HIGH WITNESS

Meister Eckhart

"The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love."


HIGH WITNESS

as we are camped out here

on this more often and indeed very darkling plain

Djwhal Khul tell us to be the high witness

we have our electronic campfire

we sit facing the television

we move through the ceremonies of Kennedy funerals

through the ceremonies upon the death of a princess

we bear high witness

we bear high witness to war after war

there is Desert Storm

the Towers fall

oil explodes in oceans

earthquakes come

tornadoes come

and then the fires



Netanyahu speaks to Congress

Obama speaks to Parliament



in 1939, a ten year old boy writes

of the terrible scar of war

and pleads for leaders to sit down together

sit down together and talk things out

work together

this scar is a terrible thing

these wars…



long deceased now,

that ten year old yet watches

still keeps watch for these children



we sit facing the screen

we watch and listen

all the world speaks now

cries out in pictures



the grandson of a Kenyan cook in the British Army

stands before the British Parliament

as President of the United States

and says “It will be years before

these revolutions will reach

their conclusions”…

and says, “We have a say in how this story ends.”

he quotes Churchill: “…wherever the bird of freedom

chirps in the human heart…”

there is the eye that sees

--Barbara Smith Stoff

THE SUNDAY TIMES MUSEUM OF FINE ART

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, is now seen as a good early copy of Bruegel's original.
 
THE SUNDAY TIMES MUSEUM OF FINE ART

I see too,
remembering Auden's Icarus,
that when it comes to suffering
they are seldom wrong
these reporters and their cameras,
the way they catch tragedy on the human face,
and yet sometimes they fix for us
in their instants and afterimages
...something achingly beautiful, incandescent...
so human, so human rising up.

Take this picture of Redgrave for example.
I have kept it here on my desk,
for weeks now, have studied her expression...
hand gesturing for some ideal, tender,
perhaps clear only to her.
I have met those eyes, the lips
pursed to appeal from her side.
I know little of sides and battles,
but I know that face.

--Barbara Smith Stoff

Here is the poem which inspired me and my students:
MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS
By W.H. Auden
 
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
 
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears,
Executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden.
 
Pasted from

 
Here is another poem...this one from DOORS INTO POETRY, by Chad Walsh (Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1962)...
 
THE FALL OF ICARUS (From Brueghel's painting)
by Charles F. Madden
 
The bulging sails by a riotous wind caught
pull the ships and their rigging nets toward shore
to be emptied.  The sailors quickly will calm their floors
and their houses in the evening light will melt into the mountains.
 
And on the hill with one foot planted in the earth
his plowing almost done; his eyes cast down and fully shielded
from the sun which now is growing shadow, the farmer 
turns in soil and toil the final circles of the day.
 
Below him a quiet pastoral: on lichen bearing rocks
the feeding sheep, the quiet watching dog, the silent shepherd
so stalking with his eyes the homing flights of birds
that neither he nor the intent fisherman closer to the shore,
 
none has seen the silent fall of Icarus
through the riotous wind and the shadows of the coming evening light,
nor do they hear his sigh, both of pity and delight
of his remembrd waxed and winged flight.
 
--Charles F. Madden
 

ELIJAH'S CUP

ELIJAH'S CUP

Dear ‘Elijah Rising’…I was just going to post this poem today, and as I come to the blog, I see your comment…so this is for you...what beautiful synchronicity! I wrote the poem several years ago as my night time reflection after being invited to a large Seder service at a temple. The Haggadah explained the fifth cup and how only the children in the room notice that indeed Elijah has come and sipped the wine. There was a small ‘post script’ which said it’s now okay to drink from that fifth cup during the service. I raised my glass with deliberate thought and real joy.
--bss

ELIJAH’S CUP

That fifth cup is Elijah’s cup.
Be reverent
with the shards
that remain
of that perfection
which was childness.
Turn them carefully
against your callouses,
or listen, as with a shell
to the ear, for secrets saved
toward wholeness.
All these years…
kept in the keep of the heart,
the secret stirs, and Elijah
begins again to whisper.
--Barbara Smith Stoff

