WAKE UP AND PAY ATTENTION!

Wake up and pay attention!
You have no idea what you're missing!
Focused on the wrong things
It's harder than it needs to be.
Practice makes perfect.
Pay attention!

      -- Barbara Casey

WAKE UP CALL

Watchman, what of the night?
The simple start of a complex play.
So goes life, the smallest slight
Can cause catastrophe.

Wake up, what you overlook
Can bring you down.
An offhand remark
Can cause great pain.

Listen and be aware.
Keep watch on what you say and do.
You never know
What tragedy you might begin.

      -- Bill Byrne

MASKS

1995

A magenta mask.
Mouth and chin covered by leaves.
A jewel, plume, and stars adorn the mask.

Eyes blind to this world
Look inward to the World between Worlds,
in towards the world of dreams.
There is work to be done, alone and lonely
in the vast reaches of the night.

Each of us is dreaming our own dream
Before we awake.

1998

A yellow mask.
Sunshine yellow, facing the day.
Mouth smiles widely, curly hair grows on the head.

Sky blue bow tie covers the throat
Celebrates the voice, throat chakra.
The source of praise.

Brilliant blue eyes behold this world,
Observing, noticing, seeing the day.
Awake!

      -- Phoebe Cassidy © 2000

PRAYER FOR MARILYN MONROE - CONTINUED

Lord!
      Forgive us. We projected our needs
onto this shopgirl, as onto a goddess.
(Remember the temple of gold and marble.)

      We desired from her what she could
Not give herself. Love!

      Separated from our own self love,
we hungered for her to span the abyss,
heal the void in our lives.

      Fragile as flawed porcelain,
she shattered under the weight.


Lord!
      Accept her in her broken-ness
for she carries our need.
Lord!
      Forgive us, for we asked her to
carry our sin.

      -- Phoebe Cassidy © 2000

WAKE UP, WAKE UP

O followers of the God of materialism. - Ah,
Can we get it cheaper at Wal-Mart or
K-Mart? Oh, you say, Sam's Club or the Internet.
Never question why it is cheaper or try to understand who is paying the price.
If it doesn't last - no matter, it is cheap - throw it away - we can get another.

Wake up, wake up,
O exploiter of the universe. Ah -
But there are still oil fields in Alaska
And acres of rain forest to cut down
And our high powered engines help us
To cover greater distances faster and faster.
Certainly we can find technological solutions
To all the problems of pollution and depletion.

Wake up, wake up
Ask the question, "Who will pay in the end?
Who will be left to mourn?"
Only God will shed a tear.

       -- Ev Pilgrim

WAKE UP!

The newspaper's unerring thump
against the front door of our house
advertises the arrival
of all the news that's fit to print.
      Wake up!

A quick scan of headlines reveals
the world's not o'ernight grown honest
nor more comfortable for those of
high personal integrity:
      Wake up!

And there's no news from El Salvador,
no poets in Nicaragua,
nothing but drugs in Colombia,
polluted reefs in Panama:
      Wake up!

       -- Charlie Randall

WAKE UP!
People of the First World!
Wake up!
   Turn from your useless pursuit of more things, more adventures, more pleasures.
   Look around the world!
   There are God's people starving and homeless--in poverty beyond your imagination.
   There are God's creatures who will cease to be because their habitat is gone.
   There is God's earth--raped.
You ask:   Why?   How?
   The wheels of materialism and selfishness drive it all.
   Where is our part--our responsibility is all this?

Wake up!
Kit!
Wake up!
   Where is your responsibility in all this?
   Look in your eye.
   There is a log there--try to take it out. You will never be able to.
   Just know that it is there and that YOU are part of the problem.

       -- Kit Pilgrim

RESPONSE TO ERNESTO CARDENAL'S "DAWN"

Wake up! Wake up!
   Catch!   Hold fast!
   Alas,
This brief moment shall slip away
This reached-for view shall fade . . .
Another dawn is fleeting . . . fled,
   . . . and gone.

Now! Straightforth now!
   stay, awakened be . . .
   catch, and . . .
   hold fast . . .
Grasp!
   catch-if-you-can,
   and . . . persist.

Wake-ful stay!
   Who knows when
   the dawn of the new day
   or new man
   liberates us?

       -- Ruth Blattenberger

POEM TO BE SENT TO ERNESTO CARDENAL

I think it was Vaclaw Havel about 1989
said at his country's liberation:
now literature must become unimportant.
Ernesto Cardenal, I pray your words
have the opportunity to become unimportant.
But your words will not be forgotten:
Gandhi, his death for his people
flawed by a waxing moon, had one more incarnation
as his translation of the Bhagavad-Giitaa into his mother tongue.
Even at the event horizon, at the Schwarzschild radius
of the black hole, where not even light escapes,
information is not lost,
Bereshith, the Big Bang, is not entirely reversed.
Your words will live. Our words will live.

---

LISTEN UP, AMERICA!

And drive out the money changers of language,
the lullabies of management,
the eviscerations of MTV.
Even the muse of the wise,
Musa sapientium,fruit of Eden, banana
is corrupted - even the genome's language
is corrupted, the G's, the C's, the A's, the T's.
las palabras de los indígenos,
maíz, tomate, chocolate,
papa, yuca, banana;
   with toxins of milky spore,
   with antifreeze of Antarctic fishes,
   with deadly allergies to peanuts.
In this smug retreat
where the silence speaks English
a crow caws black over new fallen snow.
In that far land of bananas of tears,
where the grass burgeons on the blood of martyrs,
a blue world dissolves the words of poets,
in greens, in blues, word before winal, word before baktun:
   yax

---

RESPONSE TO "ORACIÓN POR MARILYN MONROE"

Lord,
Now I, Tom Noguchi, coroner to the movie stars,
who dissected that temple of gold and marble
into piles of blood, guts, and shit on a morgue table
will gird up my loins and answer you:

that shrink was a damn fool
who gave her chloral hydrate instead of barbs
Lord, see her hand on the phone,
she didn't intend to die: manner of death
therapeutic misadventure.
She is rising, assumed from her dormition,
la verdad es que estaba en el cielo y no lo sabía,
the truth was she was in heaven and didn't know it.

    -- Robert S. Richmond