Adolfo Caso Dedicates Poem, The Empty Nest, For Me -- Cool!

Glenda, I am dedicating the attached poem to you, because you have been a wonderful friend throughout my life. No poet has enjoyed a solidarity that you have given me

THE EMPTY NEST

 (Dedicated to Glenda)

Guided by its own internal clock,
The brown finch

Silently and covertly

Flies by different routes

With grass blades in beak

Into the thickest branch

Of my evergreen arborvitae,

Looming strong and impenetrable

In the corner of my backyard

As though it were holding up

The house walls on each side

And protecting against

Would-be intruders or predators

From the outside.

Through my kitchen window 
I follow each flight of the finch,

From many directions,

Carrying its precious cargo into the tree

To build its nest.

And I feel miserable

Not knowing

Whether it is only the mother finch

Building that nest

Or with the father too

As I wished it would be,

With my other wish.

For her to pause And,

To sing me A love-song.

(Adolfo doesn't see him but This is the male finch singing to his female)

II

The nest completed,

Evidence for a successful clutch

Was in the reduced number of flights

Into the arborvitae,

Now a surrogate

For new life-forms in the making.

I moved to my deck chair

Inconspicuously,

My back to the tree

To avoid perceived threats

To the emerging brood,

My heart in full wonderment

To see the fledglings--

As when I first saw

The beautiful face of each

Newly-born chick

And all the grandchildren

Together with

An indescribable expectation

Of the great-grandchildren

Yet to come;

My emotions are overwhelming

Over this deeply-felt

Non-duplicative joy!

III

Suddenly,

A tumultuous crowing

With abrupt churning in the branches

Brought me to the outside;

Two crows dove down,

Obstreperously,

From the edge of the roof

Into the branch containing the nest.

Before I could take any action,

They flew away with as much clamor,

My mouth wide open

As my eyes caught sight of the finch

In the nearby tree,

Going from one branch to another

Desperately waiting

For destiny

To reveal itself.

My eyes glaring

Between the finch

And the branch,

I ran to the tree.

In bringing the twigs down gently,

I saw the empty nest,

Its destiny fulfilled

To my consternation

Knowing that no amount of despair

Could mitigate my affliction

And the loss to the finch,

Already poised to depart

Without

Perhaps

Knowing

The ramifications of the crows’ action,

Except for me,

A member of my species

With eyes

To see more,

And ears

To hear more,

And a heart

To pump more blood

Through these weather-beaten veins,

Needing only

A small amount of brain

To perceive the pain

Of the mother finch

And to feel that pain

Deep inside my heart.

IV

With little comfort in knowing

That neither crow nor finch

Acted with the conscience of humans,

I am left alone in my solitary thoughts

To contemplate

That no action is without consequence,

That there is little

Counterintuitive

In the existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre

Except the utter nonsense of concluding

That after having done something,

What remains is nothing,

He being an avowed Marxist

A non-party affiliate,

Whose Soviet purges

Both within the party

And through its Gulags

Pitilessly

Executed countless people

And even used each victim’s soul

To define its wanton nihilism

Within the scope of their programmed nothingness.

After having killed the body

And wiped out the God

Of more than 100 million people--

Their souls turned to nothing

According to Jean-Paul’s existentialism--

Now emboldened by the collaboration 

Of Bertrand Russell--

English patriot,

Who demonstrated against an easy America

Not to side with England

Against Hitler’s World War II--

A champion of anti-Americanism

Bertrand also excoriated America

Over the victims of the Vietnam War

While saying nothing,

Not one word

Against the perpetrators

Of the on-going Pol Pot genocides

Within

The various sects of his United Nations’ body

And without one word of protest

From the followers

Of Confucius, or Mohammad,

Gandhi or Buddha.

Russell and Sartre:

Two Marxist would-be warriors

Joined together

On behalf of peace

Conditioned by their ideology

At the expense of millions

Of innocent victims

To grease the wheels of their un-feeling

Human-made killing machines.

But,

Luckily,

The survivors continue to seek salvation

Through their religion

And a God

That can be temporarily denied but not suppressed,

Like the souls of men!

This kind of philosophy

Has always given me pause--

A bewilderment deepened

By my inability to understand

The behavior of the crow and of the finch

Let alone that of my fellow men

Bent on manipulating everything

Including our dreams

Be they a presage of happiness or anguish

Life or death

Or whether dreams are generated

Biologically or chemically

Without answering the basic question

Of why we dream in the first place!

