Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Ignorant before the heavens of my life


Ignorant before the heavens of my life,
I stand and gaze in wonder. Oh the vastness
of the stars. Their rising and descent. How still.
As if I didn't exist. Do I have any
share in this? Have I somehow dispensed with
their pure effect? Does my blood's ebb and flow
change with their changes? Let me put aside
every desire, every relationship
except this one, so that my heart grows used to
its farthest spaces. Better that it live
fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than
as if protected, soothed by what is near.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

(Translated by Stephen Mitchell )

My Lament

This poem cannot waste a single word.

I am watching the world,
my community
go slowly insane.
Due to my close proximity,
the
unraveling of my existence
loses its tentative hold.
Like an ache that walks alone,
my heart is homeless.

I am trying not to be afraid.

I need no reminders,
my people are dying.
Every time we reinvent ourselves,
someone else claims it.
We use vanishing cream
of
avoidance and denial
invisible to others
and
lost to ourselves.

I am trying no to be afraid.

Globalization is the new word
for
slavery, civilized bondage.
For the powers that be
their comfort
has been
bought with our suffering,
it ties us to the familiar places,
yoking us with the pleasures
or our own indifference,
a complacency
of self-appointed oppressors.

I am trying not to be afraid.

I suppose
what I really,
truly
want to do
is
love
tear by tear.

- Shahara Godfrey

BY THE SEA IN LATE SPRING


The smells of the sea
and the yellow lupine mingle
tart and sweet
in the cool morning air.

The sounds of the restless waves
and the cliff swallows and the gulls
the finches and the pelicans
blend into a morning song.

The sights of the cliffs—
rocks upturned and tossed about
a few thousand—maybe million?—
years ago
by an earthquake or two or three
worn and worn and worn away
for all these years
by the buffeting sea
and still proudly jagged and steep.

The seals and the sea palm floating
on the swells
and high on one black rock
a bright orange star fish lying
exposed and vulnerable—
like me.

- Lilith Rogers

Earth

Let the day grow on you upward
through your feet,
the vegetal knuckles,

to your knees of stone,
until by evening you are a black tree;
feel, with evening,

the swifts thicken your hair,
the new moon rising out of your forehead,
and the moonlit veins of silver

running from your armpits
like rivulets under white leaves.
Sleep, as ants

cross over your eyelids.
You have never possessed anything
as deeply as this.

This is all you have owned
from the first outcry
through forever;

you can never be dispossessed.

- Derek Walcott

Magic

We were talking about magic
as we drove along a crowded
Sunday highway

when the whirl of wings
made me turn
and a flock of geese
flew over our car
so low I could see
their feet tucked under them.

For a moment the rustle
of their presence over our heads
obscured everything

and as they disappeared
you said,
"I see what you mean."

- Jenifer Nostrand

I’m Listening

I'm listening. But I don't know
If what I hear is silence or God.
I'm listening. But I can't tell
If I hear the plane of emptiness echoing
Or a keen consciousness
That at the bounds of the universe
Deciphers and watches me.
I only know I walk like someone
Beheld, Beloved and Known.
And because of this
I put into my every movement
Solemnity and Risk.

- Sophia DeMello-Breyner

Ask Me
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

- William Stafford

Awake At Night

Late in the night I pay
the unrest I owe
to the life that has never lived
and cannot live now.
What the world could be
is my good dream
and my agony when, dreaming it
I lie awake and turn
and look into the dark.
I think of a luxury
in the sturdiness and grace
of necessary things, not
in frivolity. That would heal
the earth, and heal men.
But the end, too, is part
of the pattern, the last
labor of the heart:
to learn to lie still,
one with the earth
again, and let the world go.

- Wendell Berry

Poetry

Its door opens near. It's a shrine
by the road, it's a flower in the parking lot
of The Pentagon, it says, "Look around,
listen. Feel the air." It interrupts
international telephone lines with a tune.
When traffic lines jam, it gets out
and dances on the bridge. If great people
get distracted by fame they forget
this essential kind of breathing
and they die inside their gold shell.
When caravans cross deserts
It is the secret treasure hidden under the jewels.

