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  1. TopTop #1
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Poem of the day from Larry Robinson

    Dear friends,
    I have been out of the country and (blessedly) incommunicado for the past three weeks. I appreciate the messages of concern and apologize for not letting you know why I haven't posted the daily poems. I am back - a bit heavier in body (from cucina Italiana) but lighter in spirit. Here is today's poem. Many blessings to all of you.
    Larry

    Eagle Poem

    To pray you open your whole self
    To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
    To one whole voice that is you.
    And know there is more
    That you can't see, can't hear
    Can't know except in moments
    Steadily growing, and in languages
    That aren't always sound but other
    Circles of motion.
    Like eagle that Sunday morning
    Over Salt River. Circles in blue sky
    In wind, swept our hearts clean
    With sacred wings.
    We see you, see ourselves and know
    That we must take the utmost care
    And kindness in all things.
    Breathe in, knowing we are made of
    All this, and breathe, knowing
    We are truly blessed because we
    Were born, and die soon, within a
    True circle of motion,
    Like eagle rounding out the morning
    Inside us.
    We pray that it will be done
    In beauty.
    In beauty.

    - Joy Harjo
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  2. TopTop #2
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem of the day from Larry Robinson

    Forgiveness

    The one who forgives restores,
    even though it seems a small segment,
    the wholeness of being.

    Everyone's history
    is, without doubt, part of the world's history,
    is, in fact, the world's history.

    In other words,
    whatever a man or a woman does,
    even in secret, touches,
    no, even more, shapes all humanity.

    - Jaime Sabines
    (translated by Rebeca del Rio)

    El perdón

    El que perdona restaura
    aunque solo parezca serlo en pequeña escala,
    la integridad de ser...

    La historia de cada persona
    sin duda parte de la historia mundial,
    es historia mundial.

    En otras palabras,
    cualquier cosa que un hombre o una mujer hace,
    aunque fuera en secreto, toca,
    más aún, modela a la humanidad completa.


    - Jaime Sabines
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  3. TopTop #3
    Melodymama
    Guest

    Morning Ritual

    Morning Ritual

    I have an addiction.
    It has continued from childhood.
    Every morning I am compelled to
    Step outside into the yard
    To dig in the dirt with no gloves;
    No protection to interfere with
    Feeling the Earth, vibrating with new life
    Bringing forth something exquisite.
    And when I am very still
    And breathing slowly and deeply,
    I smell the scent of dirt and green.
    The Earth whispers to me,
    “You too are vibrating with life;
    Fully ready to bring forth
    Something exquisite.”

    Laura LaVelle 08
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  4. TopTop #4
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem of the day from Larry Robinson

    Today

    The ordinary miracles begin. Somewhere
    a signal arrives: “Now,” and the rays
    come down. A tomorrow has come. Open
    your hands, lift them: morning rings
    all the doorbells; porches are cells for prayer.
    Religion has touched your throat. Not the same now,
    you could close your eyes and go on full of light.

    And it is already begun, the chord
    that will shiver glass, the song full of time
    bending above us. Outside, a sign:
    a bird intervenes; the wings tell the air,
    “Be warm.” No one is out there, but a giant
    has passed through town, widening streets, touching
    the ground, shouldering away the stars.

    - William Stafford
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  5. TopTop #5
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem of the day from Larry Robinson

    A Map to the Next World

    for Desiray Kierra Chee

    In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for

    those who would climb through the hole in the sky.


    My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged

    from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

    For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.


    The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It

    must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.


    In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it

    was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.


    Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the

    altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.


    Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our

    children while we sleep.


    Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born

    there of nuclear anger.


    Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to

    disappear.


    We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to

    them by their personal names.


    Once we knew everything in this lush promise.



    What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the
    map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav-

    ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.


    An imperfect map will have to do, little one.


    The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s

    small death as he longs to know himself in another.


    There is no exit.


    The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a

    spiral on the road of knowledge.


    You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking

    from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh

    deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.


    They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.


    And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world

    there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.


    You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song

    she is singing.


    Fresh courage glimmers from planets.


    And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you

    will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.


    When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they

    entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.


    You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.


    A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the

    destruction.


    Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our

    tribal grounds.


    We were never perfect.


    Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was

    once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.


    We might make them again, she said.


    Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.


    You must make your own map.

    - Joy Harjo
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  6. TopTop #6
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem of the day from Larry Robinson

    DO NOT BE ASHAMED

    You will be walking some night
    in the comfortable dark of your yard
    and suddenly a great light will shine
    round about you, and behind you
    will be a wall you never saw before.
    It will be clear to you suddenly
    that you were about to escape,
    and that you are guilty: you misread
    the complex instructions, you are not
    a member, you lost your card
    or never had one. And you will know
    that they have been there all along,
    their eyes on your letters and books,
    their hands in your pockets,
    their ears wired to your bed.
    Though you have done nothing shameful,
    they will want you to be ashamed.
    They will want you to kneel and weep
    and say you should have been like them.
    And once you say you are ashamed,
    reading the page they hold out to you,
    then such light as you have made
    in your history will leave you.
    They will no longer need to pursue you.
    You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.
    They will not forgive you.
    There is no power against them.
    It is only candor that is aloof from them,
    only an inward clarity, unashamed,
    that they cannot reach. Be ready.
    When their light has picked you out
    and their questions are asked, say to them:
    "I am not ashamed." A sure horizon
    will come around you. The heron will begin
    his evening flight from the hilltop.

