March 2018
 Frederick Feirstein
feirstein2@aol.com
After months recuperating from knee replacement surgery and doing nothing but having phone sessions with patients, I'm ready to travel, take part in poetry conferences. I'm talking about the dramatic monologue in Colorado in July, will be giving readings and talks in Israel in November. Anyone else have an idea of where I can become itinerant? "Creation" closes my New&Selected Poems. Perhaps I was influenced by my conversations with the my old mystic friend Dick Allen, perhaps by a Buddhist monk who visited me before he talked to a crowd in Central Park -- after spending years and years alone on a mountain meditating.

Creation


The soul must be rinsed in time
Where Sufis and Baptists stand
With washerwomen wringing shirts
Patterned like mandalas of sand

That monks make and destroy.
Once we stood on a bank,
Shadowless beside a river,
While over us passed a clank

Of geese, invisible and unborn.
Our feathers linnet-white,
We bathed what we must mourn
In waves of broken light.

I write this in the middle of the night,
One finger a moonlit taper
Burning like an acolyte
In a passion of pen and paper.                                                                                   
© 2018 Frederick Feirstein
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