by Alan Harris
1999
|
God? Even this fly walking across the ceiling stops often and prays. |
|
Free PDF download of this entire book: Flies on the Ceiling in Adobe Acrobat PDF format (18 formatted pages including color photos) Free Adobe Acrobat Reader is required. |
Contents
(Click on any divider between poems to return here.)
| A Haiku Quilt for Y2K | |||
|
| ||
|
| ||
|
| ||
|
| ||
|
| ||
|
| ||
|
| ||
PDF for printing
A Millennial Date
(Written in 1999)
|
I'm so glad we know of this magical forest-- don't the clear waters here make us look younger? End of the what? Oh, that. Here, let me pour you a Coke from our picnic cooler. Diet or regular? With or without ice? Of course, a toast-- here's to this endless earth we've made and are made of. May our one-triple-nined planet contrive to survive this year of broadcast hysteria, and may the Christian clickover of 2000 somehow transform trumpeting holiness into selfless silence. Magic tricks? No, I have none. There's so much magic here in this forest, here on this earth, here in our hearts, that any more would be less. Safe this year, are we? As safe as we feel, I'd say-- and as safe as we love, as safe as we give, as safe as everything we don't understand. We are flies on a ceiling which is also the floor of a marvelous room above. Count that room's years base 10 and it's a third millennium. Count them base God and oneness is far enough. Another Coke? Yes, thank you. A toast to all the magic that keeps us safe and all the daring that keeps us magic. |
PDF for printing
Briefing
|
Here is who you will be: I. M. Ego #1 My Place Selfville, Body Remember your address and don't neglect to decorate your walls and keep your place unsoiled. You need to live here, yes, because your past exertions somehow built this place according to your own design. Here you'll be safe, with one catch-- you may not think you are. "Ego" has grown to be an ugly word, you'll notice, but it only means your walls. How could you reach a later hatching into light if forced to learn and grow unsheltered by these walls? Now go, be, love, talk, laugh, err, create, teach, glimpse and lose and glimpse the light again. Anything is permissible but everything is accountable while living in this dwelling that restrains while it protects-- until the day you hatch into the waiting sunlight with a realized reaping and a grateful weeping. |
PDF for printing
Watching No Baseball
|
We are sitting behind left field, you and I, alone in the stadium. We watch home plate where no batter swings at no ball that no pitcher has pitched. Intently we follow no action anywhere. The scoreboard contains no numbers about forgotten innings. Behind home plate no umpire fiddles with his protective pad or runs the game with shouts and gestures. We are very much here. No catcher signals for crafty pitches to be hurled from the vacant mound. We sit here safely upheld by bleachers empty of roaring rabble. Undwarfed by an immense space entirely eventless, we inhale silence. No need for talk. After just enough emptying of minds, seeing everything that is and isn't here from arbitrary seats, we know that it's over. Down the winding exit stairs we climb without a word behind no crowds to the busy sidewalk. We exchange glances but don't need to say who won. |
PDF for printing
What Lies Ahead*
|
What lies ahead no human mind can know-- Tomorrow may bring happiness or woe. We cannot carry charts Save the Faith that's in our hearts As down the Unknown Way we blindly go. *Note: The above poem was not written by me, nor have I been able to discover the name of its author. I found it handwritten on the opening page of a 1941 wartime scrapbook kept by my grandmother, Theda M. Harris. I was strangely moved by this poem and felt it to be worth preserving and sharing. I'd be grateful to anyone who can e-mail me the name of its author. (To do so, click
|
PDF for printing
An Evening Question
To a Guest Reading by Paul Meier|
Blackbirds crackle random sonic pepper under fading skies at end of day when silence brings more pain to birds than sounds held in can bear. Up west, three backlit afterclouds, blue-gray, suggest a breathless blessing, outer sky to inner eye. Two robins try antiphony positioned fence to fence and trade their choruses across a subtlety of dew. Overhead, a helicopter's growl subdues the singing birds who observe a silent minute waiting for the bully to be gone. Next door, the dog barks out his being at something heard or felt and with each bark a girl shouts "Shut up!" until he does. A cat comes walking by, surprised at me, too close, but quickly taking care to show no fear. Quietly alert, I stare across this outdoor table-- top all strewn with wings of maple seeds delayed from reaching earth-- and I bow within. My breath amazed at simple dusk, I fold in half, and half, and half, until there's hardly any I. This enigmatic sky now closing day with fake finality while straddling yin and yang abstains from answering my wordless evening question. |
PDF for printing
Graduation
|
Our ride slows to a halt and the man says "Everybody off." We don't quite know where we've been and we're a little dizzy as we step down into the future. |
PDF for printing
Shopping Cheap
To a Guest Reading by Paul Meier|
