Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

For Mike Tuggle


and the days months years crawled by
leaving an unexpected week
on my wall

where were you all this time?

here is your name
fading on my to-do list

I meant to call

suddenly you are gone

and the Cazedero redwoods whisper your name
to the nighthawks
and the weeping moon

and dim do I hear you
strong-legged and Okie-drawled
singing
to the absolute elsewhere


- Vilma Olivary Ginzberg

[Ronaldo]

For Mike Tuggle ...

[Larry Robinson]

Mennonites

We keep our quilts in closets and do not dance.
We hoe thistles along fence rows for fear
we may not be perfect as our Heavenly Father.
We clean up his disasters. No one has to
call; we just show up in the wake of tornadoes
with hammers, after floods with buckets.
Like Jesus, the servant, we wash each other's feet
twice a year and eat the Lord's Supper,
afraid of sins hidden so deep in our organs
they could damn us unawares,
swallowing this bread, his body, this juice.
Growing up, we love the engravings in Martyrs Mirror:
men drowned like cats in burlap sacks,
the Catholic inquisitors,
the woman who handed a pear to her son,
her tongue screwed to the roof of her mouth
to keep her from singing hymns while she burned.
We love Catherine the Great and the rich tracts
she gave us in the Ukraine, bright green winter wheat,
the Cossacks who torched it, and Stalin,
who starved our cousins while wheat rotted
in granaries. We must love our enemies.
We must forgive as our sins are forgiven,
our great-uncle tells us, showing the chain
and ball in a cage whittled from one block of wood
while he was in prison for refusing to shoulder
a gun. He shows the clipping from 1916:
Mennonites are German milksops, too yellow to fight.
We love those Nazi soldiers who, like Moses,
led the last cattle cars rocking out of the Ukraine,
crammed with our parents - children then -
learning the names of Kansas, Saskatchewan, Paraguay.
This is why we cannot leave the beliefs
or what else would we be? why we eat
'til we're drunk on shoofly and moon pies and borscht.
We do not drink; we sing. Unaccompanied on Sundays,
those hymns in four parts, our voices lift with such force
that we lift, as chaff lifts toward God.

- Julia Kasdorf

[Larry Robinson]

Meditations At Lagunitas


All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry .

- Robert Hass

[Ronaldo]

Meditations At Lagunitas...

[Larry Robinson]

What Were They Like?

Did the people of Viet Nam
use lanterns of stone?
Did they hold ceremonies
to reverence the opening of buds?
Were they inclined to quiet laughter?
Did they use bone and ivory,
jade and silver, for ornament?
Had they an epic poem?
Did they distinguish between speech and singing?

Sir, their light hearts turned to stone.
It is not remembered whether in gardens
stone gardens illumined pleasant ways.
Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom,
but after their children were killed
there were no more buds.
Sir, laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.
A dream ago, perhaps. Ornament is for joy.
All the bones were charred.
it is not remembered. Remember,
most were peasants; their life
was in rice and bamboo.
When peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies
and the water buffalo stepped surely along terraces,
maybe fathers told their sons old tales.
When bombs smashed those mirrors
there was time only to scream.
There is an echo yet
of their speech which was like a song.
It was reported their singing resembled
the flight of moths in moonlight.
Who can say? It is silent now.

- Denise Levertov

[Dorothy Friberg]

I'm not sure it is silent. Many are still haunted by those experiences. Who can measure the damage done to so many? My nephew, working in underwater demolitions was personally traumatized when he had to set demolitions to destroy a bridge carrying escaping citizens. I admire the resilience of all those who survived this tragic war and I pray that our leaders could learn from it's lessons. A prayer falling on the granite brains of our officials who continue to do what they do.

What Were They Like?
...
When bombs smashed those mirrors
there was time only to scream.
...
Who can say? It is silent now.

- Denise Levertov

[Jude Iam]

When the people lead, the 'leaders' will follow.
All people need to well understand the phrase "cannon fodder" and read All Wars are Bankers Wars

and LOTS of other ways to unpack this truth which MUST BE UNDERSTOOD BY ALL so the 1% must actually do the fighting for their own murderous profits. peace, jude

[Larry Robinson]

Love Comes Quietly

Love comes quietly,
Finally drops around me,
On me, in the old way.

What did I know,
Thinking myself able to go alone
All the way?

- Robert Creely

[Larry Robinson]

Naming the Children

He remembers good night and good morning
He remembers my wife, Gail, which is the wind,
Who sits beside him, stroking his thin right hand.

From the back of the car through the neighborhoods
He recites the names of his children
In Russian, Hebrew and English. The names squeeze through

The damaged arteries, past the house in Odessa
Over the remarkable ocean to New York.
Mischa will be Morris. Hodya will be Ida.

Ten years later my mother, Beatrice Florence,
Stares into polished stone. At last
She sees herself, nee Bryna Fagel, beautiful bird.

Which is how it is in America,
Over the graves of our parents, how we are named.

- Steve Orlen

[Larry Robinson]

Swimming Lessons

A mile across the lake, the horizon bare
or nearly so: a broken sentence of birches.
No sand. No voices calling me back.
Waves small and polite as your newly washed hair
push the slime-furred pebbles like pawns,
an inch here. Or there.

