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  1. TopTop #2911
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    When Giving is All We Have



    One river gives

    Its journey to the next.



    We give because someone gave to us.

    We give because nobody gave to us.

    We give because giving has changed us.

    We give because giving could have changed us.

    We have been better for it,

    We have been wounded by it—

    Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,

    Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

    Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,

    But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

    Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,

    Mine to yours, yours to mine.

    You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.

    Together we are simple green. You gave me

    What you did not have, and I gave you

    What I had to give—together, we made

    Something greater from the difference.


    - Alberto Ríos
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  2. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  3. TopTop #2912
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    You think the world was shocked when Nixon resigned?

    Wait 'til I whup George Foreman's behind.

    Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

    His hand can't hit what his eyes can't see.

    Now you see me, now you don't.

    George thinks he will, but I know he won't.

    I done wrassled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale.

    Only last week I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick.

    I’m so mean, I make medicine sick.

    - Muhammad Ali
    (1942-2016)
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  4. TopTop #2913
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection


    Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
    Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches.
    Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,
    Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.
    Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
    Of yestertempest's creases; | in pool and rut peel parches
    Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
    Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there
    Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature's bonfire burns on.
    But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
    Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!
    Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
    Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone
    Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark
    Is any of him at all so stark
    But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
    A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection.
    Across my foundering deck shone
    A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash
    Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:
    In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
    I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and
    This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
    Is immortal diamond.


    - Gerard Manley Hopkins
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  6. TopTop #2914
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Halle Berry Caught in Disneyland Without Makeup

    Imagine my excitement
    the fire in my blood
    as my greedy fingers click through to the photo,
    a lead story on this end-of-August Saturday,
    the trees so dry they cannot cry
    for want of tears.
    America,
    we need more news like this!
    Forget the poisoning of bees by the billions
    or their connection to our own mortality.
    Forget the plight of millions
    living on the streets
    sans food, sans work, sans medicine.
    Give us more serial killers, inflated to hero size
    project their likenesses on every billboard
    teach their names as school yard jump rope rhymes.
    Pen graphic novels around them
    etch them on video game platforms around the world.
    Forget the melting ice caps
    rain forest decimation
    the mounting molestations by pedophile priests
    the commerce of women around the globe.
    Serve us more Donald Trump, please
    with extra vitriol spewed from blanched lips
    the small American flag smirking from his lapel.
    And please, keep them coming
    those photos of celebrities who dared to do the unthinkable:
    leave their mansions without the shield of makeup.

    - Sandra Anfang
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  7. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  8. TopTop #2915
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    For Someone Who Did You Wrong

    Though its way is to strike
    In a dumb rhythm,
    Stroke upon stroke,
    As though the heart
    Were an anvil,
    The hurt you sent
    Had a mind of its own.

    Something in you knew
    Exactly how to shape it,
    To hit the target
    Slipping into the heart
    Through some wound-window
    Left open since childhood.

    While it struck outside,
    It burrowed inside,
    Made tunnels through
    Every ground of confidence.
    For days, it would lie still
    Until a thought would start it.

    Meanwhile, you forgot,
    Went on with things
    And never even knew
    How that perfect
    Shape of hurt
    Still continued to work.

    Now a new kindness
    Seems to have entered time
    And I can see how that hurt
    Has schooled my heart
    In a compassion I would
    Otherwise have never learned.

    Somehow now
    I have begun to glimpse
    The unexpected fruit
    Your dark gift had planted
    And I thank you
    For your unknown work.

    - John O’Donohue
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  9. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  10. TopTop #2916
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Denouement


    Sometimes
    led
    into discovery
    scarcely informed
    what perils
    lie ahead
    yet trusting
    the way is right and clear
    rich with adventure
    stops in his tracks:
    Wait. Wait. Is this journey

    Recklessness or Fate?
    Faith or Resignation?
    Wisdom or Folly?

    Still the pilgrim pushes on,
    eyes open to unseen things
    divining the path home
    fears unspoken
    ever forward
    to survive
    tempests and dashed hopes
    everything hinging
    on the very next living moment
    to present
    itself.

