These Growing Vines
My Personal Website
Welcome!
If you have time, please sign my guestbook before you leave!
Sign Guestbook View Guestbook
Below are several poems with similar themes from my book And What Great Wall. For poetry with various themes from the book, please click here.
(For Children's Poetry from my book Little Brown Sticks click here.)
--Written after visiting Los Encinos Park, the last Spanish rancho in California, and the San Gabriel Mission. Los Encinos was passed down through the family until the 1980's, when the land then remaining was broken up into lots, and sold. At the rancho there is the main house, a blacksmith's shed, and another two story structure which housed the workmen, and was used for storage. There is also a cistern, and a small pond with geese and ducks, which is fed by an underwater stream. While visiting there I felt the existence of the past, as if it were separated from the present by a thin membrane of time--these shifts in time occur in the poem below.
With Stone Wings
--"The bones of the earthgods shake, and planets
come to a halt when they sight the king in all of his power,
The god who feeds on his father and eats his mother....
the stars die and fall."
From The Cannibal Hymn, (c. 2180 B.C.) Egypt, Anonymous
Only in the mind can we fly with stone wings, where the sun is a light defined behind the eyes.
The sculptor's chisel finds those musical indentations, those invisible supple curves
where journeys in the heart of stone take place, where air is light, brilliant,
and Isis' alabaster wings blow breaths of wind and cloud;Time, like flecks of silver dust, compresses from coal into miniscule diamonds,
sculptors' hands turn to ash, and the idea of warm mortality is shaped from stone.
Death passes through the years, a wind of white bone dust bequeathed from generation to generation,
a stone-winged angel standing forever in shadow. In silence tears are burned dry by fires in the heart,
are turned to ash in hands raised in prayer;
stone remains, shadow remains, time is everywhere, like breath.
From a large clam shell water pours into a fountain, clear water ripples in the sun.
Ghosts move about, their footsteps ring on stone paths.
Here, the grass remembers itself long and green
where padres in hooded cowls gathered the animals,
and Indians in the garden
weed vegetables;
"The past walks inside of us",
thinks the woman with the long silken hair
who loves a man oblivious to her. As invisible
as the Indians who work for her in the kitchen,
she embroiders a shawl with red and green flowers,
its fringe falling over her lap.
I dream of the continuous presence
of those who lived before me,
of a chain broken in my life.
When did cruelty first raise itself like a cut,
as a red wound not yet become a thick scar of skin.
It must be the way of God to erase memory,
that becoming which erases the past.
Like sheets of waves, years empty and sad unfold
before the woman who watches at the edge of the room.
Like a fog sadness covers things, covers the world like a shawl
worn to a fiesta, where a beautiful dance takes place amid candles,
and colors flow like the wings of butterflies across the night.
It is a dance a woman watches from the edge of a room, solitary,
apart, from someplace inside herself, that place
where connections have been broken,
and all is becoming undone.
Ghost Dancers step on air
which has since become the color
of leaves in the fall. In Alaska white bear
walk on snow, strange animal dancers, like phantoms,
step on traces of smog embedded in crystal, and on snow
where salt is the crystal
embedded in tears.
We are losing everything, like those before us
who have lost their worlds. On a journey
where everything is disappearing,
as pieces of clouds weave themselves across the sky,
footprints become fossils the color of blood,
time is winding down, running out of room,
and the world is becoming a memory.
The light of the sunset is brilliant across the sky.
Horses begin to return.
The rancho becomes quiet,
and as the man reads in the study,
the woman, her embroidery in hand,
looks out the window, remembers her childhood,
a ribbon she once wore in her hair.
Now her ghost moves along the corridors of the walls
a moth brushing against the soft
veils of my breath.
Four thousand years ago raw stone pulled from the earth
by a stone-cutter's hands became a goddess carved,
entombed, returned to dry earth, shrouded in time,
this small delicate statue now standing in the shadow
of a museum's muted light."The bones of the earthgods shake,
and planets come to a halt
When they sight the king in all of his power,
The god who feeds on his father and eats his mother."
