Nanao and Bikki

Last night I had a dream that Nanao asked me to tell people about his friend Bikki. When I published poet Nanao Sakaki's book of poems "Let's Eat Stars", the cover art was by Ainu artist Bikki Sunazawa (enhanced by Beth Leonard,it is an image I now have tattooed on my right arm). Nanao was a great admirer of Bikki's work, and "Let's Eat Stars" contains two poems specifically speaking to Bikki. I have included them below.You can learn more about Bikki in the excellent book "From The Playground of the Gods - The Life & Art of Bikky Sunazawa" by Chisato O. Dubreuil.




Bikki Salmon

Bikki salmon swimming
Nanao salmon swimming
Allen salmon swimming
Gary salmon swimming
Black Elk salmon swimming
Issa salmon swimming
Lao Tsu salmon swimming
Ezo wolf salmon swimming
Ainu Koroppocl salmon swimming
Yamanba witch salmon swimming
Maitreya Buddha salmon swimming
Northern Cross salmon swimming

Fair-weather cumulus floating
in October morning sky
rosy fruits of mountain ash trembling.
I stand on the cemented bank
of the River Teshio, Hokkaido, Japan.
A river straightened and strangled by man,
and on the bank, scattered eggs of salmon
left by a poacher.

Orion high in the evening sky
geese and swans head southward
maple leaves burning red
deer cry for love in fir forest
boletus edulis and wild grape
invite you into the mountains.

Just before the Sea of Okhotsk
begins to shine with drifting ice
North Pacific salmon return to mother rivers
where woods and waters nursed them years before.

Salmon means
blood and meat to grizzly
Fish of God to Ainu
Fish of festival to Japanese.

In the pebbly river
against quick running water
holding their energy
they wait and wait
and suddenly, thrusting their fins
they leap up the stream
-Hurry to the spot of their birth and death.

Bikki Sunazawa, legendary Ainu artist
for him too the time has come.
While cutting a woodblock print of the Fish of God
he becomes a salmon.
Having fish eyes, nose, scales, tattoos,
spirals and soul
He's now a seventy-centimeter-long fish, Bikki salmon.

Pectoral fin, dorsal fin,
ventral fin,
adipose fin, anal fin.

Under the river banks, heaps of trash
...TV sets, refrigerators,
...chemical flotsam in the river
...acid rain and radiation in the air

Against the flow of poison
Against the flow of decay
Mumbling Heart Sutra
Bikki salmon swimming.

In this crooked generation
salmon moves straight forward.

Now the ripples ripple in unison:
"Sing, dance as the river flows!"
"Sing, dance as life flows!"
"Sing, dance with your friends!"

Bikki salmon swimming
Nanao salmon swimming
Allen salmon swimming
Gary salmon swimming
Black Elk salmon swimming
Issa salmon swimming
Lao Tsu salmon swimming
Ezo wolf salmon swimming
Ainu Koroppocl salmon swimming
Yamanba witch salmon swimming
Maitreya Buddha salmon swimming
Northern Cross salmon swimming
Bikki, Bikki
Bikki salmon swimming
in River Teshio.

********************************

Star Bikki

A myth - a new star is born!
There are teeny, tiny six thousand stars
in the solar system, the minor planets or asteroids
which turn around the sun, day & night.

Somebody discovered a new one
& named it Bikki after my friend's name.

Bikki Sunazawa -
born in Hokkaido as Ainu
all his life he was carving
something in the empty sky with his chisel
something in wood with his soul
like his grandfathers.

Oct. 1988, his health was not good -
on one beautiful afternoon
I took my canoe & visited his studio.

Looking into my eyes, he asked
"Nanao, is the twenty-first century really coming?"

Tired out, Jan. 1989 he said
"Bye-bye" to this world.

And one day he metamorphosed into a tree,
his favorite one, an Ezo spruce in his garden.
The tree grows higher & higher above the clouds.
Today you find him in the solar system
as one of the minor planets.

Hi Star Bikki. Congratulations!

Do you know about your new identity card?
1. Registered number: 5372
2. Star Name: Bikki
3. Temporary number: 1987 WS
4. Discoverer: Kin Marudate, Kazuo Watanabe
5. Discovery spot: Kitami, Hokkaido, Japan

Hi Star Bikki! Nowadays
what are you carving?
What songs are you singing?
What kind of sake are you drinking?

Hi Star Bikki! Sometime
send me a postcard
decorated full of stars!

poems by Nanao Sakaki
photo of Bikki Sunazawa from "From the Playground of the Gods"

In Lille

Archangels raising their horns
facing the dawn
facing the river, St. John
singing the light
one hundred years of sunrise

On Saturday, September 8, 2018, I read poems at the Musee Culturel du Mont-Carmel, in Lille, Maine. For more information on this incredible building and project, please go here!
Gary Lawless

Birds fly through the sacred

photo by Sean Hawkey/WCC

His All-Holiness, Patriarch Bartholomew, releases a kestrel into the wild sky on the Greek island of Spetses. The two kestrels released that day had been rescued and rehabilitated by the Greek organization Animas link here . One flew north, the other flew south.

Zeus released two eagles at opposite ends of the Earth. They met at Delphi, the omphalos, the navel of the earth.

"When will we learn that to commit a crime against the natural world is also a sin...for human beings to destroy the biological diversity in God's creation; for human beings to degrade the integrity of the earth by contributing to climate change, by stripping the earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands; for human beings to contaminate the earth's waters, land and air - all of these are sins."
His All-Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew

Herodotus:
two dark birds flew from Thebes.
One established the Siwa Oasis oracle in Libya.
One established the oracle at Dodona, Greece.
At Dodona, the bird flew to an oak.
The wind would stir the leaves, the sound
recognized by the birds as the voices of the gods.

