POETRY •  Now and Then  •  Here and There

     I'm working on a series of my own poems coupled with photographs that I have taken over the years. During my years at Hambidge I've had the pleasure of meeting and making friendships with many fine poets, all of whom in some way helped to open my eyes to the art and craft of poetry. I hope poets everywhere as well as my poet friends, will indulge me through this process. I do not presume to think of myself as a poet, merely someone who is enjoying what words can do and beginning to experience the music and imagery that grows out of them. Moving through different creative processes is exciting to me, but even as I have much reverence and respect for the "craft" of a thing and the skill needed to produce it, the irreverence of jumping in and experiencing it for myself is energizing and affirming.
     When I was about 4 years old my parents and I moved from West Palm Beach to Roswell, Georgia, a small town north of Atlanta. My father's brother and his family had already settled there a few years earlier and my father wanted to be near family. Roswell was indeed at that time small, for the most part a farming community and home to the Roswell Manufacturing Company, a cotton mill dating from the mid nineteenth century.
     Roswell was founded in the 1830s by a group of well-to-do families from the Georgia coastal area. They came as did many coastal families to escape the fevers, insects and heat of the summers, however they were so pleased with the location and the land that they decided to settle in the area permanently. They built many fine examples of federal and antebellum homes and public buildings which now constitute one of the largest groups of these structures within a close proximity to Atlanta. It also includes the girlhood home of Mittie Bulloch, the mother of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Growing up in an area so rich in history and steeped in the flavor of the antebellum south I developed a deep and long lasting interest in history and a deep seated appreciation for the best of the South. There was much that couldn't be appreciated.
     As my father's family was from southern Illinois, having been original settlers in Greene and McCoupin counties and my mother hailed from cold and snowy Minnesota, much of my life has been spent in some discomfort at being a "Yankee" in a southern court - only however until I discovered that my father's ancestors came from Virginia and called Pendleton, South Carolina home before Carrollton, Illinois.
     All this is to briefly explain why I start out with a poem tied closely to my love of the past, my childhood and the place where my life began to unfold.

Winter - Barrington Hall - Roswell - 1968
Then, so many steps lay in my path and I did not know my feet were already weary from,
Scores of years that would play out far beyond my shortsightedness and eagerness to burn.
My dreams were infants then, rushing toward old age and death, under cold skies and even
When the sun came to interrupt life’s speed, it was only a cold glint on melting ice.
I would go back to frozen rooms and act as if I could not see the end, the curtain's fall to the stage.
I moved into the future, unaware of moving's cost, not asking for much, or so I thought.
I only wanted love, friendship, and respect, but gave myself none. I waited for another donor and
While waiting, wanted to be simplicity and kindness, but did not know kindness was not simple.
Creativity and transformation came close to love and fueled me with warmth. They led me on and
Fooled me into a plan and something beyond hope. I found them not simple either.
Treachery and ill will, impatient to strike, lay in wait between the footsteps of my journey when,
Near the end of the path they rose up to blind me and my, by now ancient dreams, stumbled.
Through a cold piercing wind I return to the frozen rooms and wait for the warmth of the curtain's fall.

Two poems about hope, expectation, passion and unexpected outcomes. I always want to see dreams as clear, navigable maps to happy, successful arrivals, but at best they are satisfying diversions from truth and at worst, misleading tour guides to our destinies.
And then there are the nightmares. Certainly not specific to the wee hours.

UNDERTOW
Coming such a long way.
Through waves of time and
Years of moving toward,
Toward something no longer,
Part of the future.
Realizing it was always a dream,
Sometimes a nightmare,
Always out of my control,
Certainly a delusion.
What I wanted, longed for,
Always beyond my reach,
Remained possibility.
I was carried by the waves,
Through days that seemed endless,
A life recorded in moments, but Lived in a broad swath of escape,
And assumption it would turn out right.
Creating, transforming I thought
Was a talent and a gift that would
Bring me - to love, to connection,
To family, to a belonging, to full being.
That was delusion, a dreaming,
That would become nightmare.
I remember brightness and comfort,
Days of optimistic creation,
Feeling I possessed a key,
To what lay ahead.
The waves carried me on,
In friendship I thought.
When at last I needed an anchor,
Most needed to know some safety
In belonging and being “part”,
In giving and caring outside of myself,
A dark, solitary undercurrent rose up,
Grew and filled the wave.
It gave life to every nightmare,
To every doubt,
To all the self-loathing I could create.
The crash of water meeting land is over,
But I am carried out to sea again,
In the darkness of the undertow.
Bob Thomas

FORGIVENESS
Can it be forgiven,
The murder of a dream?
The need to make a difference.
To share and make a mark in the world.
Wanting to be visible, And remembered.
Something made of then, of before.
As some who have them, leave children,
To move forward.
To carry the spirit of the older life, Into the new.