Sometimes commanders take us over, and they
try to impose their whole universe,
how to succeed by daily calculation:
I can't eat that bread.

- William Stafford

He Said/ She Said

He said,
The road ahead is dark. Will you walk with me?
She said,
Whither thou goest, my love.

He said,
May the ancestral waters run down to cleanse our spirits.
She said,
The ancestral waters flow in my veins.

He said,
A tree stands its ground by sinking roots.
She said,
The wheel turns in time.

He said,
Protect what you love.
She said,
Love itself is the protection of life.

He said,
I need you to love.. and more.
She said,
Come back to bed, my love.

- Larry Robinson

Whales Weep Not!
They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.

All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of
the sea!

And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep bed of the sea,
as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale-blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and
comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale's
fathomless body.

And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking the
wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and
forth,
keep passing, archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the
sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.

And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-
tender young
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of
the beginning and the end.

And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves in a ring
when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood
and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat
encircling their huddled monsters of love.
And all this happens in the sea, in the salt
where God is also love, but without words:
and Aphrodite is the wife of whales
most happy, happy she!

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.
- D.H. Lawrence

There Are Those Who Love To Get Dirty

There are those who love to get dirty
and fix things.
They drink coffee at dawn,
beer after work,

And those who stay clean,
just appreciate things,
At breakfast they have milk
and juice at night.

There are those who do both,
they drink tea.

- Gary Snyder

I wonder if whales write poetry about us?

I wonder if they admire and even envy all of the things that we get to do?

Thanks, Larry. Wow!

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Whales Weep Not!
They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent...
- D.H. Lawrence

---

The Breathing Place

It must be built
by following your instinct,
as a seal finds its breathing hole in ice:
by letting yourself go into
moments that pull
like a magnet to North.
You listen quietly
until you know
the moment,
its song,
why it pulls a place in you
and like the seal
you may find an Eskimo spear
poised to strike
as you listen.

Then,
you visit your breathing place
where some moments
come, are lived quickly, and go;
others visit for years
and are still not over.

You must visit daily
so the path remains visible
as the doubts of others
try to entice you
to be their breathing place
try to make you forget
the place
you have struggled to find.

- Robert Smyth

End Of The World

When I was young in school in Switzerland, about the time of the Boer War,
We used to take it for known that the human race
Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died. I wrote a schoolboy poem
About the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shore
Of the last sea, alone, alone, alone, remembering all
His racial past. But now I don't think so. They'll die faceless in flocks,
And the earth flourish long after mankind is out.

- Robinson Jeffers

Where the Sidewalk Ends

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

- Shel Silverstein

Youth

Strange bird,

His song remains secret.

He worked too hard to read books.

He never heard how Sherwood Anderson

Got out of it, and fled to Chicago, furious to free himself

From his hatred of factories.

My father toiled fifty years

At Hazel-Atlas Glass,

Caught among girders that smash the kneecaps

Of dumb honyaks.

Did he shudder with hatred in the cold shadow of grease?

Maybe. But my brother and I do know

He came home as quiet as the evening.


He will be getting dark, soon,

And loom through new snow.

I know his ghost will drift home

To the Ohio River, and sit down, alone,

Whittling a root.

He will say nothing.

The waters flow past, older, younger

Than he is, or I am.

- James Wright

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

- Robert Hayden

My Father
The memory of my father is wrapped up in
white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day at work.

Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits
out of his hat, he drew love from his small body,

and the rivers of his hands
overflowed with good deeds.
- Yehuda Amichai

Loud Music

My stepdaughter and I circle round and round.
You see, I like the music loud, the speakers
throbbing, jam-packing the room with sound whether
Bach or rock and roll, the volume cranked up so
each bass notes is like a hand smacking the gut.
But my stepdaughter disagrees. She is four
and likes the music decorous, pitched below
her own voice-that tenuous projection of self.
With music blasting, she feels she disappears,
is lost within the blare, which in fact I like.
But at four what she wants is self-location
and uses her voice as a porpoise uses
its sonar: to find herself in all this space.
If she had a sort of box with a peephole
and looked inside, what she'd like to see would be
herself standing there in her red pants, jacket,
yellow plastic lunch box: a proper subject
for serious study. But me, if I raised
the same box to my eye, I would wish to find
the ocean on one of those days when wind
and thick cloud make the water gray and restless
as if some creature brooded underneath,
a rocky coast with a road along the shore
where someone like me was walking and has gone.
Loud music does this, it wipes out the ego,
leaving turbulent water and winding road,
a landscape stripped of people and language-
how clear the air becomes, how sharp the colors.

- Stephen Dobyns

A Praise

His memories lived in the place
like fingers locked in the rock ledges
like roots. When he died
and his influence entered the air
I said, Let my mind be the earth
of his thought, let his kindness
go ahead of me. Though I do not escape
the history barbed in my flesh,
certain wise movements of his hands,
the turns of his speech
keep with me. His hope of peace
keeps with me in harsh days,
the shell of his breath dimming away
three summers in the earth.

- Wendell Berry

The Bagel
I stopped to pick up the bagel
rolling away in the wind,
annoyed with myself
for having dropped it
as if it were a portent.
Faster and faster it rolled,
with me running after it
bent low, gritting my teeth,
and I found myself doubled over
and rolling down the street
head over heels, one complete somersault
after another like a bagel
and strangely happy with myself.

- David Ignatow

To The Great Circle Of Nothing

When the I AM THAT I AM made nothing
and rested, which rest it certainly deserved,
night now accompanied day, and man
had his friend in the absence of the woman.

Let there be shadow! Human thinking broke out.
And the universal egg rose, empty,
pale, chill and not yet heavy with matter,
full of unweighable mist, in his hand.

Take the numerical zero, the sphere with nothing in it:
it has to be seen, if you have to see it, standing.
Since the wild animal's back now is your shoulder,

and since the miracle of not-being is finished,
start then, poet, a song at the edge of it all
to death, to silence, and to what does not return.

- Antonio Machado
(translated by Robert Bly)

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm
in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

- James Wright

Encounter

We were riding through the frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive.
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going?
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

- Czeslaw Milosz

Eating Blackberry Jam

When I hear that God is the same as existence,
I fall silent, but I keep turning my eyes
Up to the little creatures of nonexistence.

Some believe that the sea perch became identical
To keep the shark from zeroing in. But staying alive
Doesn't mean they are free from nonexistence.

The cries of the infant barn-swallows rising from
The mud-nests fastened ingeniously to the rafters
Taught me to love the skinny birds of nonexistence.

Taoists with their thin beards fishing all day
With a straight hook tell us they have learned
Not to expect a whole lot from nonexistence.

Blackberries have so many faces that their jam
Is a kind of thickening of nothing; each of us
Loves to eat the thick syrup of nonexistence.

When each stanza closes with the same word,
I am glad. A friend says, "If you're proud of that,
You must be one of the secretaries of nonexistence!"

- Robert Bly

Because of "Iron John," I will give Robert Bly the benefit of the doubt and keep thinking about his poem, with hope of truly understanding. I do understand his glee at the symmetry, so that is something...

Thanks, Larry.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Eating Blackberry Jam

When I hear that God is the same as existence...

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When Someone Deeply Listens



When someone deeply listens to you

it is like holding out a dented cup

you've had since childhood

and watching it fill up with

cold, fresh water.

When it balances on top of the brim,

you are understood.

When it overflows and touches your skin,

you are loved.



When someone deeply listens to you,

the room where you stay

starts a new life

and the place where you wrote

your first poem

begins to glow in your mind's eye.

It is as if gold has been discovered!



