Friends, there was a format problem with one of the poems. Please use this and delete my first email.
OSLIST POETRY CELEBRATION AND CONTEST I like to emphasize the Celebration: these are great poems! Thanks to each of you who wrote. Enjoy them everyone. We also have a Contest to select the next OSLIST Poet Laureate, so that person can enjoy a special creative award that was given by their peers. It's a real honor! It also names the person who will collect the next selection of poems, six months from now. Here's how the contest works: You have five votes for your favorite poem. You can give all five to one poem, or distribute your five votes to more than one poem. Please send your votes to ME by Monday, August 30, at midnight California time. DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL OR SEND THE VOTES TO OSLIST. Send your votes ONLY to Jeff Aitken at mailto:tzimt...@earthlink.net. I will gather the votes and announce the new Poet Laureate. (This time, as the poems were all posted already, I'm including the names of the authors. I'm sure this won't be a problem.) And now: Here are the poems. 1. Butterflies and Open Space, Any Form our original thought wanders into chaos, and dissolves into a liquid body suspended weightless at the wild and quivering edge, ripening with the passion fruit of silence: yes *and* no we re-mind we re-member the pattern of Our Body re-forms, and the radiant chrysalis Opens at just the right time this is living in truth, and beauty, in conflict, confusion, and love these wings whisper into unexpected being the fierce light-net that cradles the grief this is the World to Come: now here this -Christy-Lee Engel 2. summer coast glowing gray in fog. sea lions shout their lazy tales. and here along the moist forest trail el dorado appears: a grove of eucalyptus dripping with gold. paper thin flakes, tarnished with black: a thousand gently resting butterflies. this silent miracle can only take place because they dare: to follow their hearts for a thousand miles. -Jeff Aitken 3. The Butterfly Always peers through narrowed eyes is the attraction genuine or merely desire peeling from a moving wall? For she cannot see beauty on her back, the challenge of her design, the random, nested within age-old patterns, in the half-light. I must learn to pace alate flutters, sultry mornings, ventures in silence to be seen reaching deep into the nectar. -Ralph Copleman 4. A momentary monodrama Butterflies we experience as flimsy, fleeting, fragile, beautiful, incomprehensible. A colleague does wondrous graphic recording of the conversing through which self organising manifests when space is open. She also brings a harp to add to the harmony through which co-creation emerges in a vibrational realm. Recently a plucky participant took time alone to strum on the strings while others got on with the serious play at hand. Did this bobbing and wafting aligning of tender vibes contribute to a transformation which almost strained credulity? -Alan Stewart 5. PORTALS In the green heart of the wild wood, Woodpecker is knocking: at midsummer the air is as green as light filtered through emerald. Deer steps into a shadow And disappears. I sit by the water drumming, open my eyes to Butterfly - a flash of black and yellow rises up in my face, soars over my head and leaves me drumming, enchanted. Earth holds the weight of tree trunks, heavy and unmoving, but in the circle of the sky leafy treetops bend and shake, playing a wild game with the wind. The air is interlaced with open spaces, this world and some other lie as close together as a leaf lies against the air - a blink of an eye, shift of imagination, will take me there. And my heart is captured by longing, restless with the thin veneer over the surfaces of things, watching for the moment of invitation: a trembling leaf, Woodpecker knocking, a new note in your voice . . . The world on fire burns with a green flame: I will not trade a precious moment of the chaos, joy and pain for a life with no surprises, for a day with no time to let you in. -Joelle Everett 6. I had an admiral in the house. He got in through an open window and he fluttered around trying to push through the glass to get outside again. Butterflies always point to the open space. They move to the edges and transcend the boundaries drawing our attention to what is over there outside even of the space we think we have opened. My admiral, white stripes on black wing, flew free when I opened the window and let him go. -Chris Corrigan 7. For Harrison the old skipper commands the bar. all around him the hotel is in storm, waves run thru the halls, ideas crackle. but his stories roll on, his hand light on the wheel. his tattoo is a butterfly! no need for bravado. he has traversed a darkness, cut free from a chrysalis, felt the strength of wide wings. he knows that the calm always comes once again. -Jeff Aitken * * ========================================================== osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist