Broom Bridge

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BROOM BRIDGE TOTEM

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BROOM BRIDGE TOTEM

The Linnet´s Wings 5

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Heart Moon There’s a new world rising from the deep blue, In thoughts advising both me and you, In hearts connecting, to beat in tune, Painting the song played under the moon.

There’s a heart moon falling, it’s coloured blue, Falling from a star: On a rope-of-dew, There’s a heart moon falling: It’s green and blue, It’s falling true. True hearts connecting;

True hearts directing, respecting, respecting.

The colour of communion and conversation.

There’s a new world rising from the deep blue.

There’s a wild moon falling for me and you.

In hearts so true for me and you, For me and you in hearts so true.

MLF, 2016

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Moonlight Classics Adlestrop Yes, I remember Adlestrop – The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up there Unwontedly. It was late June.

A Summer’s Night The night is dewy as a maiden’s mouth, The skies are bright as are a maiden’s eyes, Soft as a maiden’s breath the wind that flies Up from the perfumed bosom of the South.

Like sentinels, the pines stand in the park; And hither hastening, like rakes that roam, With lamps to light their wayward footsteps home, The fireflies come stagg’ring down the dark.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came On the bare platform. What I saw Was Adlestrop – only the name And willows, willow-herb, and grass, And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, No whit less still and lonely fair Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

To The Moon

And for that minute a blackbird sang Close by, and round him, mistier, Farther and farther, all the birds Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

And, like a dying lady lean and pale, Who totters forth, wrapp’d in a gauzy veil, Out of her chamber, led by the insane And feeble wanderings of her fading brain, The moon arose up in the murky east, A white and shapeless mass.

Edward Thomas (1878-1917*)

Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth, And ever changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object worth its constancy?

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

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For Peter Richard Gilkes (Oct 1st, 1950--5th May, 2019)

There will be an evermore selection of sunrises and sunsets

Nos reuniremos de nuevo (We’ll meet again)

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Other Publication "The Song of Hiawatha" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ISBN 1 3: 978-1 4801 76423- https://www.amazon.com/dp/1480176427 "The House that Jack Built" ISBN-1 3: 978-1 483977669 Chapbooks "One Day Tells Its Tale to Another" by Nonnie Augustine ISBN-1 3: 978-1 4801 86354 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1482730995 "About the Weather-- Spring Trending" by Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick ISBN-1 3: 9780993049330 "Disabled Monsters" by John C. Mannone ISBN-1 3:978-1 522869504 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0993049389 "Three Pounds of Cells" by Oonah V Joslin ISBN-1 3: 978-0993049378 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0993049370 Poetry and Photography "This Crazy Urge to Live" by Bobby Steve Baker ISBN-1 3: 978-099304909 Short Story Collections "The Guy Thing" by Bruce Harris ISBN-1 3: 978-1 98111 6409 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1981116400 Poetry Series Contributors´ Quarterly Spring Poetry, 201 5 ISBN-1 3: 978-1 51 2051 225 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1512051225 Spring Poetry, "Ghosts," 201 6 ISBN-1 3: 978-1 51 7567637 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1517567637 Autumn Poets, 201 5, ISBN-1 3: 978-1 51 91 57827 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1519157827 Autumn Poets,"There´s Magic in the Pictures" 201 6 ISBN-1 3: 978-1 537361 659 https://www.amazon.es/dp/1537361651 Summer Poets, 201 5 ISBN-1 3: 978-1 51 4761 71 7 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1514761718 Summer Poets, Just Like "Peer Gynt" ISBN-1 3: 978-1 53286511 4 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1 533245886 Christmas Series The Linnet´s Wings: "A Christmas Canzonet" ISBN-1 3: 978-1 51 9581 686 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1519581688 The Linnet´s Wings: "A Christmas Canzonet" ISBN-1 3: 978-1 540454935 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1540454932 A Christmas Canzonet: "Dreamers" ISBN-1 3: 978-1 977809070 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1 977809073 Poem on the Wind: Art and Poetry Series "Purple Kisses" by Priya Prithviraj ISBN-1 3: 978-1 978203266

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All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

For permission requests, mail the publisher at: thelinnetswings@gmail.com ISBN: 9781080914661 July 2019 First Edition 07/2019 frontispiece: Heart Moon MLF, 2016 Book and Cover Design: MLF, 2019 Broom Bridge Here as he walked by on the 16th of October 1843 Sir William Rowan Hamilton in a flash of genius discovered the fundamental formula for quaternion multiplication i² = j² = k² = ijk = −1 and cut it on a stone of this bridge.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Frontispiece, Heart Moon by Marie Fitzpatrick 7 Masters on Form: Moonlight Classics Pau Laurence Dunbar , Percy Bysshe Shelley , Edward Thomas 8 Dedication 11

Part 1 Land under Wave

Art: La Siesta by Gustave Caillebott 20 Hina, Moon Goddess & TeFatu, by Paul Gauguin, 22 Lost Sugar by Maggie Shearon, 23 Galileo and the Moon Goddesses by Stephen Zelnick 26 Phtotgraph: Title: Delta Orinoco, Wiki Creative Commons, 38 Cambalache by William Hamilton 38 Art: Cloud Study by Esme Kyle 50 The Song Maker by Sara Teasdale, 50 Copy of Letter from Emerson to Whitman 51 The Buried Moon, A Fairy Tale 53 Out Of The Cradle Endlessly Rocking by Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass Extract 61 David Garrick, short bio 62

Part 2 Wood of Wonders Art: Wood Woman, Watercolour on Card MLF 64 Until Moonlight by Oonah V Joslin 67 Moonwalking by Oonah V Joslin 68 Neil Armstrong by Oonah V Joslin 69 ART: Whirlwind by Filipp Malyavin 70 Worries by Oonah V Joslin 71 Phases by Sam Hartburn 72 Mare in the Moon by Carol L Deering 73 ART: Gardener’s Gloves and Shear by Marsden Hartley 74 How is it going, Mother Earth? by Irena Pasvinter 75 Mother Moon by Lesley Timms 77 Lunar Eclipse by Ann Thornfield-Long 78 Spin me up Grandpa by Bill West 79 ART:Jellyfish by Childe Hassam 80 Moon Jellies by J. S. Fuller 81 How the Moon was made by James Graham 82 ART: Error on Green by Paul Klee 83 Look at me by James Graham 83 ART: Moon Path by Ivan Aivazovsky 84 Somewhere Under a Waxing Moon by John C. Mannone 85 Photography: Supermoon in Partial Eclipse by John C. Mannone 86 First Humans on the Moon by John C. Mannone 86 Gethsemane by John C. Mannone 87 ART: Jealously:The Green Room Series by Edvard Munch 88

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What in Hell is Green Cheese Anyway? by Mathew Paust 89 Night Light by Kathleen Cassen Mickelson 90 ART: The Lover by Paul Klee 91 Urge by Shikhandin 92 ART: Nuns and schoolgirls standing in church by Gwen John 93 ART: Dreamy by Kandinsky 94 Full Moon by Shikhandin 94 ART: Ridiculous dream by Francisco Goya 95 PS: Man in Moon by Marie Fitzpatrick 96 A Blasphemy in the Dark by Alisa Velaj 97 ART: Woman at Seaside, by Marie Fitzpatrick 98 Desirous by Susan Tepper 99 ART: Pustka - Stare gniazdo by Ferdynand Ruszczyc 100 Dear Moon by LaVern Spencer McCarthy 101 ART: Moonlight by Edvard Munch 102# Dust by Bill West 103 ART: In Moonlit Shade PS, MLF 104 Moonlight Shade by Marie Fitzpatrick 105

CNF A Half Century Come and Gone Tom Sheehan 106

Editors for the Issue Managing Editor Marie Fitzpatrick Senior Editor Bill West Poetry Editor Oonah Joslin Offices Online: The Linnet´s Wings Submission Office Publishing and Design, Corkaree, Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, Rep of Ireland.

Print Layout: MLF, 2019

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Time is a Crooked Thing We have to break the mirror to be ourselves. –May Sarton

Though silver and exact, the mirror has no memory.

No stop or start or rewind. Each day an exercise in remembering who I am. Unremarkable, ordinary, day unravels into day – brief bliss or grief to cling, to sift through, to find myself again. Lines deepen, shadows darken, and we must lean closer, ever closer to see.

Photos flaunt the proof. Had I shattered that mirror when it first exposed the truth, I could have hoarded the image of youth, the one my brain still imagines, though my body begins its betrayal.

Squatting for the dropped sock, stooping to tie the shoe, the petty aches and pains when cold weather comes, when dawn silvers the sky with dew – oh, oh, I should have known when the wren stopped singing the day was done.

KB Ballentine

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Art: La Siesta by Gustave Caillebotte, 1877

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Part One Land Under Wave

LW 2009 Archive: Lost Sugar by Maggie Shearon 23 Classic The Songmaker by Sara Teasdale 50 Letter from Emerson to Whitman 51 The Buried Moon, A Fairytale 53

Gailileo and the Moon Godesses by Stephen Zelnick 26 Cambalache by William Hamilton 38 David Garrick 62

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Hina, Moon Goddess & Te Fatu, Earth Spirit Paul Gauguin/1893

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Lost Sugar

by Maggie Shearon My mother had a spice cupboard. But it wasn’t ordinary. I hear you breathing, asleep, steady, deep not listening so I will tell you this story and know that you won’t remember it, so sometime I can tell you the same story when you are awake, and maybe the story will be the same but maybe it will be better by then. You are breathing, slow, deep, Even in this faint light from the street I can see your eyes move under their lids. No. I can’t see that. Already I am making up what doesn’t belong.

But you are breathing yes. I hear it and feel my hand light on your chest, feeling the slow, strong beat of your heart. Sometimes at night when you are here, I stay awake almost on purpose to hear you breathe. It’s an ordinary sound, but have you even heard someone breathing and then heard the moment when the breathing stops? I have, and the quiet of it is like a freight train rushing through a tunnel, sucking in all the infinite future last breathing of us all. So I stay awake sometimes as long as I can to hear you breathe.

And if I was sitting on a bus and the old lady next to me dozed off I would listen to her breathe too. I would try to will the next breath as if I could somehow will it, call one more breath, me not wanting to be sitting there when the last breath fell. Worse with my children. They climb into my big bed and snuggle up close to me and then I can’t sleep. I listen to their breath, their stuffy noses restless dreams, Sometimes I count the breathing and fight my own sleep to not miss even one breath then or yours now. And it’s not that you are so special now to me but the breathing in and out is a kind of destiny of forgiveness.

My mother had a spice cupboard but not an ordinary one. It was the bottom cupboard, one of those ugly built in metal kitchen units. Dirty yellow, scraps of black showing through, tiny dents from where a chair or a pan came crashing down. A cupboard like the other ones in the tiny kitchen, its handle finger smudged stainless steel and the door fitting not quiet right against the frame.

My sisters and I knew what was in that cupboard and we wanted some of it.

Chocolate jimmies and rainbow sprinkles. Cinnamon heart and chocolate chips. Coloured sugar and silver balls. Cinnamon and Coconut. Vanilla extract and creme de menthe. All the things we had seen there once now forever gone into the cupboard that we weren’t allowed to open anymore. No one could.

We could have pulled the handle and jiggled the door a little and the squeaky hinges would

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have turned but we didn’t open that door because she said we couldn’t. Poison there. Open the cupboard and look inside and we would die. Right There. Immediately on the kitchen floor. If we looked inside she would die all at once and we would watch her die and then die next to her, crying ourselves to death. That’s what she would tell us and that’s what we believed, and the cupboard shut tight for years of Christmas cookies lost to the closed cupboard of ingredients too dangerous to even contemplate for long.

She was in the living room. I watched for the breathing in and out and in the again that never came. I watched until the wintry morning light grew stronger through the pale green drapes and I waited for her breathing to begin again. But there was no rise and fall so I ran into the kitchen and looked at the cupboard. Door still shut, dust on the handle, old evidence still of vanilla spilled, the sticky seal unbroken.

My sisters awake now too and we stood on cold white feet, staring at the cupboard until my sister Lizzie, the oldest, the bravest, pulled open the door. She reached her hand in and we held our breath to see what would happen and nothing did. We didn’t die but our mother was already dead there still in that house.

Lizzie pulled out the cinnamon hearts and toll house chips, the chocolate jimmies and colored sugar, the little silver balls and colored almond candies, Next came ancient chocolate Easter bunnies, chocolate turning gray along the ears, and we carried it all to the kitchen table and waited in the quiet of the sleeping dead.

