Listening to the Good News in Poetry 

   I cherish friends who love good poetry, and I enjoy the way we share our favorite poems in social media posts and emails. So I think many can understand the meaning in one of William Carlos Williams well known poems, Asphodel that Greeny Flower, when he wrote: “Look at what passes for the news. You will not find it there but in despised poems. It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die every day for lack of what is found there, ”*(recall that “men” in his era refers to the human family of men and women.) 

   In this love poem for his wife Flossie of 40 years, he wrote, “my heart rouses, thinking to bring you news of something that concerns you and concerns many men.” The news we get from poetry is not the same as reported in the daily media. Williams is referring to something deeper, more nourishing, life sustaining. Though we will have different ideas about what the important news is, I perceive in the reference to death, “men die every day,” an allusion to soul survival, the suggestion of not dying, another life after this one. If you “get the news,” you’ll leave “lack,” to experience fullness, what we might call ascend to heaven (or the mansion worlds), attain Nirvana, “graduate,” enter the afterlife that spiritual traditions have taught us about in varying details. The poem ends, “Hear me out for I too am concerned and every man who wants to die at peace in his bed besides.” 

   Those who are spiritual but not religious (SBNR) may see that the message we get from poems is one of mental health, balance, emotional intelligence, soul health, progress. Are poets still delivering news that’s spiritually nourishing, leading readers/listeners to know these truths? If you look, you may find they are. 

   Where can poets do the work that will help the planet thrive? I consider myself a working poet; I often ask what exactly is our (or my) work? Engineers and carpenters build workplaces, houses, bridges, and highways. What do poets build? When I started writing, my goal was to construct a different kind of shelter, to frame new thoughts and insights, to reflect them accurately and clearly, so they’d be understood, to share ideas that might be inhabited comfortably by another, lived in, a philosophy of life, a life raft, to guide one in the construction of a character, to make better decisions about the purpose we wish to serve, or were born to achieve. 

   Here’s a poem about the future life. This one is about an entity, a spirit guide, that accompanies us in life and the hereafter: “I Am Not I” (by Juan Ramon Jimenez) 

“I am not I.  

                   I am this one  

walking beside me whom I do not see,  

whom at times I manage to visit,  

and whom at other times I forget;  

who remains calm and silent while I talk,  

and forgives, gently, when I hate,  

who walks where I am not,  

who will remain standing when I die.” 

   There are so many more poems about spirituality in our present and future life. Go out and get some of the news from poetry!

Usually it seems I labor for years. The well known quote from a craftsman in the field, “a poem isn’t finished, it’s abandoned,” has at times described my experience. But once in a while a spontaneous outburst, one great gush of words, happens like it did when I wrote Strawberry Moon the evening of June 5th, night of that month’s full moon. I knew from American Indian tradition that it was the Strawberry Moon, a signal for the harvest of the ripe red fruit to begin. 

After seeing on The Rachel Maddow Show the reaction of our congressional representatives to the tear gassing of peaceful protestors when police cleared the way for Trump’s now infamous Bible photo-op, I ran out into our yard to see if the moon actually had a rose pink tone. Couldn’t see it yet. I came back inside, wrote down things my mind, maybe my spirit guide, was insisting I pay attention to. How did all these threads get orchestrated into one composition? 

Stray words were bubbling up in my brain, “everything is broken;” I feel we’re being carried “with the flotsam” over the dam. I wrote down my feelings of dismay watching the treatment of the reporter attempting to get comments from our representatives in Washington. 

The flow of words continued: “the color of harvest,” and another thought, “gonna drown when the ship goes down,” a ship which didn’t become the Titanic, the first obvious image, but became Leonard Cohen’s “ship of state,” (which he in turn had picked up from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow). I went outside, watched the sun set and gathered more phrases, “dark angel cloud, a belly of fire,” running back and forth, looking for the moon, writing thoughts into my notebook, “sump’in brewin’,” (I didn’t use that! Poetry is inspiration but also work that’s like weeding a garden, some you pull up to let the more desirable plants thrive.) 

We started rewatching the wonderful Italian movie “Il Postino,” a fictionalized story of Pablo Neruda’s exile in Italy, and so “the naked lovers,” entered the scene of my poem. 

As I gathered up all these rough images and began typing, they took a shape, a curve, even a circle that readers found pleasing. Other pictures came to mind while I typed: Athena birthed from Zeus’s brow, only this time it was the tyrant birthed from the frustrated, hurt, and angry minds of the American electorate. I had been thinking about our parliamentary democracy back in Canada where we didn’t vote for a leader directly, we voted for a party, the Members of Parliament we supported determined which party took power, and who the Prime Minister would be. Is there something significant there in the difference between the 2 systems? Hmm. The poem came full circle to waiting under the Strawberry Moon for the berry fruit harvest, picking time under the June sun, words that recall a time when I was once a strawberry picker as a teenager working on one of the vanishing farms of my Canadian hometown. 

Strawberry Moon 

Dark angel cloud, belly of fire, sunset, but soon 

strawberry moon, color of summer, 

sometimes feeling, all of us, caught, lovers naked, 

vulnerable to moonlight, carried with the flotsam 

of everything broken, through torn hull of the ship of state, 

yet no one leads the way to safety; passive politicians, 

the women too, downcast, speechless, fleeing to hidey holes, 

floodwaters gonna follow, find ‘em, 

still gonna drown when the ship goes down.

