Accidental Wisdom

By Alla Bozarth

Dancing the Labyrinth

The only reason
for going into
the open heart
or the labyrinth
rose
is to let your heart break
open
so that you can hear
the first cry
of creation
when God birthed
the universe,
and you can
become
large enough
to respond,
let your whole
life unfurl
in all
its magnificence
and purity,
and cry back
to the Holy One
with the beauty
that will rise
within you.
-Alla Rene Bozarth

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 9, 2003
• ISBN: 9780595751310

Alla Bozarth

Dr. Alla Rene Bozarth is an award-winning poet and author of numerous titles of prose books, poetry collections, and audiotapes, including Stars in Your Bones, Life is Goodbye/ Life is Hello, Widsom and Wonderment and Water Women. She is one of the Philadelphia Eleven, history-making women who became the first female Episcopal priests in 1974. Dr. Bozarth holds a doctorate in performing arts from Northwestern University and is a certified Gestalt therapist. She practices soul care of herself and soul-mending and soul-tending of others at Wisdom House near Mt. Hood in western Oregon. Many of her poems, along with the art of owner and designer, Susan Lind-Kanne, are featured on Bear Blessings Soul Cards.

Book preview

© 2003 by Alla Renée Bozarth

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written

permission of the publisher.

iUniverse, Inc.

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Blessing of the Stew Pot first appeared in Earth Prayers HarperSanFrancisco,

1991; and Before Jesus and Pillar of Salt first appeared in Life Prayers

HarperSanFrancisco, 1996, both edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon.

Call from Tomorrow and Peace Plan first appeared in Grounds for Peace—

an anthology of writings by the members of Women Against Military Madness

and Women Poets of the Twin Cities, 1994.

Eden Revisited first appeared in Prayers for a Thousand Years, edited by

Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon, HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.

Back photo by John Jarman

ISBN: 0-595-30022-7 (Pbk)

ISBN: 0-595-66116-5 (Cloth)

ISBN: 9-780-5957-5131-0 (ebook)

Contents

Acknowledgements

Tribute to a Family Scribe

On Learning of a Poet’s Death

Her Parents Met in Istanbul…

What is the Difference Between Poetry and Prose?

This is How Women Get Lost

Women in Space

Refugee Women

Dangerous Witness

Lost Ethic

War Over Women

In A Stew

Peace Plan

Call from Tomorrow

For the Two Cameramen Shot Down in the Baltic Rebellion, January 20, 1991*

True Story of a Russian Orphan

Evil

A Brief Analysis of Evil

For the Love of God

Firewalker

Gender, Humanity, Morality:

Biology as Destiny or My God Is Jewish but My Religion’s Gone Roman

A Case for the Generic Feminine

People Will Talk

Codependents

Mindmelt

Pillar of Salt

How it Is

Starling

Malignancy

The Body of Christ

Apology for My Species

The Terrible Twos

Sequel to the Nuclear Age Love Poem,

Relationship

Good Dragons and Guide Dogs—The Inner Bestiary

Anthropomorphism?

Part of the Problem

Original Insecurity

Nightmare at Noon

Eden Revisited

Midrash for Eve and Adam

Eldridge Cleaver Meets John Milton

Why I Refuse to Read Newspaper

We Sometimes Regress

What I Heard on Public Television

Girl Talk

Why I Hate Shopping

Constellation

Entropy

Fifty—Crone Mother

Tantra Poem

Origins

All Souls Day

Sweet Honey in the Rock

The Two Best Meals of My Life*

The Red Hat

The Croissant

Playing the Odds

Rollicking Art

Kvelling—Prayer for the Human Family

Starfishing

Stroll

Spirit Blood

Rendezvous at the Custer P.O.

Ancestors

Livey

The Woman Who Became the Ocean

Wind Woman

Not at Home

Sun Salutation

Boundary Waters

Falling in Friendship

Electronic Poet

For Arty

Melody’s Child

At the Speed of Light

Getting Back Green

To a Convent Graduate

Rosaire, O.P.