"We have lost the spirit of worship. We are no longer respectful pilgrims on this earth; we have been reduced to careless consumers or passing travelers."
His All-Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew

after the rain stopped, Noah released a raven. The raven did not return.
Next he released a dove, which returned, finding no other place to land.
He waited seven days, and released the dove again.
The dove returned, with a freshly plucked olive branch in its mouth.
Seven days later, he again released the dove.
This time the dove did not return, having set foot on land.


"A merciful heart...It is a heart on fire for the whole of Creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons and for all that exists."
St. Isaac the Syrian

and the birds,
flying through the Sacred
every day.


In June of 2018 Gary Lawless and Beth Leonard traveled to Greece to attend the "Toward a Greener Attica - Preserving the Planet and Protecting its People" conference, called by His Al-Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew, and held in Athens and the islands of Spetses and Hydra.

Venice Wood

Posts. Hundreds of posts. Thousands of posts. Millions of posts.A whole city built on posts. Posts driven into the mud, below the surface. More than ten million trees. Posts for buildings. Wood for houses, storage, churches, bridges. Wood for shipbuilding. Wood for docks and levee systems. Wood for heating and cooking. Wood for the glass furnaces on Murano. Wood harvested and brought to Venice: wood from the Lagoon's littoral forests - larch, pine, alder ; wood brought downriver -oak and beech forests; wood from the mountains,from Slovenia,from Istria. Brought to the Zattere, named for the barges carrying the logs, now that long, flat walkway along the Giudecca, next to the water, Fondamente, where Pound loved to walk.
All of those ghosts.

venice waters

Everything is Holy.
Bless the Lagoon, sweet Saint Lucy.
Bless the birds, the fish,
Bless the trees on the outer islands,
Bless the waves and the wind.
Send the cruise ships to Hell.
There is room there,
for one more boat.

Prospect, Maine

My Grandfather Lester Dow's store, Prospect, Maine
photo undated, early 1900s


Prospect

My grandfather Lester
walked down, down
to his store
at the crossroads of town,
now buried with Hannah,
across the road low
on the hillside, there
my mother's first school.
My uncle walked down,
down to the marsh and
Bucksport beyond,
to the mill, making paper,
the mill now
closed down,
soon to be gone -
From Prospect the land
falls down to the river,
Verona, to Bucksport, beyond
and the whole world,
somewhere, below us now.



(For Lester, Hannah, Earl, and Ruth Dow)

Gary Lawless

originally published in "Still Mill - poems, stories and songs of Making Paper in Bucksport, Maine, 1930-2014"

In Ireland

Gary and Beth, with the Blasket Islands behind us -


Where every cove has a name
where every field has a name
we walk the "god-trodden"mountains
who are the dark birds
what is the yellow shrub
where every river has a spirit and
all wells are holy
from Tralee into the clouds
older than rock our
first day on earth


some other wet-weather
sung-over place
near a river
"It was long ago
if time means anything
long long ago" (Padraic Fallon)
limestone karst leads us
into clouds, into wind the
church of the ruined light
we are older than stone

fields rising into cloud, sheep
coming down the hill
coming down to
land where we
meet the rain of the day

circle fort in the field
leave flowers, leave flowers
Beltaine fires and a clear sky
leave flowers, touch stone

sink now into the peat
sink now, and sleep,
let the stones sing
over me

Gary Lawless

Beth Leonard photo - on the Burren


"low lie the fields of Athenry
where once we watched
the small free birds fly
our love was on the wing
we had dreams and songs to sing
it's so lonely round
the fields of Athenry"

Beth Leonard photo with Siobhan Lawless at the Lawless Family's Foods of Athenry"

"He was Lawless by name, Lawless by nature.
He was trouble right from the start"
Christy Moore

While in Ireland I gave a poetry reading in Dingle, at Dick Mack's Pub, as a part of the Feile na Bealtaine, on April 30, 2016. To view the short reading, in two parts, go here and here

Following in the footsteps of friends:

Here is Nanao Sakaki in Ireland:
Magic Pouch

On pilgrimage
to holy mountain Croagh Patrick
on Ireland's west coast
I found my magic pouch missing.

from Guatemala, some years ago
a black, white and purple cotton pouch
arrived and attached itself to my waist.

inside the pouch -
an Irish five pound note
an army knife
a fountain pen
a magnifying glass
a pair of sunglasses

to buy fish & chips for two persons
Irish money came yesterday.

poet Allen Ginsberg gave me the army knife
in New York City 1988.
It stayed with me as a good friend like Allen.

agile and sharp as an old star
the fountain pen, my soul, wrote many poems.

boundless chain of life -
with magnifying glass I inspected insect eggs,
flower seeds and the future of our galaxy.

the sunglasses were great for looking
into a rainbow, a sundog
& above the sundog... another rainbow.

Now the time is ripe.
I dedicate you all to Mt. Croagh Patrick.
you are gone...good luck!

Nanao Sakaki, Autumnal Equinox, 1993


and here is Gary Snyder, in Ireland:

Icy Mountains Constantly Walking
(for Seamus Heaney)

Work took me to Ireland
a twelve-hour flight.
The river Liffy
ale in a bar,
so many stories
of passions and wars -
a hilltop stone tomb
with the wind across the door.
Peat swamps go by:
people of the ice age.
Endless fields and farms
the last two thousand years.

I read my poems in Galway
just the chirp of a bug
and flew home thinking
of literature and time.

The serried rows of books
in the Long Hall at Trinity
the ranks of stony ranges
above the ice of Greenland.

Gary Snyder 1999