Accidental Wisdom
By Alla Bozarth
()
About this ebook
The only reason
for going into
the open heart
or the labyrinth
rose
is to let your heart break
open
so that you can hear
the first cry
of creation
when God birthed
the universe,
and you can
become
large enough
to respond,
let your whole
life unfurl
in all
its magnificence
and purity,
and cry back
to the Holy One
with the beauty
that will rise
within you.
-Alla Rene Bozarth
Alla Bozarth
Dr. Alla Rene Bozarth is an award-winning poet and author of numerous titles of prose books, poetry collections, and audiotapes, including Stars in Your Bones, Life is Goodbye/ Life is Hello, Widsom and Wonderment and Water Women. She is one of the Philadelphia Eleven, history-making women who became the first female Episcopal priests in 1974. Dr. Bozarth holds a doctorate in performing arts from Northwestern University and is a certified Gestalt therapist. She practices soul care of herself and soul-mending and soul-tending of others at Wisdom House near Mt. Hood in western Oregon. Many of her poems, along with the art of owner and designer, Susan Lind-Kanne, are featured on Bear Blessings Soul Cards.
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Accidental Wisdom - Alla Bozarth
© 2003 by Alla Renée Bozarth
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written
permission of the publisher.
iUniverse, Inc.
For information address:
iUniverse, Inc.
2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100
Lincoln, NE 68512
www.iuniverse.com
Blessing of the Stew Pot
first appeared in Earth Prayers HarperSanFrancisco,
1991; and Before Jesus
and Pillar of Salt
first appeared in Life Prayers
HarperSanFrancisco, 1996, both edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon.
Call from Tomorrow
and Peace Plan
first appeared in Grounds for Peace—
an anthology of writings by the members of Women Against Military Madness
and Women Poets of the Twin Cities, 1994.
Eden Revisited
first appeared in Prayers for a Thousand Years, edited by
Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon, HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.
Back photo by John Jarman
ISBN: 0-595-30022-7 (Pbk)
ISBN: 0-595-66116-5 (Cloth)
ISBN: 9-780-5957-5131-0 (ebook)
Contents
Acknowledgements
Tribute to a Family Scribe
On Learning of a Poet’s Death
Her Parents Met in Istanbul…
What is the Difference Between Poetry and Prose?
This is How Women Get Lost
Women in Space
Refugee Women
Dangerous Witness
Lost Ethic
War Over Women
In A Stew
Peace Plan
Call from Tomorrow
For the Two Cameramen Shot Down in the Baltic Rebellion, January 20, 1991*
True Story of a Russian Orphan
Evil
A Brief Analysis of Evil
For the Love of God
Firewalker
Gender, Humanity, Morality:
Biology as Destiny or My God Is Jewish but My Religion’s Gone Roman
A Case for the Generic Feminine
People Will Talk
Codependents
Mindmelt
Pillar of Salt
How it Is
Starling
Malignancy
The Body of Christ
Apology for My Species
The Terrible Twos
Sequel to the Nuclear Age Love Poem,
Relationship
Good Dragons and Guide Dogs—The Inner Bestiary
Anthropomorphism?
Part of the Problem
Original Insecurity
Nightmare at Noon
Eden Revisited
Midrash for Eve and Adam
Eldridge Cleaver Meets John Milton
Why I Refuse to Read Newspaper
We Sometimes Regress
What I Heard on Public Television
Girl Talk
Why I Hate Shopping
Constellation
Entropy
Fifty—Crone Mother
Tantra Poem
Origins
All Souls Day
Sweet Honey in the Rock
The Two Best Meals of My Life*
The Red Hat
The Croissant
Playing the Odds
Rollicking Art
Kvelling—Prayer for the Human Family
Starfishing
Stroll
Spirit Blood
Rendezvous at the Custer P.O.
Ancestors
Livey
The Woman Who Became the Ocean
Wind Woman
Not at Home
Sun Salutation
Boundary Waters
Falling in Friendship
Electronic Poet
For Arty
Melody’s Child
At the Speed of Light
Getting Back Green
To a Convent Graduate
Rosaire, O.P.
