Lynx Liberation Communique

Lynx Liberation Communique

Plum Creek Che
Down from the mountains

Comandante Lynx, Presente!
down from the mountains.
Comandante Wolf, Presente!
down from the mountains.
Comandante Moose, Presente!
down from the mountains.
Comandante Loon, Presente!
down from the mountains
with courage and strength
comrades
for the struggle to live
free in your own lands
to bring democracy
to biodiversity -
courage and strength
to stop the roads
No Pasaran!
to stop the clearing, the destruction,
the dying
Presente, Comandante,
Brothers, Sisters
We stand with you.



Gary Lawless

bees - kimberly art/gary poem

bee line
line of sight
first line I see tonight
I wish I may
I wish I might
be the bee i dream tonight

St. Jerome

Bitter roots and Penitence

Jerome, with a book, writing

I dreamed of you last night or

Augustine, writing a letter, Jerome

I dreamed of you

last night I

dreamed you were dead.

Ring the hermit's bell

to scare the devil away.

The lion, alone,

now licking his paw.

Ferruccio Brugnaro, Italian Poet

In Venice, Beth and I met up with native Venetian Beat Bard Alessandro Spinazzi. Sandro said to meet him on the Rialto bridge at 2PM, and when I asked him how we would know him, he said "Because I look like you!' We spent the afternoon at a very pleasant street cafe, and the next evening we went to the home Sandro shares with his wife Katy. Sandro had invited the poet Ferruccio Brugnaro and his wife Maria. A wonderful evening of food, wine, poetry and friendship.

Ferruccio is also a native Venetian, and worked for much of his life in the industrial zone of Marghera, just west of Venice, on the mainland. A Communist, an activist, a lifelong poet, Ferruccio has recently read at festivals in San Francisco and Cuba. His work is available here in the United States in a collection called Fist of Sun, translated by Jack Hirschman and published by Curbstone Press, and in a collection for his wife Maria, called Portrait of A Woman, also translated by Jack Hirschman and published by CC Marimbo Press.

Here is a poem called We Don't Want Bosses, Period (from Fist of Sun)

We don't want bosses of any kind,

period.

They've already splashed around

in our blood,

already feasted plenty

on our lives.

Stop asking us so many questions.

Look at our injuries

the damage done to peasants

and miners.

We've gotta yank this plant out of the world

once and for always.

Don't ask anything else of us. We've really

made up our guts.

We don't want bosses

because they're

the same as ever:

because they want the land

all for themselves,

because they want the sun

all for themselves,

because they never stop

robbing, trampling,

and killing, killing

day and night under every kind of sky.

and a poem from Portrait of A Woman, for his wife, Maria:

Sometimes Maria sings

the most intense songs.

Songs I've never

heard before

that aren't heard

anywhere

She sings, sometimes explodes

wordlessly

with her songs

packed with

history.

She sings tirelessly of things,

unknown

events

she moves, sways,

she sings

profound joys to me.

Sings to me, invents, makes up

songs for me

does Maria

returning sometimes

in the middle of the night

songs that can't be described

can't be re-told.

italian history of the west

In San Gimignano, a hilltop town of many towers, we stay in a small hotel facing the central piazza. On a table in a common area I find, among the Italian fashion magazines, two issues of Mountain Gazette, where I find this "New History of the West":

Kill all the Indians.
Kill anything with fur.
Mine all the mountains.
Cut down all the trees.
Dam the rivers.
Ski.
Ryan Dingus

italia

nobody knows us here we're

moving down the mountain we're

looking for a river we're

looking for a cloud we're

looking for a language we're

looking for a sign we're

looking for a story that will

tell us when we're home

gary lawless

Italian relics

Usually when we go to Italy I am on the lookout for relics, looking in the Catholic churches for body parts, pieces of saints, bones, teeth, blood, breath, pieces of the True Cross and thorns from the crown of thorns. This trip had a slight variation on that theme.
In Rome we went to the Spanish Steps, and the Keats/Shelley museum, the rooms where Keats died, facing the Spanish Steps. There they have locks of hair from Keats, Shelley and Milton, collected by Leigh Hunt, and also a piece of Shelley's jaw (with a quote from one of the women in their circle saying that she couldn't bear to see the jaw, as she would remember the lips that once covered it, and the words which came from those lips...)Shelley's heart, saved by Trelawney from the funeral pyre, is not there. Mary took it with her.
In the north of Italy, in the south Tyrol/Dolomites/Alto Adige we went to the city of Bolzano, to the Museum of the South Tyrol, where the oldest relic going in Italy is housed - The Ice Man. The Ice Man dates to 5400 years old, frozen into a glacier high up in the mountains and found emerging from the ice by two hikers. A storm in the Sahara had deposited a dark layer of sand on the ice, causing melting (of course, along with global warming) and the eventual exposure of the Ice Man. Italy and Austria argued over which country would house the relics, and the international border was surveyed, showing the Ice Man to be about 20 meters into Italy.
Relics have always brought pilgrims, tourists, and business. Bolzano has created a lovely museum to house the Ice Man. They feature, of course, a look at him, but also create a story and a context for each article of his clothing, his tools, his first aid kit, his weapons. The museum looks at everything from his tattoos to his bearskin soled shoes, from his fleas and tick, stomach parasites and blue eyes to his arsenic levels (high, probably from taking part in the smelting of metals). He has mushrooms in his first aid kit, to stop bleeding, and carried two birchbark containers lined with leaves. He was killed by an arrow in the back, and died clutching a dagger in his hand. It is an amazing thing to come face to face with someone from so long ago and yet, right there. I sat on a chair in the museum and wrote this little poem:

Ice Man Sutra (Bolzano)

where everything is revealed.
These are the mountains.
These are the mountains
beyond the mountains.
This is the sky.
This is the sky
beyond the sky.
This is the moment
beyond the mountains
beyond the sky.