I Want a Great Rucksack Revolution Like a Lover

“I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ’em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.”

~ Gary Snyder

Best Samhain Song Ever

Bonus Song for Samhein — Our Souls Are Bound to Older Ground

I was born in the state where my mother was raised
With the children of soldiers, the children of slaves
And it’s too much to take, the mind how it breaks
The lessons, the stories, the shame, and the glories, and all.

They linger ’round
Foxes and hounds
Our souls are bound
To older ground.

Fell in love with a girl who’s found love before
In the hands and the hearts of the people she wore
She’s all that I see, but there’s things in between
The fractures and fissures of all of the pictures we leave.

They linger ’round
Foxes and hounds
They’re with me now
Can’t lay them down.

And I feel it all around, I’m surrounded
And I feel it all around, I’m surrounded
And I feel it all around, I’m surrounded by ghosts.

So we keep them at home, the secrets and bones
The voices we hear so we’re never alone
They tease and they taunt, comfort and haunt
My mother and father and so many I’ll never know.

They linger ’round
Foxes and hounds
My hands are bound.

And I feel it all around, I’m surrounded
And I feel it all around, I’m surrounded
And I feel it all around, I’m surrounded by ghosts.

Friday Night Poetry Blogging

The Conjugation of the Paramecium
~ Muriel Rukeyser

This has nothing
to do with
propagating

The species
is continued
as so many are
(among the smaller creatures)
by fission

(and this species
is very small
next in order to
the amoeba, the beginning one)

The paramecium
achieves, then,
immortality
by dividing

But when
the paramecium
desires renewal
strength another joy
this is what
the paramecium does:

The paramecium
lies down beside
another paramecium

Slowly inexplicably
the exchange
takes place
in which
some bits
of the nucleus of each
are exchanged

for some bits
of the nucleus
of the other

This is called
the conjugation of the paramecium.

Saturday Slow Dancing on the Porch Blogging

Wordless Wednesday

Saturday Slow Dancing on the Porch Blogging

Bonus WWI Centennial Blogging

John Barleycorn Must Die — Music for Lughnasadah

A Song for Lughnasadah