We ate it all, each small sweet with out small hands, licking out fingers, palms turning green and red and yellow and blue and we listened to our breathing in and out and in again waiting for what comes next after the cupboard door is opened, We finished our new breakfast of lost sugar and we watched ourselves still breathing in and out and in out not stopping with the breathing and the cupboard door ajar.

We heard him on the stairs. He always wore his slippers in the morning. I could hear them slapping against the soles of his feet on the stairs. Funny what you hear when you listen for the sound.

Bridgie licked some sprinkles from her fingers and Lizzie reached over and pulled some pink frosting from my hair. We knew he must have seen our mother in the living room and how he must be standing there, listening to the living room, listening to no breathing of in or out while we listened for the sound of trains coming through the living room.

In two long steps and he found us. I couldn’t hear him breathing, but I knew he must have been with that quiet kind of breathing some people have when they are standing up and holding years of breathing, storing up oxygen for when they really need it.

He looked at us then, in our sugar coating, and told us we would be late for school if we didn’t hurry up so we left th remains of our first empty cupboard morning and we went back up the stairs and dressed in the ordinariness of school uniforms and ugly shoes.

We left the house without our lunches and stood in the schoolyard with the other children. I jumped double Dutch and thought about my mother and whether she would still be waiting for us later, in the living room. I hoped not.

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Back inside the Mother Superior announced my name, and Lizzie’s name and Bridgie’s name on the loud speaker. I knew what she wanted. I didn’t want to describe my mother in the pale green drapes hanging in the living room.

I ran up the stairs and into Mother Superior’s office. My Grandmother was there, sitting on the detention bench, clutching her purse. Lizzie and Bridgie were already there.

We walked with Grandmam along Coffman Avenue to the Little Miss shop.

Grandmam spoke to the lady in the hoarse whisper and she rushed behind a flowered curtain to find our new clothes. When she came back she carried three black dresses in the right sizes. Short sleeved, but it was almost winter so we would have to wear our fuzzy sweaters.

We walked home alone along the avenue looking in store windows, walking home to what would be left of the breathing in and breathing out in that pale green drapery light. ue my mouth.

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Previously published in The Linnet’s Wings Autumn 2009

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Galileo and the Moon Goddesses

by Stephen Zelnick

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[Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642) Italian astronomer, physicist, engineer and discoverer of worlds]

oyager 1, launched in 1977, has by now left the solar system to enter interstellar space. And having done so, Voyager 1 has become the first man-made object to soar out into the galaxy. Traveling for more than thirtyfive years at 17,000 MPH, when Voyager 1 left, it had traveled more than 123.5 AU’s (astronomical Unit), each of which measures 93 million miles, the distance of the earth from the sun. In 1979, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spent time studying Jupiter and its numerous moons (67 in all), and especially Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa, three of which are larger than our moon, and one larger than the planet Mercury. These are the moons discovered by Galileo in 1609.The Voyagers witnessed nine volcanic eruptions on Io, and tides of heated materials on Europa, under its icy surface. Voyager 2 came within 350,000 miles of Jupiter’s cloud tops, and both crafts sent back massive numbers of pictures and a trove of data.

Yet none of it shook our cosmic understandings. We have known for centuries that other planets have moons and that these planets, like our own, orbit the sun. We know that our solar system sits off to the side within a galaxy 100,000 light years in diameter and containing between 200 and 400 billion planets. At the center of our galaxy (in Greek “Milky”, as in “lactose”), there may be a black hole, just as we imagine in space adventures. Astounding, but it has nothing like

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the impact and caused nothing like the stir of Galileo’s reports early in the 17th century.

The usual Galileo story flatters our ignorance. A pure man of science stands boldly against persecution at the hands of a benighted Catholic Church. Humiliated in his own time, his truths are vindicated by the triumph of scientific fact over superstition and hypocrisy. The Age of Science, our own, claims its victory, as do we. How silly our ancestors to believe the earth to be the center of the universe, with the sun and all its planets orbiting us! Yet I doubt many of us could prove what we claim to be true or explain away the preposterous facts that would follow from such an assertion.

I Appreciating the impact of Galileo’s work requires background. The ancients, even while accomplishing remarkable feats of measurement, looked upon the heavens in theological and poetic terms. The earth appeared to stand still and to be at the center of the universe – it still does. The notion that the earth rotates on its axis towards the sun, and thus the sun merely seems to rise at the eastern and then fall to the western horizon defies common experience.

The speed at with the earth would have to be moving in order to be rotating on its axis at one full revolution each day exceeds 1,000 MPH at the equator -- the earth is approximately 25,000 miles around at the equator and a full rotation is accomplished each 24 hours – do the math. How could an outfielder catch a high fly ball while traveling at more than 1,000 MPH as he tried to position himself for the catch?

But the numbers are worse when we measure the speed the earth travels to orbit the sun once a year. The sun is 93 million miles from earth, and that line would be the radius of an immense circle (in fact, an oval) the circumference of which we travel each year. We would be speeding through the heavens at close to 67,000 MPH to complete this annual journey. Perhaps that’s why humankind has always been dizzy and confused.

Although we suppose the earth rotates on its axis and speeds around the sun, imagine the problem Galileo faced in 1609 in explaining what he was seeing. The model he was challenging no longer worked, but what he was proposing was preposterous.

2 Aside from astronomers, ancient peoples, at least as mentally alert as we are, were not much interested in numbers. They preferred stories, as most of us still do. Feeling their way around in nature’s vast darkness, it was easier to find correspondences to help make it seem like home. The heavens are unintelligible until we see our own story displayed on the big screen

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shimmering above us. How comforting to realize that story is our story? The moon moves through its cycle -- an orbital revolution around the earth in 27.32 days, and it displays a complete cycle of ‘phases’ in about 29.53 days, which is approximately a month. That cycle has its splendid regularity, as does the menstrual (or monthly) cycle of most women. To measure a year, compile twelve lunar cycles (twelve is so mathematically pleasant), (12 X 29.5 = 354 days … how disappointing!). When you plan your planting, you soon find how far off the lunar year is from the seasons. Without adding a thirteenth month every few years, soon you would be planting in the Fall and harvesting in Spring --- truth is, it’s a mess.

But the moon is about fertility, and we worship it and make up lovely stories.

Two generations ago we still would spoon, in June, by the light of the silvery moon. In the ancient world, moon goddesses abound, and in every culture. The stories of change and cycles are particularly amenable to moonshine. From a shadowy disk, the moon becomes a sharp crescent, growing pregnant with brilliant light, only to wane and wither, as do we. Although its distance (239,000 miles) varies little, the moon also seems sometimes close and immense and at others distant and aloof because of the earth’s changing atmosphere. Even without magnification we can see the face of an elderly man, a tilted rabbit, a god or two and make out what appear to be seas amidst the blotches and dents.

Astronomers and shepherds have had millennia to make up stories and see what their heart suggested.

[Celtic moon goddess, Cerridwen, chases her consort Gwion, while both change into various animals and plants. Cerridwen tosses her infant son Taliesen into the sea, where a Celtic prince, Elffin, rescues him. Cerridwen controls change, rebirth, and transformation … Wiccan Pagan statue.]

The moon seems feminine not only for monthly phases but also for her shifting emotion. Moon goddesses – Hecate, Juno, Artemis, and Selene (Greco-Roman), Isis (Egyptian), Cerridwen (Celtic) – share powers and stories.

They have their phases – virgin, mother, crone – and each phase changeable: Crone as good witch – wise and helpful – but at times vengeful and destructive; the virgin Artemis takes deadly revenge upon poor Acteon who glimpses her naked. And Hecate and Isis guard the borders between this world and several others, with powers to recall the dead, or in the case of Selene, produce new lives by invading the dreams of unconscious mortals (Endymion).

Changeful, uncertain, blessed and dangerous – moon goddesses are dim-lit sources of powers beyond our reckoning.

[Hecate, powerful Greco-Roman goddess, guards the thin

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boundary between our commonplace reality and the shadowy realms before and after our life. She is a triple goddess, maid-mother-crone]

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Early conceptions of the heavens proceeded without benefit of telescopes and timely communications between points of observation. Religious thought moved easily from Heaven to the heavens and populated the night skies with divinities. In the trial of Socrates one charge associated him with Anaxagoras, who denied the stars were gods and nothing more than shining rocks. However, even those realists proceeded with another, less poetical kind of idealism. Lacking direct observation, early astronomers employed mathematics and geometry to describe the universe. Pythagoreans, as every veteran of high school geometry knows, were particularly inventive. Once they discovered the regularity of the right triangle and the constant value of π, they were licensed to imagine that the earth was a dodecahedron with twelve five-sided panels (think a soccer ball). Why twelve? Twelve can be derived from all numbers up to six (1x12; 2x6; 3x4), while the missing integer, five, describes the pentagonal shape of each of the twelve panels. Since the universe is the product of the gods, its ordering would be mathematically perfect. Following this same faith in perfect order, the ancients found it easy to imagine each of the planets, plus the moon and sun, as resting upon the circumference of perfect spheres and following regular but independent journeys across the night sky.

[Raphael (1483 – 1520) “School of Athens” depicted Plato and Aristotle as the twin sources of all philosophy and science. Galileo’s observations dismantled their authority.]

Aristotle assumed another regularity. The heavens, being heavenly, must be perfect, and must never need or want change. We, however, experience change and stupefying imperfection. The solution is brilliant. From the level of the Moon out into the empyrean, nothing changes. Nothing decays and dies, since all is perfect. However, below the moon, in our sublunary region -- of earth, water, air, and fire -- everything changes. And at the center sits the earth, the sinkhole of death and confusion. The fixed stars resemble gods in their perfection. The wandering stars (planets) are also perfect in their motions, regular and beyond change. The moon itself follows fixed habits and motions. On earth, alas, everything is badly mixed and perishes.

[This model by Ptolemy – Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer – dominated Byzantium, Arabia, and Europe for

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1,500 years. Galileo and contemporaries dismantled the geo-centric universe, its crystalline spheres, with perfect movement of perfect celestial objects.]

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Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria (100 AD – 170 AD) described a geo-centric universe in which sun, moon and visible planets orbited earth in perfect, concentric circles. From the beginning, the theoretical picture collided with observations. The plan was beautiful; the facts kept wandering astray. Not only did heavenly bodies have to move in perfect circles, but they adhered to crystalline spheres, each of which had its own direction and speed – a fact necessary to account for the strange motion of these bodies (the word “planet” means wanderer). These spheres had to be transparent so we could see through them to the celestial bodies attached to outer spheres. The concept is elegant, simple, and wrong.

[To make the Ptolemy’s geo-centric system work, astronomers imagined spheres orbiting a dislocated focal point and planets looping crazily in epicycles along the edge of perfect spheres.]

[The result was less than elegant, especially if you were navigating strange seas.]

Even for those who simply watched the night sky, Ptolemy’s model yielded confusing results. Since earth, as an inner planet in the solar system (along with Mercury and Venus), moves in a tighter and more rapid orbit around the sun, the outer planets seem to move sometimes out ahead, then slowing to a stop, and then moving backwards. For the next millennium and a half, astronomers exercised great ingenuity to account for discrepancies.

To maintain the model of perfect spheres orbiting the earth required two corrections: in the first, the focal points of the orbits of the outer spheres had to be placed away from the earth, these orbits termed “eccentric”; and second, the heavenly bodies had to be thought to be obeying small corrective orbits along with the general orbit around the earth in order to account for their apparent speeding up, stopping, and slowing down; these “epicycles” were constantly recalculated. These adjustments were good enough when measurements

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were merely academic; however, when Europe ventured far and seamen required precise information, these frantic corrections exposed the dysfunction of the Ptolemaic model.

5 In the sixteenth century, Copernicus (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies, 1543) proposed a heliocentric alternative. Copernicus was secretive, both because his model violated tradition and Church doctrine but also because, while resolving some problems, it introduced new ones. Decades later, two celestial events convinced Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe the crystalline spheres did not exist. In 1572 a supernova and in 1577 a brilliant comet streaked across the night sky in a path that would have shattered the spheres. Brahe proposed a mixed system in which the sun and moon orbit the earth while the remaining planets orbit the sun. In Brahe’s model, the earth remained at the center of its own system, while introducing a helio-centric alternative.

