Poetry Laurels

On Manna, the Dead Sea, and the Divine

2012-02-19T21:46:00.000-08:00

My final project as the Sixth Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga is an anthology of poetry on religious and spiritual themes, entitled Meditations on Divine Names (Moonrise Press, 2012).

Almighty, Loving, All-seeing, Compassionate, Silent, Omniscient, Forgiving, Knowing, Merciful, Graceful, Beautiful, Kind, Sublime, Absolute, Patient, Just, Wise, Awesome, Sovereign, Peaceful, Hidden, Perfect, Holy, Giving, Unknowable, Eternal, Light, Love, Life, Power, Supreme, Lord, Goddess, Mother, YHWH, Christ, Yehovah, Allah, Shekinah, Krishna, Lada…

The “divine” of the title is a word introduced into English in the 14th century; it stems from the Latin “divus” or “god.” This word, in turn, is related to the ancient Sanskrit term “deva” meaning “deity” and originating in the Proto-Indo-European “diwos” (“celestial” or “shining”). “Divine” pertains to, or relates directly to “deity.” The ancient Greeks and Romans had many different gods, who ruled over various spheres of existence. The 21st century world has many gods, too, though monotheistic religions predominate, at least in numbers.

The mystery of the divine may be approached from many directions. The heart of the visible matter is invisible. Science makes inroads into understanding how matter works, but the more you read about science —especially at the outer ends of the spectrum, in the areas of quantum physics and cosmology—the more it sounds like religion. This last word, oft maligned and distorted into fanaticism and hatred, actually focuses on connections between people, between humans and the divine.

The word “religion” stems from a Latin root, variously translated as “respect for what is sacred, reverence for the gods,” or “obligation, the bond between man and the gods.” St. Augustine connected this word to “re-reconnecting” (“re-ligare”); contemporary theologians emphasize the connectivity inherent in all religion. Connection to what? Typically, religions connect like-minded people into groups sharing the same beliefs, languages, and customs. Their dogmas may become immutable, fixed, and hostile to everything and everyone outside the chosen group. Remember the wars between the Protestant and Catholics in Ireland? During the tumultuous period of Reformation the whole European continent was in flux. It still is...

Religions, at their core, also connect people with the Ultimate Source of Life, the Higher Being, the Absolute, the One... Here, despite the divisiveness of language, similarities begin to emerge. Poets, who belong to different religions or religious denominations, see the manifestations of the divine in many aspects of life: personal prayer, religious ceremonies, singing of psalms, family relationships, nature, sun, bread making, dying, loving, and love making. They admire the colors of the sky and the liquid nourishment of water. They praise the clarity of mountain air and the gentleness of human touch. They cope with the loss of a loved one and cherish the affection that reveals the essence of the Divine. From the four letters of YHWH to Lada or Pele, the anthology catalogs some unusual divine names. Poets reflect on the act of naming, describe the manifestations of the divine, and dispute the very possibility of knowing of our God(s). They give testimony to their hopes and beliefs, and share what they find beautiful and inspirational. There is darkness around and death, but the poets look for ways to ascend above the turmoil and dreariness of the profane; they seek illumination.

The 135 poems are arbitrarily arranged in ten sections: Naming, Names, Earth, Water, Air, Fire, He, She, Being, and Loving. Simultaneously, the Pythagoreans’ perfect number of ten is organized in five pairs: naming names, earth and water, air and fire, he and she, being and loving. The framework eschews conventional divisions into Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, or Light and Darkness. Similarly, there is no separation of poems into those belonging in different religious denominations and spiritual traditions. Yahweh, Christ, and Allah, or Father, Son and the Holy Spirit of the great monotheistic religions appear alongside less known deities worshiped by Hindus and followers of Kabbalah, Scientology, Wicca, and Sukiyo Mahikari. The Bread of Life, the Unnameable Absolute, and the Goddess… Themes are intertwined in each poem and new meanings arise from the juxtaposition of distant religious traditions. Sometimes, additional thematic threads arise within a theme—bread, light, birth, mountains, solitude, and joy... Many poems are about love and acceptance; many focus on creation, charity, serenity, gratitude, and contemplation.

This project, initiated in 2008, has grown to its final scope in four years, thanks to the contributions and encouragement by many poets. The original idea stemmed from a meditation during a workshop on Rumi and spiritual practice. For thirty minutes, under the guidance of a Sufi mystic, I meditated on a Divine Name I selected. Puzzled by the interplay of absences and revelations in my life, I thought of “Hidden” and came home with a very strange poem about the mysterious, unknowable God, Playful (Via Negativa).

Each life is different and each person has an individual way of experiencing the world and sharing this experience. My way to religion and to meditating on divine names was not simple. I was raised as an atheist, went through a dramatic and traumatic conversion in my late twenties, and was baptized at the age of 30. I was not born into my community of faith. I could have become Jewish, or Baptist, or Eastern Orthodox… Instead, I ended up as an usher in a Catholic church, attending the Mass every week. How on Earth could this have happened?

My path is unique and I feel an obligation to express it. Sometimes, I recognize an echo of my own spiritual experience in another poet’s words (T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets!). In turn, my experiential truth may resonate in someone else. It is good to know we are not alone. It is good to reach beyond “Either/Or” of Kierkegaard’s, stop seeking differences and divisions.

I am grateful to all the poets who shared their thoughts with me and who made this anthology such a special, light-filled volume. I am particularly glad that I managed to persuade members of my poetry groups to join me: the whole Spiritual Quartet (Taoli-Ambika Talwar, Lois P. Jones and Susan Rogers), and the whole Village Poets Planning Committee (Joe DeCenzo, Marlene Hitt, Barry Ira Geller, and Dorothy Skiles). I am thankful for their words and their faith in me.

As a sample of poems in the anthology, I'll use two of my own. The first poem, “Dead Sea Alive” describes a visit to a San Diego Museum where I saw an exhibition of fragments from the ancient manuscripts found near the Dead Sea. Having seen many medieval manuscripts and the Gutenberg Bible, I was not prepared for the emotional encounter with shreds of papyrus over two thousand years old.

The second poem, “Manna” is about the experience of Communion, a ritual of Christians who are spiritual cannibals and eat their God to become fully Divine. Both poems have previously been published elsewhere (in an online journal Quill and Parchment and in my book Miriam’s Iris, respectively), but I like them, and hope my readers like them, too.

Dead Sea Alive

An archipelago of broken words
A mosaic of ill-fitting pieces
Torn ribbons with angelic voices
Coded by crooked signs

Scholars decipher, assemble patterns
The dust of ages obscures the meaning

Here: “Blow your trumpets, slay the guilty”
There: “He heals the badly wounded, makes the dead live”
I see: “YHWH” - four letters in an ancient script
I hear: “Halleluiah!”

Two thousand years, two hundred days
And two hours. I too offer a sacrifice
Of my mind to the eternal presence

The angels are here with us
Hovering on iridescent wings
Just above red boxes with fire blankets
Just beyond a row of glass screens
With miniature shreds of holiness inside

© 2009 by Maja Trochimczyk

Manna

love fell on me
like snow from high sky
gently

I stood there
waiting for
communion

I looked into the eyes
of the man
who held love
my love
in his hand

abyss called to abyss
depth touched
the deepest core
of my sorrow

my bread and body

eyes closed
“Noli me tangere”
said Jesus to Magdalene

I know
this love will shield me

I count my blessings
bless the Holy Name

© 2008 by Maja Trochimczyk

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The text is based on the editor's introduction to the anthology. The Meditations on Divine Names, published by Moonrise Press, will be available in all major online bookstores. In the meantime, it is already available on Lulu.com The full list of poems is posted on moonrisepress.blogspot.com

On Pursuit of Happiness - from Paris to Monrovia

2012-02-10T00:07:00.000-08:00

For the Voice of the Village, February 2012 issue, I wrote the following column. My term as Poet Laureate of Sunland Tujunga is coming to an end, so I thought about what happened in the last two years. . .

Poetry … in pursuit of happiness

As a new citizen (American for mere two years), and a resident of Sunland for just fifteen years, I was delighted to have been elected the Sixth Poet-Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga in March 2010. English is my second language, so it was quite an honor. During my “Passing of the Laurels” Ceremony in April I was wearing a silly grin almost the whole time: I was so excited! I picked my motto for the two years in office to be “Poetry ... in pursuit of happiness."

There are many rights enshrined in constitutions of different countries; only in America do we have the pursuit of happiness. Many people came here for that reason and I am one of them. As a professional music historian, I spent years finding out and explaining what others thought – why the composers created the music they did, what did they try to say… It was – and is – a worthwhile occupation, but there is no comparison with writing my own poetry, about what I think and, what’s at the core of my being, what I feel. “The moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself” (e.e. cummings).

I feel calm and safe when wondering in Tujunga Wash, taking pictures and scribbling notes for my poems. There are so many things you can say about the sublime beauty of the mountains and the river. I feel proud to have found a place where I am at home among friends, where I can be, for once, for all, “nobody-but-myself.” Sunland-Tujunga is a wonderful, homey, friendly community, with amazing history and talent. The natural surroundings, the colors of clouds in the sky, the infinite variety gardens – this is all breathtakingly beautiful, but the greatest treasures of our neighborhood are its people. This is why we have Watermelon Festivals, Bolton Hall Museum, Village Poets Readings, Fourth of July Parades, art exhibitions, and community papers. Time for some “love poems” for our neighborhood… one illustrated with my photo, and one with a painting by Susan Dobay, Musicscape 12. (www.susandobay.com)

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I already posted here one of the two poems from the column, "My Sky" (I live inside a painting by Rene Magritte...), which I had illustrated with a variety of photographs I took in the Tujunga Wash and in my garden.

The other poem belongs in a set of four inspired by paintings by Susan Dobay. These particular light blue paintings are incredibly happy and whimsical. Looking at them fills me with happiness that can be felt but rarely. Reading poems with music by Rick Wilson improvised to accompany my voice was one of these unique, unforgettable moments of complete and perfect happiness. The sun was golden, in that four o'clock hour that fills the day with ripeness of things well done. The friends as attentive as they could be. The host, Susan Dobay was asking impatiently if I'll read my "Awakenings" that she's so fond of... Kathabela was spectacular in her light turquoise outfit with shiny mirrors on the skirt. Rick's playing was inspired. I think that making art makes life worth living.

Thanks to my poetic and artistic friends, I have found happiness in Sunland and Monrovia. The painting for this poem is above and on the cover of the book, "On Awakening" edited by Kathabela Wilson for Poets on Site and including poems by many poets, inspired by seven of Susan Dobay's paintings. That one, of a large tree, reminded me of a children's game. . .

See, how we dance?

Simon says – “grow”
and our roots reach for water
our branches for the sun

Simon says – “blossom”
and our pink petals open
in a gold mist of newness

Simon says – “sing”
and we let the breeze whisper
with hummingbirds, jewels, leaves

Simon says – “fly”
and we turn and turn again
in swirling clouds, voiceless music, dancing

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Hilda Weiss and Wayne Lindberg of Poetry LA have recently visited Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga, to record Featured Reader Just Kibbe and local poets. As one of the co-hosts of the Village Poets Open Reading on January 22, 2012, I was recorded as well.

I presented my Three Postcards from Paris which will appear in Quill and Parchment later this year. The postcards are about my visit to Paris on the occasion of the Maria Szymanowska Conference in October 2011. There's nothing about Chopin in my postcards, except that he lived in Paris and I walked some of the same streets. I had visited his grave at that time, but I did not write a poem about it.

Poetry L.A. posts videos on YouTube and links on their website. Thanks a lot to Hilda and Wayne! This is their labor of love. They are not paid for it and they spend countless hours documenting the state of poetry in L.A.

As for the fruits of my own labor, I had already rewritten the central poem and reorganized them, moving the first one to the end. Maybe it will not be moved, in the final version. I'm still figuring out the flow. The current one is fine, too - ending on a humorous note.

Maja - Three Postcards from Paris

A Haiku for New Year 2012

2012-01-09T14:58:00.000-08:00

A Haiku for 2012

black water dragon

in a nimbus of danger

we laugh to freedom

© 2011 by Maja Trochimczyk

Christmas Wishes with Roses and Ivy

2011-12-13T17:24:00.000-08:00

It is that time of the year again. Christmas. The stack of cards waits for my pen and a moment of stillness. Maybe an afternoon on the sunny patio would allow me to reconnect with friends and family? There is so much to do, so many parties to go to. I have to remember not to start thinking of holiday-ing as a chore, one more thing to do when there is no time, no time at all. It is nice to send cards, at least to sign them, if not write something original for every addressee. We are all interconnected through a network of thoughts and affection, but tend to forget about its importance in days filled with the daily business of busy-ness.

I was asked to read some poems at a party and realized that I have not written my annual Christmas poem yet. It came to me in the rain, when I could barely see the road ahead and the sky was heavy with darkness.

Did you know?

Some Christmases are rainy
Tears fall from overcast sky
On lonely crowds in hospitals
And prison yards

Sometimes Christmas is icy
Frozen under the pale moon
Changing faces into lifeless
Shadows at night

Some Christmases are scarlet
And green like fir garlands and hearts
Warmed by barszcz and hot chocolate,
Evenings by the fire

Sometimes Christmas is white
Snowflakes melt on my gloves
The thin wafer of opłatek we break
Shelters us in good wishes

Some Christmases are sparkly
With the tinsel of laughter
Giggling children unwrap gifts
Magic in the morning

My Christmas is golden
Like that first star of Wigilia,
Warm kisses with kompot and kutia
Blessings under the tree

© 2011 by Maja Trochimczyk

I paired this poem with a photo I took this October at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. I liked the open window, looking out through the multitude of shapes and colors onto a simpler, luminous world.

The picture became the cover of my Christmas card, and I paired it with the collage for the poem of "Rosa Mystica" - already posted here, but included below in the image pages. I also reprinted my last year's holiday poem, "Rules for Happy Holy Days" as a reminder about the importance of holidays. This poem was written for my last year's Christmas wishes. These Rules are timeless.

Rules for Happy Holy Days

Don’t play Christmas carols
at the airport. Amidst the roar
of jet engines, they will spread
a blanket of loneliness
over the weary, huddled masses,
trying not to cry out for home.

Don’t put Christmas light on a poplar.
With branches swathed in white
galaxies, under yellow leaves, the tree
will become foreign, like the skeleton
of an electric fish, deep in the ocean.

Clean the windows from the ashes
of last year’s fires. Glue the wings
of a torn paper angel. Brighten
your home with the fresh scent
of pine needles and rosemary.

Take a break from chopping almonds
to brush the cheek of your beloved
with the back of your hand,
just once, gently. Smile and say:
“You look so nice, dear,
you look so nice.”

© 2009 by Maja Trochimczyk

Since the year 2012 is supposed to be the last year of this Earth in existence in its present form, I figured I'll reprint, as a farewell of sorts, the "Apocalypsis" poem written for Easter, as well as some lovely poems that I enjoyed writing and reading this year: "A Jewel Box Sunrise" and "On Mushrooms." Below is the complete card with all the poems I selected to share for the holidays this year.

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Poetry, photos and design (c) 2011 by Maja Trochimczyk

You can print out a little booklet from the .jpg images of the poems, each stretched to a full page 81/2 by 11 in., sideways.

A Season Sparkling with Love

2011-11-26T20:51:00.000-08:00

I spent the morning taking pictures of liquid amber leaves and all sorts of other colorful tree leaves or petals that shone in the sun. I love the sparkling beauty of sunlight. The pictures are not ready yet, but I found a poem about fall colors, so here it is. As everyone knows, November in California is the equivalent of September in Canada, and our fall display of color ends only at Christmas. The first daffodils are coming out already, confused.

The Way

Do you like the poplars?
They line up the streets
cutting across sugar beet fields
on the outskirts of Warsaw
The yellow heart-shaped leaves
tremble in the breeze, glisten
like molten metal after the rain

The California poplars stand straight
and tall, guarding the way
Two fence poles gossip
The fields sparkle with color –
Fuchsia, rusty orange,
Burnt mauve, and bronze

The summer grass is dead
The rocks bruised purple
By the dying sun
Only the sky, blessed by honey,
Shines with the mandarin certainty
Of coming home

Would you like to know everything about everything? How about narrowing the focus and knowing just one thing, right now? Is knowing it all better than loving it all? Or some of it? As far as we can see? Astronomers keep finding clouds of matter further and further away. Billions of years. The seventh-billion human was born recently, or so we heard. Could you love seven billion people, even in theory? Possibly not. The numbers are too overwhelming.

Holidays give us a perfect opportunity to leave billions of people to their own resources, abandon trillions of stars spread across billions of light years to their unimaginable cosmic scale, and to focus on the people we are closest to, those we are connected with either biologically, through genetic links of kinship, or by choice, through that strange thing called "love."

It is probably because I got so completely disconnected from my "kinship network" and the safety of my genetically-predetermined, linguistically-defined environment, that I like writing about love so much. Writing is a substitute for doing, Freud knew that. At one point, I tried to define the various types of love, from desire to acceptance. The word itself is completely overused and extremely hard to put in a poem.

There is no greater love than... Love your neighbor... Do you love me? ... Mommy loves you...I love this necklace... I love turkey?

What does a single person without a single family member nearby do on Thanksgiving or Christmas? Mope around? Try to score an invitation to someone's party? Write? I wake up early and look at the sky above the hills outside my window. I make up memories of non-existent past. They are nicer than the real ones, I'm sure of that.

A Jewel Box Sunrise

Silver cirrus clouds float west
Like shoals of fish in an amethyst sky.
Sun rises over a wintry orchard.
The smooth zeppelin of poetry
Carries me above the tangle of dreams.
I rest, bruised after stumbling
Through twisted roots, broken tree limbs.

Frost grows flowers on window panes.
See how they dance? You nod
Over your morning tea. “You are welcome”
I smile at your questioning gaze.
My grandma’s gold-rimmed china cup
Warms your hands. Steam rises
From the bright topaz liquid.

“Tea flows in your veins, sweets,”
You say, laughing. The helium of words
Fills the skin of the moment.
“Come here” – you wrap
Your arms around my waist.
A kiss of herbal fragrance.
Dawn blossoms into lucid light.

We go outside, stand under
Snow-covered cherry trees.
They sigh and crackle. Their sap
Rises deep beneath the bark.
The white balloons of our breaths
Dissipate through cold air crystals.

I’m glad I waited so long
For my jewel box sunrise.

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The "Jewel Box" poem came from the coldness of an air-conditioned room and being really, and I mean, really bored with an endless meeting. This is why I'm never bored. In transit, on a plane, waiting for a red light - if I find a bit of paper of any kind, I just write, write, write. Is it a better way of spending time than doing anything else, like fretting and complaining? Possibly. The results are here to stay.

Pity the modern chefs of astounding inventiveness; we can never eat twice what they cook. Pity the musicians before the advent of recordings; we could never listen twice to their voices. The notation was, and is, just a skeleton of a music that came to life under their fingers, with the air they breathed.

But pity the poets? We still know the names of Sappho, Dante, Keats. The words change meaning as the river of language flows, like lava, through centuries. The liquid, effervescent stream shifts, evolves, and transforms itself in response to the new landscape it encounters. We translate and re-translate ancient poetic gems into new linguistic guises. Poetry lives, sparkling with love. It is the mirror of the spirit, life itself.

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Photos of public art at Washington Dulles International Airport, and of a palm frond in Sunland, California (C) 2011 by Maja Trochimczyk

Poetry (c) 2011 by Maja Trochimczyk. "The Way" was inspired by a painting "Road Home Olancha" by Trish Shaheen, a part of the Poets on Site project associated with the "Painting My Way" exhibition at APC Gallery in Torrance, September 2011. Published in the Poets on Site anthology, edited by Kathabela Wilson.

On Szymanowska's Satin Slippers

2011-11-12T23:45:00.000-08:00

I went to Paris in September, came back changed in October. An astounding city, full of history and charm. My purpose was to talk about Maria Szymanowska and visit and photograph places associated with Chopin. I found his grave and put a poem from "Chopin with Cherries" there. I went to the church where his Funeral Mass was held, with Mozart's Requiem (St. Madeleine) and I wondered about his empty chair and white evening gloves at the Bibliotheque Polonaise near the Notre Dame Cathedral.

The purpose of my trip was to give a paper about Maria Szymanowska, a Polish virtuoso composer-pianist, who preceded and inspired Chopin with her brilliant style, etudes, mazurkas and songs... Szymanowska (1789-1831) died young, too; Chopin was 39 when tuberculosis finally defeated him. Szymanowska - at 42 - went quickly, of cholera in St. Petersburg. But first she managed to enchant Goethe, who wrote for her a poem entitled "An Madame Marie Szymanowska (Aussohnung)." Known as "Aussohnung" (Reconciliation) it was included in the Trilogie der Leidenshaft, inspired by the sixty-year-old poet's tragic infatuation with a young girl, Ulrike. Szymanowska's music, her empathy and beauty helped the aging poet return to his senses. (I write about recent research into her life and work discussed at the Maria Szymanowska Colloque in Paris in my "Chopin with Cherries" blog).

At the conference, I presented the first version of my poem about Szymanowska. After making some changes, I read it for the workshop of Westside Women Writers group and I received comments from Millicent Borges Accardi, Kathi Stafford, Georgia Jones-Davis and Sonya Sabanac. Here's the third version of this work in progress. I want to capture her life as I see it - she was dazzling, inspiring, enchanting, and disappeared all too quickly.

The Shooting Star

Reflections on Maria Szymanowska (1789-1831)

“He brought a horse to her bed, that’s why” – they said.
“No, he did not let her play. She left…”
“Not the only one, mind you.”
Rossini wrote: “Madam,
I equally adore your modesty and talent.”
“At least she was a mother – that redeemed her.
Three children, two daughters, that sort of thing.”
“Did she love them? Was she doting?”
“Didn't she leave them for three years
To play her music?”

“Did she travel alone?” Always with her sister –
Paris, London, Dresden, Marienbad.
Devastated by Ulrike’s youthful charms,
Goethe found comfort in Maria’s nocturnes,
Reconciliation in the kindness of her voice.
He saw Das Ewig Weiblich.
He wrote Die Aussöhnung.

A Roman Goddess?
Wearing the latest London fashions?
She was the Queen of Tones for Mickiewicz,
the Polish bard. A friend of Prince Vyazemsky.
The Court Pianist of the Tsarinas.
A Warsaw brewer’s daughter,
She rose to royal heights,
Shining with the brilliance of her art.

She was elegant, refined
In her pristine muslin gowns,
With sleek belts and jewels.
Her satin slippers dared to
Outlive her by two hundred years.
They sit on a shelf, laughing.
She’s gone. Her daughters,
orphaned in a fortnight of cholera,
Are gone, too. So are
Their daughters’ daughters.

What remains of this dazzling life?
A gold bracelet with a cut sapphire?
A handful of songs, etudes and dances
Scattered along the way? Sweet melodies
Frozen in the air above vast plains
Of snow drifts and tundra?
The sparks of a shooting star
Falling across our dark winter sky?

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Lithograph based on a portrait by Maria Szymanowska by Jozef Oleszkiewicz, 1825. Framed print from the collection of Bibliotheque Polonaise in Paris.

Maria Szymanowska's satin evening slippers and an image of Warsaw's Grand Theater of Opera and Ballet. Paris, Bibliotheque Polonaise.

Portrait of Maria Szymanowska by Aleksander Kokular, Rome, 1825. Copy, original in the collection of the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature, in Warsaw, Poland.

From Grief to Thanksgiving

2011-10-30T23:08:00.000-07:00

I have written a lot about death and sorrow - too many poems, I think. It is what I lived through, not just the death of the loved ones, the loss of the family, of home – also the worst death, the death of hope, the death of the soul itself. Those of us who have extended, loving families may not understand the sentiments of my poem, “For Sale.”

For Sale

© 2009 by Maja Trochimczyk

Can I sell my life at a swap meet?
I do not want it. Nobody does, who knows.
Tattered, it has big holes
Where happiness used to be.

Can I sell it, then? Or trade it, at least,
For a better, less worn model?
You know – four kids, a minivan,
Home on the golf course.

Not this broken set of mismatched
Memories, fit for a thrift-store shelf.

My mother had a suitcase
Full of fabric pieces she cut to shape
And never made into dresses.
A seamstress’ cemetery
Of abandoned dreams.

The hue was not right,
She said.

The life she gave me was not right either
It faded into a dark, hollow green
Losing its luster in one country
After another, as I moved on
Hauling my treasures –
A stack of papers, ready
To go up in flames.

Can I sell it on E-Bay?
Or just give it away
To a more worthy keeper?

There are so many of these signs now, littering our streets. And nobody’s buying. What do you do after you lose yourself – to grief (as I did), to drugs, or despair (as so many other still do)? One way out is to look closely at the world around you, to actually see the fuzzy petals of the iris, to forget about the existence of everything else just for an instance while contemplating the strange beauty of a flower, bewildering in its fragile complexity (“Black Iris” reproduced in the previous blog). Still, it is tempting to see the desert landscape as saturated with sorrow, while waiting for the new life of rain.

