The Atolls
The atolls spaced on the ocean
Beautifully caught by the eyes in the soft morning light
How wonderfully decorated they are!
Especially the ring-shaped reefs, my love
Hovering all over the earth I enter into my home to rest and make love
The coral reefs bound tight by the ocean
Calls you and me to sleep in touch all through the night
The heart always falls on
I know you never let the time to go in vain
Hanging in love
As the atolls stand on ---- so strong
We must sing all through life with the music of the waves in the moonlit ocean.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
30/07//2022
A Matter of Scale
One side of the stage shows a MAN dressed in whatever clothing will connote poverty to the audience. The other side of the stage has a conference table and plush chairs with FOUR or FIVE PEOPLE in the day's business attire.
A few minutes of pantomime: the shabbily-dressed MAN is obviously begging; he is ignored or pushed aside by passersby, perhaps even arrested. The FOUR or FIVE are conducting negotiations: one will be handed a pen and sign an agreement, after which handshakes all around.
Voice (from dark center stage):
As it was in the beginning,
it is now, and shall ever be:
Panhandle for a few bucks,
you're a bum
Panhandle for a few hundred million,
you're a civic leader
(LIghts go down.)
THE END
The Last Word
Upstage L, a casket with mourners crying. Downstage R, a MAN preparing to speak of the deceased.
MAN: He was a liar, a cheat, a bully,
who made life difficult for those of us
who worked under him;
we were partially consoled by the thought
that most of us would outlive him
For those of us who did, he got us again,
dying in December to deliberately
thwart those of us who were
planning to piss on his grave
(Lights go down.)
THE END
For What It's Worth
A school anywhere in the United States, action to be demonstrated wordlessly as NARRATOR speaks.
NARRATOR (can be onstage or off):
There's something happening here
What it is is quite crystal clear
There's a kid with a gun over there
Who wants to do more than just scare
Once started he won't stop
Children, hear that sound
Everybody knows what's going down
The battle lines have been drawn
And the spree won't take very long
Bullets strike some very deep,
sending them to permanent sleep
Thoughts and prayers, I'm afraid,
won't make this sad day go away
Again and again that sound
Everybody knows what's going down
(Repeat last two lines at least twice)
(Lights go down.)
THE END
The History Game Show (Episode 2)
Setting: Two tables with four chairs each, one on each side of the stage, set at enough of an angle so that each chair is at least partially facing the audience. These two tables will be lit from the start of the play; center stage will be dark.
Cast of Characters:
MAN, whose identity will not be revealed until the end of the play
And tonight's show is
TO TELL THE TRUTH
MAN (speaking from dark center stage):
"It is conducted
for the benefit of the very few
at the expense of the very many",
"a racket . . . possibly the oldest,
easily the most profitable,
surely the most vicious"
"I helped purify Nicaragua
for the international banking house
of Brown Brothers
in 1909-1912
I brought light to the Dominican Republic
for American sugar interests in 1916
In China I helped to see to it
that Standard Oil went its way unmolested"
There are other instances I could give,
but I think these three will suffice
"Looking back on it, I feel
I might have given Al Capone a few hints
The best he could do was to
operate his racket in three city districts
We Marines operated on three CONTINENTS"
"In short,
I was a racketeer,
a gangster for capitalism"
This is the point in the old show where the four panelists would try to guess which of the four contestants was the real person whose achievements had been cited. If you are the one in a million who correctly guessed my identity, give yourself a prize.
(Lights go off the tables, come up on center stage, revealing the MAN
I am Smedley Butler,
once a Major General, USMC
(Lights go down.)
THE END
The History Game Show (Episode 5)
And tonight's show is
WHAT'S MY LINE?
(GUEST walks to the chalkboard, signs the name THOMAS MIDGLEY, and then sits next to the HOST.)
HOST: Are you ready, panel? (murmurs of yes from the panelists.)
PANELIST #1: Are you well-known to the general public?
MIDGLEY: No
PANELIST #2: Were you involved in the arts in any capacity?
MIDGLEY: No
PANELIST #3: Were you involved in what is today called STEM?
MIDGLEY: Yes
PANELIST #3: Were you involved in the Science part of that?
MIDGLEY (after quick consultation with the HOST): No
PANELIST #4: Were you involved with the Math part?
