How to organise a team building exercise

Makes me want to do something crazy, like help restore one of our wonderful historic houses around here. Suppose it’s best to ask the owner first, though…

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You can pay a lot of money to have ‘experts’ come along to your company or organisation and teach your staff all about teams and cooperation. Thousands of pounds.

Or you can do it on the cheap.

For this to work you need some quirky project such as the miraculous Talliston house, (http://www.talliston.com/) gardens, art installation, and dead nun repository. You invite a group of people that includes all of the following. Four published authors, two Pagans, a Wiccan, two guys who work in a department store, a youthful architect, a drama student, a layabout, and your mum and dad. There may be some overlap between the categories. I myself am an atheist layabout, for example.

At 10:00 o’clock on a Saturday morning, you say ‘Here’s what needs doing by 5:00 o’clock tomorrow afternoon.’ Then you  let everybody loose. You have to do some graft as well, or…

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A planting haiku

tearing apart roots
spun too long in small spaces–
the break before bloom

This was sort of inspired by Paul’s lovely haiku, here:
http://poesypluspolemics.com/2013/05/27/vantage/

I love when that happens!

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mermaids (bad tv)

Those singing mermaids–
I want to tell him I have heard them too,
weaving whispers for dolphin ears
where we can’t live, but still crave
a cradle of water and salt, not unlike
where we first learned the mechanics of  breath.

Their sea-floor canticle was never spun
for sailors or anything over the waves,
secret and driving dreams
that sometimes I am weightless in,
openarmed in flight similar to swimming.

I always wake before I remember how
to land, gravity not the pull in those dreams,
but fear.  The feel is as familiar
as sunlight; memory laid down
reptilian, where instinct sleeps:

the things babies know
but have no words to tell us.

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Vessels

Stravinsky said there was no tradition
behind his rite, that he simply
wrote what he heard, the vessel
through which the sacre passed,
and this is ritual without rote,
a rise of all things rooted
in dirt.  There is nothing holier
and more base than May,
and we know it, we who sing
in scales or words or color
what is given, what is blended and mixed
in this glass of our bodies
before it is poured out,
this time in libation.

***for your listening pleasure, click here to listen to The Adoration of the Earth from The Rite of Spring.  I can see the dancers, jumping down hard, pressing their feet flat as I listen to this.

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Keriah

There are mornings
whose blues are unspeakable,
whose yellows are far too dandelion
to dilute under sun.

You should have died in November.
I could count you in raw clouds,
reflected in reds rotting to brown.
I could paint all color siphoned to straw,
brighten it with blood kissed from my fingers
caught on the skeletons of roses.

But there is room for loss
even in blooming.  I can mourn
you vineless, thornless,
worn open as the hole I tear
over my chest, where my heart was.

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , , , | 36 Comments

sometimes sky is less
window to stars
or blue we breathe

and more mouth

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what’s left

There is an equation for this:
an imbalance of temperature
added to wind shear
equalling an F5 swath of correction
one mile wide.  For us,
it’s personal, raising brick
of what used to be a city
to find some(one) any(thing) living
underneath walls, below floors
that were ceilings; roofs
torn open like sardine tins, keyless.

We put up signs with street names
so we can learn where our houses were.

We learn the sky is sometimes hungry.
We hug our children.  If we can.

After we count the bones,
after we tell the ashes
we remember a random sparing
of an indifferent giant
which is less mercy
and more chance, impersonal scythe
to life with a face on it,
pick for logic in a rubble
of computer monitors and picture frames,
but that’s gone missing too.

Easier to tally what’s lost
than find meaning in what’s left.

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , , | 43 Comments