SUTRAS AND SUTURES: THOUGHTS ON THE BALKANS

May we transmute higher mystery

from each people’s history and fractures

These fortify but do not heal.

make us wail and moan,

Our backs against the wall.

May we keep higher mystery

from being mired

In what we tried to retire

from ourselves,

But which tantalized,

then tied us up.

Will bleeding sutures

seal our fate,

Or can we teach our fates

to wait for us,

As we play catch up,

Wearied and confused

By our victories and falls,

triumphs, all.

We are the masters

of what our masters ask of us.

Is there a finer film for our souls?

We are the guardians

who learn to guard the good.

In this fortress too,

are the recesses of our natures,

False nurturings,

misshapen nursery rhymes,

Told my tellers long grown old,

their vengeances untold.

But here too, are our hopes,

however hackneyed and old.

Can we seek wisdom in our frivolity

and in small daily victories?

Can each person be

a well digger for their species,

A dweller in those pipelined depths,

an unrequited air breather,

Transmitter through all the depths,

and brother to all the deaths in us?

May our melodies

mollify the beast in us,

And help our best

to modify our worst.

This bursts from the depths,

From what on high

hides in us,

Beyond our pale imaginings.

from Growing Up Is A Cosmic Thing - 1999 Poems

by Paul L. Dolinsky

pdolan@taconic.net

buddhistpoems.com

geocities.com/searingsun

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NO VESSELS, NO CONTAINMENT: THOUGHTS ON THE BALKANS

In the winding down

of the cycle that binds us,

In our fiercesome jockeying for position,

Promises are but filled plugs

for profit,

And our munificence

is but the manacles of success.

For here, all success manuals

are buried with their owners.

In galleries of plows and ploys

we play,

Toast each other’s lives,

and share our boasts.

Encrypted, we encounter each other,

and counter each other’s

Philanthropies and misanthropies.

We watch this all,

mesmerized by hope

That a day might exist, that persists

without time’s incessant beat and bleating.

Our finitude is filled with decrepitude

and ineptitude.

Is the icing on our cake

but the lining of our graves,

Just a place for dreams and fears

to play?

The new graves that migrate

toward human resorts

Are filled with these spectral retorts.

Let us follow our longings

through alchemical beakers

That bleach us of truth and lies,

And follow our travails

into past lives.

We trace reluctant saps back

to older vessels,

To when all was permissible and malleable,

like ripe pomegranates

hanging everywhere.

Here we lie before truth and lies

circumscribed our lives.

Entwined are we

in all these possibilities.

But the sparkle in dead man’s eyes,

Is that we survive past

what we revere and revile,

And simply die.

He listens for free will to percolate

Through the denser substance

of the grave

Into the subtleties of our lives.

Our choice is always

to heal or hurt,

To glorify or besmirch

each other’s lives.

Is peace but a bitter pill

For those who await

the start of war once more?

Or is peace the ultimate reward

for the winding down of strife,

Where what is gone stays gone,

And why’s and wherefore’s

but adorn the pinafores of peace?

Karma, quiet and dapper,

Wears no coat of mail to nail us,

or make us wail.

Karma rests,

and is not sedated.

The spirit of peace is elated

to see this new human alloy arise,

Free of ploys and lies,

Heading toward no rebirth,

Yearning for nothing,

Free of fears and threats of death.

This being is destructible and truly free,

And is clad in cut of spinner’s threads,

The last threads of the shut down ancient shuttle.

Our ribbons of joy

and rivulets of tears

Now yield to the years

and curl themselves around us.

And saints and sinners,

Malingerers and Boddhisattvas

Return no more.

from Growing Up Is A Cosmic Thing - 1999 Poems

by Paul L. Dolinsky

pdolan@taconic.net

buddhistpoems.com

geocities.com/searingsun

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LANDSCAPE AND MINDSCAPE: ON STRIFE IN THE BALKANS

Trains to and from the future

Pass years like numbered stations

unnumbered times.

But the doors fly open at will.

Tyrannies, victories, infirmaries

all pass by,

Our seconds, baring none,

Leapfrog other seconds

onto that landscape,

And push us toward

where we’ve been,

The looking glass

where we see ourselves,

With our shackles on.

The broken bones of defeat pile up,

like precious booty

In plenitude’s penitentiary,

that sad storehouse of plenty.

But if we place our mindscape

on that landscape,

With a focused will,

There will be no devastation,

or wars of liberation,

But mutual admiration,

Forest and forager

will be as one,

We will be at peace

with our past,

Our parts will find each other,

We will find repose from the past,

And repast in the present.

from Growing Up Is A Cosmic Thing - 1999 Poems

by Paul L. Dolinsky

pdolan@taconic.net

buddhistpoems.com

geocities.com/searingsun