CREATIVITY AND OTHER LIFE QUALITIES: Reflections and Poetry...Compassion and Love

Tuesday

Reflections and Poetry...Compassion and Love

My adoptive grandmother, our neighbor for many years, lived in Hawaii and was interned in one of the camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. She only spoke Japanese, and I only spoke English. We were both very shy. But we managed a kind of dialog of our eyes and our smiles, and every now and then, a robust pat on my back with her tiny, heavy hand when I'd done something wonderful, like threading a needle for her.

Hibiscus by Chris Price

Responding to a reflection question on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing offered by Sharon Halsey-Hoover, a very dear teacher and actor I've come to admire so, I wished to react in poetry. But I found the task daunting. I wanted the poems to be sparse, like the language Gramma and I left unspoken but not unsaid, and like the ravaged land even long after the bombing.

For "Hiroshima" I was moved by readings yesterday on National Public Radio, among them letters of survivors, and the phrases therein about sleeping tigers, black rain, and paper cranes. The sparsest snippets were made more real to me drawing on imagery in our neighbors' home, paintings of tigers on silk and of cranes on rice paper, on the meaning of the paper cranes in Gramma's room, near a small prayer shrine, as well as on memories her son detailed of his mother's experiences in the camp and her losses in Japan. For "Nagasaki" I've always admired Einstein, a great thinker and a great humanitarian, and wanted to write about the paradox of his contribution to the tragedy.

Japanese Garden at Hiroshima (public domain photo)

Here's what I've come up with for now:

HIROSHIMA

by

D.M. Solis

Every
year
the reminder

not to wake
the sleeping
tiger.

Never again
the black
rain.

Never again
the paper cranes.

NAGASAKI

by

D.M. Solis

Einstein died
one

year later
of heart failure.

Some say,
more believe

his heart
was broken.

Diane Solis

The poetry of Diane Solis has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, excerpted in Expressive Writing: Classroom and Community, and has been published or is forthcoming in literary journals and magazines, including, America, Big Muddy, The Healing Muse, Hobo Camp Review, The Lost Country, Psychological Perspectives, Sinister Wisdom, Slink Chunk Press and elsewhere. Her chapbook ART SPIRITS, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. A science writer and technical editor by trade, Solis practices contemplative and Zen forms of meditation and travels to remote places to photograph and write about the "wild" she encounters there. She resides on the Central Pacific Coast with her partner.

www.dmsolis.blogspot.com

The Latest Quotes for Contemplation:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. --Annie Dillard

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, age after age, forever. ~ Tagore

I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world.... ~ Frank O'Hara

Of all fires love is the only inexhaustible one. ~Pablo Neruda

Prophets are so dangerous because they cry in season and out of season, politely and impolitely, loud and long. ~Joan Chittister

When I say be creative, I don't mean you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem. ~ Osho

There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But, who wants easier? ~ Mary Oliver

Without warning, as a whirlwind swoops on an oak, Love shakes my heart. ~ Sappho

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
T.S. Eliot, from "Little Gidding"

Love many things, for therein lies your true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well... ~ Vincent van Gogh

I have found that to love and be loved is the most empowering and exhilarating of all human emotions. ~ Jane Goodall

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone--we find it with another. ~Thomas Merton

I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for our victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.
~John F. Kennedy

I cannot write convincingly about anything that I am not passionate about. ~Darrell Bourque, Poet Laureate of Louisiana

In the lover's heart is a lute which plays the melody of longing. ~Rumi

But perhaps the most important thing about my father was that he taught us the simplest things -- Navajo things -- like how to just sit and be quiet, to blend in and watch, or to move so silently we'd become a part of the forest. My father taught us how to live the concepts of our culture, especially the importance of communicating with the natural world. ~Lori Arviso Alvord, M.D.