Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

BLESSING BHUTAN: a mandala in seven movements


SPINNING

Pelela pass
wooden spindle whirling
sheep wool yak wool
bus wheels rolling rolling
round the chorten
wrap around bowstring
plaid gho
feet stomping dancers
black hats Tshechu twirling
prayer wheels turning round and round
humble hands round and round spinning wheels
water falling

FALLING
water pouring down cliffs canyons
powerful hydro
pungent splats of betel juice
feudal reign falls
reborn baby strapped on mother’s back
sliding sidewise his eyes crusty cracks

CRACKING
sidewalks roads
sides of the roads
overhangs cracking
stacks of straw burning running
skull cracking brains open raptor food
psyche cracking
deities demons delusions spill inside outside
Bhutan cracking open rocks crashing stories erupting
ancient lore stretching over reality canvas
spinning and falling portals flapping

FLAPPING
prayer flags astrological hues 108 blending
bright then fading
fluttering from hills bridges gossamer
spirits wafting among
daphne pulp porous through screens
fingers stack paper on
shutters snapping capture
orange chartreuse rice fields waving
buckwheat amaranth chilis
eagles magpie wings flapping high
blue dot butterfly fluttering low low

BLOWING
bronze horns rumble deep
out of earth little children sing anthems
tourists blow a mound of marijuana buds
suck hard small flame
black plastic smoking sky over
fractal forests
help and thank you
monks chant on and on
hungry ghosts opening throats
each breath a prayer

TAPPING
woodpecker staccato against blue pine
baby monk blesses with wooden phallus
light raps on head
Silther taps on window
hiking poles pony hooves clop to Tiger’s Nest
thanka painter dips brush into orange
onto the god of epilepsy
huge canvas explodes in color
finger holds steads
precision
steady

STILLNESS
target embraces its arrow
dragon tongue
bus stops
white bellied heron lands
dogs silent
just this moment
vast meditation
dead center of the wheel
spokes whirling out in five dimensions
most mysterious

- Sharon Bard
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[Larry Robinson]

The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

- Margaret Atwood

[Larry Robinson]

Pity The Nation
(After Khalil Gibran)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose
sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully
as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by
torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but
its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation--oh, pity the people who allow
their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

[Larry Robinson]

Pray for Peace

Pray to whomever you kneel down to:

Jesus nailed to his wooden or marble or plastic cross,
his suffering face bent to kiss you,
Buddha still under the Bo tree in scorching heat,
Adonai, Allah, raise your arms to Mary
that she may lay her palm on our brows,
to Shekhina, Queen of Heaven and Earth,
to Inanna in her stripped descent.

Hawk or Wolf, or the Great Whale, Record Keeper
of time before, time now, time ahead, pray. Bow down
to terriers and shepherds and siamese cats.
Fields of artichokes and elegant strawberries.

Pray to the bus driver who takes you to work,
pray on the bus, pray for everyone riding that bus
and for everyone riding buses all over the world.
If you haven't been on a bus in a long time,
climb the few steps, drop some silver, and pray.

Waiting in line for the movies, for the ATM,
for your latte and croissant, offer your plea.
Make your eating and drinking a supplication.
Make your slicing of carrots a holy act,
each translucent layer of the onion, a deeper prayer.

Make the brushing of your hair
a prayer, every strand its own voice,
singing in the choir on your head.
As you wash your face, the water slipping
through your fingers, a prayer: Water,
softest thing on earth, gentleness
that wears away rock.

Making love, of course, is already a prayer.
Skin and open mouths worshipping that skin,
the fragile case we are poured into,
each caress a season of peace.

If you're hungry, pray. If you're tired.
Pray to Gandhi and Dorothy Day.
Shakespeare. Sappho. Sojourner Truth.
Pray to the angels and the ghost of your grandfather.

When you walk to your car, to the mailbox,
to the video store, let each step
be a prayer that we all keep our legs,
that we do not blow off anyone else's legs.
Or crush their skulls.
And if you are riding on a bicycle
or a skateboard, in a wheel chair, each revolution
of the wheels a prayer that as the earth revolves
we will do less harm, less harm, less harm.

And as you work, typing with a new manicure,
a tiny palm tree painted on one pearlescent nail
or delivering soda or drawing good blood
into rubber-capped vials, writing on a blackboard
with yellow chalk, twirling pizzas, pray for peace.

