AMERICA

There was a bird I liked,

its name was I don’t remember.

It skimmed the waves a day from shore.

My mother held my head up to the rail,

I was too sick to stand.

America, she said,

this bird has its nest in America.

I could fly as far as that bird flew,

my mother said, its wings are fragile feathers.

When the ship came into the harbor

my spirit was waiting for me,

dancing on the shore,

a bird on the edge of the water.

DRIVING HOME FROM ELIZABETHTOWN

At the top of Spruce Hill,

just before the highway

plunges into the valley,

the wide seep of mountains

gathers me in to its shadow

and silence, holds me,

until I am ready to fall

with the turnings of poplar

and oak.  Through the windshield,

even the thin rain that takes on

gold light from the sun in its falling

is fuel for the burning.

Read more of Bert Stern’s Poems:  ”Steerage”  ”Lunch” and  ”Hot Food”

Born in Buffalo in 1930, Bert Stern is retired Milligan Professor of English at Wabash College and Chief Editor of Hilton Publishing.  At present, he teaches in Changing Lives Through Literature, a program for people on probation, and, with his wife, Tam Lin Neville, co-edits Off the Grid Press, which publishes collections for poets over sixty.  Stern’s poems have been published in journals including Poetry, Hunger Mountain, The American Poetry Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and New Letters, among others, and in a number of anthologies, including Anthology of American Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry. His chapbook, Silk/The Ragpicker’s Grandson, was published by Red Dust in 1998. Steerage, a new collection, was  published by Ibbetson Street Press in the summer of 2009.  Stern has recently been featured reader for the Brookline Poetry Series, Calliope, Chapter and Verse, Pierre Menard Gallery, and has also read at Boston University, Lesley College, UMass Dartmouth, and Berklee College of Music.  He is a reader at this year’s Boston National Poetry Month Festival at the Boston Public Library.

                                                                                     Lone Fiddler, Johnson’s Court, Dublin by Fionán O’Connell

Raffael de Gruttola is past President and Treasurer of the Haiku Society of America and one of the founding members of the Boston Haiku Society which is one of the oldest groups in the USA and Internationally.  He has published three books of Haiku: Recycle/Reciclo, Where Ashes Float, and The Rattle of Bamboo Windchimes which are a combination of haiku with visual images or haiga as it is called in Japan. All three of the above books feature visual and/or sumi-e calligraphy with Wilfredo Chiesa, Wilfred Croteau, and Peggy McClure.  The last two portfolios have the Japanese calligraphy as well as the roman-ji by Shokan Tadashi Kondo along with the English text.  Raffael has also edited four chapbooks of poets from the Boston Haiku Society.  He also writes renku (linked verse) and has done two books of concrete haiku with Louisiana poet Carlos Colón: Circling Blackbirds and Wall Street Park. He recently adapted a one act play, HAIKU, by Katherine Snodgrass, Director of the Boston Playwrights Theatre, with Karen Klein and Judson Evans, which will be premiered at Berklee College of Music in the Spring of 2009 with the music of Berklee composer Allen LeVines.

**The images, unless otherwise noted, are by Kaji Aso, the founder of the Kaji Aso Studio on St Stephen Street.  He died a few years ago and a cherry tree has been planted in his honor in the Boston Gardens to commemorate his contribution to the City of Boston for so many years.  He was a professor of Japanese arts and painting for many years at the Museum of Fine Arts School.

Listening to a Monk’s Ch’in in Depths

Carrying a ch’in cased in green silk, a monk

descended from Eyebrow Mountain in the west.

When he plays, even in a few first notes,

I hear the pines of ten thousand valleys,

and streams rinse my wanderer’s heart clean.

Echoes linger among temple frost-fall bells,

night coming unnoticed in emerald mountains,

autumn clouds banked up, gone dark and deep.

Li Po (701-762)

Bamboo-Midst Cottage

Sitting alone in silent bamboo dark,

I play a ch’in into breath chants.

