Category Archives: inspiration

Third Healing Offering

Original blog post was on 2/24/12.

I would like to share my healing song, “Prayer of Lovingkindness,” which I wrote in 1996. When I read the first three stanzas below, I heard music. This was not usual for me, so I paid attention. I sat at my piano and figured out the notes I had heard. Years later, I was doing healing work with Susi Roos, NP, and she suggested adding on the second part to the song using present tense. It seemed very powerful together–and peaceful. Although originally shy about singing on my own, I’ve now sung “Prayer of Lovingkindness” at workshops, funerals, healing services, and in the surgical suite with my medical team before cancer surgery at a major Chicago teaching hospital (a story for another day). Read, listen, and sing along with my CD, Full Blooming: Selections from a Poetic Journal (track # 59). Please share.

Prayer of Lovingkindness

(music by Margaret Dubay Mikus)

The asking:

May I be at peace.
May my heart remain open.
May I awaken to the light of my own true nature.
May I be healed.
May I be a source of healing for all beings.

May you be at peace
May your heart remain open.
May you awaken to the light of your own true nature.
May you be healed.
May you be a source of healing for all beings.

May we be at peace.
May our hearts remain open.
May we awaken to the light of our own true nature.
May we be healed.
May we be a source of healing for all beings.

The answering:

I am at peace.
My heart remains open.
I am awake to the light of my own true nature.
I am healed.
I am a source of healing for all beings.

You are at peace
Your heart remains open.
You are awake to the light of your own true nature.
You are healed.
You are a source of healing for all beings.

We are at peace.
Our hearts remain open.
We are awake to the light of our own true nature.
We are healed.
We are a source of healing for all beings.

And so healing ripples out from you like a stone skipped on a clear pond.

Words adapted from the Buddhist metta (lovingkindness) meditation, (originally I read it in Pocketful of Miracles by Joan Borysenko, Ph.D.)

Recorded on Full Blooming: Selections from a Poetic Journal, (2007), track # 59. Sing along.

Please share!

My Lawrence Ferlinghetti Story, part 2

Some poems insist on being sent to the one who inspired them. I try to follow that impulse, but sometimes I lose track. My poem, “Ferlinghetti Speaks,” was one of those. It was written in 2002, but I didn’t send it to him until 2014.

The push to send it was his 95th birthday and the sense that time was running out to do it. Probably urged by my voice teacher, Kip, I emailed City Lights Booksellers (begun years back by Ferlinghetti in San Francisco) to see if that was the best address to send my poems inspired by him. The staff got back to me in 1 1/2 days: “Yes, if you send them c/o the store, they will be passed on to him. Thanks.”

Encouraged, I wrote a short letter and mailed it with the two poems (the one below included). I did not hear back, but that wasn’t the point. I did what I felt strongly I wanted / needed to do and that was enough. I wanted to tell someone that they inspired me, that who they were or what they did or wrote mattered, enough to take my time to tell them.

I felt so strongly about this, wanting to avoid regrets, as alluded to in this poem, because of previous experiences when I waited too long. So here is the second poem I sent to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, part of my honoring his passing.

3/25/14

Someone Posted on Facebook

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is 95 today
and I never did send him that poem he inspired
by his inspired reading in Chicago that day
that turned the compass needle sideways and
the streets in the Loop ran in perpendicular directions

no lie
until things settled down out of the long shadows
out back in the sun, back in touch
with the ground and the somewhere blue sky.

I considered sending him the poem
considered writing the back story
even tracked down the San Francisco address
of City Lights Booksellers
but each time I talked myself out of it

intimidated maybe
or not high enough on the crowded list
or waves of life knocking me flat sometimes.
You would think I’d learned after Vonnegut’s death,
and Susannah’s, how the good ideas, the kindnesses
left undone are the things later that haunt you
not every day, but sometimes.