The Waiting

(c) 2011 by Maja Trochimczyk

Nothing but rocks grows here
On this plain of sharp yucca leaves
And sand –

Lavender hills draw sorrow
From the air, waiting for the clouds
To burst open –

Heavy with rain, they bring
A promise to each seed, hope for the roots
Of new life –

Another way of moving beyond grief and ennui, feeling too tired to live, is to learn the two key virtues that saints master and mere humans sometimes reach: compassion and gratitude. Since November is the month of Thanksgiving, and I’m immensely grateful for the beauty I have seen this year in the High Sierras, in Paris, and, of course, in Sunland, I think it would be good to end with a thanksgiving poem of sorts, inspired by a Buddhist amulet box, with a mini-Buddha inside (“A Box of Peaches”). If you want to hear me reading it, call the Pacific Asia Museum, 626-628-9690, and dial 455#, to hear me and Rick Wilson on the flute. It is also posted online by Poets on Site. I thought it would be nice to illustrate it with a picture of a very happy apple.

A Box of Peaches

© 2011 by Maja Trochimczyk

You locked your Wisdom in a gilded box
Placed dainty copper flowers
Where metal bars cross, to hold them

You made a window for Compassion
To look out onto the silent world
Glowing with the Unseen

Would the talisman of the Smiling One
In your pocket save you? Draw luck
To your game of cards?

Let it be. Let the ancient words fall
On a carpet of bronze petals on your path
Dappled with tree shadows

Walk slowly through the magic
Orchard filled with an avalanche of peaches,
Ripening in scarlet sunrays

Stoop down to pick one, feel its warmth
In your hand, taste the mellow richness
Beneath the fuzzy, wrinkled skin

Say to no one in particular
The sun maybe, or the tree, or this late hour –
Thank you, yes, thank you very much

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Once, just once, I visited such a Buddhist orchard, filled with overripe peaches and the golden glow of afternoon sunlight. The friend who took me there died merely three weeks later, so I never wanted to go back. It is enough to look at pictures. But, at the end, the best thing to do is to count the blessings, the little ones, and the big ones. The time we have here is borrowed, we have to give it back, and to give an account of how we spent our capital of gifts, abilities, families, friendships, talents...

I must say I am very grateful this October: so many nice things happened to me. I received amazing signs of public recognition - as a community volunteer and activist. All these endless hours of working without pay and, often, a proper "thank you" have been rewarded by the kind words of the entire City Council of Los Angeles, City Controller, City Attorney and City Clerk.

Councilman Richard Alarcon sponsored a resolution that recognized my 15 years of volunteering on behalf of Polish-American community in Los Angeles, and my contribution to promoting culture in the local community of Sunland-Tujunga as the area's Poet-Laureate. The recognition, associated with the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the Modjeska Club, was also recorded in the city documents, keeping track of such honors for countless community groups and activists. For someone who arrived in California merely 15 years ago, this is a great joy!

Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich added his Commendation, and I can finally bask in the joy of being truly appreciated for all this volunteering that I have done, often questioning my sanity. Who does so many things for free? Would these recognitions, once for all, prevent a return to the doom and gloom of "I want to sell my life at a swap meet"? Maybe not, but they will certainly look great on a shelf in my office.

On Visiting Chopin's Tomb in Paris

2011-10-15T00:04:00.000-07:00

The curiosity about Chopin's death appears almost morbid today, when the cult of fitness and health has placed all disabled and sick on the margins of society. As Franz Liszt writes in his biography of Chopin, the hagiography, rather, setting the tone for the legend of the feeble, tortured body and the elevated, spiritual, noble, suffering mind: "None of those who approached the dying artist, could tear themselves from the spectacle of this great and gifted soul in its hours of mortal anguish." And a spectacle it was. As Liszt claims, Chopin planned things in advance:

"By a custom which still exists, although it is now falling into disuse, the Poles often chose the garments in which they wished to be buried, and which were frequently prepared a long time in advance [...] Chopin, who, although among the first of contemporary artists, had given the fewest concerts, wished, notwithstanding, to be borne to the grave in the clothes which he had worn on such occasions [...] He had linked his love for art and his faith in it with immortality long before the approach of death, and as he robed himself for his long sleep in the grave, he gave, as was customary with him, by a mute symbol, the last touching proof of the conviction he had preserved intact during the whole course of his life. Faithful to himself, he died adoring art in its mystic greatness, its highest revelations."

Then, he decided on his burial - the Mozart Requiem at the Church of the Madeleine, the body to be interred at the Parisian cemetery Pere Lachaise, next to Bellini and Cherubini, and the heart, submerged in brandy, carried under the skirts of his sister back to Poland, to be enshrined in a pillar in the Church of the Holy Cross on the Krakowskie Przedmiescie Street in Warsaw, not far from the place where he spent his youth.

Before burial, came Chopin's last days and moments, so fastidiously and admiringly described by Liszt:

"From week to week, and soon from day to day, the cold shadow of death gained upon him. His end was rapidly approaching; his sufferings became more and more intense; his crises grew more frequent, and at each accelerated occurrence, resembled more and more a mortal agony. He retained his presence of mind, his vivid will upon their intermission, until the last; neither losing the precision of his ideas, nor the clear perception of his intentions. The wishes which he expressed in his short moments of respite, evinced the calm solemnity with which he contemplated the approach of death.

As Liszt had it, everyone was blessed and raised to the heights of a spiritual realm by the very proximity of the dying "seraphic" artist: "—every knee bent—every head bowed—all eyes were heavy with tears—every heart was sad and oppressed—every soul elevated." After the final blessings, the agony began:

"A convulsive sleep lasted until the 17th of October, 1849. The final agony commenced about two o'clock; a cold sweat ran profusely from his brow; after a short drowsiness, he asked, in a voice scarcely audible: "Who is near me?" Being answered, he bent his head to kiss the hand of M. Gutman, who still supported it—while giving this last tender proof of love and gratitude, the soul of the artist left its fragile clay. He died as he had lived—in loving. When the doors of the parlor were opened, his friends threw themselves around the loved corpse, not able to suppress the gush of tears."

To remove the sanctified sheen of Liszt's verbosity let us read what Anne Woodworth wrote about this very moment in her poem published in the Chopin with Cherries anthology:

At the “Hour of Twilight”

– after reading Franz Liszt on Chopin’s death

Anne Harding Woodworth

Franz will write it all down:
that I swooned, that I asked for flowers
and music. Trouble is, I don’t know any Franz.

Tens of friends waited
in the anti-chamber. Trouble is,
I don’t have even four.

And a student held my hand,
because he wanted to return my affection
except that I’ve never had a student who loved me.

I do have a sister. I have two, but they wouldn’t think
of being prostrate at my bedside.
So who will hold my hand?

Where is a Franz who will unabashedly
describe my pillow? my sweat? my bitter suffering?
the unknown shores where next I go?

Of course, it’s true:
I don’t believe I’m going anywhere,
nowhere beyond nothing, that is.

Sing, Countess. Sing, my compatriot.
Trouble is, I’m not Polish. I don’t know any singers,
at least not one who can attain profound pathos.

And there’s no one to roll the piano I don’t own
to my bedroom door. Oh, Liszt, where are you?
I am coughing so. And the pain . . .

And the love . . .
Where is my Franz who will record
the cliché of a final agony?

I have not written about Chopin's death; for me his music is far too alive. But I have written about death and sorrow - too many poems, I think. The worst death, the death of hope, the death of the soul:

Black Iris

by Maja Trochimczyk

Black iris
Purple iris
Three tongues licking the air
The infinity of golden fuzz
Three in one

Trinity inside
Trinity outside
Circling, endless

Oh, to dissolve
Into that velvet smoothness
become one with the tricolor blossom
one with the tongues
Licking the air

Oh, to fade
Into the molecules
Dissemble within the iris
Flower into un-being
Into seed

The association of flowers with paying tribute to the dead, so typical of the West, was amplified in Chopin's death chamber: "His love for flowers being well known, they were brought in such quantities the next day, that the bed in which they had placed them, and indeed the whole room, almost disappeared, hidden by their varied and brilliant hues. He seemed to repose in a garden of roses. His face regained its early beauty, its purity of expression, its long unwonted serenity. Calmly—with his youthful loveliness, so long dimmed by bitter suffering, restored by death, he slept among the flowers he loved, the last long and dreamless sleep!"

The flowers are still there, in abundance. I visited his grave at Pere Lachaise Cemetery on October 3, 2011, during a strangely hot Indian Summer day. The tomb was easy to find. That's where everyone was going. The cemetery office distributes maps with notable graves marked, from Heloise and Abelard, to Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, and Rossini. But there are no fresh flowers at almost any of them - except at Chopin's. The grave is taken care of by a local Polish Historical Society that decorates it with the national symbols (white eagle on a red flag), and vases for flowers. These are always fresh, brought to the grave by the stream of visitors. About fifty people passed by during the ten minutes we were there.

Afterward, I was asked for the location of Chopin's grave five more times on the way out - by an American, a French hobo (visibly drunk), an Italian couple, and a family with teenage kids. Some had flowers to leave at the people's shrine, I brought my poems and a cover of our anthology. I left it there for the grave-keepers to put in a makeshift historical museum, preserving notes, piano keys, and other memorabilia left for Chopin over 150 years after his death.

The intertwined themes of death, mortality and morbidity were associated with Chopin especially strongly at the end of the 19th century and through the early decades of the 20th century. Polish composer Zygmunt Noskowski (1846-1909) elaborated on the topic of the “typically Slavic” feeling of the unspecific, yet overwhelming, “sorrow” (“żal” or “żałość”) and nostalgia permeating Chopin’s music. This overriding expressive tone was associated with a general poetic quality in Noskowski’s 1899 article, “The Essence of Chopin’s Works:”

"Whatever we call the mood in Chopin’s works, be it “elegiac quality,” “longing,” or “sorrowfulness,” it is of primary importance to state that, above all, the purest poetry prevails in them and that the breath of this poetry captures the hearts in a way that cannot be described with words."

Strangely enough, Liszt attempted to do precisely that, "describe the ineffable in words" in his discussions of that most famous, and trivialized of Chopin's pieces, his Funeral March from the Piano Sonata No.

"All that the funeral train of an entire [Polish] nation weeping its own ruin and death can be imagined to feel of desolating woe, of majestic sorrow, wails in the musical ringing of this passing bell, mourns in the tolling of this solemn knell, as it accompanies the mighty escort on its way to the still city of the Dead. The intensity of mystic hope; the devout appeal to superhuman pity, to infinite mercy, to a dread justice, which numbers every cradle and watches every tomb; the exalted resignation which has wreathed so much grief with halos so luminous; the noble endurance of so many disasters with the inspired heroism of Christian martyrs who know not to despair;—resound in this melancholy chant, whose voice of supplication breaks the heart [...] The cry of a nation's anguish mounting to the very throne of God! The appeal of human grief from the lyre of seraphs!"

Seraphs or not seraphs, the music still moves us deeply, still resonates within us, still inspires. The YouTube comments of uneducated teens betray their helplessness under his sway:

"When this song is played while bright sun light shining through a big window. its simply amazing" (on Nocturne Op. 9, no. 2)

"Even when I'm sleeping its playing in my head!! Have to learn this!! Chopin rocks!" (on Prelude in D-flat major, Op. 28, no. 15, "The Raindrop")

"Full metal alchemist" (on Pollini playing the Etude Op. 10, no. 3)

"This is how music was meant to sound like, from the soul. Sounds that you can relate to and understand." (on Zimmerman playing the Ballade No. 4)

"Amazing how few notes can make you wonder in your thoughts.....ahhhhhh" (on Aszkenazy playing the Nocturne Op. 55, No. 1)

"Ok the first time I've heared this song, was because Jimmy Page did a cover of it and I must say this song is just like a sweet but really deep pain that is falling slowly and slowly as it's becoming more near to it's end...a very intense short piece of music indeed" (on Prelude Op. 28, No. 4)

So here it is, for your enjoyment, Jimmy Page (I do not even know who that is, but apparently, he plays a guitar):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZXG0fNUUXs&feature=related

______________________________________

Photos (c) 2011 by Maja Trochimczyk, including the tombs of Bellini and of Chopin at the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Vintage postcards with scenes of Chopin's death, from the private collection of Maja Trochimczyk:

Postcard with a caption in Polish: “Portrait of Chopin on his death bed, according to a watercolor by T. Kwiatkowski.” Published in Lwów: Nakł. Spółki Wydawniczej “Postęp,” n.d., ca. 1910.

Postcard The Last Chords of Chopin, based on a painting by Fr. Klimes, Les derniers accords de Chopin. Published by BKWI (Bruder Kohn) in Vienna, Austria, c. 1900-1910.

One Hundred Thousand Poets For Change - Me Too!

2011-09-24T22:01:00.000-07:00

One of the poetry groups I love spending my time with, Westside Women Writers, had a scheduled meeting today, the last Saturday of September. We were to meet at Georgia's home, bring one poem each, do a workshop, you know, the usual. (We means: Georgia Jones-Davis, Kathi Stafford, Susan Rogers, and Millicent Borges Accardi, the founder and spiritus movens of the group). But then, Millicent, our fearless leader, said: "Wait, did you know this Saturday is the Hundred Thousand Poets for Change event? We have to do something." So that something we did was to read poems, of course, one extra poem each, on the topic of peace, or the transformation that is needed in the world to change its evolution from the current downward slide into chaos and violence.

So it would be peace poetry, anti-war poetry, environmentally-friendly poetry, activist poetry, involved in fixing the evils of this world. The trouble is I do not write this sort of stuff, at least, not obviously so. The closest I get to war themes are my poems for the paintings and art of Manzanar - inspired by art created at the annual Plein Art Workshops of painters conducted at the site of the former detention camp for Japanese Americans and in nearby mountains. The artists have a group show at the APC Gallery in Torrance, curated by artist and gallery owner Ron Liebbrecht. Poets on Site come to write poems and a wonderful book gets published.So every hear, I get closer to the heart of Manzanar, step by step. At the beginning, I studiously avoided the topics of barbed wire and watchtowers, focusing on sunsets instead. I thought that poetry should be more subtle, more ethereal, more of the sky than the earth, and then I found this digital collage by Beth Shibata, photographer and poet, connected to the topic of Manzanar through her Japanese-American husband.

Entitled "What we saw, what we dreamed," Beth's piece is a stark photograph of sharply outlined bare mountains and a pink sky above filled with paper cranes. I thought that they were dancing and called my poem "Skydance." I also dedicated it to Henry Fukuhara, the blind painter who was imprisoned at Manzanar as a child and established these workshops 14 years ago to help heal the wounds through art and keep the memory alive. Henry's friends, Ron and Beth, are doing exactly that, as the workshops and poetry writing goes on.

SKYDANCE

~ to Henry Fukuhara and the prisoners of Manzanar

the mountains rose and fell
with their glory useless –
trapped in time they did not
think they’d make it –
days so long, stretched
to the horizon, mindless

and the sky danced above them
avalanche of paper cranes

it was not a time for joy
the landscape said –
bleak, unforgiving,
it was not that time yet –
in gaps between minutes
a shadow rose, a breath

and the sky danced above them
spring dreams of paper cranes

contours remembered,
felt in the fingertips
filled the world with color
faded pastels, knowing,
pale rainbow, hues
of distance, peace, serenity

and the sky danced above them
paper cranes, oh, paper cranes

What is a paper crane for? In a Japanese tradition a thousand origami cranes, held together by strings is a wedding gift; apparently after making a thousand of cranes a real crane will come and grant you your wish. They mean that your wish will come true and that you will a very long and happy life. Beth Shibata's artwork places these strings of cranes in the sky, like semi-transparent shadows they are a wish that a wish would come true.

But is this my wish? I'm not Japanese, I'm barely American, having become a citizen only in 2009, after having lived here since 1996. What would my wish for change be? I am not one to speak up about politics, to go to demonstrations. I've learned my lessons from a childhood spent in communist Poland, where you had to hide what you thought, never admit to what you knew, and, in general, make yourself invisible, so you would not be noticed by police and get into trouble.

I know it is impossible to change the system when you need to change it. It will, eventually, evolve, like a dinosaur, moving slowly through time, too slowly for an individual life. The only change we can make, the only transformation we can control is the personal one: we are all challenged to evolve on a spiritual scale, to become more enlightened, better people. I have written a lot of poems about this and will keep writing, but is it something to share in public? I wanted to read a different poem for A Hundred Thousand Poets for Change, a poem about the only change I can make, I can control: my personal quest for light.

AT LAST

- to Theilhard de Chardin in gratitude for his visions of cosmic fire

Brown, muddy, dirty –
the river rushes down its course
to the ocean. The rains pass,
years go by, centuries, ages –
silt into stone into sand.
The circle turns – grinding, crushing.

A spark in the cosmic fire
I rise upward, striving
to shine above the murky waters
that have to flow down,
pulled by gravity.
I’m free to choose – right or wrong,
good or evil. My anger’s gone,
burned by the flame,
that left only ashes
falling into the darkness below.

I ascend through constellations.
Higher, lighter – regrets fall off.
The weight of nightmares lifts.

The crystalline sphere sparkles
as I waltz into the ever greater,
ever brighter blaze of holiness,
spreading above the void.

Tranquility expands, singing
“Consummatum est.”

_______________________________

The last words of my poem, "It is done," are the last words of Christ on the cross, in the old-fashioned Latin. I studied it for a year in high school and three years in college. I like quoting Latin, it is a part of my world, that unique sphere of ideas, memories, thoughts, dreams, and things I've done that marks my place in the world.

My wish for the new world is simple: if everyone did what I'm trying to do, ascend into the light of love, there would be no wars, no violence, no greed, no theft, no betrayal. Maybe then people who run countries now would apologize for what their countries did to other people at other times. Just look at Japanese-Americans, how they were suspected of being secret enemies of the state, how they got three weeks to pack up their lives and go to live in some desolate place, with one of everything, one doll for the child, one pair of shoes. . . But then my Polish family when they were kicked out of their property in the land that was Poland but became Soviet Union, were given 24 hours to decide what to take and what to leave.

They lost everything, except their lives and their heroic, noble spirit. Short on money, long on nobility - virtues grow in poverty, so maybe being poor is not so bad, after all? Why did my grandparents have to run, sell what they can, sew the gold coins into the lining of my mother's coat, see it ripped apart by the guide who was to take them to safety on the other side of the river Bug.... Why? Because Hitler signed a deal with Stalin in 1939 and Roosevelt and Churchill signed another one in Teheran in 1943 and again at Yalta in 1945. They sold Eastern Europe to the despot and murderer. They sold my grandparents lives, and those of millions of others.

And what about the British Queen? The Polish pilots from RAF Squadron 303, who defended her country in the Battle of Britain, wrote a desperate letter to her in 1944, begging for British intervention to save Warsaw at the time of the Uprising against the Nazis. After the initial victory and through the 63 days of fighting, the Russian troops stood idly by and the city burned. Over 200,000 people were killed there, including 170,000 civilians; when the underground Home Army capitulated, the city was emptied of all residents and dynamited, street by street... Where is the Queen's apology for not intervening?

Polish people are resilient, they know how to rebuild and rebuild again. They decided to remake the old Warsaw based on 18th century paintings by Bellotto Canaletto. The Old Town came to life, filled with cafes and jewelry shops selling Polish amber and silver. The Royal Castle remained in ruins for more than twenty years. I used to walk by on the way to my music school three times per week right by its last standing wall with one window opening into the night sky. The rest was a pile of grass-covered rubble. Now, the Royal Palace is again magnificent, even better for being made new.

What can the poets do to change the world? Remember, inspire, and love.

_____________________________

Poetry and Photos of California sky (c) 2010 by Maja Trochimczyk
Beth Shibata's "What We Saw, What We Dreamed" (c) 2010 by Beth Shibata

Poetry Audio Tour of the Pacific Asia Museum

2011-09-12T16:16:00.000-07:00

When you are tired and have a headache - write a poem. When you are happy you do not know what to do with yourself - write another poem. When you look at a beautiful piece of art - write a poem again. Then, burn the first poem, hide the second, and record the third...

This is how we - over 30 California poets - have created the amazing new Audio Tour celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena.

This Poets on Site Project was created under the guidance of the Museum's Education Director, Amelia Chapman, and thanks to the good graces of the indefatigable poets and artists, Kathabela and Rick Wilson - who organized, coordinated, and recorded the entire set. The poets have completed describing over 50 artworks from various Asian countries that are currently presented at the Museum. Their voices are accompanied by Rick Wilson who plays some of his amazing flutes from around the world. The instruments are named after each poem on the recordings.

All the poetry stops are now uploaded by the museum and can be heard on the phone from anywhere! How to listen? First dial 626-628-9690 then the number and the number sign, #.

The exhibition and the audio tour stops are divided into several categories, as follows:

The Art of Daily Life
• Tibetan Rug - Nora DeMuth, Sharon Hawley 404#
• Tibetan Table - Kath Abela Wilson, Monica Lee Copland 405#
• Rhini Horn Cup - Kath Abela Wilson Pauli Dutton 406#
• Thai Bowl - Constance Griesmer 407#
• Thai Bottle Vase - Constance Griesmer 408#
• Vietnam Charger with Myna Birds - Constance Griesmer, Pauli Dutton 409#
• Bilim (Bilum) Bag - Taoli-Ambika Talwar, Erika Wilk, Mira Mataric 410#
• Ink Box and Stand - Taura Scott, Kath Abela Wilson, Pauli Dutton 411#
• Horseshoe Chair (China) - Pauli Dutton, Alice Pero 412#

The Beauty of Nature
• Eagle in a Snowstorm - Sharon Hawley, Chris Wesley, M. Kei (read by Just Kibbe) 415#
• Persimmon and Pine Trees by a Stream - Christine Jordan, Erika Wilk, Deborah P Kolodji 416#
• Plum Blossoms in the Moonlight - Nora De Muth, Janis Lukstien, Kath Abela Wilson 417#
• Mt. Fuji in Clear Weather - Kath Abela Wilson, Nora DeMuth, Liz Goetz 418#
• Landscape after Snowfall - Ashley Baldon 419#
• Ducks and Lotus - Christine Jordan, Ashley Baldon, Deborah P Kolodji 420#
• Monkey Performing the Sanbaso Dance - Mira Mataric, Just Kibbe 421#
• Origins of Life (Korea) - Janis Lukstein, Sharon Hawley, Taoli-Ambika Talwar 422#

Wisdom and Longevity
• Yam Mask (New Guinea) - Cindy Rinne 426#
• Incense Burner - Nora DeMuth 427#
• Fukurojin - Nora DeMuth 428#
• Shou (Longevity) - Richard Dutton, Ashley Baldon, Joan Stern 429#
• Canoe Prow (New Guinea) - Cindy Rinne 430#

Religion and Faith
• Bodhisattva in Yab-yum Embrace - Genie Nakano 435#
• Vishnu and Garuda - Ashley Baldon, Christine Jordan 436#
• Daoist Priest Robe - Nora DeMuth, Pauli Dutton 437#
• Buddhist Five-point Crown - Genie Nakano, Mira Mataric 438#
• The Goddesses Durga and Kali Fighting the Demon Hordes - Pauli Dutton 439#
• Kensui (waste water bowl) - Peggy Casto, Kah Abela Wilson 440#
• Le Genie San Noms. Corée - Mel Weisburd, Monica Lee Copland, Joan Stern 441#
• Bodhisattva (Tibet) - Sharon Rizk, Nancy Ellis Taylor 442#
• Yamantaka Mandala - James Won 443#
• Bodhisattva (China) - Susan Rogers 444#
• Buddha (Pakistan) - Maja Trochimczyk 445#
• Seated Buddha (Korea) - Susan Rogers 446#
• Lohan and Attendant - Radomir Vojtech Luza 447#
• Goblins and Ghosts - Liz Goetz 448#

Status and Adornment
• Courtesan Reading a Letter - Deborah P. Kolodji, Monica Lee Copland 450#
• Kogo (Incense Box) - Sharon Hawley 451#
• Netsuke: Mask of Danjuro - Mel Weisburd 452#
• Netsuke: Pomander - Mari Werner 453#
• Netsuke: Horse - Joan Stern, Mari Werner 454#
• Gau (Protective Amulet) - Maja Trochimczyk 455#
• Female Figure - Mel Weisburd, Beverly M. Collins 456#
• Prince (India) - Kath Abela Wilson, Genie Nakano 457#
• Charger (Celadon) - Alice Pero 458#
• Charger (Qilin) - Mel Weisburd 459#
• Marriage Bowl - Rick Wilson 460#
• Earrings with Crab Motif - Susan Rogers, Nancy Ellis Taylor 461#
• Pair of Sleevebands - Erika Wilk 462#
• Pair of Bound-Foot Shoe - Chris Wesley, Taura Scott, Nora DeMuths 463#
• Ji-fu (Man’s Semi-formal Court Robe) - Maja Trochimczyk, Mari Werner 464#
• Head Ornament (New Guinea) - Cindy Rinne 465#

___________________________

I wrote three poems for this exhibition and like the most "A Box of Peaches" (no. 455#), but its "thanksgiving" theme makes it more suitable to the month of November. Of the other two, "An Embroidery Lesson" focuses on an ornately decorated courtier's robe, called Ji-Fu. The same robe has also inspired Mari Werner to write about embroidery. Here is my poem.

