“In the end, we’re all just walking each other home.” Ram Dass

The above quote says it all for me. I could so easily make it my entire bio…Except I suspect Quy Ma expects a bit more out of me than this. (Insert smile emoji.)

poems and sundry photos

How do I love thee?
Too limiting a question
once thee becomes All

a love poem to promise

“nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands” E. E. Cummings

A walk to collect the mail, the fingers of a breeze lifting my hair from my neck, the sole of my flip flops nibble-kissing my feet like a mother entranced by her baby’s. A song of birds whose lyrics I’ve memorized except I’ve yet to identify the soloists — divinity’s magic and mystery duly reverenced.

My neighbor’s fence, collapsing beneath the aeonium arboreum, I know well.
Still this awed morning it surprises me as much as the white glaze of clouds sponged like Led Zeppelin’s stairs in…

an ottava rima

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. William Shakespeare

I woke today — my neck in pain — so stiff.
I’ve no idea what could have led to this!
Perhaps my neck and pillow had a tiff…
Methinks there’s more. Shakespeare I’ll not dismiss;
forever earth and heaven play his riff.
Are stiff necks signs pride’s had the upper hand?
Look left. Look right. With Love’s the path most grand.

©Jenine Bsharah Baines 2021

A scene from my life right now — ouch! It’s hell, driving. Which got me to pondering.

…

Wise souls assure me — it’s all energy, and I like this
It feels Real, this Thirst quenching
Niagara of powers tinged sage,
negative ions of epiphanies leaping
from river dance-floors of mosaic questions
that once upon a tale grounded me
with two left feet

How else to explain
how
I will post your words on my frig
the hell
became
I will pose your woods on my frog

It’s all energy, I the absolute queen of energetic texts
proclaim — my phone now a most favored manic court jester,
our chemistry immediate

Anna, my majesty’s soul, courts mysteries
Auto-spell, murderously…

“As Rodin said, What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back and legs, with his clenched fists and gripping toes.” Norton Simon Museum website

Let’s go one better than a Vulcan mind-meld, though Spock was certainly a thinker, and I share his pointy ears. From grass, gravel pathways, faith in the magic of yearning yielding neither to science nor black hole,
let’s sculpt a transporter

and beam ourselves into one another’s world.

I’ll go first. I…

Paper Poetry Daou ضوء Series

“Wine is sunlight, held together by water.” Galileo

O, for a real Elixir of Love –
not Dulcamara’s bottle of cheap red wine
nor even Daou’s finest

but a blend of helium and hydrogen
tasting of transcendence,
truth effervescent with All
entwining the beams of my arbor of ضوء
with double-flowered oxygen molecules –

breathlessly abundant clusters of trust orbed,
fermenters of miracles,
the ascendant kind of abandonment,
a bacchanalia minus so much as a droplet
of mean bumpkin-esque brutality
shadowed with a taste of its own pain

May my sole lust be
a compulsion for Divinity,
for compassion,
for intoxication erupting
from vats…

three haikus, one tanka, & a line wilding

Wild souls of the Sun
Forests beam in the garden
Pure gift. Distilled joy

Wild but tamed by Time
Locked gaze on the Sun’s clock face
Dancing to Wind’s tune

Their wild soul in me
I take sacred vows to dance
Nun and bride of Light

Wild contagiousness
imbues sun art on a wall
I straighten its frame
It balks, gavotting again
Life’s hymn, hum, heartbeat, breath, smile

where least expected

©Jenine Bsharah Baines 2021

There’s an impish angel in my house, or a ghost, although I suspect angel. …