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August 16, 2020
Vertigo / Picking up glass on Monhegan Island
By Gary Lindorff
A poem about picking up the pieces and being in a good place to contemplate what it means to be whole.
::::::::
The back of Monhegan rises
Over a hundred feet above the sea
Like a bit of wild Ireland
I am partway down
A series of climbable ledges
Picking up shards of glass
Green and amber and clear splinters
Of what's left of beer bottles
That were lobbed from the top of the cliff
After the beer was finished
From the top of the cliff
The whole Atlantic Ocean
Spreads out to infinity
With the United States behind me
I can picture each bottle
Arcing and free-falling
And exploding out of sight on the rocks
And when I am sitting on that cliff
I am in a place that is its own place
I am free
To let myself be lulled by the waves
That break on the rocks like glass
And are pulled back by the sea
To become waves again
Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.
He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.