Welcome Earthlings! prayer

Welcome Earthlings!

Scopes Park, Photo by Linda Lemaster, 2007

Now today you say it's Earth Day A special holiday - no day off to enjoy said Earth, but lots of trinkets to show you've been there! Watch those footprints!

With your Soymilk Uplink
Facebook Similies
Corporate Smiley Green-Faces

(I heard the news today, oh boy)
"only seventeen percent of your toxic drinking water bottles getting recycled"

Now we're bad guys - now corporations tell us what is good and what is bad memory becomes obsolete
Our Own Story gets lost in the smoking clang of commerce
of success of Manifest Destiny
in the form of an open-bid contract
measurable objectives
of who can be the sleaziest
in the Game of Slide-In-Bye

War Mongers Dignified by their missteps, retired for bad training while their orders murder on
Intensive Care Veterans' hospitals mired in rats feces and mildew'd windows and lost records,
Our living heroes lost, alone
Philidelphia's ringing citizen democracy not dead yet
merely drowning
in the Roar of burning flesh, smeltered souls, and empires sold at auction
by banks
now rewarded for screwing their clients
in Spades

Walt Whitman, Benjamin Franklin would have to go underground, or to jail
if they visited today. Earth Day

We do not need to believe
To feel Her Ire
Her Lava is also my womb
My suffering is also her Pain
Her Oracle is the only true map to Life

We do not have to understand, just kneel down
and put our fingers past the dirt, feel the Life in this ground
Forget the parcel number and unhang from meridian logic
Breathe past the inTOXicated grasses, be careful in Her River's detritis accept Great Ocean's salient secrets
Quick, get to the Life of 'the thing', find your senses, awaken them
walk barefooted
while you still can

Great Mother
Just a Match in the Wind of God perhaps
For us
ever-embracing our enfeebled engorged Humanity
Her swirling Emerald Dress of Song and tragedy
into Her Divine Grace her Gaia children's Boat and Bosom

She is hearing our Song, even as we don't hear each other

We burn her Entrails, suck blood from Her Womb
as tho she were already cold
While demanding more More not even hungry just rapacious

Great Mother I give you my puny Earth Day

Your Oracle everywhere,
the den of sowbugs
the broken twig pictograph
the absence of bossy jaybirds, the lone tulip
even the stoplight flinch

Awakens me to Your Grace
Great Mother I give you back my Life

And you give me back my Song!





(c) Linda Ellen Lemaster . April 22, 2010
Brash Collection, prayer, "Welcome Earthlings"

STORYTIME -- an occasional column about books, movies and stories

~~~ ClOSE TO THE BONE ~~~

movie review of Lars von Trier's Antichrist
released 2008

by Linda Ellen Lemaster

Dateline - Last Chance Ridge, March 18, 2010

I must have always assumed there's a celestial level of movie-making; a standard of true art that transends everything we've already seen and imagined and are paying for. Something that nobody can fit onto the five-star rating system When I saw Antichrist, I felt the excitement of witnessing -- and partaking of, and surviving -- art. I left the moviehouse changed.

Banned in our town soon after it opened, this movie struck me as expanding the boundaries of beautifully created movie-making. It appealed to my gothic, surreal, magical, photo-realistic, and dark blue tastes as well. It kept me on the edge of my seat and left me wanting to see it again. I'm grateful for this movie, and recharged about what's possible in moviemaking.

I can only rave about it: the photography was rivetting, as was the luscious revelatory waves of intensity packed throughout Antichrist. The music, and the slo-mo opening scene deserve note.

It's the untold Epic of 20th Century Obsession, one could say. A picture about the holy fruit from a Tree of isolating pair-bondage. What our society puts out as modern-day marriage. "Divide and Conquer" reduced to the level of genetic angst. Or maybe that's harsh? A picture about a couple clawing their way through each other's souls in their self-contained, respective and shared, realities on behalf of professionalism and a fouled understanding of development and succession. A couple hobbled, as we all are, by the perversions of gender and sexuality brought to us by ages of both organized violence and puritanical zealots.

If you could cut and run with your Beloved, in the wake of a shared tragedy, no ties, not even a phone, would you nestle yourselves in the bosom of The Great Mother? And could the earth and the green umbrella sooth nerves; and would your shared soul reknit, restore itself in the quiet? Or would you get too grossed out by the ticks and sticks and contrary-seeming zephyrs? Would the night-owl's coo-wooo cover you like the moon, or would he seem to portend? I've been to both places. Could you even do it soberly?

Maybe the title set me up for surprise? Antichrist -- I musta had a preconception or two? Since Willem Dafoe was in it, I knew I'd like it, so I skipped over my normal cursory preview.

Both actress Charlotte Gainsbourg and DaFoe were beyond excellent portraying lives becoming gritty -- to say the least -- and they kept it up, continually intensifying the depth of their acting and art to the incredible depth required by director Lars von Trier

Starring: Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg

to tell this important story. About the upwardly mobile professional class He and She coming unglued. And perhaps about the everywoman, the everyman and about the ghastly transpositions we may endure when we are not entirely honest within the bounds of Mother Nature?

What Burton and Taylor gave us with words and wit in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?" may have blossomed forward here, with Gainsbourg and DaFoe giving us heart-rending, psyche-wrenching performances of two characters stripped to reptilian essence in a movie that flutters meaningfully between black-n-white and subtle coloring.

Loaded with metaphor and both classical and americana symbolism, but that's another whole study.

There were a lot of times in my life I wouldn't have had the fortitude and openness to see this movie. I was too "sensitive" to harsh images (violence, blood, breaking glass); movies then could restimulate unresolved ancient crashes and unhealed grief. And maybe I'd have even felt it was misogynist in my knee-jerk days? But seeing it now, I know it belongs far beyond such categorical classifications. I recommend you check out trailers and reviews before you, like me, just jump into Antichrist.

Then get a good seat and hold on.