Diane Aoki, Creativity Activism
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Poetry

Grabbing Inspiration from the Everyday

2/9/2020

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Here is the link on my page of the Medium platform or stay here and read here.

I have a great temporary gig in which I monitor students as they take online tests. I selfishly have been able to mine this time for my own purposes. Being confined to this time and this place has been like a nest in which ideas come to roost, and I birth them into poems.
It feels like raised consciousness. It feels like I am living a poetic life, seeing layers of meaning in the everyday. It has to do with being forced into this empty space — needing to keep my attention on the students, but also needing to be stimulated. Some of the time, I am waiting for the next group of students. I keep a little sketchbook with me, and lately, I’ve been grabbing, jotting down, and capturing, these little poems, mostly haiku, to sort out the random thoughts that come to tease my attention. I took the bait, and wrote these poems — written in the first two hours of my workday.
Poem 1 — It started with the drive to work in the morning:
Stuck in traffic
I notice
The palm trees shivering in the breeze
The clouds, pastel-tinged, hovering
Over the ocean
Dripping its soft shade
Onto the wet, gently-rippling surface.
On the side of the highway
Because I’m crawling by,
I see that my dentist has moved to a new location.
It’s not my choice
That I’m stuck in traffic
But it is my choice
To notice.
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Poem 2 — As I’m walking across the school’s well-kept campus, I “commune” with a certain tree which always makes me happy at this time of year.

And there’s God
In that flowering tree
With purplish-pink pastel blossoms
Like tissue paper
The tree called rubbish tree
By the custodians
God is there
And there’s God
In the flower falling
Floating gently to the ground
To join the other rubbish flowers
On the well-kept lawn
God is there
And there’s God
In the custodians raking
Complaining about the rubbish
God is there
And there’s God
In the bird flying
Above the rubbish tree …..
Poem 3 - As I’m sitting in the quiet of the room, I thought about how my elderly mother is so impatient, so instead of leaving that thought in my gut, I wrote:
As you age
Are you more impatient
Because you know
You have less time in your lifespan
And you hate wasting it
On slow food service
Or sitting in traffic
Or in the doctor’s office?
I hope not
I hope when I get there
When I do feel impatience
I will recognize it as a sign
To savor the waiting
And fill it with presence
And gratitude
Poem 4 — And then, when I took a drink from my flask, into which I squeeze lemon every morning:
Drinking water
From my stainless steel
insulated flask
I recognize the lemon juice
That I squeezed this morning
Picked from our tree
In the front yard
Planted by my mother
Over thirty years ago
Now overflowing
With huge, juicy
Puckery lemons
Poem 5 (set of 6 haiku) — I was disturbed by something I had heard on the radio in the morning, on NPR, about an interview with a psychologist who worked with the CIA to torture prisoners being held at Guantanamo. He claimed it was his moral duty to protect Americans and he feels no guilt about the work he did. But thinking about this, feeling outrage over it, inspired me. This is a major issue for a pacifist like me — to communicate the need to not dehumanize those you deem “dangerous.” And then to think about — what can I do about what I see as evil and unjust? The last two haiku speak to that attempt to DO something. So here’s some political haiku:
Dehumanizing
Permits war, torture, murder
No one deserves this
I start to wonder
Does God approve of torture
Does that bother you?
America first
That’s no justification
To be inhumane
What can I tell you
To make your heart open to
People not like you
I try to see the
Ugly in me to transform
The ugly in you
I will speak with love
With clarity, for justice
When faced with darkness

I wish I could say this is normal for me. But it is not. I aspire to be this inspired, this free, this in tune with the muse. More and more.
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