Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Roland Jacopetti]

Fantastic, Larry!

Claim

Once during that year
when all I wanted
was to be anything other
than what I was,
the dog took my wrist
in her jaws. Not to hurt
or startle, but the way
a wolf might, closing her mouth
over the leg of another
from her pack. ...

[Larry Robinson]

Turkeys

Sometimes we saw shadows of gods in the trees; silenced, we went on. Sometimes the dog would bound off over the snow, into the forest. Sometimes a tree had twenty or more black turkeys in it, each seeming the size of a small black bear. We remember them for their care for their kind ever since we watched the big hen in the very top of the tree shaking load after load of apples down to the flock. Sometimes I felt I would never come out of the woods, I thought its deeper darkness might absorb me or feed me to the black turkeys and I would cry out for the dog and the dog would not answer.

- Galway Kinnell

[Larry Robinson]

The Big Heart


“Too many things
are occurring for even a big heart to hold.”
W. B. Yeats


Big heart,
wide as a watermelon,
but wise as birth,
there is so much abundance
in the people I have
and all in their short lives
give to me repeatedly,
in the way the sea
places its many fingers on the shore,
again and again
and they know me,
they help me unravel,
they listen with ears made of
conch shells,
they speak back with the wine
of the best region.
They are my staff.
They comfort me.
They hear how
the artery of my soul has been severed
and soul is spurting out upon them,
bleeding on them,
messing up their clothes,
dirtying their shoes.
And God is filling me,
though there are times of doubt
as hollow as the Grand Canyon,
still God is filling me.
He is giving me the thoughts of dogs,
the spider in its intricate web,
the sun
in all its amazement,
and a slain ram
that is the glory,
the mystery of great cost,
and my heart,
which is very big,
I promise it is very large,
a monster of sorts,
takes it all in—
all in comes the fury of love.


- Ann Sexton

[Larry Robinson]

An Invitation


Make of your kitchen a hearth
where you warm and nourish your life.


Make of the sky over your town your temple
where you refresh yourself daily.

Make of the people in your town your Beloved
to rediscover with kindness each day.

Make of the earth of your town your own garden
where you gaze with attention each day.

Make of your life a steady flame of delight.

Look around you in this moment and see
how all of this, pierces us with pain and such happiness.


- Elizabeth Garber

[Timothy Gega]

An Invitation

...
Make of the sky over your town your temple
where you refresh yourself daily.

[Larry Robinson]

Benediction


There is so much to know, so much to love, so much to share
Let us go forth and minister.


There are forsaken elements in each of us,
Abandoned dreams, neglected fears, breast closet skeletons,
Tremendous possibilities as yet untapped.
Let us minister to ourselves.


There are broken relationships among the people.
Friends we need to touch,
Partners we need to love,
Enemies we need to forgive.
Let us minister to each other.


There is a sorrow in the land.
War, Pollution, Injustice,
A tragic squandering of immense worth.
Let us minister to our world.


And there is a forgotten cry within us all.
A deafening Silence,
Largely unheeded but ever beckoning.
Home, home, home it calls,
An explosion of Joy waiting to be born.
Let us minister to our Source.


There is so much to know, so much to love, so much to share.
Let us go forth this day and minister.


- Dan O'Neal

[Larry Robinson]

The Light Arrested


When we have passed the Day of the Dead
and have seen the light drawn out thin
on the horizon like vague ships,
and Night and Cold are two kings on the land

and a third enters, the Pacific Ocean
raising itself in colossal waves silently
over the western slopes, flooding the earth
and falling on the interior plains

then our hearts, then our hearts
are fish in a trackless ocean
and we find that this is heaven, this cold
motionless place and the light arrested

for everything we see— the fields and fences
and the trees and the surging fog—
is filled with that luminous presentness
here from before the start of time.

