shamash says...

After the Party

"AFTER THE PARTY"

You’d think there’d be remorse

or regret

or homesick longing

at least some evidence I was there

 

but really it’s just me, the nocturnal nessy,

leaving the continent

around my neck

a string of grandmother’s pearls

I never should have worn

 

try to spot me, pirate’s eye,

I’m not really there

I’m somewhere in my dreams

introducing the moon to sea monsters

 

wings, feet, scales: indestructible amphibian

part air, earth, water

prophetess neither leaving nor arriving,

unwelcome in her own country where she

once shook the dust off her sandals

of all the the towns

she left

 

and now she has no shoes

 

flying fish-friend, wing-ed fairies

who skim over the dark surface of things

come find me comforted in the weight of water

in the sea between homelands 

 

on this ocean floor

I stand breathing, listening,

practicing my underwater voice

 

©2022 Kat Shamash

 

Image credit:

Illustration from the book The Tuning Fork by Edward Gorey, titled “The Sea Monster - The simple creature was aghast” via.

 

"Stonehenge"

Day 2 of 30:  Our GloPoWriMo 2019 prompt for today is to write a poem that transforms the natural world into an unsettled dream-place and resists closure by ending on a question.

"Stonehenge"

 

Summer solstice

Double-decker bus

Just in from Glastonbury- maybe Wimbledon

Parking lot crowded

Sightseers with

Audio phones pressed to their ears

Muted and servile, cattle-like, gawking 

Touching the ropes and signs that warn:

“Do.  Not.  Touch. The. Stones.”

The sandstone ring, the bluestone, the sarsen

Carved four thousand years ago and

Off limits to everyone but

The Druids.

********

Across Salisbury Plain

Lonely sound of wind

Whips 

Raven’s shadow circles close

Stone posts carved from boulders lugged in from Wales

Rise against the storm

Drums beat loud to Celtic tunes, caped figures dance,

The toes of the troubadour shoes point and curl,

Velvet hoods,  tall staffs, a single hand extended,

A gust moves the long beard of Merlin,

In the yellow sky a message: an incantation from the

Woman warrior with outstretched arm and the long

Red braid.

What is her prophesy?

 

********

Turn off the phone. The car. The lights.

Forget the tele.

Light a fire.

Circle round.

Beat the drum

at Stonehenge.

Call in the powers of North, South, East, West.

To Salisbury.

Listen closely.

Press your ears to the stones.

What do they have

to say?

 

~by Kat Shamash ©2019 Kat Shamash

Image "The Morrigu, Phantom of the Celts" by Howard David Johnson

 

"Stonehenge"

 

Summer solstice

Double-decker bus

Just in from Glastonbury- maybe Wimbledon

Parking lot crowded

Sightseers with

Audio phones pressed to their ears

Muted and servile, cattle-like, gawking 

Touching the ropes and signs that warn:

“Do.  Not.  Touch. The. Stones.”

The sandstone ring, the bluestone, the sarsen

Carved four thousand years ago and

Off limits to everyone but

The Druids.

********

Across Salisbury Plain

Lonely sound of wind

Whips 

Raven’s shadow circles close

Stone posts carved from boulders lugged in from Wales

Rise against the storm

Drums beat loud to Celtic tunes, caped figures dance,

The toes of the troubadour shoes point and curl,

Velvet hoods,  tall staffs, a single hand extended,

A gust moves the long beard of Merlin,

In the yellow sky a message: an incantation from the

Woman warrior with outstretched arm and the long

Red braid.

What is her prophesy?

 

********

Turn off the phone. The car. The lights.

Forget the tele.

Light a fire.

Circle round.

Beat the drum

at Stonehenge.

Call in the powers of North, South, East, West.

To Salisbury.

Listen closely.

Press your ears to the stones.

What do they have

to say?

 

~by Kat Shamash ©2019 Kat Shamash

Image "The Morrigu, Phantom of the Celts" by Howard David Johnson

 

Expat Life: The Honeymoon Is Over

I expected my move to China to be an easy transition. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I have reinvented my life many times. Packed my belongings into cars and suitcases, locked my possessions in storage units, and taken off on yearlong road trips and planes bound for many foreign lands. I’ve lived as an expatriate for over 12 years on four different continents.  Because of this, I expected my move to China to be an easy transition. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Image: an art exhibition poster I found at the Hangzhou Academy of Art. I want to go, but first I need to find a translator.

China is not a place for a Westerner with a low tolerance for uncertainty. If you want to avoid ambiguity, it’s best to stay home. Hibernate. Find a cave and stay there. Believe me: it’s tempting. I’d probably stay home more than I do, but I avoid hanging out in my apartment with its mismatched furniture, florescent lights, and white, undecorated walls. I still haven’t figured out how to adjust the temperature of the water heater because the controls are written in Chinese. Most of the showers I take are cold.  My tiny kitchen is always hot and stuffy, so cooking is like taking a sauna. I eat out a lot.

I’ve moved halfway around the world to a country whose citizens speak a language I do not understand. I work at a new school at a job that is a brand new profession.  From my city apartment, I look out my living room window to a view of six high-rises that are over 40 stories high. I have traveled on a bullet train at 220 mph towards the most populated city in the world.

I’ve lost my frame of reference. Where’s my country, my house, my friends, my mountain, my language? I feel myself changing: shifting into an urban creature directed more by instinct than intellect. Minus language or cultural reference, I use my intuition to guide me. I am the city survivalist, trying not to crash her e-bike into the bus barreling around the corner. I communicate with non-verbal cues, expressions and gestures. I am the chimpanzee in an unmanaged zoo, trying to speak and write and talk. I’d rather be home in my forest, gently picking fleas off my cousins.