V

Oh, Freud, such a misguided prophet

Using Eros and Thanatos to explain man-made wars

Or repressed sexual drives to explain our dreams

Or drugging his patients and self

In search of convenient man-made personal truths

Not found in nature

Without the scrutiny

Into his self-inflicted enslavement

And to that of his patients

Without ever a word on Hitler’s ultimate solutions

Or of Stalin’s raging the land,

Or of Mao’s ubiquitous purges,

Or on Einstein making decisions against Hitler--

No!

Not one word

To preserve his people and fellow man!

Dying from self-administered drugs

Freud never knew he was discovering the means

To assure his and his patients’ bondage,

And not knowing, when he should have known,

He was void of either Eros or Thanatos.

He was sexually barren!

What am I to think and feel about a philosophy of life

That misses the point on every crucial issue

Of human behavior and solidarity?

Is it not possible that dreaming

Is a physiological necessity that keeps us alive

Each dream reflecting a phase

Of our physiological evolvement

As biological and social entities?

We respond to the stimuli

Of our pre-existing floating formulae,

As did all three men

Coming from the same area,

From the same people,

And from the same time:

Why did Hitler inherit his irreversible DNA?

And Einstein a different one?

And Freud still another?

Why mine!

Why your DNA?

Why the crow’s!

A perfect example of Sartre’s existentialism

Is in Freud’s irreversible behavior of self-destruction:

Which,

Neither ended in nothing

Nor filled the nothingness of phenomenology

Nor alleviated the suicidal pain

From life-afflicting drugs

Administered as wonder drugs

From Eros to Thanatos

As though life-forms could be explained
Through convenient formulae

As in Sartre’s existentialism.

Dreaming and dreaming are two different things,

The one,

A desire of what should be and is not

The other,

A chemical reaction

Of endless single or morphing frames

Without relevance to each other,

But interpreted

By Freud’s self-imposing personal relevance.

VI

I sit in a triangle on my deck

Directly opposite the house

Whose walls enclose the arborvitae.

I look into my own mental images

Of  waves smashing ashore

Scattering untold and countless drops of water

In every direction and just as quickly disappearing.

Which drops are carrying the DNA for new life-forms?

Which drops are destined to enhance those now living?

Which drops are rushing back

To recycle the remnants

Of those of us who have just died?

In my dreaming,

I see the Spring of next year,

The branches greener, more full and vibrant

And as an ever-inviting tree

Waiting for the finch

To make its first pass

To renovate and renew its nest,

To bring its hatchling to their first flight

And to perch on the extreme end

Of an undulating branch,

To sing the love song

Of my life.

Wow! Extraordinary poem which include the greatest twist of all! Life then Death!

We are all so involved as we grow older with how long...will it be... And, yet, that is not something that normally would be on my mind. For the first time, physical problems have affected my daily life...and yet, it is something that shall pass, I believe... The stark movement from watching birth happen almost immediately followed by death is more real than most of us want to see or even contemplate. Yet it happens.

Death has become a predominant issue in today's world, as so much is happening at the government level that forces us to contemplate whether death shall come naturally, as intended, or because of the maddening issues that arise almost daily, sometimes hourly. I have no answers... Just as, perhaps, others are facing the same feelings. Questions seem to become larger, more important when chaos occurs. 

Yet, for many of us, there is a certainty of life after death, when we shall all meet again... Until then, my friend, Adolfo, thank you for dedicating your thoughts, your hopes, your internal, endless questioning... That we two do share...

And then I shall give you a love song... Agape, philia...the greatest loves of all!

Glenda

William "Bill" Walton: A Charmed Life - Fascinating Historical Bio on WWII Journalist!

World Battlefronts: Parachute Landing in Normandy

Monday, June 19, 1944

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/a

The night before D-Day, few of the paratrooper comrades of TIME Correspondent William Walton tried to sleep. After midnight they turned out, climbed into EUR-475. They were the spear head; some of them would not live to see that day's dawn. Walton, a qualified parachutist attached to the outfit, crawled in with them, was soon over France. He cabled:
I plunged out of the plane door happy to be leaving a ship that was heading toward flak and more Germans. The jump was from such low altitude...
                                                            ~~~

William "Bill" Walton:

