Neil Meili

Zen Cowboy Poet & Freelance Philosopher

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Tag Archives: Art & Artists

Poems and stories about art, fine art, painting, sculpture, artists

Bemused

Audio Recordings, Poems about Poetry, Travel / tagged Art & Artists, Gratitude / September 17, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

It is never wise to be
at all ungrateful to your muse

Though times she picks to bring her gifts
are ones few of us would choose

She does live on a mountain in Greece
while I'm scribbling in Texas at two AM
She's bright and alert and off to work
because it's nine in the morning to her

Karolina

Audio Recordings, Relationships, Travel / tagged Art & Artists, Greece, Independence / September 9, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Artist Laureate of Mykanos
her adopted town floats above the canvas

Windmills dance on the hills
church domes and white houses
rebound light across the narrow lanes

Ships bob on the bluest water
watched by pink pelican and faithful dog

In her pictures handsome Greek men
work the boats and bars

Forty years from Boston town
she knows too much of these men
but the island nights get cold

Her art raised their two children

–it cost a lot

but to marry one of these
patriarchetypical sons of pirates
would have cost more soul
than this artist or her art would pay

Read more about Karolina of Mykonos

Base Coat

Audio Recordings, Environment, Nature, News, Poems about Poetry / tagged Art & Artists, Climate Change, Responsibility, War / September 4, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

People are killing the planet and each other

Every poem is written on that paper

How many coats of love and laughter
will it take to keep its color from seeping through

Read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being this weekend. Hope it will help.

Bad Moon Rising

Audio Recordings, Relationships / tagged Art & Artists, Grief / September 1, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Coyote howls past the moon
Anger, sorrow, copper, where?

Written after the death of dear friend Copper Love, with thanks to her family for allowing us to share one of Copper’s paintings. To see more of Copper’s art click here

Mary Oliver

Audio Recordings, Poems about Poetry, Travel / tagged Acceptance, Art & Artists, Connection, Envy / August 13, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Of all the poets I admire
only one did I envy

How she could take us all on her journey
remind us of the wild beauty of our lives
and the soft animal of our bodies

It is disowned parts of us I. know
that we hold too high or low

And yet I wanted to go where she could go

This year in the merry month of May
on a trip in search of other things
a book I didn't know she'd written
in a town where I didn't know she'd lived

I hung five days like her hummingbird
on the green wheel of its wings

Her flowers were my food
her town became my town
her dunes became my dunes

Sip by sip on that Cape Cod shore
I began to envy her less
and love her more

And that pretty green stone
I was taking with me
I threw it back into the sea

Poet Laureate at Ninety Five

Audio Recordings, Poems about Poetry / tagged Adversity, Aging, Art & Artists, Education, Resilience / August 12, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

The new poet laureate is ninety five
he’s been working on his demons
for a long long time

Six weeks before the poet was born
his father burns his demons out
by drinking carbolic acid in the park

Mother burns father’s pictures
forbids mention of his name

Young Stanley finds one in the attic
and asks about the man

She tears the picture to shreds
without a word, and slaps him hard
six decades later he still felt the sting

Bright boy gets scholarship to Harvard
Okay but forget about teaching classes
these were not the days when a Jewish boy
could teach their ivy league asses

Marries a poet, moves to honeymoon farm
she disappears, never to be heard from again

The new poet laureate has had plenty of pain
each day he wakes as a poet, not a man of ninety five
still seeing everything new – still glad to be alive

Stanley Kunitz, Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize Winner, Teacher and Gardener (July 1905 – May 2006)

Fire Relief Concert in Austin

Audio Recordings / tagged Art & Artists, Charity, George Strait, Help, Lyle Lovett, Music, Musicians, Support, Texas, Wildfire, Willie Nelson / July 3, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

It’s damn dry
in Texas this year Y’all

It was summer in spring
and it’s still summer in fall

Big old lakes are all piss-puddle small
and the cows are eatin’ Bar-B-Q grass
the ones that are eatin’ at all

A million trees and a thousand homes
burned up in Bastrop just like dry sticks

But the stars are gathering over in Austin
Willie and George and the Dixie Chicks

Neighbors who know and care how they feel
Lovett and friends and Asleep at the Wheel

So let’s all chip in and do what we do
I’ll write a poem, what about you?

Willie Nelson singing Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die at Fire Relief: The Concert for Central Texas October 17, 2011 – Click here to listen to him perform it live in 2013

1 Reply

Artificial Intelligence

Audio Recordings, Poems about Poetry / tagged Art & Artists, Creativity, War / April 26, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

What a marvelous thing is man
the animal that makes things
and makes things up

Behold the medicines machines and lies
Behold all the structures that he builds
to keep him warm and keep him safe

Behold the bullets and the bombs
Behold the prisons who else needs

Behold the poems and the prose
some of truth and some of pose

Tempis

Audio Recordings, Poems about Poetry, Relationships / tagged Art & Artists, Time Flies / April 21, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

In the caves there are paintings
thirty thousand years old
and the Sistine Chapel has been
around for a while

In Tibet and Arizona
they paint with colored sand
a Cordon Bleu feast, beautiful
for a moment then brushed away

For those who would judge
one as better than the other
I offer a poem or a psalm
in a long-remembered book

Reading it is in column one
hearing it in column two

Or how about a whispered
I love you in the ear
is it gone ... or is it here

The Test

Audio Recordings / tagged Art & Artists, Concentration, Copper Love, Hawaii / March 27, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

If you want to see an artist, here's a picture

Copper, sitting, back to a cliff
on the northernmost tip of Maui

Two hikers stop and say
What are you doing? Just sketching
Been here long? Not sure
Don't the ants bother you? What ants?
She looks to where they point
at the long column single-filing
up, acros, and over one bare let
between, then up and over the other
and down toward the red-sand cove

Red Sands Beach, Maui Hawaii

by Copper Love – Plein-air

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