[Tycho Brahe, Danish astronomer (1546-1601) proposed a mixed design, largely heliocentric but with a geo-centric addition. Galileo had a better idea.]

Galileo’s “The Starry Messenger” (1609) appears during these controversies. Galileo brings to these debates something new, the direct observation of the heavens with a powerful telescope. Among the immediate results was seeing stars no one had seen before.

Training his telescope at the constellation Orion, Galileo saw eighty additional stars among the nine previously noted; in the constellation “The Pleiades,” Galileo saw forty additional stars never observed. For millennia, star-gazers had formed imaginary figures out of the few stars they could see; Galileo was the first to see celestial things as they are.

One dispute he resolved was the composition of the Milky Way. What was this glowing streak across the night sky – a thickening of the ether? Reflected light? – Galileo could observe the multitude of stars, the rays of which conjoin to form this illusion of celestial clouds.

[Galileo’s notebook indicates the 6 stars that had formed the Pleiades Constellation, and then adds the stars we have never seen, now visible with the telescope he constructed]

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Galileo’s “Starry Messenger” shows us our solar system, but also how a first-rate scientist practices his art. Galileo exercised precise care, he used mathematics when possible, he kept careful notes. However, his genius was in navigating between what he observed and what the prevailing model demanded he ought to be seeing. Although most scientific energy is expended painstakingly on the slow gathering of information, discoveries disrupt our paradigms and shift our perspectives.

Galileo’s excitement is evident in “The Starry Messenger,” but by far the most interesting portions describe his imaginative thinking and bold insistence on what his newly empowered eyes can see. From 230,000 miles away he sees the moon, far from perfect, made up of valleys and mountains like the earth. This discovery of the rough lunar surface demolishes the ancient notion of the perfection of the lunar sphere and all objects beyond. After Galileo’s observations, the moon is, as Anaxagoras had proposed in ancient Athens, just another rock in the sky.

[Galileo’s accomplishments depended upon a telescope capable of magnification and clarity. He became an expert lens-grinder, improving the device constructed by Hans Lipperhey (1570 -1619)]

7 Far from a perfect sphere, Galileo’s moon has mountains and valleys, revealed by the play of sunlight across its surface. High peaks catch the “morning” rays and valleys fill with light as the sun’s radiance sweeps the surface. The moon obeys the same physical laws as earth. While the moon does not revolve on an axis towards the sun’s light and then, at end of “day” away from it, the moon does shift its aspect towards the sun as it rides along, hanging above the earth. Galileo can note and measure the moon’s irregularities by observing the play of light at the dividing line between its bright and dark areas.

[Among Galileo’s other talents, he produced excellent drawings to support his arguments.

These images from his notebooks display his skill.]

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The moon’s dividing line, marking the border between the illuminated and its shadowed hemispheres, shows sharp irregularities. At some locations, bright areas appear in the dark sector, well over the line, while dark markings show up in bright areas. Galileo imagines sunlight caught by high peaks in the dark area, as would be the case on earth in early morning. Similarly, the dark markings appearing in illuminated sectors of the dividing line are the rims of valleys waiting, in shadow, to be filled with light as its aspect turns towards the sun. While this imaging by analogy is not exceptional, when the viewer decides to commit to what his eye sees, it yields a surprisingly new view. The moon, according to Aristotle, is unlike the earth. Aided by telescope, Galileo’s conclusion is unmistakable.

How did Galileo measure the height of the moon’s highest peak? He knows roughly the comparative size of moon to earth, two-sevenths, knows the earth’s diameter is 7,000 miles, the moon’s diameter (2,000) and its radius (1,000 miles). He determines roughly the distance from the dividing line of the farthest point of light catching the sun’s rays inside the dark sector (100 miles). Then with nimble re-imaging, positions the mountain peak on the moon’s circumference. With these estimates and re-positioning, he constructs a right triangle, and then, employing Pythagoras’ theorem, calculates the hypotenuse at 104 miles. Subtracting the radius of 100 miles, he estimates the distance beyond the circumference, and concludes that the peak is more than 4 miles high (Everest is 5.5). As irregularities go, this is stunning and ends forever distinctions between sublunary and celestial physics, material or moral.

[Diagram illustrates Galileo’s approach to measuring the mountains of the moon.]

Galileo then investigates a stranger puzzle. Astronomers had observed a peculiar light glowing within the darkened sector but were unable to explain it. Some proposed a source of light within the moon itself or passing through from the illumined other hemisphere or originating from Venus. However, following the notion that the moon is simply another rock in the heavens, Galileo proposes that just as moonlight is sunlight reflected to the earth, the moon captures sunlight reflected by the earth. Row a pleasant stream upon the moon and you could serenade your sweetheart by the light of the earth.

[Europa, one of Jupiter’s major moons, shown in its crescent phase, just as we see our own crescent moon.

The image was obtained by Voyager 1 as it flew past Jupiter in 1979.]

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8 Galileo prized most his discovery of four “wandering stars” orbiting Jupiter. Galileo named these the “Medicean Stars” to appeal to the powerful Medici princes, However, these “stars” (really moons) interest him principally because they strengthen the case for the Copernican universe. The moons of Jupiter demonstrate that smaller objects regularly orbit larger ones elsewhere in our solar system. Galileo writes: “But what surpasses all wonders by far, and what particularly moves us to seek the attention of all astronomers and philosophers, is the discovery of four wandering stars not known or observed by any man before us. Like Venus and Mercury, which have their own periods about the sun, these have theirs about a certain star that is conspicuous among those already known, which they sometimes precede and sometimes follow without ever departing from it beyond certain limits.”

[Jupiter’s major moons photographed in 1995, now called “Galilean Satellites” not “Medicean Stars”.]

This discovery begins with Galileo’s chance observation of what appear to be three “fixed stars” (objects so far in deep space we cannot perceive their motion) in the vicinity of Jupiter. In his excitement at seeing many new stars, Galileo could easily have overlooked these, except they appeared in a straight line with Jupiter and were brighter than others their size. Galileo recorded a rough drawing of these three stars -- two to the East and one to the West of Jupiter -- and observed they were approximately the same size. Two days later, Galileo happened to look at Jupiter and was surprised to discover the “fixed stars” had shifted, with all three now west of the planet. Galileo was puzzled; had Jupiter moved eastward, and how to account for the shift in spacing between them? He rushed the next night to his telescope only to find that the sky was clouded, but what he observed on the subsequent night amazed him. Where he had seen three stars to the west of Jupiter, he now saw only two stars to the east. Perhaps one star was now hidden behind the planet. However, how had their position shifted from west to east, unless Jupiter had been wandering wildly? On the next night, things become bizarre.

Two stars he had previously witnessed were still to the east but the interval separating them had widened, and the star further to the east was now significantly larger than the others.

Strange as all this appeared, Galileo continued to believe that he was seeing three stars, one of which was being obscured behind Jupiter in a random pattern. The next night, he saw all three stars, but one had shifted to the east of Jupiter, and the three stars had taken on three different sizes. And then, suddenly, there were four of them. Worse yet, Galileo had no way to explain the size changes he was witnessing. He did know that none of his explanations fit what he was seeing. These fixed stars could not be changing size if they were far beyond Jupiter and fixed in their position. And Jupiter could not shift its position relative to these fixed stars so rapidly. And all along, so strangely, these stars remained in a straight line with

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Jupiter.

[Galileo’s notebook reveals his record keeping, without which he could easily have overlooked the conflict between what was known and what he was seeing.]

Galileo could easily have mistaken his observations had he not kept notes, night after night. More important, Galileo with admirable patience sustains the clash between what he expects and what he sees. It is often easy to accept our expectations while dismissing the facts. The scientist must negotiate this difficult contradiction by being ready to disconnect from what s/he knows to be true in order to lend credence to the naked data that refute it. Galileo, like all good thinkers in any field, had to be ready to treat what he knew as merely provisional.

Who hasn’t discovered that we see with our minds and with our eyes? You misplace your car keys but know just where you left them. Still, when you look there, the keys are gone. You look in other places but cannot find them. Finally, you spot them in a place you had not figured on. The surprise is that in searching, you had looked at the keys several times without seeing them because you were convinced that they were not there.

The image formed by your eye did not register in your mind because you knew better.

What would we have to do to see what we were looking at when the object defied our understanding? A good scientist must be capable of performing this disconnection in order to obtain and record data accurately, no matter how they defied what s/he considered natural and likely.

The test for Galileo became more difficult when, on the next night, he saw not three but four stars, and those four stars aligned with Jupiter in a pattern of unexpected sizes, brilliance, and distances. Nor was his task any easier when on the subsequent night he saw only two stars and then three again the night after that, and then four, with all of them shifted to the east of Jupiter. Those “Medicean Stars” were in fact the four most prominent moons of Jupiter. They change in number because one or more, in orbiting the planet, is obscured by being either before or behind Jupiter to our line of sight. Finding another planet with several moons helped confirm the Copernican view of an open and various solar system. Galileo noted that even advanced thinkers had been reluctant to accept the Copernican model or even imagine the moon orbiting the earth and sharing the sun’s reflected light with the earth. He writes: “Some have believed that this structure of the universe should be rejected as impossible. But now we have not just one planet rotating about another while both run through the great orbit around the sun; our own eyes show us four stars which wander around Jupiter as does the moon around the earth, while all together trace out a grand revolution about the sun in the space of twelve years.” The mind would prefer a simpler model; Nature refuses to comply.

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9 It may seem that hard-fact science has replaced the poetry of the heavens. The sweet imaginings that found correspondence between our mathematics with the mind of God loses ground to empirical observation and an exuberant awareness of Nature’s dizzying complexity.

This is the modern picture to which we have become accustomed. However, before we consign poets to one corner and scientists to another, we should consider the ingenuity of Galileo and how he fashioned his discoveries. We need to realize that for him to conclude that the “wandering stars” orbited Jupiter, Galileo had to project himself imaginatively to where he could never be. To “see” these satellites orbiting mighty Jupiter, Galileo had to imagine himself standing serenely above the planet and peering down at the orbiting paths of these moons. He had to have noticed that the inner moons moved more rapidly in their orbits than the outer, thus accounting for the greater apparent stability of the outer “stars.” We too easily discount the power of imagining in scientific and other apparently “mechanical” activities. Try carpentry, for example, to discover the necessity of imagining, in apparently simple tasks. The worlds of poets and scientists, of carpenters and Creators, do not settle simply into separate realms, as Galileo notes: “All these facts were discovered and observed by me not many days ago with the aid of a spyglass which I devised, after first being illuminated by divine grace.”

[Moon goddess Selene fell in love with Endymion, a human youth of surpassing beauty. He begged of her the peace of eternal sleep. Loving him, she granted his wish and then gave birth to 500 children by him, conceived in his slumbers, painting by Albert Aublet (1851-1937)] ###

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CAMBALACHE by

William Hamilton

Title: Delta Orinoco Wiki; Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.

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aybe it’s the sound of the name. Or the myths and rumors that come with it. But Cambalache has been resting at the back of my mind for a long time. Waiting. Somewhere up there in the mountains, beyond the places most people care to go.

A swap, a trade, an exchange. That’s what cambalache means. It seems a strange name and no one seems to know where it came from.

“They say slaves used to escape to Cambalache,”someone tells me. “They say they’ve found escaped criminals hiding up there. Está muy lejos, very far.”

Perhaps. But even one as gullible as this gringo takes such news with a grain of salt.

The mountains are full of legends. Some are based on something solid like a petroglyph or a cave. Others seem woven out of thin air, like La Fuente de los Niños Riendo, The Spring of the Laughing Children.

They say when you climb up through the cloud forest out of Chuao toward Cepe, you sometimes hear children laughing. People passing this way, alone among the thick vegetation, are drawn off the narrow path, searching for hours for the source of the laughter.

But they never find children, only a hidden spring of clear, icy water, gurgling up from beneath the undergrowth.

And Cambalache remains just such distant chatter, something vague set aside for the future, until one Friday I’m talking to Julio Blanco, the man who comes by once a week to vacuum the pool and balance the chemicals. Because Venezuela teems with Blancos, everyone calls Julio, “Cangrejo,” the Crab. Unlike most nicknames, Julio has no idea where this one came from. His father was a Cangrejo, and his grandfather before him. Somebody in the family must have walked backward or shuffled sideways. But Julio is not at all crablike – a pleasant, uncomplicated man in his late forties, with bright eyes and a small brush mustache. His wiry hair is just now going gray. He drinks a little too much beer and has grown a round pot above his shorts, but that’s not unusual here where just about everybody goes through the day with a bottle of Polar in his hand. We sit and talk over coffee in the morning or a few Polarcitas in the afternoon. So it is quite natural we should get around to it eventually.