Someone once told me “We are the same people we were last year except for the books we have read, the films we have seen, the people we’ve met, and the places we’ve been.” I am not the same person I was two months ago. I am finding beauty in concrete and steel. I have learned to meditate while moving. Even though so much of New China is urban and contemporary, I am tapping into something ancient. I'm enamoured with traditional Chinese medicine, traditional Chinese massage, and the Way of Tea.

I think less about horoscopes and astrology and more about the design of buildings, the fabric of society, and how my choices and behavior affect the design of my own life.

Before living here, I swallowed the stereotypes about China hook, line, and sinker. I actually believed that everything made in China was inferior merchandise and that the Chinese were, in general, an unhappy people. Now I realize how the western media distorted my view, and how threatened the U.S. government is by the power of the Chinese economy.  The U.S. press reflects this fear. Living here has opened me up to a new way of seeing China and rest of the world.

Two months of living here, and I feel as if I have shifted on a cellular level. I’m more aware of mass consciousness. I light my nam champa incense with a slightly different prayer. The sacred tobacco seeds from women’s lodge still aren’t planted in the pots on my windowsill, but soon they will be. Only the moon makes me feel rooted – a strong and powerful connection to my former life and my community back home. I’m searching for something that’s just beyond my reach- the sound of a gong in the night air, an unexpected scent of jasmine, yellowed maps from the Old Silk Road.  I am still looking for a city tribe that understands soul matters: a group of poets, a community of artists. In my dreams, I go to the place of the mountains. I want to stay there.

I am torn between the old me and the new me, shadow boxing the questions and trying to accept the tears that come with confronting my own identity.  I am fragile. Vulnerable. They said this would happen, those experts in the psychology of expatriate living and culture shock. That the honeymoon high would wear off around the second or third month, and the oh-my-god-what-have-I-done phase would set in.

I’m at the oh-my-god-what-have-I-done phase, but I’m not quitting. I’m not running home. I’m staying, because the greatest growth is not an external process: it’s internal. The fortitude it takes to stay, when living here is so hard, has something to do with perseverance and a lot to do with hope. One day, I will call China home. I will have art on the walls, and warm lamps and showers, and a group of friends to invite home for dinner.

Until then: it isn’t easy, people.

Facebook doesn’t tell the whole story.

Ever.

Taylor Mali: the importance of conviction

The Way of Tea

"Water can quench your thirst and wine can drown your sorrows, but only tea can refresh your spirit."

- Lu Yu, Tang Dynasty, "The Classic of Tea", 760 CE - 780 CE

While contemporary cosmopolitan coffee shops are known for 24-hour wifi/caffeine and jolts of espresso for high-energy boosts for a better and faster life, tea houses celebrate the slowing down of things: a stepping away from sidewalk traffic into a ritual that honors that which is timeless.

 

Rome: Prosecco, Espresso, Caffe Greco

We are not Caesar, and we avoided the Forum, so I can say with confidence that The Ides of March was by far our best day in Rome. After days of clouds and rain, the sun and the moon both showed their faces. We couldn’t seem to tear ourselves away from the Piazza de España and by dusk, we were still there, drinking prosecco at a café under moon clouds.

“How do we rearrange our lives to live in this magnificent city?” we ask ourselves. There’s something about Rome at night, especially under a waxing moon, that causes me to think that reinventing my life and steering it against all the plans that drive me forward is the most natural thing in the world to do. Here, in this city of fallen empires and lovers on Vespas, going against the current of one’s well-planned life seems possible, even wise. The words of Keats, once an expatriate in Rome,

Steps of Broken Stones and Temples

Here in Rome, tsunamis and earthquakes seem as distant as the dated letters of the 18th century Grand  Tourists- the young British noblemen who came to Rome to study Italian art and to carry marble busts and statues back home to England. 

Here in Rome's historical district there are no skyscrapers, no billboards, and no high-speed expressways.  Instead, we walk over streets and sidewalks of cobblestone polished smooth by centuries of moving carriage wheels and the shuffle of pedestrians’ feet. One, red geranium peaks over a windowsill high above the street. There is more marble here than tarmac, and more cafes and patisseries than fast food. Our hotel has ornate, brass handrails and well-worn, marble steps leading all the way up to the 6th floor. In this neighborhood, there is no evidence, thank Artemis, of America: no McDonald's, no Starbucks, no strip malls, no Hummers. Instead: family-run ristourantes, cafes, small specialty shops, and Vespas.

As I walk on the very stones on which Julius Caesar walked on his way to the Forum, 

The Class that Ruined My Blog Life

Over the years blogging had taken me away from my spiral, hardbound notebooks, my multi-colored pens, my propensity to glue things (like ticket stubs, favorite articles, and paraphernalia found on bar counters, restaurants floors, and airplane seat pockets) into my journal . So, when I saw the Split Rock Arts Program offering the course called “The Visual Journal: Exploring Urban Landscape" taught by artist by Julie Baugnet (an artist featured in Drawing from Life by Jennifer New), I caught the first plane to the Twin Cities. I wasn’t disappointed.

(all photos by shamash)

Brave, Fearless Drawing Machines

What do a labor arbitrator, a radio personality, a teacher, an epidemiologist, a registered nurse, an education specialist, a bat expert, a physiology professor, and a defense lawyer for the Dept of Justice all have in common?

This past week, I found out. And, in the process, realized that much of that which unites us as human beings has little to do with our professions, and much to do with what we long to do after-hours.

Frank Lloyd Wright and Phillip’s 66

We are so “Thelma and Louise”, so I will call her Thelma.

She drives a hot, silver-bullet of a car, an Audi TT, that makes you want to drive, drive, drive for days through the winding forest roads of northern Minnesota on a road trip into the unknown.

But, we had to stop to fill up at this gas station designed by the one-and-only Frank Lloyd Wright.