#poetry

Meditation by Chief Tecumseh

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So live your life that the fear of death can nev­er enter your heart. Trou­ble no one about their reli­gion; respect oth­ers in their view, and demand that they respect yours.

Love your life. Per­fect your life. Beau­ti­fy all things in your life.

Seek to make your life long and its pur­pose in the ser­vice of your peo­ple. Pre­pare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meet­ing or pass­ing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lone­ly place. Show respect to all peo­ple and grov­el to none.

When you arise in the morn­ing give thanks for the food and for the joy of liv­ing. If you see no rea­son for giv­ing thanks, the fault lies only in your­self.

Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spir­it of its vision.

When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a lit­tle more time to live their lives over again in a dif­fer­ent way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

Chief Tecum­seh (1768–1813), Shawnee Nation

The Backstory of “The Laughing Heart” Post

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It all start­ed with this animation/short film by Bradley Bell:
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In which he inter­pret­ed “The Laugh­ing Heart”, a poem writ­ten by Charles Bukows­ki, and spo­ken by Tom Waits. This should have been an easy cut-and-paste video/text post on my Tum­blr, where I usu­al­ly store quick-strike things of inter­est and inspi­ra­tional val­ue. But part of the being of what has been a prod­uct of a Poet­ry class back in my Undergrad/University days just could­n’t let it go and be done with. The tex­tu­al for­mat just did­n’t have a resound­ing echo to me as it should.

A part of me just want­ed much more to come out of each line.1 “Much more,” but not too much; though I have always been intrigued with a lit­tle bit of con­crete poet­ry.2

Con­tin­ue read­ing →

  1. What is a line in Poet­ry? [↩]
  2. What is con­crete poet­ry? [↩]