Tag Archives: poetry

As it’s April, it’s all about Poetry (capital P)

The blog that’s getting the love is my ab chaos poesis, in which I play every day and link to other wordsters. But stay right here and enjoy a little Diane di Prima with your coffee.

REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #19

(for The Poor People’s Campaign)

if what you want is jobs

for everyone, you are still the enemy,

you have not thought thru, clearly

what that means

//

if what you want is housing,

industry (G.E. on the Navaho reservation)

a car for everyone, garage, refrigerator,

TV, more plumbing, scientific

freeways, you are still

the enemy, you have chosen

to sacrifice the planet for a few years of some

science fiction Utopia, if what you want

//

still is, or can be, schools

where all our kids are pushed into one shape, are taught

it’s better to be ‘American’ than black

or Indian, or Jap, or PR, where Dick

and Jane become and are the dream, do you

look like Dick’s father, don’t you think your kid

secretly wishes you did

//

if what you want

is clinics where the AMA

can feed you pills to keep you weak, or sterile

shoot germs into your kids, while Mercke & Co

grows richer

if you want

free psychiatric help for everyone

so that the shrinks

pimps for this decadence, can make

it flower for us, if you want

if you still want a piece

a small piece of suburbia, green lawn

laid down by the square foot

color TV, whose radiant energy

kills brain cells, whose subliminal ads

brainwash your children, have taken over

your dreams

//

degrees from universities which are nothing

more than slum landlords, festering sinks

of lies, so you too can go forth

and lie to others on some greeny campus

//

THEN YOU ARE STILL

THE ENEMY, you are selling

yourself short, remember

you can have what you ask for, ask for

everything

the hooves of a cow but not a cow, the neck of a camel but not a camel, antlers of a deer but not a deer, the tail of a donkey but not a donkey

PereDavidMoltingLast Winter Solstice, when I drove around Texas, I stopped by my friend Jane’s place in Boerne and saw the Père David’s deer that had appeared on her property months earlier. The funny, definitely archaic-looking creature was discovered by an old French missionary, Père Armand David, back in 1866 when he was trying to convert the Chinese. (Wonder how that went.) Also known as the milu, it is still among the rarest 10 species in the world.

The Père David’s deer is presumably native to Northern China, but (according to Wikipedia) archaeologists have found their antlers at settlements from the Liao River in the north to Jiangsu and Zhejiang Province and across the Yellow and Yangtze River Basins in Shaanxi and Hunan Province. By the time the priest came upon them at the Emperor’s game park near Beijing, few remained. He sent a carcass back to Europe. Right away an Englishman got interested in the funny creature and brought a group of them back to his estate in England, Woburn Abbey. A few other Europeans followed suit at the end of the century and they were scattered around several zoos on the continent.

This was most fortunate, because much of the Chinese herd died in a flood in 1895 and the remaining deer were killed during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.  davidsantlers

Best of all, the marvelous Wikipedia also describes the deer’s Chinese name, sibuxiang:

sibuxiang (Chinese: 四不像; pinyin: sì bú xiàng; Japanese: shifuzō), literally meaning “four not alike”, which could mean “the four unlikes” or “like none of the four”:

  • “the hooves of a cow but not a cow, the neck of a camel but not a camel, antlers of a deer but not a deer, the tail of a donkey but not a donkey”
  • “the nose of a cow but not a cow, the antlers of a deer but not a deer, the body of a donkey but not a donkey, tail of a horse but not a horse”
  • “the tail of a donkey, the head of a horse, the hoofs of a cow, the antlers of a deer”
  • “the neck of a camel, the hoofs of a cow, the tail of a donkey, the antlers of a deer”

It’s like a poem!

(From: “China To Return More David’s Deer To the Wild”. People’s Daily Online. January 13, 2000.)