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

For Louise

Audio Recordings, Poems about Poetry / tagged Art & Artists, Louise Glück / October 27, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Everything returns, but what returns is not what went away - Louise Glück

I never knew she was here until she left
It was in all the papers

There were pictures, I liked her from them
got a bunch of her books, not so sure now

She won a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize
I'll have to take the judges word for it

If she came back, I'd take her to tea
where we could talk of anything - but poetry

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/louise-gluck

Why He Didn’t Go To Mary Oliver’s Workshop

Audio Recordings, Personal Growth, Poems about Poetry / tagged Art & Artists, Fear / October 12, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Reasons he didn’t go
to the intimate week-long
with the world famous poet
on an island off New England

What he told himself …

It was expensive
(he had the money)

He had commitments
(easy enough to change)

Difficult to get to
(his travel skills were legend)

What he didn’t tell himself …

He might have to on his return
burn everything he’d ever written

Thanksgiving Poem: How-to

Audio Recordings, Nature, Poems about Poetry / tagged Art & Artists, Autumn, Fall, Gratitude, Holiday, Thanksgiving / October 9, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Don’t write right away, but soon.
Watch the leaves and the light fully
Connect – allow – relax – delight.
Too quick is a tourist in a selfie,
Taj Mahal untended over left shoulder.
Wait too long and the phone will ring

Write a few hundred poems before – good and bad,
so fear of the water doesn’t keep you on shore
And how about a title throwing two shadows
(as Mary Oliver encourages)
an easy one here with movement and the season

Do not say leaves look toward the sun, an object,
but towards the rising of the sun, an event
one more evocative of motion

Note the angle of the sun,
so low on the horizon that is shines upwards
into the twisting, twirling, falling leaves,
as they lift at times in slightly gusting breeze

If pirouetting is what you see, bring the ballet in

And gratitude, of course, and on what day

Grandmother Georgina

Audio Recordings, Family, Relationships / tagged Art & Artists, First Nations, Native, Reconcilliation, Tradition, Wisdom / September 28, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

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)

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