Joseph in Nazereth

Each flame in fire dances different,

each piece of wood provides its own rhythm,

each movement makes us wonder where it went

while we watch as the ashes burns through them.

Early morning, somehow the calm sunrise

opens its eye and banishes the moon;

breakfast hearths crackle as a rooster cries.

The difficult decisions come too soon.

There’s nowhere to go to escape the fear.

I am told they know our names and faces.

We’ve sheltered with friends but we can’t stay here,

they look in all the usual places.

The news is noise: sound without true meaning,

everyone talking with full conviction

all at the same time, about the same thing,

as if they would know how to take action.

What do they say about what’s happening,

who’s opinion matters and should I care;

 if I could run, what do I have to bring?

Denying the choices is easier.

How much does Mary suspect and shouldn’t?

I heard a solemn voice commanding me

because it was still fearful I wouldn’t:

authoritative without subtlety.                         

Ben Gage
Merry Xmas

Blues

She's the single reason for the blue note,

the naked ink brush black line gesture wash,

the only sonnet Shakespeare never wrote

of love's eternal eventual loss.

We heard the f-holed guitar cry baby,

saw the figure in that damn drawing dance,

mesmerized by a magical maybe

with a gambler's once in a lifetime chance. 

Listen to the plaintiff sad song lament,

quietly portrayed with tender beauty,

unembellished on love's bare instrument:

a small forgotten folk tune's melody.

As  I awake from the spell I am under,

I will miss what I cannot remember.

Ben Gage

The Musician

Speak of small things quietly to yourself,
nod if there are any answers, smile
spontaneously for no reason while
you wait like every book on a shelf
to be opened for the lines to escape,
new images and symbols are our hope.

Stay in tune as if a loved instrument,
a saxophone or guitar in its case,
available for music anyplace
whenever the sounds of song are absent:
beautiful melodies we have not heard
are freed, a story with each note a word.

Ben Gage

Song for a Lost Child

I see her everywhere

in every child's place.
I  am her father

drawing out what I cannot erase:

the fragile beauty of her face,

her body full of grace

and now the hollow of the empty space.

Perhaps before I awake,

while I am unaware,

unharnessed from all that I can take,

myself stripped completely bare,

I hear my child's laughter

soft in the arms of her mother

and I have no fear.

Ben Gage

The Oil Spill

What is buried is not what we are of,

now this: the drilled earth opened and bleeding

dark, crude, thick blood, as if it were weeping

from a deep bottomless well to above.

The punctured skin opens an artery,

the cut wound spills into the old ocean,

the wide gulf between us asks it's question

over and over," Why, mama oh why...."

There are tears you cry, unexpected tears,

uncontrollable, for the loss of love,

whatever you try, nothing seems to solve

with all our might our worst fears.

Memory is a bandage just because

what's left might still remember what there was.

by Ben Gage

The Great Art Handlers

In the beginning there were 5 great art transporters,

each had talent and practiced the art as if it were an ordinary act,

humble in the action of a fact,

unaware of the value of their endeavors.

They were all peculiar of course,

lived apart in separate geographies

studied opposite philosophies,

aiming towards a similar source.

The differences in technique and opinion

described the range of the great art handler,

difficult situations brought out the master,

it was obvious in their personal presentation.

Now they’re almost forgotten,

split up by the business of natural selection,

the opportunity of personal evolution

and the end of an unreasonable passion.

Ben Gage

*I earn my living as an Art Handler, when I started, I learned from a great group of friends, I thank them....

For the Last Artist

The moment before I heard you were gone,

and in the shattered moment thereafter,

the difference I wished I'd never known,

each day in me begins to grow clearer.

Is it always so fragile creation?

I know the madness described inside you,

the drawings on your arms for protection,

the ideas you aspired to make true,

in some else's imagination

will slowly fade and lose identity.

What becomes of the world we leave too soon?

Of all that has been seen, what may we see?

If it's true that what you've lived lives in them

your future may now be another's dream.

Ben Gage

music

The World is on Fire

The world is on fire

and it has ever been so,

if anyone tells you no

they are a liar.

All our plans and wishes

are paper balls thrown in the blaze,

I can see tomorrow behind the smoky haze

burn brilliant bright before bursting into ashes.

The fiction of innocence

is suspended. Our lost faith

describes the truth

of a life without consequence.

Is the end of days this sad?

Like being alone forever

in perpetual fever

for the love you never had:

the wind blows your hair in a cloud around your face,

a wild web crocheted cloth of thread

softly dances about your head

while your eyes peek through the lace.

Ben Gage

The Birth

The dark cloud disappeared in the black night:

a strange bright star lit the sky with candles.
Arriving too late to find rooms, for naught,
they lay with the animals in stables.
Both anxious to end their predicament,
aching, drained of everything but spirit,
unprepared for what must be heaven sent,
fearful they were not anywhere near it,
he held her hands as she closed her eyes
and suffered through the first contraction.
“God help me?” he asks as his woman cries,
unaware of the perilous question.
Exhausted, numb, like anybody would,
overwhelmed by all that’s misunderstood.

Merry Xmas

Ben Gage

The Mammoth Hunter

From a faraway dark horizon, shapes

appear on the crescent foreshortening,

their great lumber thump a rhythmic drumming

headed towards lost ancestral landscapes.

To the slow earth quake thrum below my feet,

a slow rumble ocean of tall grasses

wave like crowds to the frequence of the beat

their bunches of seeds as each foot passes.

How long has extinction kept you away?

Who told the herd to leave and not come back?

When did cave drawings fail to make them stay?

Will they leave a trail that I can track?

It’s a holographic world of visions

played out upon a shared screen by pixel

in a struggle to make believable

what’s real despite the contradictions.

Ben Gage

The voice that use to call me can speak now

The voice that use to call me can speak now,
from a far place out where I could not look,
past what I should and should not want to know,
as if I were in a dream and then I woke.
I can not say if what I hear is near
or if the sounds were meant for me to find.
I am stalked by what there is to fear:
I have left tracks in search of what is mine.
Short of breath, the nerve I use raw and red,
I see more with my eyes closed tight and blurred,
I can smell the meat of the dark thing bled.
I must be close if that is what I heard.
I did not know why what was in the hunt
could turn, charge and change all I thought to want.

Ben Gage

In the Old Beginning

In the old beginning while the world spun
a different orbit, drawing upon a
large wild nature, was life a burden?
Born small and powerless, each night and day
hiding in sanctuaries, traveling
for food and safety, hunting and hunted,
armed with only the hand tools we can bring,
before the naming of the names of God,
were we worst off, naked, less possessive?
Hungry for what hasn’t nor shouldn’t be,
unable to demand which life to live,
we were in a paradise, weren’t we?

Each morning greeted by more explosions
a hemisphere apart, scenes of neighbors
and neighborhoods diminished by fractions
with each bomb burst boom breaking what took years
to make: a building or a back the same,
suddenly each an object in the way,
another target in a weapon’s aim,
a small ordinary act of a day,
a vignette of an on-going story,
without an ending that can be written,
able to find peace for everybody,
in this civilized moment we live in.

Maybe there are no words in language yet
created to speak what is a secret.
Like some cave painting whose colors are wet
the meaning’s not the metaphor of it.
Buried deep in an impossible place,
discovered by a random accident,
painted by an artist without a face,
outside natural light, incandescent,
the truth somehow survives for all to see.
Perhaps it has its start as a picture,
drawn on a private wall from memory,
explanations can always come later.


Ben Gage