MIDGLEY looks at the HOST, who then answers for him.
Math was involved but not as the primary part,
so the answer has to be No.
PANELIST #1: Well, now I've got a fifty-fifty chance (chuckles from audience)
PANELIST #4: I'm betting he gets it wrong
No takers on that bet?
See the confidence people have in you
PANELIST#1: Were you involved in the Technology part?
MIDGLEY: No
PANELIST #4: I'm betting the next panelist gets it right
Again no takers
PANELIST #2: Were you involved in the Engineering part?
MIDGLEY: Yes
PANELIST #2: Were you involved in the building of bridges or roads?
MIDGLEY: No
PANELIST #3: Were you involved in the building of buildings?
MIDGLEY: No
PANELIST #4: Did you hold any patents?
MIDGLEY: Yes
PANELIST #4: I believe Mr. Midgley
is known as an inventor
HOST: That is correct
Mr. Midgley was known as an inventor
(Lights go down on everyone but the HOST, who continues speaking.)
That was his claim to fame during his lifetime,
and he was much honored by his peers
But during the decades after his death
his two most famous inventions,
leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons,
continued to inflict untold damage
upon planet and people
He has been called
"a one-man environmental disaster"
but even that understates his impact
He can legitimately be called
the most destructive individual
of the twentieth century
(Lights dim.)
THE END
Michael Ceraolo is a 64-year-old retired firefighter/paramedic and active poet who has had two full-length poetry books published (Euclid Creek, from Deep Cleveland Press; 500 Cleveland Haiku, from Writing Knights Press), and has two more full-length books in the publication pipeline.
Where the wilderness is now, a house once was
Look there— where the branches are twisted
Together like arms of a contortionist
You’d think it was the shade of
Two trees instead of one
Until you look closer and follow the roots
Right there— at the towering branches
Was a window and a boy looked out of it.
His life passes now. Time washes over youth.
And it has cut a canyon through his heart
Which deepens year after year.
Soon the water will disappear into the ground
And time will wash his youth away.
Over there— across the prairie you can also count
One, two, perhaps, three trees he used to climb
Walk there—
And you can ask each leaf and blade of grass
On the way home
To tell you his name.
A Love Poem
After John Ashbery
And they were right to have said it.
We just need a little love, and when the little
Things fall as soft, salt, sobs on your lips
Does it taste, how it does, at the start
Of a kiss? (Maybe not the first, but surely the last)
They say, you think each time it happens
Again and again, how it thrills the twist
And turn of your thoughts, how it reflects
In long hmms and self- neurosis. Considering this
And that, slowly probing the what ifs and nots.
There is no escape for me, from it. I think
I mean, the thought of you—
With me is so quite a new dream, is
Itself the night and the body and the
Body in the night, the dreaming of you;
Intimate as a touch which I feel
As it feels me, this is how it works
Just like this, very see-saw like.
Note for the previous tenant
Thank you for the things disowned:
The roll of toilet paper, the bar of soap
The straw-broom and the floor mop.
I tried to scrub the floor clean as a face!
Found it to be undoable,
And realised you had tried, too.
The landlord says you lived here
For years. But nobody had seen your face.
You were like a stranger’s name read from
An envelope. Like those birthdates of people
Carved on park benches and trees, who I know
So little about as do I of my own past.
So, the black hair in the sink
Gives a clue to… what? Were you
A man or woman? The question persists… what?
This handprint on the knob. Whose is it?
Did someone sit outside the door,
Waiting for you to return from work.
Made the bed. Then dreamt next to you.
Only to wake in the night and say—
“But dear, I’m not sleepy at all”
How often did you dance on the floor?
The place was done and broomed. Your life
As it were, a sudden wind that had swept away.
September
The day we discovered love was the
The day it had also been there all along,
Waiting to be noticed in the background we
Recede into so heedlessly. In Delhi, everything
And everyone is moving in the same direction.
Notice, how the streets are overfull with people;
But their eyes are empty like tea cups.
In bookstores, like nascent flowers on wet days
Pages open with the thrill of new beginnings
But in the gardens, we’ve got the butterflies
Going at it; dancing in courtship before
Our eyes like kissing teenagers
In teeming metros, unembarrassed by PDA.
