April 10 AntiWar Demonstration in SF

The United National Antiwar Committee will lead a demonstration Sunday, April 10, 2011, 11:00am (march at 1:30pm) at Mission Dolores Park, SF. It's sponsored by hundreds of social justice organizations. The poster is cool, and if you click on it, you can read the whole thing.

Reading March 20, Sunday, at Diesel Books

I am happy to be reading at Diesel Books on March 20, Sunday, at 3 p.m. with Fred Marchant and Dan Bellm.

Fred Marchant and I have gotten to know one another at various literary conferences in the past couple years. He served during the Vietnam War and was one of the first marine officers ever to be honorably discharged as a conscientious objector. He is a genuinely sensitive individual, as seen in his poems. I am so honored to be reading with him and his friend Dan Bellm. Dan Bellm lives in San Francisco, and his third book of poems “takes as its starting point the Jewish practice of studying weekly portions of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, in an annual cycle.”

As usual, I’ll do a kind of mixed genre presentation, mixing song with poetry and trying to surprise you! I’ll also read from my new manuscript of work that relates to the documentary I’m cowriting, Duas Americas.

Read more on Fred, Dan, and me at the Diesel Bookstore link
Diesel, A Bookstore Oakland
5433 College Ave
Oakland, California
94618-1502

We Have Volcanoes To Thank For...

Once, our planet first was nothing but fire. Through the action of volcanoes' steam vents, water vapor became our atmosphere and clouds, which then rained down and made our oceans.

"Volcanic activity is the main process by which material from Earth's interior reaches its surface. Volcanoes played a large part in the formation of Earth's atmosphere, oceans, and continents." --ScienceClarified.com

The Sundial

I was down at the Berkeley Marina pier last year with Moises and his parents who were visiting from Brazil.

I began to marvel at the perfect magic of the sundial: through careful measurements in accordance with the laws of sun and night, someone constructs it: and when the shadow falls across the nose of the circle, it falls upon a number: and this is the time of the clock.

Then I mused... What if, somehow, amidst this perfect harmony, a misalignment occurred? So that the shadow fell upon the body of the sundial, but no longer told the time?

I began to think of us, our bodies and souls in the universe of our days and nights, and how fragile is alignment in cosmic time. How easily we can step out of magic.


Sundial. Black blade of the sky.
The sun can’t stop touching you,

It lays its hands on your sides.
You’re the sundial by the sea,

On an enormous discus. Splayed.
People, out for a stroll, stop

Sit on your edge, touch your clicks,
Your metal minutes.

Your metal sail points north.
They finger the shadow it casts

On the circle. They pronounce
The o’clock, proud

Of the ancient technology,
Sun-driven,

From a time when fire
Still lived in our homes, our woven huts.

A child rests in the shadow
Cast by time and the sun.

Earth leans away, and this
Is shadow. They ooh

And aah, the people,
At this display.

* * *

Sundial, sundial.
Some days

Your heavy metal sail
Refuses. The wind

Has caught it, something
Ambient. In the seas

Struggling, it veers
Off course. Or else

A mechanism, unseen,
Whirring in the wings of the sky

Presses it, forcibly,
Off. It must suffer.

Pray it help itself.
No, no, it can’t.

The people gather,
And all times are untrue.

When we would have two,
It has three.

When we would have one,
It has five.

Sundial wonders why
It was born to earth,

If only to click
So many lies.

At night, when it
Must tell nothing,

In the darkness
It cries.

Nothing to Save

A friend and I conversing about the fate of the planet, veering between the two poles of doom and idealism, fear and acceptance, gave rise to this poem.

I saw that yes, the planet would end.

Or I would end.

The two were mixed and I could not distinguish.

It approached.

I saw that we too like the dinosaurs would pass away.

The suffering of the animals, keeling in the seas and in the forests, would be great.

The butterflies would slowly pass from the surface of the planet; nothing would flit.

The corals in Australia had already died in 75% of areas; soon nothing would light

The way of fish or blackskinned divers in search of the curious.

