Arlene Corwin Poetry

Sorry to bother you on New Year’s Day, but yesterday being about love, this reaction burned itself into my brain today.
Happy New Year!

       New Year’s Day 2020

While Nintendo tends to games that train,
Australia burns.
Koala bears and kangaroos, the populace
Lose loves and lives: Apocalypse.

We sit and watch the TV news,
Last night’s champagne obscurely active,
We alive, not losing home and life, the fact is,
There can never be
equality,
Wins and loss an unmoved boss.

While year becomes a twenty-twenty,
Eyesight lags behind and we see worse than ever,
We, the cognoscenti severed from reality.

I, one of the ‘cognoscenti’ weak in kindness,
Strong in ignorance, probably a hubris too. Goodness me,
To see the goodness and receive, retrieve it,
That’s the trick.

A slick and sick society,
We cheat and lie
To satisfy self-serving need,
Feed vanity’s rapacious greed;
A lie which grieves the planet as we watch it die
While I write futile poetry and pry
This New Year twenty twenty.

——-New Year’s Day 2020 1.1.2020
Our Times, Our Culture II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Sitting Down To Play 🎹🤸‍♀️🎯

I may have heard a tune that noon
Or suddenly remembered one from out the past.
Breathing in (it’s called inspired )
Sitting down at keyboard, tired or not
I play a chord.
A transformation may take place
A consonant become a dissonant –
Anyway, completely right!

I carry on, and if the mood and mind are light,
Spontaneously born,
I get a fresh new version
Left not knowing what the right has shorn.

With instincts of a bass player and basic to my talents
(which I’ve long learned to respect?
I gallantly proceed to seed a whole new version
Of a song I’d long forgotten.
It’s like cottonwool onto my ears.
I leave the keyboard cleared of doubt,
Cheered by what strange voicings have come out.

Ah, yes, sitting down to play
Is likened to a sitting down to pray.
Can you agree, jazz player-reader?
Have you never had the pleasure
Of this pressure-less approach?
If not, I vouch for senses that are on
The way to exaltation
And in some way liberation.
Sitting down To Play 6.15.2019 Vaguely About Music II; Arlene Nover Corwin

This is actually a spontaneously inspired message of love and appreciation to new found Facebook friends from all over this varied globe.

         Cryptic Time

Posts from all the world!
Who would have thought that flags unfurled
For little me from many you,
And many you from little me.
I’m filled and swell!

Time passes and with glasses raised up high
I sigh a gladdened sigh
That sitting here on chair in Sweden
More than one admiring eye
Is reading this, this very minute
Taking in the things I have to say
On chairs a million miles away.

Quell mystery! For we
Will all be history a hundred years from now,
Perhaps no documentary fragment left
To inventory our best efforts.
Yet, we’re here, to write and wrestle with
A universe, and universal questions all have faced
Since time began.
And we, each other’s fan
Give love through likes and hearts and upraised thumbs.
Fumbling, tumbling round, zooming in on every crumb
That life can offer
Never coming to an ultimate.
Offering love to every Facebook friend
Not succumbing to the humdrum of an end
But encouraging each other.
Is that not grand!
Cryptic Time 6.14.2019 Circling Round Time !!; Circling Round Reality; Birth, Death & In Between III; Arlene Nover Corwin

Just looking through some old stuff and found this lovely one inspired when sitting in the living room with an extaordinarily bright full moon coming straight through my window.

  Mister Moon Looking Through The Window 🌎☛🎯🌝☛🎯🌎!

Mister Moon looking in the window,
Angled forty-five degrees or so.
Minutes before midnight, TV show still going strong,
Me inspired by his song,
The man who woos from distances I cannot reach,
Who tempting me with valley eyes and mountain nose,
River mouth, a face that shows
The whole of him for one sweet night:
Peachy ball
Seeing all.

I’m watching and he’s watching,
Yet there’s nothing he can give
Except the tides, the tears,
Moon madness fears.

