Arlene Corwin Poetry

Can Meditations Influence A World?

Can meditations sway the world?
Dare one respond?
One waits for answers there, unlearned
Through insight’s scene,
The mystical discerned.

A world? To have effect on? Shape through some sorts’ inspiration?
Misery, the suffering, the evil, the corruption
Where we know that all that we can do
Is purify and cure our selves: the flawed and imperfected self
Whose weakening shortcomings are so onerous to shelve.

Can little we, (and little me) alone on cushion, chair or sofa
Offer up this blemished being
To a seeing eye up in the sky
We well nigh can’t be sure of?

Breathing tricks, mantric techniques,
Sound and focussing and tweaks –
Can each ache jerk a world into a working peace?
Endeavours and experimenting reach long-term
Through reaching in and out the brain?

One hopes!
We see a world that barely copes.
Whose bleak, weak, tweeting leaders
Cheeky-cheat the bleating of the latest.

Science tries, the churches try; social-minded allies too.
But here is little you, a-seat as I am seated now,
Mulling over if and how,
Wondering if our meditations are a mediation
Of conciliatory worth,
And if they reach the big round earth
With leverage from this average me.
We’ll speculate and try, and see!

Can Meditations Influence? 3.24.2020 Our Times, Our Culture II; To The Child Mystic; II The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II;Circling Round Meditation; Arlene Nover Corwin

Many Hours, Many Days

So many wonder, many ask
About the writing: task
or inspiration?
I say perspiration.
(not exactly, for there’s joy and fun
in reading what you’ve ultimately done)
Still yet,
It’s work and effort,
Spadework fundamental, elemental;
Work, but also preparation mental
for what is to follow
All the golden yellow years to come.
First a phrase, a thought, a sight,
A theme the middle of the night.
The paper, pen, computer close:
The start of slogging elbow grease.

First draft, still filled by sweat
May probably be filled with sh_t.
It doesn’t matter, for
The after-write will be to edit.

Changes, flexibility, ability to cross things out,
Delete, expunge, all but destroy…
There is a certain joy in that.
But still, it’s to exert an effort.
To create is always effort.
To excite and rouse yourself an effort always
Work, but worth it.

Here’s the send-off:
In the end and after years
It’s actually easier.
The fears that held you back have disappeared.
Ideas developed, riper.
Technique, range your own:
It’s called a style. You’ve a rone,*
A drainpipe in your brain
To carry off unwanted stuff
And carry on much wanted t-raining.

Many hours, many days in which to raise your standard.
Many years of joy and tears –
It all adds up up to guarantees and widened spheres
Of self-esteem and understanding.

*a gutter for carrying off rain from a roof:
Many Hours, Many Days 2.12.2020 The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Ideas, they come from nowhere. A poem is a kind of emblem, not a treatise. Always a projection of the universal through the personal.

A Poem Is An Emblem

A good poem is a movement well within the brain – :
Neurological and chemical,
Its sum of cells the working mind
Through growing chains of synapses –
Those tiny gaps across which pulses pass
Where day’s long lapse spells out
Its relativity.

Peculiar to each one (and me)
The time goes fast or slow,
Components shrink or grow,
The details varied with each person.

For that reason,
And to not appear too brazen,
Poetry, (my own)
Has made me sharper, keener,
Smarter, gleaner
Of ideas that come from no- and everywhere.

Thus, this simple object
Formed of alphabetic letters
In no worse or better
Than the eyes that fall upon it,
Emblematic syntax that it is.
A Poem Is An Emblem 3.17.2020 The Processes: Creative,Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Replication*

Don’t do it! Do not replicate!
We all are influenced. We duplicate.
But you are you,
Creating you anew each time you say or do:
Be true to it!
Each bit that comes from hands or mouth
Must be authentic.
Whatever else a main road to unhappiness,
Impatience, and the opposite of blessedness
(whatever that is.)

There is no other you.
A funny face, untied shoelace,
Your life anomalous
Which no one comprehends.

That’s fine! An understanding
Is not all that it’s made out to be.
We ourselves don’t grasp the each and every,
Do not take it in and don’t quite savvy…
Not everything depends on being canny.
All depends on being you,
True to the soul-whole you were born with,
Born to find, for after all we’re all born blind;
We need to spend the years becoming
When we’re meant to be,
Which freshness means originality:
O R I G
– I N A L – I T
And finally,
Big -Y.
*Replication; An exact copy of

Replication 3.19.2020 the Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Definitely Didactic II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Everything Has An End

Light waves and bends.
Comes from the sun, reaches its object.
Lo, it ends.
(its start to other aims the subject for another poem).

You know what I’m talking ‘bout.
A teeny, microscopic lout
Which at the moment rules our days –
It will not always,
But die out.
Once it’s found a final project
To project its deadly darts at.

Where things go
When they appear to disappear
We do not know,
Can only guess and speculate,
A date out of the question.

All we know is all things end:
The bending light, day, night,
Humongous, slight;
Even the alphabet, A to Z,
There still a further mystery
And further question:
Which came first, the egg or chicken,
Cause where, when
Or even why?

The keys lie in philosophy,
Material, its -ality.
And so we end with unclear hope
That we can cope until the finish;
That the crash is but a hyperbolic gnashing
Of the teeth that brandishes its blemished face
And ends.

Everything Has An End 3.16.2020 Our Times, Our Culture II; Arlene Nover Corwin

She Was A Hippy

She never smoked, never drank,
Never joined a cult or sect.
Her hippiness, her happiness
Found itself in waist length hair,
Patterned tights,
Bra dismissed
And short, short skirts:
Her expression of new freedom.

Fifties beatniks never reached her,
But the sixties found a new awareness
Which addressed her heart,
Unleashed a part she only guessed at;
One which dressed her mind.
Convention could not bind her
As behavior took a shape unstudied,
Natural – hardly touched before.

Maturity without hashish, Rajneesh,
The itch of spirit bringing in a shift in old priorities.
A little bolder, somewhat older;
Hippy of a different sort.
Mother, wife, musician, poet
All and each each supportive
And escorting her some steps to standing,
Understanding and continuance.

She Was A Hippy 3.13.2020 Pure Nakedness II; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin

Everything That Comes To The Surface

Everything that makes its way onto the surface
May be good,
Its matter surplus, or not wanted –
Dead fish notwithstanding.

A surgeon’s stitch forgot, ignored,
(as was my dated fate of late);
The spooned off fat on top of soup,
Secret thoughts self hidden
Coming up and out unbidden,
Sifting happiness from pain.

Again, again,
Examples endless:
Plants that sprout to charm the bees;
Corks that float,
Pus gravitating towards an ‘out’,
Shoots whose object’s being eaten…
Endless signature secretions
For the use of us
And every creature,
Surface purpose their first feature.
Everything That Comes To The Surface 3.12.2020 Nature Of & In Reality; Arlene Nover Corwin