With each month’s picture frame,
I vanquish the jester’s stick,
the Buddha’s charm, the rough rope of arms.
I set each memory aflame
and backwards say your name
above three candles –
past, present and future –
I extinguish twelve mistakes
in one breath, quite easily.
©2023 | K.F. Hartless
dVerse Poet’s Pub | Happy dVerse Twelfth Anniversary!
Photographer and digital artist Jane Long
Any sort of serious belief can be scary, wouldn’t you say? I’m thinking Crusades, Holy Wars and Jihad. I prefer to passively enjoy all faiths and spiritual practices. I recently spent a month studying Buddhism, but I don’t think that women are profane, powerless, and imperfect. I’m okay with Buddhists, though. It’s much safer to enjoy religious rituals in writing. 😉
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I would argue that faith, by definition, is blind, as it asks us again and again to accept that which we cannot see to be true. Labels are the result of fear and otherness is what we do to people and situations that make us uncomfortable or that won’t conform to our belief boxes, be they religious or otherwise. Cheers to the spiritual freedoms our foremothers lacked.
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Yes, of course, you’re right. Faith is always blind. It would deny that water is wet and the sky is blue if dogma requited water to burn and the sky to be green with purple polka dots. We do have far more theoretical freedoms than our forebears, but we still seem to prefer the boxes and the comfort of belonging to the group ‘with the truth’ to be ‘on the right side of history’. Maybe the big difference today isn’t so much the freedom to choose not to join, but the freedom of choice. Most people choose one of the dozens of cults available, if only the one that says, I want/like it, so I’m going to have/do it, regardless of the misery that implies for people I don’t care about. Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I see ‘freedom’ used in very selfish ways.
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Thank you, Dwight. I really liked Jenny Lewis in my younger years, and I was happy to see her putting out some new music. I also really enjoyed what Jane Long did with the old photographs she collected. Thanks for stopping by. I am taking a writer’s retreat next week. Headed to the mountains for a long weekend. I can’t wait to be back in the blue ridge.
🙂
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Honestly, I haven’t a clue in the real world, but I wish I could set photos aflame like that that. Thanks for these comments, Björn.
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What a great act of imagination, one is never sure whether literature comes from experience or imagination which is why reading through comment and response is so interesting although this poem stood up tall on it’s own…
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Yard Sale of Thoughts 
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