Hamlet and the Piraha

“There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes?” William Shakespeare   (Hamlet, 5.2.214)

To live as Brazilian Pirahã
is to be wholly in the present
where mists of past and future
are intangibles of time.

To live with Pirahã worldview
is to have no word for worry.
Dreamtime is the same as waketime…
seamless experience.

To live on the Meici River
is to flow one with the moment
where death is observation
eyes close…breath stops…
and readiness is all.

Bonnie Marshall

Art by Salvador Dali

iThing, My Ariel

You nestle in my ears
to sing me wondrous songs
and orchestrate full symphonies
of kaleidoscopic notes.

Responsive to my fingertips
you anticipate my need
for instantaneous union
with out of sight dimensions
of thought and imagery.

Then…once you take me there,
you so intoxicate my mind
with vast…prodigious wonder
that.. inebriate and tranced
I grow reluctant to return
to tame sobriety.

 

Bonnie Marshall

Worlds Traveling

I’ve heard Scots witches chanting,
survived a Bermoothes shipwreck,
smelled the reek of battle gore
at Agincourt.
I’ve…watched players play
The Mousetrap one still cold night
in Denmark…
and I’ve circle danced
while Titania’s elves and faeries
sang lullabies in an Athens grove.

I’ve souvenirs…
a simple balance scale
glass vials
lace handkerchief
and once…from Egypt
a covered basket
brimmed to the top with figs.

Bonnie Marshall

On the Cusp

On the Cusp

Deep…deep beneath Dad’s land
and still cooling from beginnings,
tectonic plates expand…subduct…
slip slide with incremental tension,
slight tremors on a Richter scale…
yet not enough for red ants
in his woods beyond the barn
to swarm out from their mounds,
nor for his canary in the kitchen
to bash its feathered body
against the metal cage.
He knows those warnings
to move horses from the stable.

Lately, we’ve all noticed
he doesn’t pay much mind
to TV news and such…
only reads the local paper
and books from the living room…
like the Bible and Farmer’s Almanac
and plays here and there by Shakespeare.
He spends more time out on the porch,
and senses weather changes
even before the metal rooster
on the old barn arcs from east to west,
and notes balances tipping
like horizon sun flash…on the cusp
just before the set.

Bonnie Marshall