Prim

Poems / March 30, 2025

Bonfire at Midnight

A shout comes out of my room

where I’ve been cooped up.

After all my lust and dead living

I can still live with you.

You want me to.

You fix and bring me food.

You forget the way I’ve been.

The ocean moves and surges in the heat

of the middle of the day,

in the heat of this thought I’m having.

Why aren’t all human resistances

burning up with this thought?

It is a drum and arms waving.

It is a bonfire at midnight on the top edge of a hill,

this meeting again with you.

—Rumi

a bird’s nest
unscathed by a storm
of cherry blossoms

—Basho

I am I is the essence of self-acceptance. But it is not passive or selective self-acceptance. It is active, loud, strong, and, if necessary, heroically aggressive. It applies to all aspects of self …

Judgment value, moral equivocation, cultural and conventional values, the ideas of others do not cause me to deaden, repress or attempt to cut off parts of myself. I includes all that the culture may see as assets, liabilities, limitations, resources, insensitivities, cruelties, neurotic, good, bad, sensitive, wise or stupid in me.

— Compassion and Self Hate, Theodore Isaac Rubin

Footnote

While you believe you are in a body, however, you can choose between loveless and miraculous channels of expression. You can make an empty shell, but you cannot express nothing at all. You can wait, delay, paralyze yourself, or reduce your creativity almost to nothing. But you cannot abolish it. You can destroy your medium of communication, but not your potential*. You did not create yourself.

*capable of development into actuality

— A Course in Miracles

Emphasis Mine

The fact is, I can’t give up sleeping with the window open. Electric tramcars with all their bells ringing rage through my room. Automobiles drive across me. A door slams. Somewhere glass from a broken window clatters to the ground. I can hear the big pieces laughing and the little splinters sniggering. Then suddenly a dull muffled sound from inside a house on the other side. Someone’s coming up the stairs. Coming, coming, on and on, is there for a long time, goes past. Back in the street. A girl shrieks: ‘Ah, tais-toi, je ne veux plus!’ The tram, mad with excitement, races up, and across, and away. Someone is calling. People are running, overtaking one another. A dog barks. What a relief: a dog. Toward morning there’s even a cock crowing, and what a boundless blessing it is. Then, abruptly, I fall asleep.

— The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke

Latest Blog Posts — Page 16

Bonfire at Midnight

a bird’s nest
unscathed by a storm
of cherry blossoms

—Basho

Oath, Defended

Footnote

Emphasis Mine

a bird’s nest unscathed by a storm of cherry blossoms —Basho

a bird’s nest
unscathed by a storm
of cherry blossoms

—Basho