who knew when they loved how to love?

this is the third and final part of this triptych of easter poems.

i mean to illustrate them with a tasteful and beautiful picture of easter eggs.

who knew when they loved how to love?
wasn’t love being the same as the loved
one – one – one could never disentangle?

and being apart, wasn’t it not like life
at all, unwhole, the atom split in two,
something alone no one could do?

so was this whole undoing then a way to become whole
when they loved – but who knew how to love?

                            *

who knew when they lost how to lose?
wasn’t losing it all the only way to find your
self: self – selflessness being everything to have

in nothing, and to gain by giving it all
away for a kiss of the air
and find our heartlove beating everywhere –

we love and feel our lives a universe
which when we lose, who knows what we lost?

                            *

who knew when they lived how to live?
or be the one that wasn’t just alone to
live: live – live recording loops unending

till the next verse overwrites us?
to be reborn’s to think those other unbecoming lives we had were fakes
being we alone have now got what it takes –

maybe another life to be the ones
who knew when they lived how to live?

freddie
easter 2011

othertime

othertime

i dreamed a dream of life, and lived it in my sleep
and when i woke i saw through a ghost’s eyes:

a scrawling world of vacant cemeteries,
queasy seas of memory, reflections deep,
and muffled beyond purple coral banks, skies
unfathomable as eternity…

… i thought it was the vanished i could see –
void significant nothings, truth-packed lies,
unrisen suns, eclipsed in tenseless space.

for i was a poet of when
and now and then
saw written in your face
love stuff that words forgot to write –

while palpitating in our hearts tonight
are words in blood which leave no other trace
but of another self, another place
whose vanishings recur, but always out of sight.

                            *

we live a poem of when, but otherwhere
and othertime – like ivy spread on vines –
creep through our veins: chance, undeciphered signs,
runes and symptoms of things which are not there.

like shadows in a maze of moonshine
we black out, eyeless and pale in the night –
but when cold dawn dissolves us, hold on tight
together, two syllables that overspilled the line.

being alive at all
even hearing quite another call
is being blessed
in incomprehension, in difference;
and inner reflections on our innocence
are inattentive to our interest –

all to the good – beyond reason and rhyme
we live a poem of when, that otherwhere and othertime.

                                                                            freddie
                                                                            easter 2011

happy snaps – easter haiku

i snap happiness
and in an easter egg-hunt
i happen on it.

       *

i happen on it
like an egg under a bush
in springtime hatches.

       *

snip-snap-happy now
a shutter on opening
floats in reflections.

       *

float on in a flood
sun seasoned petals swirling
butterfly wings past.

       *

i happen on you
no matter what the season
springs of happiness.

                                       freddie
                                      easter 2011