When I was 4 my father came out to the yard one night to bring me back into the house. I was pointing a flashlight up into the night sky, turning it on and off, on and off, on and off, so THEY would see me. I told him I was in the wrong place and THEY should come and get me.

He told me to point the light to the top of the tree and turn it on. It was so faint that I couldn’t find the top of the tree.

Father said, “THEY can’t see your light…let’s go in now.”

ILLUMINATION #2

Then I tried putting letters in the mailbox for THEM to come and get me, but I didn’t know how to write.

Mother said, ” If it’s scribbling, how do THEY know what you want?”

11 Norman Bailey_the Vagabond
Sung by: Norman Bailey
from “Songs of Travel”
music: Ralph Vaughan Williams
text: Robert Louis Stevenson

The Woman’s First Song, from Dear Judas (1928)
by Robinson Jeffers

Never look down, stone trees.
I am only a poor half-crazed old woman
That come and sit in the grove after dark,
Too old and poor for any one to do me harm.
It is true that I’m one
Who has known great and bitter occasions.
Oh garden that the glory from my body haunted,
The shining that came forth from between my thighs . . .
Is gone: past the flower and the fall
I sit and sing a cracked song.
I bid you fishermen mending brown nets
On the white sand,
I bid you beware of the net, fishermen.
You can never see it,
It flies through the white air and we are all snapped in it.
No, but look round you.
You see men walking and they seem to be free,
But look at the faces, they’re caught.
There was never a man cut himself loose.
. . . That’s true but comfortless.
Nor dead in their graves are not free,
The mistletoe root-threads
In the wood of the oak of the earth
Are a net, are a net.

photo by Cody Edison

This great Redwood has endured generations of warriors
Esalen, Spaniards, Carmelite missionaries and firefighters
yet it stands unscarred among the ashes.
My people were warriors against generations of enemies who are no more
for a land unknown to me,
and I stand unscarred among the ashes.
Our shield bears the white stag, I carry it on this land.
My home now stands unscarred among the ashes
Salvation came with the northbound wind

text by Katherine Edison

–byline

Do not celebrate

that the beast called war

is dead,

because the bitch that bore it

is again in heat.

Bertolt Brecht