Writer, Musician, Poet, Academic
09 May 2020 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: blood, creator, free verse, giving, home, mother, poem, poetry
My mother’s life is and was
All giving
My creator, an image of my Creator.
Her very blood infused into my veins
She has made a home and a life for me
In my weakness, she was strength
In my want, she was plenty
In my soul, my mind, my aspirations
My mother’s heart is poured into mine
In our differing visions, or visions shared
My mother was there
Supporting, condoling, celebrating
Much of me is not her
Much of me is her
It matters not
She gave, gives
A mother’s life is and was
All giving.
07 May 2020 1 Comment
in Blog Tags: bluebell, Buddhists, delight, dukkha, flower, friends, joy, love, pansy, poem, poetry, rhyme, time
We love to see a meadow of wild flowers
And take delight in sweet pea, bluebell, pansy
But if we try to pick and hold their beauty
We find they fade and wilt in only hours
Still after we have placed them in a vase
We love their delicate pedals and scent
Like flowers, time with friends is only lent
Though beauty in friendships gives life grace
And we love it when our friends are nearby
But time with friends tends to be uncertain
If long or short, impermanence is certain
People change; in time we’ll say goodbye
Buddhists say that joy in friend or lover
Still is dukkha, suffering or grief
I see the transient nature of all life
Yet still take joy, delight, and pleasure
As it is in friendship, love, or flower
07 May 2020 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: activity, ambition, COVID-19, edit, free verse, incentive, job, money, poem, poetry, publishers, reading, sloth, time
What was that I needed to get done today?
Well, nothing really—I can barely remember
When they shut us down, shut down my ambition
–“I have to what?!”—”Do what?!”–
That mandated sloth that tells me stall, stop
So I slouch upon my couch, and pass time
At times, I take the time to touch base
With a treasured book—which I never would have
Chasing time filled with needless activity
Chasing a job, a dollar, more money
No money and nothing to spend it on—
I would go to the mall, the bookstore, the casino
And with a home library filled with good books
I never did read, read now—sometimes
When I can find the incentive
And my poems that I organize to send out
Re-read, fix, edit,–search out publishers
When I can’t find the incentive
And just slouch upon the couch
And watch TV that I don’t like
Don’t like not doing what I want to get done
This mandated sloth, this slovenly lost ambition
Not even waiting for it all to be over
Just waiting on time, making time, taking time, time to get something done
Plenty to get done today, and nothing, really
05 May 2020 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: Beethoven, cultivation, culture, free verse, language, muse, music, recording, singing, soul, symphony, synapses
Music isn’t just pretty sounds, a pulse
Rock isn’t just a distorted guitar
Blues isn’t just a 12-bar form
Music should strike fire from the heart, so said Beethoven,
Music is poetry of the soul, heart and soul
Soul music, the existence of the soul
Touched by fire, music is a living thing
Life-giving, live or recorded, alive through ages
Living with individuals through life, through aging,
In youth or age, youth and age
Peasant and king hear the same music, so say the Chinese
Pounding through the heart, hearing, heard with soul
Existence of the soul, sounds’ salve, alive
Conducted through electricity in the brain
Singing through synapses in the soul
Symphony of the senses sent from on high
Humans sang before they spoke,
The lilt of language’s inflections
Performances perfecting the human condition
Culture, cultivation, culmination of the muse’s calling
Meaning so much more than pretty sounds, a pulse
05 May 2020 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: creativity, fancy, manifest, poem, poetry, style, tradition, verse, wings
Blessings rarely fall upon creativity,
The blessed gift that gives blessings to the world
Would that all God’s people were prophets
Business demands compliance to management
Academia demands conformity to pedagogy
The workers and scholars who meet success
Want creativity, don’t want creativity, wanton creativity
Constrained in a cage, the wings of creativity chafe
But soaring flights of fancy ill bear containment
Even at peril, wings flex their wits
Affront establishment, norms, aesthetic strictures
Flout trends, tradition, transmission of style
Interested only in release of the muse, manifestation
Fractious under pressure to demur to stricture, structure
Nature knows no other course
And must be itself, be it bless or curse
Knowing blesses only at happy realizations of muse
The which only creative natures nurture
Must manifest, make, make known, appear, make apparent
04 May 2020 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: art, Blake, Eliot, F. Scott, fame, free verse, Hemingway, litany, obscurity, poem, Sheyyey, wealth
The Keepers of intellectual trends hold apparent power
And to make it, some are slaves to the Keepers’ fashion
I am a free man to my own muse
I am a priest who intones the litany:
Blake was a free genius, self-published,
And died in literary obscurity
Until T. S. Eliot gave him a name
Shelley knew, “Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure”
Whom all English students now study
Though F. Scott knew fame and wealth,
Gatsby didn’t even sell out its first printing
And F. Scott never knew the book as all high school students do
They suppressed Hemingway’s Pulitzer
They fiercely debated whether Frost were a poet, Wyeth a painter
The Impressionists showed in the Exhibition of Rejects
And Moreau, in the National Paris Salon
Pollock had his 10 years, before his suicide
Mozart died unknown, unsung
We can’t give our contentment to the Keepers
It rests in the beauty of our art manifesting,
In the pen of the writer alone with paper or laptop screen,
And a happy finished project
In the living-room, study, or dorm room
With, or without, the blessing of the Keepers
David Fekete 