An Embroidery Lesson

Tonight we’ll count the clouds
The blue splendor of courtier’s robes
Awaits them

We’ll take a long silk thread
And wrap it with a filament of gold
Until it shines like ocean sunrise

We’ll catch the bright flames of the fire
Of red-eyed dragons that prance
And snarl on the hem

Their talons stretch towards a mandala
Resting above cobalt swirls
Of midnight rain

This, an unspoken secret
The serpent eats its tail
The end is the beginning

Look, it moves across the sky
Chasing a flock of gold-rimmed clouds
Let’s count them

___________________________

Rick Wilson improvised on the following flutes from his personal collection:

Japan: A shakuhachi was used to accompany poems about Japanese
objects. The instrument is a little over 21 inches long and made of thick, heavy bamboo. It is held vertically and sounded by directing the breath towards an straight edge carved out of one open end. The instrument is very expressive.

China: On the recordings of poems about Chinese objects, a xiao was played. This instrument is held vertically and has a notch carved in one end. It is made of bamboo; it is lighter than the shakuhachi, but longer. It has a mellow sound.

Korea: A Korean danso was played for the poems about Korean
objects. This instrument is a notched end-blown flute like the xiao but is smaller and higher pitched.

India: The bansuri is a bamboo flute played transversely (horizontally) in India and nearby regions. A large bansuri of the type played in Northern India was used to accompany poems on objects from this nation. The instrument is mellow sounding and is played legato with frequent portamento.

Tibet: A small transverse flute made in Nepal, a type of bansuri, was used for poems on Tibetan objects.

Vietnam: A small transverse cane flute purchased in Hanoi, a sao truc, was played for poems on pieces from Vietnam.

Indonesia: A suling, a traditional flute from Bali, was played on the recording of poems from Indonesia. This flute is a an example of a duct
flute, which produces sound like a recorder or whistle.

Thailand: A wide-bore recorder was used as a substitute for the Thai khlui,a duct flute, on the recording of a poem about a bowl from Thailand.

New Guinea: Flutes are not common in Papua New Guinea, and a bamboo mouth harp made in the Philippines is played, in lieu of the traditional bamboo models found in the former country, for the poems on New Guinean pieces.

________________________________

At the end, though, Rick Wilson switched from music to describing his beloved wife in a poem inspired by The Marriage Bowl (460#)- comparing Kathabela to an elegant, golden, and magical dragon. She recently celebrated her birthday, and I honored her with a little birthday-wish poem, also describing her magical abilities:

For Kathabela

Hail to the Queen of Many Hats!
The Sprite with multicolored notebooks
collecting treasures, pictures, smiles.
Let's laugh with the pixie sprinkling magic dust
on each minute and gesture. Let's hear
the weaver of words, spinning poems
out of tea cups, necklaces and clouds.
Long live the Queen of Pentacles,
presiding on the Throne of Earthly Riches
over her court of jesters, knights, and lovers.
Let's praise the wisdom of a sage,
the charm of a dancer,
and the devotion of a whirling dervish -
hidden in her secret name, revealed
in the kaleidoscope of her art!

__________________________

The pictures are from Japan (Kathabela and Rick Wilson), from the courtyard of the Pacific Asia Museum (with Erika Wilk, photo by Kathabela Wilson), from recording sessions at Kathabela and Rick's salon in Pasadena, and from another exhibition of Poets and Artists at Susan Dobay's Scenic Drive Gallery in Monrovia (at 125 Scenic Drive, by appointment only).

Invited to contribute to the Poets and Artists Exhibition, I made two collages, one with a digital art piece and four "klosy" of wheat, illustrating my poem, "Tiger Nights." I made and framed this collage as a gift for Kathabela's Birthday (it is above her head in the photo). So here's a poem and an artwork, as a tribute to the spiritus movens of the Poetry Audio Tour at the Pacific Asia Museum.

Living in the Moment

2011-08-29T07:42:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the lovely hostess, Elena Secota, and friendly poets and musicians the featured reading at the Rapp Saloon was very enjoyable. I even had a bass-guitar accompaniment to some of my poems, including "Look at me..." inspired by Ella Fitzgerald's version of Misty. Rocky played the melody during the poem's refrains and was silent during the narrative stanzas. It worked very well! The poem itself is published on this blog, as well as in the Loch Raven Review.

My listeners liked it a lot, but the greatest impact on the audience was made by another, older poem of a more philosophical nature. I wrote "Memento Vitae" after the death of a good friend. The title, modelled on a medieval monks' maxim, Memento Mori (Remember Death), means "Remember Life."

Memento Vitae

Let's talk about dying.
The gasp of last breath.
The end. Or maybe not,
We don't know.

Let's talk about the last day.
What would you do
if you knew?
Whom would you love?
Would you find your dearest,
most mysterious love?
Or would you just stay
in the circle of your own?
Would you rob, steal
or insult anyone?
Would you cry?
Burn your papers?
If the fabric of your future
shrank to one day,
or maybe just an hour?

Let's talk about living, then.
The next breath,
that will take you
to the next minute,
the next heartbeat.

Just about – now.

Soon after presenting my work to a very gracious audience at what should be called "Poetry Salon at the Saloon," I was on the way to the High Sierras for my first real vacation in years - without the internet, TV, or Blackberry. I was off the grid, wandering around lush mountain meadows and forests, while the Kadafi regime fell and Hurricane Irene was approaching New York.

A week in the wilderness was a time of tranquility, rest, and spiritual revival. I listened to the breeze singing in the tops of the trees, as they whispered and sighed. I swam in the cold mountain lake every morning, leaving my worries "in my wake" - and I wrote a poem about it. Since it is still unfinished, here is a humorous testimonial to picking wild mushrooms among tall pine trees and delicate aspen.

On Mushrooms

In the forest of Christmas trees for giants
I look for the shapes of mushrooms
I used to know well – hiding
In tall grass under the aspen,
Beneath piles of pine needles and bark

Prawdziwek – the true one,
The king of the forest, Boletus
Rules in unexpected places
Among birch twigs and Douglas fir
Osaki, Kozaki – his second-rate,
Still lovely cousins wait in the shade
Among manzanita, wild currants and fern.

I find bitter, colorful szatans,
Pretending to be true
Pale muchomory my grandma used
To kill flies in a glass filled with sugar water
Psie grzybki fit for a dog
That would not eat them
And twisted, tree-growing huba
I do not know how to cook.

My share of mushrooms?
The toxic lookalikes of true ones!
That’s all there is in this
Enchanted forest for me.

And this is why, my dears, I wrote
And you read Confessions
Of a Failed Mushroom-picker.

Picking mushrooms is a great activity, as it takes your mind off everything, since it requires all the attention you have to spot and claim the mushrooms hidden under pine needles or in the grass. Next year I might be more lucky and actually find some... Besides, I do have to swim around that rocky island in the middle of the lake, with just one pine tree on it!

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All poems and nature photographs (c) 2008-2011 by Maja Trochimczyk. Portrait of Maja and Rocky by Elena Secota.

The Watermelon Festival and the Rapp Saloon

2011-08-15T23:23:00.000-07:00

When I last went to the Rapp Saloon, I thought that visit would be that, "last." I did not find the majority of the poetry I heard there, with an overabundance of one letter, "f," to be of much interest. I decided to skip driving that far for so little. However, I made a friend there, Elena Secota, who turned out to be a fascinating poet in her own right. She now hosts one of the weekly Friday Open Readings and books her own monthly features. I am very glad that thanks to her invitation, I will be able to re-visit the Rapp Saloon and see the changes that her high-class act has brought to this establishment. My appearance is planned for Friday, August 19, 2011 at 8:30 p.m. To honor the vibe of the place, I'll read a darker, more edgy fare than at the recent Moonday feature, where it was all about awakenings...

THE RAPP SALOON - POETRY READING HOSTED BY ELENA SECOTA
1436, 2nd STREET, (between Broadway & Santa Monica Blvd)
Santa Monica, California 90401

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POETRY AT THE WATERMELON FESTIVAL IN SUNLAND

The Magnificent Four, or the Village Poets of Sunland Tujunga: Joe DeCenzo, Marlene Hitt, Dorothy Skiles and yours truly, created and managed a new element at the 50th Annual Watermelon Festival, held at Sunland Park on Saturday, August 13, 2011, from 1:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. The Poetry Corner presented new, original poetry for children along with well-known classics by Shel Silverstein, A.A. Milne, and Rudyard Kipling (The Tale of Elephant Child). We recited English and Polish tongue-twisters and sang humorous rhyming children's songs. The model of a home-setting with children's chairs on a giant comforter, scattered with zebra pillows and stuffed animals, was created at a poetry event for the Puppetry Festival at McGroarty Art Center last year.

Each of the four poets contributed something: Joe brought the baloons and comforter, Dorothy donated the gifts, Marlene lent us a mike, and I had signs, books, and more comforters and stuffed animals that I cared to carry from my car... Our fifth member, Barry Ira Geller, did not make it, though contributed to advance publicity of the event.

Children came with their parents to rest for 10 - 15 minutes from the hectic pace and excitement of the festival. They sat quietly, listened, read poems from the books provided by poets, and picked up their prizes - colorful balloons and little toys. We planned on two hours, but filled out three - due to the constant ebb and flow of the audience it was hard to find a good time to pack up and go. We are happy that Beverly Collins once again brought her poetry to share in Sunland.

I do not write for children and certainly do not write in rhyme, so I was especially pleased that Joe DeCenzo read from his Ballad of a Hawk and twice recited a very amusing, brand-new poem-game, helping children to learn the names of body parts in English. In his poem, the last word of each couplet is missing and children have to guess what it is..."head" or "chin" or "shin." I noticed quite a few children who were English learners and this was a very good lesson for them.

We also had a couple of older children reading from our stack of books - picking poems they found funny. My contribution included poems "What I love in Sunland" and "On the Beach" for Father's Day, as well as two New Year's Haiku about the Year of the Rabbit. I also sang about The Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly and recited tongue-twisters about the winsome woodchuck and the warbling warbler, and, my favorite, a Polish beetle rustling in the rushes:

W Szczebrzeszynie chrzaszcz brzmi w trzcinie
a w Trzemiesznie straszy jeszcze postrach oczu strzyg!

Next year? More poets, and some limericks, I think... the G-rated ones, of course.

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UPDATE ON THE POETRY PICNIC IN BENICIA

The Poetry Picnic of August 6, 2011, went very well according to Benicia's Poet Laureate, photographer and organizer extraordinaire, Ronna Leon. She created lots of wonderful poetry posters and other materials to distribute at the event and through the Poem Homes installations in the community.

My poem dedicated to Henry Fukuhara and inspired by a digital artwork by Beth Shibata, "Sundance" was printed in color as a broadside and I'm very happy to see this attractive poster at my home.

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NOTE: All photos from the Poetry Corner at the Watermelon Festival in Sunland, held on Saturday, August 13, 2011.

Tigers, Orchards, and Moonday (August 8)

2011-08-05T00:40:00.000-07:00

The famed Moonday in the Village Poetry Reading will feature myself & Lucia Galloway during the August event that will take place at a private home at 14839 West Sunset Blvd, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272 on Monday, August 8, 2011 at 7:30 p.m. Moonday is a once-a- month poetry venue, co-produced by Alice Pero & Lois P.Jones. There will also be an open reading. See www.moondaypoetry.com for more details.

A featured reading is a self-portrait; every time I have to pick a set of poems for a feature I wonder about "the type of a person do I want to present." Since I am a community poet, a complete and proud "amateur" (lover) of poetry, I do not have to follow the rigors and snobbery of the poetry world. I've seen enough of that in the academic music world to give the whole thing a pass. I often write and read love poems. These are welcomed very warmly, but too often misunderstood. Written in the first person, they impress some of my listeners with an idea that the poems are autobiographical and talk about real people and events that transpired in my life. While fragments of experiences and deeply felt emotions served as the foundation for each of these poems, the events as described in the poems did not happen.

After one reading, a female listener came up to me all excited and moved by one of the faux romances I just read with great sincerity and conviction. She breathlessly asked: "And what happened then to the guy that gave you the ring?" "What ring?" I answered. There was no guy with a ring. There was no ring. Or, rather, there was one, but in a jewelery store window... Several poems that I selected for Moonday belong to this category, including two reproduced below. They fit the spirit of the late summer very well - the time of the Hollywood Bowl and outings to the countryside.

Tiger Nights juxtaposes a strange dream with a re-imagined concert at the Hollywood Bowl, with Joshua Bell as the soloist. It is written in the first person, to strengthen the immediacy of the experience and the intimacy of the voice. The poem appears to be a favorite of editors and publishers, as it was selected to appear in The Epiphany Magazine (No. 6, 2011), along with my profile for the Poets' Cafe radio interview, posted on Tim Green's website, and on the announcement of the upcoming Moonday Poetry Reading. Of course, the incipit of the poem also appears on my Poet Laureate portrait by Ronna Leon posted in a previous blog.

Tiger Nights

Someone nailed gold-plated clouds
to the hard, polished turquoise of the sky.

Striated, like the stripes of a tiger
I did not know I had for a pet

until he bared his teeth
at the dogs flowing through the air

to corner him in my backyard.
The blond fur glistened in shadows.

Three golden labs growled
at the cat the size of a calf.

He turned. His stripes shone
with danger. I woke up afraid.

Now I watch the gold of the clouds
change into orange, scarlet and amaranth

in a quickly darkening cupola
that rests on the hills

above the Hollywood Bowl.
Smooth tones of Joshua Bell’s violin

glow in the air, escaping
the relentless chase of the brass.

Wind snatches notes from the bow,
plays with their glossy sheen.

Stars blossom on cloud-stems
in bouquets, wild as tiger lilies

you gave me that night.
Danger lurks in your smile

as you caress my ear
with a whisper: “Remember?”

To everyone thinking that "first-person" poetry is strictly autobiographical, I hasten to explain, again, that I went to the Joshua Bell concert described in Tiger Nights with my best friend, Elizabeth, who certainly does not resemble a tiger, did not give me any tiger lilies, and did not whisper seductive and ominous thoughts into my ear.

The dream was as real as dreams are, but the tiger's smooth coat appeared to be beige and not striped at all, until I recognized the cornered, graceful creature as one of power and danger: the lovely animal turned its head at the dogs and snarled, becoming a striped beast. That was enough to wake me up. But the word "beige" is too plain for a dream poem, someone said, so I changed it to a more human "blond." The stripes on the sky, the stripes on the tiger, the tiger lilies... this fragmented imagery creates a surreal scene of uncertainty, filled with seductive charm and vague threats. The "gold-plated clouds" become real in a jewel sky as the danger passes, or, at least, seems to do so.

The second "imaginary romance" poem, also a favorite with audiences and publishers, draws together scattered seeds of experience: a glance from a passing biker, a long ride between slopes of California's dry golden grass , contrasting with the deep green of the live oak during a trip to Lake Elizabeth, and the favorite melody outlined by the flowing voice of Ella Fitzgerald. No, it did not happen in my real life. Yes, it could have happened, as the poem is cobbled together from fragments of different memories. Instead of two contrasting images - as in Tiger Nights - I use a refrain that brings back the beguiling singer's voice to lift the biker's narrative high above the melting asphalt.

“Look at me…”

- after Ella Fitzgerald’s “Misty” and a Sunday drive to a peach orchard

the dark honey of Ella’s voice
filled the valley with a golden sheen

The bike stopped at the red light.
The biker looked at me intently.
All in black leather, he did not seem familiar.

the dark honey of Ella’s voice
spilled onto the asphalt

The light changed to green. I was touched
by the brightness in his eyes as he drove by,
turning his head, clearly off-balance. He stopped
to gaze at my metallic Honda. I felt his surprise.

the dark honey of Ella’s voice
blossomed in an aftertaste of sweetness

I knew he realized who I was,
the woman he found irresistible again
and again and again. I wonder if he told
his girlfriend about our sunny encounter.

the dark honey of Ella’s voice
flowed over the wonderland –
the dark honey, oh, the dark honey

The country road led me towards live oak
and grassy slopes, shining yellow and bronze.
There was no hatred, just being alive
after the storm. I was silent. I had nothing to say.

The poem was published in Loch Raven Review (Spring 2010) and reprinted on the Poetry Super Highway website where I was a Poet of the Week in January 2010. The title comes from the first words of "Misty" as sung on that astounding collection of Ella's Blues and Ballads (Verve). The song, by Johnny Burke and Erroll Garner, ends with "I'm too misty, and too much in love..." You can listen to the version I love on YouTube. Compare it with other interpretations: by Sarah Vaughan, Julie London (with a charming alto and annoying twitter of flutes), and Ella Fitzgerald, again - with the Tommy Flanagan Trio. If you do not like singing, listen to Stan Getz, as delightful as any of the singers.

________________________________________

The Moonday reading will include some other perennial favorites of mine, like the Rose Window, and one of the Chopin poems, and maybe The Music Box that I like reading with an actual music box. Of course, I will read some ekphrastic poems to paintings by California artists - I have too many to chose from... The difficulty with selection stems also from boredom; poems written more than a couple of months ago sound old and tedious to me. The most interesting ones are the ones I'm currently working on and I hope to revise and improve as a result of a public reading. But these ones are still unfinished.

The most important reason for selecting a particular poem to read is the spirit of generosity - sharing poems with friends and listeners to enrich and brighten our lives. We are interconnected in a "noosphere" of minds that reach out and link together, raising each other to a higher level of awareness. I hope to do so, again, on Monday.

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Photos, digital collage "Tiger Nights" and poems (c) 2009-2011 by Maja Trochimczyk.

Poets' Picnic in Benicia - 8/6/11

2011-07-26T22:13:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, August 6, from noon to 4 p.m., Poets Laureate of California will have a reunion in First Street Park with Gazebo (Military and First Street) in Benicia, California.

Organized by Benicia's Poet Laureate, Ronna Leon, the Poets' Picnic is subtitled "Grassroots Poetry on the Grass" and will include readings by Poets Laureate or Poets Laureate Emeriti and their Poetry Communities during an afternoon of poetry, food, and discussion. All guests are asked to bring a Cold Picnic Dish to share. The Benicia poetry group will supply watermelon and beverages. Listeners are also encouraged to bring a poem to put in a picnic basket for a chance to have it read by a Poet Laureate in the reading.

The reading by Poets Laureate is from 2:30 to 4:00 pm and will include the following poets (who will read their own work and poems picked at random from the picnic basket):

*Cynthia Bryant, Pleasanton, 2005-07, 2011-12
*Terry Ehret, Sonoma County, 2004-06
*Joel Fallon, Benicia, 2006-08
*Deborah Grossman, Pleasanton, 2009-11
*Parthenia Hicks, Los Gatos, 2010-12
*Ronna Leon, Benicia, 2010-12
*Juanita Martin, Fairfield, 2010-12
*Janell Moon, Emeryville 2010-12
*Connie Post, Livermore, 2005-09
*Mary Rudge, Alameda, 2002 ongoing
*Robert Shelby, Benicia, 2008-10
*Allegra Silberstein, Davis, 2010-12
*Gary Silva, Napa County, 2008-10
*Maja Trochimczyk, Sunland-Tujunga, 2010-11
*Cher Wollard, Livermore, 2010-14
*Ronnie Holland, Dublin 2008-2010
*Ruth Blakeney, Crockett, 2006

Ronna Leon's previous and ongoing project was placing "Poem Homes" around her community of Benicia. These sturdy and decorative containers, somewhat resembling birdhouses, included copies of poems sent in from around California by poets who wanted to participate. The poems were printed out and distributed via the Poem Homes - people could just pick up and take home a poem they selected in one of the Poem Homes that could be found in various offices, stores, and community locations around Benicia. What a sweet idea!

Another great idea that Ronna has brought to fruition was taking portraits of all Poets Laureate in California, and illustrating them with a short quote from a poem and a handwritten signature by each poet. These black-and-white portraits are certainly a fascinating gallery of spiritual and artistic personalities. My portrait was taken in the library of John Steven McGroarty, California Poet Laureate in the 1930s, whose home now serves as a community arts center in Sunland-Tujunga. In the portrait, I'm holding the heart filled with laurel leaves that is passed on from one poet to the next during the solemn ceremony. I organized a poetry booth at their puppetry festival in 2010 and was teaching a poetry class to kids that summer. We held some of our sessions in the historic library, filled with vintage photos, books, and memorabilia. I would not mind moving in to that room, to spend my afternoons thinking poetic thoughts while looking at the pines surrounding the mansion and at the mountains beyond.

While my participation in the Poets' Picnic is not certain, I have contributed the following selections to the Poem Homes: Tiger Nights, Buddha with Swans, Skydance, "Look at me..." and Rose Window. I have already reprinted in this blog the Buddha with Swans and the Rose Window, the other three poems, were published earlier in various venues.

Two of these pieces will soon appear in a discussion of Moonday Poetry reading in August. The third poem that I submitted to Ronna Leon's Poem Homes, is entitled Skydance and belongs with a series of poems associated with paintings and other artwork created at Manzanar Internment Camp. This historical site documents a dark page in American history: the WWII internment of Japanese-Americans suspected of wrongdoing as potential "enemies of the state", though not proven guilty. Their lives and careers destroyed, the Japanese-Americans showed a remarkable resilience when they returned to their communities and started to rebuild their lives.

Some, like Henry Fukuhara, a former prisoner, painter and organizer of the annual plein-air workshops, have never forgotten and hoped to make Manzanar an example of darkness overcome by light, of suffering erased by creativity. A Japanese-American photographer, survivor, artist and poet, Beth Shibata, is a frequent contributor to these workshops and has inspired many members of the Pasadena group, Poets on Site. In 2010, she made a collage of a photo of the mountains and paper cranes that permeate the landscape and ... my poem.

Skydance

~ to Henry Fukuhara and the prisoners of the Japanese Internment Camp at Manzanar

the mountains rose and fell
with their glory useless –
trapped in time they did not
think they’d make it –
days so long, stretched
to the horizon, mindless

and the sky danced above them
avalanche of paper cranes

it was not a time for joy
the landscape said –
bleak, unforgiving,
it was not that time yet –
in gaps between minutes
a shadow rose, a breath

and the sky danced above them
spring dreams of paper cranes

contours remembered,
felt in the fingertips
filled the world with color
faded pastels, knowing,
pale rainbow, hues
of distance, serenity

and the sky danced above them
paper cranes, oh, paper cranes

This poem, inspired by Shibata's art is dedicated to her master. Similarly to the poem "Look at me.." the narrative form is structured around the irruptions of a brief refrain, bringing the dance of the sky down to the earth and the painter's canvas. Henry Fukuhara lost his sight and painted from memory; his friends and associates continued to surround him and draw inspiration from his joie-de-vivre.

Skydance was published in Poets on Site chapbook on the Exhibition of art from the Annual Plein-Air Workshop at Manzanar and Alabama Hills, held in September 2010. The chapbook belongs to a series of ekphrastic poetry chapbooks edited by Kathabela Wilson. The series continues and the future Poets on Site projects will include my voice.

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Maja Trochimczyk's Portrait as Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga, (c) 2010 by Ronna Leon, used by permission.

Poetry and photos (c) 2009-2011 by Maja Trochimczyk. Photos taken in Sunland, Granada Hills, and at Lake Elisabeth, California.

Meditations on Divine Names

2011-07-07T23:03:00.000-07:00

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

OF ORIGINAL POETRY

to be published in

MEDITATIONS ON DIVINE NAMES

An Anthology Of Contemporary Poetry

Edited by Maja Trochimczyk

Forthcoming in 2011

from the Moonrise Press

_______________________________________

Almighty, Loving, All-seeing, Compassionate, Silent, Omniscient, Forgiving, Knowing, Merciful, Graceful, Beautiful, Kind, Sublime, Patient, Just, Wise, Awesome, Sovereign, Peaceful, Hidden, Perfect, Holy, Unknowable, Eternal, Light, Love, Life, Power, Supreme, Lord, Life-giving, God of Gods, YHWH, Christ, Yehovah, Allah, Goddess…

_______________________________________________

New Deadline – August 30, 2011 ; Language – English;

Length – maximum 40 lines per poem, 3 poems;

Format – email to info@moonrisepress.com, poems and bio in the body of the email; no attachments; include the address and contact information for the author and a biographical note about the author (100 words).

No reading fee. Authors receive a copy of their contribution in pdf and a 30% discount off the price of the book.

Submit your contribution online through the contact form or by email to info@moonrisepress.com, or maja@moonrisepress.com

P.O. Box 4288 Sunland CA 91041-4288

info@moonrisepress.com

www.moonrisepress.com/divine.html

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The 4th of July Parade is always fun in Sunland-Tujunga. Flag waving, marching bands, water guns and balloons, classic cars, horses, dirt bikes, Little Landers Society, churches, the Little League, Girls Scouts, Boy Scouts, and even the Oldest Rock of Sunland-Tujunga found their place in the grand procession along the Foothill Boulevard.

Entry No. 31, just after the Oldest Rock, and quite as quirky, was the Royal Chariot of the Poet Laureate - a Ford Mustang Convertible decorated with a scattering of letters, numbers and flags, and staffed with the Queen of Poetry's Court: Anna and Ian Harley-Trochimczyk, and Rosie Ramos who took most of the pictures.

Ms. Rosie came up with the "royal court" and "queen of poetry" labels. The following poems were distributed as postcards, illustrated with my photographs: two Haiku for the New Year (blue skies with white clouds), "Sunlight" (yellow rose), "On Bliss" (red rose) and "The Color Guard" (tri-color flag-waving parade picture) written especially for this year's celebrations and posted on July 1, 2011.

On Bliss

In a house of stained-glass cherries
you can hear a cat sleep
snoring into the comfort
of his hand-embroidered pillow.

