rendered unnecessary by electronic sensors, so rather than being greeted by a cute R2-D2 character chirping, “Good morning, kindly commuter!” as you pause at the Golden Gate Bridge and slip some bills into his remarkably flexible mechanized hand, a mostly invisible sensor just reads your license plate as you zip on through the now empty toll booth.

You know, the same booth you always aimed toward, the one that was the workplace of Shirley, a single mother of two who knew yo...