Tag Archives: river of life

Sonnet: Barbara Loots, ‘Climbing’

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I have begun to narrow down desire.
As though tracing a river to its source
I climb, charting the change higher and higher
from placid meander to the turbulent course
where it began. I have loved much, not well,
collecting worlds to carry on my back.
What shall I leave? The spirits that compel
this climb demand a spare and steady pack.
Leave beauty, wonder. They are everywhere.
Leave hope, and drink from the relentless stream.
Leave knowledge, learn trust in the nimble air
until, suspended by a slender dream,
you seek only to climb, and not to know
where you came from, where you have to go.

*****

Barbara Loots writes: “Climbing is one of my earliest successful sonnets. Over the decades, I have turned to it again and again as life bears out its wisdom.”

After decades of publishing her poems, Barbara Loots has laurels to rest on, but keeps climbing. The recent gathering at Poetry by the Sea in Connecticut inspired fresh enthusiasm. Residing in Kansas City, Missouri, Barbara and her husband Bill Dickinson are pleased to welcome into the household a charming tuxedo kitty named Miss Jane Austen, in honor of the 250th birthday year of that immortal. She has new work coming in The Lyric, in the anthology The Shining Years II, and elsewhere. She serves as the Review editor for Light Poetry Magazine.

Photo: “Himalayian Stream of Life” by Lenny K Photography is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

SF Sonnet: RHL, ‘Transhuman Evolution’

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The humans crowd the riverbanks in cities
while you, would-be transhuman in your boat,
trust to your dreams and luck as on you float,
ignoring all the land’s static committees,
the buildings taller with their strident voices,
the citied banks ever more crammed and loud,
leaders and statues oversize and proud,
fixed in their views. But you see other choices.

And then there’s no more land. Only the sea.
You deso-, iso-, yet e-lated find
after the Desolation of the Years,
sailing and searching past humanity
in the vast oceans of the future mind,
a life within the music of the spheres.

*****

This sonnet has just been published in Space and Time #146, a magazine where fantasy, science fiction, horror and whatever else are presented in a variety of print, online and audio forms. The sonnet owes something to one of my favourite Matthew Arnold poems, ‘The Future‘, which begins

A wanderer is man from his birth.
He was born in a ship
On the breast of the river of time;
Brimming with wonder and joy
He spreads out his arms to the light,
Rivets his gaze on the banks of the stream.

and ends flowing out into the ocean:

As the pale waste widens around him,
As the banks fade dimmer away,
As the stars come out, and the night-wind
Brings up the stream
Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea.

I assume Matthew Arnold limited this vision to the individual life, but I see it also as an image relevant to the progress of the human species into something vaster and unknowably different – not far removed from Nietzsche’s sense of Man as being a bridge between animal and… superman, or transhuman. Not the nasty small-minded punks of Nazi and neo-Nazi superman stupidity, but something far grander in a far larger development towards what life could become.

Photo: “Millennium Dome/O2 Arena from Trinity Buoy Wharf, Blackwall” by wirewiper is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.