JOURNAL ENTRY 7/31/11: Quotes & Short Poetry

NOTE: This is the second of four posts copied here from my new blog, "Red Dirt Mysterion." I would have published them at each blog site simultaneously, but my computer was having trouble getting back to this Blog site (turned out to be some kind of tekky problem with the wrong "cookies" setting). Future posts intended for both sites should appear at each place at the same time.

¶ I expect this to be a fairly typical post here at Red Dirt Mysterion: a hodge-podge of personal stuff … quotes I like, quickie thoughts of my own (usually but not always about faith) … short poetry, almost always my own.

For that reason, this potpourri entry always will be called Journal entry … followed by a quickie description of what is in the particular entry. In today’s case, a quote I like … and some “haiku” stuff of my own.

¶ This pretty much sums up what the “About” page in this blog is getting at:

“In early Christian language, sacramentum or mysterium

was applied to any sacred action or object, in fact to

anything which as mirror or form of the Divine was regarded

as revealing the Divine. The number of ‘mysteries’ is

therefore potentially limitless, for everything in the cosmos

in some manner mirrors or enforms [sic; I assume this means]

"locates in a provisional/tentative form accessible to human

consciousness] the Divine, and thus is a mysterium.”

~ Philip Sherrard, The Sacred in Life and Art, Golgonooza Press, Ipswich UK (1990), p. 22.

Even red dirt.

Philip Sherrard (1922 – 1995) was an Eastern Orthodox in the UK, a scholar, translator, author, poet.

¶ When I “discovered” Twitter a couple of months ago, I found and followed a gazillion haiku poets. That’s because the 140-character limit for each tweet is ideal for haiku and other “micropoetry.”

Within 24 hours I was writing and tweeting my own haiku, and quickly found myself addicted to micropoetry.

My own writing style tends toward intense imagery. Haiku, if not always “intense,” nevertheless is highly focused. It also specializes in its own forms of red dirt – the very ordinary. And the poet’s ego, at least in classical forms of haiku, should have disappeared!

Focused observations without an observer, so to speak.

That makes haiku – indeed, any micropoetry – ideal for this strange Orthodox writer (me). Orthodox icons aren’t signed for the same reason. This art is about something immeasurably more Vast than this small doddering everyday surface self (“ego”), what the New Testament calls “the flesh.”

It’s also ideal for a damned sinner like me, one who pretty much plays a little fast and loose with, shall we say, the torah of haiku – number of syllables, etc. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.

The next (¶) below has a few I wrote earlier today. Any in the future will just be posted without all this intro stuff. [NOTE: when I post my own poetry or short fiction stuff, without any "Orthodox slant" included, these will tend to be the kind of posts I restrict to Red Dirt Mysterion. The "slant" always will be there, but may be so covert as to feel inappropriate at this site.]

¶

Montezuma’s revenge

two thousand miles from Montezuma

quantum weirdness

[NOTE: if I had it to do over again, I might have replaced “quantum weirdness” above with “Net of Indra” just for this blog]

where none dwell

voice crying in wilderness

one flower

* * * * * * * * * * *

orange spider curled in web

as feather duster dusts up storm

sneeze

And this one which isn’t haiku, but is a “theme” or “voice” that interests me and that I’m still noodling, trying to locate it within Orthodoxy (I’m sure it has to do with living in a Shadowed cosmos due to the Fall):

farm house

bare boards sprung like

disrupted teeth

leans away from

outbuildings behind

the barn narrow and tall

its door The Scream --

something happened

¶ Future haiku, or poems of any kind, will be posted at this site [Red Dirt Mysterion] without any of the introductory stuff.