What happened to the thanks in Thanksgiving?


Before we all indulge in what has become culinary gluttony, we should spend a little time reflecting on what we have in our lives to be thankful for. Four hundred or so years ago, people were just trying to survive, and they sat down with several Native Americans to have a mostly meager dinner of corn, squash, wild turkey, venison and flat bread. And then they prayed in thanks, to their native friends for showing them how to grow most of what was on their table.

How far we’ve come and how far we’ve lost sight of gratitude and thanks giving. If I see one more ad about Black Friday, I’m going to scream. This blatant materialism is shameful. It has no part in the meaning of Thanksgiving. Crass commercialism is unfortunately invading most all of our holidays. I think I know why.
Corporate America drives and oils the consumer machine, of which we are the end part.
I know our society functions that way, but there is a time and place for it.

It’s difficult to be thankful when you’re disabled, but we must be. Never mind the consumer frenzy, never mind the stomach fill to bursting, remember what you do have.
Look around, see not things, see family love, appreciate the trees and gardens, the mountains and the power of the sea. Look up, notice the amazing sky, the sparkling stars at night. Appreciate your part in it. Even though you may not dance anymore, you still have love in your life.

Have gratitude your situation is not worse than it is. You are reading or hearing this article and can read or hear more, in any genre, and that’s good. If you can move your limbs, be thankful. If you are part of a support group, tell them thank you.

Thanksgiving is not about busting your seams, or running to the superstore or mall, it’s about thanks, appreciation, gratitude, and what that means for you, and in you.  

Suburban Chapter

poem from my old house on Windsor Ave.:



                     Suburban Chapter
   
                Municipal street maintenance boys
                cut the huge dying cedar out front
                as if it was so much refuse.
                From their boom buckets
                they jolly the day away
                as I watch a friend
                carried away by loud coroners.

                Strangled by a sloppy gas leak
                its choked roots succumbed under asphalt
                like a coal miner without legs.
                Malfeasance on an elder.

                Earlier in the week  up the nice street,
                under a burgeoning banana tree,
                a man’s body was dumped,
                tossed in the azaleas like a used six pack,
                his dress was torn.

                Tonight
                looping feline whines fissure the dark
                forcing my audience,
                boasting pathetic territory.
                Not far away, slipping from buses
                come the desperate, who sometimes
                accost gold watched men
                returning home
                as they park their maroon cars.
           
                Further east
                clapboard slung bungalows
                weather eighty-five years
                of particulate haze
                only to be pelted by semi-automatic bullets.
                Vertical irons manacle homes,
                unnoticed as seeds on a bun.

                But, angry old women still make their way
                to market,
                people walk their dogs
                putting fear aside,
                battling far worse odds on the freeway
                than the caustic curb outside.

                               

Late August - poem

As nights cool darkness finds you,
and mysteries of mortality creep in,
surround you,
that beseeching hollow refrain about your paltry worthiness,
resonates as an awful tightening
rendering you stunned and stricken.
What wonders are there still to be played out?
If any.

Troubling accounts of destiny,
wrestle in your chest,
welt the heart like a whip,
while morbid fingers pull on your dreams at night,
shifting shadows haunt your deeds done.
Sleep anyway, night brings the cool,
the paradox,
and the rest.

Kingdom of Sea

The Kingdom of Sea Shore swells compelled by the moon, driven by massive currents crest, curl and thunder down, a process of eons, carving the rock into sand, making a shelf in the rugged continent. Light strewn coral beds form, a divine circus of lively function, where colours have fins, where eels sway their grotesque heads, jellies drift in, mollusks sieve the waves, and big lipped groupers idly fan the water, while ocean turtles stop in for rest pausing over orange stars, purple urchins and frenetic crabs. Further out in that cobalt blue, bullet nosed swift hunters abound, slicing through the water, screaming towards prey. They shatter schools in frenzy, eat and gorge, the bloodied column now littered with flesh. Those bits sift down and settle in the abyss, where meters long ribbon fish, anglers and bizarre bioluminescent fish reside in blackness, where molten vents host strange worms in the starless midnight of the fathomless deep. Way above, world traveling cetaceans fly though in brighter light. They glide as whales, whacking the surface when discovering krill, family types and the dolphins too, sonar squeaks and chatter keep members by, they breech and plunge, pirouette and dance in the volumes, in the ancient sea, the spawner of life our salt tears a vestige of then, a link to the water planet.

