Even in translation / I am like a yoyo in his hands.

::::::::

Milosz on a bad day

Thought that he would be quickly replaced

By a stronger wave,

A brighter flame,

A faster flowing stream.

But on a good day

Humility was not his thing.

Even in translation

I am like a yoyo in his hands.

Down and up, down and up

Down and spinning in place,

Up and zinging back and forth

And around and around spinning.

When an older poet dies

There is no one to replace them.

Don't just read the poems they are famous for!

Read the poems they gave to us

Reluctantly, with pain in their eyes.

Read the poem

That gives you courage to keep writing

Because maybe their worst poem

Is like your best.

And maybe the thought even occurs to you

That you yourself

Are irreplaceable.

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

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.