“Do you know Cambalache?” I ask.

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“Know it?” He lets out a delightful burst of laughter. “I was born there.”

“How long since you’ve been back?”

“Mira.” He mulls it over awhile, figures with his fingers. “Twenty-four, maybe twenty-five years.” He smiles broadly, remembering the place of his childhood.

“Maybe more.”

“But you have family there?”

“No, just old friends now.”

“You want to go up with me?” I ask.

He doesn’t even have to think about it.

“Seguro.” He rolls his eyes and smiles.

“Cambalache.” His sudden enthusiasm is infectious.

I wonder why he hasn’t gone before. What a stroke of luck, I’m thinking.

It’s so much better to go with someone who knows the place.

“How about the week after next?”

Bien, Tuesday a week.”

Now that the trip seems a reality, I start firming up a plan. I’ve heard about a trail to San Pablo from farther down in the valley.

That’s the jumping-off point for Cambalache.

So I ask Emanuel, a young Swiss who guides European tourists through the mountains.

“Do you know the trail to San Pablo from La Sabaneta?” I ask.

“It’s a nice route for my older hikers.”

He leans obnoxiously on the word “older,” caresses it with a thin smile, obviously including me among the decrepit, and I find myself taking sudden exception to his slightly Teutonic accent, bleached crewcut, black sideburns and diamond-studded left earlobe. “Más suave. Not so steep, you know.”

“But how long does it take?” I ask.”In your professional opinion.”

“Not long,” he shrugs. “A nice little stroll.” I have not yet learned not to trust

anyone under thirty.

By seven in the morning on Tuesday, Julio and I have dropped among the boulders behind the abandoned electric plant, crossed the log bridge to Hacienda La Sabaneta and are hiking the path along the upper bank of the Choroní River. I have my palo azul and a backpack with hammock, change of clothes, canteen and bottle of rum. Julio has a bag with a couple of sheets, spaghetti, cans of tuna and some bread.

And at first the sandy trail does seem gentle enough, aside from the swarms of bachacos – those large, ferocious ants that can chop down a good sized bush overnight and are now coursing like a black river down our path. We hop over them, sprint through them, shake them off, but they still manage to get in under our sandal straps and bite with enough force to set us dancing. Their mandibles are large enough to draw blood.

“Coño!” we shout, hopping around as if we were on hot coals. “Coño’e su madre!”

After a quarter-hour, the trail breaks away from the river and follows a barbedwire fence through thick forest. Then suddenly we break into a very large field, newly planted with cacao and plátano.

There, because of the recent clearing and planting, the trail becomes hard to follow and finally disappears altogether into marshy ground. We waste a half-hour searching along the tree line to the south, then finally backtrack and pick up a branch that heads east, seemingly out of our way.

But we can tell from burro droppings that it’s well traveled, so we follow it and soon start climbing up a steep ridge. Up and up and yet again up. Through tall grass, bushes and then thickening forest.

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So much for professional guidance.

Two hours later, panting and sweated through, we arrive at San Pablo, cursing that lying young Swiss. I should have trusted my instincts. And gotten in better shape. A nice little stroll, indeed. If you like your strolls vertical.

San Pablo was once a thriving little community, but now only the trapiche survives, and a single tumbledown colonial house under a sagging tin roof, with boarded windows and in crying need of another coat of lime. The trapiche is the largest working sugar mill in the valley, but nobody wishes to stay here overnight.

“Espiritus, fantasmas,” they say.

“Ghosts.”

Willie, the Irishman who owns Hacienda El Tesoro, told me some young campesinos tried to sleep in the house one night and ended up scared out of their wits.

Things moved in the dark. There were strange noises. “Nunca más!” they vowed.

“Who’s the ghost supposed to be?” I asked Willie.

“I’m not sure, but I think it’s a young girl who died up there.”

“You don’t believe that stuff do you?

Let’s go up there some night with a Ouija board and a bottle of rum.”

“Yes, that might be a lark, though I think finding a Ouija board in Choroní might be asking a bit.”

In front of the house, under a gnarled tree, stands a small tomb. It’s built with old crumbling bricks and the mortar looks a little worse for wear.

“Do you know about the young girl who died here?” I ask Julio.

“Sí, she was about my age when I lived in Cambalache. Una culebra. It fell out

of a tree on her and bit her.”

“Macao?”

“Creo.”

“And this is her tomb? It doesn’t seem like much of a reason to go around haunting a place and scaring people.”

Two men are working under the large tin roof of the trapiche, grinding sugarcane in a large noisy press, squeezing syrup into a vat. From this they will mold the papelónes, or sugar loafs. We throw down our packs and lean against the concrete wall, resting. It’s cool under the roof, surrounded by trees in the shadow of the mountain.

“Epa, Julio,” the men cry out over the banging machinery. They ask about Puerto Colombia and chat about mutual friends.

Happy to have a minute’s rest, I pull out my canteen and they watch me as I drink the still cool water.

“Quieres más?” they ask politely.

“There’s water here if you need more.”

“No, thanks, I have enough.”

“Where are you going?”

“Cambalache.”

“Está lejos.”

“How far from here?”

“Three hours, four poco a poco, little by little.”

“I’m definitely going poco a poco,” I say. “Do you live here?” They look at me with surprise.

“Here?”

“Yes, at the house.”

“Nunca. Never after sundown.”

“Because of ghosts?” They look down at the ground. “Is it that little girl?”

“No sé,” the older answers, looking at Julio.

“Maybe el dueño,” the younger says finally.

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“El dueño?”

“The one who owned El Tesoro when there were slaves here. He was very hard.”

“Sí, I heard that story,” the older says. “The slaves made a cross. It was a beautiful cross. They wanted to celebrate Cruz de Mayo, the holy day. But el dueño was hard, he made them work.”

“He buried the cross so they couldn’t use it,” the younger adds. “But then, when they were working here at the trapiche, el dueño fell into the machinery and died.”

“Maybe he was pushed,” Julio suggests and they all laugh.

“So they dug up the cross and celebrated the holy day,” the younger says with a toss of the head. “Now, every few years people come up here at Cruz de Mayo and dig up the cross again. It’s a tradition.”

“Now that’s a good ghost story,” I say. “Do you believe it?”

“No sé,” the older repeats.

“Nunca se sabe,” the other says.

What at first is a sandy path up a gentle rise into the forest soon becomes a steep, eroded trail, where the best footholds come from large stones and tree roots. I’m glad I have my palo azul to help me up the high steps. This is not unlike the trail I’ve been on to Chuao by way of La Sesiva and Sinamaica – deeply eroded by centuries of use and rain, surrounded by thick forest that shuts out the sky. But this one is definitely steeper, constantly switching back and forth up the side of the mountain. Julio, on younger legs, soon forges ahead and then out of sight, so our only contact is by an occasional distant yelp. Then after about an hour I come up along a cliff and find him sitting on a large boulder, waiting for me. I drop my pack, pull out my canteen and join him. Even though it’s cool in the shade of the overhanging trees, my shirt is sopping.

“Fuerte,” I say. “Tough.”

“One has to accustom himself.”

“And take a break once in a while. How often did you do this trail when you were a kid?”

“Three, four times a month.”

“That will get you used to it.”

Then we’re off again and soon I’m once again by myself, mounting those giant steps on short legs, cursing my age and lack of conditioning. After another hour, I come to a conuco, where a campesino has cleared a space in the forest and planted plátanos. From here I can look out far down the curve of the valley, where Choroní is now little more than a speck before the misty blue of the sea. What a view – all cool shadows under the trees, but out there burning with light. I sit down wearily on a fallen tree. I have to admit that I’m fagged. For a moment, I even consider hanging my hammock right here along the trail and letting Julio go on alone.

But after a short rest, if not as good as new, I’m at least good enough to climb on. I give out a yell to Julio, but hear no reply. Yes, I’m alone and truly beat, but I have to smile.

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How many people pay some city gym a handsome fee to get such pleasure from pain?

Another hour passes before I finally reach the notch at the top of the mountain where several trails meet, and there at this dusty intersection, in front of a little roadside shrine, I see Julio’s pack. I drop mine beside it and look across the path, where steep wooden stairs rise to a small chapel, surrounded by a neat line of tall bushes. There at the top of the stairs, Julio sits talking with a small dark man I can just make out in the shadowy light.

“Hola,” Julio calls out.

“How long have you been waiting?”

“About twenty minutes. Where have you been?”

“Sleeping.”

“Come up. This is my friend Jesus, who takes care of the chapel.”

“Buenas tardes,” I say, because it is in fact now just past noon. “Your chapel is very beautiful, Jesus.”

“Yes, everyone tells me so,” he says proudly. “Many come up here from the valley for Cruz de Mayo. You see our cross.”

On a small altar covered with plastic flowers and a whole array of little plaster saints, the cross stands a full meter high on a stepped pedestal within a niche of shiny tiles – bright white and elaborately carved, set with rubyred glass and draped with pink cloth. It radiates, even in the shadows, the center of a grand fiesta.

Cruz de Mayo is similar to Thanksgiving, but here people pray for the year to come as well as give thanks for the past. Altars are decorated with all the food they ask for – cacao, plátano, ocumo, a bag of flour, a sugar loaf, a breadfruit, even a

bottle of aguardiente.

“They pray for aguardiente?” I ask.

“Seguro. Everybody brings his blessed bottle of aguardiente,” Jesus says with a smile. “If you go down this trail the morning after Cruz de Mayo, you will stumble on all the unconscious muchachos who drank too much of their aguardiente before they arrived. Entiendes? Praying too hard.”

“Carajo, that trail’s tough enough without aguardiente,” I say, and then getting back to the problem at hand, “How much longer to Cambalache?”

“Muy poco. Twenty minutes, halfhour.”

A short distance from the chapel, we drop behind a huge boulder and start what I’m pleased to believe will be a gentle descent. But I’m mistaken. Soon we begin to climb again and a half-hour later Cambalache is still nowhere in sight. Then just as I’m thinking this could go on forever, we turn a curve and are looking down out of the forest onto the long valley of Chuao. A hot dry breeze greets us from the ocean far below.

“This is called La Esperanza de Chuao,” Julio tells me with reverence. “It is called that because when the escaping slaves looked out on this view, they saw their first hope of freedom.” I can well imagine the joy they must have felt, since I’m pretty happy just to be near the end of my climb.

But in fact it is not quite over. We must still ascend another twenty minutes through more forest, past a high waterfall and along a deep ravine before we come to the first dilapidated ranchito. And another ten minutes before the trail rises to the central house of this tiny village.

“Julito!” a small dark woman cries out

43

Just Released This dramatic tale is played out in the heart of Manila, a city once called “the Pearl of the Orient,” now being destroyed by massive bombing, strafing, artillery barrage and mortar attack.

“When the big historic tale gets told, this might be a part they let fall through the cracks. So let me fill you in. I’m not going to tell it pretty, because it’s a war story. And a war story is like a hunk of shrapnel. It’s got nasty ragged edges.”

So begins young Johnny Oldfield’s account of his imprisonment by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II in the Philippines – pivotal teenage years filled with danger and defeat, adventure and intrigue, cruelty and betrayal, starvation and death, survival and liberation.

Johnny calls himself a WONK (from the Chinese won gau, yellow dog) a cur, mongrel, running with a pack of rebellious kids and viewing his society from the ground up.

Separated from his father by the

Japanese invasion, he gets his life lessons from a diverse cast of characters: his mother Ruth, a nurse with a strong and independent spirit; Harry Barnes, a storyteller who arrives from China carrying the urn of a friend’s ashes; Southy Jack, an ex-pro boxer who trains boys in the manly art; Polecat, a mestizo pal with an all-consuming hatred for the Japanese; the Colonel, a wise old plantation owner who gives advice on survival; Haverford, a disgruntled alcoholic from Manila’s high society; and Abiko, the feared officer of the Japanese camp guard.

WONKS is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and in audiobook at Audible and iTunes.

from above. And people suddenly appear from all directions. Along with chickens and doves, turkeys and ducks, a couple of cats.

Geese squawk and hiss from a nearby pen. A parrot whistles from the porch. A black and white hound barks and wags his tail. Far up

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the hill a donkey brays, goats bleat. “Epa, Julio,” they all shout in greeting, embracing him warmly. I feel like I’m witnessing the return of the prodigal. Names and faces come at me too fast to remember.