Midwives

Leaving the Premises

Eskimo Crone—Visiting the Old Folk’s Home

Lost No More, She Comes to My Senses

Moonfire

Saving Grace

Women’s Confession

On Playing a Piece for Four Hands with Only My Two

Housecleaning as Prayer

In Celebration of Working at Home

Sweet Medicine, Accidental Wisdom

The Power of the Crone

It Begins

Loving Hands

Women at Play

Winter Rite

Bring a Torch, Jeannette

The Letter

To One Whose Sacred Map Was Stolen

"Some Women Amazed Us

Nobel Woman

Corita

The Annunciation

In Behalf of the Mystery

Against Bad Religion

The Unchurching of Women

Those Women

Before Jesus

Durham Cathedral

Glastonbury Goddess

Journey Blessing

Wicca

Circle of Fire

You Have Always Belonged Here

Pearls

Water Women

Chambered Nautilus

The Ascent of Woman

The Winter Wombs of God*

Uncle Yasha, or My Family History

Moonroot

Last Poem for Galway Kinnell After Long Winter

My Tradition Tree

My Religions

Ordination Extra-ordinary

Metaphors for My Job

When Things Seem to Come Together and Life Says Take a Risk

Religious Manifesto of a Grown Woman: A Personal Re-Membering

Oracle

Lineage/Image

Easter Wisdom Rite

Heresies

Song of Mary

Imminence

All Kinds of Risings

Living on the Fault Line

Rumi’s Answer to Job

Sister Grace—Jesus’ Older Sister

Spinningwoman God

Grandma Wisdom

The True Meaning of Christmas and Everything Else

Smart Luck

Dying is Temporary

Praxis

Where to Find Me

My Work Ethic, or Why I Write in Winter

You Are What You Read

Spanning

Titleweaving—

A Day at the Movies

Don’t Bug Me in the Morning

The Night I Sang at the Paris Opera

Seduction

Sexual Awakenings

Telling it Like it (Almost) Was

Poets’ Reunion

Hegira*

Morning Song

Two Heavens

A Place is Like a Person

On the Tenth Day of Christmas

Moonlust

Deep in Morning’s Dark

Coasting

Mama Sea and Mama Rock

Hymn to Gaea

The Dreams of Trees

Machines Have Spirits

Why Be Good?

Why Pray?

Why We Exist

Is the Universe a Friendly Place?

Kaleidoscope of Praise

Dancing the Labyrinth

Passover Remembered

Under Threat of Fulfillment

Thirty-One Commandments or Flavors of Grace

This book is dedicated with love and thanks

to The Reverend LouAnn Pickering,

cherished friend and sister in priestly service.

Acknowledgements 

Some of the poems in Accidental Wisdom first appeared in the following books and audiotapes by Alla Renée Bozarth:

Books

Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey

Life is Goodbye/Life is Hello: Grieving Well through All Kinds of Loss

Love’s Prism: Reflections From the Heart of a Woman

A Journey Through Grief

Sparrow Songs—A Father-Daughter Poetry Collection

Soulfire—Love Poems in Black and Gold

Wintefire—Love Poems in Silver and White

Stars in Your Bones: Emerging Signposts on our Spiritual Journeys

Gynergy

In the Name of the Bee & the Bear & the Butterfly

This Mortal Marriage: Poems of Love, Lament and Praise

This is My Body—Praying for Earth, Prayers From the Heart

Six Days in St. Petersburg

Audiotapes

Water Women

Reading Out Loud To God

Dance For Me When I Die

All Shall Be Well, All Shall Be One

A Journey Through Grief

Tribute to a Family Scribe 

for Giovanni Ciminello—

in the New World known as John

We take what we have

been told of our ancestors’

lives, turn them into sacred

stories whose facts and fictions

blend unconsciously, creating

a truth that in turn recreates us.

In time, we apply this practice

to the recollection of our own lives.

All of history is historical fiction.

All memory is but brave imagination.

What matters is: what it means.

What it means is what happens.

The story, so vivid,

of your grandfather’s grandfather

following his daughter to the dock

in Sicily, drenched and demanding

she not take his grandchildren away

to America where he would never

see them again. "Go home, Papa,

it’s raining." But he followed on,

talking louder, his tears

drowned out by the rain.