It must be autumn then, when what woos our
Keatsian heart is in the air which consumes us with… what?
What was it again… beauty? To rebreathe life
Into what once was touched and identified here
Before it went to cold sleep under a rock.
Too much with lovers and too little with love—
The world gives us just as much as one does to a beggar.
Here, take it. Now, go away. How much time until
We find our other half is hard to say but, instant as
The camera’s shutter when it imprisons reality
Is how instant we’re going to have to capture the present.
As the canopy of overhanging trees reddens into the eye
Of a setting sun. A new season writes itself in the rain
Reminding us -life is ever wheeling, faster and faster
With the air which stirs our world like memory.
Like the future. Like history.
Seeking the enlightened One
His garment is a reservoir of healing,
His Name is a strong tower,
His shrilled voice of glorious melody is calling,
All heavy laden and burdened and cumbersome,
Come to the fountain he provides.
In him is light and there's no darkness nor blemish,
Seek him all along and stay on the road that leads to his holy city,
No book or wisdom surpasses his,
In him is peace eternal.
Seeking the Enlightened one is as digging below the earth for jewels,
It is finding what the soul craves,
Finding him means humility and love,
Find him, because only he gives grace.
He is the bright morning star,
He sees your tears and hears your cries,
He has no beginning and no ending,
Like an oceans no one knows his beginning and his ending.
Out of his love he formed you before you existed,
Saved you even though it was death he tasted,
He is the mirror of your thoughts,
To reflect what is ugly and wrought.
Guiding your steps to the hilltop of life,
The gracious Lord leads you to glory,
Follow him and will change your story,
I dont see any cause for you to worry!
Seeking the Enlightened one requires your life,
All the waves and strikes,
They will come to accompany you to his presence,
Just as his blood broke the house of death and set you free.
Love and Belonging in John Crowley’s Brooklyn
By Jaylan Salah
Home is where the heart lies.
Does this saying have any truth to it?
“You’re homesick, that’s all. Everybody gets it. But it passes. In some, it passes more quickly than in others. There’s nothing harder than it. And the rule is to have someone to talk to and to keep busy.”
- Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín (novel)
“Homesickness is like most sicknesses; it’ll make you feel wretched and then move on to somebody else”.
- Brooklyn, Nick Hornby (script)
Isn’t cinema just powerful? I watched “Brooklyn” directed by John Crowley before reading the novel written by Colm Tóibín. The novel fleshed out what it feels like to be Eilis, an immigrant Irish girl in 1950s America, but the film masterfully captured how it feels to be Eilis without giving it all away.
Proof? Compare the two quotations above. They belong to the same character, Father Flood, as he speaks to Eilis when homesickness is gnawing at her fragile frame, haunting her days and leaving her a tearful mess.
In the film, the power of his single sentence stems from the lack of resolution or relief. Unlike in the novel, he doesn’t give sound advice. He just tells her she is in bad shape, yet it will pass. He doesn’t give her any clue as to how or when.
Contrary to common belief, “Brooklyn” is no sweet, sappy romance. It is not an ode to the power of love and how it conquers in the end. “Brooklyn” is one scary film, a meditation on the idea of home, love, death, and moving on.
It would be relatively easy to throw Eilis’ final choice on the beautiful reminiscence that love wins. But it’s not. “Brooklyn” is a film that paves to the power of individuality. Like most viewers, I got into it waiting for something bittersweet to fondle my nerves and leave me a puddle of goo by the end credits. I never thought that I would cry for reasons very foreign to what I previously had in mind.
Dare I say “Brooklyn” is an existential movie? In my book, it is. Before anybody attacks, let me explain why.
According to American director and actor Cameron McHarg, this existential movie deals with man’s search for meaning in an absurd world. It highlights a personal struggle in a meaningless world that doesn’t provide answers or even steps to follow. The viewer is on their own, literally and metaphorically, but expected to reach some sort of explanation by the end.
All of the films that I’ve come across labeled as “existential” starred existentialist male leads. Not a single one had a woman in the center. Enter Brooklyn, where it’s all about the female protagonist Eilis and her sense of identity, struggles, and attempts to find the self in two seemingly different worlds. Eilis leaves her hometown in search of a better opportunity. She gets it, not in the form of a job as an accountant but in the form of a young, handsome Italian chap who sweeps her off her feet and presents a sense of the very elusive thing she has been searching for: home.