FOR WORDSWORTH: DAFFODILS

FOR WORDSWORTH: DAFFODILS

Through a long winter
my feet have traced a new path
through unpatterned shadows
from ice-laden limbs of bare trees.
Bare trees cannot shelter,
even sparrows,
yet they do offer themselves
as cold crystal prisms,
as pale sun warms the waiting
for some sound of spring. There!
Yellow chalice-faces,
green-stemmed hope,
daffodils breaking through—offering—
There!
--Barbara Smith Stoff

THE HEART

THE HEART

Having inquired too much

of too many lessons and too many books

now I lay me down on this good earth

to mound the leaves like words--

piles and piles of yarrow words.

Silent and dark, I stir and stir

until the question bows,

until the question stirs.

Where does "I want" arise?

In the mind.

Where does "I need" arise?

In the body.

Where does "I have" arise?

In the heart.

The heart can never be cut down.

The heart can never be used up.

--Barbara Smith Stoff

THE BALANCE TURNS ON YES

THE BALANCE TURNS ON YES

My soul is balancing out there
and the balance turns on yes...
a light burning through black and white,
press printing new patterns
(this is only flat paper news)
I look down from the horrors
of the Sunday paper
to this cat
(who has become my teacher of late)
here on my lap
(warm ease and somehow here being)
with balance here
with balance here seeming
on a thin thin wire
silver spun from some center...
is pure? will hold?
the center holds
(even to that mountain in the distance there)
Yes.

Trusting the morning hand
for some graceful knot,
I look up to bind...
up and out and level
(even to that distant mountain there)
and back to this flat paper news
whose power leaps quivering from points of pain
dangerously shaking the gossamer line.
Almost I hear the fearsome snap:
a heartpulse...and the line holds.
My soul comes comes home again
from rare space
and I stroke the cat
and we enjoy fragrant tea
with some serenity.

--Barbara Smith Stoff

DRAGONS FROM THE DEEP LOCH

DRAGONS FROM THE DEEP LOCH

Up from the deep waters
The deep unconscious
The unreflected upon waters of the oceans
Which hold together this striving planet
Up and out in the open
From these deep waters
The old patriot rejection of old world parentals…
Are we afraid of old European ideologies which suckled
Throughout centuries...and aeons...? even learning all the while
to winnow out some poisons..
...An old-new idea
Is born and in Boston the tea boxes go into the sea
That sea of consciousness
(they sometimes call the marrow in our bones the sea of consciousness)
…that sea of consciousness which ultimately touches all shores on this planet.

“And what is the ocean doing?”

And like the unclean knives buried for centuries on the ocean floor,
The creations in the deep loch come up to walk our modern streets
And populate our screens…for better or worse…we must decide.
The old subterranean dragons in the edens of our ideas…
How to integrate them into our dimly dreamed benevolent humanity?

The patriot’s cry…”from my cold dead hands”…pry this weapon.
And the nation which says it’s “Christian” forgets that the man Jesus
Urged the giving up of weapons…even suggested they be made into
Plows for growing fields of food to feed the hungry.
So we have the rebirth of the tea party…
Rather than leaning shoulders to wheel to actually build
That more perfect union, that more perfect government
Which ultimately leads to the laying down of the weapon
Before we have to deal with that “cold dead hand”…


Fear? Well, bombs, swords…
Those who make them tend to reject
The idea of benevolent evolution for humankind.
Jesus said those who live by the sword will die by the sword.


Do not let us be that ever adolescent culture
Continually rebelling against motherfather countries
In order to discover the “new” identity within….
Let us put down the weapon
Before we are that cold dead hand…

Rather be the hand that signed a declaration of the benevolent
Future for humankind…that promised to be example…
A living walking example…into being.
We must not become that cold dead hand.
We create ourselves each day
According to our idea of ourselves.
Let us welcome the future with warm hands.

--Barbara Smith Stoff
March 24, 2010