You threaded five balsa blocks on a strap
and buckled them to my waist, a crazy life
vest for your lazy little daughter.
Under me, green deepened to black.
You said, “Swim out to the deep water.”
I was seven years old. I paddled forth

and the water held me. Sunday you took away
one block, the front one. I stared down
at my legs, so small, so nervous and pale,
not fit for a place without roads.
Nothing in these depths had legs or need of them
except the toeless foot of the snail.

Tuesday you took away two more blocks.
Now I could somersault and stretch.
I could scratch myself against trees like a cat.
I even made peace with the weeds that fetch
swimmers in the noose of their stems
while the cold lake puckers and preens.

Friday the fourth block broke free. “Let it go,”
you said. When I asked you to take
out the block that kept jabbing my heart,
I felt strong. This was the sixth day.
For a week I wore the only part
of the vest that bothered to stay:

a canvas strap with nothing to carry.
The day I swam away from our safe shore,
you followed from far off, your stealthy oar
raised, ready to ferry me home
if the lake tried to keep me.
Now I watch the tides of your body

pull back from the hospital sheets.
“Let it go,” you said. “Let it go.”
My heart is not afraid of deep water.
It is wearing its life vest,
that invisible garment of love
and trust, and it tells you this story.

- Nancy Willard

[Larry Robinson]

Susanna


Nobody in the hospital
Could tell the age
Of the old woman who
Was called Susanna
I knew she spoke some English
And that she was an immigrant
Out of a little country
Trampled by armies
Because she had no visitors
I would stop by to see her
But she was always sleeping
All I could do
Was to get out her comb
And carefully untangle
The tangles in her hair
One day I was beside her
When she woke up
Opening small dark eyes
Of a surprising clearness
She looked at me and said
You want to know the truth?
I answered Yes
She said it’s something that
My mother told me
There’s not a single inch
Of our whole body
That the Lord does not love
She then went back to sleep.
- Anne Porter

[Larry Robinson]

Remember

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star's stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is. I met her
in a bar once in Iowa City.
Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother's, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe. I heard her singing Kiowa war
dance songs at the corner of Fourth and Central once.
Remember that you are all people and that all people are you.
Remember that you are this universe and that this universe is you.
Remember that all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember that language comes from this.
Remember the dance that language is, that life is.
Remember.

- Joy Harjo

[Larry Robinson]

Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty,
I Pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles



It seems these poets have nothing
up their ample sleeves
they turn over so many cards so early,
telling us before the first line
whether it is wet or dry,
night or day, the season the man is standing in,
even how much he has had to drink.


Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow.
Maybe if is snowing on a town with a beautiful name.


“Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune
on a Cloudy Afternoon” is one of Bun Tung Po’s.
“Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea”
is another one, or just
“On a Boat, Awake at Night.”


And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with
“In a Boat on a Summer Evening
I Hear the Cry of a Waterbird.
It Was Very Sad and Seemed to be Saying
My Woman is Cruel—Moved, I Wrote This Poem.”


There is no iron turnstile to push against here
as with the headings like ‘Vortex on a String,”
“The Horn of Neurosis,” or whatever.
No confusing inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over.
Instead, “I Walk Out on a Summer Morning
to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall”
is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders.


And “The Days of Rain Have Kept Me Indoors”
is a servant who shows me into the room
where a poet with a thin beard
is sitting on a mat with a jug of wine
whispering something about clouds and cold wind,
about sickness and the loss of friends


How easy he had made it for me to enter here,
to sit down in a corner;
my legs like his, and listen.


- Billy Collins

[Larry Robinson]

Shine, Perishing Republic


While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass
hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make
earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and
home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly
long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing
republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening
center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left
the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught—they say—God, when he
walked on earth.


- Robinson Jeffers

[BothSidesNow]

1925 Jeffers published this--before the Depression, before Joseph McCarthy, before the Vietnam War, before 1968, before Nixon, before shock and awe! I would like to take some sadly smiling comfort in this date, hoping the republic isn't finally really perishing, though it feels like it.

Shine, Perishing Republic


While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, ...

[Larry Robinson]

"next to of course god america i

love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh

say can you see by the dawn's early my

country 'tis of centuries come and go

and are no more what of it we should worry

in every language even deafanddumb

thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gory

by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-

iful than these heroic happy dead

who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter

they did not stop to think they died instead

then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

- e. e. cummings

[Ronaldo]

"next to of course god america i
...
- e. e. cummings

[Larry Robinson]

MidsummerRelated Poem Content Details

The adolescent night, breath of the town,
Porchswings and whispers, maple leaves unseen
Deploying moonlight quieter than a man dead
After the locust’s song. These homes were mine
And are not now forever, these on the steps
Children I think removed to many places,
Lost among hushed years, and so strangely known.

This business is well ended. If in the dark
The firefly made his gleam and sank therefrom,
Yet someone’s hand would have him, the wet grass
Bed him no more. From corners of the lawn
The dusk-white dresses flutter and are past.
Before our bed time there were things to say,
Remembering tree-bark, crickets, and the first star…

After, and as the sullenness of time
Went on from summer, here in a land alien
Made I my perfect fears and flower of thought:
Sleep being no longer swift in the arms of pain,
Revisitations are convenient with a cough,
And there is something I would say again
If I had not forever, if there were time.