Midwives
Leaving the Premises
Eskimo Crone—Visiting the Old Folk’s Home
Lost No More, She Comes to My Senses
Moonfire
Saving Grace
Women’s Confession
On Playing a Piece for Four Hands with Only My Two
Housecleaning as Prayer
In Celebration of Working at Home
Sweet Medicine, Accidental Wisdom
The Power of the Crone
It Begins
Loving Hands
Women at Play
Winter Rite
Bring a Torch, Jeannette
The Letter
To One Whose Sacred Map Was Stolen
"Some Women Amazed Us
Nobel Woman
Corita
The Annunciation
In Behalf of the Mystery
Against Bad Religion
The Unchurching of Women
Those Women
Before Jesus
Durham Cathedral
Glastonbury Goddess
Journey Blessing
Wicca
Circle of Fire
You Have Always Belonged Here
Pearls
Water Women
Chambered Nautilus
The Ascent of Woman
The Winter Wombs of God*
Uncle Yasha, or My Family History
Moonroot
Last Poem for Galway Kinnell After Long Winter
My Tradition Tree
My Religions
Ordination Extra-ordinary
Metaphors for My Job
When Things Seem to Come Together and Life Says Take a Risk
Religious Manifesto of a Grown Woman: A Personal Re-Membering
Oracle
Lineage/Image
Easter Wisdom Rite
Heresies
Song of Mary
Imminence
All Kinds of Risings
Living on the Fault Line
Rumi’s Answer to Job
Sister Grace—Jesus’ Older Sister
Spinningwoman God
Grandma Wisdom
The True Meaning of Christmas and Everything Else
Smart Luck
Dying is Temporary
Praxis
Where to Find Me
My Work Ethic, or Why I Write in Winter
You Are What You Read
Spanning
Titleweaving—
A Day at the Movies
Don’t Bug Me in the Morning
The Night I Sang at the Paris Opera
Seduction
Sexual Awakenings
Telling it Like it (Almost) Was
Poets’ Reunion
Hegira*
Morning Song
Two Heavens
A Place is Like a Person
On the Tenth Day of Christmas
Moonlust
Deep in Morning’s Dark
Coasting
Mama Sea and Mama Rock
Hymn to Gaea
The Dreams of Trees
Machines Have Spirits
Why Be Good?
Why Pray?
Why We Exist
Is the Universe a Friendly Place?
Kaleidoscope of Praise
Dancing the Labyrinth
Passover Remembered
Under Threat of Fulfillment
Thirty-One Commandments or Flavors of Grace
This book is dedicated with love and thanks
to The Reverend LouAnn Pickering,
cherished friend and sister in priestly service.
Acknowledgements
Some of the poems in Accidental Wisdom first appeared in the following books and audiotapes by Alla Renée Bozarth:
Books
Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey
Life is Goodbye/Life is Hello: Grieving Well through All Kinds of Loss
Love’s Prism: Reflections From the Heart of a Woman
A Journey Through Grief
Sparrow Songs—A Father-Daughter Poetry Collection
Soulfire—Love Poems in Black and Gold
Wintefire—Love Poems in Silver and White
Stars in Your Bones: Emerging Signposts on our Spiritual Journeys
Gynergy
In the Name of the Bee & the Bear & the Butterfly
This Mortal Marriage: Poems of Love, Lament and Praise
This is My Body—Praying for Earth, Prayers From the Heart
Six Days in St. Petersburg
Audiotapes
Water Women
Reading Out Loud To God
Dance For Me When I Die
All Shall Be Well, All Shall Be One
A Journey Through Grief
Tribute to a Family Scribe
for Giovanni Ciminello—
in the New World known as John
We take what we have
been told of our ancestors’
lives, turn them into sacred
stories whose facts and fictions
blend unconsciously, creating
a truth that in turn recreates us.
In time, we apply this practice
to the recollection of our own lives.
All of history is historical fiction.
All memory is but brave imagination.
What matters is: what it means.
What it means is what happens.
The story, so vivid,
of your grandfather’s grandfather
following his daughter to the dock
in Sicily, drenched and demanding
she not take his grandchildren away
to America where he would never
see them again. "Go home, Papa,
it’s raining." But he followed on,
talking louder, his tears
drowned out by the rain.