    - Wendell Berry
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  7. TopTop #7
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem of the day from Larry Robinson

    Can You Imagine?

    For example, what the trees do
    not only in lightning storms
    or the watery dark of a summer night
    or under the white nets of winter
    but now, and now, and now--whenever
    we're not looking. Surely you can't imagine
    they just stand there looking the way they look
    when we're looking; surely you can't imagine
    they don't dance, from the root up, wishing
    to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
    a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
    more shade--surely you can't imagine they just
    stand there loving every
    minute of it, the birds or the emptyness, the dark rings
    of the years slowly and without a sound
    thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
    and then only in its own mood, comes
    to visit, surely you can't imagine
    patience, and happiness, like that.

    - Mary Oliver
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  8. TopTop #8
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem of the day from Larry Robinson

    The Want of Peace

    All goes back to the earth,
    and so I do not desire
    pride of excess or power,
    but the contentments made
    by men who have had little:
    the fisherman’s silence
    receiving the river’s grace,
    the gardener’s musing on rows.

    I lack the peace of simple things.
    I am never wholly in place.
    I find no peace or grace.
    We sell the world to buy fire,
    our way lighted by burning men,
    and that has bent my mind
    and made me think of darkness
    and wish for the dumb life of roots.

    - Wendell Berry
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  9. TopTop #9
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem of the day from Larry Robinson

    What Is Poetry

    The medieval town, with frieze
    Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow

    That came when we wanted it to snow?
    Beautiful images? Trying to avoid

    Ideas, as in this poem? But we
    Go back to them as to a wife, leaving

    The mistress we desire? Now they
    Will have to believe it

    As we believed it. In school
    All the thought got combed out:

    What was left was like a field.
    Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.

    Now open them on a thin vertical path.
    It might give us--what?--some flowers soon?

    - John Ashbery
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  10. TopTop #10
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem of the day from Larry Robinson

    Vocation

    This dream the world is having about itself
    includes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,
    a groove in the grass my father showed us all
    one day while meadowlarks were trying to tell
    something better about to happen.

    I dreamed the trace to the mountains, over the hills,
    and there a girl who belonged wherever she was.
    But then my mother called us back to the car:
    she was afraid, she always blamed the place,
    the time anything my father planned.

    Now both my parents, the long line through the plain,
    the meadowlarks, the sky, the world's whole dream
    remain, and I hear him say while I stand between the two,
    helpless, both of them part of me:
    "Your job is to find what the world is trying to be."

    - William Stafford
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  11. TopTop #11
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem of the day from Larry Robinson

    The Excesses of God
    Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
    Our God? For to be equal a need
    Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
    Rainbows over the rain
    And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
    On the domes of deep sea-shells,
    And make the necessary embrace of breeding
    Beautiful also as fire,
    Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
    Nor the birds without music:
    There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
    The extravagant kindness, the fountain
    Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
    If power and desire were perch-mates.
    - Robinson Jeffers
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  12. TopTop #12
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem of the day from Larry Robinson

    Still I Rise

    You may write me down in history
    With your bitter, twisted lies,
    You may trod me in the very dirt
    But still, like dust, I'll rise.
    Does my sassiness upset you?
    Why are you beset with gloom?
    'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
    Pumping in my living room.
    Just like moons and like suns,
    With the certainty of tides,
    Just like hopes springing high,
    Still I'll rise.
    Did you want to see me broken?
    Bowed head and lowered eyes?
    Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
    Weakened by my soulful cries.
    Does my haughtiness offend you?
    Don't you take it awful hard
    'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
    Diggin' in my own back yard.
    You may shoot me with your words,
    You may cut me with your eyes,
    You may kill me with your hatefulness,
    But still, like air, I'll rise.
    Does my sexiness upset you?
    Does it come as a surprise
    That I dance like I've got diamonds
    At the meeting of my thighs?
    Out of the huts of history's shame
    I rise
    Up from a past that's rooted in pain
    I rise
    I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
    Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
    Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
    I rise
    Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
    I rise
    Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
    I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
    I rise
    I rise
    I rise.

    - Maya Angelou
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  13. TopTop #13
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem of the day from Larry Robinson

    Sometimes A Man Stands Up During Supper

    Sometimes a man stands up during supper
    and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
    because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

    And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

    And another man, who remains inside his own house,
    dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
    so that his children have to go far out into the world
    toward that same church, which he forgot.

    - Ranier Maria Rilke
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  14. TopTop #14
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem of the day from Larry Robinson

    I will be on retreat until May 28, so this will the last poem until then. Blessings,
    Larry

    Wait

    Wait, for now.
    Distrust everything if you have to.
    But trust the hours, Haven't they
    carried you everywhere, up to now?
    Personal events will become interesting again.
    Hair will become interesting.
    Pain will become interesting.
    Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
    Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
    their memories are what give them
    the need for other hands. And the desolation
    of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
    carved out of such tiny beings as we are
    asks to be filled; the need
    for the new love is faithfulness to the end.

    Wait.
    Don't go too early.
    You're tired. But everyone's tired.
    But no one is tired enough.
    Only wait a little and listen:
    music of hair,
    music of pain,
    music of looms weaving all our loves again.
    Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
    most of all to hear
    the flute of your whole existence,
    rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

    - Galway Kinnell
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