Poet Tree

Pumping gas by the Ali Baba motel When the world has changed: We know now the photos of the earth Are faked, the wars are agit-prop, The peo...

Jesus dying is now dead — It is done — The drone of air siren Nuclear holocaust alarm And the afternoon Can proceed Now that the belief slat...

We’re accustomed to believe spiritual power is vested in objects: the lucky rabbit’s foot, the Roman cross that transformed ego death into a...

Purple has always been the color of enlightenment and the enlightened ones. It is Aphrodite's color and the Greek mystery religion culti...

More repackaging of fragments a la a philologist, this time with a recurring theme of Adonis, the doomed mortal who became Aphrodite's l...

A nice Veneralia surprise for me that fragment 2 is in Sapphic stanzas and is about my favorite subject, the divine feminine. Diffuse here f...

I took the conventional road of seeing the scraps of Sappho's Epithalamia as separate expressions, only to find out it's all one coh...

I'll leave to the reader whether the rituals expressed in the remaining fragments from the wedding song are so very different than those...

Two more fragments from the wedding poem (Epithalamium), which still seem as strange today as when the papyrus was first unrolled. Bride “Vi...

The tack rooms are deserted, A red woodpecker sings Clinging to the pole As the silence grows loud. There is always room for a solo voice Wh...

The papyrus record of this wedding is frayed, but parts of vows are preserved in crystal.   Quince Something sweet reddens, the last graft, ...

I light the sage And literally create God in the sky,  Real only in my belief --  That's the revolution, The real altar of belief, The t...

As I explore these Sapphic fragments I notice they are not broken things at all but concentrated. Emotion lives on in words that demand rele...

Modern translations of Sappho can probably be summed up by how Ezra Pound famously or infamously translated or violated only the first three...

There are break-up poems and there's this Sappho break-up poem, still next-level despite inventing the genre. The papyrus has lost much ...

Hat tip Dionysus of Halicarnassus for allowing us to read the one remaining complete poem of Sappho. On rainbow throne hear my plea Aphrodit...

For centuries, fragment 58 existed only as a series of scraps that seemed to end with a mythological Tithonus rotting in the arms of the Daw...

Fragment 16 is one of only five reasonably complete fragments that remain from Sappho, who Plato called "the 10th muse," the inven...

Fragment 31 is arguably the most translated —and "untranslatable" — piece of lyric poetry in Western history. For 2,500 years, it...

A piece of spiritual journalism I arrive at the purple yang gate. The lioness asks “Attain the Tao how?” I’m immorally immortal Now, but I ...

The grass stalks are thick as trees, The moth flies lightly. as the breeze. Each taper of mustard vibrates the field On hills inundated with...

High Point beats Wisconsin “The boys we’re fighting for” The siesta is over Bottom dogs win again Sons are there to ignore High Point beats ...

A few last flakes of fear Exhale like smoke in the glare — This weapons-grade retrograde Disconnected the dots Dust of the fallen world What...

People can talk sometimes about something besides Themselves, what has been done to them. They can transcend the relief of their belief Into...

The ghostly gnats that drift in the slant sun Like electrons in silicon, these are My assistants, to help me understand  The world is much l...

It's the kind of wind with voices in it All unresolved and whispering For the fabric of resistance, That limestone that must choose On w...

"I am stretching language, breaking it, pushing to the limit all the possibilities that Spanish can offer me, even with incompatibiliti...

The silence of home is the stillness of God. It does not belong here, the adamantine  Plasma, in soaked papyrus, with the people  Who get yo...

From the Spanish of Mara Romero Torres Hey heretics of centuries far Wounds still open as sigils, No embargos on earth to mother And the aco...

From the Spanish of Federico Garcia Lorca The gush from the gash Of guitar. The chalices shatter At dawn. The gush from the gash Of guitar. ...

Crows and cameras are on top of the lamps. Three seagulls fly the grey. Under the red pill moon the news Takes a horsewoman’s risk of truth ...

Lady Rabia al-Adawiyya (717-801) went from slave to Sufi spoken-word poet.  There’s two loves for the one: The devotion of desire And the fl...

From the German of Paul Celan Festoon sunning Adorns the charcoal gray post-void A palm- High vibration Strikes with its light tone: there a...

From the Farsi of  Forugh Farrokhzad (1934-1967) Let us believe Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season Let us believe in the rui...