A Charmed Life

By Mary Hackett

Edited by Mary Claire Kendall

London was teeming with fascinating people such
as attractive and self-assured Martha Gellhorn, the
third and current wife of Ernest Hemingway, who
would also become a close friend of Bill.
~~~

A writer will always write and when William Walton went to report on many activities in Europe, he also wrote letters home to his family. He had always thought of writing his own biography, but thankfully, the family, and, in particular his sister-in-law Mary Hackett saw that his letters could be turned into one of the most interesting books sharing American history from a journalist's viewpoint...

Those who will want to travel with him into the war years will certainly have the opportunity. I think the

As he stood, he surveyed the once peaceful
and picturesque rural area of Normandy,
looking in horror at the blight that blanketed
the land: houses and barns now riddled with
holes; trees reduced to scattered fragments;
equipment smashed to pieces. Bill said the
fate of the dairy herds, one of the war's
signature images, was even worse--stinking
black and white cows, sometimes one lonely
cow, often scores, lying lifeless in fields.
It was a disheartening scene, one that he
could not have imagined...Most of Bill's
exposure to war had been viewed from an
aircraft flying high over a city, not on the
ground where up-close images of
extensive carnage and flattened structures
were forever seared in his memory.
~~~

thing that made the most impression on me regarding his desire to do all that he could to keep America informed

English: Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway with unidentified Chinese military officers, Chungking, China, 1941. Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

was to accept an invitation to train as a paratrooper. He jumped so that he was already there by the time the ground troops showed up!

But not all was about the war... Bill became close friends with Ernest Hemingway and his wife Martha Gellhorn, shown at the left...Hemingway even saved Bill's life, but there were many times for social gatherings as well.

One personal interest caught my attention--Bill was there when the most wanted gangster, John Dillinger was killed, and rode with his body to the Cook County morgue. {Me, I'm related to the Dillingers and had a John Dillinger in my family who always got picked on--LOL} Bill..."noticed that Dillinger must, at some point, have attempted to fie or burn his hands in an effort to eliminate identifying fingerprints...This reporting coup gave Bill his first national recognition. His byline, "by William Walton," would soon begin to appear in many more publications..."

Another little tidbit I enjoyed was that when, in June 1946, Bill stood to receive an honorary degree he gave a little [payback] speech... "he noticed that most of the faculty seated before him were those who had voted to kick him out almost 20 years earlier...At the end of his speech, to express his displeasure with the school's heavy-handed discipline so many years before, he turned his backside to the assembled crowd and bowed. Later, he commented to his family, "There was a very nice shape to that!"  To me, that's why we enjoy reading about people's lives, don't we?!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
William_Walton_(painter)
The body of John F. Kennedy in repose
 in the White House on November 23, 1963.
William Walton helped research the funerary
decorations for the room and the dressing
 for the catafalque.

I became fascinated with Walton's love of the outdoors and his painting activities, which became a little more well known when Bill became friends with John F. Kennedy and his family to carry through even to helping with the arrangements for his burial. There is quite a bit covering that time and his friendship with Jackie afterward Kennedy's death. "(1949-1960)"

Life, for whom he had also worked, took his friendship with Kennedy to write an article about his paintings. in "Life" in 1961. At first when you read somebody is an artist and a friend of Ernest Hemingway, et. al., don't you just wonder where somebody gets all that talent, LOL! I don't know about you, but you must begin to admire this man, don't you think?!

There's a strange appeal to his work as well as his life during the period from 1949 to 1960 when he traveled and spent most of his time painting... Although it doesn't quite come out and say it, but his trip to his final destination in Italy brought him together with Martha Gellhorn who was by then divorced from Hemingway, (Bill was also divorced by that time) writing to his sister:

...two met in Rome and "the room I took," as he described it, had "long windows and small balconies looking out on tiled roofs where chickens, cats, people, and flowers dwell in magnificent turbulence..." Italy stood out for its color. "Nobody had ever told me the color of Rome," he wrote, which is a "rich, organish tan, faded and blotchy, but very vibrant and much more alive than the cooler gray of Paris...One night they dined at a well-known and established restaurant, the next night at a charming sidewalk cafe where strolling musicians and splashing fountains enveloped them, making for a lovely scene. They returned to their hotel by horse carriage, which sounded so romantic, though Bill simply chalked it up as the last expensive transportation... Bill could not have been happier painting the beautiful vistas in the bold colors that came to distinguish his painting...

Going back a bit, I wanted to include at least part of Bill's words written on the occasion of Jack Kennedy's inauguration.

We slowly proceeded toward Constitution Hall amid the darnedest scenes of staff cars, clustered people wrapped to the eyes and torchlight flickering on the heavy snow. A beautiful trip... silver ribbons of snow swirling through the floodlights around the Washington Monument, and a snowy glow over everything and as we rode along, the inside lights on to display Jackie, she commented it was "so cozy with the world all shut out by the storm." Jack read Jefferson's first inaugural and at the end said quietly "Better than mine."