    - Larry Kenneth Potts
    Last edited by Barry; 06-09-2016 at 11:44 AM.
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  11. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  12. TopTop #2917
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Rubai One


    Birds mistook Saint Francis for a tree.

    May I be so free
    of nervous haste, ambition, and regret
    so in the extirpation of thought
    innocence and improvisation
    may tell the dawn each day afresh
    that fresh is what it is.

    The nickname of God is Now.

    - Bruce Moody
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  14. TopTop #2918

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    I doubt that birds mistook St. Francis for a tree. I'm sure they knew exactly who he was.

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson: View Post
    Rubai One


    Birds mistook Saint Francis for a tree.

    May I be so free
    of nervous haste, ambition, and regret
    so in the extirpation of thought
    innocence and improvisation
    may tell the dawn each day afresh
    that fresh is what it is.

    The nickname of God is Now.

    - Bruce Moody
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  15. Gratitude expressed by 6 members:

  16. TopTop #2919
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Things to Think

    Think in ways you've never thought before
    If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
    Larger than anything you've ever heard,
    Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

    Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
    maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
    Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
    A child of your own whom you've never seen.

    When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
    To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
    Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
    Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

    - Robert Bly
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  17. TopTop #2920
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    School Prayer

    In the name of the daybreak
    and the eyelids of morning
    and the wayfaring moon
    and the night when it departs,

    I swear I will not dishonor
    my soul with hatred,
    but offer myself humbly
    as a guardian of nature,
    as a healer of misery,
    as a messenger of wonder,
    as an architect of peace.

    In the name of the sun and its mirrors
    and the day that embraces it
    and the cloud veils drawn over it
    and the uttermost night
    and the male and the female
    and the plants bursting with seed
    and the crowning seasons
    of the firefly and the apple,

    I will honor all life
    - wherever and in whatever form
    it may dwell - on Earth my home,
    and in the mansions of the stars.

    - Diane Ackerman
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  18. Gratitude expressed by 5 members:

  19. TopTop #2921

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    this is beautiful, and so universal!
    When I was a kid in the '50s in a suburb of St. Louis (should write something about this),
    old Miss Rossi, the kind Principal of Flynn Park School, surrounded by an almost forest-like park, took to the PA system every morning to recite for us the Flynn Park Prayer and the Flynn Park Creed. This was all before the laws preventing sectarian public school prayer, and indeed I still remember The Flynn Park Prayer, part of it at least, with great love, as it too was just totally universal! It began, "KInd, heavenly, father, Help us to receive this day as a gift from your hands, and to use it earnestly and joyously..." I could look up the rest, but I remember that part because it is MEMORABLE, and, well, I still try to do that!
    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson: View Post
    School Prayer

    In the name of the daybreak
    and the eyelids of morning
    and the wayfaring moon
    and the night when it departs,

    I swear I will not dishonor
    my soul with hatred,
    but offer myself humbly
    as a guardian of nature,
    as a healer of misery,
    as a messenger of wonder,
    as an architect of peace.

    In the name of the sun and its mirrors
    and the day that embraces it
    and the cloud veils drawn over it
    and the uttermost night
    and the male and the female
    and the plants bursting with seed
    and the crowning seasons
    of the firefly and the apple,

    I will honor all life
    - wherever and in whatever form
    it may dwell - on Earth my home,
    and in the mansions of the stars.

    - Diane Ackerman
    Last edited by Barry; 06-12-2016 at 12:15 PM.
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  20. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  21. TopTop #2922
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson



    (graphics by wacco Ronaldo )
    Last edited by Barry; 06-12-2016 at 12:17 PM.
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  22. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  23. TopTop #2923
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Counting on Sunday