“This is el Llanero Antonio, from the

plains. And his wife, Luisa. The little boy is Alejandro. That’s Bertilio and his two nephews, Jacobo y Manuel. Here’s José, el cazador, the hunter.”

“Mucho gusto, señores. Encantado, señora.”

“You look tired,” Luisa says. “I’ll get some water. Sit down, sit down at the table, in the shade. Julito, it’s so good to see you. Dios mio, how long?”

The table is behind a rail along a porch in front of the small house. The floor is dirt, the walls are split bamboo, the roof is tin. It is as basic a home as anyone might live in – two rooms for sleeping and a small covered space for a kitchen. The toilet is across the path. No electricity, no running water, yet somehow a pleasant place, neatly kept and surrounded by a great green space with a grand view of the valley and sea beyond.

Before we can thank her for the water, Luisa has placed lunch in front of us – macaroni, vegetables, a watery sauce.

“Buen provecho,” Antonio says.

It’s nothing that will shake up the world of haute cuisine, but topped off with a delicious cup of homegrown coffee, it’s more than good enough to take the edge off our appetites. I’m suddenly embarrassed, because I have thought they had already eaten and only now realize they’ve been waiting for us to eat before sitting down to their own lunch.

“Perdóname,” I apologize, flushing. “Lo siento, qué bruto.”

“No, no, señor,” Luisa says softly. “We have more than enough.” And while the men sit down around us and start to eat, she still hangs back, waiting to serve. We present her with the bread we have brought. Julio gives her the spaghetti and tuna. I take our dishes into the kitchen, looking for a place to wash them. A wood fire is going, but there is no sink. Julio, noticing my confusion, takes me to a place down the path. There, in a slight depression, paved with flat stones and surrounded by a rock ledge, water flows through a bamboo tube from a stream up the mountain. On the ledge are a plastic tub and bars of soap for washing dishes and clothes and taking baths. The clear, cool mountain water is pure enough to drink and plentiful enough to quickly fill the bucket for flushing the seatless, tankless porcelain toilet in the little shack across the path.

When everyone has eaten and the table has been cleared, Julio goes into one of the rooms to sleep. I crawl into a nylon chinchoro hung next to the table and immediately start to drift off into my siesta.

“That man really looks tired,” I hear one of boys say to Luisa.

“Verdad,” she answers, and then I am asleep.

Refreshed by an hour’s nap, I wake to find Luisa teaching the little seven-year-old Alejandro. He rattles off his ABC’s like a pro. Then it’s on to his additions and subtractions.

“Is he their grandson?” I ask Julio.

“No, he’s from Choroní. His mother didn’t want him, so Antonio and Luisa are bringing him up.”

“Good kid. Lucky too.”

“They take good care of him.”

The men have all gone off to work, so Julio and I head down the path toward the

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river. Two hundred meters from the house, we come to a place fronted by what looks like a tall, wide box hedge. It is in reality the same hibiscus that grows wild along our property line, but so scrupulously trimmed, so perfectly squared, there is not even room for a red blossom. Behind it is another humble little hut, which could be the twin of Antonio’s. A young man comes up the path, smiling.

“Epa, Julio.”

“Hola, Umberto.”

He invites us in for another cup of wonderful coffee. I know Umberto’s brother Juan, who works in construction in the valley. But Umberto lives here alone. He is taking a break before returning to his conuco to plant and dig among his plátano, ñame and ocumo.

After another couple of hundred meters, we come to a third house with great stacks of wood in the yard and a large, beautifully kept garden below. The young man in the yard eyes us suspiciously.

“Tu papá está aqui?” Julio asks.

“Sí.”

“Casimiro!” Julio calls out. And an older, balding man with a trim of white hair appears in the doorway with a machete and a large bunch of plátano.

“Julito.”

“Your son doesn’t remember me.”

“It’s been a very long time. He was a baby when you left.”

We sit with him while he cuts the plátano into smaller bunches and stuffs them into a large gunnysack for market. Julio has a lot to tell him about his brothers and sisters.

“I heard about your father,” Casimiro says. “But I couldn’t get down to the funeral.”

“He was very old and sick. He suffered very much.”

“I understand.”

Suddenly it occurs to me that this older man has been here in this place longer than anyone.

“Disculpe, señor. But perhaps you can tell me something about the name, Cambalache. Where does it come from?” He gives me a knowing smile.

“Bien. Nobody is sure, of course. It’s only what you hear. But many have asked this question. Why Cambalache? A trade? Of what?”

“I heard that maybe someone swapped his house up here for a conuco down the mountain,” Julio says. “Or for a burro, a cow, something like that.”

“I heard that too,” Casimiro says. “But I don’t believe it. What they traded here wasn’t cosas, things. It was information. Los esclavos, the slaves who came up from Chuao and Choroní knew things, you see. When was the owner away? How many new slaves? When were the Dutch coming in from Curaçao to trade? Which slaves wanted to leave? And they traded what they knew for other information. Where could they escape from here? What trails could they take? When was it safe?”

So Cambalache was once a stop on the Venezuelan version of the Underground Railroad, I’m thinking, directing African slaves off to places where there were no masters.

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And whether this explanation is exactly correct or not, it’s the best I’ve heard.

Another twenty minutes down the hill, we reach a place where a stream tumbles from high caves to a pool carved into the rocks, then spills over into another pool before it falls again and disappears into the rain forest. We wade in the shallow pool and splash water on our hot faces.

“You must have loved this place when you were a kid,” I say.

“Seguro. This is the Chuao River.”

“The source must be near here?” I say, comparing this stream’s size with the broad river I’ve seen running through the town of Chuao below.

“No, it starts way up on the other side of the mountain, then curves around to this side.”

Sitting on a rock in the middle of the stream, I point to where a path runs off into the forest on the other side.

“Where does that go?”

“Down to Chuao.”

“How long?”

“Four, five hours, maybe.”

“Someday we’ll take it, OK?” “Someday,” Julio says. “But not today.”

When we get back, night is falling fast and little Alejandro is herding the goats down the hill to the path in front of the house. Two large bucks are already tethered by the outhouse and Alejandro now ties the first nanny tightly to a post for milking. Antonio squats beside her, grabbing her hind leg with one hand and milking with the other hand into a small bowl. She doesn’t give much, so they milk her only once a day.

As a boy in New Jersey I milked Saanens and Toggenburgs, which gave much more and needed milking twice a day, but the goats in Venezuela are mainly wild grade goats with much smaller udders. Like all Llaneros, Antonio sings sweetly to the nanny as he milks her. These songs, well known throughout the country, flow like stream of consciousness from the milker, in his communion with the animal. The moon is rising over the eastern ridge into a sharp clean sky full of stars, and Antonio sings about the moon and the dark trees and the sweetness of the milk she is offering him. Everyone is quiet, listening to the song and the insects of the night. This also is a kind of cambalache.

When the milking is finished, small kerosene lamps are lit and we sit down to supper. Luisa has not only made a meal of Julio’s tuna and spaghetti, but added pieces of freshly killed chicken. Antonio breaks off some bread and brings the plates to the table. As he sets each down before us, he says the same thing.

“Aquí hay algo muy malo. Here is something very bad.”

It’s a kind of litany of the poor, knowing we will all eat our meal with relish. When the coffee comes out, we drink it with the goat’s milk. I present Antonio with the bottle of rum. He thanks me and begins pouring it into a small tin cup. He offers it first to Julio,

47

who downs it in a single gulp, then to Bertilio and José. When he fills the cup for me, I offer it to Luisa, but no, she doesn’t drink. So I sip the rum and pass it back to Antonio when I’m done. And so round and round the bottle goes.

Bertilio’s nephews bring the bucks out in front of the house – two large, black and white creatures with strong horns – and we watch as they rise up on their hind legs and spring forward, over and over again, butting heads with a resounding “crack.” This is the evening’s chief entertainment, and I have to admit it beats a lot of what I’ve seen lately on Direct TV. Now we go down, one-by-one, to bathe under the bamboo pipe. With darkness, a chill has descended rapidly over the mountains. I change into sweatpants, socks and a longsleeved shirt, take down the loosely strung chinchoro on the porch and hang my thicker, closely woven hammock. As the men settle into a game of dominos, I climb in to sleep. There in the dim light, to the murmur of voices, the soft clatter of dominos and the ring of the tin cup on the table, I drift off.

I can never sleep more than two hours at a time in a hammock. When I wake, it’s to a deep darkness and vast silence. Everyone else is sleeping inside, away from the mountain chill. I discover Julio has very kindly placed one of his sheets over me and I burrow under it to keep warm. I change my position, but I don’t drift off right away. I lie in my little cocoon thinking of Cambalache and the life of simplicity and hard labor, where the only history is passed on by word of mouth, naturally distilled into the large conflicts of legend. Such myths can’t take in the subtle grays of everyday life. They need the cruel master, the devout slave, the constant search for the Promised Land of freedom and plenty, the stark symbols of sword, cross and star. Could we go back to it, forsake our intricate education system, medical insurance and stock exchange, accept our limitations in a small isolated place where dominos and butting bucks suffice for entertainment? For thousands of years people lived like this, with a few animals in a faraway place. I could gladly give up the TV and perhaps the car, but not the music and the books. I am forever changed, for better or worse.

I wake again to a dawn of thick mountain mist and the sound of a cock crowing. Luisa is sweeping the dirt floor. Tom turkey struts back and forth along the path, puffing up his chest and rattling his heavy feathers. It’s still very early, but Bertilio and his nephews have already brought three mules and a burro down from the upper field and are saddling them.

One of the mules is a male, and the joke of the morning seems to be the way he sniffs the two females and grimaces with lust, shaking his head and baring his teeth in a kind of lewd horse laugh.

Over our morning coffee, cheese and arepas, we watch them load the two female mules and burro for the weekly descent to the main road at Paraparo, where a truck will pick up their produce for the free market in Maracay. The female mules can haul much more weight than the male. Each will take about 50 kilos (well over a hundred pounds) with a steady confidence and at a rapid pace down that treacherous mountain trail where a simple misstep could mean a broken leg. The burro will carry far less and the young macho mule will return unburdened to his life of ease and prurient thoughts in the upper pasture.

Little Alejandro has brought three ducks down from the pen to have their feet tied for a

48

ride to market on the burro and Antonio teaches him how to hold the wings so they won’t hurt themselves. The nephews lift heavy bundles of produce and distribute the weight evenly before tying them fast to the mules’ saddles. Then, with a peremptory farewell, Bertilio, nephews, mules and burro are off at a fast trot down the mountain.

The sun begins to break through the clouds, but the weight of impending rain remains, and soon Antonio goes off to work in his conuco. Before we leave, Luisa asks Julio for a favor.

Another boy lived with them for a number of years, but before he left for the valley, they had had words and he has never returned. She wants Julio to tell him that she holds no grudge and hopes he will come up to see them again. It’s a nice reminder that not all is peaches and cream even in Cambalache.

As we leave, it is just starting to drizzle. We pass a young man going up the mountain to hunt lapa or deer. He’s dark and bare to his jeans, with a string of white animal teeth around his neck, a tattoo of the devil on his arm, a machete in his hand and a rifle slung over his shoulder.

“Buenos días,” I greet him. He grunts without looking at us and goes on. Down the road, I fill my canteen at a cold spring, but it is rain rather than thirst that has us concerned. By the time we reach the chapel, it is beginning to come down in earnest. And within another half-hour it has turned into a true mountain torrent, a palo de agua.

At first the roots and large stones provide us with some footing, but the earth is dissolving into thick mud under our feet, so that in many places the trail becomes a slick jungle slide, un tobogan de la selva. We are no longer descending by our own volition, but by the pull of gravity and lack of tierra firme, falling on our duffs, covered with mud. Paul Simon is in my head, singing happily, “Slip slidin’ away, slip slidin’ away, You know the nearer your destination, The more you’re slip slidin’ away.”

Are you laughing at us or with us, Paul? I’m just damn glad I’m not climbing up this mountain today. And so it is that we slip and slide down past San Pablo and the trapiche and on into Hacienda El Tesoro, home of my Irish friend Willie. His huge gray mastiffs greet us at the gate, growling and barking, so I shout up the hill.

“Hey, Willie. Damn it, Willie! Where are you?”

“Hello, señores, where have you been?”

“Cambalache, and we could use some beer.”