Empty-feeling in this full-discount store, I notice others trancing by, glaze-eyed, behind their clinking lop-wheeled carts. Lured, are they, by the hook of free? Hypnotized by the hype of cheap? I wander hapless and mapless through thingful, clerkless aisles and chafe inside at where things aren't. PA speakers storewide announce who-cares specials, demand urgent price checks, summon somebodies to the front, then resume happy snippets of syrupy sambas. Ah! A rare tagged homo employus-- I'll catch him and be out of here. "Where are the reading glasses?" I ask his back before he can escape. He gives robotic directions to Aisle 5, cinched with a "Can't miss 'em." Remember when store clerks would ask if they could help you, and lead you to your product, then stick around to make sure it was really what you needed? Remember customers? Service? Within this barn of bargains harried service-counter girls refund to waiting lines for slipshod quality, murmuring memorized apologies to jaded ears, then "Step up, please." Remember quality? Cordiality? Absent is any quality counter to make up for poor service at the service counter. Employees hired here for ho-hum per hour evade frazzled shoppers who, from all different wealths, squander the numbered heartbeats of their lives to search for bargains planted cleverly near high-margin impulse racks. Remember joy? Hilarity? Blindly, the free market (an oxymoron to the credit-card poor) ratchets money up to our finely-computered investors who downwardly squeeze more work for equal pay out of fewer desperates who hate the jobs they have which earn the scratch they need to take out bigger loans. Remember philanthropy? Altruism? No reading glasses found in Aisle 5. Did miss 'em. Aimless now in Aisle 7, I stop my cart to ask within: How might people market goods with love instead of greed? Is selfishness the ultimate? As if an angel had the mike, the PA system broadcasts "Follow the blue light...", crackles, and goes silent. |
PDF for printing
|
Above poem is included in the
Christmas Reflections PDF book Holiday poems to print for gifts or for keeps Free PDF Download - 2.0 MB, 18 pages Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader (also free) |
Angels of the Sunset
For Those with Open Hearts
Photographic Version
|
Some lucky ones have claimed to see and even hear an angel or a host of them presiding in resplendence over countrysides or busy city neighborhoods. Most angels seem to hover just where bright meets dim, and rarely show themselves to televisioned eyes or eyes that scan stock tickers for the best bonanza yet. Some people yearn lifelong to see an angel near their morning porch or, ill, pray earnest prayers for healing angels who will touch them and dispel disease. Anyone who has a western sky and something of an inner eye may sometimes notice sunset angels in their dance of shifting veils above the darkening ground. Concealed and yet revealed in colors you can see between, these angels bless in silent bigness all whose eyes are listening and all with openness of heart. So subtle are the wings of angels that you may not realize they've come and gone, except that innerly remains a glowing which seems just as good as knowing. |
PDF for printing
Meeting
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
Letters to mail and a twilit beckon from the dimming sky tempted tonight my walk to the mailbox that never seems to come to me. At my first turn the fat, lop-lit moon shouldered me and whispered, "I'm here with you, never not here. Turn you to dust or turn you to ash, I will be here." I mailed my letters and walked for home. So simply it came to be-- my ageless friend and me slipping past tree and tree. |
PDF for printing
A Christmas Light
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
At Christmas some will doubt-- they'd rather see first-hand the legendary holy child than hear fine stories told. Some legends place a star above the manger scene to be a beacon guide to men who had wise gifts-- but if a body of heaven were wanted to remind folks nowadays of this child who was gifted and gave, why not the unassuming moon, whose quiet beaming gives us all an inner warmth akin to Yuletide happiness? Humbly shines this second light, relaying solar guiding rays to people lost within a night who wish to find a path. Who hasn't sometimes wished to thank the moon for glowing above a ride back home from church on Christmas Eve? The lowly moon a Christmas light? How daily seem its rays to us-- no special star sent from afar that never will be seen again. If peace and softness were required, the moon has both. If mystery were needed, where could more be found? Perhaps someone is in the moon, as nursery rhymes suggest-- let's grant this may be true, and this man or woman is you. The moon inside you is your inner manger birth, and you inside the moon shine gifts upon the earth. |
PDF for printing
|
Above poem is included in the
Christmas Reflections PDF book Holiday poems to print for gifts or for keeps Free PDF Download - 2.0 MB, 18 pages Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader (also free) |
A New Beatitude
|
Blessed are the shrinks who'll listen to you hollah for just a hundred dollah when life completely stinks. |
PDF for printing
Gathering
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
A hush around the dying lacks nothing for no words-- forgiveness by default, love river-big, faltering philosophies, robbed expectations. The air inside the air seems ready to receive. |
PDF for printing
|
Previous Poetry Collection: Knocking on the Sky (1997-98) |
Poetry Home Page |
Next Poetry Collection: Just Below Now (2000) |