Monday Poems: "Millennium Sutra" -- by Anne Waldman

what learned?
what trigger what reflection?


thus have I heard


This was something I dreamt waking
that the earth could
be scorched galactic cinder
frozen in orbit
about a gone sun


apocalyptic tongue'd preachers
line the mall
with glib glow & twitch
so that you sign on, sign on


give dollars,
& all around children begging
cranium resolve! cranium resolve!


& homeless in the streets
a bed for the night, will work, a bed...


vote apocalyptic
& you will get your war


thus have I heard


rain forests stripped & bare
no trove there
but all you could ever need—
a slump, a dress, a new life,
     tales to be greedy by—
is accessed on a poison machine


what need we trees?
they grow in the brain


thus have I heard


*     *     *     *     *


Anne Waldman, along with Allen Ginsberg and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where she serves as Distinguished Professor of Poetics and the Director of the famous Summer Writing Program.


Waldman is associated with the Beat poets and is an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has published over 40 books of poetry, including: Manatee/Humanity (Penguin, 2009), Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble (2004), and Dark Arcana / Afterimage or Glow (2003), with photographs by Patti Smith. The above poem can be found in her collection In the Room of Never Grieve: New and Selected Poems, 1985-2003.