When someone deeply listens to you,

your bare feet are on the earth

and a beloved land that seemed distant

is now at home within you.



- John Fox

Sea Washes Sand Scours Sea

(for my daughter's wedding)

No hay camino. El camino se hace al andar.
—Antonio Machado


Walking the shore that day, each reaches down
for stones from time to time, the other talking,
her eye finding stones like purple berries,
his hand holding a cloud-light shell to her.

Seas they cannot yet see are ancient seas;
trees they will later pass are not yet trees.
Shore that he looks back to turns to haze,
and sand that she imagines turns to shore.

He says, "Sea washes sand scours sea."
"And sand drinks sea drowns sand," says she.
Voices of gulls call through them on the wind;
the dog circles out beyond their voices.

"All that proceeds recedes," he says at last.
"That you and I are here," she says, "is all."
The man watches the woman watches the man.
The woman loves the man loves the woman.

The day does not diminish other days;
they gain a newer language from the day.
Though wave by step their footprints wash away,
The day does not diminish other days.

- Tom Vander Ven

The Barber

The barber is someone who creates

by taking away, like a writer
who owns only an eraser.
He is like a construction company

that begins with a large office building
and ends up with a small wooden house.
On the wall is his license,
showing that he’s been to school

and learned of all the varieties
of loss. For this reason
a haircut can make me nervous;
sometimes I close my eyes

and hear only the snip
of the scissors, their two gleaming halves
talking of the balance that is here, the partnership
between this man in a blue smock

and the hairs faithful as rain,
that even before birth and after death
flow tirelessly out of the head
toward the comb and the blade

- Jay Leeming

Ruby’s Gift (As told by Sheila...)


Ruby O’Burke

was about 90.

Small, lively.

White, short, flat-cut

sides and bangs.

Interested, pert.


A flat upstairs, in

Noe Valley, San Francisco,

with books and shelves,

not overly neat,

much like a student’s,

and a pottery studio below.


She said, “Oh! Let me

show you

a gift I just got

when I was in Japan.”

Her frail hands, trembling

in anticipation, opened

an elegant, plain wooden

box to reveal a

small tea cup.


“Look,” she said, “how beautifully the

glaze crawled.” Indeed it had, inside and out,

lumpy, mottled, and webbed.

Clearly flawed, I knew,

being a potter as well.

Yet she beheld her gift

with such childlike

amazement. In Japan, this was

a treasure.


Years later, I had made a large mug

for my now departed, somewhat

flawed father. Its glaze had crawled

completely. Yet I have not tossed it.


For each time I hold my father’s mug,

I can see in both

a treasure.



- Scott O'Brien

Fire On The Hills

The deer were bounding like blown leaves
Under the smoke in front of the roaring wave of the brushfire;
I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
Down the black slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,
Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders.
He had come from far off for good hunting
With fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was merciless
Blue and the hills merciless black,
The somber-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than mercy.

- Robinson Jeffers

Friday morning
sky a hot pale grey
I’m sitting in the back of a green Subaru Forester
in a parking lot
with a dying dog
Mucha

It’s an ordinary day
in moments the vet will come out with needles
the hole has been dug

months ago I painted a stone
at a garden party
a celebrate life party at a poet’s home
just before she went to cancer
Diane

please understand
I do not feel heavy or morose
in fact I felt the same
driving with a scarcely breathing dog
as I did with a scarcely not breathing dog
these things must be done
part of the big plan

but the smoking sky
the infernos to the north, the east and the south of us
are they necessary
are they part of the plan as well
will I feel different when the blue returns

the stone now a marker has a beagle face
loyal stoic
stones have long life spans
and this small fact is comforting


- Sharon Bard
6/27/08

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never
even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a
bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

- Billy Collins

Underside

I imagine the underside of the English language,
a garbaged, mottled dream-tangle
like the reverse side of a tapestry
where each carefully tied thread
runs wild in a course of its own,
where every color is let loose
in a scribbled, shaggy riot of un-being--
the dictionary lists clear words, sounds marked
and numbered, described and dated, but one summer
I stood in the winter-cold of a cave’s dark
and shone my flashlight up
to see a straggle of root dangling
from the roof, knowing then
how the whole forest above me
was anchored in darkness, its grammar rooted
in what falls away, my understanding
leaping into every word to find it bottomless.