With each breath in, take in the faith of those
who have believed when belief seemed foolish,
who persevered. With each breath out, cherish.

Pull weeds for peace, turn over in your sleep for peace,
feed the birds for peace, each shiny seed
that spills onto the earth, another second of peace.
Wash your dishes, call your mother, drink wine.

Shovel leaves or snow or trash from your sidewalk.
Make a path. Fold a photo of a dead child
around your VISA card. Gnaw your crust
of prayer, scoop your prayer water from the gutter.
Mumble along like a crazy person, stumbling
your prayer through the streets.

- Ellen Bass

[Larry Robinson]

Walking

My dog hurries the path, worries its scents
As if one could goad the Earth, governed
As she is, by the gods of geology.

- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

O Captain! My Captain!

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.


O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills; 10
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths--for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.


My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won; 20
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

- Walt Whitman

[Larry Robinson]

Dominion

A mandrake quickens
into greed-grab, tears a page
from Genesis. Clods

of earth are clods of god.
Clods of earth are clods
of dendrites with dirt

skirting the roots.
Let there be light

skins and dark skins. One
to rule the other. Manifest,

destinations of night’s pitch
plague the heart’s
thirst for extinction.

Memory of the untouched
is the more beautiful object.

From the streets
a humpback’s gashed fin laments
this justice, its skin scarred

with extinction’s dark
body owned by light.

I strike a candle
against tribal ruin, against
the separation of day

and night.

- Rajiv Mohabi

[Larry Robinson]

The Front Door of God

Stop beating up on your ego, 

Trying to lynch it, 

Making it the scapegoat
For your misguided pain. 

Your ego is the front door of God,
The prow of the boat of your Godness 

Forever entering the next new port 

Of every fresh moment, 

The heat shield of the space capsule 

Of who you are be-coming in for a landing on a planet 

It was never really launched away from
To begin with: 
God Enworlding. 

Whose human ego 

Never does altogether 

Burn alive.
And shouldn't -
For God's sake

- Saniel Bonder

[Larry Robinson]

The Earth is my Mother

The wind is my Mother’s breath.

Trees, flowers, birds and animals—
all are my beloved Mother.

The waves are my Mother’s cheeks,
the stones, my Mother’s feet.
Trees, flowers, birds and animals—
all are my beloved Mother.

The stars are my Mother’s crown,
the sun and moon, her eyes.
Trees, flowers, birds and animals—
all are my beloved Mother.

Oh Mother,
let all the world
be peaceful
and gentle.

Let all the women and children
who have been violated
be peaceful
and well.

Let all the men realize
they are not superior
to the plants or the animals,
the women or the children.
Let them be peaceful
and gentle.

Let us be peaceful
and gentle.

Mother Earth, it is not you
who need to be invoked—for you are always here!

But we your human children who today
must be invoked—who have abandoned you,
forgotten to call upon you, neglected to care for you,
failed to serve you and disregarded your needs.

Help us now to awaken and remember
our obligations to you and all Earth’s beings.

Let your spirit fill us with love, appreciation, joy
and overwhelming desire to serve you in all that we do.

May we think, speak and act as one family of one Mother
who gives life to all and when it is time, takes it away.

Guide us, Great Mother, in every decision we make,
every habit we develop, every action we undertake.
May we never forget you again, beloved Mother Earth,
beautiful and bountiful source, and resting place, and wonder.

- Janine Canan

[Larry Robinson]

Rapa Nui On Easter Island, How did the stone axe feel While swinging into the last tree’s trunk? Chopping, chopping, until it toppled to the earth. In the field brimming with daffodils smiling at the sun, what did it feel like To plant the first one

- Alan Cohen

[Larry Robinson]

The Damnedest Finest Ruins

	Put me somewhere west of East Street where there's nothin' left but dust,
	Where the lads are all a hustlin' and where everything's gone bust,
	Where the buildin's that are standin' sort of blink and blindly stare
	At the damndest finest ruins ever gazed on anywhere.

	Bully ruins - bricks and wall - through the night I've heard you call
	Sort of sorry for each other cause you had to burn and fall.
	From the Ferries to Van Ness you're a God-forsaken mess,
	But the damndest finest ruins - nothin' more or nothin' less.

	The strangers who come rubberin' and a huntin' souvenirs,
	The fools they try to tell us it will take a million years
	Before we can get started, so why don't we come and live
	And build our homes and factories upon land they've got to give.