An area the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific Ocean was dead water filled with plastics we had left there, ground down to bits the algae could not breathe through; everwidening, it gained as fish surrounding died from no algae to consume.

Meanwhile, I mulled over whether to get a navel piercing.

Why not a navel piercing?

Or whether to season my cauliflower curry with one or two teaspoons of red-black ancho chile powder.

Meanwhile, the planet turned.

And in the morning, I got into my pale green 2001 Subaru Outback, and listened to news of a filibuster as I drove 40 miles to work as a teacher, spewing my lot of carbon into the air with the rest of them, the rest of us, as we drive the planet to its destruction.

What happened to the green and blue paradise of animals and flora with which I had been entrusted, so many years ago when I dwelled in the Garden of Eden?

I was supposed to be steward of them, to keep them healthy.

What had I done?

I was supposed to fight it, to fight the ones who were poisoning it.

But I was the one, I was the human.

(I was fighting at the fences and turned back to see I had let escape my own ones out of the gate of my little poor place.)

I saw there was nothing to be done.

No doom to be avoided.

Nothing to save.

It would come, it would pass away.

Pity the dinosaur, pity homo sapiens.

So wise, so knowing, it thought, for a moment.

A second in the eye of the universes.

And to the region, #4971, that lies beyond time,

The eye that sees time as an odd artifact made by ancestors, a child’s pull-toy lamb left on the floor of an attic abandoned by Victorian children in a house left to be sold away.

The consciousness of the fires of Mars, red planet, that ensures it spins in exactly the correct orbit to press on its path around the sun, that it never drops into the vast, but stays in the dance of hot attraction

This would continue beyond me, beyond us

And the sun also would pass away,

Only after the planet of our birth, whose culture I had admired and tried to sing in, would lose its green and blue flush of youth, and another ice age would come, and not a thought would be given to what we once had been or dreamed or even loved.

Yes, even love, which I had prized as core,

This also would pass away,

As if no one in the galaxy had even felt it beneath their ribs pulsing or sending its waves out from afar.

Love, like a 45 rpm record produced in the 50’s, all the copies of which had been crushed in little black shards and ground to a fine powder, its vibrations never to be felt or even imagined again.

If not it, what?

I don’t know, do you?

No I or you to know.

Black holes humping, wormholes thumping.

Space.

Consciousness, which began all and will continue, inhuman, graceful.

Beautiful.

As it began, and shall (never) end.

Green-Haired Iara in Amazon Declares Rivers Are Alive!

The Brazilian mermaid goddess Iara is alive in the Amazon! Not sighted in some years, the green haired maiden is regarded as the protector of Brazil’s Amazon region.

Recently, in Santarem, Para (Brazil), people gathered in protest at the Pan Amazon Forum, which just ended on November 29, 2010. In protest against the Belo Monte Dam (the largest proposed dam project in the history of the planet), their bodies made a human banner, in the form of the mythical mermaid, on the shore of the Tapajos River, a major tributary of the Amazon. Students were gathering signatures in protest of the more than 60 hydroelectric dams the Brazilian government plans to build.

The results of the planned dam? Not only the release of more emissions than a coal plant, not only the displacement of the traditional-living Xingu people, but, after the area is opened, the mining that is sure to follow.

The Xingu Forever Alive Movement (Movimento Xingu Vivo para Sempre) is not accepting without protest the planned gigantic dam to displace the indigenous tribe.

They declare: Rios Vivos - The Rivers Are Alive (see photo); the rivers are their sustenance, not only of stomachs, but of way of life, cultural traditions carried on through millennia.

Rafaela Tavares Kawasaki writes, "When an Iara dies, her river dies with her."

Rios Vivos! Read more

Interview in Poets and Artists!

I'm very honored that poet and critic Michael Parker's interview about my work appears in the September 2010 issue of the beautiful online magazine, Poets and Artists.

Parker chose my book as his Best Book of 2009!

The interview covers my book,"And Aeneas Stares Into Her Helmet" (Carolina Wren Press 2009), as well as upcoming film and music projects.

Read the interview in Poets and Artists. Scroll down to the interview on pages 24-30.