In a house of fresh-cut roses
you can feel the air bloom
with the sweetness
of cinnamon and nutmeg.

You can taste love
mixed with raindrops
on the patio of my magic house
where everything you touch
changes into pure gold
of bliss, perfectly remembered.

(C) 2006 by Maja Trochimczyk

The photo album is available on Flickr: The Fourth of July Parade

Joy in Red, White and Blue

2011-07-01T12:43:00.000-07:00

Last year, I decorated a silver convertible in blue letters, silk roses, and flags to ride in the parade. My daughter brought her new favorite toy, vuvuzela (or zuzuvela? - I can never remember the name of this infernal noise maker). We stocked the car with postcards and candy and rolled through the town. The Poet Laureate's crew consisted of: the inspired poet of light, Susan Rogers; my favorite USC Viterbi Chemical Engineering Student, Ania (the best in her department, who just graduated with the Order of Troy and a Ph.D. Scholarship to UC Berkeley); and translator/producer extraordinaire, Elizabeth Kanski.

We wore colorful scarves I had bought in Washington, D.C., and we had so much fun! There were horses, classic cars, firemen, dirt bikes, clowns, civic groups, scouts - and everyone who was not marching in the parade, watched it from the sidelines. Thanks to the Rotary Club's efforts and Ellis Robertson's leadership, we'll have our parade again. Hurrah to Sunland and Tujunga! (I live in Sunland and these are two different little towns in my mind...)

This year, the decorations are not yet done, the poems to give away are not yet printed, but I have a little poem to share, with the best wishes to everyone who truly celebrates the joy of independence, that is the essence of the Fourth of July.

We live in a land of limitless possibilities. Let's be grateful for all our gifts. Our parade goes down the Foothill Blvd., from Mt. Gleason and Summitrose, to Sunland Park. It starts at 10 a.m. See you in the parade!

The Color Guard

Above the hills' crooked spine, clouds dissolve
into the azure. A red rose lazily unfolds its petals.

Mr. Lincoln blossoms by the birch tree,
glowing with the innocence of lost summers.

White bark hides among green leaves.
pale oleander spills over the picket fence,

shines against the deepest blue of the iris.
Its yellow heart matches sunshine's gold

bouncing off the brilliant sphere of stamens
in the bridal silk of matilla poppies.

My garden presents the colors at noon
dressed in the red, white and blue of the flag.

At night, fireworks tear the indigo fabric
into light ribbons and multicolored sparks.

The visual cacophony echoes the loudness
of sound explosions imagined by

that quaint musical genius, Charles Ives.
The orderly march of brass anthems

scatters into the chaos of laughter -
a child's delight - the Fourth of July.

And here's a link to the astounding piece by Charles Ives that I mention in the poem, the best Fourth of July celebration I have ever encountered.

Charles Ives (1874-1954) - The Fourth of July (Third Movement of A Symphony: New England Holidays, 1904-1913)

I do not have the time to dig into my class notes about this piece (my favorite for both music appreciation and history survey classes). Here's the note posted on YouTube by "inlandempires" with the recording:

"A parade of Americana with thematic nods to such popular tunes as Columbia the Gem of the Ocean, Battle Hymn of the Republic, Battle Cry of Freedom, and Yankee Doodle. Probably the most complex and fascinating of the four movements of the "Holidays" Symphony, Ives's Fourth of July takes metrical and motivic play to its outer limits. Commenting in his Memos, Ives wrote, "I did what I wanted to, quite sure that the thing would never be played, although the uneven measures that look so complicated in the score are mostly caused by missing a beat, which was often done in parades. In the parts taking off explosions, I worked out combinations of tones and rhythms very carefully by kind of prescriptions, in the way a chemical compound which makes explosions would be made."

Happy Fourth of July!

Summer Blues in Indigo and Gold

2011-06-26T13:35:00.000-07:00

You should never believe a poet. They make stuff up. They create worlds of words and twine. They always lie. Do they? Is a poem made of personal experience distilled into its essence that transcends the individual origins and speaks to millions? Is a poem a lesson in verbal pyrotechnics, exploding with fireworks of erudition, allusion and sophistication? Is a poem just a page from an intimate journal left to be read and pondered long after the thinker and the pen are gone?

The pen could outlive the thinker - we see the golden pens in museums. Would the computer do it, too? If the technology shifts as fast as it does, what could we put in our museums along with the clothes and plates and pillows of dead poets? Maybe their Kindles, laptops and smart phones that they use to read their work, scrolling down the screen with miraculously agile thumbs while holding the tiny device up in the air and squinting, because the font is too small in the feeble light on the stage...

Maybe nothing. Maybe there will not be any museums built for poets living today. Too many poets lived and died and clamored for fame already. There's no more space for museums, no space for new words to be added to the universe of language that surrounds us, that makes us who we are, fully human. Does it? Is language, fit for naming things and limiting them with a label, the answer? The only answer? Too many questions just give you a headache.

Mister Cogito wrote Zbigniew Herbert, taking his cue from the famous saying Cogito ergo sum... In her intensely intelligent essay, Oriana Ivy wrote an ode to non-thinking as a key to bliss. I followed another lead - into doubt (Dubito ergo sum , instead of Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum as Rene Descartes's dictum is sometimes rendered), but I will save it for another day. Could the poets say: Scribo, ergo sum? - "I write, therefore I am?" Sounds unusually boring. How about: Lego, ergo sum... or Recito, ergo sum... (I read, recite...) This does not work either. Amo, ergo sum - now, that's something altogether lovely, but we cannot be mono-thematic, can we.

I started public readings at Poets on Site various events around Pasadena and decided to start the summer with a reprint of one poem first heard in Torrance in the summer of 2008, the first reading that surprised me by the hushed attention of the audience. Everyone was silent, listening to my voice. An eerie feeling, even for a former college professor, used to inspiring silence in the classroom. The difference was that the poets were listening to my own words, not regurgitated thoughts of others. I start from this poem to welcome back our founder and leader, Kathabela Wilson and her wonderful musician-mathematician husband. They just returned from a long tour of China. The picture, by Milford Zornes is depicted in the lower left corner of the photograph. Susan Rogers, who later took my portrait above and called it "Maja Starlet" is standing and reading behind me.

Point San Vincente

~ inspired by a painting by Milford Zornes

Wincenty, my Orthodox great grandpa,
was a cipher I'll never unravel
except that the name bore a whiff
of old-fashioned stiffness.
Prim and proper, St. Vincent
was the patron of lovers in Poland
before the wave of Valentine's red hearts
swept aside such quaint traditions.
In France, old beggars crowded
to St. Vincent de Paul, the giver of bread
to the hungry, love to the afflicted.
In California, one young Vince was proud
of his middle name, shared with the saint.

A lone lantern shines in Vincent's name
onto deep ocean waters from the cliff
of last hope for those who lost
their most cherished treasure –
their life, drowned in the foam
of temptations, slowly strangled
by the fecund seaweed of desire.
Dangers lurk beneath the surface,
tentacled monsters wait
to pull weary swimmers under the waves.

Lasciate omni speranza say the gates
to Dante's Inferno. In the ocean,
Symbolophorus barnardi, the lanternfish
lures its victims with a false light
shining in the murky depths. The golden
sands announce the safety of shore. There is hope.
The light keeps calling: "Come to me,
come to Point San Vincente, come home."

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This occasional poem brings together various Vincents from my life in a free play of associations, centered on the image of the light shining over the ocean. Since the inspiration was the painting of Point San Vincente, I skipped the obvious reference to paintings by Vincent van Gogh.

Three years later, on the way to work, I saw horses wondering around their enclosure and the image wrote itself into a poem of sorts. Still fresh and unfinished (too wordy), it brings together disparate thoughts and images in another play of associations.

Summer Blues

The bay colt learns
how to shake his tail
properly from left to right
looking at his mom’s smooth bronze coat,
swift movements. Three-times his size,
she does not mind the attention.
They trot around the enclosure
in locked step, their manes waving.

“You look like a tomato” –
my son notices my skin
burned by the first rays of summer.
“Sunscreen, Mom, it’s called sunscreen”
– scolds the girl, as cautious
as ever.

I wish I lived in Spain
danced the flamenco every night,
an outpouring of passion
distilled into gestures.
I wish I had a horse ranch
in Nevada – a big Stetson hat
and cowboy boots to shield me
from rattlesnakes, made of their skin.

I was a ballerina,
played in an orchestra,
baked Canadian muffins
I hated, with bran and molasses.
Choral singing, knitting
and embroidery - two perfect napkins
still await the half-finished
tablecloth with Art Nouveau flowers
entwined along the edges
in purple and gold.

Shape-shifting, I move
from place to place, life to life,
like a petal carried by the gale
above the ocean.

The colt will grow into a horse.
The children will find their paths
to make and follow. I’ll keep dancing
my solitary flamenco – black, twirling skirts,
fluid gestures cutting the air
that shimmers with the strumming of guitars.
Throaty voices tear the hearts
with nostalgia
for life that could not be.

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The heartbreaking beauty of flamenco used to be spontaneous, but is so strictly choreographed these days, there's no room for invention. The flamenco "I" would have danced - in my poem - does not, could not, exist.

In contrast, it is very pleasant to write about things that are.
Solid, physical, gold-plated, able to withstand the assault of time.
Things outlive us. The pianist's suit laughs in its glass case,
in a museum room filled with things that make the absence, the loss of the owner even more vivid. His body already turned into dust.

The solidity of a Japanese screen calls for a celebration in a "mock-haiku" sequence. The golden glow is made to last, it is created to fix a moment into perpetuity, transform the afternoon minute into timelessness.

Six Variations on a Screen

Rich golden sunset
blooms with intensity
ignored by the birds

Camellia blossoms
with innocence unnoticed
In the dazzle of sunlight

Pine branches shine
stars in the gold sky
happily oblivious

The rocks sigh, resting
aged by mineral stardom
tired into existence

The mossy slope spreads
between glistening stones
sleepy with contentment

Green grass awakens
the veil lifts before you enter
serene gold kingdom

This poem also came from an inspiration by Kathabela, who organized a Japanese-themed Poets on Site reading at the Pacific Asia Museum in 2010. The golden beauty of the screen fills the room with tranquility. No wonder, billionaires spend such fortunes on collecting artwork! Could someone spare a fortune for collecting words?

____________________________________________

Credits:

Portrait by Susan Rogers (2009, Pasadena)
Photo from Poets on Site reading at APC Gallery in Torrance by Kathabela Wilson(2008)
Photo of a matilla poppy by Maja Trochimczyk (2011)
Photo from Poets on Site reading at Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena by Kathabela Wilson (2010)
"Point San Vincente" was first published in a chapbook edited by Kathabela Wilson for Poets on Site (2008) - Three Generations: Milford Zornes, Bill Anderson and Ron Liebbrecht
"Six Variations on a Screen" was first published in a chapbook edited by Kathabela Wilson for Poets on Site (2010) - Gifts to the Japanese Collection at the Pacific Asia Museum

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COMMENTS FROM FACEBOOK
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Kathabela Wilson wrote:

"So, so sweet and beautiful Maja, you know how I love your poetry and love our collaborations. That is the most beautiful welcome I can imagine. And this is such amazing timing as we begin a NEW adventure together as Poets on Site for the Pacific Asia Museum's 40th anniversary exhibition, 2011! I love your tapestry of words here, and hear them ring. As some of the countries of Pacific Asia still resonate with immediacy in my mind I am up late weaving words too. You would have loved to see me writing in the dark on the way to Yellow Mountain, the words tumble over one another for 20 pages...in my journal for the trip... I know I can decipher them but there is something so amazing about the wildness of that first writing... maybe tomorrow I will untangle them and let them sing... our words will turn to gold... words on white like sunset coloring clouds, and seeping into the dark pen of night..."

Toti O’Brian wrote:

"Marvelous good morning I got, with these thoughts, poems and images of beauty. Thank you Maja! The words of poets are just like dreams, as you well demonstrate all the time: not only true, but quintessentially true. Yes, the story has been told already an uncountable number of times, but, as papa stork says to mama stork (they're are two amazing philosophers, after all) in Hans Christian's tale... . we will say it again, and again, and again. Trust the stork."

Lois P. Jones wrote:

"Awash and awakened in this golden outpouring Maja, weaving the thread of wonder between memory and imagination. Your rich history, mingled with the ecstatic bounty of nature makes for such a pleasure ride. How fortunate for those who know you that the scholar turned to poetry. When poetry calls to us...it is like the siren we cannot resist, no matter how we might try :)"

Rina Rose wrote:

"Maja, every word of prose and poetry is beautiful and magical. If I haven't thought so before, I think so now that you are one of my favorite poets. You are still a teacher, at whose feet so many (or at least this one) poet(s) would love to sit and learn. And I do learn from your words here."

Scott Kaestner wrote:

Wonderfully elegant per usual Maja, may you continue to dance with your muse and make music with language and I shall sing along to praise your poesy...

Oriana Ivy wrote:

"A lovely post. Marvelous opening photo. I am also taken with “nostalgia for what never was, could not be” – one of the main themes of my poems.

Yes, it takes a intelligence to argue against thinking – or introverted overthinking, to be exact. Interesting that the “think less” portion of this post is getting the most attention. I am certainly aware that some situations require us to think more. But productive thinking is “task-oriented thinking.” By “think less” I meant introverted overthinking that in my case invariably led to the conclusion: “I am a failure.” Maybe the word “thinking” should not be even applied to this phenomenon. It’s an automatic delusional train of thought that is not to be confused with functional thinking or the creative process.

I am also thinking of Dante’s warning against the misuse of the intellect. To Dante, misuse of reason was the source of all sin. But what truly haunts me is Jack Gilbert’s dementia. He used to be brilliant, and his best poems are indeed very good. His earlier photos showed a craggy, gloomy face, all sharp features and no smile. His recent ones show him with a roundish, cherubic face, and a happy smile at last. I am tempted to say he (involuntarily, to be sure) traded intelligence for bliss (in some cases, dementia disables mostly the left hemisphere, leaving the victim cheerful and sweet and childlike, delighted by the smallest things). Would I ever trade my intelligence for this kind of bliss? Never.

For all this brave talk about bliss, I put intelligence first. Nothing comes ahead of intelligence. If I had a choice between more intelligence or more bliss, I’d take more intelligence, in spite of the biblical warning that “in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow” (Eccl 1:18). Intelligence can be either a source of deep pleasure – when I read a challenging book, for instance, one that makes me think – or a tool of torture when it turns against me, trying to find answer to questions such as “What is the greatest mistake I made in my life?”

It’s thanks to my intelligence that I know there can be no reliable answer. I also know that it doesn’t matter what the mistake was, since the process of healing remains the same: I have to forgive myself, acknowledge the huge role of circumstances I couldn't control, and move on (what Milosz called “escaping forward into work”). It’s thanks to my intelligence that I decided not to be depressed, and defined my “no-think zones” – my former portals to depression, which I could enter at will as a refuge against the hardship of engaging with the world. It’s thanks to my intelligence that I can read, re-read, and analyze – and write. I’d still choose to be intelligent rather than happy, assuming such a choice existed. But since the proper use of intelligence – going into a subject in depth, for instance, or “gazing at the world” – gives me great pleasure, it’s not an either/or. My new ideal is “intelligent AND happy.”

There is the kind of bliss which gives the brain a rest from thinking, or else the thinking is effortless: the surprising discovery and insight, the right ending for a poem. For me, these are watery phenomena that occur while I am in the shower. But there is also intellectual bliss, the bliss of making a huge, dedicated effort – the bliss of studying and learning, the bliss of writing a complex piece of prose (I typed “peace,” since writing prose is so beautifully peaceful in contrast to writing poetry, which easily slides into the hell of obsession). Of course I enjoy and welcome the watery bliss of non-thinking. But I am not giving up the bliss of complex thinking, of using my conscious mind to the utmost."

John Guzlowski wrote:

“In a world increasingly given to stark images of chaos and collapse, forgotten mothers and orphaned houses, it's important to celebrate the occasional moments of transient beauty that still somehow occur."

Oriana Ivy answered:

"I agree about the need to celebrate moments of beauty, but I wonder if the chaos and collapse are anything new. Possibly the Victorians' flight into the kind of sentimental beauty that we now reject was their reaction to the "dark satanic mills." Or think about the horrors of the Middle Ages -- yet some of medieval art is the most transcendent ever produced by humanity."

John Guzlowski responded:

"I'm sure people have always felt something of the chaos and collapse, but really when I think about how much violence there is now and how much violence there was in the last century, I feel that maybe there is more chaos and collapse."

Oriana Ivy ended the discussion:

"No question that the 20th century will be known as the age of mass annihilation, but what makes me slightly optimistic is the spread of education, the rising life expectancy, the economic surge in countries such as India and China, more communication, and much else. The progress is painfully slow, with backslides, but we are progressing. That's not to say we'll ever run out of pain, or that the beauty of nature can cease to inspire us to praise. Gee, maybe my optimism has something to do with my knee shots? And knowing that in the worst-case scenario, I won't be subject to the kind of crude knee replacement that was the only option 20 years ago? It is one of the ironies of my life that I, a poet, take comfort not in art (well, occasionally), but I am thrilled by leaps in science, technology and medicine. The genius of humanity, the collective psyche, does not fail to awe me -- in spite of religious wars and other monstrosities."

"To return to the gift of Maja's post, what comes to my mind is this statement by Joseph Campbell: "We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy." My last blog post tries to say the same thing, and discusses various unexpected means achieving to more joy, e.g. limit choice (who knew?). "We must risk delight" -- Jack Gilbert"

Susan Dobay wrote:

"To my understanding those poets who lead us toward to higher awareness through imagination are giving us more TRUTH than those who giving facts and materialistic reality. Maja's poetry gives me beauty and food for my soul. The make up stuff could be closer to truth than the fact based lies."

Father's Day on the Beach

2011-06-14T01:13:00.000-07:00

Did you notice how children want you to admire them when they are doing something special? I used to sit in my garden and watch my son jumping on the trampoline. As it turned out, I had to watch him, I could not read my paper instead, because the moment I lowered my eyes he’s cry out from the air, “Mommy, Mommy, look at me, look how I jump. Did you see what I did? Oh, you are not looking…”

Their childhood passes so quickly: they grow up, graduate from high school, from college. Then, they move away. We are left alone, wishing that we looked at them when they asked. (I’m glad I did). In June we celebrate graduations and the Father’s Day. Here’s a poem I wrote about a father and his little daughter playing on the beach. That daughter might have been me, on the distant, cold shore of the Baltic Sea. My father did not like water, but I spent hours swimming. I even knew how to swim backwards…

On the Beach

Daddy, Daddy! Look at me!
Look how I jump! Higher than the waves!

Daddy, look! I caught a fish!
Oh, it got away…
Don’t worry, Daddy, it’s okay,
I can be a fish.

Look, I’m swimming.
I’m a fish now and you are a shark.
Try to catch and eat me!
Let’s play fish!

Na-na-na-na-na
You can’t get me
You can’t get me
Na-na-na-na-na

Wow! That was a big wave!
Salty! I swim backwards now.
Did you know I can swim
backwards like a crab?

Watch out! I got you!
The crab caught the shark
and ate him! I win! I win! I win!

Let’s walk along now,
Maybe we’ll find
pretty seashells for my room.
Maybe we’ll find a pearl.
Will you make me a crown with my pearl?
I’ll be a real pearl princess.

I love you, Daddy, I love you so much!
I’ll always be your princess!

Daddy, Daddy! Look!
I found a pearl!

© 2008 by Maja Trochimczyk

For a companion piece to this childish monologue of a five-year-old, I picked a “geometric” poem, structured in two parts with a “horizon” line in between, just like the paining it was inspired by. (“Linea in aurea” means “line in gold” – almost, it is not correct Latin, but sounds good. “On the Beach” also has this pivotal central point in the little girl’s song, so there’s a structural similarity in two vastly different poems.)

For some reason, a beautiful, geometric painting by my favorite Hungarian painter, Susan Dobay, called “Sunset,” reminded me of pearls. Maybe it was the memory of the shining surface of water at dusk, an expanse of brilliance against the quickly graying sky. But the geometric transformation made this image a beach from an alien planet. Pearls are, according to one legend, made of a mother’s tears that fell into the water and became jewels, shining with sadness. There is something melancholy in their glossy sheen. They also lose their luster when not worn, for they have to be touched by warm human skin to stay shining and brilliant.

The subdued colors of Susan’s “Sunset” are quite melancholy, just like the pearls. I created a subdued mood by repeating the “sibilants” – shell, sunset, shelter, sun, sadness, sand, shore, silver… The word “shell” has another meaning in the last line: “shell-shocked” means “deeply traumatized.” One consequence of trauma is a tendency to escape from reality, another is compulsive control over one’s surroundings, continually organized in perfect order, just like the waves in Susan’s painting. That’s what makes this image so sorrowful and full of meaning for me, ten years after the death of my father from gunshot wounds. A home invasion robbery I wish I could forget. Or, maybe today I’ll wear another string of pearls…

Shelled Sunset

~ after a painting by Susan Dobay

In a parallel universe
umbrellas are made of seashells
and shelter suns from the glare
of the waves – daintily, stealthily
threading lines through more lines
ad infinitum. The air breathes
with golden contours of silence
after sadness danced away
on the sand, at the shore,
above silver waves – twirling,
circling towards the horizon.

Linea in aurea in linea
Line after line after line

You have to tread carefully here,
not to be snared by metallic vines
that multiply, moving into calm.
You have to be cautious – so close
to the heart of sorrow in this cosmos
of resignation, dignity and absence,
where waves petrify into shells,
the rhythm of their frozen crests
echoing the pearl-gray patterns
that blossom in the foreign,
distant, shell-shocked sky.

© 2009 by Maja Trochimczyk

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Photos and poetry (c) 2008-2011 by Maja Trochimczyk
"Sunset" by Susan Dobay, used by permission

The Golden Rule of Compassion

2011-06-01T22:32:00.000-07:00

Compassion - co-suffering, shared feeling. This concept of Latin roots in two words, meaning "with" and "suffer" is the key to major religious traditions of the modern world. It may be found in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.

The Buddha said: "Compassion is that which makes the heart of the good move at the pain of others. It crushes and destroys the pain of others; thus, it is called compassion. It is called compassion because it shelters and embraces the distressed." Dalai Lama explained: "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion."

Compassion is more active and engaged than mere empathy; it implies action based on altruistic, charitable motives. It means living connected to others: to their emotions, their distress, their pain. There is no human society that is truly and fully human without compassion.

In the Western ethical tradition, the beginnings of compassion are summarized in the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you..." Ancient Chinese knew it as: ""Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself." (Confucius). Buddhist teachings phrase it as: "Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful." (Udanavarga 5:18). In 1993, the Parliament of the World's Religions, representing 143 faith organizations, passed a "Declaration Toward the Global Ethics" including the Golden Rule as the shared principle of all religions: ""We must treat others as we wish others to treat us."

How do we express it in contemporary world? How do we hear its voice in the incessant noise of the overwhelming barrage of information, mostly useless, and mostly ignored through the phenomenon of "partial attention." In order to feel connected and share the suffering of others, we need to focus on them, pay attention to other people in an intimate, personal way. Great spiritual traditions used "focal points" of stories or deities to make sure that the faithful paid attention.

A Buddhist monk lived a life "moved by mercy and, living compassionately, is kind to all creatures that have life." During the recent lecture of the Dalai Lama to students at USC, he talked about the difficulty he had with taking the life of a mosquito, he would not kill the first one that bit him, nor the second, third or fourth. Instead he would gently blow at them, trying to make them fly away. But by the fifth bite, his patience would being to run thin... Apparently, mosquitoes are the Dalai Lama's pet peeve and compassion for these pesky insects is extremely hard to practice.

Let us leave mosquitoes to their vices, then, and turn to noble swans. The range of "swan" stories is quite fascinating. In the West, we are all familiar with the "Ugly duckling" story of a swan raised not to know his true, regal nature, expected to be a mere duck and live among the common fowl. The magnificent self-discovery is the tale's timeless attraction: don't we all want to be enchanting swans, rather than quacking and waddling ducks? Another "swan" story is that of the Swan Lake and the myths surrounding this dark story with evil sorcerers and tragic loss, all the way up to the cinematographic and haunting in its spiritual darkness, the Black Swan.

But who has heard of Buddha's swans? The story is as follows: When the Swan King was caught in a hunter's trap and his leg started bleeding, all the other swans flew away. All, but one, his closest friend who refused to abandoned the injured King. When the hunter came back for his prey, the faithful swan begged him to free the Swan King so they could both fly away. Moved by the altruistic behavior of the second bird, risking his own life for that of his friend, the hunter let both birds free. The King of Swans was Buddha himself, teaching a lesson of self-sacrifice and friendship. The core virtue of this story is compassion.

In my poem, describing a sculpture found in the permanent collection of the Pacific Asia Museum, "Usha" is a Vedic/Hindu goddess of dawn and "Ushnisha" means a three dimensional topknot or crown on Buddha's head - a sign of enlightenment. Both words are used more for the sound effect than meaning, though ascent and illumination at dawn is an old spiritual theme. "Numinous" refers to the power or presence of divinity - I look at the Buddha through my Christian eyes, seeking divine signs and lessons everywhere.

Buddha with Swans

Swans embrace
on Buddha’s breastplate,
below his heavy-lidded
eyes and a half-smile
overshadowed
by the massive crown.