In a film that plays on themes of home and love, Brooklyn deconstructs them as it builds up to them. One moment Eilis falls in love with Tony and believes she has found her home. Viewers think that Brooklyn is where her heart lies. A family tragedy forces her to go back to Enniscorthy, Ireland, and puts viewers in the shoes of the doubtful Eilis as she is lured back into her old life but with a different scheme. This time she is treated like a conqueror back from America, not the modest, simple girl constantly abandoned on the dance floor. Whereas Tony’s love for Eilis seems solid, her love for him is uncertain, driven by her insecurity and loneliness.
In the end, viewers ponder that had things taken a different direction, would Eilis have gone back to Brooklyn? Which does she consider home? Is there such a thing as home in the first place? What about love? The position of women in a time when they didn’t have a lot; either happily married, depressed, or unmarried didn’t leave much for the imagination. How would that woman find love in her own free will when singlehood would mean sharing a toilet with another miserable divorcée who dreamed of a husband to have a toilet of her own?
The film asks questions yet never gives us answers. What is home? Is it an actual place where a person belongs? Would we consider a place a “home” because of the people who live there, or is it just that it carries certain sacredness beyond our earthly perception?
The power of Brooklyn is in its ability to deconstruct every principle that it slowly builds for in the first half of the film. It reflects on free will and how far we as humans would go to seek shelter in the most ordinary of places, among ordinary people. Eilis’ transition was palpable and honest, yet it was also confusing and shaky. That’s what made her a great character. The strength in “Brooklyn” comes from the uncertainty and the absurdity by which Nick Hornby’s script, John Crowley’s directing, Yves Bélanger’s cinematography, and Saoirse Ronan’s acting handled the material.
This young woman’s existential crisis resolves but doesn’t leave viewers with a sweet ending. It gets them to think, “Really? Did she do that because she loved him?” and also, “Is this really what she considers home?” “Is that where her heart lies?”
My Parents’ Promises for Me This Christmas
It's seven days to Christmas
I’m so excited about it!
I will be on holiday;
free from school activities and other disturbing tasks in class
I will have the opportunity to remind my parents their promises for me;
the amusement park, the holiday resorts around and outside town
and lots more!
I will play with my friends
I will put on my favorite Cloth of Many Colors dress
I will help mom and dad decorate our house,
provided they give me what they promised, seven days before.
Title: Creativity: Where Poems Begin
Author: Mary Mackey
Publisher: Marsh Hawk Press
Genre: Literary Creation: Poetry
Pages: 110
ISBN: 9781732614123 (paperback)
Price: $18.00
Publication Date: September 2022
Review of Creativity, by Mary Mackey
By James Tipton
Where is creativity before it becomes the created thing? Mary Mackey’s new book, Creativity, explores the range of creativity itself: its subtle, pre-language source, experiences and people that helped inspire or discover it, and the poet’s journey from the depths beyond thought to the forming of a concrete, original image. People may think of art as its finished product—as, say, a beautiful sculpture. But what they don’t see are the chips of marble on the artist’s floor: Mackey shows us all the scattered chips and their usefulness for her.
She defines in her introduction the process of creativity as: “…the movement of an adult mind back to the radical innocence and vision of the very young child who sees, not only the reality we all share, but all those unnamed, unclassified parts of reality we learn to overlook as we grow older. “
Mackey consistently returns to the notion that the source of creativity is beyond categories. One has to go beyond the boundaries of the rational mind to find creativity waiting, like a jaguar beyond the flicker of firelight. She starts us with her visions and sensations as a child who can be “conscious and unconscious at the same time…float in infinity.” That child lives in the pre-verbal source of creativity. Adults talk her ”into reality” but at the price of abandoning “all that exists outside its walls.” She enters “the world of time, the world of words.”
Creativity takes us on her journey from the source of creativity to its manifestation as poems and her first novel, and back to the source, which she must rediscover after the rational mind has chased it out of her.