- Jay Leeming

A Morning Offering

I bless the night that nourished my heart
To set the ghosts of longing free
Into the flow and figure of dream
That went to harvest from the dark
Bread for the hunger no one sees.

All that is eternal in me
Welcome the wonder of this day,
The field of brightness it creates
Offering time for each thing
To arise and illuminate.

I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Wave of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.

- John O'Donohue

The Summer Day


Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,’how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

- Mary Oliver

Retirement

After that knifeblade, we breathed
a film on it like a mirror and looked up -
our children were gone, and in their place
a vacant road continued into a storm.
That's when I think we began to know
how the rest would be, the soft
careful sound of little worlds falling.

Those flakes, every one, hit
the windshield with a glad sacrifice
and then never existed. You could
look back and imagine a lifetime
of snowflake incidents again, but
this time - you could hope - with religion,
or some kind of thicker coat on.

For certain young readers:
You don't have to understand this.
Pretend that you don't understand.
Go back to your inhale-exhale
existence. Don't look up now.
There will be time.

- William Stafford

On a Cape May Warbler Who
Flew Against My Window


She's stopped in her southern tracks
Brought haply to this hard knock
When she shoots from the tall spruce
And snaps her neck on the glass.

From the fall grass I gather her
And give her to my silent children
Who give her a decent burial
Under the dogwood in the garden.

They lay their gifs in the grave:
Matches, a clothes-peg, a coin;
Fire paper for her, sprinkle her
With water, fold earth over her.

She is out of her element forever
Who was air's high-spirited daughter;
What guardian wings can I conjure
Over my own young, their migrations?

The children retreat indoors.
Shadows flicker in the tall spruce.
Small birds flicker like shadows —
Ghosts come nest in my branches.

- Eamon Grennan

Sense of Something Coming


I am like a flag in the center of open space.
I sense ahead the wind which is coming, and must live
it through.
while the things of the world still do not move:
the doors still close softly, and the chimneys are full
of silence,
the windows do not rattle yet, and the dust still lies down.

I already know the storm, and I am troubled as the sea.
I leap out, and fall back,
and throw myself out, and am absolutely alone
in the great storm.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translated by Robert Bly )

The Journey
Anghiari is medieval, a sleeve sloping down
A steep hill, suddenly sweeping out
To the edge of a cliff, and dwindling.
But far up the mountain, behind the town,
We too were swept out, out by the wind,
Alone with the Tuscan grass.

Wind had been blowing across the hills
For days, and everything now was graying gold
With dust, everything we saw, even
Some small children scampering along a road,
Twittering Italian to a small caged bird.

We sat beside them to rest in some brushwood,
And I leaned down to rinse the dust from my face.

I found the spider web there, whose hinges
Reeled heavily and crazily with the dust,
Whole mounds and cemeteries of it, sagging
And scattering shadows among shells and wings.
And then she stepped into the center of air
Slender and fastidious, the golden hair
Of daylight along her shoulders, she poised there,
While ruins crumbled on every side of her.
Free of the dust, as though a moment before
She had stepped inside the earth, to bathe herself.

I gazed, close to her, till at last she stepped
Away in her own good time.

Many men
Have searched all over Tuscany and never found
What I found there, the heart of the light
Itself shelled and leaved, balancing
On filaments themselves falling. The secret
Of this journey is to let the wind
Blow its dust all over your body,
To let it go on blowing, to step lightly, lightly
All the way through your ruins, and not to lose
Any sleep over the dead, who surely
Will bury their own, don't worry.