On the other hand, of course, there are not too many Americans who cannot cite Kennedy's last line: "Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country." That night the overture "From Sea to Shining Sea" was played for the first time in public...

Mary Hackett and editor Mary Claire Kendall have presented us with an excellent review of the life of William Hackett! There is so much more that is included such as his interest in the arts, architecture, and of course, writing... This is well worth any historian's interest because of the personal insights in not only Walton's life, but all that he was involved with! It seemed to me only appropriate that I closed my overview with his obituary...

William Walton Is Dead at 84; Headed Federal Fine Arts Panel  THOMAS J. LEUCK  

Published: December 20, 1994 New York Times William Walton, who as chairman of the Federal arts commission presided over the construction and restoration of several of the best-known monuments in Washington, died in his sleep and was found on Sunday at his loft in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. He was 84.Although the cause of death was not immediately known, Mr. Walton had suffered a heart attack in 1993, his family said. A journalist, painter and close friend of President John F. Kennedy, Mr. Walton had a diverse career that reached its zenith from 1963 to 1971, when he was chairman of the Fine Arts Commission, which oversees public monuments and new construction on Federal land in the District of Columbia.He defeated efforts to demolish the West Front of the Capitol, oversaw construction of the Washington subway and presided over the restoration of Lafayette Square and much of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Mr. Walton, the son of a newspaper publisher, was born in Jacksonville, Ill. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin, he began a career as a correspondent for The Associated Press and Time magazine. In World War II, while working for Time, he was among a handful of correspondents who parachuted into Normandy at the start of the invasion on June 6, 1944...

Highly recommended for those who enjoy reading about the lives of those that were involved in our own lives, but we just...didn't...know him at the time. Now is your opportunity to meet a man with a charmed life (I guess I would say that definitely is true based upon the action he saw in WWII!)


GABixlerReviews

About the Author

Mary Hackett, the author, is Bill’s niece by marriage Mary Hackett is the niece, by mar-riage, of William Walton. They developed a close relationship which was personal, and one of shared interests in gardening, art, archeology, Native American pottery, architec-ture, and the appreciation of books. The author has lived several years in the Orient and Mexico, and traveled widely. After he died, Bill's lifelong letters to his older sister were inherited by Mary and her husband. The letters, and many intimate conversations, are the basis for this book. She felt his life was so unusual, personally involving several presi-dents and many of the famous people of our history, that his story should be chronicled for others to know.

Highlighting Beautiful Words From Lisa Frost

Renewal

There is hope around the corner
look to nature to renew
Watch the rays of golden sunrise
and the grass covered with dew

it is on these things we must focus
to help keep our eyes upon the Lord
among Nature HE created
we find the truth in His words!!

All things old shall pass away
And shall be rebirthed anew
This is witnessed at the end of winter
When spring awakens a beautiful view

Life springing again around us
In glorious beauty from above
Hear the birds singing joyous
The music of happiness and love

This is the same with Christ's renewal
In our heart, mind and soul
If we keep our eyes on heaven
We shall then reach our goal
~~~

Poetry Challenge: Danger
While this is written from some experience, I have to say that it is more from things I know from working as a preschool teacher, than my own experiences, which were not as extreme. When Nation posted Danger as the challenge word, this is what came from it. There are all too many children who live in Danger where they should be safest! Even one is too many.

Danger in Safety

Here I am
where "safe" should be
yet you are the one
most dangerous to me

I never know
when it will come
or what sets it off
though I do know some

It is always something
new you see
rarely does it
make sense to me

I don't know
just how to fix
because, you see
I am only six

I try to be
as good as I can
but I seem to fail
despite my plan

I was just standing
where I thought I should be
Oh please don't Mommy
Don't hit me.

~~~

Poetry to me


Words that flow like music
some with rhythm and rhyme
give my heart so much joy
helping me to pass the time

Whether you are full and happy
with a life that is filled with glee
or you are facing storms and floods
you can express it with poetry.

If you remember your true love
on that beautiful Spring day
or trying to get past the impossible task
that life threw in your way

poetry has it's own kind of healing
whether it's light, dark, or strong
it can help sort out feelings
or tell your love you were wrong

Whatever your reason for writing it
just pick up your pen and say
the words flooding your heart and mind
and help yourself along the way.

~~~

Lisa can be found at Gather.Com! Check her out by clicking the title of the article!