News
The year ends, the year begins as we cycle from light to light, darkness to darkness, from time to time. We'll keep an eye out for whatever awaits us in 2020. One friend made a calendar of 2020. He took many famous paintings and gave their inhabitants eyeglasses. Vision. Insight. Old friends Nina Serrano and Jack Foley, KPFA's interwoven pair, welcome the new year with one of their special radioromps. Listen as these elderyoung'uns give you the news--about themselves, about the world, about (yccch) what is the name of that presquedent? "King Liar lives in a house of White." A special feature of today's program will be songs by Tony Perez. Here is a poem by Nina: BENICIA SUNSET We brought folding chairs and blankets to the grassy cliff top surrounded on three sides by the Sacramento River to listen to John on his indigenous flute accompany the sun as it set slipping behind the Carquinez Straights into the glowing horizon Amazing! And yet it has been happening every night of my life unwatched and unappreciated by me So many moments of note going unnoted by me Me is missing the planets' major daily events They happen without my awareness My awareness is unaware My awareness is unaware Missing Mother Earth's glories Missing Mother Earth's glories only an eyeful away And here is Jack on the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats (1856-1939): W.B.Y. Gone at 73, Poet of Ireland Poet of the Other World Looking for its traces In the Wind Among the Reeds None like him For the passion Of renunciation "O what a sweetness strayed To barren Thebaid" "The foul rag and bone shop Of the heart"-- Three books Quote that line And leave "foul" out-- None like him For the continual Recognition That language Always goes beyond itself-- Innisfree Haunted by the words Of a 3rd-century Neo Platonist-- The immense distance between This world And that other From which The "voices" came. Love of the woman Love of the woman as symbol The tragedy That spirit Lodges itself In the mire Of flesh And that a woman Must grow old-- Not "unity" But the fierce knowledge That all we have Is the power to know What we cannot be or emulate. The swans Leap up in the pool And descend again, and leap again. I love him for the clarity of his monumental, daring, unerring vision. . I have lived with him throughout my life Lived with the symbols The magic that leapt about his table Lived not where he walked But where he thought In that sky to which Helena Blavatsky brought him Demon Est Deus Inversus . In the dark you entered in 1939, Did Plato and Plotinus welcome you? Did your soul rise, a falcon in the air Ignoring cries to bring it back to earth? Did Cúchulainn honor you, show you the sword That killed in battle frenzy the hound of Culain? Did Emer soothe the wounds that ended you And bind them deeply with a purple cloak? Did honeybees ignore you in that dark Where wild swans flew and fire sweetly burned? Did all the gyres end, did darkness sing? Did you become a consecrated bone? . Nothing is true, dear love, nothing is true. [for Robert Sward]