    He didn't have his
    Heart in his sermon.
    If he did, it didn't Show up in any enthusiasm
    In his voice.
    And I didn't have
    My restless soul
    In church.
    If I did, I wouldn't Have counted
    The 823 bricks
    On the wall.
    Outside one Of the48
    Window panes
    Behind the 16
    White shutters
    That helped shade
    The sunlight
    Off the 11 crosses,
    2brass, 4 on cloth,
    1 on a plaque that's nailed
    To the rail that leads
    To the wooden one
    That's carved on the altar
    Just left of the
    Wooden one that holds
    The page numbers
    That face
    The one in concrete On the baptismal font
    That stands beside
    The organist
    Who is married To the preacher who
    Has a silver one
    Hanging around his neck
    As he speaks to
    10 women, 8 men
    And 4 children
    Who sit in 21pews
    That hold 161 Hymn books
    Under 78 electric candles
    That shine on
    5 doorknobs
    And 2 flags That stand
    Over 11 eyeglasses,
    7 necklaces,
    2 flower arrangements,
    1 hair bow,
    1 bow tie,
    1 silver barrette,
    And a sermon
    In a pear tree.

    - Margaret Vaughn
    ( poet laureate of Tennessee)
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  24. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  25. TopTop #2924
    Dorothy Friberg's Avatar
    Dorothy Friberg
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Yeah, I've sat through some boring sermons; used to count the pieces of glass in the stained glass windows.

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson: View Post
    Counting on Sunday

    He didn't have his
    Heart in his sermon....
    Last edited by Barry; 06-14-2016 at 02:50 PM.
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  27. TopTop #2925
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for 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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  28. TopTop #2926
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    It fell to me


    It fell to me.
    I don’t know why.
    How can we know these things?
    It fell to me to dismantle,
    to take down the fortifications,
    to take apart myself
    not so to destroy
    but to try to understand,
    to hope to know
    the inner workings
    of a single human heart
    and go from there—
    to Auschwitz,
    for example,
    as an end point
    of all that brought us there
    or as a new beginning for me,
    my own very private mirror
    that shows a heart quite able
    to morph such an image
    of unspeakable acts
    reflected there
    never, never to be done again
    into others of their kind
    that go unnoticed, unseen,
    unrecognized as such
    until their carnage has been done
    and then we say once more,
    “Never again! Never again!”,
    to ourselves and go on—
    to drones over Pakistan
    for example, run by little boys
    with joy sticks and video cams
    from half a universe away
    and think, no doubt,
    if they think at all
    of what they do,
    of what we ask them to do
    in our name and with our money,
    think, no doubt, that they are fighting evil.
    “A silly comparison,” you say,
    “Auschwitz and drones.
    What have you learned
    in all your dismantling
    if this is where you end—
    with drones and joy sticks?”
    And where would you suggest I look, dear listener,
    that I might understand more clearly
    what I am complicit in—
    Orlando, perhaps?
    Where, dear listener, would you look?
    Where would you look?

    - Bill Denham
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  29. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  30. TopTop #2927
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Inclination

    One's throat must be like a garden
    And one's eyes like windows
    through which love passes;
    And one's stature
    Must be like a tree
    that rises out of rocks;
    And poetry must be like a singing bird,
    Perching on the highest branch of a tree,
    Breaking the heavy silence of the world.

    - Hamid Reza Rahimi
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  31. Gratitude expressed by 7 members:

  32. TopTop #2928

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    OH, YEAH!
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  33. TopTop #2929
    Ronaldo's Avatar
    Ronaldo
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    A bit of color and Paul Klee's birds.
    Name:  Inclination.jpg
Views: 988
Size:  180.9 KB
    Last edited by Barry; 06-17-2016 at 01:04 PM.
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  34. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  35. TopTop #2930
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    No Man Is An Island

    No man is an island,
    Entire of itself,
    Every man is a piece of the continent,
    A part of the main.
    If a clod be washed away by the sea,
    Europe is the less.
    As well as if a promontory were.
    As well as if a manor of thy friend's
    Or of thine own were:
    Any man's death diminishes me,
    Because I am involved in mankind,
    And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
    It tolls for thee.
    - John Donne
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  36. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  37. TopTop #2931
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Pulse Night Club Orlando, FL 6/12/16, 1:49 am