And we eat the earth, are the kings of the earth,
those who throw trees into death's darkness,
radiation into rivers, who turn the earth into sun,
and war thunders across the ages, disembowled,
burned into shadow,
small pox blankets given to Indians,
children murdered in their sleep,
and we sleep the sleep of the blind.This is a statement of loss, a statement of grief,
it speaks of your life and mine, of our children frozen
in their feelings,
embedded in anger, without recourse, and we have become
only that which we sought to become.Written four thousand years ago,
words, stone, shadow remain.
the stars die and fall.
Tonight the moon crescent is a thread of light,
it is autumn, and sixty thousand years ago
Mars journeyed this close to the earth.
I walk bare-foot in the grass with my daughter's dog
in the quiet of midnight, thinking of those who stepped before me,
watched red Mars light the sky;
Mars the color of cinnebar,
of red ochre blown onto a dark cave wall;
Thirty-six thousand years ago
in light dancing with shadow, earth was blown
between the fingers of a hand; in that act,
a prayer, a hope, a beginning,
in that breath, the mind shaping light.
Below is a poem I wrote at the end of 2002. This was a very painful poem to write. As I was writing it, I felt the sadness of the very real loss we are all experiencing at this time.
And What Great Wall
"Of everything I've experienced here, the most demanding, the most courageous challenge has been to stay centered in love in the face of violence and anger, of frustration and fear and sadness."
Julia Butterfly Hill
At this turning point
these are the last of the great gorillas
eating green shoots in the forest.
The thick-skinned elephant, endangered, lifts its trunk,
bathes itself on the dusty shore of a dried-up river.And the white man with the gray-flecked beard
who runs the Black Rhino sanctuary will surely be dead by summer.
He will stay to protect the Rhinos
from poachers starving for food.In America, too, the earth seems changed as we go about our work.
We remember the Twin Towers, how they collapsed,
firemen carrying people into the falling ash,
those three thousand dead.
Our rivers carry papers and plastics, beer cans
and bottles to the sea, to the gill nets, to the Baggies
stacked up like floating ghosts, with mercury and toxins
hidden in the waves.Tonight a sharp wind blows in the shadows
where the living sleep, scattered like dead leaves.There is a solitude in the body,
which is like a solitude of darkness or of light, it is of a sleep
which is like deep water, the homeless dreaming
in alleys, in the rain forests, in the woods
near cut-down trees.And what great wall can now name the dead?
As logging trucks rattle into our old growth forests,
cut roads into the Congo toward Pygmies' homes,
in a city where Bushmeat is sold to the elite,
a girl dies of AIDS, her small hand
the size of a shriveled plum.Bombed-out cliffs in Afghanistan,
where cranes nested on their way to India,
no longer exist. Children play next to land mines,
Russian tigers disappear in the coming darkness,
in underground silos missiles wait beneath snow.In Antarctica, there is a great cracking,
the shuddering of separation, where heaves of ice break apart,
fall heavily into a stark whiteness. The ghostly snow rises up,
and slowly drifts downward again, to cover the frozen terrain,
to settle, finally, into the immensity of its own silence.The strength of the world lies in love,
and through touch the filaments of the world
are connected, each history, both animals' and mans', born from night,
woven together beneath sky and earth.And at this, our last great turning point,
as the polar ice thins, and water washes ash
from our streets, what wall will now name the dead,
or return their histories to us,
who will now name the loss of the great red coral reefs,
or bring them back to the sea?
Moon Poem
1.
When the moon first appeared
in the ebony void
people saw it
and began to worship
the god of light.
It had risen
from behind the hills
and in the darkness
we saw its face
as the tip of a flame
lighting the shadows of trees.
The black water
became a resting-place
for its reflection
and because it mirrored
the face of a god,
we drank this water
and began to store it
in holy vases
which were placed in our homes.