“Come in, come in. You look as if you could use a bath as well.”

Willie has guests, one of which is that no-account young Swiss, who is just now looking me over with a supercilious grin on his face.

“How did you like the climb to Cambalache?” he asks, with just a tinge of disrespect in his voice.

“Stroll in the park,” I reply. ###

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The Song Maker by Sara Teasdale I made a hundred little songs That told the joy and pain of love, And sang them blithely, tho’ I knew No whit thereof.

Art: Title:Cloud Study Artist: Esme Kyle

I was a weaver deaf and blind;

Year: 2019

A miracle was wrought for me,

Media: Oil on Canvas Board

But I have lost my skill to weave

Poet: Sara Teasdale, 1884-1933

Since I can see.

For while I sang -- ah swift and strange!

Love passed and touched me on the brow, And I who made so many songs Am silent now.

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DEAR SIR--I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “LEAVES OF GRASS.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.

I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.

I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.

I did not know until I last night saw the book advertised in newspaper that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks, and visiting New York to pay you my respects.

R.W. EMERSON

Concord, Massachusetts, 21 July, 1855

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Forgotten Village, Arkhip Kuindzhi, 1874

Like a bustling flirt

Run away moon moon moon

The moon came

Run away before

To the forge

the gypsies come Run away before

She opened her arms

they make necklaces

A show of pure, light Electrified her charm

and rings from your heart

Balad of the Moon, by FG Lorca Excerpt, Translated, MLF, 2016

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The Buried Moon Once upon a time, the Carland was filled with bogs. When the moon shone, it was as safe to walk in as by day, but when she did not, evil things, such as bogies, came out.

One day, the moon, hearing of this, pulled on a black cloak over her yellow hair and went to see for herself. She fell into a pool, and a snag bound her there. She saw a man coming toward the pool and fought to be free until the hood fell off; the light helped the man make his way to safety and scared off the evil creatures. She struggled to follow until the hood fell back over her hair, and all the evil things came out of the darkness, trapping her under a big stone with a will-o’-the-wyke to sit on the cross-shaped snag and keep watch.

The moon never rose again, and the people wondered what had happened until the man she had rescued remembered and told what he had seen. A wise woman sent them into the bog until they found a coffin (the stone), a candle (the will-o’-the-wyke), and a cross (the snag); the moon would be nearby. They did as the wise woman said, and freed the moon. From this time on the moon has shone brighter over the boglands than anywhere else, and the evil things were chased from the Carland.

Balfour, M. C. (June 1891). “Legends Of The Cars”. Folk-Lore (Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.)Vol II, No II, pp. 157-165

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Should you ask about these stories?

About these legends and traditions, With the odors of the forest With the dew and damp of meadows, With the curling smoke of wigwams, With the rushing of great rivers, With their frequent repetitions, And their wild reverberations

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“Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sand of time” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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“CHANTE ISHTA” The Linnet’s Wings: The Eye in the Heart

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Classic Tepper Susan Tepper’s new novel is a picaresque romp. A Gulf War vet battling PTSD is tricked into chauffeuring millionaire country music legend Billy Bud Wilcox from Newark to Colorado.

Everything goes wrong. Tepper expertly skewers a vast collection of characters on a wildly entertaining road trip from hell. – Richard Peabody, ed. Gargoyle Magazine

Kafka meets Lost in America in Susan Tepper’s quirky, irreverent, and incisive novel What Drives Men. Part nightmare, part slapstick comedy, with a generous dose of social critique, here everything slithers out of the flummoxed protagonist’s control. – Beate Sigriddaughter, author of Xanthippe and Her Friends

Tepper’s keen eye and darkly dry humor make for a restless yet precise chronicle. By all means, get in this rain-soaked taxi, walk into the shadows, follow the sounds of doors slammed, because Susan Tepper’s “What Drives Men” is going to challenge your notions of strength, loyalty, and love. – Michael Dwayne Smith, Editor/Publisher of Mojave River Press & Review

Susan Tepper’s What Drives Men is a picaresque masterpiece. Tepper’s cast of characters: a Gulf War vet, an octogenarian C&W singer, and three twenty-three year-olds, are as diverse a group of nutcases you’ll come across this side of The Master and Margarita. Tepper spins a marvelous tale, sure to tickle the funny bone. – James Claffey, author of The Heart Crossways and Blood A Cold Blue What Drives Men is a different kind of road novel, as Russell is a different kind of journeyman. Fun, odd, engaging, and even moving, you can’t anticipate where you’re going or when you’ll get there. It’s a delightful ride though, as much a trip for the reader as it is for Russell. As with him, things will move you off where you’ve gotten stuck, and get you going to where you really need to be. I enjoyed the ride immensely. - David S. Atkinson, author of The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes and Bones Buried in the Dirt

Susan Tepper is the author of eight published books of fiction and poetry.

Her stories, poems, interviews, essays and columns appear in journals and magazines worldwide. Honors and awards include eighteen Pushcart Prize Nominations, a Pulitzer Prize Nomination for a novel, 7th place winner in the Zoetrope Contest for the novel, Best Story in 17 Years of Vestal Review, and more.

Tepper is a native New Yorker.

What Drives Men is Available on: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1733118500

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ADVERTISMENT “Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimmage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!

We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

Mark Twain *Taken from “The War Prayer”

Poets on Form: WWW1:SORROW 1914-1918 -

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1727721314

- Wilfred Owen Rupert Brooke Julian Grenfell Charles Hamilton Sorley William Noel Hodgson Alan Seeger Edward Wyndham Tennant Arthur Graeme West Ernst Stadler Alfred Lichtenstein Robert Ernest Vernede Francis Ledwidge Hed Wyn E. Alan Mackintosh John McCrae Isaac Rosenberg Philip Bainbrigge Robert Ziege Alfred Lichtensteinl TLW, 2018 Bill West,

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Stephen Zelnick Oonah Joslin Pippa Little, Marcus Bales James Graham Tina Cole Tom Sheehan Kathleen Thorpe J S Fuller John C. Mannone Caroline Hardaker Megan Denese Mealor, Lesley Timms Tina Cole Barry Charman

TAKE ALL MY LOVES Contributors Barry Charman Stephen Zelnic Sean Farragher Bill West Bruce Harris Tom Sheehan Classic Yeats Judith A Lawrence Oonah V Joslin

Sonnet 40: Take All My Loves My Love

by William Shakespeare

RP Verlaine Ann Egan Miki Byrne

Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all:

James G. Piatt

What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?

Ron. Lavalette

No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call—

Dolores Duggan

All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.

Jan Wiezorek

Then if for my love thou my love receivest,

Jo Ann Newton

I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest;

Anne Donnellan

But yet be blamed if thou this self deceivest By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.

I do forgive thy robb’ry, gentle thief, Although thou steal thee all my poverty; And yet love knows it is a greater grief To bear love’s wrong than hate’s known injury.

Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows, Kill me with spites, yet we must not be foes.

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Art: Title, Blind Pew, Medium, Watercolour on Card Artist, MLF, © MLF 2019

In The Dock

Day Break: And birds were tweeting blows With wind that settled in night´s soot.

Their song was piercing ice with prose That night had packed in metric foot.

And there was dawn awake and chilled!

And Then Two song birds seized the sun: Each took an end To tug and pull the rain-bow blend And up Dock flew to run And flow across the way.

And from her deck the sweetest song , A blackbird’s song’ Sailed on the breath of day

Susan Tepper Kandy Abuelita Mochilera Bruce Harris Ramesh Avadhani pavle radonic Oonah Joslin Megan Denese Mealor Tom Sheehan James Graham Jeff Jeppesen Michael Wooff Akeith Walters Arthur Callender Anum Sattar Peter Feng Ron. Lavalette

Patrick Thoren Erickson Beate Sigriddaughter Tom Sheehan Ceinwen Haydon Dolores Duggan Lesley Timms C. Mannheim

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Out Of The Cradle Endlessly Rocking

By Walt Whitman

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle, Out of the Ninth-month midnight, Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot, Down from the shower’d halo, Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive, Out from the patches of briers and blackberries, From the memories of the bird that chanted to me, From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard, From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears, From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist, From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease, From the myriad thence-arous’d words, From the word stronger and more delicious than any, From such as now they start the scene revisiting, As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing, Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly, A man, yet by these tears a little boy again, Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves, I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter, Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them, A reminiscence sing.

Leaves of Grass, Extract

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DAVID GARRICK David Garrick, was an English actor, producer, dramatist, poet, and co-manager of the Drury Lane Theatre. He was born February 19, 1717, in Hereford, Herefordshire, in England and he died January 20th, 1779 in London. He is buried in Poets’ Corner, in Westminster Abbey. .l,..

David was the son of a captain in the English army, who was of French descent and the daughter of a vicar, from Lichfield, who was of Irish extraction, He was born at the Angel Inn, Widemarsh Street, Hereford, the third eldest of seven children. When he was 14, his father, in order to supplement his income joined an infantry regiment in Gibraltar; he left “young Davy” at home to help his mum take care of the household with an instruction to keep him informed of the goings on in the family, and the town. David obliged and it’s said that his letters to his father were newsy and entertaining.

During this time also, the young David was making a name for himself in local theatre circles, by writing, acting and producing plays, and Gilbert Walmesley, who was registrar of the ecclesiastical court of Lichfield and who hosted private shows in the Bishop's palace, advised the family that he had a talent that might be developed and that he should be sent to the new academy that Samuel Johnson had opened near Lichfield David joined the academy but the venture proved to be a non-runner and on March 2, 1737, Johnson and Garrick set out for London where Garrick entered his name as a law student at Lincoln’s Inn and prepared to study with a friend of Walmesley’s at Rochester, Kent, however, his father’s death in March 1737 and a legacy of £1,000 from an uncle allowed him to raise his sights to further his dreams. And David Garrick had notions of riches, and his inheritance saw doors open to him which had previously been closed. in 1737 £1,000 had buying power.

That year he spent some months at Lisbon as apprentice to his uncle, a vintner, and once sure of his footing, he and his elder brother proceeded to set up as Garrick & Co., Wine merchants—Peter at Lichfield and David in London, in Durham Yard, off the Strand.

His business dealings took him into places of entertainment, like Drury Lane and Covent Garden, where he soon established a large network of acquaintances and friends, including the actor Charles (“Wicked Charlie”) Macklin--with whom he discussed the acting theories of the day-- and also the elegant but unreliable Charles Fleetwood, manager of Drury Lane Theatre, one of the two theaters authorized by the 1737 Licensing Act, the other being Covent Garden--this act allowed government to censor and control what was being said through British theatre and stayed in force in different forms up until 1968.

Garrick's first professional acting job was as a Harlequin, at a small theatre in Goodman's Fields, he stood-in for an actor who fell ill and soon afterwards the proprietor took a

62

company to Ipswich for the summer season, and Garrick went with them and appeared there in Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko, as Aboan, a noble savage, with his face blackened, and later he played Captain Duretête, in George Farquhar’s The Inconstant.

Though he was well received in several rolls, when he applied for a position at Drury Lane and Covent Garden neither Fleetwood nor John Rich, manager of the Garden, wanted him and he had to return to Goodman’s Fields.

It was 1740: his mother had died and he still dared not tell his family that he had entered a profession that was in those days generally held in low esteem. Up to then, to avoid their consternation he had been using a pen name, Lyddal. Not until the day after his astounding first appearance as Richard III in 1741 did he break the news.

And the Garrick legend was founded in a single night, he had instant success, a young, unknown actor in a major tragic Shakespearean part drew to himself an adoring public who wanted something new. And he gave them that as he took on the old establishment and made each acting roll his own as he continued his successful run, and later proved his mettle.

He was equally as good in Pamela, a dramatization of Samuel Richardson’s novel; in Thomas Otway’s The Orphan and Venice Preserv’d; in Colley Cibber’s Love Makes a Man: or, The Fop’s Fortune; in King Lear; and in a farce he himself wrote, The Lying Valet.

Though his success was tremendous, his love life fell at the first fence when his affections were rebuffed by Peg Woffington, an Irish actress whom he hoped to marry, having lived openly with her for a number of years. After this heartbreak Garrick played the field and is thought to have fathered at least one child, a son with Jane Green an actress who shared the stage with him at Goodman’s Fields. Woffington, never married, and she died at the age of 40 , in 1760, in Teddington.