Lane's Diamond

Chapter 2 - Catching Up


Lane walked beside Karla as they left the hardware store and turned up a path woven with tree roots and weed clumps as familiar as the pattern in an old hallway rug. Their arms brushed one another’s until finally, Lane blurted out, “Old Putty Face quit working at the gas station.”
“Why? Something happen to him?” Karla frowned.
“Don’t know for sure. Someone said he had another stroke and his face went from bad to worse. My mom said he couldn’t use his arm very well anymore.”
“It’s so sad,” Karla sighed.
“Maybe he just couldn’t deal with Tim and Nate’s
teasing anymore,” Lane whacked at a bush. “Or, maybe he’s dead.”
“Lane! Why’d you say that?” Karla stopped.
“I don’t know,” Lane suddenly felt awkward. ”Let’s just change the subject.”
Karla glanced ahead and swatted at a bug, “You brought it up!”
Lane wiped the sweat from her upper lip as they walked on and looked over at her friend. Lane could see, in that moment, all the unfolding beauty Darren saw when he had eyed Karla earlier. Her exotic face had smooth skin, and her full alluring mouth, boys always seemed to like, whether they knew why or not.
“So, what’s up with you and Darren?” Karla asked brightly, “You’re hangin’ out with him I see.” It was as if Karla knew her thoughts.
“Awe no. Not true. I just bumped into him in the hardware store.”
“So, you haven’t hooked up with him other than that?” Karla swept her hair off her neck.
“No, not really. I mean I’ve seen him around and we say ‘hi.’” Lane answered, feeling somehow very childish.
“Lane! You’ve got to come on to him a little. Otherwise...”
“...how will he know?” Lane finished, crossing her eyes.
“Well, not just that. Some girl will come along and do it for you! Definitely when school starts,” Karla added as matter-of-factly as a newscaster.
Lane slowed then nodded in agreement, “What do you think of Darren now?”
“What do you mean?” Karla slowed down too. “Do I think he’s cute now? Well, more than a year ago.”
“Definitely,” Lane smiled. “Do you think he has any idea that I really, you know...”
“Like him?” Karla glanced her way. “No, I think he’s totally clueless.”
“I’m so off his radar,” Lane laughed.
She began to swing the toilet plunger, the bag flying off on the fourth arc. She dropped back, crouched, and swung the plunger hard, like a bat this time. Karla ran ahead to catch the phantom ball, which made Lane run as if she had connected with the same ball. She tagged a parked car and then a tree, creating her own softball diamond.
Karla yelled, “It’s a double, folks!” They both grinned.
“Remember when you did that for real, and drove in two runs for our win against Taft?” Lane smiled as she caught up with Karla.
“Duh! I doubt if I could do it now. I’m totally rusty.”
“That’s why you need to practice right away. We have
only two games until playoffs,” Lane pulled her tank top away from her damp midriff. “We slumped after you left.”
“I’m going to try. Not promising anything,” Karla wagged her finger.
They turned into Lane’s front walkway lined with blue, pink, and mauve hydrangea, but it was the smell of fresh cut fruit that they noticed as Lane opened the door.
“I smell pineapple or something. Yum.” Karla dabbed her forehead.

-HMorrell

More Please

Oh the ways of civility,
the kind gesture, the extended hand.
Your gaze reveals a thoughtful mind,
passions wrestled, teams spirited,
lessons learned, no black and whites.
We share only education,
but of that, we can rhyme forever!


Oh the degrees of earnestness,
that shameless caring, fraternity,
the extended hand;
it’s gradually wizened by fear
and electronica,
by the satiric media, the crass and snide masses.
They run defensive line,
for the Corporate Larvae that trammel
and eat on the dying corpus of good sense,
fortitude and compromise, -that earnest civility...

The body of what was once ‘America, the beautiful’,
is now ‘America, the fat, ignorant and whorish’.




- HMorrell

High Seas

         We live our younger lives, instinctually learning, studying books, ever preparing; plans and strategies seem to make sense. A robust social hunger, a pliant mind, and an elastic sensual body sets the table for supper to feed you, enrich your psyche, and broaden you.
    However, moving forth in age, the invincible self erodes, and aspirations fade away like mists in sunlight. We learn uninvited lessons, hopefully gaining grace and kindness to some degree. Over our years, events occur, battles are lost or won, but are always paid for. Injustice and disappointment absorb the former hunger of those keen plans, mitigated by intruding reality; and that tattered bravado recedes, but not entirely.
   People you know, young and old, die. Small catastrophes claim you. You humbly learn those stinging chapters where not only is life not fair, but it is teeming with deceit, agony, fraud and and not a little humor.
   So you cloak yourself in a fabric woven with existence riddles and irony. You present a little laughter, a small measure of stifled hysteria, and brandish cautious celebration. Joy remains but is tempered now with a gradual surrender to those changes you cannot actuate.
    Next you set your brave boat to coordinates of resilience and steer the rudder to  family harbors, coves of compassion; taking onboard friends, dogs, and supplies that please and comfort you. You control not the winds, nor the tides, not anything but your own humbled boat. Yet the sun is out there too, the fish and birds, your prayers,  and stars to guide you.


revised 3/2014

5/29/10