Usha towers above
Ushnisha. Dawn rises
over spiky bronze prongs,
wings on the shoulders.

He is covered in glory,
his mind ascends already
into the lucid distance of yes.

The left hand gathers love
from the world as a gift
to the other universe,
where all is always well.
The right hand sternly points
down to the earth.

Straight fingers, simple laws –
stand upright, patiently wait
for the rain of blessings
to fall upon you with the weight
of Buddha's crown.

On his chest, the swans
embrace, faintly shining
in the numinous wreath
of the present.

In the second poem, called "Illuminata" (the enlightened one), I refer to another core Buddhist principle: the renunciation of all desire, as the foundation for wisdom and compassion. Except, in my Western zeal for self-betterment, I really, really, really "want that crown" - thus, paradoxically, giving in to the desire that makes it impossible to attain enlightenment. "Avalokiteshvara" - a strange, eight-armed figure that is portrayed either seated or dancing, is an embodiment of infinite compassion. This Buddhist saint (Bodhisattva) was an enlightened one who refused to enter the blissful state of Nirvana in order to stay among people and help them ascend spiritually.

Illuminata

I want that crown.

That one. In the middle,
right above the eight-armedjavascript:void(0)
Avalokiteshvara of gilded
bronze with blue paint.

I want that crown.

I want the divine light
to paint my thoughts
with the blue of wisdom,
with the gold of compassion.

I want my eyes to sparkle
with the jewel hues
of enlightenment.

I want to soar in the song
of the mountain peaks,
breathe their rarefied air.

I want that crown.

(C) 2009 by Maja Trochimczyk

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NOTES:

Written in 2009 for the tour of the permanent collection of the Pacific Asia Museum, the first poem is a description of a Seated Buddha sculpture from Myanmar (Burma), wearing a high crown and body armor. The second poem refers to a crown worn in Buddhist processions in Nepal.

Both poems were first published in a chapbook edited by Kathabela Wilson for Poets on Site, Pasadena, 2009.

"Usha" is a Vedic/Hindu goddess of dawn and "Ushnisha" means a three dimensional topknot or crown on Buddha's head - a sign of enlightenment. Both words are used more for the sound effect than meaning, though ascent and illumination at dawn is an old spiritual trope.

The digital collages (c) 2009 by Maja Trochimczyk use the images of the crown and of the sculpture accompanied by an enlarged detail from the armor with the two swans embracing.

"All is always well" - paraphrased quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.

Roses and Roses Without End

2011-05-18T13:38:00.000-07:00

An insightful poet and photographer, George Jisho Robertson, who lives in London, England, posted a sweet set of rose photographs on Facebook, with many of the flowers captured chiaroscuro, their pastel colors contrasting with rich, verdant leaves of the rosebushes. George likes to blur parts of pictures and some of the artistically transformed photos are striking, appearing more transient and poetic than the real blossoms. (Other photos, changed into black and white, remind me of the portraits of the deceased on their tombstones, found in old cemeteries in Europe - no, I do not like those monuments of the dead).

The photo included here, of a "Chicago Peace" rose covered with raindrops (or, rather, as the case may be, drops of water from the sprinklers), looks like candied confection, a marzipan. It is delicate and pale, but it is not from misty England. I took it in my garden in Southern California, and posted in an album of 48 rose photos, called Rose and Roses, on my website.

A red "Mr. Lincoln" rose, with round water droplets spaced regularly along the edge of petals, reminded me of notes of music and I used that photo as a label for my "Chopin with Cherries" blogs. Other roses I saw through the lenses of my camera were completely covered in droplets of rain, shining like polished crystals or diamonds. My rain roses of the spring.

None of these roses, neither those in George's photographs, nor even those that are fading in the mellow fog of English countryside, have the tell-tale signs of Southern California heat: petals scorched by sunlight, shrivelling as they open. In the summer, all luscious, opulent blooms bear those heat marks. Their demise starts from the edges.

Seeing their struggles, one becomes mindful of transience and of the manifold and futile efforts we make to protect ourselves from our untimely demise - anti-wrinkle creams and lotions, injections, peels and masks... If all else fails, a lot of make-up. True, our lifespans exceed those of roses, but the efforts to transcend time are futile, all in vain. Inevitably, we'll fade away, just like these sun-singed roses!

You can see more scorched roses in my Rose and Roses album. The photo reproduced here was taken during the Station Fire, when all the mountains around were burning and the powdery white and gray ash kept falling down on my garden for weeks. There is an intense beauty in those last moments of a dying flower, don't you think? Like fireflies we dazzle in the summer, at dusk.

For the cover of a new edition of my first poetry book, Rose Always - A Court Love Story, which I was just inspired to revise, I picked what could be called a "royal rose"- bedecked in all its jewels of dewdrops and water reflecting the morning light. In contrast with the previous editions of this novella in verse, that featured up to 50 photographs of multi-colored roses from my garden and the Rose Parade, I decided to only use the dark red ones that have the texture of velvet or are lined with delicate veins like human skin. Astounding.

Rose Garland

I thought roses.
I thought rich, velvet blossoms.
I thought a red rainbow
from deep crimson to delicately pinkish.

The secret was underground
where the roots sustain
the multi-hued orgy of sensuous allure –
flowers opening to dazzle and fade.

The strength of the rose
is invisible – you see the blush
of seduction in each leaf and petal,

You admire their charms.
Yet, you care for what’s out of sight,
not for the obvious.

I thought your love.
I thought how you adore me.
I went deeper down to the source.

The rose, Sappho’s lightning
of beauty, breathes love,
laughs at the wind and wonders.

The mystic rosebush dances,
crowned with the royal
garland of fire.

The revisions of my book were quite substantial and required a withdrawal of the previous versions. As I explained in the preface to the new edition: "The original version, woven from lyrical poems and dramatic court excerpts, inexorably ended in a tragedy, implied by the focus on the vicious circle of crime, depression, and alienation. . . The agglomeration of literary tropes of love, with a multitude of quotations and allusions, counterbalanced the weight of darkness, with a glimmer of hope appearing at the very end. Yet, it was only a glimmer. In the three years since the book’s publication, the tragic mood has lifted. Darkness is no longer inevitable. A new hope arises from a slow process of transformation, searing experiences, and deepened self-knowledge. The spiritual evolution will continue after crossing the turning point on an ascending path of gradual enlightenment. The toxic shame and self-destruction are replaced by the quiet persistence of caring and forgiveness."

The transition is marked by some newly added poems, such as the Rose Window (found in the Valentine's Day blog), and the Ready to Wear, copied below (and earlier published in our local community paper, the Voice of the Village). I published this poem in the revised book without its title, in accordance with the volume's structure of 85 numbered lyrical poems, and 24 "lettered" (with Greek alphabet letters) excerpts from the story. The novella unfolds in stages: Wishing (Annunciatio), Seeing (Revelatio), Knowing (Dilectio), Feeling (Consolatio) and Being (Redemptio). The sections still feature paraphrases of actual court records that documented the circular flow of one tragic life, in and out of jail. But they are enveloped in and transformed by poetry. It may turn out, at the end, that the circle of crime and punishment may be broken... In my book, this miraculous deed is done by roses.

Ready to Wear

I’m dressing you in roses
so you don’t have to wear
the heavy sweatpants, block letters
across your thigh – PRISONER.

Scarlet blossoms are prettier
than the orange jumpsuit
and shackles on the way
to the courthouse.

Sheltered by poetry
you will not have to hide
in lies, deceptions,
color your hair black,
become an enigma
in sunglasses.

The blanket I wove
will protect you
from spurious rage
unneeded when the locket
of prayer opens
in an offering to the Unseen.

You cannot escape
His presence. Transparent,
opaque, you will blossom
after the light’s blade
cuts the bonds that trapped you
in the cycle of un-forgiveness.

Some of the original "rose" and "love" poems were included in this blog to celebrate Valentine's Day with a reflection on the nature of love, spanning a rainbow, from eros to charity. I tried to capture the essence of loving defined both as a feeling and an act. Thousands of poets and writers did that before me. Lyricists of country songs still do that, but "real" artists and creators of "high art" look upon the subject of love with disdain, as if new expressions of ancient and timeless romantic ideas were somehow found unworthy of a serious literary effort. Lucky me, than, that I am not serious. (Only by being entirely non-serious about myself, can I stay alive). For this abandonment of love and roses, you may blame post-modern irony and ironists if you want, or Adorno with his declaration that poetry after the ravages of the Holocaust is dead...

We can be dead with the dead, or alive with the roses, the choice is ours.

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Look for the 2011 revision of Rose Always - A Court Love Story on Lulu.com.

The Rose and Roses Album was posted in October 2010.

All photos and poetry (c) 2008-2011 by Maja Trochimczyk.

Happy Mother's Day, Everyone!

2011-05-08T00:22:00.001-07:00

Yes, you can find love in the streets of Los Angeles. I did - here it is! In time for the controversial exhibition at MOCA, making graffiti into art. I must say I will not attend this exhibition, yet another at MOCA I found a reason to miss. To put it simply: I do not like graffiti Tagging, to me, is what it is: the equivalent of dogs urinating to mark their territory, stinking ugly. Still... that heart on the utility box was painted over in a boring grey shade and I really missed it while driving to work. The heart reappeared recently, but without any text, nor tags, just in red.

Making "art in the streets" inspired painter Susan Dobay to create a beautiful collage from a photograph she took in Budapest. A young violinist, in a drab navy sweater and skirt, plays music in the street, while her baby looks on from his baby carriage. The open violin case waits for donations, which are not coming in the drizzle. I found something magical in this moment, looking at the scene transformed by Susan's art. I wrote a poem, one of a series inspired by her art. It was published in our community paper last May. Another poem on a painting by Susan Dobay, the Awakenings appeared here not long ago. I have to re-post the melancholy Shelled Sunset. Here's a tribute to Susan Dobay's "Violinist in the Street."

Mama’s Music

(After a collage by Susan Dobay)

The milk bottle is in the bag
but little Leo is smiling.
He likes watching the street.
He likes the music Mama makes
with those strange things she holds.
He gurgles happily at the sound
of the coins dropped into the box.

He stretches his arms to catch a sun ray
shining on them from an overcast sky
above the cobblestones and a magic tree
that grew from the sweet melodies
flowering with star dust. Maybe it will drop
bright blossoms on her dark skirt,
make her pretty like the ladies that listen?
They will go home when it starts to rain.
She is happy just to have the music
flowing from under her bow –
andante, tranquillo, legato.

________________________________________________

Another artistic friendship and a shared artwork connect me to another Susan, a wonderful poet and all-together-inspirational-and-inspired person made of light, Susan Rogers. We wrote poems based on the same painting. Mine was called "Always" and found the sweetness of old country music in that sugary landscape. Susan thought about her Mom. She posted her poem on this blog once already, as a comment to my poem about Patsy Cline and her landscape of love. Here it is again, in celebration of Mother's Day.

With You Always

~ for Jane

(by Susan Rogers)

It was supposed to be
just this way-
a watercolor world
lit by the clear, clear light
that happens only after rain.
You are lit here too
and so am I.
You who gave me
all the words I know
to describe the world
have become that world—
the colors bursting into
names: “Look, the sky
is peacock blue,
the grass is apple green.
See the peaches
in the clouds, persimmon
in the nearby hill, olive
where the branches lean.”
I couldn’t yet walk,
but you wheeled me
everywhere.
The stroller was my chariot
and you— my charioteer
pointing out the poetry
in every object,
every phrase
until my world filled
with the sound of your voice
and my eyes knew,
my ear knew, my mind knew
the wonder that lives inside
all spoken words.
When I was almost grown
you told me the story
of how you described the universe
giving me my gift of words.
I laughed, but never properly replied.
I wanted to bring you colors

of rain washed air,
to walk beside you when you
couldn’t see the lavender
anymore in mountains,
or the mustard in fields
where dandelions bloom—
and describe for you how beautiful
the colors are in the after light of rain,
how everything seems deeper—
even the water soaked grain
on the bark of trees.
In the picture that I paint
we are walking up a path
in the late afternoon—
we are bathed in the clear gold light
that fills a sky with promise.
I am pointing out a tree
with avocado leaves
streaked with teal.
It has just rained.

In gratitude for my mother
who gave me the gift of words
and for Kotofumi Tsukuri who created them.

_____________________________________________

Photo of grafitti in Lake View Terrace (c) 2010 by Maja Trochimczyk.
Poem by Susan Rogers used by permission.
"Violinist on the Street" by Susan Dobay used by permission.
"With You Always" by Minoru Ikeda - from the collection of Maja Trochimczyk.

Cherished Chopin & Poets Cafe

2011-04-30T08:21:00.000-07:00

My October 2010 interview for Poets Cafe (KPFK 90.7FM) found its permanent home on the website of Timothy Green, editor of Rattle who graciously supports KPFK's initiative to document poetry life in Los Angeles.

Lois P. Jones, an amazing, spiritual, insightful, and incredibly talented poet (I forgot sensuous and erudite), is a fantastic hostess at the Poets' Cafe, airing on Wednesday evenings at 8:30 p.m. She prepares well for her interviews, reading poetry, talking to her prospective guests, asking them to bring a lot of poems. She is warm and lovely and then... ambushes her guests with completely unexpected questions. Thrown off their planned path, guests have to reveal more about themselves than they knew they would, or would have planned to. The hosts laughs with them, shares her favorite lines of their poems, and leads them into a deeper self-understanding and, might I say, enlightenment. Well done, Lois!

After my hour in the studio, that was to be about the "Chopin with Cherries" anthology, but turned out to be all about the poetic me: Who am I? Why am I here, in Los Angeles? Writing in English? What and who do I love? How do I capture the ineffable in words?

Interview: Maja Trochimczyk on Poets Cafe, hosted by Lois P. Jones and broadcast on Pacifica Radio, KPFK, on March 30, 2011.

Our lovely friend, Kathabela Wilson organized a listening party for the broadcast date of the interview, on March 30, 2011, which she did not know for I did not tell her, nor shared it with Lois, was the 25th anniversary of my baptism during the Easter Vigil at St. Martin's Church in Warsaw, Poland. That miraculous night opened the way across the ocean for me, a Californian by choice. Ultimately, it led to a level of illumination that only now I'm slowly beginning to grasp.

I read one poem from the "Chopin with Cherries" anthology - the title poem, a memory from my Polish childhood, spent in the villages where my grandparents lived. That one is dedicated to my maternal grandparents, Stanislaw and Marianna Wajszczuk who settled in his ancestral village of Trzebieszow in the Lublin region after escaping from the area taken over by the Soviets during World War II. My mother was born in Baranowicze, now in Belarus. Each house in the village was surrounded by gardens, neatly divided by fences into sections where children were allowed into (orchard) and those they were not (flower and vegetable gardens). Children were like pets, or like livestock, in their capacity for destruction. My grandmother took no chances with her crop of tomatoes and strawberries...

We were not allowed to climb the cherry trees, either - the branches were too fragile, cracked easily. But the ancient Italian Walnut tree, with a smooth broad trunk and a perfect spot to sit in, with a book and a cup of cherries, that was something else.

The walnuts, first covered in smooth green skin, and completely white (if you peeled off the yellowish skin off each bitter-sweet nut), were scattered to dry in the attic. Full of old clothes, spinning wheels, weird instruments, and bunches of herbs hanging from the rafters, the attic was my refuge on rainy days. I'd read the old weeklies or books, and eat the walnuts or cherries, or whatever other edibles could be found, scattered on old newsprint. Who said, children had to watch TV or play video games to have fun? All you need is the rain, and a little bit of Chopin.

A Study with Cherries

After Etude in C Major, Op. 10, No. 1 and the cherry orchard
of my grandparents, Stanisław and Marianna Wajszczuk

I want a cherry,
a rich, sweet cherry
to sprinkle its dark notes
on my skin, like rainy preludes
drizzling through the air.

Followed by the echoes
of the piano, I climb
a cherry tree to find rest
between fragile branches
and relish the red perfection –
morning cherry music.

Satiated, sleepy,
I hide in the dusty attic.
I crack open the shell
of a walnut to peel
the bitter skin off,
revealing white flesh –
a study in C Major.

Tasted in reverie,
the harmonies seep
through light-filled cracks
between weathered beams
in Grandma’s daily ritual
of Chopin at noon.

_____________________________________

I was ready to read two other poems from the Chopin anthology, but Lois moved on, first to my "Ode of the Lost" - about the pain of emigration, dedicated to Adam Mickiewicz of the Great Emigration generation of Poles who settled in France after the fall of the November Uprising of 1830. An Ode of the Lost was published in The Cosmopolitan Review, in a special issue about immigrant experience in poetry that I edited, based on materials from a session at the Polish American Historical Association meeting held in San Diego in January 2010. Since that version (The Cosmopolitan Review) did not include any line breaks, I think it will be nice to see the poem with its stanza divisions.

An Ode of the Lost

~ to Adam Mickiewicz and all Polish exiles

Tired exiles in rainy Paris listen to Mickiewicz
reciting praises of woodsy hills, green meadows —
distant Lithuania, their home painted in Polish verse,
each word thickly spread with meaning,
like a slice of rye bread with buckwheat honey.

“Litwo! Ojczyzno moja! ty jesteś jak zdrowie.
Ile cię trzeba cenić, ten tylko się dowie,
Kto cię stracił” — he says, and we, homeless Poles
without ground under our feet, concur,
sharing the blame for our departure.
There’s no return.

Are not all journeys one way? Forward,
forward, go on, “call that going, call that on.”
The speed of light, merciless angel with a flaming sword,
moves the arrow forward. Seconds, minutes
stretch into years. Onwards. Go.
The time-space cone limits the realm of possibility.
If you stay, you can go on. If you leave—

Can you find blessing in the blur of a moment?
In a glimpse of soft, grassy slopes shining
like burnished gold before the sun turns purple?
Can you learn to love the sweet-fluted songs
of the mockingbird, forget the nightingale?

How far is too far for the lost country
to become but a dream of ancient kings—
where children never cry, wildflowers bloom,
and autumn flutter of brown, drying leaves
whispers of the comforts of winter?
Sleep, sleep, eternal sleep,
in the spring you will awaken…

Note: Quotation from Adam Mickiewicz’s Invocation to Pan Tadeusz, or the Last Foray in Lithuania (“My country! You are as good health: /How much one should prize you, he only can tell who has /lost you”), from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, and from the author.

__________________________________

Quickly moving through time in an interview that became my best portrait, I then came to my California inspirations. I read one poem from that strange novella in verse, "Rose Always - A Court Love Story" that preoccupied me from 2005 to 2008 (and still echoes in various love poems I write from time to time, they are all related!). Published just with a number (76), but often entitled just "The Music Box," this poem is the most miraculous, I feel, of the whole interview.

The magic comes from an actual music box, the one you see in my portrait above. I bought it for five dollars at a garage sale from a neighbor on my street. A white porcelain box with a pink rose in a gold frame on the lid, it plays a lovely song. I found it and then the poem just wrote itself, as I put this and that into the box. I do have a weakness for music boxes: my collection is not large, maybe ten or twenty boxes, mostly carved from wood with decorative inlays and carvings. The white china box, delicate and elegant, was a perfect expression of the nostalgic tone of the poem.

The Music Box

What the world needs now
is love, sweet love…

My china music box plays a song
from your childhood.
Under the lid with one pink rose
I keep my sentimental treasures –
the miniature portrait
in a grey enamel frame echoing
the color of your tank top
worn in defiance
of my sophistication.

The white tulle ribbon – a memento
from my wedding gown?
It held the ornament up
on the bough of the Christmas tree
after that second, numinous summer.

My broken ring, bent not to be worn again,
with a deep scar from your blunt saw,
a shape marked by the strength of your fingers.

It was a moment of liberation –
I don’t have to – anything – any more.

The three little diamonds –
faith, hope and love – embedded
in the scratched gold, still shine,
though not as brightly as the forty three
specks of light surrounding your face.

The missing ring piece hit the ceiling
when it broke off with the pent-up energy
of unwanted love – the marriage that wasn’t.
It is still somewhere in the corner
of the coldest room in my house.

What else?
Three brown leaves from the ash tree
that grew by itself and died,
unwelcome. The Cross of Malta
waiting to shine on your chest.

* * *

What the world needs now
is light, God’s light. . .

My music box plays on. I make up the words
just as I made up this love of clay and gold,
the dust of the earth and starlight –
partly fragile and partly eternal.

______________________________________

If one were to look for a poem, amidst all I wrote, that better defines me, not as a music scholar, nor an administrator, nor a award-winning historian, nor an usher who's always late for Mass, nor a mother who only cooks for holidays, nor even a poet, but simply as a person, this is that poem. T.S. Eliot ended "Little Gidding" - the fourth of the Four Quartets, with these prophetic words:

"And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one."

_______________________________________

PHOTOS: Maja with Lois in KPFK Studio, October 2010. Maja with Lois at Kathabela and Rick Wilson's Salon, summer 2009; Collage art by Barbara Koziel Gawronski in a California landscape (Tujunga Wash in Sunland) photo by Maja Trochimczyk, and portrait of Maja Trochimczyk by Jolanta Maranska-Rybczynska.

Easter Wishes and Awakenings

2011-04-21T22:33:00.000-07:00

Who said that Easter is about pastel flowers, cute rabbits that lay eggs and are made of chocolate, and fluffy dresses with matching hats? Medieval sculptors, carving the emaciated body of Christ, covered with realistic wounds and blood droplets, had an entirely different vision. Mary of Magdalen had a vision, too: the gardener, she thought, but it was He, and she realized her mistake only when He said, "Noli me tangere..." - "Do not touch me..."

Our love wants to be physical, fluffy, tangible, warm, sensuous. It is very hard to imagine a different kind of love, something greater, unique and universal, human and divine, always the same and always new. The true colors of Easter are the intense reds of the blood spilled on the Cross; the intense purples of coagulated droplets and the sorrow of Good Friday, a day of absence; the dazzling gold shine of flames of a new fire during Easter Vigil; and the brilliance of Easter bells ringing, ringing up to Heaven on that astounding, joyous morning, when all, finally, is well, once for all.

Instead of Easter wishes this year, I wrote a poem about the end of the world. It is really Harry Mulisch's fault. He should not have written that novel about the Discovery of Heaven, which is, actually, about the Discovery of Hell - unseen and distant God takes His Commandments back from the unfaithful, sinful humanity, leaving the traitors to their chosen fate in the Kingdom of Satan. That's what Mulisch's imagined and convincingly described. In the novel, the astronomer who finally discovered Heaven is killed by angels with a meteorite, so he fails to share the secret.

His son becomes the new Messiah, finds the stone tablets, as blue as the lapis-lazuli of his eyes, and takes them up to Heaven, floating in the air, surrounded by a whirlwind of Hebrew letters detached from the holy precepts that were ignored and disobeyed for far too long.

Here's my "Easter Apocalypsis" illustrated, appropriately, with a fading, dying rose.

Easter Apocalypsis

~ After "The Discovery of Heaven" by Harry Mulisch

It is coming. The angels know.
They dwell in their Piranesi castles,
twisted spaces where outside
is inside. They are not indifferent.
Not too smart for their own good.
Not cruel. They don’t tell us.

The end is coming, it is near.
Not death, mind you, not that
Ugly spinster without its twin.
No. The end of the end. Finis.
The satin fabric of a wedding dress
Trails behind the steps of a beauty
Gliding towards her beloved.

The river’s end tastes of salt
In its own mouth, opened widely
Into the waves of the ocean. Nothing
we can do will stop it. Just stretch
Your tired fingers, let the water
Cool your skin.

Why resist? Heraclitus
Dipped his toes in this river.
Shape-note singers praised it.
Saints dove in and swam around,
Luxuriating in incandescent glories
That passed us by.

The end is coming,
Flowing down the slopes.
Let’s sit on the porch, doze off
In honeyed sunlight, before it
Disappears, transfigured.

Let us believe there will be
Light, enough light inside us
- That kindling of kindness,
A half-forgotten smile -
To keep us afloat in the final flood
Coming, coming to erase the world
And remake it, anew, bejeweled.

Now, it would not be fair to all the chocolate lovers out there, if my Easter wishes were limited to this brief vision of the end of the end, a cosmic catastrophe that we will survive only if we allow ourselves to focus on the unbearable lightness of being, the heart of the heart. That happens when we awaken from non-being to an awareness that only what's within truly lasts, that the least tangible of our possessions - a fleeting moment of kindness, a gesture of compassion and comfort - is an eternal treasure, a sapphire hidden in ashes and dust.

I found a treasure this year, I found a friend. I also found a poem in a painting by another friend - a painting I like so much I would love to find myself inside it. Susan Dobay, a Hungarian artist is both spiritual and earthly, a hostess who laughs with her guests and feeds them regional specialties, but scolds them for being too loud when a poet reads something she'd like everyone to pay attention to (even if she is sometimes too busy making sure they listen, to do it herself).

Awakenings

~ after a painting “City Whispers” by Susan Dobay

First to wake: the maple tree.
Up and up, sprouting from a seedling.
With a crown of burnished gold, white
diamond crystals for winter –
It slept through blizzards to flourish
dressed in pinks and celadons.

Second awake: the girl.
Watching the trees from her bed
Or her wheelchair. She cannot go far
Into the streets, filled with noise.
Protected by smooth glass panes
She sees the buds on each twig
Fill out until they burst
Into carmine, wrinkled bows
Small and shiny, maturing
As they change into the green.