As a child in school, math, with its abstractions, makes her mind ”blank out.” But geometry, dealing with “solid, palpable things: shapes, forms, positions and angles” is a different thing. It’s a process of seeing the world in a specific, minute manner, which leads her to poetry. It’s all about the looking, noticing what’s there, the microcosms that surround us, as in her childhood perspective:
“…the world outside my window is on fire with autumn, and the leaves are blowing like sparks, torn off the trees by a wind that lifts them up and thrusts them toward the earth in wave after wave so the air seems filled with falling embers.”
Her art of noticing continues: “I study one leaf closely, following its flight. I study another leaf immediately next to it.” This close observation leads to a unity of subject and object, of seer and seen: “I feel a thrill of recognition, as if this room has joined the whirling world outside the window. As if both are for a single moment the same.” One could see this as another interpretation of Keats’s ”negative capability,” in which the subject is negated and becomes the object, but it’s more than that. It’s about a fundamental interconnection, the discovery of which emerges as poetry: “I want to sing the words in my head, the words that will go outside and merge with the leaves, and then return to me so I can put them down on paper.”
The structure of Mackey’s book itself is one of integration of rational language and vivid, intuitive imagery: she starts and ends each chapter with a poem that conveys in verse the essence of the chapter. The poems are carefully chosen as microcosms that bring the chapter to the reader on another, more subtle level.
Mackey traces in each chapter a source of inspiration for her, whether pleasant or unpleasant, such as the ecstatic visions of the high fevers, the wildness of the jungle, and the challenges of being a feminist in a non-feminist world. Each of these experiences is boundary-breaking, taking her beyond what she perceived before as the world. And going beyond boundaries takes us to the major journey of the narrator: to discover and rediscover the pre-language source of the poem itself. The book’s narration brings us her story in the present tense: it all unfolds now for her in reflection and for the reader in a style of presentational immediacy.
One experience separates her from the source of creativity, and that is, ironically, the path of the scholar. The Harvard senior thesis, the doctoral dissertation, the articles on literary criticism: even though they take her deeply into her field they take her out of the pre-verbal range of poetry: “my rational mind seems to have taken over at the expense of instinct, intuition, and ambiguity.” Since the act of creativity, and not logical, analytical, scholarly thinking is the deeper truth of her being, this lack of being able to write poetry brings her a sense of “disconnection, a dull ache, a background grief.” She asserts early in the book that “poetry continues after logic ends.” That is why she felt drawn to the worlds of the high fevers, why she loves the jungle: “In the jungle I will fall in love with wildness, and this love for wild things will make me into a poet.” The jungle frees her from the restrictive and relentless logic of the scholar.
So the last third of the book takes us to her rediscovery of the poetic source within her. And to do this she must abandon also the voices of other writers as well as her own scholarly voice. In the dark night of the soul, which, for her, was the dead-ends of her life throughout 1971, she “wrote and wrote, and the words flowed so easily it seemed as if they were being dictated by a voice apart from me, a voice somewhere deep in my brain that finally knew what poetry was.”
The last twenty pages of this little, but powerful book, bring us to the realization of jaguars. Mackey reflects: Jaguars are the keys that unlock the dream work for the shamans…or maybe it’s not a messenger I need, but some sort of technique that will lead me into those parts of my brain that have been inaccessible since I learned to speak. She eventually succeeds in this endeavor to be both “at a desk in a room in Berkeley, California, and…plunging ever deeper into a great ocean—boundless, infinite, and indescribable.”
Mackey simplifies and clarifies the source of poetry: it doesn’t involve the self-destruction of Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses, but a heightened awareness of the senses and of the intuition. Near the end of the book she takes us to the inception of a poem that comes not from suffering or from chaos but from the silent, wordless depths of the mind:
"After a while, ideas and images come bubbling up from the depths. A poem begins to form in my mind, not a complete poem, not a polished poem, but the seed of something. The poem does not come in words."
Read the book to find out more about where poems come from. Mackey’s style is immensely lucid, readable, and engaging. It is a trick to make the complex clear and the abstract concrete, but she does it. This book will be enlightening not just to anyone interested in the creative process, but also to creative writing students at all levels, discovering in themselves their own pre-language source.
-- James Tipton, PhD, Professor of English, College of Marin, and bestselling author of Annette Vallon, A Novel of the French Revolution (HarperCollins).
You can buy copies of Creativity at your local bookstore, on Amazon, or online from Small Press Distribution.