Margaret Dubay Mikus
© 2014

From Thrown Again into the Frazzle Machine

The poem, “Ferlinghetti Speaks” is in My Ferlinghetti Story, part 1

My Lawrence Ferlinghetti Story, part 1

The time: Evening, Autumn, 2002
The Setting: A reading sponsored by The Poetry Center of Chicago in an elegant building, downtown.

The facts of that day are actual, not just metaphorical. Here is my poem inspired by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s reading, which seemed to temporarily disrupt geography among other things, posted now in honor of his passing, at age 101, last week.

Let me tell you a story…

10/18/02

Ferlinghetti Speaks

Traffic is thick, but smooth.
Rain, not sleet, falls from mid-October sky,
trees reluctantly flame.
All directions lead to Rome.
Building disguised with scaffolding,
I walk past unnoticing and have to backtrack.
Remaining front row seats reserved
for important people, few do not come.
A woman, whose daughter is in a wheelchair,
removes her raincoat and umbrella from a prime chair,
offering it to me. I accept gladly.

Welcome. Introductions set the scene.
Gilded room filled and beyond.
Audience willing to be amused and amazed
with sharp use of language.
Ferlinghetti, blindfolded, steps groping onto the stage,
reading his first poem as if blind, but “cheats,”
turning pages as he reads. Or does not cheat,
reading from memory, turning pages for effect.
The crowd laughs, delighted at the ruse.

He continues, eyes uncovered now, twinkling,
having a good time—
born in 1919, still in mental prime.
About Willie Mays and Tito Fuentes,
about a dog who wants communion,
about peace and Prague, and painting with light.
Rapt faces of the audience upturned:
an unlined earnest Greek god face,
another face framed by fuchsia hair,
the faces of matrons, students,
artists, poets, professors, insiders, outsiders.
Now and then a camera flashes as he speaks,
hands clap after most every poem.
In expressive sing/song he reads eighty minutes,
stopping briefly for small sips of water from a sport bottle.

The poet dons aviator goggles and leather cap,
ending with “A History of Airplanes”
from Wright brothers and Lindy to 9/11.
He stops with a smile—pleased.
Admirers line up to get a piece of him to take home.
I consider the long line and turn to go. Outside on the street,
a dollar in a cup for an invisible newspaper.
Leaving in rain to meet husband waiting at train.
Parking garage machine will not take my card—
three times it denies me before letting me leave.
When I emerge, driving north,
the streets of Chicago no longer run in their previous directions.
Confused, I drive south on an east/west street
and keep circling to find my way until
I decide to go with what I know.

Margaret Dubay Mikus
© 2002

From my poetic journal.

Tomorrow part 2, what happened next (well, more than a decade later).
My Ferlinghetti Story, part 2

Later Looking Back

3/22/20

Later Looking Back

Good will come of this
you will see, not now but later
looking back after this crisis is over

While the old life is crumbling away
it feels like loss, and the unknown overwhelms
the usual complacency. But

at some point farther than this minute
the future is playing out in all its
various possible strands to weave

And as we choose, we create
we become aware, more or less
of the ongoing co-creative process

Some will settle in, take the pill back
to previous unconscious oblivion
but some will stay completely open

And that may be enough

From my poetic journal.

In This Time of Corona

5/31/20

In This Time of Corona

This virus doesn’t have a brain
it does not choose to do anything
cannot decide to attack human beings
It is small, minimal even
its simple components do not determine
its place in the scope of things

Is it even living?
there is debate about that
It doesn’t have a Soul as we would define it
but does have a tiny spark, an energy potential
Whether it comes or goes
survives or thrives depends
on factors outside its control

subject to the whims and whispers
actions and reactions of billions of humans
It will die down, mutate
go and come again
a means to an end
An opportunity for us
to learn more about

what it means to be human.

From my poetic journal. From this tiny virus what have we learned, if anything, about what it means to be human? About our inter-connection with each other? What about our relationship to nature? Thank you for traveling with me on this journey!

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