The third: a robin calling out
To his friends, dispelling darkness
With his shrill fluted motives.
The spring is woven from his calls,
Warmed up in red feathers on his chest.
He came late to scratch the ground
For a worm to peck, a beetle.
The looping birdsong measures
The coming of days. It floats up and up,
Above the rooftops.

The girl touches her curly blond hair
Growing longer, straighter
As the nurse braids it each morning.
The life, the light, she wishes
For this power to come in.
Make her walk, yes, make her walk.
She stretches up and up.
Outside, city whispers.

It was a distinct pleasure to read this poem while being accompanied on a flute by Rick Wilson: his music rose up and up in the middle two stanzas, appearing after a silence and allowing the tranquility of the sick girl's room to speak for itself at the end. In some way, it was my best reading with music. Rick was truly inspired. Susan Dobay and Mira Mataric said they identified with that handicapped girl, whose longing for wholeness and health is our longing, at other times expressed in the search for perfectly decorated chocolate eggs, tulips and the new spring dress for Easter.

In Poland, we used to say "Wesolego Jajka!" as if an Egg could actually be Joyous. Maybe we have to return "ab ovo" - to the beginning and start anew, with a rediscovered capacity to experience real joy? Before God takes his Commandments back and leaves us all to the dreadful fate of non-existence, without the source of all being? You know, that one: Beauty, Goodness, Truth.

Let the Easter bells ring, ring, and ring.

Alleluia! Pangue lingua gloriosi...

Pangue lingua sung by Coro de Cámara Abadía

___________________________________________________

Illustrations:

Photographs of flowers (C) 2010 by Maja Trochimczyk

Susan Dobay's Painting "City Whispers" - the poem "Awakenings" is a part of Kath Abela Wilson's poetry book project dedicated to the art of Susan Dobay.

Two recordings of bells from Il Duomo (Cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore) in Florence, Italy. From YouTube.com.

From the Canyons to the Stars - No, not about Messiaen

2011-03-31T00:16:00.000-07:00

If you never go to any classical music concerts but love art and painting, find some time to listen to Oliver Messiaen's monumental suite From the Canyons to the Stars (Des canyons aux etoiles...). This is cosmic mysticism set in sound, maybe the most powerful and inspiring work of music composed in the second half of the 20th century. Not "easy listening" music... one should say "awesome" - if that word did not shift its sphere of significance to somewhere quite distant from "awe." But you have to find a concert hall where they play this surreal assemblage of wind machines, birdsong, horns and instrumental chorales. This song of praise arises from the orange slopes canyons in the American west (the Bryce Canyon and Grand Canyon were two inspirations) to the starry skies and beyond.

Here's a visual interpretation of the first movement, Le desert, posted on You Tube by JeeRant two years ago. I found only the recording of the third movement, What is written in the stars (Ce qui est écrit sur les étoiles ), possibly uploaded without copyright clearance. Listen at your own peril! There are many versions of the sixth movement for the solo horn called Appel interstellaire (Interstellar call) posted by ambitious horn players the world over. You can listen to it on your tiny loudspeakers, but to have a full experience of the otherworldly music, you need to go to a real concert with live musicians, such as the one by Ensemble Intercontemporain in Athens, Greece.

My canyons and stars are found in poetry, not sounds. I document things that catch my attention in short occasional poems that have no pretense to "Great Art" - these poems are pages from a personal, intimate journal. They capture impressions and reflections from my peregrinations through a southern California landscape, a place of beauty unparalleled in this world or any other.

Only in California

The desert is rich with the noise
of our ghost river, suddenly filled
with mocha cappuccino, a swirl
of white frothy foam on the surface.

Chuparosa and sunrose blossom.
The moving white spot of a rabbit’s tail
disappears between sticky snapdragons
goldenrod and pearly everlasting.

The last red leaves tremble on the tips
of tree branches. The liquid amber
is bare; the gingko, no longer golden,
a skeleton waiting for summer.

One by one, scarlet star-shapes fall
onto the bright green carpet of new grass.
The shoots of narcissus and hyacinth
peek through the weight of dead foliage.

Puffy pink clouds surround the disc
of the moon, shining on the smooth
turquoise. Seasons melt in a day.
The sun smiles at the audacity

of this preposterous, beyond belief,
one and only, California spring.

My dear friend artist and poet and a person extraordinaire, Kathabela Wilson, has lots of great ideas, one of them asking poets to write about gardens and parks. The following two short poems were inspired, respectively, by the Pasadena garden of Jean Sudbury and Vance Fox, and by the Arlington Garden in South Pasadena, planted in the vacant lots that await the construction of the extended 710 freeway. I saw both gardens in the middle of the summer last year, and what a summer it was!

Time Lapse Garden

Arms of the agave
Stretch out to the sky
Waving in slow motion
Trying to stop the train of time
From moving on and on and on
Past fluffy two-color roses
The madness of cactus spikes
And the hammock swinging
Seductively in the shade
When Jean goes by

The Golden Hour

The mockingbird leads a chorus
of orioles, black phoebes, bluebirds,
finches, juncos, and ruby crowned kinglets.
The buzzing you hear is not dangerous,
these are Anna’s hummingbird’s wings.
Birds crowd around the fountain,
water droplets scatter on sandy path.
The afternoon sighs with relief.
All is well and all shall be well
in our garden at four o’clock.

From the desert, to the gardens, to the skies... An image quite different from these photos of leaves captured my attention when I was working on the materials for the most recent meeting of the Polish-American society that I lead, the Helena Modjeska Art and Culture Club. The meeting took place at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and the Polish-American engineers showed us the sublime beauty of cosmos and the allure of space exploration. Entitled "Cosmos - The Real Poetry," the evening was as educational as it was entertaining. I got some photos for the program and the blog with its description; the beauty of cosmos, indeed.

Cosmos

green rings around a red heart
sing in the darkness, sing
and blossom

light waves dance across
millions of years swirling
within black matter

the stars are born
the stars are dying
dying

green clouds around red suns
bloom in the vastness, bloom
filling the void

clusters of galaxies
expand, crush and collide
the ages turn

before me — beyond me — through me

a spark of cosmic fire
I float upward to the unknown
glow of the timeless “yes”

the stars are born
the stars are born
brightness

______________________________________

I find one constellation especially fascinating. Orion, the Hunter. It is not as clearly visible in Poland as here, in California. It dominates the winter's sky above my home and inspired the following love poem of starry skies.

Orion

I saw you
in his contours, when I looked up,
coming home from a late Christmas party –

My Orion, my bright
hunter crossing the night skies
with a bow strung for action.

Smooth skin shines over broad shoulders,
the three-diamond belt
adorns the narrow waist.
You are a constellation of beauty.

But a seraph? A fallen one?
They say he is “Shemhazai” – the angel
who fathered giants,
lured by the silky faithlessness
of golden hair,
the tresses of seduction.

He crucified himself,
hanging upside down in the winter sky,
remorseful, still guilty of desire.

It fills you to your fingertips
when your hands join together
at the small of my back
and you pull me closer.
I taste the salty drops
of your sweat on my lips.

Swathed in the midnight blaze
I’m waiting for the double helix
of our embrace to twirl
higher and higher,
into a brilliant, fluted column
of light

rising to pierce the indigo cupola
where the stars of Orion now sleep
immutable and content
in their silence.

© 2010 by Maja Trochimczyk

__________________________________________

Photo of Thor's Hammer formation in Bryce Canyon National Park, Southwestern Utah, USA. Photo by Luca Galuzzi (2007), uploaded from Wikimedia Commons.

Photos of California (C) 2010 by Maja Trochimczyk. Poems "The Golden Hour" and "Time-lapse Garden" were published in chapbooks by Poets on Site, edited by Kathabela Wilson.

Photo of nebulae and stars by NASA/JPL, courtesy of Andrew Z. Dowen.

Photo of Orion over Utah's Arches National Park by Daniel Schwen (2004) from Wikimedia Commons.

Poetry Readings in the Foothills

2011-03-15T22:17:00.000-07:00

March is the month for poetry readings in the Foothills. On March 4, 2011, I introduced elementary school students at the Pacoima Charter School to the "Chopin with Cherries" anthology (I discuss these two classes, the fifth grade and the second grade, in my Chopin with Cherries Blog).

On March 9, 2011, just before the Ash Wednesday services, I spent 15 minutes reading my poetry inspired by art, and accompanied by the wonderful Dr. Blues, who created different music for each poem. The program, entitled "Imagine Poetry," was presented by the Art, Culture, and Recreation Committee of the Sunland-Tujunga Neighborhood Council as entertainment for the monthly STNC meeting, at North Valley Neighborhood City Hall, in Tujunga. It was a great experience to rehearse the poems with Dr. Blues and see him creating these accompaniments to fit the different mood and imagery of each poem. We went in a circle from art to poetry to music.

I read poems inspired by the art of Phyllis Doyon, Henry Fukuhara, Minoru Ikeda, Saralyn Lowenstein, Stephen West, and the music of Patsy Cline ("Always). I also made photographs and photo collages for some of these poems. Since it was an Ash Wednesday evening, I picked several melancholy and spiritual poems, with only a hint of my trademark "love stories." Here's one example:

Consolation

you too will find the way into the orchard
where green fruit ripens among late blossoms
I found the path, I'm waiting there already

the birds chirp and frolic among the branches
they fly - cheerful in the orange sun

you too -
the path is not too narrow
the gate too distant

will find -
the most amazing jewel
of deep peace

the way -
will open soon
you will see

into the orchard
of love's riches
you will come

(c) 2008 by Maja Trochimczyk

At the STNC Meeting, I ended my reading with "Always" - a poem inspired to the same degree by the painting of Minoru Ikeda ("With You Always") and by Patsy Cline's unforgettable interpretation of Irving Berlin's love-song of the same title. I actually cite two lines from the refrain at the end of the poem; that part has to be sung. The audience typically joins in humming "I'll be loving you always" and everyone lives happily ever after. At the STNC Meeting the audience was silent, though. Having an excellent guitar player at my side, I was transformed into a singer for that occasion. I was later complemented for my lovely voice. Perhaps, I'll start yet another career...

"Consolation", published in my book Miriam's Iris, or Angels in the Garden (2008), though ready for presentation on March 9, was actually not included in the reading at the STNC Meeting. Instead, I will include it among the poems presented during the next Village Poets Reading at Bolton Hall, featuring the Spiritual Quartet of four poets.

The Spiritual Quartet consists of four female poets - Lois P. Jones, Susan Rogers, Taoli-Ambika Talwar, and Maja Trochimczyk. We will appear in a structured program at the Village Poets Reading, on March 27, 2011, at 4:30 p.m., at the Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga.

Each poet comes from a different spiritual background, while sharing the focus on compassion, beauty, enlightenment, and a creative expression of positive energy. We weave poems around the themes of light, love, forgiveness, hope, and friendship. We contemplate nature, mountains, birds and gardens, and draw inspiration from the poetry of Rumi, Rilke, and from our own spiritual traditions. More information about the Spiritual Quartet and samples of our work may be found on the Village Poets Blog.

The Rilke inspiration for my "Consolation" came from his astoundingly rich, intense, and comforting Sonnet XVII from Book 2 of The Sonnets to Orpheus (cited in a translation by Robert Hunter, 1993):

II/XVII

Where, in what blessed garden of eternally flowing waters,
on what trees, in the cups of which tenderly leafless flowers,
ripen those exotic fruits of consolation ?
Those delicious rarities, of which you may discover one,

in your meadow's trampled poverty. Often, in wonder,
you stand marveling at the size of the fruit,
over its soundness and unblemished exterior,
perfectly amazed that some careless bird or jealous worm
away beneath the root

has not deprived you of it. Are there indeed such trees,
where angels slide, tended mysteriously in slow degrees
by obscure hands, able, though not ours, to sate our hungers?

Could we ever, the lot of us but shadows and shades,
through any act of ours (too soon ripe- too soon decayed,)
disturb the calm composure of those blissful summers?

Since I first knew this masterly work in Polish, it still sounds strange to my ears in English. Knowing the words in two languages, it is possible to detect the undercurrent of the original German. This is one of those poems that touch you deeply, the lines flowing with an overabundance of grace. Everything else I can say about this poem will sound quite silly...

Seeing and Hearing in the Spring

2011-03-05T08:15:00.000-08:00

The gift of poetry is a gift of seeing and hearing the world as if it were discovered for the first time, seeing differently. A lot of my poems are written in “my” persona, an immigrant from Poland, a woman in love… One short example is below – I am a pious Catholic and I love late Gothic art, gold halos on paintings and sculptures of Madonnas.

Seeing Madonnas
at the National Museum, Warsaw

Gothic Madonnas with down-cast eyes
demurely
look within:

The infinity of love
spreads out the galaxies of laughter
amidst nebulae of bliss.

Happy overabundance
marks their cheeks
with a half-smile
of knowing.

Since I can see mountains from my bedroom window, and they look so beautiful all day long with changing colors, shadows, clouds, (not that I spend my days lounging in bed... though with a laptop you can have a "bed-office" as a part of your "home-office"), I find myself writing about the mountains a lot. When I used to fly around the country to conferences and lectures, leaving home at least once per month, my poems were about seeing the world from above the airplane wings, looking down on the Liliputian people below. Here's a poem about the rain season and what happens then:

Canyon Growing Pains

The little baby Canyon said to his Mama
“I want to grow up big, like you!”
She responded: “You have to lose yourself,
Forget your shape, your well-made borders,
Stretch beyond the boundaries
Of decency and rocks.
You have to flow with the flow
Of winter’s blizzards, summer rains.
You have to …” That’s where she was stopped
By violent tremors.

Her child, the Canyon, was no longer little.
A wall of vicious passion roaring down,
He playfully swept old pine-trees off their roots,
Broke windows, covered houses
with thick mud layers, piles on the grass.
He carved a new path from the mountains,
Down to the ancient riverbed, his Grandpa.

What would a teenage Canyon do?
We have no knowledge. Before he grows,
Let’s save our lives and move.

In this poem, I use the "device" of personalization - depicting the canyon stream as a child growing up during the rainy season.

A similar device worked quite well when I envisioned the mountains as ladies getting ready for their earthquake dance by having mud-baths and showers (see my poem, "Mountain Watch" published here earlier). Not that either one is a masterpiece; just an occasional celebration of the spring.

Another place that I cherish in the spring, and actually year-round, is my garden of roses, fruit-trees and a jungle of bushes where many songbirds find shelter.

I spent my childhood in a suburban garden like that in Poland, and liked watching the plants grow, finding the first shoots of green among the dead foliage in March. Birds would come back to sing in late March or April. The winters were too cold for them, filled only with crows and ravens, that flew to Poland from much colder Scandinavia.

The pattern of birdsong in California is different, as many northern songbirds come here for winter or, at least, a portion of it. We have a burst of birdsong in October. Have yo noticed? March is filled with a symphony of voices.

Bird’s News

The bird in my yard
eloquently said

“The Spring has come!
The Spring has come!
Completely, secretly
WILL STAYYYYYYYY!!!
Oooh, yes, yes, yes, yes,
Come and hear,
come and hear,
come and seeeee!”

Indeed,
when I went out,
the Spring was there,
smiling
___________________________________

In February I went to hear the poetry of my friend, actress, poet and photographer, Elena Secota, who was a featured poet at Beyond Baroque, www.elenasecota.com

Recited with a lovely voice and in a slight Romanian accent, accompanied by a guitar of her friend, Chad, her poetry took us to her favorite place in the world, the beach, where she escaped to watch the waves of the ocean in solitude. She wrote a whole book of poems about the ocean and illustrated it with her photographs, some taken repeatedly from the same place at 6:30 a.m. That’s dedication!

The book is written in one poetic persona, “her” persona – imagined to an extent, since she is the most social of my friends, always forging and strengthening friendships, bringing people together. Yet, she praises solitude…

_____________________________________

Photographs of leaves (c) 2010 by Maja Trochimczyk.

Portrait of Elena Secota, courtesy of Elena Secota.

Gothic Madonna: Tilman Riemenschneider (German, c. 1460-1531), Madonna and Child, carved linden wood. Wikipedia.

Love After Love - For Valentine's Day

2011-02-14T07:02:00.000-08:00

It is a topic of so many country songs, so many romantic sonnets, so many tales and novels. It gave rise to new genres of literature (romance, troubadour poetry) and in other arts (rom com, or romantic comedy in film; the comedy as a classic theatrical genre). After centuries of efforts to describe it, we still do not know what it is. The taxonomies and definitions that I cited in the previous essay are just one way of approaching this elusive topic.

For the Valentine's Day of 2006, I wrote the following short poem, dedicated to my children. It is simple and didactic, defining different types or levels of loving:

Love Defined

Amor
You are beautiful. I love you.

Eros
You are beautiful. I want you. I take you.

Caritas
You are beautiful. I love you. I give you. . .

Agape
Beauty is Goodness is Truth is Love.
Or,
We are.

♥ ♥ ♥

Step by step, the gradation leads upward from romantic infatuation to spiritual Love. At the highest level it is a complete acceptance of Being, the eternal "Amen" - "Yes" resounding from the slopes of the mountains, from the waves of oceans, from the smallest blade of grass and crystal of quartz in the sand. Love is... and always will be, unchanged. To understand it, it is enough to think of its opposite - hatred - and the deafening, blinding "No" that it entails. Denial. Rejection. Death.

The variants of love that I named "Amor" and "Eros" are often intertwined. The presence of "Caritas" and "Agape" may be sensed even in those stages of admiration and attraction. The following poems are selected to illustrate the process of spiritual evolution from love based in need, want and desire to that grounded in compassion and connection through mutual acceptance - the divinely timeless love.

A Chocolate Kiss

You are my chocolate,
my candy, my lover sweet
in the morning,
alive with kisses

My soul rests
like a bird
on your shoulder

I dream of you
daily

♥ ♥ ♥

This free-verse poem has been my favorite among my own love poems, not only because I do love chocolate. It is just sweet. Love for another human being that brings a sense of safety, trust, happiness in being together, in sharing, in becoming one... And then, there is the longing, dreams filled with desire. That is one way of looking at love: the romantic, "Happy Valentine's Day" type of love.

Its strength, from the times of Sappho, has astounded generations of poets, who, like Goethe's Werther wandered around smitten, with the eyes of their beloved blazing in their mind, the feeling of her lips still burning in memory... Petrarch, Dante, Rossetti, Rilke... all lovers of love. How strong could it be? For Sappho, it was like the storm that fells trees, like a lightning. Here's my version of that sentiment:

Lauda

It waxes and wanes
with the moon

It grows and recedes with the tides
flowing through my veins
with every heartbeat

It shines in the dark
like phosphorescent letters
on a child’s shirt

It is so full of color
that it shames the rainbow
and dims the neon glare
of acrylic wonderland

Indestructible
it has outgrown my despair
my anguish, my pride

Like child’s laughter
in an empty room,
like the stillness
of crystal mountain air

Beyond words
love is

♥ ♥ ♥

Now, if love cannot be defined in words, what am I doing, trying to name it and describe it in so many different ways? That, of course, is the task of poetry: naming the unnameable. In doing so, poets have linked love to roses, rich and fragrant, with hues ranging from pure white, through rosy, to intense scarlet and vermillion. Reading the history of roses makes you realize that, although these flowers were found in nature, they were created and re-created in countless varieties by lovers for lovers. The rose gardeners and makers crossed different varieties, spliced the roots of one bush with the branches of another - all in pursuit of that perfect flower. Now, let someone who saw a rose deny the power of evolution, or the human role in evolution...

A Secret

I thought roses.
I thought rich, velvet blossoms.
I thought a red rainbow
from deep crimson to delicately pinkish.

The secret was underground
where the roots sustain
the multi-hued orgy of sensuous allure –
flowers opening to dazzle and fade.

The strength of the rose
is invisible – you see the blush
of seduction in each leaf and petal,

You admire their charms.
Yet, you care for what’s out of sight,
not for the obvious.

I thought your love.
I thought how you adore me.
I went deeper down to the source.

The rose, Sappho’s lightning
of beauty, breathes love,
laughs at the wind, wonders.

The mystic rosebush dances,
crowned with the royal
garland of fire.

♥ ♥ ♥

In this garland of allusions, I managed to weave Sappho with T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets (the end of Little Gidding):

"All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one."

I also thought about Rilke's superb ode to the beauty of roses (Les Roses, translated by Barbara Collignon, VI and XV). Elsewhere he compared these flowers to eyes of butterflies, transient and timeless at the same time:

"One rose alone is all roses
and this one: irreplaceable,
perfect..."

And then, he says:

"Alone, oh abundant flower
you create your own space"

One rose alone ... That is a great idea I borrowed for my next rose/love poem. The "Rose Window" is structured like an argument, in a Socratic style of thesis, refutation, and synthesis. It marries the timelessness of a stained-glass window in a medieval cathedral with the recurring timelessness of petals that grow and fall, grow and fall, ever new, ever old, ever new...

Rose Window

I place you in the heart
of my rose, dark red one,
with dew drops on its leaves.

Like a tricked-up baby
from Ann Geddes’ postcard
you rest, snugly wrapped
in the comfort of my love.

“That too shall pass,” they say,
“That too shall pass.
The rose will wither,
love will fade away.”

Respectfully, I disagree.
I know the symmetry
of velvet petals
is but an opening
into a different universe,
a cosmic window,
timeless.

I see it in the shyness
of your smile. Yes.
You are that lucky.

In the morning,
when the curtains of mist
open above silver hills
carved from time
like a Japanese woodcut,
you taste freedom.

You found your true self
under the detritus
of disordered life.

Isn’t it strange
that you’ve been saved
by the perfection
of just one rose?

♥ ♥ ♥

Too sweet? Too charming? Let me go all the way, then, through a rainbow of hues found in a painting I liked so much that I actually bought. At one of the Poets on Site's Manzanar Workshop projects, I saw a watercolor by Minoru Ikeda, "With You Always." The title reminded me of a Patsy Cline song, and the colors of the hues remembered from the landscape of my childhood spent in villages of my grandparents, and in the pink house surrounded by yellow daisies that towered above my head when I came back to the city suburbs from my summer vacations.

My friend and wonderful poet, Susan Rogers, wrote a poem for her mother, inspired by the same painting, so I'm including my poem here as a gift of friendship. In poetry "I am, you are, we are."

Always

The voice of Patsy Cline
hovers above sweet cuteness of pastels,
brightly hued like the candy
we call “landrynki” and laugh
when the sugar dye paints our tongues
with fake pink and blue, fuchsia and lavender

We walk down a country road
to our pink and blue homes,
in a fuchsia and lavender embrace
under matching, happy hills that sing
“I’ll be loving you, always
With the love that’s true, always”

♥ ♥ ♥

Let us hear the timeless song, then... Irving Berlin's ballad, "Always" - in the voice of Patsy Cline who died too early, leaving us with the unforgettable sounds of her rich, throaty mezzosoprano, country-style, no less: Patsy Cline sings Always.

________________________________________

With the exception of "Defining Love," the poems reproduced here were published earlier.

"Chocolate Kiss" "Lauda" and "A Secret" appeared as no. 17, 71, and 41 respectively in Rose Always - A Court Love Story (Moonrise Press, 2008).

"Rose Window" was published in Voice of the Village in the Voice of the Village 1, no. 10, August 2010, p. 27 (pdf download).

"Always" appeared in a chapbook by Poets on Site edited by Kathabela Wilson and including poems written for the 12th Annual Fukuhara Workshop at Manzanar and Alabama Hills, Observations and Interpretations, (Poets on Site, September 2009). The poem was first read at the closing of the exhibition from the Workshop held at APC gallery in Torrance in September 2009.

What is love? Valentine's Day Reflections

2011-02-05T17:34:00.000-08:00

What is love? Expressions like “Mmmm, I love this chocolate…” or “Wow, I love this dress!” somehow do not seem to belong with “Whoever fails to love does not know God, because God is love.” (First Letter of St. John, 4: 8). The month of February is a good time for considering this question since it is dedicated to the celebration of love and romance, with the ubiquitous red hearts, sweets, diamonds, and Victoria Secret’s underwear ads. Apparently, it is also a time for desperate searching for a mate, with the accompanying spike in the use of dating sites and the inevitable incidents of depression.

I know at least one lovely and love-filled couple who celebrates their engagement on Valentine’s Day, and why not? I imagine that such perfectly match paired human beings are like the mystical angelic creatures dwelling in Swedish theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg’s Heaven – eight-limbed, perfectly whole, united for eternity… Swedenborg writes: “The most perfect and noblest human form is that which exists when by marriage two forms become one single form, thus when two fleshes become one flesh in accordance with creation. That the mind of the man is then elevated into superior light, and the mind of the wife into superior heat; and that they then bud and blossom and bear fruit, as do trees in the time of spring.” (From Swedenborg’s Wisdom's Delight in Marriage Love, 201: XVI).

In Swedenborg’s perfect “conjugal union” the male element is wisdom and the female is love. By uniting and exchanging these core elements, the man and woman become whole and perfect. Only together they are completely fulfilled. This vision of coupled happiness inspired the following poem:

Eros 6

we are the walnut
of perennial wisdom

locked together
(two halves in one)
we share one breath
of blessed air

delighted,
we peel the minutes
off the ancient clock

The loving couple defines their own world that they share and that they exclude everyone else from. In their uniquely intimate love, the sexual and the emotional are fully united. Their bond is deep and deepens with time. Eventually, it may seem to be timeless – we hear about couples celebrating their 30th, 40th, or 50th wedding anniversaries and still in love… They are on their way to become Swedenborg’s angelic creatures in married heaven.