Can it be forgiven,
The destruction of purpose?
The crushing, grinding, annihilation,
By one of another.
One and another, both part of a whole.
Cain and Able all over again.

The greed of presence and control,
Of one self-importance,
Bent on rising to the fall of the other.
The one gorges on victory.
And another dies in a cataclysmic death,
Of Spirit and Hope.

Can it be forgiven,
That humanity is abandoned?
One loses sight of duality and death,In the shadow of hatred.
And hatred either softens or overcomes,
The need to make that death real.

In the hating there is,
An opportunity for accepting.
In the hated, An opportunity for courage.
Can it be forgiven,
To kill the possibility of both?
Bob Thomas

The mystery, in the end, the sadness, is how helpless one is to triumph in the face of hate, self-aggrandizement and power. Feeding on the power of consent given freely by those who choose to look in the other direction, fuels the ultimate extinction of the powerless. “Right is might!” Staggering how often that maxim is proved untrue. It is the exception rather than the rule. It is the confluence of self-serving power that ultimately wins out.

     Singing amazes me and I feel the act of bringing something up and out one’s core being must be one of the most intense experiences a human being can have. It seems a most joyous thing to do and a "release" of monumental proportion. Somewhere in the process it must be possible to get close to some understanding of one's self.
     The two poems below are about transformation and experience and looking at both from a place of have and have not, about wondering how a journey begins, evolves and what the outcome might be.
     Keep the experience of transformation and possibility close to ward off self doubt. A neat trick if it can be mastered.

INSIDE OUT
Somewhere inside
Something wants
To get to outside.
To get to being In the world,
Instead of closing off -
Inside, deep down,
Below the knowing of feelings.
I burn when I hear
What a human can do,
How far they can go,
How high they can rise,
How large they can get
When song comes
From their deepness,
The deepness below feelings.

Sing and the chasm opens.
It splits to your heart,
Screwing down to the depths
Of the darkest there is in you.
To the inside so deep,
To the darkness so hard,
That It shatters when the
Spirit soars up and out
To find release.

The release is so
Exquisite that it makes
Love out of the moment.
It makes sunlight
Out of the black void.
It makes all that can be,
Out of the smallest particle
That you are.

That something you glimpse,
Is you, yourself.
No other but the truest vision
Of the one, the thing
You are and are meant to be.
Hold the love,
The sunlight, The knowing.

Experience all there is In that moment.
Hold it if you can.
Keep it close
To the hard darkness, Poised to shatter
Self doubt And loathing.
 
Bob Thomas

GREAT EXPECTATIONS
I’ve always expected to be something,
Something it seems I’m not,
Something I new there was to me
That just didn’t show up.
It was standing right there next to me.
It was inside of me.
It was something I could know,
But it would never show up.
I would grow up down.

I pretended so long and so hard,
That real would go away,
And something better would stay.
Stay and look like me,
Like something that wasn’t,
But was the something I couldn’t be
 
I was it, but couldn’t be it.
So much pretending would be,
So much bending the key,
To losing the inside to save the outside.
Pretending to be or not to be
Would be the ending of me,
The turning down that closed me up.

Closed up I look out of cracks in my armor.
The me that I know as something I’m not,
Comes real when I see what I could be in others.
When I see the something they are able to be
Without pretending to be something else.
Even for a moment I’m lucky to see up,
An exception to the rule of down.
 Bob Thomas

DOWN UNDER
Movin’ and jivin’s not somthing that sits on top,

It’s down under, It’s inside.

It comes out like big bubblin’

Till it breaks out in a shout.

A sweet twist, an arm breakin’ into the sky.

The music pulls the soul out

And the shout rings loud.

Slappin’ hand to hand,

Shakin’s the makin' of bacon.

The heart tangles in the race

To blossom on the face.

There’s no more knowin’ for sure,

When you know for sure the cure

That makes your heart

Know who you are.

That big bubblin’ comes up again,

The down under is up and over.

There’s no more hidin’,

The secret’s out.

Knowin’ what you’re all about

Can’t ever go away

And the shout rings loud.
Bob Thomas