    I am Xavier, I am Juan, I am Enrique
    You are Amanda, Frankie and Angel
    We are Mercedes, Christopher and Luis
    We are 6 degrees of separation
    Which means there is no separation

    If I could have been there at 1:49 am
    I would have taken each person by the hand
    Led them outside said, Look at those stars
    Go home now - be safe

    If I could have been there at 12:49 am
    I would have kept Omar Mateen
    From entering
    Instead I’d take his hand
    Say go home, go home
    To your heart
    Go home to your humanity
    There you can find safety
    There you will find you are not separate

    I would, if I could, turn his hate into tears
    I would say the distance between
    Your dreams and my longing is
    The distance between
    Each heartbeat
    I would say that we are all us
    There is no you and them
    Only the disconnections
    of you/them in your own heart

    It’s the truth that hurts the most
    If I had been there at 1:49 am
    I could not have done a thing

    Nor could God
    God gave us choice and will
    We choose what we will
    God says choose life
    Choose life

    This night
    God cries with us
    And asks us to remember
    They are us

    Choose love
    Choose life

    - Sally Churgel
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  38. Gratitude expressed by 6 members:

  39. TopTop #2932
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    For All The Fathers

    For all the fathers with us and gone,
    the ones who worked in factories
    and taught us to drive cars,
    the ones who knew how to put a worm on a hook
    and how to get a fish, flopping, off of it.

    For all the fathers, lonely on their couches,
    ash trays on their bellies, the smell
    of cigarettes on their hands, the blare
    of the television drowning out the voices
    of those too difficult to remember,
    even some of those still living and breathing
    in the same room.

    For all the fathers reaching for their books
    turning to the pages of poetry that give music
    to the sounds trapped inside them, turning
    the pages of manuals that informed their hands
    on how to make furniture for the family, toys
    for the grandchildren, cradles for the neighbor’s children
    adopted from Vietnam.

    For all the fathers who once, when boys, looked up
    to see their own fathers standing in the place
    of the men who came before them, men
    who loved a good story, a certain spring flower,
    the smell of dust rising after a rain.

    For all the fathers who could not give
    what was expected of them
    and showed this by their absence, gone
    in a bottle, gone on a rampage, gone
    on an assignment. Gone. Gone. Gone.

    For all the fathers who lifted and carried groceries
    over water, babies up mountains, children off to bed,
    war stories untold for decades, and memories from childhood
    they could not speak of even to the ones they loved.

    For all the fathers in good health and ill, for their strength
    and their weariness, the dwindling away of possibility
    into the wrinkles and bald spots we remember
    before the final good-byes. For all the fathers,
    the silent, the speaking, and the fathers
    all of their young boys will become.

    - Ann Arbor
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  40. TopTop #2933

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

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  41. TopTop #2934
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Real Work

    It may be that when we no longer know what to do
    we have come to our real work,

    and that when we no longer know which way to go
    we have come to our real journey.

    The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

    The impeded stream is the one that sings.


    - Wendell Berry
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  42. TopTop #2935
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    A Cautionary Tale

    I woke from a dream
    of a circle of men where
    the most basic elements of men's work
    had been forgotten
    where the distrust and fear anger
    in men was not met with
    wisdom where being here to make a racket had primacy
    where we forgot to ask if we
    could agree that there would be no violence
    no physical violence this week
    where we were reluctant to share
    even our names and praise with
    men we did not know
    laughter and poetry singing were
    thrown out, just get 'em out of here
    someone said, "just punch him
    in the face. I'll pay your
    legal bills." it was a dark time
    it was hell.