For the rest of fallible humans, there are repeated try-and-fail attempts, serial dating, serial marrying, serial heartbreaks. The fairy-tale romances start from love at first sight and continue in the novelty and excitement of meeting the beloved, discovering new things about him or her, knowing them and knowing oneself through them. Poets write about that love, film-makers keep producing romantic comedies filled with surprise romances, ending these made-up stories, for the edification of the masses, at their high points of romantic fulfillment. Dante and his Beatrice? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet? Goethe’s Werther and his beloved?

Amor 2
You looked at me
and I saw myself
for the first time

I’m beautiful! I’ve heard this
many times before
but did not quite believe

In your hands
love fills
every square inch of my skin

I glow with a brightness
that even your absence
cannot dim

The contentment with having found a perfect, loving partner, too soon and too often gives in to the longing for more, always more – to see the beloved all the time, to glow with the delight of his or her presence, doing the most mundane, silly, every-day things… Does such “love-at-first-sight” exist?

Dr. Earl Nauman in Love at First Sight: The Stories and Science Behind Instant Attraction (Casablanca Press, 2001) claims that it does, and cites a whole series of first-person narrative accounts of its sudden appearance and life-long persistence. The “love-at-first-sight” tradition extends to ancient literature of Greece and Rome, to the story of Narcissus, an innocent youth of such incredible beauty and ignorance that he fell in love with his own reflection in smooth surface of the water and stayed there, transformed into a flower, abandoned to eternal self-contemplation… The psychological disorder of “narcissism” comes from that story. Is all “love-at-first-sight” and its core of desire essentially selfish? Why the success of so many romances in novels, theater, film?

Desire, the heart of erotic love may be understood and explained as a profound sense of emptiness, of needing and wanting someone to be together with, to “have and hold” – as the British marriage vows have it. That longing, in turn, too often leads to disenchantment: when satisfied it may be transformed into boredom, when the satisfaction is postponed, it may lead to disappointment. The heightened expectations are a set-up for failure. And so the cycle continues.

Eros 1

my dreams are simple –
I just want you

today, tomorrow,
in my bed, at my table,
talking on your cell phone,
putting on your socks,
all wet from the shower,
bewildered by the steady
glow of my love,
touched so deeply
that it hurts –

you – just one man
of wicked charm,
strength, wisdom

A friend of mine with a rich romantic history told me of a horrifying moment of self-revelation. While seating in a car with her lover number three, she looked at his hand, that he wrapped around hers in the exactly same gesture as her lover number one used to do. Déjà vu ... She felt the same love, the same elation, perfect happiness of togetherness with both men, yet, they were so different. Was it not the love of that person, then? The love of who they really were? Was it just a sweetly seductive feeling that being near and with these men engendered in her? Did she actually care about them and their dreams or did she just need them to put herself in a dream state of being filled with the ecstatic joy of love? Was it the heightened emotion of being in danger, of flirting and breaking rules that she misread for love?

Amor 6

the more I love
the more dangerous
life becomes
in its graphic beauty
carved with a dagger
stolen from time

the blade cuts
old wounds open

it slides on the skin
of the moment

pierced by knowing

I could end here, by adding a comment from a love-researcher, Stanton Peel who analyzed the phenomenon from a critical perspective in “Fools for Love: The Romantic Ideal, Psychological Theory and Addictive Love.” Peel contrasts “addictive” love filled with pain, “uncontrollable urge and unconscious motivation” with love as a “state of heightened awareness and responsibility.... one that kindles the most elements of feeling and moral awakening.”

In a similar vein, Robert J. Sternberg, one of the editors of The Psychology of Love where Peel’s article was published (Yale University Press, 1988), came up with a triangular theory of love (passion + intimacy + decision/commitment), and a multi-tiered classification of types of love that result from presence and absence of some of these elements. Between the extremes of passion (infatuation) and intimacy (liking), dwells the romantic love. Between passion and commitment you can find “fatuous love” but commitment alone is “empty love” – is it love at all? Just deciding to be with someone without either being attracted to that person, or liking him or her? If you add “liking” – the resultant “companionate love” is what most marriages turn into after 10 years, if not ending in a divorce. Only when the three elements co-exist, Sternberg claims, love becomes perfect “consummate love.”

Are there any other kinds? Let me continue next week...

______________________________

All poems cited from Maja Trochimczyk, Miriam's Iris: Or Angels in the Garden (Moonrise Press, 2008).

New Year, New Moon, New Light

2011-02-01T16:17:00.000-08:00

Let us talk about the moon, then... In the month of February, the Village Poets of Sunland-Tujunga will present a wonderful, witty and erudite poet, Mari Werner (February 27, 2011, at 4:30 p.m., Bolton Hall Museum, 10110 Commerce Avenue, Tujunga, CA 91042). For her "portrait" on the series's blog, she sent in the following poem, which is so delightful, I decided to reproduce it here as well:

Crescent Moon

by Mari Werner

A crescent moon floats above the horizon.
“You can totally see the rest of it,”
she says, as though the moon is cheating.

And the moon is cheating.
A crescent moon should be
what a crescent moon looks like
in a bedtime story illustration,
a crescent clear and simple,
no dark sphere to detract
from its perfection.

Under the smile of the crescent moon,
she sleeps in fluffy comforters,
winked upon by stars
cuddled by a curled up cat,
guarded by a sleeping dog.

That’s the bedtime story version,
but here on the surface of the planet...
you can totally see the rest of it.

In Polish children's literature, the moon is often presented as a "crescent roll" - "rogalik" - brown, well baked and tasty, neither an alien, eerie source of lunar light, casting a pall on all living things (a la "Pierrot lunaire"), nor a wasteland of rocks and dust that the astronauts have walked on. Not really a place for lunatics, either... A tamed, story-book, crescent.

On New Year's Eve 2010, over a year ago, I saw the moon differently: full, enormous, with a fuzzy halo taking over half the sky. At midnight, it crowned the horizon with its lucid glory. I saw its bluish reflections in water droplets on my rose.
________________________________________

MIDNIGHT ROSE

"...quanta è la larghezza di questa rosa ne l’estreme foglie!" ~ Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXX

A pale light appeared behind the black ridge of the mountains. The moon floated up like a white balloon losing air, whitening the night around it. The bright halo cooled the glare of electric snowflakes on a Christmas fence, sheltering the reindeer of prickly light points and wire. The moon rose higher, the halo around it grew into a solid crown. It took over half the sky, sparkled in water droplets on the rose. Straight above our heads at midnight, it was a brilliant omen for the New Year.

the moon’s new halo
dims electric glare into calm -
illumination
________________________________________

As the night wore on, the intense whiteness of the moon at midnight reflected the brightness of my rose-shaped diamond brooch that could have been a heirloom, but was not. I make up my own history here, in the land of endless possibilities, so I have amassed a whole bunch of such "could have been" heirlooms. For instance, I bought my Canadian Grandma on E-bay - a portrait of her, at least. It is a gold-framed late 19th-century daguerrotype of a stern dark-haired lady with hands folded in her lap. Elegant, strong, and confident, with a lovely cameo brooch at her neck, small lace collar, and a wide skirt of a shiny brown tafetta dress - she looks like she could have been my ancestor. I'll adopt her, I thought, and clicked "buy now."

I did not buy the brooch, though, it came from my daughter's prom dress, worn once and discarded after one glorious night. I find its shiny petals a notable addition to my festive wardrobe. Like a magpie, I admire all things shiny; since I lost that platinum bracelet of real diamonds worth a couple thousand of dollars, a gift from my parents, I prefer to dazzle without the expense. I do not think any jewelrer would have loaned me those priceless gems for the Oscars. Here it is, a diamond rose sparkling in my haibun for the full moon.
________________________________________

MIDNIGHT FIRE

"In the golden holiness of a night that will never be seen again and will never return…" ~ from a Gypsy tale

After greeting the New Year with a Chopin polonaise danced around the hall, I drove down the street of your childhood. It was drenched with the glare of the full moon in a magnificent sparkling halo. The old house was not empty and dark. On the front lawn, boys were jumping around a huge bonfire. They screamed with joy, as the flames shot up to the sky. The gold reached out to the icy blue light, when they called me to join their wild party. Sparks scattered among the stars. You were there, hidden in shadows. I sensed your sudden delight.

my rose diamond brooch
sparkles on the black velvet -
stars at midnight
_______________________________________

Growing up Polish, becoming American

2011-01-13T00:27:00.000-08:00

At a recent annual meeting of the Polish American Historical Society in Boston, I was invited to join a panel of poets reading verse about their experience of "growing up Polish-American." I did not, I grew up Polish... or maybe not even that... In my remarks, I talked about my immigrant experience and about my grandparents and family history affected by the war. I was born and raised in Warsaw, but I trace my roots to eastern borderlands of Poland.

My compatriot, Czeslaw Milosz, whose footsteps I followed from the Polish Kresy, north-eastern Borderlands, to the Far West of California, often wrote about the spiritual richness arising from the clash of cultures in areas where Poles, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Jews, and “Tutejsi” – people from here, have lived for centuries. After the conquerors of America returned home with some new root vegetables and the new plantings spread around Europe, they shared a cuisine, eating not only the local blincy, bliny, nalesniki, or pancakes, but also placki kartoflane, or latkes…

Many languages, many religions: Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Judaism, even Islam, represented by the Tatar settlement of Kruszyniany, established in the 17th century by a Muslim captain of cavalry Samuel Murza Krzeczkowski, his soldiers and some other Tatar officers were granted land there by the Polish king. My grandmother’s village of Bielewicze is not far from there, and not far from the ancient old-growth forests, the "puszcza" of Bialowiez. Her name was Nina Niegierysz. Her father, my great grandfather came from somewhere in Ukraine, and bought a large estate in Mieleszki, in the Voivodeship of Bialystok. I have a picture of my great grandfather as a boy in Odessa. Who were these people? Memories are lost in the turmoil of history. Even the birth certificate of my father was burnt during the war.

Thanks to this part of my family, I’m not even fully Polish. My grandmother married a local man, Wincenty Trochimczyk, and this is how I got my Belorussian last name. She did not speak or write Polish; having dropped out of high school to work on the family farm, she wrote in Russian alphabet and spoke to her Polish grandchildren in Belorussian. My father, Aleksy, started learning Polish at six, and spoke with the Eastern borderlander accent, pronouncing the consonant H differently from CH.

My mother Henryka Wajszczuk was born in Baranowicze, in Nowogrodek Voivodeship (now Belarus, previously Soviet Union, but Poland before the war), and her family belonged to impoverished Polish landed gentry. An online family tree is maintained by an American cousin, Waldemar Wajszczuk. The family roots go back to the 16th century and there are many branches spread out across the world.

The extended family includes such memorable characters as my mother's uncle Dominik Hordziejewski, who used to ride in a horse buggy across his vast estate to the famous lake of Switez or to Nowogrodek church, but who lost his mind after the Soviets took over and forcibly resettled him and his family to Gdansk Oliva. They had 24 hours to pack the remnants of their possessions in less than half of a railroad car. Try squeezing a manor house into that! Of his herds, he was left with one cow. He spent his last years dressed in his best coat and top hat, grazing this one cow in the parks and by the roads of his new city. Before the war, he had shepherds doing that on his estate...

My Polish grandmother Marianna Wasiuk gave me my first name, which I changed to my childhood nickname of Maja only in California, after a decade of being annoyed by being called Ma-ri-a, like the heroine of the West Side Story, an alien name for a stranger... My parents met after the war, while studying and helping rebuilt the destroyed Warsaw.

Thus, I am a hybrid, urban and rural, sophisticated and simple. I am primarily a highly sophisticated and educated city-dweller. I spent 10 out of every 12 months in the capital of Poland, Warsaw, studying music, literature, and history, attending theater and opera premieres, art openings, and exclusive receptions. Looking back, I would call myself a "fashionista" or a "social butterfly" in high heels and fancy dresses. But for the two months of the summer I was transformed into a country girl working in the fields, picking mushrooms and berries in the forest, making hay, carrying water from the well, or cooking strawberry preserves on a wood stove. For some reason, when remembering my childhood, those summer days glow with happiness never experienced in the most sophisticated environments of rainy Warsaw.

The loss of the native land, vividly experienced by all emigrants, is a frequent theme of my poetry, often juxtaposing the old with the new. Here's a poem inspired by my childhood in the meadows of Bielewicze, an idyllic land, remembered during a walk in the Big Tujunga Wash...

Dragonfly Days

The California dragonflies are
as they should be – orange,
enormous, flying in formation
above green algae blooming
in the winter stream.

A hairy bug looks for a crevice
to hide his ugliness,
straight from the pages
of a horror book or a painting
by Hieronymus Bosch –
a creature that could have been,
but is not.

A blue heron floats down.
His majestic wings beat slowly
until he finds a reedy alcove
for an al fresco dinner. Transfixed,
I watch his shape-shifting ways –
a cruel flash of movement erupting
from a graceful silhouette
standing still as a priceless etching
amidst the rocks.

Once, I knew such dark-winged herons
watching us scare away the fish
from their river with our childish giggles.
Red-billed storks picked their lunch
of frogs and crickets from the trail
of freshly cut grass, its straight rows
measured by the motion
of my uncle’s scythe
across the meadow.

Like long-legged pets,
storks followed the man
who fed them. They paid no notice
to a silent child trying to catch
a butterfly in her small hands,
watching bright blue dragonflies
over a ditch filled with rainwater
and forget-me-nots.

Blue and orange, the dragonflies
still haunt my memories, hovering
above the smooth surface
of long forgotten stream,
beneath the tranquil expanse
of high noon sky.

The key word is “once” – the pastime is one of comparison: then and now, there and here, what was and will not ever be and what is and will continue to be with a full weight of the presence. This poem was included in my first book of poetry, Miriam's Iris, or Angels in the Garden (2008).

The sense of loss and distance is also making an appearance in the poem about birch trees, my favorite of all. There were birch trees near my grandparents houses in both Bielewicze and Trzebieszow. My parents planted them, with oaks, in their country garden on the outskirts of Warsaw. Inspired by a painting by Steven West depicting the aspen, the poem includes a paraphrase of a title of a book on Russian “bieriozka” letters written on birch bark in old Russian villages. I got the book from my father, Aleksy, who had worked as Russian translator and electrical engineer and spent over 20 years in Persian Gulf, Iraq and the Emirates.

A White Letter

The aspens look at me. The eyes of white birch
reproach: "Where are you, why are you there?
Not here, with us?" Yes, I was supposed to keep
collecting yellow leaves each fall.
The branches sang softly, trembled
in the slightest breeze, anxious to fly away.
Birches shed their bark in broad strips and sheets
I could use to write love letters and stories
of olden times, but did not, seduced
by the allure of paper and keyboard –
the tools of memory that keeps the eyes
of the birch trees wide open as they whisper
I will send you a birch bark letter -
“я тебе берёзку пошлю…”*

The poem was written for an exhibition of paintings at APC Gallery in Torrance, and published in a chapbook by Poets on Site of Pasadena. Perhaps poetry can only grow "on site" - somewhere it takes root?

When looking for a place of my own in California, I picked Sunland - with its village atmosphere and friendly neighbors it reminded me of those villages of my childhood where everyone knew whose granddaughter I was... The beauty of Sunland's landscape - our gardens and mountains, the colors, the sunlight - does not cease to astound me. It feels all the more vivid right after coming back from wintry, snowy, beautiful, historical but ultimately quite grey Boston.

__________________________________________________________

Photos of Sunland and Big Tujunga Wash by Maja Trochimczyk

Happy New Year 2011!

2011-01-03T01:19:00.000-08:00

Among hundreds of wishes in my inbox this year (Christmas, Holiday, Birthday and New Year's Wishes), I found some fantastic animated ones, and the following one in Serbian from Mira Mataric, a wonderful Serbian-American poet:

Živeli zdravo, radosno, radoznalo, raskošno, razumno i razborito, povremeno se okliznite u avanturu i ne zažalite za onim što odlazi!

I do not know exactly what it means, but it certainly looks good! I also liked very much the wishes from two Polish friends, "Happy New Year Everybody" from Krysia Kaszubowska and "Happy New Year" from Eva Matysek Mazur. It seems that paper cards have been replaced with lovely animated ones these days, just as books are slowly giving way to electronic "reads" on things like I-Pads, Kimbles and other electronic book readers. I like cleaning the frost flowers off the electronic window to see the village covered in snow outside - just like the villages and the frozen flowers of my Polish childhood. But I like electronic snow much more than the real one, and that's why I live in Southern California...

At a recent Haiku Party of the Southern California Haiku Study Group, chaired by Debbie Kolodji at the welcoming home of Wendy and Tom Garen, I read two new haiku celebrating the change of the year, from the tumultuous Year of the Tiger to the placid Year of the Rabbit. These are my first poems of the year, expressing the hope for a serene and content future, or, at least, some rest. The first one got accidentally printed on four lines. The white rabbit is the one from Monty Python, of course. Enjoy!

Happy New Year! Dosiego Roku!

Christmas and New Year's Wishes

2010-12-24T17:46:00.000-08:00

For the holiday season, I was asked to write something "Christmasy" for the party of Little Landers Historical Society at Bolton Hall in Tujunga. I thought that a recent poem for a married couple celebrating their 35th wedding anniversary would fit it quite well, if there was a carol in the text. I chose to quote a carol that remains one of the most beloved Polish carols, cited by Fryderyk Chopin in his Scherzo in B-minor, op. 20.

Married Christmas

May your path be smooth,
and your sunlight mellow
~ an old blessing

He said
“You are the apple of my eye”
She said
“Let us have tea for two”

Steam rises from bronze liquid
freshly-baked szarlotka waits its turn
scent of cinnamon sweetens the air
the music box plays an ancient carol

Lulajze, Jezuniu, moja perelko,
Lulaj ulubione me piescidelko

She does not have to finish –
one glance and he knows
after thirty-five years together
faithful like cranes on a Chinese etching

Their looking glass is hidden away
in a box of treasures they don’t need
to find blessings
among daily crumbs of affection

The carol's text incipit means: “Hush, hush, Baby Jesus, my little pearl, my lovely little darling…” – This ancient Polish carol is a simple lullaby, filled with tender love for the infant, held in the arms of his gentle mother. There are many lullabies among Polish carols; the focus of Polish Christmas is on the baby and his mother, on the familial love that binds them. The LulajÅ¼e Jezuniu carol is sung throughout the Christmas holiday season, from Christmas Eve to February 2nd, the Candlemas.

Last year, I was traveling close to Christmas, and the empty airports were full of fake cheer, recorded Christmas carols blaring from the loudspeakers and tinsel with childish decorations everywhere. The poem I wrote about that is similar in tone to the "Married Christmas" - extolling the virtue of the subtle affection, gentle understanding of a shared life, the true family virtue...

Rules for Happy Holy Days

Don’t play Christmas carols
at the airport. Amidst the roar
of jet engines, they will spread
a blanket of loneliness
over the weary, huddled masses,
trying not to cry out for home.

Don’t put Christmas light on a poplar.
With branches swathed in white
galaxies, under yellow leaves, the tree
will become foreign, like the skeleton
of an electric fish, deep in the ocean.

Clean the windows from the ashes
of last year’s fires. Glue the wings
of a torn paper angel. Brighten
your home with the fresh scent
of pine needles and rosemary.

Take a break from chopping almonds
to brush the cheek of your beloved
with the back of your hand,
just once, gently. Smile and say:
“You look so nice, dear,
you look so nice.”

This is the poetry of a moment in the kitchen, home cooking meals of the season and sharing a togetherness and affection that is quite beyond words, yet forms the very fabric of life.

Best wishes to all my poets friends!

“Healing from the Ashes” - Poetry & Art

2010-11-16T20:58:00.000-08:00

When Ariyana Gibbon invited us, the Village Poets, to a special poetry reading at the Healing from the Ashes exhibition she organized in Sunland to benefit the victims of Station Fire on October 17, 2010, I did not have much to show for it. I had written one haiku about wildfires in general and one poem about my experience of watching the danger approach, anxiously waiting for the wildfire to leave the slopes of my mountains, where it just sat for days on end:

FIRE TREASURES

The flames are closer and closer,
the air thick with smoke, dense
with the noise of helicopter engines.

I have never faced such danger.
Pacing around the house, I start
collecting papers, packing suitcases

of photo albums that nobody looks at,
so old, they show us two lifetimes earlier
in an antique glow of happiness.

Neighbors sit on their front porches
with binoculars, watching the spectacle
unfolding, a reality show without a screen.

They laugh and drink, eat barbecued
hamburgers and sausages saturated with
the smoky flavor of California fire season.

I can’t stand the wait. I examine the contents
of my house, gather things I cannot lose,
say farewell to those that may burn.

I give up my claim over shelves of books,
roses in gilded frames, fine china, music boxes –
my treasures become worthless bulk.

The flames shoot higher, the fire refuses
to budge under the aerial assault, stubbornly
dwells on the slopes illuminated in red at one a.m.

Next morning, my car sinks low in the driveway
under the weight of papers I packed to save.
Someone else will burn them after I’m gone.

A neighbor’s little daughter walks by,
looks at the heavy suitcases and asks,
“Mommy, is Barbie going on vacation?”

There was also a small haiku and a tanka based on mosaics from the fire that I found on the project's website:

FIRE HAIKU

wine-red sun
sinks into the ashes -
winter's fire

FIRE TANKA

red flames lick the sky
smoke thickens into darkness
a butterfly soars
ascending into turquoise
my future brightens

Not much to it, nothing tragic. It is not a surprise, then, that the Poet Laureate of our community was not the featured poet at the “Healing from the Ashes.” That title went to Jane Fontana who lived much closer to the fires and eloquently described the experience of loss and recovery. She did not lose her own home, but her neighbors did: only two houses survived on her street. Her poems were compassionate and inspired.

After walking into the exhibit on Foothill Blvd. and touring the wonderful exhibition, I was inspired, too. I was struck by the beauty and expressiveness of artwork made lovingly from remnants found in the fire – mosaics from shards of china, reliefs including burnt clocks and lamps, curio cabinets of little figurines, paintings… Our neighbors experienced real loss, and it was transformed, in that impromptu gallery, into poignant art.

On one wall was a large metal clock, burnt, with markers for the hours, but no hands. “Time stopped for this clock,” I thought as I read the title – Sun Dial by Ruth Dutoit. It spoke to me and in 10 minutes I wrote a new poem. I like the idea of a clock with no hands to show time. A French experimental filmmaker Agnes Varda made a documentary about The Gleaners, talking to those who gather and recycle things, and showcasing her own collection of her own recycled, handless, timeless clocks.

There’s a point to this. I have one clock like that at home, dark rectangular frame with mother-of-pearl inlay in the style found in India or the Middle East, it sits on my shelf to remind me of timelessness, eternity, so I would not rush around too fast, try to do too many things at once. “There’s time, there’s still time” – it tells me… Ruth Dutoit called hers The Sun Dial and there’s a small marker, or dial, on her disc, where time is measured by metal wings:

ENDLESS

The sundial glows
in a sunset of memory.

Time stops.

Dragonfly wings
freeze in a nanosecond

of fiery beauty
before evaporating.

Time stops.

We measure loss
in dragonfly wings,

in crystal shadows,
scattered wine-glasses

filled to the brim
with flames

before breaking,
before our time stops,

it too stops.

Another image that started "speaking" to me was a mosaic of a fames-spewing dragon by Robin M. Cohen. Unfortunately for the auction, it fell off its mounting on the wall and was damaged at the time of the exhibition. Cohen's mosaic was quite ornamental, almost too pretty for its materials of such tragic provenance. It resulted in a decoratively expressive, yet uncomplicated poem:

FIRE DRAGON

burn, burn, burn,
the horizon disappears
in scarlet light
burn, burn, burn
the air shimmers,
incandescent

the dragon’s here
watch the dragon
the creature of change
the beast of renewal
transforms our lives
by pain, by loss, in fear

the dragon sings out
burn, burn, burn
flames lick the rooftops
with fierce kindness
to destroy and renew
burn, burn, burn

Finally, I came across a larger artwork by the exhibition's organizer, Ariyana Gibbon. She made several mosaics on canvas for this project and one of her pieces reminded me of something I knew, both pleasurable and painful. I went home before I was able to write the following poem, stringing a necklace of tearful memories from 1975 and 1999...

FROM THE ASHES

~ to Ariyana Gibbon

The mosaic tears glow
and flow In indigo sky
crystallizing in memory
into soft petals of ash
blanketing my driveway
after the mountains
were bright with fire
for weeks, hot-spots shining
in charcoal darkness
like an ocean-liner’s lights
on the Bosphorus,
on the way to the Black Sea.

The mosaic patterns
measure space in echoes
of arabesques on the ceiling –
the Blue Mosque
in Istanbul made me
dizzy with delight.

Wait, I saw such tears elsewhere –
Oh, it was that lapis-lazuli
silver necklace I admired
in a Grand Canyon shop
He bought too late
to save what was beyond repair.

The mosaic teardrops fall,
ashen, each one shattered already,
made of old pain that does not go away,
or cry itself out. It just sits there,
a boulder on the highway
damaged by rockslide,
a burnt-out shell of a house,
lost to flames.