- James Wright

TOBAR PHADRAIC

Turn sideways into the light as they say
the old ones did and disappear into the originality
of it all. Be impatient with explanations
and discipline the mind not to begin
questions it cannot answer. Walk the green road
above the bay and the low glinting fields
toward the evening sun. Let that Atlantic
gleam be ahead of you and the gray light
of the bay below you,
until you catch, down on your left,
the break in the wall,
for just above in the shadow
you’ll find it hidden, a curved arm
of rock holding the water close to the mountain,
a just-lit surface smoothing a scattering of coins,
and in the niche above, notes to the dead
and supplications for those who still live.
Now you are alone with the transfiguration
and ask no healing for your own
but look down as if looking through time,
as if through a rent veil from the other
side of the question you’ve refused to ask,

and remember how as a child
your arms could rise and your palms
turn out to bless the world.

- David Whyte

Life At War

The disasters numb within us
caught in the chest, rolling
in the brain like pebbles. The feeling
resembles lumps of raw dough

weighing down a child’s stomach on baking day.
Or Rilke said it, ‘My heart. . .
Could I say of it, it overflows
with bitterness . . . but no, as though

its contents were simply balled into
formless lumps, thus
do I carry it about.’
The same war

continues.
We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives,
our lungs are pocked with it,
the mucous membrane of our dreams
coated with it, the imagination
filmed over with the gray filth of it:

the knowledge that humankind,

delicate Man, whose flesh
responds to a caress, whose eyes
are flowers that perceive the stars,

whose music excels the music of birds,
whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs,
whose understanding manifests designs
fairer than the spider’s most intricate web,

still turns without surprise, with mere regret
to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk
runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies,
transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments,
implosion of skinned penises into carcass-gulleys.

We are the humans, men who can make;
whose language imagines mercy,
lovingkindness we have believed one another
mirrored forms of a God we felt as good—

who do these acts, who convince ourselves
it is necessary; these acts are done
to our own flesh; burned human flesh
is smelling in Vietnam as I write.

Yes, this is the knowledge that jostles for space
in our bodies along with all we
go on knowing of joy, of love;

our nerve filaments twitch with its presence
day and night,
nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying,
nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness,
the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

- Denise Levertov

Faith

The word faith means that when someone sees

A dew-drop or a floating leaf, and knows
That they are, because they have to be.
And even if you dreamed, or closed your eyes
And wished, the world would still be what it was,
And the leaf would still be carried down the river.

It means that when someone’s foot is hurt
By sharp rock, he also knows that rocks
Are here so they can hurt our feet.
Look, see the long shadow cast by the tree;
And flowers and people
throw shadows on the earth:
What has no shadow has no strength to live.

- Czeslaw Milosz
(trans. Robert Hass)

My Child Wafts Peace

My child wafts peace.
When I lean over him,
It is not just the smell of soap.

All the people were children wafting peace.
(And in the whole land, not even one
Millstone remained that still turned).

Oh, the land torn like clothes
That can't be mended.
Hard, lonely fathers even in the cave of the Makhpela*
Childless silence.

My child wafts peace.
His mother's womb promised him
What God cannot
Promise us.

- Yehuda Amichai




* The traditional burial place in Hebron of Abraham
and the other Patriarchs and Matriarchs of Israel.

Growing Old

What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
Yes, but not for this alone.

Is it to feel our strength—
Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay?
Is it to feel each limb
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Each nerve more weakly strung?

Yes, this, and more! but not,
Ah, 'tis not what in youth we dreamed 'twould be!
'Tis not to have our life
Mellowed and softened as with sunset-glow,
A golden day's decline!

'Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirred;
And weep, and feel the fulness of the past,
The years that are no more!

It is to spend long days
And not once feel that we were ever young.
It is to add, immured
In the hot prison of the present, month
To month with weary pain.

It is to suffer this,
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel:
Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But no emotion—none.

It is—last stage of all—
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.