    - Mark Gardiner
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  43. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  44. TopTop #2936
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    You Cannot Kill Me

    I am not only I
    but a multiplicity of souls
    I have always been here
    I will always be back
    I was your uncle, your 5th grade teacher, your cousin
    I will be your grandson, your niece, the boy next door
    you can erase my words
    and a new Sappho, Rumi, Whitman, Stein, Lorca, Lorde
    will emerge and write what I wrote
    even more beautifully
    you can shatter my statues
    and a new Michelangelo
    with a sharper chisel and a stronger arm
    will make grander statues
    you can silence my singing
    and a new Bessie Smith
    will sound a bluer note
    I have always been here
    indivisible, essential
    to the human spirit
    firebird I am
    feathered serpent
    in every opposition
    I am
    the tender collapse
    that always happens
    before a song
    rises up
    to heaven
    you see
    I cannot die
    you cannot
    kill me


    - Franklin Abbott
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  45. Gratitude expressed by 5 members:

  46. TopTop #2937
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Campo dei FioriRelated Poem Content Details

    In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori
    baskets of olives and lemons,
    cobbles spattered with wine
    and the wreckage of flowers.
    Vendors cover the trestles
    with rose-pink fish;
    armfuls of dark grapes
    heaped on peach-down.

    On this same square
    they burned Giordano Bruno.
    Henchmen kindled the pyre
    close-pressed by the mob.
    Before the flames had died
    the taverns were full again,
    baskets of olives and lemons
    again on the vendors' shoulders.

    I thought of the Campo dei Fiori
    in Warsaw by the sky-carousel
    one clear spring evening
    to the strains of a carnival tune.
    The bright melody drowned
    the salvos from the ghetto wall,
    and couples were flying
    high in the cloudless sky.

    At times wind from the burning
    would drift dark kites along
    and riders on the carousel
    caught petals in midair.
    That same hot wind
    blew open the skirts of the girls
    and the crowds were laughing
    on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

    Someone will read as moral
    that the people of Rome or Warsaw
    haggle, laugh, make love
    as they pass by the martyrs' pyres.
    Someone else will read
    of the passing of things human,
    of the oblivion
    born before the flames have died.

    But that day I thought only
    of the loneliness of the dying,
    of how, when Giordano
    climbed to his burning
    he could not find
    in any human tongue
    words for mankind,
    mankind who live on.

    Already they were back at their wine
    or peddled their white starfish,
    baskets of olives and lemons
    they had shouldered to the fair,
    and he already distanced
    as if centuries had passed
    while they paused just a moment
    for his flying in the fire.

    Those dying here, the lonely
    forgotten by the world,
    our tongue becomes for them
    the language of an ancient planet.
    Until, when all is legend
    and many years have passed,
    on a new Campo dei Fiori
    rage will kindle at a poet's word.

    - Czeslaw Milosz
    Warsaw, 1943
    (Translation by Louis Iribarne)
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  47. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  48. TopTop #2938
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    My Dad As A Young Man
    c. 1930

    His father told him to drive the car without the brakes.
    He never forgot the thump of the woman landing on the hood

    at the corner where he couldn't slow down to turn, she
    stepped in front of the grill, the hood ornament a terrible witness.

    Over the decades, he said things like, Mary, I couldn't stop.
    or I saw a woman crossing the street. Never the story

    beginning middle end. Either he told me she died or I just knew it.
    I played my own scene of what might have happened.

    His heart stopped or beat wildly or maybe both. Brain said
    no, No, NO. He opened the car door, got out, stood upright.

    Bright blood on packed white snow. Felt hat flung far
    from her body. Fur-topped boots without her feet in them.

    Screams of her friend sounded far away. And other cars,
    cars with equipment that worked, brakes that worked, stopped.

    All the drivers looked like his father, the robust real estate man
    glaring through windshields at the son who read aloud from books.

    Little details before he could look at her. A woman he'd never know,
    couldn't recognize but who would spend the rest of his life with him.

    - Mary L. Barnard
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  49. Gratitude expressed by:

  50. TopTop #2939
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for 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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  51. TopTop #2940
    Dorothy Friberg's Avatar
    Dorothy Friberg
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    For my nightmare, it would be a bicyclist on one of our narrow winding back roads wearing dark clothing and invisible in the shade of overgrown trees. Although I am sure this poem is about responsibility in keeping equipment safe, there is also responsibility on the part of the victim as well.

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson: View Post
    My Dad As A Young Man
    c. 1930

    His father told him to drive the car without the brakes.
    ...
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