	"Got to give"! why, on my soul, I would rather bore a hole
	And live right in the ashes than even move to Oakland's mole,
	If they'd all give me my pick of their buildin's proud and slick
	In the damndest finest ruins still I'd rather be a brick!

- L. W. Harris
(After the San Francisco earthquake April 18, 1906)

[Larry Robinson]

Song

Here is calm so deep, grasses cease waving.
Everything in wild nature fits into us,
as if truly part and parent of us.
The sun shines not on us but in us.
The rivers flow not past, but through us,
thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell
of the substance of our bodies,
Making them glide and sing.
The trees wave and the flowers bloom
in our bodies as well as our souls,
and every bird song, wind song,
and; tremendous storm song of the rocks
in the heart of the mountains is our song,
our very own, and sings our love.

- John Muir

[Larry Robinson]

It’s Morning

How every morning I wish to clutter your arms with jewels,
rubies no basket could hold, diamonds no velvet set.

It is simply the morning I offer,
and if not being explicit, this one,
with its white sky and the bare small shrug of the pepper tree leaves.

Such happiness is a color all its own.
Like purple or like dogs or birds.

Listen, you don’t even have to be here to get this.
Everything I say is already here behind your eyes.
The whole treasure, the whole loot is yours to loot and treasure.

For what could I add to the skin of your being alive?
What medal could I pin on your breast to douse that birth-given privilege?

Words come your way here because I’m proud to know you.
And I send this poem along as a casserole to your doormat.

Don’t worry. No one had died within. The sickness you talked to yourself about
actually went out with yesterday’s slops. Happiness

called from across the hedge. Happiness arrived in the comic jalopy
of this poem. It’s morning. It’s morning of everything!

- Bruce Moody

[Larry Robinson]

Let’s meet in a restaurant

Is food the enemy? Giving a dinner party has become an ordeal. I lie awake the night before figuring how to produce a feast that is vegan, gluten free, macrobiotic, avoiding all acidic fruit and tomatoes, wine, all nuts, low carb and still edible. Are beetles okay for vegans? Probably not. Forget chocolate ants or fried grasshoppers. Now my brains are cooked. Finally seven o’clock arrives and I produce the perfect meal. At each plate for supper, a bowl of cleanly washed pebbles. Enjoy!

- Marge Piercy

[Larry Robinson]

Reading Neruda While Waiting for an Ultrasound


We try hard not to fall into error - like trying to avoid the beehive, though it's where the honey is kept.
Autocorrect wants to make beehive Bernice, wants to turn Neruda into Jerusalem
My own eyes, when they spot The Redress of Poetry on my shelf, see The Red Dress of Poetry.
When i love you less than perfectly, it is the same.
When I am the sand in your soap, it is the same.
Peel back the edge for the honey.
- Michael Sierchio

[Larry Robinson]

Button
It likes both to enter and to leave,
actions it seems to feel as a kind of hide-and-seek.
It knows nothing of what the cloth believes
of its magus-like powers.
If fastening and unfastening are its nature,
it doesn't care about its nature.
It likes the caress of two fingers
against its slightly thickened edges.
It likes the scent and heat of the proximate body.
The exhilaration of the washing is its wild pleasure.
Amoralist, sensualist, dependent of cotton thread,
its sleep is curled like a cat to a patch of sun,
calico and round.
Its understanding is the understanding
of honey and jasmine, of letting what happens come.
A button envies no neighbouring button,
no snap, knot, no polyester-braided toggle.
It rests on its red-checked shirt in serene disregard.
It is its own story, completed.
Brevity and longevity mean nothing to a button carved of horn.
Nor do old dreams of passion disturb it,
though once it wandered the ten thousand grasses
with the musk-fragrance caught in its nostrils;
though once it followed - it did, I tell you - that wind for miles.
- Jane Hirshfield

[Larry Robinson]

Becoming

Nowhere is it the same place as yesterday.
None of us is the same person as yesterday.
We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.
This downward cellular jubilance is shared
by the wind, bugs, birds, bears and rivers,
and perhaps the black holes in galactic space
where our souls will all be gathered in an invisible
thimble of antimatter. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Yes, trees wear out as the wattles under my chin
grow, the wrinkled hands that tried to strangle
a wife beater in New York City in 1957.
We whirl with the earth, catching our breath
as someone else, our soft brains ill-trained
except to watch ourselves disappear into the distance.
Still, we love to make music of this puzzle.

