Katherine (aka Ravenlea)
Hi... I love writing poetry and short prose, singing... I wish I could draw or paint. Color and sound delight me. I'm inspired by lots of things... the beauty around me, my cats, my friends, human courage, ideas, reiki, our capacity to love.
Some other things that inspire me:
This painting by Hans Memling. When I saw it in a museum years ago, I became convinced that reincarnation is real. I had hoped this gentleman was a romantic attachment, but a psychic later told me he was me in another time. Hmmm.
Then there's the fact that I'm 60 years old and I still feel so very young in some way.
One of my favorite poems is called Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owens. He wrote (and died) during World War I. I find this poem - especially the last lines - to be a perfect reflection of my own pain about sending young people to die by violence for any cause.
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori*.
*Translation: It is sweet and good to die for one's country.
And I guess we are supposed to share one of our own poems so here goes...
THE ROCK AND THE DEAD CHILD�
with thanks to James Mulry
In my throat is a rock with a dead child inside
Like the petrified fist of some giant god,
It wraps around her small corpse
Her legs stick out, limp and dead
And the rock wonders what she is doing there,
And why she died
It does not mean her any harm
It does not undersand, even,
How she came to lie dormant and frail in it�s grasp
It does not understand, even
Who it is
It remembers vaguely as though from some dim dream
That she needed to keep quiet
And stop struggling
But struggling against who or what
It cannot say
And it is frightened
By a vague sense of somehow having done wrong
It wishes she was gone
And then wonders who it is without her
Maybe they are one being and not two
And it did not exist first
But slowly grew around her
Day after day after day
And year after year after year
Never noticing
Until in this moment
Suddenly awakening
It finds her long dead
It keeps thinking of the Wicked Witch of the East
And wishes some Dorothy would come along
And make those legs (so limp and dead,
So small)
Shrivel up and go away.
But this is not Oz
Or Kansas either
But some no man�s land
And this body is not some evil witch
But a small child...
She can�t be more than four...
Silenced in a tomb of oblivious stone
That wishes
With whatever dim heart a stone can hold
That it could let her go,
Could bring her back to vibrant life
Wishes too somewhere in it�s confusion
That it knew how to cry
And wash itself clean
Of this child who holds it as captive
As it holds her.~~October 5, 1999
Others