Even their names in that scene
were part of the drama—
Vito, Salvatore…
Generations come and go by
and foreign and familiar
rivers fill with rain,
oceans brim with saltwater tears.
One day in another country
someone’s great-great granddaughter
comes to the end of her story,
puts her head on her husband’s shoulder,
sighs and dies.
In her grandchildrens’ stories,
her time will become a saga,
she, a sage, and her wisdom
will live forever, and grow.
On Learning of a Poet’s Death
Kenneth Rexroth’s dead.
The way I find out
is a shock (isn’t it
always?): In
The Book of Luminous Things,
Milosz, who knew him personally,
marks the time in long selections
throughout The Moment
section—
1905-1982.
So he was 74 when I met him
eighteen years ago, that hot
summer night of outdoor poetry
indoors. He stood in the back
of the room, praised my poems
to my husband while I read
up front, liked me for being
rebellious and young—boasted
he was an Anglican Trotskyite
and loved the reverent
dissonance of change.
I remember he laughed
at a line no one else
in the room recognized
as ironic and his laughter
gave my life a richness
in that moment.
He’s been dead for fifteen
years and I never missed him.
But now suddenly, artificially
inspired, I do miss him—
standing there in the back
of the room filled with
the incense of poetry
and poets’ commingled breath,
whispering generously his
praise words and history
in my also-now-dead young
husband’s ear.
The eternal wildlight
of summer evening
be with you always,
bless you both
in memory and in your
forever now.
I feel you here in fragments
of the air I breathe,
all around me, now
and everywhere.
Her Parents Met in Istanbul…
I read on Christmas Eve—
her mother Welsh, her father
a Russian Jew. I met her once.
Denise Levertov.
It was December,
like now, almost
twenty years ago.
We were alone
on top of the world
in the nightsky over
a city far from here.
The winter crescent moon
rests on its back, tired
like the rest of us.
We say Goodnight, this moon
and I, and put out the light—
I come up again, turn the light
back on with a familiar itch,
a sudden flush, something coming
up from below, amnesiac inklings
of what I can only know by writing.
The poet’s obituary said she took it
as a life work, a whole vocation,
being a poet,
and not just a skilled craftmaster,
but servant of some inner imperative,
an activist of the Word.
A dedication devoutly to be
lived, a spiritual practice,
I take it as a kind of singing
that goes on outside my window
at night, down the road,
voices of some beloved creatures
beyond the elements of day—
raccoon or owl or coyote or dog
blurred into the unknown tones
of the night, the unknowing dark.
One stretches toward them, all ear,
part contemplative artist, part scribe.
It takes a lifetime of wakefulness
and many solitary, empty meetings
to bring back just one such song.
It’s worth everything.
What is the Difference Between Poetry and Prose?
Galway Kinnell says
"Prose is walking,
poetry is flying."
Flying or swimming.
Dreams allow these
groundless elements,
and buoyancy above,
below.
As dreaming to waking,
so poetry to prose.
As wisdom to knowledge,
so poetry to prose.
Prose is a green pasture,
poetry a wildflower field.
Anna Akhmatova, an exile
in her own country, sits
at a kitchen table in her
friend’s apartment–-She writes
a line on a sheet of cigarette
paper, hands it to her friend.
They both memorize the line,
then roll a cigarette and smoke.
This is the hard way to get published—
blowing smoke rings out the window
printing poems in the air
that people breathe.
Prose is Akhmatova standing in line
to visit her son at a Soviet prison.
Poetry is her saying I can,
to another
mother who asks, Can you write this?
Prose is sending poets to prison.
Poetry is the poet in prison secretly
composing poems by heart, going right
on with the truth.
Prose is noon, poetry dawn.
As singing to talking,
so poetry to prose.
Prose is walking, poetry is dance.
You can do it in the sky,
or in a cave under water.
You can do it lying down.
You can do it in loving arms
or any kind of prison cell,
in union or in solitude.
Poetry lets you walk through
all the walls.
Poetry moves.
It takes you
where prose cannot go
or dare not go.
This is How Women Get Lost
This is how women get lost:
they marry men and bury their names.
Remember the radiant class president
who took time to comfort you
when your pet dog died?
And the girls you laughed with
after school?