Sententiae

“Tyrants impose, peoples depose.”

“He who builds the future without regard for the past is like one who looks into the mirror and promptly forgets what he sees.”

1986 People Power Revolution

Sententiae

“Aloneness is alienation, solitude communion.”

“Solitude is the companionable presence of God.”

The Anchorite (1881) by Franz Ejsmond

The Short of It (more)

I listen to broken grass…

I listen to broken grass

Dried out by summer

Popping underfoot like

Frozen grass in winter.

***

Forbearance is silence…

Forbearance is silence,

Virtue of the meek.

Silence is complicity,

Oppression of the weak.

***

I like my coffee hot and black...

I like my coffee hot and black—

hot hornet stings,

black squid ink—

heady broth of

bitter cumin,

red pine smoke,

dusky forests,

blue lightning.

***

I like my tea hot and sweet...

I like my tea hot and sweet—

hot thermal blooms,

sweet billowing mists—

suffusing beverage of

crow-black herbs,

white-petal clouds,

distilled memories,

prophetic dreams.

***

THE JEWELER

Afternoon is a jeweler

Setting hours in gold,

As silver glinting waves

Slap the garnet shore.

Scottish shortbread fingers

Odds and Ends

This blog is a personal journal for public consumption:

https://oddsandendsgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/

Seated Figure (1989) by Ang Kiukok

The Short of It

You are the reflection...

You are the reflection on the pavement of a rainy day,

Mirror of the sky painted briefly by shadows of a bustling world.

Where is my soul but in your image?
Eternity will reveal your beauty glistening in the memory of water.

***

How dark the sky...

How dark the sky,

Bright the water

When silver fish

Reflect the moon.

Aphorisms

APHORISMS

A theory works until you try it out.

A theory corrected by experience is no longer a theory.

Wisdom is life experience applied to well-considered judgment.

Darkness arises from the absence or deficiency of light, obscurity from its excess.

Religion is a hat the devil wears to cover his horns.

Tinker to tamper is but one small step.

Do not surrender one handhold until you have grasped another.

When a pot fails to boil, turn up the heat.

The social sciences are like the straight edge of a ruler that guides the creative pencil of the humanities.

He who builds the future without regard for the past is like one who looks into the mirror and promptly forgets what he sees.

Populism is an incomplete and degenerate form of democracy.

Under a tyranny the law is misused as an instrument of injustice, persecution, repression, and oppression.

Correctly construed, the rule of law protects and upholds human rights and our God-given freedoms.

The rule of law creates, builds, and sustains just societies.

Originally published in The Penmen Review (October 16, 2017)

Three Winter Poems

WINTER DAWN

In first wintry morning light

The window sill peeling paint

Has grown a beard of ice

Overnight. Glacial darkness

Now is luminous chill. Wan

Beams bounce about, silent.

Walls, doors, bed, and sofa

Glow like the full moon.

Hidden behind the horizon, a lantern

Reddens the sky, blue and gray.

Winsome, time turns, smiles

For the photographer, who

Traps the moment in amber

As eternity enters the room.

THREE MILES SOUTH OF THE CANADIAN BORDER

When Ragnarok comes, it will be bleakest winter. Snowstorms will pour forth incessantly, clotty ash engulfing the air. The sun will evaporate, the moon and stars join permanently with darkness. Rivers, lakes, oceans—vast expanses—will densify into sludge. Hills, trees, the entire land will disappear beneath rising snowy heaps. Wild animals, bony, starving, will wander about the whiteness. Domestic animals will perish from bitterest cold and neglect. Shuddering, everyone still alive will wrap themselves inside fireless caves.

When the world ends, it will all take place at the epicenter of all wretchedness, nexus of all misery, and seat of all gloom…three miles south of the Canadian border.

WINTER SOLSTICE

December 21, 1989

I am prisoner to conversation with an old man with a broken nose, mute with catarrh, sedentary and limping.

The window is squealing like a small animal, trapped.

Outside in the empty parking lot sits an abandoned car, dried out extinct turtle.

Dryness scrapes skin off the flaking season lying lifeless, electricity gone dead.

Clouds cast to the ground the feeble eyes of a pallid man.

Trees written in charcoal thrust into the sky, exclaiming, “I am turned into a pillar of salt!”

Winter breaks its stony face against the hammering wind,

Dust and rocks mix with air,

Grass grinds like pebbles underfoot.

A warm room withers faster than a disconnected leaf.

Memories scatter, twigs across the carpet.

Deaf to clapping, hooded thoughts wander.

Only blue sparks crackle in recognition.