POEM: Ashes to Ashes into brick - on coalitions of the formerly powerless

 Ashes to Ashes*

Dust has no tongue,

hasn't a song,
wields no pen,
no tools for building or carving,
scumbles no brushes
in maddening rhythms.

Dust does not long for nor aspire.
Dust lies in random arrangement,

drifts will-less though the cracks under doors,
accumulates behind the tassels of bedspreads,
in the dim beneath of things.

Dampened  with a measure of tears,

pressed by hardship to a mold,
dust becomes brick,
paves the way,
shoulders a roof,
shatters plate glass with aplomb.

                    - Mad Mar Walker (Mistryel)

* published in heck I forget where

Club America, Members Only

One of the consequences of 9/11 is the extended backlash against immigrants, even visitors or folks on work or student visas. Even citizens who display evidence of "otherness."  Some of us have gone back to Joe McCarthy's ways.

 

There is such irony that people whose ancestors came here to flee oppression, seek opportunity, find freedom, find home - they don't want to pass it on. While I don't believe in open borders -- I do believe in the melting pot, in asylum and a pathway to entry and to citizenship. There once was a long negotiated bipartisan immigration bill passed that 45|47 squashed because he wanted to run on the issue. That's bad form. 

This poem dates from 2005 published in A First Tuesday in Wilton an anthology, edited by Rose Drew and Alan Gillot and printed by Stairwell Press. It was then titled The Get Away. 

Club America, Members Only

Outside
=========
a locked gate waiting.
Socked-in, Statue of Liberty's
harbor gone grey.
Ellis Island, your sentimental
push-button displays,
sepia-toned icons, a memory
of distance and desperation,
clutched burlap bundles, dented
suitcases, hand-written name tags,
befuddled seekers. almost home.

Now you welcome

only tourists. Neon bloodies

your halls of remembrance:

"No Vacancy * No Vacancy * No Vacancy"

Close the airports!

Close the Brooklyn Bridge!

The children of the children

of the formerly oppressed

want to seal the borders

with invisible force fields

with infallible alien detection devices

and declare

"CLUB AMERICA -  MEMBERS ONLY!"

So take back your tired, and your

poor, your huddled masses yearning....

Give them a cell

with room service, limited menu,

meticulously kept steel bunks.

STOP - PACK UP!

Fold your love of FREEDOM,

tuck it in.

Fold your sweat up with your dreams,

Forget about your son in Cinncinati.

Do not pass. Do not collect. Go directly. Go back

================

Outside

A sweepstakes poem inspired by the old print Contest Newsletter*

Send in your post card, post card!

Fabulous prizes you can win so
be sure to send your entry in....

Write down your name, address, your zip
so we can save and catalog it!

(We'll sell it to marketers you don't know
- they got things to sell and wares to show.)

So send in Your name address your zip
- we'll sell it for decades in triplicate!

Be sure to send your entry in, for
fabulous prizes you can win!

-------

*The original founders of Contest Newsletter were a couple whose hobby turned into a newsletter with several million subscribers.  It all because too much I guess. and they sold it -- but the new owner turned out to be a mailing list company who really only wanted the subscribers list. Comprised mainly of seniors and folks willing to respond to adds and offers with a post card - it was a valuable list, nick-named "The suckers list."  This was just before online contest entries became a thing. Ah well.

Preferences of my 7th decade

 - a response poem to Patricia Smiths poem "Medusa" 

Too Much Drama, 

all those hormones

the burning and bravado

followed by anxiety and self-doubt.

I don't miss them,

not even a little

The old gods have feet of clay

and petty, vengeful hearts.

Explosions of thunder,

stabs of lightning

seem relaxing by comparison.

I'd take a solitary sunrise

seen through thistle and milkweed in the meadow

or a humming bird busy in the red bee balm

a wood dove on the roof-line....

 -- Mad Mar Walker, (Mistryel)  July 5, 2026 at a "Sunday Writes" session led by Faith Vicinanza at VSG Gallery.

I also have an old Medusa poem:

 Love and Mirrors 

 When courting Medusa, don't call her by that name. Let her have her delusions as she allows you yours.

Let her have her memories of a time when soft hair cascaded down her back and men reached to touch her cheek.

When you come to take her, lose the mirrored glasses, close your eyes tightly lest she see the snakes reflected, transmogrify to marble, cold statuary in your garden of love.

And who would be Medusa then? Or was it you all along?

-- Mar Mar Mistryel Walker (p22 - from  my first poetry chapbook Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding (Puzzled Dragon Press, 1998)

The Terrible Mistake

The Terrible Mistake

On the Seventh Day, 

when the Almighty should have been napping,

He paced the glassy surface of new poured sea 

wringing his sculptor's hands in celestial anxiety.
A nagging tug, a vexing doubt about creation, 

something about creation -something obvious 

and overlooked. a single lively thread, woven
in his own image in a split second of pride. 