Shards of broken china
glow against dark velvet –
a treasure found in ashes,
held together by a thin ribbon
of gold paint, a promise of sunrise,
at the edge of indigo sky.

______________________________________________

More photos from the poetry reading at the exhibition may be found on Picasa Web Albums: http://picasaweb.google.com/Maja.Trochimczyk/SunlandHealingFromTheAshes#.

All photos and poetry reproduced here are copyrighted:(c) 2010 by Maja Trochimczyk

My Sky - A Poem of Found Images

2010-10-31T20:49:00.000-07:00

I like seeing light in the world, permeating little things, enchanting. I notice its presence with a child's wonder, seeing the world for the first time, as if it did not exist before I looked. Raindrops on leaves are an endless fascination. There is nothing as happy as the grass, covered with dewdrop diamonds in the morning after a short summer rain.

In one old children's poem, shape-shifting clouds take the forms of endlessly changing desserts, stacks of cakes, ice-cream, whipped cream... Unlike the hungry, boy dreaming of sweets, Dyzio Marzyciel (The Dreamer), I don't see food above my head, only magic. The transformation of our world from the profane, ugly and boring to the sacred, saturated with quiet charm may happen anytime, anywhere.

In an instant, I see footsteps of the Greek goddess, Demeter, in another, I am moved to inhabit a painting... It takes just a bit of effort, after eyes are washed of the unwanted images of distress, chaos, pain. I still remember that stain of blood on the sidewalk in Venice, left after a suicide. I still see faces distorted by hate. I want to erase these memories with raindrops on rose leaves.

Some of my roses have impenetrable surfaces, keeping the raindrops round, jewel-like. Other ones absorb moisture in an instant, the drops spread out into amorphous blobs and disappear.

My life, my words, may be one or the other, visible or invisible, remembered or forgotten. I do not know what will happen when I'm gone. Now, this is my time to write, to record the beauty I discover. I am a witness to what I want to see. I could write about the rotten cans and layers of graffiti marring the landscape of the riverbed, and that rusty jeep that was sitting on the shore for years, gradually losing parts to the homeless, selling it off, bit by bit for scrap metal. OK, maybe I'll write about that jeep and the homeless. I already started, but that poem is still unfinished. Too dark, maybe? Too hopeless?

Today, it is time for something sweet. Isn't Halloween the day for treats?

MY SKY

A Poem of Found Images by Maja Trochimczyk

I live inside a painting
by Rene Magritte.

My river is made of silver,

my sunsets of tiger stripes.

I make my own rainbows.

My roses sing in the morning

to a sweet tune of water droplets

playing on the edges of leaves.

Spherical, crystal-clear globulets

of white light adorn each green surface,

like a handful of diamonds scattered

by Demeter, the goddess of plenty.

Water shines in full sunlight -

a child's memory, innocent and pure -

glistening before the breeze stirs,

droplets fall and petals begin their journey

crumbling into dust.

Poetry for an Art Auction

2010-10-19T22:52:00.000-07:00

Do you want to know how did I end up with an enormous map of Venice waiting for its place on my wall? No? I'll tell you anyway. It is all the fault of the Sunland-Tujunga Alliance. This civic advocacy group was formed for the "No to Home Depot" campaign - one of the recent successes in the fight for self-determination in our foothill community. The group mobilized everyone else, persuaded our elected officials that they have to listen to our voices, and, despite fierce opposition of corporate interests and the efforts of their lobbyists, the community had its say.

Fast forward to September 2010. The Alliance decides to help local cultural groups and, with other local partners - artists and community activists organizes a Community Art Sale and Silent Auction to benefit three cultural institutions: McGroarty Arts Center, Bolton Hall Museum, Little Landers Historical Society. Over 60 pieces of art are available for sale including about 20 pieces from local artists and an entire collection of maps, drawings, prints, and photographs depicting such varied topics as sailboats, English manor scenes, bird's-eye maps of famous cities, caricatures, and construction scenes.

I was invited to write about the artwork on sale, but was featured at another reading on the same day, at the Flintridge Bookstore in La Canada. I could only be there for 30 minutes at the end. It was not a huge obstacle to the organizers, more a problem for me, since my favorite painting was sold by then (a landscape scene with yucca flowers in a art-deco gold frame), but I still felt I had to contribute a plem, buy an artwork and have my share in community life.

A visit to the event's website left me with short poem, about the rooster. I found the Asian-style image inspiring, for I'm a Rooster myself (in the Chinese Zodiac), as vain about my appearance as the painted bird:

The Rooster

© 2010 by Maja Trochimczyk

Crowned with red
I admire black feathers
of my silky tail

I wake up at night
to proudly crow about
my strong beak and talons

Buyer beware

The rest of the images on the site somehow did not make sense, I could not figure out what it was all about until I saw an album of photographs of the entire collection, donated to be sold anonymously and benefit Sunland-Tujunga's cultural organizations. Painter and activist Debby Beck brought the album to local Starbucks where I had a revelation! Pages and pages of hunt scenes, pages and pages of boats, pages and pages of workers soldering steel beams, pages and pages of maps... I was hooked and found my way into the imagery, capturing my impressions in free verse:

Dreaming of Elsewhere
© 2010 by Maja Trochimczyk

Red jackets shine against dark green foliage
of English copse and hedge.
Over the hill and dale ride the hunters.
Tally ho… Tally ho… hounds bark,
their voices echo through the fields
on a frosty morning.

Steam boats wait to take explorers
to the South Seas, Tahiti, Argentina.
White sails barely flutter in the breeze,
stiff and proud on the tall ships
of her Majesty, the Queen.

The West Australian,
The East Indian, Sultana,
The Kestrel – all are ready
for adventure, to circle the world,
conquer foreign lands,
bring back the gold of El Dorado.

Dreamers dreaming dreams –

We are at the edge of the ocean,
blue and deep, it stretches
to Japan we seldom think about
here, in the Far West
of Pacific Rim, Terra Incognita.

The lay of the land is clear
on antique maps, straight
from paintings by Vermeer –
only the milkmaid’s missing,
and the pearl. Canals, islands,
and church towers of Venice,
evenly measured empty blocks
of Atlanta, chaos of streets
crowded like children
at a Los Angeles fiesta,
and the mysterious labyrinth
of Boston, carved from sea,
sliced away from water.

Why Boston? Why so much Boston?
Is there a secret to this Eastern city
that explains Californian sun?

We do not hunt foxes in jackets
redder than their fur. We do not
wait for the sailboats and steamships
to take us where we do not belong.
We measure the lay of our land
in cypress, sycamore and live oak,
with the scent of sage shimmering
in summer heat above dried chaparral,
with star jasmine and orange blossoms
sweetening our winter gardens.

We are not going anywhere –
not to New York to construct
the tallest buildings of heavy steel,
not to an English manor
where silver is polished weekly,
and the butler serves tea
and scones at five o’clock.
Tally-ho…Tally-ho…

Dreamers dreaming dreams –

We are here, longing for
elsewhere. Shall we ever
catch foxes eating fruit
in our vineyards? Shall we
find ourselves in lands distant,
exotic, unknown?

The sailboats and steamships sailed away to distant shores; the maps and small pieces found their way to people's dreams. The center, museum and society counted and shared the donations. I was left in Venice, a six-foot-long, mahogany-framed detailed map of Venice - the magic city I dream of visiting again.

In Praise, Awe of the Mountains

2010-10-09T12:13:00.000-07:00

Poetic inspiration comes from outside - the world - and inside - reflections and emotions. For me, being very sensitive to shapes and colors and the beauty of nature. California mountains are a major inspiration. I come from Poland which is a flat-country, with a small area of mountains in the south (the Tatras at the northernmost tip of Carpatian Mountains), some hilly terrain in the Foothills, and then flat all the way to the Baltic Sea. Fields, meadows and copses have their allure, the bigness of the sky above, if you walk out away from buildings, is astounding. The skylark's song falls on the ground like a rain of little bells. You do not even see the singer so high above your head...

But to live in California means to live in the mountains. Los Angeles has a bad rap internationally, as the city of crime, car chases, barbed wire, and graffiti. Nobody tells us before we come here of the amazing gardens, hills and mountains: San Gabriels, Santa Monica, Verdugo Hills... They criss-cross the terrain, so that everywhere we go we'd see something beautiful and breathtaking.

I live in the foothills, watch the mountains from my kitchen window, go for long walks in the dry river-bed of Tujunga Wash admiring the ever-changing colors and shapes of the mountains. Being aware that there are no cities for a while and they stretch for miles into the desert is a part of the allure of our little hermitage.

Interlude – Of the Mountains

I.

I love you, my mountains,
oranged into sunset
of embarrassment.

Your cheeks aglow –
what sin you’re hiding,
in waterless creases,
what guilt?

Or is it first love
that makes you shine
with such glory?

The sunlight in California is so different from northern areas of Canada, or Poland. There it is pale, often grayish, frail. Here it brings a rainbow of colors to everything it touches. Everything is more vivid, more intense, under the bright rays, in summer or winter...

II.

Bare mountains –
no – old grassy hills
worn out by wind
and torrential rains
shine in stark morning light
like exquisite folds
of red-brown velvet
covered with stardust.

Snow whitens the slopes
sculpted by crevices.

The earth sighs
in her sleep.

When my mother came to visit in 1999, she thought that these mountains, without a protective layer of trees, all exposed to the elements, looked like heaps of dought and still bore imprints of the giants' hands. I liked that image so much, I put it into a poem.

III.

I’ll never tire of these mountains
made from the earth’s dough
by the hands of a giant
who kneaded a cake
that was never finished,
the dough left in piles
on the table of smooth fields
surprised by their sudden end
in rich folds and falls
decorated with the icing of snow
on cloudy winter mornings.

The sunsets are astounding and the skies glow. It is the clearest and the most spectacular in the winter, after the rain washes away the smog. But the fire-season knows its glories, too, the darker, wine-read hues. The next part of my Interlude, from Miriam's Iris (Moonrise Press, 2008), was actually inspired by a memory of looking at a different set of mountains, rocks falling apart in the Monument Valley.

IV. (A Monument of Time)

Submerged in the sand of time,
a continent from beyond
sinks in the last sunset.

Shadows move briskly.
Soon, a gentle coat of oblivion
will cover the ridges.

The desert sleeps
devouring life.
Clocks stop.

The rocks are on fire
boiling over
into the evening sky.

Sand rises slowly.
The mountains drown
in silence.

The pastels can be seen in January, our spring. With clouds, like scarves on the hilltops, with fresh greenery of new grass on the slopes, the mountains are ready for a party. I put that last poem on a postcard I printed, with the photo above, for my participation in the 2010 Fourth of July Parade of Sunland-Tujunga. I gave them out to everyone at the parade and still do giveaways from time to time. A cute little trifle, just to make your day a fresher/newer day....

Interlude - Of Bliss

II.

I’m delighted
with newness of this day –
fresh, new grass and
fresh, new leaves and
fresh, new clouds
in fresh, new sky
Washed clean by rainfall,
colored by ever-brighter light
of green and blue,
hope and innocence,
the hues of my love.
Even the mountains wear
their fresh, new dresses
with pleats of ridges and gullies
waiting to be ironed out
by the breath of wind and time.

But the mountains are temperamental, they shake, they burn, they fall apart. Living in their shadow is like living with an elephant in the room, or a giant rhinoceros in the backyard. The danger and beauty are celebrated in my occasional poem for An Award Ceremony for community volunteers who helped with January floods, organized by City Councilman Paul Krekorian. Called three days before the ceremony, I came up with the following poem. I now adapted it to the fire season, for the nature of the danger may change, but the threat remains.

Mountain Watch

They are a bit vain, aren’t they
these mountains of ours, still young.
They like being washed by the rain,
making themselves pretty for sunset.
Wet soil turns into a mudbath
for these giant beauties.

When they stretch and practice
their dance moves, our houses crumble.
Water jumps out of toilet bowls.
Aunt Rosie’s favorite crystal vase
shatters on the floor. The mountains
shake boulders out of their skirts,
lose weight. Rocks slide into our backyards.

We stand watch. We are ready.
Neighbor calls neighbor: “Are you OK?”
A friend you did not know you had
stops by. The danger looms.

In ancient Rome, guards had to hold
one hand up, with the finger on their lips
in a sign of silence, attention. I read
about it in a book, standing on my shelf,
in a crowded row of treasures
I hauled across the ocean, from the
old country to an unknown world.
I’d hate losing them to mud.

When the mountains dress in red
robes of fire, to dance in the night
rites of destruction, sometimes
it is too late for treasures. An old man
lost a hundred years of memories,
when his family heirlooms –
pictures, tchotchkes – burned to ashes.
His life spared, he still cries for what
he cannot not bring back.

We are lucky. Storms came and went.
The neighbors lived, the houses survived.
We were ready: moved out, moved in,
moved out, moved in, awakened
at midnight, sheltered by the goodwill
of unknown friends. We watched.
The storms passed. This was a good year.
We will watch. The aging beauties
will dance again.

Maja Trochimczyk and Paul Krekorian at the Awards Ceremony, June 2010.

_____________________________

All content, poetry and photos (C) by Maja Trochimczyk, 2010.
Mountain poems were all published in Maja Trochimczyk, Miriam's Iris, or Angels in the Garden, Los Angeles: Moonrise Press, 2008.
Mountain Watch was published in The Voice of the Village, July 2010.

The Secret of Poetry ... and Chopin

2010-10-04T23:05:00.000-07:00

Is it hard to be a poet? Apparently, no. Someone said that there are more poets on this planet than ants. I would not go that far, I think that humans are still outnumbered by insects. Nonetheless, I’m constantly surprised and delighted by encounters with poets in so many different walks of life. Before moving here from Montreal, Canada (and earlier, from Poland) I thought that Los Angeles was a place where every second person is an actor or screenwriter waiting for a lucky break. I know now that it is a place of poets and artists. I’m blessed with many new artistic friendships. There are numerous poetry readings across town, there are so many different groups and groupies.

Here in Sunland-Tujunga, a small town in the foothills, we have a museum, art center, historical society, and so much more. Three groups of poets invite members: Chupa Rosa Writers, McGroarty Chapter of the California Association of Chaparral Poets, and Village Poets. There has been a monthly poetry reading series first called The Eccentric Moon, then Camelback Poetry Readings, and now Village Poets Readings. We’ve had festivals and publications, and, since 1999, the institution of the Poet Laureate has highlighted the profile of poetry. What does such a Poet Laureate do? Wonder around in a toga and a laurel wreath?

Maybe once… first and foremost a Poet Laureate is expected to read poetry, write poetry, promote poetry, teach poetry, publish poetry, and breathe poetry… Until 2006, I have never read my poetry in public, nor gone to public readings. I always had poems at home on my shelf, in my native language, Polish, in bi-lingual editions, Italian, French, and in English. I started writing after emigrating to Canada, when I felt completely out of place in my new country and decided to make a home for myself in a new language. I did two contradictory things at the same time: I changed my name back to my impossibly sounding/looking Polish original, and I started writing poetry in English. Thus, I have established a hybrid identity that is from neither the Old World nor from the New one. This fate of not really belonging anywhere is the fate of a “displaced person” who left one country and cannot grow roots in another. Poetry became, for me, a way of “rooting myself” into the new culture, exploring a new world of imagination, and recording & communicating the most intimate thoughts and emotions.

Since I like going to concerts and exhibits, I often write about music or art. This spring, I published a book of poetry about the sublimely beautiful romantic piano music by Fryderyk Chopin, whose 200th birth anniversary is celebrated this year. Called Chopin with Cherries: A Tribute in Verse, the volume includes 123 poems by 92 poets, who live in different countries around the world, but all love Chopin’s music (www.moonorisepress.com/chopin.html).

The title comes from one of my poems, based on a childhood memory of eating cherries while sitting in a tree, and listening to a Chopin concert on the radio. Here it is:

A Study with Cherries

After Etude in C Major, Op. 10, No. 1 and the cherry orchard
of my grandparents, Stanisław and Marianna Wajszczuk

I want a cherry,
a rich, sweet cherry
to sprinkle its dark notes
on my skin, like rainy preludes
drizzling through the air.

Followed by the echoes
of the piano, I climb
a cherry tree to find rest
between fragile branches
and relish the red perfection –
morning cherry music.

Satiated, sleepy,
I hide in the dusty attic.
I crack open the shell
of a walnut to peel
the bitter skin off,
revealing white flesh –
a study in C Major.

Tasted in reverie,
the harmonies seep
through light-filled cracks
between weathered beams
in Grandma’s daily ritual
of Chopin at noon.

To honor my other set of grandparents, at the border of Belarus, I wrote about my summer memories of harvest, that even little children had to participate in. Thanks to Polish national radio broadcasts, Chopin’s music was present everywhere and people were all the better for it. Their attachment to this music had a root in national history and in a characteristic trait of defiance, connected to a sense of honor and nobility. During WWII, the Nazis banned Chopin and playing his music in public or listening at home was punishable by being sent to a concentration camp. People grew more attached to it, as a result. On October 17, we remember Chopin’s death of TB at the age of 39. He is long gone, but his music remains to enrich our lives. He worked hard making sure every note was just right. This is how we write poetry, too: making sure that every word is just right.

Harvesting Chopin

After Mazurka in F-sharp Minor, Op. 59, No. 3, for my Grandma
Nina, Uncle Galakcyon, and Father, Aleksy Trochimczyk

The straw was too prickly,
the sunlight too bright,
my small hands too sweaty
to hold the wooden rake
my uncle carved for me.
I cried on the field of stubble;
stems fell under his scythe.

I was four and had to work –
Grandma said – no work no food.
How cruel! I longed for
the noon’s short shadows
when I’d quench my thirst
with cold water, taste
the freshly-baked rye bread

sweetened by the strands
of music wafting from
the kitchen window.
Distant scent of mazurkas
floated above the harvesters
dressed in white, long-sleeved shirts
to honor the bread in the making

The dance of homecoming
and sorrow – that’s what
Chopin was in the gjavascript:void(0)olden air
above the fields of Bielewicze
where children had to earn their right
to rest in the daily dose of the piano –
too pretty, too prickly, too bright

_____________________________________

Published in "Voice of the Village" October 2010 issue. The 19th-century vintage postcard from Maja Trochimczyk's Private Collection.
Yucca blooms in Big Tujunga Wash, San Gabriel Mountains, photo by Maja Trochimczyk. Portrait by Kathabela Wilson, Beyond Baroque, September 12, 2010.

Serving as the Sixth Poet Laureate

2010-09-26T00:56:00.000-07:00

In 2009, I wrote a poem called "Illuminata" and inspired by a Buddhist crown from the permanent collection of Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena. The poem starts with a line: "I want that crown" (and can be heard and read on the website of the Museum). After having heard it several times and laughing at the intensity of an entirely non-Buddhist desire, my friends commented on my election as the Poet Laureate of Sunland Tujunga: "See? You got your crown."

On April 25, 2010, the Passing of the Laurels Ceremony was held at the McGroarty Art Center, Tujunga, with Joe DeCenzo doing the honors on behalf of the Sunland-Tujunga Poetry and Literature Committee. The event included presentations by Claire Knowles, Director of McGroarty Art Center, Dorothy Skiles, President of Village Poets, Mary Benson from Paul Krekorian's office, music performances and poetry readings by Joe DeCenzo, Elsa Frausto, and myself. I was thrilled to have received Certificates of Congratulations from State Senators Bob Huff and George Runner, and Los Angeles Councilman Paul Krekorian.Actually, I was so happy, I could not stop smiling! It was awesome! This is the best neighborhood in LA: with 20,000 people we have a museum, historical society, arts center, and more poetry, literature, art, and civic groups that you could count.

My reading at the "crowning" included a poem I wrote especially for this occasion, What I love in Sunland. You may download the poem in Word format here. It is also reproduced below. For more photographs from the event, see its Picasa Photo Album.

My motto for her two years as Poet Laureate is

"Poetry ... in pursuit of happiness"

I picked these words for two reasons: first, as a new citizen of these here United States, second, as a poet in search of happiness expressed in poetry. My planned activities include public readings, appearances at civic ceremonies, participation in art festivals and community events, and a publication of an anthology with work by local poets.

So far, I have written three sets of occasional poems, commissioned by various local civic groups and individuals: Councilman Paul Krekorian, Sunland-Tujunga Alliance for their Art Sale, Little Landers Historical Society for the retirement party of outgoing President of this group, Lloyd Hitt. I have also started a regular column in our local paper, Voice of the Village, also contributing verse to its poetry corner. In this blog I'll post some of this occasional work that is created for the enjoyment of my friends and neighbors, to celebrate, laugh, and, sometimes, grieve with them.

You may see the list of events below and selected photographs in my Poet Laureate Picasa Photo Album. There are samples of poetry from my three books online in various places (Rose Always, Miriam's Iris, and Chopin with Cherries selected for the Cosmopolitan Review). I have also published online some chapbooks that are there because I like them (Glorias & Assorted Praises, Poems for My Friend, and Poems and Stories). Other poems were published on various sites, including a photo-album My Hat Collection, "Look at me..." in Loch Raven Review, (2010) and A Monument of Time and Memento Vitae in Clockwise Cat (2009).

If you want to know more of my poetry, you may consult the list of published poems, events and readings, and photos from recent events, as well as Picasa albums from Chopin with Cherries I, Chopin with Cherries II, the Spiritual Quartet readings and other events that will be added on. Here's my poem for the Passing of the Laurels Ceremony:

_______________________________________________________________________

WHAT I LOVE IN SUNLAND
(C) 2010 by Maja Trochimczyk

1.
The strong arms of the mountains
embracing, protecting our town

2.
The lights scattered in the night valley
during my drive to the safety of home

3.
How clouds sit on the hilltops
squishing them with their fat bottoms

4.
The river playing hide-and-go-seek under the bridge
to nowhere: “now you see me – now you don’t”

5.
The towering white glory of yucca flowers in June –
we are Lilliputians in the giants’ country

6.
The mockingbird’s melodies floating above
red-roofed houses asleep on little sunny streets

7.
Armenian fruit tarts sweeter than fresh grapefruit
and pomegranate from my trees

8.
Hot, shimmering air, scented with sage and star jasmine,
carved by the hummingbird’s wings

9.
The rainbow of roses, always blooming
in my secret garden

_____________________________________________________________________

To request an occasional poem or poetry reading at an event, you may contact me at maja@moonrisepress.com.

Dates	Events
November 13, 2010	"Chopin with Cherries IV" Reading at Loyola University, Chicago, IL, with a pianist and 8 other poets
September 25, 2010, 1 p.m.	"Chopin Lecture, Recital, and Poetry Reading" at Polish Fest LA, Polish Church, Los Angeles, with Mira Mataric and Lois P. Jones
September 23, 2010, 7 p.m.	Featured poet at Cypress College, with Susan Rogers,Dani Antman and Taoli Ambika Talwar, Cypress College
September 22, 2010, 2 p.m.	"Voices of Recovery" - Poetry celebrating National Recovery Month, with Jon Epstein and Susan Rogers, Phoenix House, Venice
September 19, 2010, 3 p.m.	"Poetry in the Foothills" - Featured Poet with James Pinkerton and Ross Peterson at the Flintridge Bookstore, La Canada-Flintridge
September 18, 2010, 5 p.m.	Poets on Site group reading for Exhibition from the Annual Henry Fukuhara Plein Air Workshop at APC Gallery, Torrance
September 16, 2010, 2 p.m.	"Voices of Recovery" - Poetry celebrating National Recovery Month, with Susan Rogers at Phoenix House Orange County, Santa Ana
September 12, 2010, 3 p.m.	"Chopin with Cherries III" Group Reading at Beyond Baroque, Venice, with 15 other poets and Rick Wilson playing historical flutes
August 28, 2010, 6 p.m.	Poets on Site at Arlington Gardens, Pasadena, group reading; see the event's Facebook Photo Album.
August 15, 2010, 2 p.m.	Summer Poetry Reading at Watermelon Festival, Sunland Park, Sunland
August 8, 2010, 4 p.m.	Reading "Six Poems for Lloyd" at his Retirement Ceremony, Bolton Hall, Tujunga.
July 31, 2010, 2 p.m.	Reading "Illuminata" at Celebration of Poets on Site's Audio Tour of Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena. See photos from this event at Picasa Web Albums.
July-August, 2010, ongoing	Teaching a Creative Writing Class for Children, McGroarty Arts Center, Tujunga.
July 4, 2010, 10 a.m.	Participation in the Fourth of July Parade, with Susan Rogers, Elizabeth Kanski, and Anna Harley-Trochimczyk. Picasa Photo Album
From June, 2010, ongoing	Publication of "Chopin with Cherries" blogs on poetry and music, at Open Salon, and Blogspot.
From May, 2010, ongoing	Publication of poems in journals and anthologies: The Cosmopolitan Review, San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly, My Poem Rocks, etc. See the list of poems.
From May, 2010, ongoing	Publication of poems in the local newspaper, The Voice of the Village: "Mamma and me" in vol. 1 no. 7 (May), p. 4 , "Mountain Watch" and "Interlude - Of Bliss" in vol. 1 no. 8 (June), p. 25, "Rose Window" in August.
June 5, 2010, 4-9 p.m.	"Maja and Friends" Poetry for Puppetry booth and stage presentations by Maja, Sharon Rizk, Marlene Hitt, Beverly Collins, Justin Kibbe, Don Kingfisher Campbell, and CaLokie. Picasa Photo Album