SHAKA! It's the Saturday Poetry and Art Thread!!

Hello again, aesthetes and elites. It's your old pal Yosef, here again to regale you with more of my humble verse and to solicit (not THAT way!) your own contributions of poetry and art. Creating is something we need to do occasionally to remind ourselves that politics is not the entire world.

It's noon in glorious Kauai. It's 3 pm along the coast highway in California, 4 pm in beautiful Santa Fe, 5 pm in Austin, and 6 pm in steamy New York.

Have a great afternoon/evening, you wonderful Kossacks!!

(BTW, we're going to be visiting Kauai's west coast today, so I won't be able to give any feedback or mojo until much later, but I promise I will.)

Three Haikus (Roku)

Pictures of old days
wrap their fingers around me.
I hear faint echoes.

A darting gecko
seeks protection in our home;
Kane shelters it.

We bid fond goodnight;
we embrace with practiced love;
we are one spirit.

He spoke a language

descended from the tongue
of Cicero and Ovid,
and he stepped ashore
on the sweltering beach,
clad in a sweat-drenched
dark cassock, wearing
his savior's tortured body
around his neck, and
marveling at the alien landscape's
ferocious greenery.
The rough men were bringing
the tools of conquest off the
ships, and
a group of luckless
donkeys had been landed
to carry the
shining excrement of the pillage
to come.
The man the others
called Father asked if he could
borrow one of the animals
to explore.
"Bring it back alive" was the blunt reply,
and together the tired servant
and his temporary master set out.
Clutching his magic beads and
murmuring appeals
to the ominous heavens,
the holy man and his mindless
companion pushed into
the tangles of foliage for
more than half an hour.
With a start, they came upon
a group of men as naked as
Adam before the Fall, and for
a moment that spanned centuries,
they stared at each other with
frozen amazement.
Seeing the living embodiment
of their legends in front of them,
the reddish bronze men fell to
the earth prostrate, and chanted
their humble welcome.
"God has delivered me", the rider said
in a barely audible rapture, and he
knew that the New Jerusalem
could not be far.
And holding his head high,
with the Divine Countenance itself
reflected on his face,
he rode the starved little donkey
toward those whom he would
baptize into the Kingdom,
and the bare-skinned welcomers
leading them
quivered with anticipation
at introducing the centaur-god
to their soon to be enlightened
brothers and sisters.

They are never confronted

with comfortable dilemmas
or too many options.
They have only one choice--
to get up and crush the
vertebrae of their backs
into dust to have enough
to swallow each night
so that they can rise,
and ignore the complaints
flooding in from every part
of their pack animal bodies,
and repeat the process
until,
when they are no longer able
to bend wizened hands to the
task,
they are thrown onto the pyre
to be mourned and wept over
in the interval between
shifts.

It quietly branched out

and linked
and created
a fine-meshed
net, day after day,
until, finally,
like an old television set
fading into view,
from it
emerged
the first,
primordial image,
as remote now as
the caves at Lascaux.
It is an anxious woman
with a soothing voice,
reassuring the sick
little boy
in the
strange setting
of the hospital room.
Is he summoning it
from the recesses
of soft-edged time,
or is it merely a legend
recalled from an early
hearing around the
campfire?

She sings

into the blueness
and her voice is heard
by no one,
only the scurrying,
indifferent
chameleons.
Her song is like
none other ever
heard
or imagined,
an impossible
glory
that she will never
sing again,
nor even be able
to remember.
Its reality will die out
with the last note,
to remain
forever unknown,
but part of the
universe's
heritage
nonetheless.

"We'll need salt."
Nodding his assent, the
dour assistant added it
scrupulously.
"The soil can't be too
heavy with clay" the first
one said, superfluously,
as No. 2 was already
selecting the dirt
with rigorous care.
"Add the water slowly",
was the next command.
The able partner poured it
artfully.
"The trace ingredients will
be a problem."
"I'm on it," the other
replied, never taking his eyes
off the carefully measured
spoons as he added their
idiosyncrasies.
After all had been done,
they hit the button and
the glutinous mass was
folded and stirred
vigorously.
The first one said, with
unsettling gravity,
"Now, this is tricky.
You've got to pour it in to
the mold juuuust right."
Beads of sweat dotted
the assistant's forehead as
he carried out the delicate
process with infinite
care.
Relieved that the hard part
was over, they slipped the form
into the waiting oven
to let the heat transform it
overnight.
In the morning, the two
returned and carefully
freed the figure from
its temporary encasement.
Once the last of the mold
had fallen to the ground,
No. 2 stood in inexplicable
rapture, unable to
tear his eyes away.
Cursing himself, No. 1
said, "I meant to tell you--
don't fall in love with her."
"Too late," No. 2 said,
as the Tigris and Euphrates
coursed down his face