THE BRAVE NEW LAND

The Gathering - D.Noll, July 2013 © —  I watched my father slip away over the course of a year. He had a tumor in his brain sucking at his life daily, growing like a molding sponge that didn’t know it was doomed to crumble once its host detached from the world they shared. There are moments when I can identify with that tumor, just wanting to exist, wanting to mean something to an ever increasingly indifferent reality. “ Why even try” became the ranting question bearing down upon an as-of-yet non existent future. I’ve toyed with suicidal tendencies, the band and the psychology, and I’ve experimented with alterations to my mind, in lesser or greater degrees during past lives, but none of it has ever prepared me for the chaos that I perceive tormenting life now. There is living galore, with all of the trimmings, spewing forth ever-more layers of growth-cycles-in-decay, depending upon perspectives. They often become pits to sink into to swim and drown, or clouds with which to soar a

What a rush; I spent the school year in school learning to be a teacher. I didn’t even have a real summer, as you’d expect a student to have, since it was almost entirely consumed with final exams and papers. Normally I try to travel in the summer, maybe to someplace deep and foreign, but this time I only had one week to travel and one day to plan it, so we found some cheap, last minute tickets to Zakynthos, Greece from Tel Aviv, Israel. So, knowing nothing about Greece other than what we read in the news, we launched into the skies and flew west across the Mediterranean Sea inside a plane full of teenagers heading out to party for a last minute getaway before their army service begins in the fall. What better way to finish learning how to be a good teacher, right? There were only some minor disturbances on the flight and the dread that was expressed by a few of the flight attendants before the plane took off was mostly unjustified, even though a second before we landed a universal s

Written for English Day at Gordon Academic College, this poem is composed in a series of styles, the content of which relates to our class experience learning over the past year to be teachers of English as an additional language at the college. My classmates, all from wide ethnic and cultural backgrounds, helped read the poem segments on stage in front of more than 100 audience members from the English Department.  Causeway by D.T.Noll Limerick: Stuffed into spaces economical The causeways still are habitual Passing in the halls far too often The connections fleetingly soften And the friendships made are astronomical   Free Verse: Brittle, caged laughing filling the vertical spaces of wall Spreading upwards into a slam-dunk delivery Melding into the ether with barely a whelp Singing down praise from above, and immersed in  Haiku: Straight and bent streets to walk Curved into naught with no stop Pathwa

A written response to the reading of The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin We are ever entwined within the building of our own, widespread realities, if only to communicate our inner worlds outwardly with the distant reality we face-across from daily. I become; confused, every day, by the attempt to communicate, and to which ques received to decide upon towards action and reverie. Our story opens with the wraith of a beauty hidden and desirably unknown. She is cloistered but relenting, as news unfolds of the most catastrophic epiphany granting both freedom from life and in it, from which we are in unawares, gray, still, from ignorance-stillborn and unfolding. We feel for the young woman, the wraith, but can’t feel her sorrow from the words we read. Each word escapes into clarity, read with interest, but never known till sound escapes and is gotten, meantime her cries. Sobbing in joy, like an infant in sleep, we feel for her laughter so dare stop … think. Each word that she utters

On Shabbat I went to shul. It had been a long time since I had gotten up the nerve to enter, since I hadn’t been there in a long, long time. My friends were all there, as I remembered from before. I pretended to pray, whatever that means, partook in kiddush... Then I spied an old friend sitting alone on a bench across the bima from where I had gathered next to the whiskey. He was smiling, as was proper for such a lustrous character. He walks with a walker, now, but doesn’t do it the way you’d expect. He pushes it out in front of him as he goes, then shuffles to catch up. He likes the handles high, like a drag-bike, and enjoys just watching it roll, as did I witnessing him with it. I sat next to him on the uncomfortably sublime bench in shul, and we talked of our lives. I saw his Brooklyn soul shining through tearing eyes as he spoke. Kiddush is like that, telling tales of old and of new, shiny stories and dull history colliding to recollect truth from each and every moment.

Traveling across the planet through the atmosphere above is only a recent phenomenon, like toothpaste tubes and hotdog factories, yet we’ve built our presence overhead like the progeny of our own creation, making us all proud, and, to ourselves, forever increasing our own importance and potential. In our Jetstream wake we inevitably leave behind for future generations to ponder — not only our collective lacking, but our piles of refuse — we create, once again, our world, but this time in our own image. Indonesia does that to you, looking back now, it beats raw the edges of living, of understanding our place in life, only to birth a mad questioning that spawns forth from a place deep inside. After over a month of a new pillow on a new bed in new lodgings arrived at in the dark, I find myself trying to write something coherent about the perfect chaos I perceived during my travels there. I’ve just begun to grapple with a land and sea filled tight, right up next to the world’s lid, wit