Even their names in that scene

were part of the drama—

Vito, Salvatore…

Generations come and go by

and foreign and familiar

rivers fill with rain,

oceans brim with saltwater tears.

One day in another country

someone’s great-great granddaughter

comes to the end of her story,

puts her head on her husband’s shoulder,

sighs and dies.

In her grandchildrens’ stories,

her time will become a saga,

she, a sage, and her wisdom

will live forever, and grow.

On Learning of a Poet’s Death 

Kenneth Rexroth’s dead.

The way I find out

is a shock (isn’t it

always?): In

The Book of Luminous Things,

Milosz, who knew him personally,

marks the time in long selections

throughout The Moment section—

1905-1982.

So he was 74 when I met him

eighteen years ago, that hot

summer night of outdoor poetry

indoors. He stood in the back

of the room, praised my poems

to my husband while I read

up front, liked me for being

rebellious and young—boasted

he was an Anglican Trotskyite

and loved the reverent

dissonance of change.

I remember he laughed

at a line no one else

in the room recognized

as ironic and his laughter

gave my life a richness

in that moment.

He’s been dead for fifteen

years and I never missed him.

But now suddenly, artificially

inspired, I do miss him—

standing there in the back

of the room filled with

the incense of poetry

and poets’ commingled breath,

whispering generously his

praise words and history

in my also-now-dead young

husband’s ear.

The eternal wildlight

of summer evening

be with you always,

bless you both

in memory and in your

forever now.

I feel you here in fragments

of the air I breathe,

all around me, now

and everywhere.

Her Parents Met in Istanbul… 

I read on Christmas Eve—

her mother Welsh, her father

a Russian Jew. I met her once.

Denise Levertov.

It was December,

like now, almost

twenty years ago.

We were alone

on top of the world

in the nightsky over

a city far from here.

The winter crescent moon

rests on its back, tired

like the rest of us.

We say Goodnight, this moon

and I, and put out the light—

I come up again, turn the light

back on with a familiar itch,

a sudden flush, something coming

up from below, amnesiac inklings

of what I can only know by writing.

The poet’s obituary said she took it

as a life work, a whole vocation,

being a poet,

and not just a skilled craftmaster,

but servant of some inner imperative,

an activist of the Word.

A dedication devoutly to be

lived, a spiritual practice,

I take it as a kind of singing

that goes on outside my window

at night, down the road,

voices of some beloved creatures

beyond the elements of day—

raccoon or owl or coyote or dog

blurred into the unknown tones

of the night, the unknowing dark.

One stretches toward them, all ear,

part contemplative artist, part scribe.

It takes a lifetime of wakefulness

and many solitary, empty meetings

to bring back just one such song.

It’s worth everything.

What is the Difference Between Poetry and Prose? 

Galway Kinnell says

"Prose is walking,

poetry is flying."

Flying or swimming.

Dreams allow these

groundless elements,

and buoyancy above,

below.

As dreaming to waking,

so poetry to prose.

As wisdom to knowledge,

so poetry to prose.

Prose is a green pasture,

poetry a wildflower field.

Anna Akhmatova, an exile

in her own country, sits

at a kitchen table in her

friend’s apartment–-She writes

a line on a sheet of cigarette

paper, hands it to her friend.

They both memorize the line,

then roll a cigarette and smoke.

This is the hard way to get published—

blowing smoke rings out the window

printing poems in the air

that people breathe.

Prose is Akhmatova standing in line

to visit her son at a Soviet prison.

Poetry is her saying I can, to another

mother who asks, Can you write this?

Prose is sending poets to prison.

Poetry is the poet in prison secretly

composing poems by heart, going right

on with the truth.

Prose is noon, poetry dawn.

As singing to talking,

so poetry to prose.

Prose is walking, poetry is dance.

You can do it in the sky,

or in a cave under water.

You can do it lying down.

You can do it in loving arms

or any kind of prison cell,

in union or in solitude.

Poetry lets you walk through

all the walls.

Poetry moves.

It takes you

where prose cannot go

or dare not go.

This is How Women Get Lost 

This is how women get lost:

they marry men and bury their names.

Remember the radiant class president

who took time to comfort you

when your pet dog died?

And the girls you laughed with

after school?