- Jim Harrison

[REALnothings]

BEAUTIFUL! I've been aware, and once tried to write about the "physics" of our aging and mortality...how, were it not for such forces as friction, we would indeed live forever physically. Very tough to put in words, though. Bravo, Jim!

[Larry Robinson]

The Lost Hotels of Paris The Lord gives everything and charges by taking it back. What a bargain. Like being young for a while. We are allowed to visit hearts of women, to go into their bodies so we feel no longer alone. We are permitted romantic love with its bounty and half-life of two years. It is right to mourn for the small hotels of Paris that used to be when we used to be. My mansard looking down on Notre Dame every morning is gone, and me listening to the bell at night. Venice is no more. The best Greek islands have drowned in acceleration. But it’s the having not the keeping that is the treasure. Ginsberg came to my house one afternoon and said he was giving up poetry because it told lies, that language distorts. I agreed, but asked what we have that gets it right even that much. We look up at the stars and they are not there. We see the memory of when they were, once upon a time. And that too is more than enough.

- Jack Gilbert

[Larry Robinson]

What stays with me more than flames,
broken glass, crowds swarming the streets
after the non-indictment; the edge-of-screen
war correspondent clutching his mic,
reporting low-voiced to us outsiders,
are the tears running down
the young woman’s cheek,
that she keeps swiping, as she tries
to stay calm for the interview. It’s like —
and she starts again:
they don’t realize we’re human.
Not the fire but the broken heart.


- Susan Donnelly

[Larry Robinson]

Tears

Kathmandu April 2015

The clear round vase on the table

Expand

filled with water holds the world
upside down and magnified, reflecting
the chair-back, the shimmering birch
beyond the window. Deeper

into the woods, shadows
shield the mystery of what sleeps there
having roamed the night as we
turned toward and away and toward
and dreamed our separate dreams,
while the Kathmandu restaurant

whose narrow stone steps I climbed
tumbled into a world turned
upside down in a street no longer recognizable,
turned out of itself the way mayhem
casts out meaning –

this pot where the cook melted ghee
beside the splintered back
of a patron’s chair, this blue scarf
fluttering from the rubble as prayer flags
fluttered above the entrance. The stairs

speak to each other, mystified
by their new arrangement – the first step
grating against the eighth, the ninth
under the fourth, the third beside the fifth.
If this were music, their confusion might
convey the longing for harmony
lost inside the dissonance of chaos,
the moans and cries of the mortal world
with its icy rivers turned to salt.

- Elizabeth Carothers Herron

[REALnothings]

♥ ॐ love and prayers

[Sara S]

From yesterday's Press Democrat:

HOW CAN YOU HELP?

Here are some organizations operating in the country and/or accepting donations toward their relief efforts:

UNICEF: unicef.org
Red Cross: redcross.org
Meercy Corps: mercycorps.org
Save the Children: savethechildren.org
Oxfam: oxfamamerica.org
Doctors Without Borders: doctorswithoutborders.org

Tears

Kathmandu April 2015

...

[Larry Robinson]

Aftershock

I wake, but what day is this?
I remember sleeping, but this is the dream.
I am talking. I hear myself but I don’t know what I am saying.
There is traffic, but where are they going?
I could leave, but where would I go?
The high-rise ghosts have all gone.
We are neither dead nor alive.
The big dog barks. And barks.
Will there be a meal tonight?
We will eat with our fingers.
I wear the same clothes as yesterday.
I will wear them tomorrow.
The sky threatens rain.
The light comes and goes.
People appear and disappear.
After the anxiety comes the depression.
After the panic comes the wandering.
After the dying comes the remorse of the living.
After the undoing comes the doing.
Nothing is the same as before.
I can’t even remember before.
When we slept.

- Gary Horvitz
(from Kathmandu)

[Sara S]

from Chris Smith's column in today's Press Democrat:

Hearts, minds and wallets open to Nepal following the devastating earthquake the likes of which we can imagine striking here, and that no doubt will.

“We couldn’t only be spectators,” said Adil Gauchan, whose family owns a Nepalese/Indian restaurant on Petaluma’s North McDowell Boulevard.

He invites us to come to Namaste Kitchen between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Saturday or Sunday, enjoy a free buffet and make a donation to quake relief efforts of the Red Cross.

