Prescription For The Disillusioned
is an invitation to enter into a world of the magical mundane, a meditation on the curious and unique life given to everyone. These poems cherish the quotidian and commonplace experience as the precious gift it is.
The poems are a response to the human condition, a conversation with life and loss, as well as an uncovering of the mystical in the day-to-day walk that we call our lives.
At times political, at times personal, the poet reaches through the pain or struggle to the treasures that are hidden in plain sight.
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Prescription For The Disillusioned … a selection
Prescription For The Disillusioned
Come new to this day.
Remove the rigid
overcoat of experience,
the notion of knowing,
the beliefs that cloud
your vision.
Leave behind the stories
of your life. Spit out the
sour taste of unmet expectation.
Let the stale scent of what-ifs
waft back into the swamp
of your useless fears.
Arrive curious, without the armor
of certainty, the plans and planned
results of the life you’ve imagined.
Live the life that chooses you, new
every breath, every blink of
your astonished eyes.
Begin
Begin anywhere,
the white-haired woman hangs laundry,
wide sheets and delicate blouses.
A line stretches across a burning
horizon of impossible blue. The
Mediterranean, our origins. Or begin
in line in a bank, the same hour
in another bank, in another country
a bomb strapped to a serious young man.
Flash, obscene white light,
renews again, chaos and creation. This
too, the palette to place hues of time.
Boredom: a beginning, familiarity,
routine. The gate swings closed. What
is enclosed, ensconced?
The church bell bongs the hour
an echo of time to come, time
contained, time gone.
Begin with tools: a hammer,
a hoe. A moment under gathering
clouds, a child, with blistered palms,
turns soil, the earnest immigrant,
on a steep San Francisco roof,
repairs the world, extends, renews
time. Begin by asking: who
am I? Allow sea, sky, bird
chatter to answer. Ask
again, know there is no
answer but the mirror of the moment,
a window in the heart.
Begin anywhere to listen, look.
So little within our grasp,
our control, our foolish mammalian
understanding. Begin now:
What is this? Who am I?
Keep asking.
Mundane
We want to live life on a nobler plane,
More eloquent arguments, more elegant
Intentions. We imagine ourselves living
scripts, perfectly written, great exits.
Instead we fold clothes, wash our cars.
Some days the plants need water.
The cat needs its shots. There is weeding,
Then pruning. Then everything
All over again.
Today I found yesterday’s dirt, stubborn earth
Still lodged contentedly beneath my fingernails.
My fingers are stained with tannin
From persistent forget-me-nots plucked
Constantly, who constantly refuse to be forgotten.
Why bother myself with the Big Questions,
The Big Answers? The soil, the clothes folded neatly,
Or lying dirty in the basket, these pages
Blank then filling--these are the
Boundaries which contain my exits,
Great or just exits. Commonplace and enough.
The best of these poems perform a kind of transubstantiation of the mundane to reveal the miraculous, often with an arrival at the imperative voice. “You must be/Willing to stop/Naming even yourself,” she writes in “The Lightening Tree.” This is a voice that comes unadorned, reminiscent of Hafiz, Rilke or Rumi, fearless in its declarations. But distinctly female, the voice of a woman unafraid to speak what she knows. Clear and sweet as after absolution, the poems open their arms to us, earthy and grounded in our daily lives. They refresh and affirm. We know what she’s talking about, though we may not have thought of it before.
Elizabeth Carothers Herron (author of The Dark Season, The Stones of the Dark Earth, among other works of poetry, non-fiction, short fiction and essays)
Rebecca del Rio gives us poems of her fierce and true heart. Prescription, chant, song. And ways to reflect on our own journey, our own ways of being in the world. Here are poems of Zen questioning, of family and friends, animals, war, death. In “Prescription For The Disillusioned” we walk with her, in Rebecca’s words, “a companion on the dark roads”. Rebecca del Rio’s book speaks of her travels, her life, and we can enter in, travel together, the poems “holding us as we want to be held”. Rebecca del Rio has paid attention, taken care, listened closely on her path, and we are fortunate to have her heartfelt book, made of tigers, and blossoms, and the true questions of life.
Jack Crimmins (author of I Speak of Jazz Poets, Kit Fox Blues and The Rust Life)
Rebecca del Rio’s poetry is the kind that opens your eyes to new ways of seeing the world, opens your mind to new understandings of that world and opens your heart to the mystery of our human experience. She is one of the finest poets writing today. This collection is medicine for the soul - truly ‘a prescription for the disillusioned.’
Larry Robinson (author of Roll Away the Stone, a collection of poetry (2015) and founder of Rumi’s Caravan and the Sebastopol Oral Tradition Poetry Salon)