My poetry from the 1970s

I wrote all of these poems during the 1970s and I haven’t written poems since those days.

If memory serves, most of these poems - this one included - came to me in “rough draft” through dreams. I did clean them up but don’t take much credit for them, seeing as how they were in a sense “channeled” from the dream world.
 


drop into the plains of the thornbush
an open hour from now
with emerald wings


Ice-eyed star stare
the glancing glaciers
in frigid constellation


The mad dance of the sickle swinger,
stalking stems in pantomime.
Sickles sketching grass dance,
in blade-blasted sun speckles.
knives flash, grass crash.
And the dancer
bows to the fires of suffering.


Morning

drinking star-filled water in the gutter
chasing each other's whiskers
kitties in the wind


The Pledge of Allegiance

I pledge allegiance to the Bomb,
 of the Nuclear Warlords of Earth.
And to the Terror for which it stands.
One annihilation,
under the mushroom cloud,
fissionable,
with death and destruction for all.


Precipice

I've seen the rage.
Oh! The rage on the faces,of your young, America.
One last drawn-out moment
to exalt in, to gloat over,
the sheer, living terror of what you have created.
Can you hear the scream of the wind
through the wires of your lives, America? 




 An Exotic Death

These people imagine they are protected in some way.
They believe they believe in safety,
And miss the joy of racing toward an exotic death.

They imagine they are protected.
But of their personal wars and clan feuds,
These and other invisible artifacts,
are like an exotic death,
where the trinket factory sleeps deep in the lost language.

This be the way with those who stand at the border,
by the dry sea.
Someone walked on it once, so they say.
Oh, but back then there was water.

1970s Zen Buddhist Meditation Training

Diamond Sangha

In the early 1970s I was living at a Zen Buddhist meditation training center on Maui called Maui Zendo. 
“Diamond Sangha” was a small journal that was published during those years. 
It covered doings at both Maui Zendo and KoKo-An Zendo on Oahu. 


Diamond Sangha (1973) Table of Contents
 This is the Contents page for the 1973 edition of the Daimond Sangha journal. 


Poems by Alan Mitchell

 scarface flashflood meandering memory
carve on the depth of the desert
the sleep quench of the sandmans's thirst

*****

moon flush
below midlight
salt the clouds
and sand sea

*****

the day moves itself
impaled in a mirrored ditch
speeding through the bricks of the sun

*****

baby background noises
buries in the beginner's evening
by the dust of catastrophe

*****

someone who is in trouble with death
leave shriek mutinies
at an avalanche of years
lost in the waste


Maui Zendo Zen meditation retreat
This photo was taken at Maui Zendo directly after the end of an intensive week-long Zen meditation retreat. 
I am directly behind the girl with the cropped hair in the front row, on the right side of photo. 
The Zen master, Yamada Koun Roshi, isn’t in the photo. 


Yamada Koun Roshi

  Yamada Roshi was a deeply enlightened Zen master who traveled from Japan 
to instruct us in Zen and lead this retreat.

Yamada Roshi at Koko An Zendo

 This photo was taken in Honolulu at Koko-An Zendo in the Manoa district of Honolulu. 
These shots were all taken around 1972. 
The fellow at the head of the table is Yamada Roshi. 
The man to his right is Robert Aitken Roshi, head of the Daimond Sangha Zen organization. 
Both of these awesome Zen master teachers have passed away. 
It was my honor, privilege and great fortune to have met these two men.

 
Calligraphy by Yamada Koun Roshi

 When Yamada Roshi traveled to Maui Zendo to lead our retreat, he volunteered to paint calligraphy for 
each of us. 
We could choose whatever theme we wanted. 
I chose. 
“Endurance”. 
Well, what can I say? 
I still own this calligraphy and I have endured, down these many years.