These vases, carefully made
of white jade and ivory,
contained pieces of silver light
which we could pass on as a memory
of our first vision of the moon.
We used these vases
to teach our children
that though things may become
invisible to the eye for a time,
they never the less remain
solid and hard
and do not disappear
beneath the thick darkness.
This is the thing the moon
had revealed to us.After a time
the moon lessened its image
and became three-quartered,
and a few became afraid and forgot
what it had taught them.
It had risen from behind the hills
and part of its face was gone.
These few worried that others
had discovered some way
of cutting it
and hiding its light.
They thought that perhaps
the night was more powerful
than the moon
and was eating it
as death eats men.
They told their families
and when the leaves moved
along the ground
and the hoots of owls
became like the cries of ghosts,
these few said the voices
came from the water,
were the cries
of the drowning moon.
Many began to believe everything.
They saw the onyx smoothness
of the water
as the god of the dark void
that eats all light.
2.
It was then that people
began to form numbers
that went in a straight line.
We used these to count days
and to see if our own
numbered longer
than that
of our neighbors.
We began to watch the animals,
began to suspect
the fox,
the bird,
the snake,
the dove.
We thought the beaver
might be stealing
the roots of trees
to hide the moon's reflection.
We watched the bird
and wondered if it might be gathering grass
to hide the moon in the trees.
We watched the snake shed its skin
and believed it had eaten the moon,
that it grew new skin so the silver light
could not escape from its body.
We thought the mouse had taken it
in the middle of the night,
and had run to hide it underground.
We thought the dove had swallowed it
because we heard it in her voice.
Then we began to make weapons.
We shot the dove and opened her.
We killed the fox
and the beaver
and still the moon remained partly missing.
We found the snake, the bird, and the mouse
and we skinned these animals
and put burning twigs in their skulls.
We found our neighbors
and killed them
and put lightning bugs in their mouths.
Then we lit candles and made churches
and we prayed that the souls
of the dead
would return the moon to its original fullness
and make our own days numberless again.
3.
And I looked up
and saw that the moon
was now halved in its light.
I believed that my ancestors
had made the moon wane.
They had taken the water
and had swallowed it at night
and the light of the moon
had passed
into the bodies
of their unborn.
I began to worshipthe god of spirits.
I began to make large wars
to release the hidden light
from the moving limbs of the living.
I remembered the vases
which contained the moon
in the same way the body
encircles light,
and I took these vases
and opened them
and saw
that my own reflection
had disappeared.
4.
The moon rose quartered
and I thought the air
was eating my face,
that it had taken my reflection
from the dark water.
I went to my house
and hid.
5.
I noticed the ants,
began to worship them.
I covered the ground
with large buildings
that protected me
from the day
and night.
I created my own light.
I made boxes
that reflected my image
back to me.
I saw stories of the great wars
I had won,
and stories with straight lines
that tied together so neatly
nothing was left hanging.
6.
By the time we had forgotten the moon
except as something to conquer
and put a flag on,
it went dark.
We watched the world
through only one eye.
We believed we could create
anything.
Not many noticed
the missing moon.
Powerful men had themselves frozen
before they died
so they could return
when we had learned to kill death itself.
We made glass cities which shone
with the similarity of our faces,
and we tried to discover
how to grow metal limbs
because we wanted to replace
those that still bled
when they were cut.
We believed that power
came from the blood of others,
and in our self-worship,
we even began to believe
that eternity was a measurable distance
which could be crossed.
7.
And because an idol was known
to be the face of a god,
I held mirrors up to my face,
and in blindness to anything but my own image,
I licked myself clean of age and earth,
and entirely disappeared.
When Everything We Do
Casts Shadows
This is a time when everything we do
casts shadows.
The diamonds we buy block out the light
of those who dig the stone,those who dig the stone
in anger slit throats
and throw burning tires
around the necks of villagers as the light of flames
casts moving shadows across the grass.A can for soup is cut from the earth,
scars the landscape, returns to the shadow of earth
in changed form.Giving birth to a baby
is no longer an act of light.The woman driving to pick up her kids
guns the gas residing in the darkness of an engine
that powers a war thousands of miles away.