- Matthew Arnold

In Silence

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
to speak your

name.
Listen
to the living walls.

Who are you?
Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet). Do not
think of what you are
still less of
what you may one day be.

Rather
be what you are (but who?)
be the unthinkable one
you do not know.

O be still, while
you are still alive,
and all things live around you

speaking (I do not hear)
to your own being,
speaking by the unknown
that is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
to be my own silence:
and this is difficult. The whole
world is secretly on fire. The stones
burn, even the stones they burn me.
How can a man be still or
listen to all things burning?
How can he dare to sit with them
when all their silence is on fire?”

- Thomas Merton

Patience

Patience is
wider than one
once envisioned,
with ribbons
of rivers
and distant
ranges and
tasks undertaken
and finished
with modest
relish by
natives in their
native dress.
Who would
have guessed
it possible
that waiting
is sustainable—
a place with
its own harvests.
Or that in
time's fullness
the diamonds
of patience
couldn't be
distinguished
from the genuine
in brilliance
or hardness.

- Kay Ryan


From Say Uncle by Kay Ryan, published by Grove Press. Copyright © 2000 by Kay Ryan.

NYTimes.com

Kay Ryan, Outsider With Sly Style, Named Poet Laureate
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: July 17, 2008

When Kay Ryan was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, the poetry club rejected her application; she was perhaps too much of a loner, she recalls. Now Ms. Ryan is being inducted into one of the most elite poetry clubs around. She is to be named the country’s poet laureate on Thursday.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Kay Ryan, 62, will become the country’s 16th poet laureate.
Web Extra: Selected Poems by Kay Ryan (July 17, 2008)

Known for her sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes, Ms. Ryan has won a carriage full of poetry prizes for her funny and philosophical work, including awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2004, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, worth $100,000.

Still, she has remained something of an outsider.

“I so didn’t want to be a poet,” Ms. Ryan, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Fairfax, Calif. “I came from sort of a self-contained people who didn’t believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart was rather repugnant to me.”

But in the end “I couldn’t resist,” she said. “It was in a strange way taking over my mind. My mind was on its own finding things and rhyming things. I was getting diseased.”

Dana Gioia, a poet and the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, was an early supporter of Ms. Ryan’s work, describing her as the “thoughtful, bemused, affectionate, deeply skeptical outsider.”

“She would certainly be part of the world if she could manage it,” he said. “She has certain reservations. That is what makes her like Dickinson in some ways.”

Poets, editors, critics and academics around the country offered advice to James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, about whom to choose to succeed Charles Simic as the nation’s 16th poet laureate, who was appointed 2007. Ms. Ryan’s work has “this quality of simplicity; it’s highly accessible poetry,” Dr. Billington said. “She takes you through little images to see a very ordinary thing or ordinary sentiment in a more subtle and deeper way.”

Ms. Ryan likes to take familiar images and clichés and reincarnate them in a wholly original form. “The Other Shoe” reads:

Oh if it were
only the other
shoe hanging
in space before
joining its mate.

Her poems are spare. “An almost empty suitcase, that’s what I want my poems to be, few things,” Ms. Ryan said. “The reader starts taking them out, but they keep multiplying.”

Ms. Ryan grew up in small towns throughout the San Joaquin Valley and Mojave Desert. Her mother taught elementary school. A nervous person, her mother craved quiet, so there was virtually no television or radio playing in the home, Ms. Ryan said. In “Shark’s Teeth” she writes, “Everything contains some silence.” The poem continues:

An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark.

Her father was a dreamer. She once said he could “fail at anything,” having tried selling Christmas trees, drilling oil wells and working in a chromium mine.

It was after his death, when she was 19, that she started writing poems. But Ms. Ryan said she always had mixed feelings about it. “I wanted to do it, but I didn’t want to expose myself,” she said.

After briefly attending Antelope Valley College, she transferred to U.C.L.A., where she earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English.

She moved to Marin County in 1971 and lives there now, with her partner, Carol Adair.