Staring hopeless into abyss, I think longingly 

of the homeland where I was born, where I think 

we would not be encouraged to adulate 

such a strongman tyrant, as this false one 

sprung fully formed from the troubled brow 

of America’s frowning Zeus-cloud, storm cloud 

shadow over the waiting world. 

We wait for strawberry moon; it rides 

on the marine wind, herald of the harvest, 

fields of red berry fruit under warm June sun. 

© Dave Holt, Bohemian Hwy Music and Books

“He who sees the many, the diverse and not the one, the unified, wanders on from death to death.” (Katha Upanishad, Part 4.) 

           Maybe God is like a jigsaw puzzle. Someone knocked over the card table during a quarrel scattering the pieces of the unfinished puzzle into the corners of the room, bits of insight, revelation, and philosophy cast far and wide. Some were dropped in Iran or India, others strayed into China, or became lodged in the mud of the Mississippi Bible Belt. My desire is to see God put back into a coherent picture again. Maybe the pandemic of our era will bring us together, help us discover our common brotherhood and sisterhood to defeat a common enemy. 

           So many gurus, new age visionaries, revelations, and spiritual groups proliferated in California when I first moved there, like the famed salad bars that spouted up everywhere in later decades. I was being introduced to Gurdjieff, Course in Miracles, Seth Speaks (Jane Roberts), the Perfect Master: Guru Maharaji, The Urantia Book, The Essene Gospel of Peace and others lesser known. Odd and unfamiliar churches were all over the place, unlike any I’d grown up with in Ontario, Canada, all promulgating a variety of messages, some with psychic channelers in the pulpit, adding their revelatory attempts to older traditional ones, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Joseph Smith, to name a few. 

           When I pull out my dog-eared, somewhat battered Truth Seeker’s Guidebook, a system compiled to test the claims made by all these competing revelations, I look through the facts, logic, reason, imagination, and intuitions in its pages to check the validity of these experiences, fearing I might fall into a swoon of enchantment and be misled by an idea that was someone’s mistaken fantasy. 

“When there are no authorities, people are lost and cannot find salvation unless they can develop a philosophy which will enable them to use their intelligence in place of authority,” said a couple of my favorite philosophers, Henry Weiman and Regina Westcott-Weiman, in Normative Psychology of Religion. 

           After I disassociated myself from the traditional church of my youth, I began exploring spiritual reality without the benefit of experienced authority figures. Of course, one can play it safe, avoid all unconventional religious movements, certainly many did, but that was not my modus operandi. I was s serious traveler for truth, willing to check all the locks on all the doors and try the keys. And in my backpack, I carried some clues. From George Harrison of the Beatles I’d learned about Maharishi, heard his lecture; I’d read bits of the Bhagavad Gita, much of which I didn’t understand except a glimpse of “The Supreme Lord … situated in everyone’s heart … directing the wanderings of all living entities (18:61).” My beloved Aunt Alma knew Jesus in her heart, the love of him shone out from her face and kept him alive for me. Carrying these glimmerings, I now believe my angels pointed a way out of the quagmire. “Go to California” they seemed to be saying, where I could freely explore the pathways I discovered. 

          Shortly after the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and dormant nationalisms were rekindled, the restructuring of the former Soviet Socialist Republics woke up the Eastern European region to an awareness of the religious repercussions. People living in the Soviets under Communist rule had received no religious instruction for several generations. They were hungry for religious knowledge and spiritual truth from almost any source and investigated everything just as I had done a couple of decades before in the spiritual awakening of the 1960s here in America. 

          We had an unusual chance to meet with some of these orphaned truth seekers from Lithuania and Estonia who traveled to California in the 1990s. They were staying with friends in the Bay Area and came by to meet my wife and me because one was a singer; we were musicians. I was skeptical about how they were proceeding with their search, too much superstition, crystals, astrologic star charts, magic rocks for my liking. When I expressed this to my wife, she pointed out how wrong it was for a comfortably well off Protestant American like myself to judge their experience so harshly, asked me to think back. The same kind of profligate sampling had characterized the spiritual searches of our youth. 

          Our wall had also come down in the 1960s, the invisible wall of Western culture, letting in Eastern wisdom, Native American ceremonies, Sufism amongst other rituals and phenomena. The effects of “the West shall shake the East awake,” were not so clear to everyone at first. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a physical event, easier to see. The Russian and Eastern European situation inspired me to understand my own spiritual journey, thus this chronicle of wanderings was begun. I still have one of the magic pebbles one of the Estonians gave me in the form of a keychain. I think of them every time I take down the key to open my gardening shed. 

          If someone were to sew a patchwork quilt to document my journey, they would create a patch for each phase, the Christian, the yogi, the philosopher, the Buddhist, the mystical meditator. 

          “They call me brother Joseph, I have a many colored coat, to tell you the story of my brothers, and sisters too; for like a rainbow is our history. The threads that weave in you and me,” ... a song I wrote when I started out walking, rejecting nothing that might have value, examining closely even what had been discarded, for something vital may still be found there in the windblown, forlorn, scraps. 

          Finding a spiritual center was a slow process, a gradual gleaning of insights with a few personal epiphanies thrown in that helped me jump start my stalled car. Eventually, I did have a suddenly-all-at-once kind of revelatory experience about Jesus. It was followed by big changes to my lifestyle and my introduction to The Urantia Book two years later. 

          We have as a planet survived many trials, traveled many roads with each other. Perhaps we will now learn that we are blessed with the unbiased love of the same Deity, a common Creator, a universal spirit to guide us into a new world.