From where I sit,
He looks a little
Lost in space,
That still, still face
Accepting veils of cloud,
Black veils that shroud,
Erasing, chasing, placing
His enigma high
Upon the lists: wherefrom and why?
We’re looking at each other through
The window’s creamy glow.
Mildly roused, inspired, I.
He, embracing from the sky.
A courtship undeniably absurd, unheard:
In silence.
(revised 7.20.2019 in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, July 20, 1969)

Mister Moon Looking Through The Window 5.16.2003/revised 7.20.2019
Circling Round Nature; Love Relationships;
Arlene Corwin

This is a poem that’s meant to stop worry.
Arlene
Nobody Cares But You
(a poem about detachment)

It was a gig.*
Fancy hotel, piano/song.
Song was “Yesterday” by Kern –
A song I’d learned; five decades worn.
What could go wrong?
I knew the song from back to front,
Each bar, each note Jerome Kern wrote.
And then it happened in the bridge:**
Mind went blank! Memory rigid!
No matter how I searched and banged
I could not find the changes (chords),
Which key or what. Carrying on,
Not caring what the crowd
Was thinking, I remained the fool
On a piano stool until, at last,
The bumbling, stumbling passed
And I was back on track.

Key found, my vocal sound as good as ever,
I’d discovered never be stopped by obstacle or handicap;
Never let it sap nerve, verve or energies,
For I’m not there to serve or please;
I’m there to carry through a form of choice,
Give my jazz to some Corwin voice,
Let the moment be my norm
Never wishing for perfection
Or to make a good impression,
The interpretation mine, just mine,
Anything I manage fine, just fine.

There’s no such thing as flawlessness.
The folk out there more focussed
On its own concerns and interests,
Concentrative powers, capability and prowess
Lasting no more than a minute,
Public recall all but ‘perfect’.

Do your thing
Not just for God and king
But for the joy of self and self-fulfilling.
Dare, share, always there.
No one really cares but you.

Nobody Cares But You 12.26.2019
Pure Nakedness; The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative; Vaguely About Music; Arlene Nover Corwin
*gig; musician’s jargon for job or engagement.
**bridge; the middle of a song, often called release.

        What Shall I Call This?

Fooled and foiled by age’s changing:
Wrinkling cheek or thigh or arm;
Gaugeable cholesterol, a kidney stone…
The daughter product of my womb, her own
Cholesterol controlled, the whole of life
Now shown to be on loan
As kith and kin, e’en skin and bone
Are being clocked…
I am no longer shocked, no longer blocked,
No longer feel mocked by Law;
But flowing with it as it sows
And goes someplace that no one knows
Is understanding so much more
Than just the weeks or days before.

What Shall I Call This? 12.15.2008/revised 12.29.2019
Circling Round Wrinkles; Circling Round Nature II;
Mother Book; Circling Round Woman II; Birth, Death & In Between II;
Arlene Corwin

          Quiet Xmas🌲

There will be no presents, wrapped or not.
Gifts can be sought, bought, ought to
Anytime, occasion rhyming with a need one’s own.
Food? By all means, and of course!
Lots of courses, for it’s fun to cook,
Break traditions, keeping some.
Summing up a feel and food one’s own.

We’ve stopped the tree,
Tree steeped in earth or water.
Tree slaughtered for some seller’s coin.
In short, we’ve stopped the joining.

We’ll have friends to share in,
Setting out each comfy chair in
Spots where it is warm and charming.

We’ll create a pretty table.
We are able to afford a pretty table
Cause we’ve lots to pretty china,
Several sets of cutlery and once again –
It suits our needs
To feed our friends.

It will all be like jazz improvising,
Extemporizing something one has played for years,
Knowing well that the instinctive mind can take first place,
The space inside creating as it goes along
A luscious meal or gorgeous song.

Quiet, yes. But lonely, no.
Xmases will come and go,
It’s still a Christmas eve and day
Where one can shape it any way one pleases,
Easing into year that follows.
So, respected fellowship around the world,
Wishing you the best! Self-willed zest,
Peace of mind and joy and gladness!

Quiet Xmas 12.16.2019
Our Times, Our Culture II; Arlene Nover Corwin