Archive for the ‘Catalyst2’ Category

2015-10-03 – Even This….

Sunday, October 4th, 2015
 
The Camera pans across a barren beach scape
   a place seen in a moment of time. 
A wind moves empty through the scene
  and  tuffs of grass stir amid the tableau of land and sea
      that never seems to change.

Dead friends walk there amid the multitudes
   that have come and gone.
Their names transient; like the stirring grass
   beneath the moving bowl of a never ending sky.

Truly, we are not here - we only imagine we are.

And the more one is here, the less one is,
   until the edges of your beginnings and endings
begin to blur like the impossibility
   of separating one unchanging day from the next.

Quiet descends on the dead 
   and they go we know not where.
And, in our deep meditations we pursue them;
   rivers circling between the sea and the sky.

The turning of life's wheel is mostly about
   the enduring, mutating and evolving patterns of DNA
and so very little about the names and dreams
   of the momentary instantiations that we are.

And yet we are here 
   with our names and thoughts
and yet we are here 
   with our philosophies and our meanings.

We watch the sand and the dust of each other
   blow away in time's erosion
and yet even this,
   even this can be embraced.

gallagher
03 October 2015
Christchurch, New Zealand

— Copyright 1965-2015 by Dennis Gallagher —

2017-08-26 – Red China Blues

Tuesday, September 26th, 2017
 
We are as cheap as the pigs bound for slaughter,
   in those corners of the world
      where we are just objects to others.

Everything you might think important;
   how many times has it all been swept away
      down the long road of your many lives?

I can see the execution yard,
   the concrete and the stains,
and I can see the men who fire the rounds
   waiting for their shift to end
so they can seek their evening meal
   and the warmth of their woman.

Enormous uncaring forces move around us
   and we can only hope they will not gaze upon us.

Our dreams and our children survive
   only by the simple good fortune
of where we were born;
   far from the fires of hell
that move through the forests
   of some of our lives.

Every minute I breath free and unharmed
   is a gift - in a world such as this.

You know, in China, the family of the executed
   must pay for the cost of the bullet.
But here, safe, I only have to read the book
   that tells the story.

gallagher
26Aug17
Christchurch, New Zealand
- after reading Red China Blues by Jan Wong

— Copyright 1965-2017 by Dennis Gallagher —

2019-02-01 – For Colette

Saturday, February 2nd, 2019

She’s quiet about her love.
but it fills the forms where she lives.
Each room ordered in a vision
that reflects her inner self.

I run up to her and I hug her
and she replies, “Here…”

“Here, with these rooms that I share with you,
here, I give you what I am.
Here, where my eyes and hands
have past over things ten-thousand times,
be here with me in this,
my inner garden.

gallagher
1Feb2019

Copyright 1965-2019 by Dennis Gallagher