I know there’s a place you walked
where love falls from the trees.
My heart is like a broken cup,
I only feel right on my knees.
– Pete Townshend
Author Archives: admin
Paradox
Not truth, nor certainty. These I forswore
In my novitiate, as young men called
To holy orders must abjure the world.
“If …, then,” this only I assert;
And my successes are but pretty chains
Linking twin doubts, for it is vain to ask
If what I postulate be justified,
Or what I prove possess the stamp of fact.
Yet bridges stand, and men no longer crawl
In two dimensions. And such triumphs stem
In no small measure from the power this game,
Played with the thrice attenuated shades
Of things, has over their originals.
How frail the wand, but how profound the spell.
– Clarence Wylie, Jr.
Comments on time by Einstein and Feynman
Since the laws of quantum physics are reversible in time, we shall have to consider computing engines which obey such reversible laws. Feynman RP. Foundations of Physics, Volume 16, Number 6, 507-531, DOI: 10.1007/Dec.
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. — Albert Einstein on the occasion of his friend Michele Besso’s death…and three weeks before Einstein’s death.
Light Girl
Light Girl
(an aubade
on the occasion of her birthday)
Light girl, listen -
by that noon you were missing
the gloom in heaven at your leaving
(mourning after morning,
or after parting, should we say -
you, then, being almost post partum).
Hid, though, from your recalling
is you’d been born in dawning
but for this:
A quiet voice
(I think it was God’s, though angels circled)
saying, don’t go, sing for us again -
linger just an hour.
Heaven hushed, then,
(Is heaven ever silent? More likely, laughing children –
but I think even they paused play)
except that one still voice saying,
sing your longing just once more -
yes, those wishings: caring, soothing, justice, light;
but sing your other yearnings, too
your sea-sky dreams, church bells, deep golds, crimson,
fogshroud streets, silk lace, rainstorms, kissing.
Your alms of healing are songs to God?
Your joys and passion are just as much,
And just as dear.
Light girl, listen -
I know your brown eyes closed then
all hope held there, grace within
your full lips curved round gentlest notes
and sang, in quiet, as I have heard,
until the last pure, heartfelt tones afloat -
faded,
then borne away you were,
into your song itself,
birthing,
your life and all your yearnings,
ceaseless, daily hymns to God.
Flowers on a path
Morning on summer’s first day
on this overgrown path
leading ever upward,
someone,
annoyed
at the bright yellow
dew laden blossoms
bent cross the path
has broken
twisted and
shredded
the branches
as if they could not bear
the bursting-light flowers,
the touch of the world.
Winnowing
A white-dusted woman looks up from sifting circles of
Yellow grain, and husks, and leaves.
In the clicking speech of her people she calls, Ah hello.
Dear God! Your two faces shine before me.
The tallest wipes the sweat from his eyes and says, We are
Elders, come to talk of you, of your belief,
And our own. You see, we are much alike—
Winnowing, wielding a sieve.
The old woman grins up, and sorts into woven baskets
Yellow grain, and stalks, and leaves.
She steps through the white heat to hoe burdens of chaff under
The rich, unfailing black earth.
I alone am drifting
Others have more than they need, but I alone have nothing.
I am a fool. Oh yes! I am confused.
Other men are clear and bright,
But I alone am dim and weak.
Other men are sharp and clever,
But I alone am dull and stupid.
Oh, I drift like the waves of the sea,
Without direction, like the restless wind.
Everyone else is busy,
But I alone am aimless.
I am different.
I am nourished by the great mother.
– Tao Te Ching
Searching
I would like to be in touch with any of the following people:
Kim Ok Gi (alternate spellings or forms: Kim Okgie, Kim Ok Gie, Ok Gi Kim, Okie Kim, Okgie Kim)
born February 19, 1963 in Seoul, Korea
Kim Yung Ai
last known address:
#760, 22 Ban
Bupyong-Dong
Inchon, Korea
Mr. Kang Jae Woo
Hung nam dang jae kwa so
Bangsan Market
5th-ka, Ulchi-ro
Seoul, Korea
Mr. Han Hyong Shik
Jang Woon Sang
#287 22nd-Ban
Bupyong-Dong
Inchon, Korea
Kim Jin Ho
12th-Tong, 2nd-Ban
Sue Jung, 4th-Dong, Dong-Ku
Pusan, Korea
Please email me at:
keith AT keithflower.org
The Way is in training
The Romans are sure of victory,
for their exercises are battles without bloodshed,
and their battles -
bloody exercises.
Flavius Josephus
The Jewish War
37-100 A.D.
Undoing
I remember waking
in afternoon slants of late autumn light
and watching you,
the crimson grapes, plump
in one slender hand
while the other hand
moved over my desk,
the metal dividers
(keys, old boarding passes,
Fast Track statements),
and you stood on nude tiptoe
before walls I’d made
of book and hope;
sharp upright edges you caressed -
undoing so much.