- Robert Fitzgerald

[Larry Robinson]

I Am Waiting

I am waiting for my case to come up

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep thru the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

[REALnothings]

I Am Waiting
...
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I love this one! I first heard it in 1968, recited by a man who called himself "The Great Lorenzo" and went around the country in a van with his female partner, reciting great poems by heart in cafes. I saw him in St. Louis, Missouri, and was inspired by him and by the poem...and still am, by both!

I love esp the way Ferlinghetti uses the title phrase and "a rebirth of wonder" in different ways throughout the poem. It's one of the best, I guess you could say, "catalogue poems" (is that the right name for an incantatory poem which starts all or nearly all its line with the same words?) , that I've read.

ps: a friend, reading this poem which I shared on my own FB page today, asked whether City Lights, Ferlinghetti's bookstore, is still there. I wrote that F (last I heard) seems to be going strong at 90 or older...and I dug up this photo that I took of the store a few years back, AND a poem I wrote inside the store!

https://www.realnothings.com/northbe...orthbeach7.htm

[Timothy Gega]

I Am Waiting
...
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Wait no more, for now is the time for all good men, (and women) to come to the aide of their country.

[Larry Robinson]

A Name For All

Moonmoth and grasshopper that flee our page
And still wing on, untarnished of the name
We pinion to your bodies to assuage
Our envy of your freedom—we must maim

Because we are usurpers, and chagrined—
And take the wing and scar it in the hand.
Names we have, even, to clap on the wind;
But we must die, as you, to understand.

I dreamed that all men dropped their names, and sang
As only they can praise, who build their days
With fin and hoof, with wing and sweetened fang
Struck free and holy in one Name always.

- Hart Crane

[Larry Robinson]

Woman Receiving Dialysis Next Bed Over


They always tell me they’re
going to come with
something and
they never
do.

ow.

ow.

I’m hungry.
Shoot.

Shoot.

Who’s that? Alligator. Quail.
It’s not fair. See
I don’t eat. Oh
I want to
too.

- Nancy Cavers Dougherty

[Larry Robinson]

Clearing

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worthy of rescue.

- Martha Postlewaite

[Timothy Gega]

Clearing

...

Very poignant.

[Larry Robinson]

John Muir on Mt. Ritter

After scanning its face again and again,
I began to scale it, picking my holds
With intense caution. About half-way
To the top, I was suddenly brought to
A dead stop, with arms outspread
Clinging close to the face of the rock
Unable to move hand or foot
Either up or down. My doom
Appeared fixed. I MUST fall.
There would be a moment of
Bewilderment, and then,
A lifeless rumble dawn the cliff
To the glacier below.
My mind seemed to fill with a
Stifling smoke. This terrible eclipse
Lasted only a moment, when life blazed
Forth again with preternatural clearness.
I seemed suddenly to become possessed
Of a new sense. My trembling muscles
Became firm again, every rift and flaw in
The rock was seen as through a microscope,
My limbs moved with a positiveness and precision
With which I seemed to have
Nothing at all to do.

- Gary Snyder

[Larry Robinson]

We Need Each Other Now

We need each other now.

In truth, we always have.
But as things disintegrate,
as chaos and disorder reign,
we become like bones,
scattered and
stripped clean of all
that is inessential.
Let’s reassemble ourselves,
the way Isis did with Osiris,
or La Loba with her wolf bones.
Let’s find a new configuration,
this part mine, that part yours –
Perhaps something original
will emerge, or
something ancient.
Let’s light a candle now, friends,
so together we might see
how to begin.

- Maya Spector

[Larry Robinson]

You’re So Vain

You're so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You're so vain,
I'll bet you think this song is about you
Don't you?
Don’t you?
- Carly Simon


Advancing age, retirement brings space
Space to think, dream and consider
Look in the mirror, fool, I say
What do you see? What do others see?

Advancing age brings more visits to healers
Healers of many kinds and natures
These days dentist and internist I visit
They examine, prod me; pull teeth

Tooth removed; temporary plate required
Plate gags me: I ask how long
Healer: you’ll get used to it
Asks am I concerned about my smile?

Sudden bulge on my elbow
Is a tennis ball hiding there?
Healer says wear a long-sleeved shirt
Asks are you going to the beach?

My dusty brain is confused
Do I seem so vain?
I ask to be cured not offered
Men’s wear guidance

- Alan Fisher

[Larry Robinson]

On the Block


in a dim-light meander
a writer's concern for precision,
compression, lyrical sound
and one simple elemental truth
goes down a very bad path

through the double lens
of imagination and memory
a flawed and flimsy
lower case moment
will be mugged

twisted turns of interpretation
coerce a deeper register of inquiry
concluding with a neat ending
and … oh, could it be ... indelibility

pending yet another bon mot
from an empty poet
the dim light of the computer cursor
blinks on and on
ready to surrender all its belongings
to a merciful delete


- Les Bernstein