In these forest depths no one knows

this moon come bathing me in light.

Wang Wei (701-761)

Listening to Cheng Yin Play His Ch’in

Another Juan Chi ripening wine’s renown

in bamboo forests full of crystalline wind,

you sit half drunk, let down flowing sleeves

and sweep your dragon-rimmed ch’in clean.

Then it’s a fresh tune for each cup of wine,

dusk’s blaze sinking away unnoticed.  Soon,

thoughts deep among rivers and mountains,

I hear this mind my former lives all share.

Meng Hao-jan (689-907 C.E.)

In Reply to Vice-Magistrate Chang

In these twilight years, I love tranquility

alone.  Mind free of all ten thousand affairs,

self-regard free of all those grand schemes,

I return to my old forest, knowing empty.

Soon mountain moonlight plays my chi’in

and pine winds loosen my robe.  Explain this

inner pattern behind failure and success?

Fishing song carries into shoreline depths.

Wang Wei (701-761)

David Hinton was a recent Visiting Artist at Berklee.

LETTERS FROM EXILE

These are the letters I leave behind me,

dull lines written for the censor’s eye.

There are no stories here, only headlines,

statements of fact, shielding the truth.

But how can I write my life without politics

when each word placed is part of an equation?

Talk of my income will be translated

into an exact amount for blackmail or ransom;

Talk of our culture will be interpreted

as a covert call to arms.

I cannot tell you

that I am learning our language,

that I stand as a poet on a Western stage

crying out the loss of our country.

I cannot send you

photographs or cassette tapes.

You will not see my hair turn gray

or my voice change accent

as I become American.

I cannot even send you postcards

because such pictures

are considered currency in our country

and will go home with the postman

to be traded for food.

I write these words for you

knowing the line of people that stands between us:

my cousin, who will sit beside you, translating,

the villagers, hoping for news of their families,

and the government clerk, who will slit open

this letter, like all the others,

checking each word, over and over,

the most sensitive reader I could ask for.

SRI LANKAN SCHOOLROOM

Traipsing across sports grounds

picked clean by equator sun,

we visit my father’s school,

long-distance callers

at the museum of memory.

My father points out the places

where, giggling, his friends once sat,

names that belong to old men

in London and Toronto now, names

that could barely fit behind these desks.

His teacher remains unchanged.

Paper-dry voice crackling

he dictates the rites of duty and decorum,

the triumph of courtesy and reason

over the casual accident of race.

It is Jaffna, 1983.

It is one day in a long, hot summer.

It is one day, seconds away from war.

Decades from now, this is all that I’ll remember

of that visit to that country:

the sand dust in the air,

the sun, bleaching dry the shutters,

and the walls, empty of pictures,

not even a map of the world.

EVENING

Because evening is not just the end of the day

but the drawing together of death’s dark forces,

because night is a place through which shadows stalk

and a dynasty of our ghosts still wanders,

because I am the daughter of your only daughter

when our sons are all dead

and the names of our living have been scattered,

you will weave these dark time prayers for me,

pour water, biting like steel, through my fingers,

place ash, sacred, between my eyes.

Grandmother,

holding a house whose rooms have been emptied,

where the heirlooms have vanished

and the photographs of our men

are garlanded with silence,

you will light these camphor lamps for me,

chant mantras that pull down planets,

name stars that will stay faithful,

following my footsteps,

even into exile.

MY COUNTRY IS A WHITE BLINDNESS

My country is a white blindness,

an absence of newsprint,

a vacuum of words,

the falling snow of radio static.

So where is there left

for me to pour out my secrets?

I will dig graves deep in the earth for them.

I will tear holes in the white silence of the page

and bury the words of witness

deep in the tomb of the text.

Let them bear fruit there,

let the sprouting grasses shout out their secrets,

let the blade-cut reeds blare out their names.

Pireeni Sudaralingam and Colm O’Riain were recent Visiting Artists at Berklee.