In 1976 she finally realized that she could not escape the poet inside her. She had decided to ride a bicycle from California to Virginia in 80 days. Riding along the Hoosier Pass in the Colorado Rockies, she said, she felt an incredible opening up, “an absence of boundaries, an absence of edges, as if my brain could do anything.”

“Finally I can ask the question: Can I be a writer?” The answer came back as a question, she said. “Do you like it?”

“So it was quite simple for me. I went home and began to work.”

Public recognition came slowly. It took 20 years for her to receive acclaim for her work. “All of us want instant success,” she said. “I’m glad I was on a sort of slow drip.”

Ms. Ryan has carved out a life conducive to poetry writing. She has taught the same remedial English course at the College of Marin in Kentfield, Calif., for more than 30 years. When asked if she thought her new position would make it harder to write, she replied, “No, uh-uh. I think it will make it impossible.”

She has published six books of poetry and her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Review of Books.

One of her first duties as poet laureate is an appearance at the National Book Festival on Sept. 27 on the National Mall in Washington. More formally she will kick off the Library of Congress’s annual literary series on Oct. 16 by reading her own work. The library doesn’t require much of its laureates, although in recent years many have undertaken projects to broaden poetry’s reach to children and adults. Ms. Ryan has no definite plans, but said she might like to “celebrate the Library of Congress,” adding “maybe I’ll issue library cards to everyone.”

For a woman who once shrank from exposing herself, this new position will put her in the public eye more than ever. But at this point Ms. Ryan is philosophical: “I realized that whatever we do or don’t do, we’re utterly exposed.”

Keeping Quiet

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth
let’s not speak in any language.
Let’s stop for a second
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment, without rush, without engines;
we would all be together in a sudden strangeness.
Fishermen in the cold sea would not harm whales,
and the man gathering salt would look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers and sisters in the shade,
doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused with total inactivity:
Life is what it is about.
If we were not so singleminded about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead in winter,
and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet
and I’ll go.

- Pablo Neruda

A Callarse

Ahora contaremos doce
y nos quedamos todos quietos.

Por una vez sobre la tierra
no hablemos en ningún idioma,
pour un segundo detengámonos,
no movamos tanto los brazos.

Sería un minuto gragante,
sin prisa, sin locomotoras,
todos estaríamos juntos
en una inquietud instantánea.

Los pescadores del mar frío
no harían daño a las ballenas
y el trabajador de la sal
miraría sus manos rotas.

Los que preparan guerras verdes,
guerras de gas, guerras de fuego,
victorias sin sibrevivientes,
se pondrían un traje puro
y andarían con sus hermanos
por la sombra, sin hacer nada.

No se confunda lo que quiero
con la inacción definitiva:
la vida es sólo lo que se hace,
no quiero nada con la muerte.

Si no pudimos ser unánimes
moviendo tanto nuestras vidas,
tal vez no hacer nada una vez,
tal vez un gran silencio pueda
interrumpir esta tristeza,
este no entendernos jamás
y amenazarnos con la muerte,
tal vez la tierra nos enseñe
cuando todo parece muerto
y luego todo estaba vivo.

Ahora contaré hasta doce
y tú te callas y me voy.

- Pablo Neruda

Wise Men Keep Talking About


Time is the shop
Where everyone works hard

To build enough love
To break the
Shackle.

Wise men keep talking about
Wanting to meet Her.

Women sometimes pronounce the word God
A little differently:
They can use more feeling and skill
With the heart-lute.

All the world's movements,
Apparent chaos, and suffering I now know happen
In the Splendid Unison:

Our tambourines are striking
The same thigh.

Hafiz stands
At a juncture in this poem.
There are a thousand new wheels I could craft
On a wagon
And place you in -
Lead you to a glimpse of the culture
And seasons in another dimension.

Yet again God
Will have to drop you back at the shop
Where you still have work
With

Love.

- Hafiz

(The Gift -- versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)