As an alternative, it’s easy to contribute $10 to any of several earthquake relief agencies. The charge will go onto your cellphone bill if you text:

· Give Nepal to 80888, Global Giving’s Nepal Earthquake Relief Fund.

· Nepal to 20222, Save the Children.

· Nepal to 864233, UNICEF.

· Reliefnepal to 45678, the UN World Food Program.

Aftershock...
- Gary Horvitz
(from Kathmandu)

[Lion]

Here is another good option for donations. Avaaz is supporting Abari, an in-country NGO that is putting up tents in the hardest hit remote areas. https://secure.avaaz.org/en/nepal_ea..._loc_be50/?dty


You can read Gary Horvitz’s blog posts here: https://spontaneouspresence.net/author/gary856/ Gary is a friend of mine - an amazing man who has been documenting his travels throughout Asia, with a Buddhist perspective. He went to Kathmandu to teach about climate change, and was there during the earthquake. He is trying to send reports, but electricity and internet access are very spotty.

Another friend of ours was on Everest during the avalanche, and we found out yesterday that he survived. We are happy to know this, and saddened by all of the death and destruction of this beautiful country and its people. Please give generously.

Aftershock...
- Gary Horvitz
(from Kathmandu)

[Larry Robinson]

Practice

Not the high mountain monastery
I had hoped for, the real
face of my spiritual practice
is this:
the sweat that pearls on my cheek
when I tell you the truth, my silent
cry in the night when I think
I’m alone, the trembling
in my own hand as I reach out
through the years of overcoming
to touch what I had hoped
I would never need again.
- Kim Rosen

[REALnothings]

thank you, gutsy and powerful! Gives solace to readers, who may not be ready to admit such things. Corresponds with much of my own experience, and also with Thomas Merton's lovely sentence,
"Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart has turned to stone."

[Larry Robinson]

hymn to the sacred body of the universe

let’s meet
at the confluence
where you flow into me
and one breath
swirls between our lungs

let’s meet
at the confluence
where you flow into me
and one breath
swirls between our lungs

for one instant
to dwell in the presence of the galaxies
for one instant
to live in the truth of the heart
the poet says this entire traveling cosmos is
“the secret One slowly growing a body”

two eagles are mating—
clasping each other’s claws
and turning cartwheels in the sky
grasses are blooming
grandfathers dying
consciousness blinking on and off
all of this is happening at once
all of this, vibrating into existence
out of nothingness

every particle
foaming into existence
transcribing the ineffable

arising and passing away
arising and passing away
23 trillion times per second—
when Buddha saw that,
he smiled

16 million tons of rain are falling every second
on the planet
an ocean
perpetually falling
and every drop
is your body
every motion, every feather, every thought
is your body
time
is your body,
and the infinite
curled inside like
invisible rainbows folded into light

every word of every tongue is love
telling a story to her own ears

let our lives be incense
burning
like a hymn to the sacred
body of the universe
my religion is rain
my religion is stone
my religion reveals itself to me in
sweaty epiphanies

every leaf, every river,
every animal,
your body
every creature trapped in the gears
of corporate nightmares
every species made extinct
was once
your body

10 million people are dreaming
that they’re flying
junipers and violets are blossoming
stars exploding and being born
god
is having
déjà vu
I am one
elaborate
crush
we cry petals
as the void
is singing

you are the dark
that holds the stars
in intimate
distance

that spun the whirling,
whirling,
world
into existence

let’s meet
at the confluence
where you flow into me
and one breath
swirls between our lungs

- Drew Dellinger

[Larry Robinson]

North

I returned to a long strand,
the hammered curve of a bay,
and found only the secular
powers of the Atlantic thundering.

I faced the unmagical
invitations of Iceland,
the pathetic colonies
of Greenland, and suddenly

those fabulous raiders,
those lying in Orkney and Dublin
measured against
their long swords rusting,

those in the solid
belly of stone ships,
those hacked and glinting
in the gravel of thawed streams

were ocean-deafened voices
warning me, lifted again
in violence and epiphany.
The longship’s swimming tongue

was buoyant with hindsight—
it said Thor’s hammer swung
to geography and trade,
thick-witted couplings and revenges,

the hatreds and behind-backs
of the althing, lies and women,
exhaustions nominated peace,
memory incubating the spilled blood.

It said, ‘Lie down
in the word-hoard, burrow
the coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.

Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.

Keep your eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known.’

- Seamus Heaney