Robert Knox Verse-Virtual 2018 February

February 2018

Author's note: In response to Verse-Virtual's theme for the February issue, here are three poems on ways of thinking about karma, the notion that the moral nature of your conduct will have an impact, good or bad, on the rest of your life. Or, in the classical Hindu belief system, on your condition in subsequent incarnations. Will you be reborn as a higher-status individual, or a lower one? Or as an animal or possibly even an insect? So don't step on that ant; he may come back as your boss. In the American vernacular "karma" tends to be used loosely to suggest a cosmic connection of any sort between past events and present ones. Did the IRS send you an unexpectedly large refund just when you needed it, after you spent a lot of time last year volunteering at a nursing home? It's karma.

In the poem "International Karma," the violence two communities inflicted upon one another in the past as warring allies of World War II enemies England and Japan now underlies the assaults of the Buddhist Burmese majority on the ethnic minority Rohingya, who are Muslims. In all other respects, I hope, the poems speak for themselves.

Karma Falls From the Sky

It falls upon the rich and on the poor
it falleth on the virtuous man
and on him who hath failed in both his love and duty,
who hath suborned the weak to lie for the strong
who maketh up false fact-hoods and speweth them
upon the weak of mind
and poor of knowledge
like the bilge of tired hours wasted in folly,
karma, that cloud of flies and freshet of love

It falleth like the rain
upon the just and the unjust
and upon those who fail in their accounting
and teacheth others to hate
It falleth like history
like a klan of ancient misery
It fouleth the river
and teaches the fishes to quote false promises
to the detriment of the honest toiler
It causes the strawberries to fail
and sours the disposition of the goodwife
who feedeth instead upon the hens of discontent

It bindeth false hoods upon the heads of the innocent
and causeth them to waste their poor substance
on supersized fountains of sugary filth
and ram bunctiously in the house of learning
and so waste the precious days of youth
on fool's gaming and fantastic ill-assorted conspiracies
of tortured minds and fumbled hours
It bringeth on conniving conmen offering handfuls of maya
and flimflam
It falls upon the lists of those who have failed to love
what love hath offered
and seek comfort only in what pleasure buys

and yea, though we shovel through
the Janus-faced snowfalls,
the cluttered ways of bad faith
lost loves, self-delusion, plain ill luck, untimely death of a loved one,
still the path winds
and that which we encounter before us resembles that
which we have left behind
and those virtues we have yet to love, much less acquire
stream ever before us
like the cleansing rain, and the blizzards of lies,
and the snowballs of forgetfulness
and the balm of endless,
second chances

International Karma

The Rohingya may know little of karma
They follow a prophet whose law was furthered
by rounds of daily prayer
offered fresh from the oven of the soul

And though their persecutors are, formally, Buddhists
whose varied traditions of thought include the notion
that what you do here and now
affects who, or even what, you become then and there
and even in the undreamt future,
traditions of thought and belief
lose sway to the smarting remembrance of grievances

therefore doing onto others what the British and their allies
have done to you, and what you and the wartime Japanese,
have done to those whose mutilated communities
now flee, carrying their borders on their backs,
raising for those who look from afar the question:
Is karma but another word for history?

It may be, as the Vikings once believed,
that 'destiny is all'
But if karma bends to the wheel of fate,
it is the heft of human deed that pushes wheels along
and karma,
the fingerprint on the soul,
the DNA of conscience,
the golden template of deeds good and ill,
inscribes our souls in the book of eternal recurrence

... And so whatever dooms have befallen you,
courtesy of the British or the Japanese
it is hard of heart
to see how compunction requires the expulsion of a people
much like oneself
arms, legs, eyes that weeps, loins that
breed a miracle of life
from particular pieces of planet Earth,
where ways of life, or worship, or contemplation
are various in dress, but rooted all in home,
familiar food, happy smells, a well of communal expectations
entreating safe return for
love's meager, wounded, breakable body

Christmas Karma

Dylan Thomas died
emptying pint after pint in a Village bar
a year after recording
his "Child's Christmas in Wales,"
that beautiful lie of reminiscence
evoking a Wordsworthian universe of childhood
wonder, but packing in more people,
makes of the Welsh sea-town a country of memory
even for those who have never set foot there
Furry uncles, cat hunters, peripatetic postmen
icing downhill in a one-footed dance step,
the wine-fueled effusions of a large-busted thrush,
the candy-ciggo cut-up kid
with beret, high socks, leather shoes,
snowballing buddies, ghostly voices,
the close and holy dark

The goodness of the words outlives the life
feeding a world of feeling seldom found
in particular memories of our own
more mass-produced childhoods
Is this the immortality of the soul
that rolls from recollected visions
into other lives, like seeds
of a future harvest?

Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF