Two Lenses—Four Europes (2019) is a collection of 113 photographs and 100 poems from our extended stays in England, France, Greece, and Spain. Christine Cote, the remarkable designer, editor, and publisher at Shanti Arts, was pure pleasure to work with on this book and took extraordinary care to make it as attractive as a book can be in design, layout, and quality of materials. Subjects for comparison between the countries include the natural world, history, religion and myth, art and artists, architecture, writers, and, of course, our presence in the world as human beings and our actions for good and other-than-good.
Copies are available in soft and hard covers from Shanti Arts Publishing, Independent Bookstores, and online distributors.
In the Nave of York St. Mary’s
Blind springs search for light
they nourish but never see.
Flames flicker in glass
cups, prick watery memory,
stir souls housed in stone to speech.
Arroyo Hondo
In Casares, the hill village
of his birth, Blas Infante
saw his people like crag
martins twist and turn
with chirps through plazas,
streets, shops, watched
them settle into sugar cube
nests precariously perched
in its cliff face. And he
dreamed of them as eagles
strong-beaked, taloned, free.
I see here only the powerful
bodies of Griffon vultures
driven by bloodlust drift
and glide in wind currents
that control their every
move. They rise late morning
from distant mountain peaks
to hiss and grunt over decaying
flesh. Like the falange. Such
is life in this gorged valley
with its deep, profound stream.
Yorkshire Dales
are my kind of poetry, an ancient landscape
worked and reworked with keen eye and mind
by farming generations for living’s sake.
Only the ridges--- rough coats of moorland
bracken flecked with heather--- are free
from human touch. Upland fields spread
shaggy as their sheep, midland fields
gentle as pampered cattle. Woodlands swell,
stone walls flow down to rivers that twist
like thick jungle vines or sweet pea coils.
Despite the rub through centuries, there’s
grace between man and land, animal and rock,
present and past. At Conistone gray wall set
stone by stone gives more light than gray
sky. Blackbirds hardy as flint in Littondale
nest in rotted post holes of derelict barns.
In Dentdale a gray heron drifts above late
summer shallows, glides beneath a pack
horse bridge, lands soft as down on sandy
banks cleared with care by farmer’s hands.
Easter Monday
Two old women
shuffle through
chilly morn
to sing Catalan
sorrows and joys.
Bodies bowed in pain
and reverence, each
step on the uneven
path a challenge met.
Between cap on head
and espadrilles on feet
black shawls mourn,
red dresses celebrate.
In the village square
a choir of friends
helps to warm stones
in winter walls,
welcomes green shoots
on vines that climb
in unpredictable webs
like history.
Priestess at Delphi
The charioteer in the museum
looks stoned but never flew
so high as the exemplary peasant
woman seated on a tripod perched
over a fracture in the ground,
both ears cocked to hear Apollo’s
pronouncements while inhaling
earthy gases till her eyes glazed,
heart raced, body convulsed
and speech erupted in tongues
for priests to interpret in words
coherent, poetic, politic, ambiguous.
The original huffer civilized.
Christian Light on Moorish Arch
I never thought a rainbow stained
until this glimpse in Mezquita,
the Mosque’s heart defiled
by Spanish opulence, its body
shrouded in Baroque stone.
No longer can its Roman columns
planted with precise measuring rods
be a heavenly woodland open
to courtyard trees leafed emerald
and laden with orange suns.