For G.

There are flowers in the garden,
and there are weeds.
My quest — to nurture the flowers
as fireworks
from divinity’s Now;

to cherish spent blossoms as memories
of happy endings,
preserving each last spark of color
in the sky within the envelope of my soul
until the season to seed anew
awakens;

to root out the weeds, digging as deeply
as it takes — a prayerful practice

to exorcise
my ugliest, invasive traits

to rehearse how to react
with compassion yet no attachment

to the weeds within others.
No anger, no resentment,
no self-pity, no hatred

for…

My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness. Dalai Lama

Hello, tree.
How lovely to meet you!
To fold my soul in your kind silence,
then seal it in letters
to the world.

©Jenine Bsharah Baines 2021

What’s a tritriplicata? I wondered, too, when I read one by Dennett.

A tritriplicata is a poetic form, haiku-esque, conceived by Arjan Tupan. 3 syllables-6–9–6–3.

Here’s a link, if you’d like to learn more. Caroline de Braganza, thinking of you.

Meanwhile, I’ve been pondering Literary Impulse (Shabd Aaweg)’s prompt for day 11 — folded silence. Something about “folded” lent itself so well…

A city resides in my heart –
an empowering, powerfully pulsing
keyboard
of chimneyed aortas, arterial streets,
sky-scraping valves, a suburban septum,
and leafy atriums fed by veins of lagoons
walled within a crystalline pericardium

too easily shattered
but repairable slowly, perceptibly
by one decision

to go deeper into my city,
into a studio

where, at my black and white keyboard,
with sharps and flats, major and minor themes,
I compose love letters of song

to yin, yang, Mystery,

in gratitude for the Heart
all cacophonous creation shares.

©Jenine Bsharah Baines 2021

This is becoming a habit I am grateful…

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Jesus, Sermon on the Mount

This is my tenet to top all tenets.
Don’t be a hurtful hypocrite.
Be Kind. Be True.
Treat others as if they are you

because — surprise, surprise, wake up! –
they are.
Treat Oneness as misguided mysticism,
baloney within slices of magical thinking
slathered with chili-peppered denial

and, this life
or the next or the next after that,
karma will come calling,

slapping you upside the head
until your resistant heart falls
to its knees.

Trust me on this. My daddy foresaw my…

Once upon a time, I went for a run
and wound up with a fractured ankle
and a big boot.
I love pretty shoes, I love pretty boots

but this boot I saw simply, irredeemably
as ugly — never realizing until now
how cracked my window of perception was.
It was the most beautiful boot

enabling me to walk. To walk –
what a gift!
Once, during that time, I even danced.
The lead singer for the cover band
sounded exactly like Jim Morrison —
exactly, exactly, exactly —
and the other three were for real.

Music streaming through me…

“In most gardens,” the Tiger-Lily said, “they make the beds too soft — so that the flowers are always asleep.” Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

I haven’t fallen down a rabbit hole,
but I have sprained an ankle in a cavernous slot in the cribbage board The Brown Gopher has fashioned in my garden. Rarely does he run too late to resist wreaking havoc on my nasturtiums. Fingers crossed he develops no craving for sunflowers

for I am recovering from a hole in my spirit, draining it of vim, and there’s no form of CPR more likely to erase…

A maze of hallways
I can’t find my apartment
I ask for guidance
but each helper deserts me
This hard journey home is mine

Yet I resist this –
mazes thereby haunt my dreams
It’s so amazing,
how we give the upper hand
not to healing but to fear

that we’re not enough
Guardian angels are real –
we captain our teams

©Jenine Bsharah Baines 2021

Two tankas and a haiku. I love these poetic forms because they force clarity. And when it comes to “recurring dreams” — Literary Impulse (Shabd Aaweg)’s prompt for day 5 — clarity is essential.

…

Clone within us, please, the Easter ability to re-seed –
only, whatever season, let’s expand our horizons,
starting off with a big bang, enlightenment fracturing resistance.
Move us from garden fences we’ve relied upon for far too long
onward, to the marrow of our hearts’ mysterious, innermost Outer
Space.

©Jenine Bsharah Baines 2021

It’s Easter for Christians around the world. And while I am no in-the-box Christian — I believe in the Divine, the One — I do love the resurrection theme of Easter.

Yesterday, in the garden, I discovered last year’s Cosmos flowers have resurrected, replicating for me —…