Their love affair wasn’t to be and while his disasters titivated the local gossip columns of the day his triumphs were celebrated, and the young man who had been refused work at Drury Lane went on to become part owner and manager of the theatre. On June 22, 1749, Garrick married Eva Maria Veigel, a Viennese opera dancer who spoke little English and was a devout Roman Catholic. Under the stage name of La Violette, she had enchanted audiences at the Opera House in the Haymarket in 1746. The marriage, though childless, was happy, and the Garricks’ hospitality became famous.

And the success rolled on in his personal and business life. David Garrick saw the good times: his work, his family, and his retirement gave him great satisfaction as he followed his dreams.

He was 62 when he was taken ill at a New Year’s party while staying with his old friends Lord and Lady Spencer at Althorp Park, and he died at his house in Adelphi Terrace shortly afterwards. ### Sources: Britannica dot com (Encyclopaedia Briticanna and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

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Part Two

Title: Wood Woman, Watercolour on Card, MLF, 2019

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Wood-of-Wonders Until Moonlight by Oonah V Joslin 67 Moonwalking by Oonah V Joslin 68 Neil Armstrong by Oonah V Joslin 69 Worries by Oonah V Joslin 71 Phases by Sam Hartburn 72 Mare in the Moon by Carol L Deering 73 How is it going, Mother Earth? by Irena Pasvinter 75 Mother Moon by Lesley Timms 77 Lunar Eclipse by Ann Thornfield-Long 78 Spin me up Grandpa by Bill West 79 Jellyfish Moon by J. S. Fuller 81 How the Moon was made by James Graham 82 Look at me by James Graham 83 Somewhere Under a Waxing Moon by John C. Mannone 85 First Humans on the Moon by John C. Mannone 86 Gethsemane by John C. Mannone 87 What in Hell is Green Cheese Anyway? by Mathew Paust 89 Night Light by Kathleen Cassen Mickelson 90 URGE by shikhandin 92 FULL MOON by Shikhandin 94 A Blasphemy in the Dark by Alisa Velaj 97 Desirous by Susan Tepper 99 Dear Moon by LaVern Spencer McCarthy 101 Dust by Bill West 103 Moonlight Shade by Marie Fitzpatrick 105

CNF A Half Century Come and Gone Tom Sheehan 106

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Until Moonshine by Oonah V Joslin Wild horses cashing on the rocks a million white percussive shocks thrilling the beach until the moon shines on the shivering marram dunes.

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Moonwalking by Oonah V Joslin

That night the moon was different from any moon I’d seen.

That Moon had been an empty place with an imaginary face.

This Moon was a bedroom, a dream of exploration in Earthlight; a place to take a giant leap, stride beyond limitations.

It hung just above our rowan tree within reach.

All eyes on Earth focused on that Moon that vision tranquility based.

(First published in Bewildering Stories Issue 358)

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Gemini XI Prime and Backup Crews Gemini-11 prime and backup crews are pictured at the Gemini Mission Simulator at Cape Kennedy, Florida. Left to right are astronauts William A. Anders, backup crew pilot; Richard F. Gordon Jr., prime crew pilot; Charles Conrad Jr. (foot on desk), prime crew command pilot; and Neil A. Armstrong, backup crew

Neil Armstrong by Oonah V Joslin He stepped out

Let us hope to follow in that footstep

onto the dust

into the dust

onto the light

into the light

surface of the Moon.

united in a single cause

We stood in awe

mankind.

united in that momen

mankind; he said a single word for all perhaps the most important word on Earth.

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Whirlwind by Filipp Malyavin Date: 1906

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Worries by Oonah V Joslin It’s the moon, you see.

These moon-mad days are

It’s drifting away

red with heat and blood

drifting away from Earth

only because we’re here you and me,

old man and all an inch and a half, year upon year.

and that spider in the sink, keen to avoid the vortex.

That’s about nine feet since I was born.

But there’llll be no witness when the moon drifts off

Not that the moon cares

and oceans cease to swell. whether I drift away.

No spiders, no whales, no you, no me.

Everything recedes And that’s my problem, you see; from everything else always looking so time gets s t r e t c h e d on the dark side. t h i n n e r and t h i n n e r

until matter goes all cold and lumpy like isolated whales in an ocean of porridge.

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Phases by Sam Hartburn New, a rock in darkness hidden Crescent, peering round unbidden Quarter, starts to show its face Gibbous, waxing into place Full, moves into opposition A brief sojourn in show position Gibbous, starts to creep away Quarter, doesn’t want to play Crescent, waning into hiding New, the darkness overriding

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Mare in the Moon by Carol L Deering A river cascades from a steep dark cliff at the edge of a meadow, fading amidst cool firs.

A white mare feeds, unbridled, mythical, tail splayed threadlike in faint blur. Painted by the rock-that-glows, she lifts her head and stirs the shadows deeper. All radiance belongs to her.

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Gardener's Gloves and Shear by Marsden Hartley

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How is it going, Mother Earth?

by Irena Pasvinter “So, how is it going, Mother Earth?

How are you feeling? What’s new?”

“Well, dear Moon, it could be worse.

Still, feeling a little blue...”

“But isn’t this how you have always been?

Blue planet, and all that stuff.”

“Oh, don’t be stupid. You know what I mean.

Things here are getting rough.

All these humans are such a chore To bear, to feed, to supply.

I’m growing warmer and there’s more...”

“Yes, you and your humans. Oh my!

Why do you bother with them at all?

Want me to talk to the Sun? He’ll scorch them out. Or maybe, you know, We could drown them. It would be fun.”

“No, thanks, my dear. I need no help.

I’ll bear with humans for now.

It will be tough if the icebergs melt, But I hope to cool down, somehow.

You know, dear Moon, if I were you, I wouldn’t be smug as as pie.

More humans will come. First only a few, But they’ll settle you, humid or dry.”

“Your humans? I’ll never! That would be the end.

Let’s slaughter them -- anything goes!”

“There’s no need to panic, my satellite friend, You might even like them. Who knows.”

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Mother Moon by Lesley Timms Nicaraguan moon gently lifts her maternal gaze, peers over the ocean’s edge, silvery smile, Madonna-tender, shimmering wide across pewter waves she now commands to break, ripple, caress, cleanse his travel-weary feet.

Nocturnal vigil in loco parentis whilst intangible umbilical ties, eternally unbreakable, softly unfurl bridging thousands of miles, interweaving the hearts of mother and child.

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Lunar Eclipse by Ann Thornfield-Long All the birds have tucked their heads, spirits ride the windy night, comets string their long, thin threads, moon is rising to her height.

Shadow crests the edge of arc, earth reveals what can’t be seen, a silhouette, distant postmark, stamped upon the silver sheen.

In earth’s wake, the moon in shade presses forward copper crowned, a trillion stars by light downplayed, charm the eyes with sight profound.

A cry of awe cannot be stilled folds of universe revealed.

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Spin me up Grandpa by Bill West Together we turn.

Tied by gravity we spin, my legs fly, we grin, orbiting, Earth and Moon.

Too soon our time ends.

His feet slow, arms weaken, the reeling ground returns and time remembers us.

Daily darkness grows, our two lives, divergent, rush on.

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Jellyfish by Childe Hassam

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Moon Jellies by J. S. Fuller Jellyfish Moon Moon jellies blister the mud-flats.

Tiny coins mixed up with translucent dinner plates make a glutinous mosaic holding a hidden sting.

They’ve arrived on the same day for the length of living memory, drawn to this thin place where present mud rests on past strata, and receding water makes finger shaped channels that point ahead.

My mind tries to send them messages but we’re as alien to each other as quicksand and diamonds.

They’ll vanish with the next high tide, leaving waning moons as a memento of their eternal journey.

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How the Moon was made by James Graham On the third day God stood in his boiler suit, one foot on Mars, the other on Phobos, picked up what was the second moon of three, and threw it at the Earth.

It was meant to miss by miles, two hundred fifty thousand miles at least, and settle into orbit, shine by night, make ocean waves. But instead it crashed: stirred up a storm of boulders, slabs and pebbles. ‘Shit!’ said God. ‘Oh well, at least I haven’t massacred my lovely beasts, because I haven’t made them yet. There’s only the primordial soup. I’d better get my gravity gun’. He had to go all the way back to Heaven to fetch it.

The debris was still spinning. This time he took more careful aim and all was well.

A million shards wheeled like a flock of birds and came together in a ball, a pale-faced, pretty little thing, Earth’s first and only Moon.

God saw that it was good, even perhaps the better way.

And so, though it was only noon, he skived off for the day.

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Look at me by James Graham Look at me.

You may ask yourselves what is the use of me.

I am a pale, cold sun: I let you sometimes see your way on a dark road, though wandering clouds too often mask my false day, and I am not wanted in your cities. But you should remember this: from time to time a person who was mad in a certain way, has looked me in the eye. I am waiting: the blue Earth I look upon is fearful; you have troubles darker than any dark. I wait for a new night-walker who will catch my eye, and be struck, and be your guide. I am wiser than you think.

It may be soon.

Error on Green by Paul Klee

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Somewhere under the waxing moon

by John C. Mannone He thought about the days to come, weighed his actions carefully —unlike the moneychangers with lying standards, gold weights shaved— before he overturned their tables sending money flying to the floor and freeing mite-infested doves that religious leaders used to scam the poor, to cheat their God. Only clangs from dishonest coins pinged the air. Where had the echoes of prayers gone? They were buried deep, sifting dirt under the fig tree bearing unripe fruit that was as pithy and palatable as starch—not even fit for bugs. No wonder He cursed it—withered branches framing his beloved Israel, Jerusalem’s temple in the background somewhere under the waxing moon passing over, soon to shine in the garden of olives.

As his disciples slept in innocence, moonlit shadows of a Joshua tree reached out to grab him, even as Judas kissed him on the cheek. And the guards from the temple, who had already prayed their empty prayers, lifted their eyes to the midnight moon ever so slowly growing pallid in the dawn.

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Title: Supermoon in Partial Eclipse Location: Near Sweetwater, TN Photographer: John C. Mannone, Jan 20, 2019

First Humans on the Moon

by John C Mannone Summer is fat with a waxing crescent; only a cold sun shines on its face. The eagle has landed, an olive branch in its talons. An earlier visitor, a hobby, perches his small falcon body and chestnut legs on a silver fragment inside a crater—his secret—on the dark side of the equinoctial moon.

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Gethsemane by John C. Mannone The sundial-face of the moon waxes full over the Kidron Valley, the Joshua tree casts purple umbras of arms, branches point into night.

Pressed olives embitter the air.

That air, still and silent, listens to his prayers. His voice cracks in shadows that gnomon the ground.

Kneeling on rocks, he anguishes like one desperate for his lost lover, for a moment, only timelessness answers while heartache pulses through his arteries to the palms of his hands, to the soles of his feet.

Ground swells with blood, drip, drip, dripping from his brow as moments flee.

A weight hung on shoulders, swings back and forth. He was unwilling to stay time. Nighthawks lament well into celestial dark.

Constellations flicker the Roman numeral’d dawn.

Sky swirls, stars entangle his hair. His face pallid in moonlight, ears haunted with cries, as his eyes fill with ghosts of the world and his tongue cleaves to the roof of his mouth

striking the sour taste of dregs.

The hour has come.

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Jealously:The Green Room Series, Edvard Munch

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What in Hell is Green Cheese Anyway?

by Mathew Paust 21 Jan 2019 Bloody Mary is the Girl I love bum bum bum bum...

Damn tune’s earworming me this morning Started when Facebook apprised me I’d missed the lunar eclipse last night The one Facebook had told me earlier Sunday would be a “Blood Red Moon” Hoo boy Not sure I’ve ever seen one of those It was a miserable, tundra night: icy, biting winds Wolf weather There was a time discomfort wouldn’t have mattered When the eclipse would have mattered When the kids were kids When my heart was young Now it’s Blue Moon haunting me Getting old Me and the Moon magic Armstrong started the decline for me Of the magic When he muffed his prepared extemporaneous exclamation His “man...a man” thing What a disappointment What a sullying of a mythic moment The snuffing of myth itself Or maybe the perfect irony: Man’s giant leap-cum-pratfall Lunar laugh prevailing Well, ain’t that too damn bad!

Wonder if Neil woulda watched last night.

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URGE by Shikhandin I have this urge to eat moon.

Not dust. Not beam.

Just the moon. In situ.

This is madness. I know.

The moon tastes like nothing in the memory of man.

Nothing’s changed. I remember another moon seen from a window, beyond cold corridors.