One thread, twisting in the solar winds
unraveling slowly down the eons....

             -- Mad Mar Walker, (Mistryel)  

Four acre lots of the mind,

are circumspect and clean, so clean

God forbid the ideas should touch one another

Or leak onto the plot next door

Which might accidentally create some 

new upstart idea, something

Unclassifiable and awkward

Requiring a hazmat team to extract....

For fertility of ideas

multifamily structure is best

 

Stack em up

like floors in a highrise

Skyscrapers of boxes on a dock

rickety, shabbily

 

Zagging every which way

expanding in various directions 

In danger of falling over

Askew. Like community garden patches,

Overgrown, seeding their neighbors

plots with something untoward and interesting.... 

                        -- Mad Mar Walker (Mistryel)

The Essential Trick

If you have perennials, biennials, 

things that seed themselves 

and return to you in odd moments,

sprout anew after a while of dying back

-- then you can't indiscriminately

pull up unknown sprouts in the name of neatness.

Be patient.

Study the situation.

Is it a weed or a daisy in waiting?

or Queen Anne's Lace 

or the wee tip of fern

about to uncurl?

The essential trick?

Never uproot a thing

that will, sometime later,

fill you with the earnest, wild

energy of delight

& make you glad you are alive...

                            --- Mad Mar Walker (Mistryel)

Afterlife

 

AFTERLIFE

I’m just a sullen moth
flinging myself at the porch light,
always speculating,
splitting hairs,
asking myself why.
Is it the light?
Or the warmth?
Or the stillness of the
dried bugs inside the fixture
with that almighty bulb….
very still, but not "one" with the light
as their papery wings become dust….

            --- Mad Mar Walker (Mistryel)

#poem #mortality #metaphor

The Hiding Habit

When the world shouts obscenities

and the winds of change roar in the trees,
move low to the ground to the hiding place.

When fear is strong, pay attention.
Sit in stillness, in silence and listen.
Wait. Think. You don't have to move yet.

Breathe in. Breathe out.
Purr to comfort yourself.

If you must move, be stealthy,

silent in the shadows, then return to safety.

When quiet evening finally comes - emerge. 

Look around. Sniff the air. Stretch. 

Give a wide yawn. Blink. You are still here! 

Pay attention!

                    --- Mad Mar Walker (Mistryel)

--------------------------------

This was an older post I thought needed another go. There is a story to the photo. The windows were wide open at home and there was a crew of roofers working nearby and they made a lot of noise. After a while I noticed my three cats were missing. I hunted under and behind everything until I found them. They were  lined up in a straight row in the narrows behind a dresser, hiding from all the noise. If I had tried to line them up like that,  well, herding cats right? 

No restaurant like home

 

NO RESTAURANT LIKE HOME

Whole wheat and rolled oats with flax, 

golden in the hot pan

cook one side then add to the top:

Red red raspberries, crunchy chopped walnuts.

Add remaining batter on top. Wait.

Wait some more. Flip. Wait. Then Flip some more.

When you think it might finally be cooked inside

Cut it in half and look.  Make sure!

Get out the maple stuff.

Pour the coffee.

Be grateful. 

Know how improbably lucky it is to have a meal at all.

                - -- Mad Mar Walker (Mistryel)

Short Poem on Aging: Surprise

Can't understand how I grew so grey.

It crept up over 10 years or more.

Inside I feel like I'm 22,

except when I feel like I'm 94.

......

Curious encounters with nature

I'm kind of low energy these days as you can see by this kind of sad poem:

Doldrums

A tickle really, a night breeze passes, barely touching
In darkness I orbit the neighborhood's circle,
pass the same facades repeatedly.
Anchored by the hum of the highway,
maybe a celestial dipper or two rising
or a flock of little porch lights
where a few someones live,
I appreciate their seeming elemental persistence.
Even now I point a bobbling flashlight to ward away shadows,
though I have nothing to say to shadows these days.
No one minds my silence.

                    --- Mad Mar Walker (Mistryel)

----------------

This is an old smudgy pencil sketch of mine. Not sure an actual horse would react as calmly to the half-man half-butterfly thingie in its meadow - which probably, being self-aware of its halves is having doubts of its own. Once the wings were moving I think there would be a hasty, slightly hysterical horse retreat....

I originally put his up at https://april30poems.blogspot.com/2016/08/unusual-encounters-with-nature.html?showComment=1472256583013#c7537839509355428630 and added it here also...

