News from the Muse

The Muse of Lament and Dissent

Introduction

We heard it.
The racket in every corner of the world. As
the hunger for war rose up in those who would steal to be
    president
to be king or emperor, to own the trees, stones, and everything
else that moved around the earth, inside the earth
and above it. —Joy Harjo

                                            “When the World As We Knew It Ended”
                                                    Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light pp. 49-50

Sara Spaulding-Phillips

Since the “Orange Man” began his tricky and treacherous reign, the Muse of Lament and Dissent has been causing a ruckus in the poetry circle I lead--Deep River—a public program for the San Francisco Jung Institute. We read great poets and write under their influence. Thankfully, we spent our last three months of this year’s cycle with Joy Harjo, who has shown us, brilliantly, how to engage in dissent and lament, in political poems that speak out of Indigenous consciousness—out of love and concern for our Mother the Earth and all her creatures.

As poets, our mode of expression is verse. So I’ve invited the poets of Deep River to give voice to their Lament and Dissent through writing political poems. The Sister from Below has graciously agreed to publish a series of these poems.

Our first poet, Maureen Wolf, gives us “Breaking News.” This powerful poem loops and spins from the NYTimes to the colorful changes spring creates in the foothills, to the myth of Demeter and Persephone, to the horrors of a Hades in El Salvador, where hapless immigrant men are held with “Trumped up” charges and without due process. In lithe poetic leaps Wolf carries us off to Ukraine, to children’s paintings of rising waters, to her Irish grandmother as she prays for her sons at war in the war to end all wars, back to the “riot” of Nature in spring, to the song in the mouth of a Stag at Easter and the Raven’s raspy voice, which even the Orange Man can’t stop.

Breaking News

        by Maureen Wolf

“Guernica” Picasso - ARAS Online

News from the NY Times: not much has changed;

the world is still riding the roller coaster of the

Orange man’s policies

dipping, looping, spinning beyond the rule of law.

“Pink Peach Trees” Van Gogh -
ARAS Online

But then maybe everything has changed.

It is spring: pops of orange, blue and white

speckle the green grass of the foothills populated

with scrub oaks, grazing cattle and the confidence of Nature.

“Demeter and Kore” - ARAS Online

Spring won’t last long here: the gentle warmth of spring sun will change

quickly. The lupine, the paint brush, the shooting stars will shrivel

and the grass will brown and the air will become heavy and oppressive

under the summer sun. Remembering the scorched earth,

I wonder if Demeter has lost her bargain with Hades.

“Wailing Female Mourner”
Yeats - ARAS Online

Haven’t we all?
Aren’t we all waiting for the long winter days of the centuries to end,
Wondering when Persephone will push through

the hard pan clay of the human heart.

“Death in the Afternoon” Yeats - ARAS Online

This spring I can hear the echo of Abel’s scream as the cell door clangs behind

Neri Jose Alvarado, Andry Hernandez-Romero, Kilmar Agrego Garcia and

more in the Terroism Confinement Center in El Salvador. Trumped up stories,

no evidence, no trials. The Orange Man and Nayib Bukele casting lots.

Not long after, I learn of a Ukrainian woman nearing her hundredth birthday,

living alone in an apartment which is miraculously standing in Zaporizhzhia—

with no electricity, no heat, thimbles of food brought by her niece

when bombs aren’t falling--who stays three more days in hospital,

not for medical reasons, but to visit friends.

Hour Glass Drawing by child

I imagine a broken table in the hospital ward where the crones have tea

and grieve for the soldiers they once suckled at their breasts and talk

of the images their great grandchildren paint, images of a child standing

on the roof of home surrounded by rising water, of earth in an hourglass.

Scrawled in a child’s hand: No more planet.

“Weeping Madonna”
Sara Spaulding Phillips

I hear them singing Bozhe Velykyi and Mariye Maty Bozha prayers for protection,

prayers of supplication. I hear my Irish grandmother praying for thirty days

until her sons come home from the war after the war to end all wars.

Prayers to Mary. Prayers to Demeter. Prayers to Gaia.

“Stag and Moon” pixabay

The songs are carried in the mouth of a Stag to me on Easter morning. When I watch

the pinks and blues of the eastern sky gently pull back the curtain of night, I hear

the raven’s raspy voice greet the sun and see the crown headed sparrow search

for seeds and know the confidence of Nature.

“In Shoreham Garden” Palmer
ARAS Online

The Orange Man cannot pen an order stopping the riot of Spring from hearts on fire.

But as the Stag, and the raven, the sparrow and the crones have sung to me

to be consumed by fire means leaving so much of me behind. The path to the Other

winds through the path hidden in plain sight.

"My Nurse and I" - ARAS Online

Artist’s Statement

For several years I had eyed Naomi’s Deep River workshop in the CG Jung Institute of San Francisco program brochure. In 2019, I attended a conference on the Other at the Institute where Naomi was presenting. I spoke with her briefly about my interest in Deep River but also of my hesitation. I found understanding the works of most poets a mystery. Naomi said something to the effect of “Jump in.”

 

Nearly five years later, I jumped into Deep River. During this past year we wrote “under the influence” of three poets dislocated from the land of their birth. In these turbulent times in the States, I too have felt dislocated. Deep River became the place where I could explore and give voice to my exile. I am grateful to Naomi for providing a place and for her enthusiastic greeting of my fledging poems. I am grateful for the Deep River poets for their warm embrace of me and, especially, of my work. Over the years, I have collected several degrees. I am a psychotherapist and live with Ruby, a dislocated husky, in Fresno, California in the Central Valley, the doorway to the Sierra Nevada. 

