The palpable substance of life evident in all things all that grows and flourishes and dies all that process of being the glory of nature and we part of it the glory of swift-flowing rivers and seas and mountains and the endlessness of life the throngs of people on the street seeing them and hearing them and knowing the ties that exist between strangers the common bond shared the glories with which life is adorned daily and not least the glory of love
How one thing leads to another a sequence a chain of events bound by conjunction the loose links that hold it all together the turbulence of the spoken word from me to you or you to me so that a bridge is a relationship it delivers a message a path of conveyance an enabler and a solution the removal of an obstacle a static craft that ferries the living crowd I had not thought that the earth contained so many. . .
and poetry the impalpable substance ideas and sentiments for generations to come others will watch the run of the floodtide but Walt’s text is there for all time a bridge between now and then others will see Ellis Island or the Staten Island ferry creeping into Gotham City at night under a winter sky flakes falling into the depths below as you cross from shore to shore the current rushing loose and swollen by recent rains the white snow and the white gulls their bodies oscillating in the bitter wind one word after another life love sight sound time for all time and in the distance the march of money that rises skywards that conquers the air the swells in the swollen vaults that lies sleepless in its bed gone the white sails of schooners and sloops money into steel and glass and the East River in its ebb-tide falling back to the sea I too am with you and know how it is the view of and on and from and beyond the bridge
As I sat today in solitude by the rolling river my thoughts went floating on vast and mystic currents
What is Nature but change in all its visible and still more its invisible processes ? Or what is humanity – in its faith in its love its heroism its poetry even in its morals – but emotion ?
Fifty thousand years ago the constellation of the Great Bear or Dipper was a starry cross a hundred thousand years hence the imaginary Dipper will be upside down and the stars which form the bowl and handle will have changed places
The misty nebulae are moving and besides are whirling around in great spirals some one way some another Every molecule of matter in the whole universe is swinging to and fro every particle of ether which fills space is in jelly-like vibration Light is one kind of motion heat another electricity another magnetism another sound another
Every human sense is the result of motion every perception every thought is but motion of the molecules of the brain translated by that incomprehensible thing we call mind The processes of growth of existence and of decay whether in worlds or in the minutest organisms are but motion
We are of the earth gathered in a mass subject to the same first principles our inner and outer selves with the same restlessness of the ever expanding cosmos beauty that derives from sharp definition so that things are as they are and not as they might seem to be —after all there are no approximate roses
The world is in our nature as much as in the badger or the fox or the lilies in the field which is to say we are the necessary agents of creation here to use our dexterities and our imagination to embellish the soul’s environment
We are the physiology of love expressed in our kisses and in our tender words in the portraits we paint and in the songs with which we lull the heart We are waves of energy turned to good purpose atoms bound by the bonds of deep romance What beauty there is in her candour in her smile in the eagerness of her eyes what beauty in her posture and in her poise in the elegance of her hands and in the firmness of voice with which she nominates the world around her Honesty emanates from the soul and beauty is its own ornament it requires no other !
Liberty relies upon itself invites no one promises nothing sits in calmness and light is positive and composed and knows no discouragement It is as the fox as the nightingale natural and honest acute and mellifluous a law unto itself the beauty of candour innocence with a backbone inviolate in the passage of time it goes under no disguise A rose among thorns its openness wins the inner and outer world : deceit and subterfuge and prevarication are its enemies It is the voice and expression of the poet stung with compassion It keeps faith with all who are enslaved a taunt to the tyrant a scourge on the swarms of cringers and suckers and the sly lice of politics
Nothing is finer than silent defiance advancing from new free forms poems of philosophy or politics or the mechanisms of science or the craft of art and the throes of human desire and the dignity of nature and passion all in the cleanest expression
What it is to be alive and to confront the turbulence of time with all its privileges and all its challenges to observe the flight of the grey gull over the bay or the mettlesome action of the blood horse or the tall leaning of sunflowers on their stalk or the sun’s daily journey in the heavens or the magnetic phases of the moon
Remembrance and understanding faith in the flush of knowledge and the beauty of body and soul an independent eye in thrall to no vested interest or party that thrives on the investigation of the depths of qualities and things with all the impartiality of one who loves and is content every motion and every spear of grass every miracle of being that frames the perfect spirits of men and women examined and honoured in awe
The silkworm is the larva or caterpillar of the domesticated silkmoth, Bombyx mori. A silkworm’s preferred food is white mulberry leaves, but it may also eat the leaves of any other mulberry tree. It is entirely dependent on humans for its reproduction and does not occur naturally in the wild.
Sericulture, the practice of breeding silkworms for the production of raw silk, has been underway for at least 5,000 years in China, from where it spread to Korea and Japan, and later to India and the West.
The poem below was inspired by these verses from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
You have formed me of earth and of water, What can I do? Whether I be wool or silk, it is You that have woven me, and what can I do? The good that I do, the evil that I am guilty of, Were alike predestined by you; what can I do?
Here we go round the mulberry
silkworm cocoons
The low branches of morus alba, with its wide spreading crown and scaly orange-brown bark pocked with lenticels to oxygenate and
expel toxic gases, and lush orbicular-shaped leaves with serrate margin: dioecious flowers–the narrow male, one to two inches long, the plumper
female at barely an inch–boys and girls in slender zigzag come out to play. Twigs with silvery white filaments draped with fleshy multiples of drupes,
cylindrical fruit, akin to the blackberry, from June to August maturing. The larva fed on this foliage, its spittle passing through spinneret lips so hardening to tensile-as-steel silk,
each cocoon wound with a single mile-long thread, the oven- baked pupas, soaked in boiling water, whence five strands spun on wooden bobbins, the yarn woven into the cloth of kings. So do not
hasten to consign Emily Dickinson’s breath to dust, nor the intemperate slobber of Walt Whitman’s leaves of grass to the furnace, in all modesty our poetry too is nothing less than solidified saliva.
johnjosephlyons 