"Say This" and SOME OF WHAT I HAVE
TO SAY ABOUT MY POEM
“SAY THIS”
SAY THIS
SAY THIS
Say this is all illusion as say
Indian sages who have put it so
thousands of years since the Indus Valley
where on a tiny tablet, seated cross-legged
is found the image of a horned yogin,
perhaps Pashupati himself, Lord of Animals.
Lately, having lights in my eyes glitter
so substantially as to render
insubstantial all photogenic forms,
I see my own believing in their presence
as exactly that, my self-delusion,
one to which, albeit, I am well accustomed --
as are we all, since when having been told
that is not what you are, yet that could be
what you own, “if you bow down to me,”
as Satan is said to have said to Jesus
in a desert way to the west
of what is now called Pakistan.
Nation states are of course illusions,
borders roped with blood
where warriors are pressed
to serve because their fathers did
with lords who claimed they were descended
from the sky.
Men are such tools of the wind and stones.
Instead of the radio news,
rather than lament, I laugh
and remember my horns,
my legs folded under me
in meditation, watching my own mind
as the game emerges from
a thorny thicket and looks back at me
wise as a goat, an antlered stag.
By Peter Fortunato
SOME OF WHAT I HAVE
TO SAY ABOUT MY POEM “SAY THIS”
by Peter Fortunato
“Say this” is the final poem of my new collection, Late Morning: New and Selected Poems, and it was rather recently composed. (The book is easily available through amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com). When collecting the poems, I immersed myself in a review of almost forty years, noting especially which of my earliest published works were those I had most often read publicly and which I was most happy to continue to stand with. In forming a cooperative publishing venture, Cayuga Lake Books, with two other veteran authors who were also tired of the dealing with mass market publishers and elite university presses, I immediately felt empowered to shape the contents of Late Morning to reflect abiding interests of mine that do not necessarily have cache with what the mainstream publishing world promotes. This is the liberating joy of what is currently being hailed as the independent press revolution.
My work has always been animated by a devotion to my spiritual path. Buddhist is probably the best way by which I might indicate the journey I’ve traveled for most of my life. I like to remind people, however, that the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, was not a “Buddhist,” but that rather he referred to himself simply as a person who’d awakened. (The Sanskrit root of the word Buddha refers to the potential or seed of awakening present in all beings.) Timeless as his message remains, the man was also a product of his time: a prince who turned his back on worldly accomplishments, a yogi who experienced deep, often austere meditation practices, and a brilliant philosopher able to communicate the essence of his awakening to others.
Shakyamuni, also known as Gautama, had access to a tradition of yogic practices and independent self-examination that had preceded him for many centuries on the Asian subcontinent and in central Asia. These practices and attitudes and the states of consciousness they cultivate might reach back as far as the upper Paleolithic era, 50,000 to about 10,000 years ago, the so called “world of the early hunters.” I believe these ancestors of ours learned how to empty themselves of ordinary ego centeredness in order to become one with the natural world and their fellow inhabitants, on whom their own existence depended. Shamanism is another way of talking about these practices; in the primary sense of the word, shamanism refers to the inner fire or inner light with which a hunter and yogi can “see” into the real nature of things, including her or his own real nature. Such practices are still employed around the planet today among primal peoples. Some have been handed down and are available to us in the modern world.
My poem “Say This” refers to a famous, but still quite mysterious, little clay tablet a few thousand years old that is connected to the Indus Valley civilization. That culture was in its time a highly developed, late Paleolithic city state that seems to have retained its connection to the primal mountain dwellers and hunters and nomad herdsmen who eventually farmed the valley and helped build its civilization. The figure on the tablet is wearing a horned crown and seems to be seated in a yogic posture. Tiny animals float in the space around him. Present day followers of the Hindu god Shiva, the lord of yogins, claim this ithyphallic figure is a form of Shiva known as Pashupati, or the Lord of Animals. I’d like to think that reading my book Late Morning from beginning to end, you will naturally see why I’ve placed “Say This” at the conclusion. What could be more independent, or for that matter revolutionary, than sitting on the ground and enjoying the play of one’s own mind?
It’s actually
evolutionary.
from
Metaphysical Times
Volume VIII Number 2
Summer 2013