A Far Small Wood [Spy Wednesday]

This black-green vale of knotted pine,
Now having found their lonely place
And here below the windy line
They make a herded, blustered sign
Against the rocky face.

They are wearied but quite unseen
From over the rolling hill;
So that only the collected crows are keen
To what the little wood will glean
Once the foxes leave their kill
Among the dry, brown straw
Where the scavengers wander
And the insects crawl.
Walking here I found a weathered doll
And ponder
Its lost child
Forgotten now, somewhere amidst the world
Of constant codes and numbers dialed
And countless dangers in closets piled
Beneath these dark crows now unfurled
And swirled into the air
To find yet another patch of trees
In shadows made of sunny glare
And windblown strands of golden hair
And men set down upon their knees.

~Jef Powers

German Photograph [Spy Wednesday]

The lime-green rapeseed
Un-pressed and swollen waits
With oil upon the harvest and
They were long ago and unknown to me
Now; but for this captured field
Of digital lime-green illumination

To reveal our eye on unfamiliar places
And share our visions with one another
Since if our communal memories met together
For a moment alone in a room the floor would
Bow for all the mendacity and homesickness.
Truth is thick with heavy liquid called tears
Like the oil of Canola
Seeds poured down on my face.

     ~ Jef Powers

The Mailbox at Night

There is not a creature

That pushes the stars

But only a length of forest breathe

At night when none is watching

The little quiet lights, spiraling

Neither modest or calm

But infernos that make us as nothing

And a roaring

From this distance though

There’s nothing to it

It’s not a concern

I’ll walk back to the glow at the kitchen door

All this light

It burns a hole in my coat

It invites the darkness

Back to the house

Thankfully it knows nothing of us

And for this disinterest

I’m utterly grateful

~Jef Powers

A Poem by Robert Graves- Is Good

Flying Crooked

The butterfly  a cabbage-white,
His honest idiocy of flight
Will never, now, it is too late
Master the art of flying straight.

Yet has who knows so well as I,
A just sense of how not to fly
He lurches here and here by guess
And god and hope and hopelessness

But even the aerobatic swift
Has not his crooked flying gift.

Halloween - Greatest Holiday Ever Invented By Humankind!

Screw Christmas, Easter, Et cetera, Et cetera, and all the rest of those goofy RELIGIOUS holidays. (But please do still send presents - I like the part about presents - that was a good idea)! 


Anyway, none of them can hold a candle (pun) to Halloween. Compared to Halloween the rest of them are dog-meat.  Halloween is the night when we get to contemplate being all those beings that roam around inside our normal lives; the ones in our dreams, the ones in our imaginations, and even the most frightening ones of all living inside our normal routines. We put the real faces of Halloween over the masks of our "so-called" daily lives. Happy Halloween! Happy Real Faces Day!

Russelling Up Some Common Sense

In his autobiography, Bertrand Russell, writes, "There is a motive (in human beings) which is stronger than self-preservation: it is the desire to get the better of the other fellow." He is writing this as a reflection of his effort to rid the world of atomic weapons and the proliferation of nuclear bombs. I do not know the current state of the "Nuclear Arms Race." Are we still racing toward some grand superiority--constructing even more weapons after having already amassed enough destructive power to kill every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth a 1000 or 10,000 times over? Are we reversing that absurd process in any way? We certainly hear less made of the situation than when I was a kid, being trained to secure myself against a Soviet attack of Hydrogen Bombs by hiding beneath my school desk. I was never quite certain whether the adults who lead us through those exercises were joking or not. I had see the photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My school desk seemed to me kind of inadequate, especially since the bombs coming at us might be 20 or something time more powerful than those used on Japan.

Lord Russell ends that paragraph with"...whether mankind will think itself worth preserving remains a doubtful question." And despite the fact that the whole subject is quite out of the news I fear we have not progressed much further than that day when Lord Russell, in his eighties, was imprisoned for the offense of suggesting  that we were worth preserving. The clarity and  wit and brilliance and humanity of Bertrand Russell will out live him (if we don't destroy ourselves first) by at least 10 million years. 

Did Cyril Kornbluth Invent the Jedi?

It is claimed that the Jedi, who are an order of warrior monks who serve as the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy, were invented by the mind of George Lucas sometime in the early 70's. I wonder if Lucas has ever laid out why his Jedi resemble so very closely the College and Order of the Heralds from C. M. Kornbluth's 1952 story, That Share of Glory. If Lucas has never formally made this connection then I am here to say, someone has some splanin' to do and the family of Cyril Kornbluth is owed some serious royalty money.