—Maureen Wolf

June 14th No Kings Day of Defiance

If you are feeling a need to express your own lament and dissent about the state of our country, we urge you to join Indivisible’s demonstrations on June 14th—A Day of Defiance.

News from the Muse

News from the Muse

of Revolution 

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—that perches in the soul—

—Emily Dickinson

Sister from Below: Cover
Painting by Bianca Dalder

What’s Happened to the Sister from Below?

If you follow the Sister from Below’s News from the Muse you may wonder what’s become of her. I’ll tell you what: the November 2024 Election, and since the January Inauguration, the onslaught of bedlam and chaos in the crazed fists of a Berserker President. The Sister from Below has been silenced. Struck dumb. The breath of inspiration knocked out of her. She, my connection to Soul, to deep Self, has withdrawn to a dark cave, to keen, to howl, to moan. She’s brought me no wisdom, no glowing intuitions from the depths, only nightmares about stormy weather. 

Kamala & Tim

Gone, gone the joyous dance of Kamala Devi Harris & Tim Walz, in whose vision of America women are free to choose, workers are paid livable wages, Mother Earth is honored and protected. Gone gone the feathered thing called Hope. Now we’re in a story of total devastation. The Robber Baron crew has showed up with their chain saws, to fell every tree our ancestors planted—the habitat for feathered creatures and their songs. 

But then, one night, I had a dream which changed everything. The Sister from Below showed up in the form of Diane di Prima, my late, long ago poetry teacher, demanding I write a revolutionary rant. That dream evoked memories of a difficult mentorship. It woke The Sister from Below to the inspiration of the Muse of Revolution and to the necessity of political rants. She gave me this poem to pass on to you. And she asks, if you are so inclined, that you pass it on to others in need of inspiration.

Diane di Prima

A Revolutionary Letter

to the Spirit of Diane di Prima

Revolution: a turning, as the earth
turns, among planets, as the sun
turns. . .  

                               we turn. . . 
faces of pain and fear, the dawn
awash among them
—Diane di Prima

You came to my dream last night    Diane
like a Zen slap    your fierce spirit hell bent    on waking
me up    rousing me to write    a roaring rant
for these terrible times    you find me in    You
who were my poetry teacher    decades ago    You
whose lineage    is my lineage    Blake    H.D.
The Black Mountain Poets    Your own wild Loba    You 

usher me up a steep staircase    to your garret    a word 

whose root means watchtower    You who believed
there is gold    deep in the roots of words    You
        whose creed was    a poet must always be    on the watch

White Wolf Fantasy

Remember the first time I came to you?    wearing a flouncy
gypsy skirt    so femme    beside your tattered Beat poet jeans
I was scared    for I had given you the power    to dub me poet
or dud    Back in the day    at a demonstration against The War
I’d heard you read    Revolutionary Letters    I was smitten    you
who mingled the lyrical    & the political    (forbidden to an English
major)    called to me    like a Muse    Turns out my lucky stars
had unexpected plans for me    an esoteric path you walked
me down    to the roots of Poetry’s Tree of Life    in the Spirit
of the Depths    in the Lunar Realms    of Magick    Tarot
                                       Kabbala Alchemy Mythology Dreams

Wm. Turner Angel Standing in the sun

I watched you being brilliant    fierce    tongue-lashing nasty

You scared me    just as my Father had    & yet I stayed
in your circle    in the spell of your Magick    long enough
to become the poet I am    whose Muse insists    on mingling
the esoteric    the lyrical    & the political    Your lineage
is my lineage    At the cusp of the pandemic    I learned 

you’d left your body    & now here you are   in my dream

insisting I remember   who I am   the first-born birth right baby   

of refugee Jews from the Shoah   reliving the very catastrophe   

into which I was born     I used to believe   never again

would such an atrocity   assault us     

The holy wind’s been knocked out   of my Muse  

My Goddess has retreated    to the underworld    

Your spirit demands    that I tell it   as I see it   

                  the whole cruel scourge   of our passion play

He has come    who sees himself as savior    creator

of a Golden Age    whose given name means    

Ruler of the World    Sea Monster from the Depths 

I prefer to call him    Berserker    You say that hardly
does him justice    The truth is that he stinks
He is corrupt    his guts rotting    in Big Mac Sauce
His Doppelganger    who does his dirty work
his little boy    as a shield against assassination    He wields
a jubilant chain saw    to cut & slash    the Civil Service
to rend asunder    the bonds that bind our land    Diane
is that you chanting    the Declaration of Independence?

Lady Liberty Weeping

Whenever any form of government becomes destructive
of our rights    to Life    Liberty    and the Pursuit
of Happiness    It is the Right of the People    to abolish it

He has ridden roughshod    over the Constitution
He has tossed landmines at clinics that serve    wounded veterans
He has swindled the working classes    to cut taxes for the rich
He has eviscerated truth    violated due process
disobeyed judges    ripped peaceful legal immigrants
out of their lives    O monstrous chaos agents
wreckers of law    & community    You who believe
that empathy is a sin    a feminine weakness
like helping a stranger    like feeding a starving child
like calling out    cruelty & bigotry    Be careful

Our Goddess has arisen    from her underworld meat hook
She who is a love Goddess    a warrior Goddess    a flood
& fire Goddess    for whom earth & sky sing
                is in a holy fury    about this desecration &    She’s Woke!

The Goddess Durga: Photo by Subhrajyoti