My alma mater, a convent school.

The moon’s frosty milk-froth light Meeting my eager lips.

Of course I had to invite the wimpled sister on her rounds to join me, which she did.

My school mates had to wait, and hated me for it. When the moon receded I shrank.

Afterwards I cowered underneath my quilt, for more things than unsheathed words.

Age has made me no wiser. No less moon struck. When the tears come, I let them flow.

It’s not over yet. I won’t let it. I taste moon and prefer to go on the way I am. Unlike those brittle old women with their cactus tongues.

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Nuns and schoolgirls standing in church by Gwen John

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FULL MOON by Shikhandin

Tonight is ripe with possibilities. We could redeem our sensibilities. Let this beer-sweat-blood destiny run dry. Fill up our veins and arteries with the dreams of those that failed to sleep. Let’s pile

ART: Ridiculous dream Francisco Goya Dreamy by Kandinsky

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up the carcasses into a heap.

Put the word out there beneath the wheeling sky. And they will come. I promise. They will circle and circle before settling down to feed on the pickled bodies in the streets. These long sleek streets of our toxic city. Life is easy for the canny. It is time to put all other thoughts to rest. No unrest. No inside-out mindset.

Empty like the moon.

Shining, smiling, empty. Dustless, serene, our moon. No graveyard can bring you greater peace. Let us keep it that way shall we? Make good while our moon glows white. Our sweet blind eye in the sky.

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A Blasphemy in the Dark by Alisa Velaj I have risen and fallen in the arms of love.

I have seen the full moon, and the one short of a bite.

I have fallen and risen through abyssal nights, and embraced chests clean of any strands of sore straw...

My Lord!

I have risen and fallen in the arms of love.

I have seen the full moon, and the one short of a bite.

I have fallen and risen through abyssal nights, and embraced chests clean of any strands of sore straw...

My Lord!

Forgive me for the blasphemy of the dusks!

Was it the sky or the moon that strayed my heart?

Translated from Albanian: ARBEN P. LATIFI

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Woman at Beach, 2019, MLF

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Desirous by Susan Tepper Your heart envies its factions choruses of deliverance that keep failing despite a clutching effort to hold intact what is left the slightest drop of good will You are your own prisoner desirous of this place your cries for help go rigid in a black-tinged scarlet night tongue of nights that pass over any light that could be cast by a new moon

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Pustka - Stare gniazdo by Ferdynand Ruszczyc

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Dear Moon by LaVern Spencer McCarthy Hello, dear moon. Where did you go last night?

I thought I saw you far across the bay.

My sky was desolate without your light.

I only had the stars to show the way.

I thought I saw you far across the bay.

Perhaps it was a comet’s afterglow.

I only had the stars to show the way.

A trail may lead where stars can never go.

Perhaps it was a comet’s afterglow.

Such imitative things are often found.

A trail may lead where stars can never go.

I saw no beams of gold where I was bound.

Such imitative things are often found.

Although I searched the dusky atmosphere, I saw no beams of gold where I was bound.

I only had the darkness and my fear.

Although I searched the dusky atmosphere, I saw no galaxy where you might be.

I only had the darkness and my fear.

You hid your face somewhere I could not see.

I saw no galaxy where you might be.

My sky was desolate without your light.

You hid your face somewhere I could not see.

Hello, dear moon. Where did you go last night?

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Moonlight by Edvard Munch

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Dust by Bill West Apollo moon rock crumbles to dust contaminated by Earth air.

Regolith particles float in Sun formed static clouds decluttering in the lunar dark.

Here, rain plumped Mexican earth.

Verdant growth swarmed volcanic ridges and time spawned life in brackish rills.

When rain clouds mass on the moon and lunar dust softens in the downpour will life flourish there, orbiting its long-dead mother?

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In Moonlit Shade PS, MLF

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In Moonlight Shade by Marie Fitzpatrick If I could choose from shades of rain, I’d choose the one bedecked with cloud.

Those diamond drops with fishhook clasps, That fall just like a blinking chain,

That shivers down a slinky dress, That vibrates through a day’s distress, That attracts the bees to buzz the flowers.

The washes; rinses, and all that they empower:

In their sparely needlepoint design: Like the breathless breaks in moonlit shade, That in night skies hang the stars, With ghostly dye and silver twine.

Those stars that float above the earth.

Hold forty-shades of summer scenes.

Of outdoor fun and childlike sighs.

Of rain-hooks’ bait and season’s mirth.

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A Half Century Come and Gone

By Tom Sheehan

I could picture what it would be like if we met again all these years later. It might go down like this: After 670 miles of a pretty cross country haul, I’d see the meeting-place pub we’d picked sitting brown and ugly like a hovel at the side of the road, a meeting place for the century, out there in some square, hard country setting. And I’d brace myself for comrades, the long stretch between get-togethers, wondering what the hard stuff would do to me this time. Undoubtedly it would leave tracks again.

I closed my eyes, wondering all over again. I hoped Balbo would be in there and Diaz. I hoped Archie’d be in there, red in the face, after his fifth visit, his third wife, his second hospital stay, counting his visits, keeping the tab at his elbow, paying it with no fanfare at all, sometimes embarrassed by his own quick acceptance of it, owing somebody, always owing somebody in this crazy life.

I saw him again on the ridgeline, forever on the ridgeline it seemed, my pal Archie, squad leader Archie, drinking buddy Archie, history and nostalgia-plagued Archie, black against the morning sun, staggering, falling backwards, his weapon emptying itself at the coming tide, his curses revolving over and over as he rolled down the hill, helmet loose and skittering on edge, canteen bouncing, weapon finally dragged useless and empty into the earth. “Tom, don’t let them bastards get me!

Friggin’ hear me, Tom? Don’t let them get me!”

I had thrown the red panel on the ground when the first wing-swept Grumman came diving on the hill, dropping the napalm in an end-over-end tumble like a field goal try, an agonizing slow roll to its arc, waiting to see if it hit on this side or the other side of the hill. Even before the flames blew up the incendiary cloud, before the heat passed searingly over their heads, Archie had screamed again, not about the heat and fire, but about the small army of Chinese gathered on the other side, the lead charge then perched on the crest of the hill: “Don’t let them little bastards get me, Tom.”

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Every day of my life, from that moment on, from the burst of the napalm, from the whine and roar of the next Grumman diving down on us like some clumsy bird diving on a seashore, from the repetition of small arms fire popping a Fourth of July morning, I heard Archie’s voice. It was part of his continual terror, the wakeful dream, the sudden silence in pre-dawn darkness: What would have happened if I hadn’t leaped to get Archie, hadn’t brought him back to the bunker, hadn’t hauled him inside just as the whole hill exploded under cannon fire, salvo after salvo after salvo? Two days under earth we were, four men who found a supply of air come tunneling under a small ledge, keeping us alive.

For two days we could hear Chinese spoken but feet away from us, it too coming with the air supply under the ledge. The napalm hit had cleared the peak of the hill, so we had immediate oxygen and enough of it coming through that small aperture. We had survived the close napalm and the creeping barrage and fusillade of our own artillery raking the length of the hill. A few timbers of the bunker roof held the Chinese People’s Army at little more than arm’s length. Under the weakest looking timber I had wedged my rifle. We had slept fitfully yet not daring to move, keeping our legs in place, our bowels inert, our voices down, whispers as bare as breath. When hunger came in its push, like the snake it was, as if it had burrowed down to get at us, we talked about favorite meals.

It came on me again, the breakfast we created for the Last Supper, lounging in the back of my head; not the way I remembered it, but the way it was: It was raining, it was 1951, it was Korea, and we lay barricaded behind dirt, loam, rock, shale, speckled hardpan, spent shrapnel, an unknown blood brown as a berry stain on a bleached wood. Stale powder smell was a laboratory smell circulating in the small hole of the mountain, the saucer of war left over, battle’s cup spilleth, the meat and meal of death taking up the air. We were wet, we were cold, we were hungry. Now and then, muffled by all of earth, Chinese came spoken as the enemy passed over or paused above the retreat.

Once vaguely I had thought of Sub Gum Harkew, quickly forgot Chinatown, brought rifles back, the probe of bayonets in Chinese hands, the thrust a search would bring, invasive, calculated, steel surgeons at work, dread doctors at awe. We waited, we hungered, we whispered, and silence, like fungus in a root cellar, like onions in a poem I could vaguely remember, grew around us, sopping, thickening, becoming moldy and wet and ever damp, crypt stuff if there ever was, mad man’s mausoleum. It was a piece of an old barn I had known, probably still struggling to sit up on its haunches in Middleboro, Massachusetts, horse leftovers, mule-stuff, leather traces, hay as old as Methuselah, fallen dust, mushrooms taking over corners.

Diaz’ beard then was a mold he could only feel. He had trouble feeling his own feet, legs locked in place, now and then thighs convulsed. Come outhouse ripe was his breath and he cursed without using words, magnificent curses that blew out from his soul.

Balbo, on his left, two days of blood on his forehead as hard as plaster cast, mumbled and hummed about steak, onions, breads his mother made atop her stove where the blue haze climbed on mountains.

Balbo brought Kentucky across the parallel, pulled it into that dim and dark retreat, as if it had seceded finally from the Union; Kentucky has odors that live forever; he whispered of turkey taken down, wild Indian corn, hickory up in smoke, ham air curling all the way down a valley’s run where the boar thought it was loose forever.

Darkness did food proper. It dissipated the edge of death, carried off wounds, lingered in the wet silence as if someone’d spilled next door’s olla podrida. The pot is the great custodian for nosy things after blood, after pain, after resurrection of hope, after palate memory, after taste finds one breathing air

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foul as rotting flesh. On the second day of mold, damp, other liqueurs, Chinese spoken atop rarely now, but distinctly, Diaz said we ought to speak more of urgent meals to make our mouths water, to salivate.

Balbo’s Kentucky came succulent, wet, leaves taking on mist, the mountains blue as far as you could see. He saw deep-set stains working his mother’s apron all to pieces as she delivered the turkey into meals that might last a week, a red jelly, steam-twisted green vegetables, corn like gold, bread thick as an anvil and justly memorable.

Diaz, though, went Mexican haywire; enchiladas wild with chili, an almost Cajun burn in his own mouth, the desert burning under a saucer sun. In the middle of Diaz’ meal I remembered a goat once over buckets of coals in New Hampshire, on a farm cut into the side of another mountain, poets reading into and out of a night of loving and the disappearance of the whole goat.

Now Diaz’ face refused to come back to me, but mold of his beard. I knew his eyes were not blue, but could not pick out their color. His mouth, his mouth so close to me, was ripening yet. Back over the meals the stench came, live as an ache. Chinese lingered again, jabbered, passed on the way history eases itself forward, slipped away like rain or pain or a forgotten cloud when your back is turned.

Balbo, in the bowels of the Earth, said he hungered because of sausages, two-day beans, bread like bricks, his mother humming at the black stove, a mountain out the window looking down at her.

I whispered of Vermont morning mountain peaks sticking up through an ocean of cloth-clean clouds, dew-damp gracing every surface, as if lacquer’s sheen had been put in place to wait out the sun, and my brother Jim, early bird, dawn’s pot-rustler, spiller of coffee, drawing together pairs of eggs, near-burnt toast, noisy Canadian bacon slabs echoing from mountain top to mountain top.

I told Diaz and Balbo and Archie how my brother cooked, how he floats forever in the holiest waters of Lake Erie drumming up meals for me. Balbo hummed again, bled again, became desert hot, cooled, said his back hurt in a new setting. Wept. The mountain rocked. And Kentucky rocked.

If those sounds were in the Sonora Desert would they have been heard? What was tamale? Chili?

What was that dank smell, that small explosion, old wet barns, mildew in the mows, eggs gone over the edge, moist blankets holding night in their twill, those brothers, those comrades, my brother, that wetness, drivel of four bodies as if we had been canned forever. Sardines cooled and wet in the war.

I’d remember how it ended.

Silence. Wet silence. Hush Boots pounding. Beyond our barricade, above, a voice, an uncursed, non-Asiatic voice, “Jeezzus, Sarge!” A comrade passing overhead, the mountain repossessed.

It was sweet as yams, maple syrup, the catch that’s caught up in Kentucky corn. Brought Mexico across the border. Made Vermont suddenly valid. Made morning’s meal, wet miracle, come in the latter part of that long ago day, that impermanent burial.

The others would all remember it, if any of them could come to this dark pub slabbed here in the middle of the earth.

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