Poem A Week 3 - Waking up fast

Waking up fast

I don't remember how I got there
or why I was flying a plane over a road
a big plane, an airliner kind of plane
.
and I was just noticing how low to the ground we were
Noticing the telephone polls below, cars busy on the road,
treetops brushing the plane's belly, a hillside in the distance.
.
I was thinking why is the plane flying so low,
moving so blindingly fast, and why am I the pilot?
And someone was screaming at me
.
Pull up Mar Pull up now!!! as the ground got closer.
I woke up right then shaking. Not sure why I was flying
or where I was going, or who left me in charge, or
.
if I had changed course or crashed in the ether of the dream.
But it was time to get up time to get up out of bed
and into the new day. So I did.

                                                -- Mad Mar Walker (Mistryel)

Poem A Week No. 2 - Unexpected Attic Access

Unexpected Attic Access

"I need to get into the attic"
the AC tech said matter of factly
.
"Not sure you can get there from here"
I said. As he darted out to his truck
.
I opened the hall closet
empty but for its pile of boxes,
.
Pushed up on the hat shelf,
found it folded back easily.
.
Pushed up on the cloths pole,
found that popped right out of its caps.
.
as I slide box after box out and into the hall
here comes Mr tech with his folding ladder
.
He props, climbs, pushes up the lid
and disappears. "Nice Space up here" he says
.
from out of sight, and a sudden light
shines through the square opening.
.
I have to see, I climb up the ladder, look around
suddenly I;m sitting on the edge of the unfamiliar
.
it's totally clean and empty, but for fiberglass bats
I make mental notes, location of the light switch
.
Kinda odd how you can live for years unaware
under this unknown, unimagined spaciousness...
                     --- Mad Mar Walker (Mistryel)

Poem A Week No 1 - At your funeral mass

At your funeral mass
Poem for Peter S. & for Elaine, Sharon, Dan & Nate

.
I am not listening to the priest
not looking towards the altar.
Not saying the words.
I stand up, sit down
when told, but no
song no words come forth at all,
no call and response.
I listen to the resonant soprano singing,
the echo of it in the empty space above.
I look sidelong, avoid the casket in the center isle
hidden under a white cloth and a symbol
that means nothing to me now.
I try to look right through the
vivid stained glass scenes.
I notice the intense blue
red, green, not the figures
or the stories they portray.
I wish instead I could see the sky
or a river, the sea or a mountain
a tree bright in the daylight
beyond those windows.
Or you on the lake in your sail boat
with your boys, family, friends
and your ready nonchalant smile.

                                --- Mad Mar Walker (Mistryel)
    

This poem is for the exhusband of a good friend who's unexpected death caused a lot of stock taking. First of the group to fall as they say. It's not that we were particularly close - it's that he is my age I guess and I remember him from his hey day. The photo is from someone else's facebook post. I hope they don't mind. 

April 2016 Poem A Day #30

The prompt was write a dead end poem. I hate that.

No absolutely not

No endings, dead or otherwise
are permitted in this poem
this is a living cascade
it will not stop this day
or any day to come
this life will
go on with or without me
with or without another poem
the little one-celled things
will stretch and divide
and the little wavy-armed things
will reach out and grab a meal
somewhere in the miniature,
a future of spinning orbs
until a black hole grabs
it all, and then who knows
what happens in there?

                        --- Mad Mar Walker (Mistryel)

April 2016 Poem A Day #29 Grief Hazard

Grief Hazard

Boxes neatly packed
stacked in closets
under tables
stowed in odd spots
boxes unlabeled but for
a single word: Mom.
.
I packed them last year
numb not knowing
what to do
I packed for days, hid
this and that away
carefully wrapped,
and now
.
I wonder
what memories hide
in each, if I look....

maybe not right now.

                        --- Mad Mar Walker (Mistryel)  

April 2016 Poem A Day #28 Let the memos begin

Let the memos begin:

trivial outcomes * noticeable chaos * important resolutions

riotous beginnings * interesting research * calm procedures

mournful happenstance * breathable equilibrium * celebratory fireworks

calamitous collapse * undetermined consequences * fortunate coordination

ambitious manipulation * opportunistic flaw * low energy

virtuous approach * flexible consideration * spiteful divergence

love *  hate
indifference 

--- Mad Mar Walker (Mistryel)

April 2016 Poem A Day # 27 Relief Sculpture

Relief Sculpture

Remove a little here
scoop out some more
deep enough to accentuate,
to undercut, the line of something or other.
Smooth the center, or rough it wildly up.
Remove more, take off the edge itself
so the world curves into concavity.
Take away the center.
See clear through
to the other side.

April 2016 Poem A Day #26 Law of Emotivity

The Great Law of Emotivity

Everyone knows
love and anti-love
cannot coexist
in the same space
as they readily ironically
annihilate each other.

                    --- Mad Mar Walker (Mistryel)