The sun on her streets blocks the light
in Iraq.Shadows wait and grow in time.
In Iraq Saddam Hussein's son
went out at night, grabbed
young girls, rapedand tortured them as his henchmen
stood in the shadows his money cast;
money from shadow
grown for two decades
still covering
their landscape and ours.In this dance of light and darkness,
breath casts shadows
as smog
filters through the sunlight. Birds,
turning in the light,
fly to alight on branches.Even food casts shadows.
In animal factories
pain is palpable,
immense;Small farmers,
broken by corporate interests,
watch as genes are inserted
into the shadow of seed.This is a time of diminishing light
where a people, in silence,
watch as their shadows gather like water,form like clouds,
block out the sun.
Garden Of Bone
In Ethiopia hunger grows like a garden of bone
around the small mouth of a girl.
At ten she knows the sharp-edged smile of starvation,
hunger that travels like a knife through her veins.
In my car I pick white lint off of my sleeve.
My arm rests on the rolled-down window edge,
buildings tower dark and steel around me---
I have grown used to a daily inhalation of poison.
On the radio a woman speaks about pollution in the once Great Lakes;
The fish are now toxic. She asks "What, exactly, are we giving up
for the convenience of 'ease'?"
On Saturdays, as I pass out newsletters about pollution
in Santa Monica Bay, people walk down the Boardwalk.
They are a river subtly drying up.
A half-mile north of me children play in water from the storm drain.
A favorite childhood stream, it washes mystery and poison
into their cells.As I hand someone a newsletter I remember my own childhood,
my now-dead father and me walking along the sand,
searching for moonstones, and shells that would forever echo
the sounds of ocean waves.
What gift can I leave my own daughter?
What is it that the waves echo?
As my chromosomes silently change within me
I can not see or feel their movements.
The ocean behind me repeats, repeats, repeats
its relationship to my blood.
On Big Mountain the Navajo bury the umbilical cords
of their newborn children, the earth of the mountain
forever related to that child. Here Peabody Coal passes laws
to relocate the Navajo from their ancestral land.
The Rio Puerco River, dead, far away,
flows like a radioactive vein. It is there that the Navajo
are offered new homes.
Beneath Church Rock, New Mexico uranium sleeps,
does not yet dream of the splitting of the atom;
the Navajo on Big Mountain fight to stay.
Who are the men who want to dig this out?
Who polluted the Rio Puerco?
Who pours toxins into the Great Lakes,
into the drains that feed the Bay?
Does anyone really gain from this; what kind
of machine do we oil?
Oil floats like a shattered rainbow
on the backs of our waters, in Ethiopia
a small girl starves. The moon
becomes reminiscent of a skull. It is silver
mercury shining on water. It shines,
its luminescence on my skin.
Along the coast
Plutonium leaks from canisters
onto the skins of dolphins.
They leap in the moonlight.
In San Francisco Bay
the U.S.S. Missouri
waits like a time bomb.
Related to the ocean,
to Ethiopia,
to Big Mountain,
to the once-living Rio Puerco,
to incessant greed,
it moves with the tides.
The Navajo have a chant. It repeats
itself like the waves.
"In beauty I walk.
With beauty before me I walk.
With beauty above me I walk.
With beauty above and about me I walk.
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty."
My father dead of cancer and I
walk along the sand.
What grief is it that the waves echo?
What gift is it that we leave?
At night the sky turns into a garden of bone,
and hunger surfaces in our dreams.
Thank you for visiting.
December 31, 2004
If you would like, please click here to visit Abalone Moon, a journal of poetry and arts. It's a well-known online magazine with many award winning poets and artists.
All poems on this page and website are the property of Velene Campbell, and may not be copied or reproduced without the express permission of the author. Copyright © Velene Campbell 2004. All rights reserved.