- Lee Perron

[Larry Robinson]

Grace

Thanks & blessing be
to the Sun & the Earth
for this bread & this wine,
this fruit, this meat, this salt,
this food;
thanks be & blessing to them
who prepare it, who serve it;
thanks & blessing to them who share it
(& also the absent & the dead.)
Thanks & blessing to them who bring it
(may they not want),
to them who plant & tend it,
harvest & gather it
(may they not want);
thanks & blessing to them who work
& blessing to them who cannot;
may they not want -- for their hunger
sours the wine
& robs the salt of its taste.
Thanks be for the sustenance & strength
for our dance & the work of justice, of peace.

© Rafael Jesús González 2014



Gracias

Gracias y benditos sean
el Sol y la Tierra
por este pan y este vino,
esta fruta, esta carne, esta sal,
este alimento;
gracias y bendiciones
a quienes lo preparan, lo sirven;
gracias y bendiciones a quienes lo comparten
(y también a los ausentes y a los difuntos.)
Gracias y bendiciones a quienes lo traen
(que no les falte),
a quienes lo siembran y cultivan,
lo cosechan y lo recogen
(que no les falte);
gracias y bendiciones a los que trabajan
y bendiciones a los que no puedan;
que no les falte - su hambre
hace agrio el vino
y le roba el gusto a la sal.
Gracias por el sustento y la fuerza
para nuestro bailar y nuestra labor
por la justicia y la paz.

© Rafael Jesús González 2014

(The Montserrat Review, número 6, primavera 2003;
postulado para el premio de la paz Hobblestock;
derechos del autor)

[Larry Robinson]

To a Passer-By on Thanksgiving Day


Gentle Reader,
it is good that you have paused
along your way, accepting
the silent invitation of these lines


For it was you I had in mind
when I sat to write these words,
you, holding a paper cup
of lukewarm dark roast coffee
and a satchel filled with groceries,
or you, clutching the dog’s leash
in one hand, with the other
pushing a stroller around the corner,
and even you, whom I had not
imagined in such precise terms


For you I drew my pen across the empty page
as earlier I drew my garden rake
again and again through withered grass
and over the buried front walk,
metal tines clawing wet concrete
gathering sodden maple leaves,
potent gift of high summer sun
turning then returning now to earth


For you I cleared a solitary path
prepared the way for your lonely passage
so that a mere moment of your journey
through the detritus of this world
might be blessed by an open space
awaiting your arrival,
conspicuous in its care,
this page inscribed in answer
to the ground now scraped bare.


- Seth H. Truby

[Larry Robinson]

Gratitude


I often think I’m good
at gratitude.
Say “thank you”
to the Goddess for divine right timing
when I’m down at the sea
and I
look up at the sky
at just the right moment to see
that big brown pelican
glide gracefully over me.


Or take that first bite
out of a fresh picked red apple
let the juice roll around in my mouth
and thank the tree
for giving it to me.


Me, me, me
yes, my gratitude
is all about me
and all the gifts
I joyfully receive.


- Lilith Rogers

[Lilith Rogers]

Thanks, Larry. I'm grateful to you for posting a poem every day and for posting MY poem today.

Blessings. Lilith

Gratitude


I often think I’m good
at gratitude.
Say “thank you”
to the Goddess for divine right timing
when I’m down at the sea
and I
look up at the sky
at just the right moment to see
that big brown pelican
glide gracefully over me.


Or take that first bite
out of a fresh picked red apple
let the juice roll around in my mouth
and thank the tree
for giving it to me.


Me, me, me
yes, my gratitude
is all about me
and all the gifts
I joyfully receive.


- Lilith Rogers

[Larry Robinson]

Lines For Winter


Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself --
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.


- Mark Strand
(1934-2014)

[Larry Robinson]

Chicken Scratchings for the Soul

It wasn’t one of my better meditations
It started out with promise…
I had a vision
My heart was encased in concrete
God’s chisel had cracked it open to
Reveal a brilliant white and gold core of light
And I thought,
“What’s so scary about this?”
Why did I resist my heart being broken open
If dormant inside is a gold and white light?
Which got me thinking…

About chickens
And eggs
After all chickens are protected by a shell until they have to
Bust through just to survive
The next sensible thought would have been something like
We have a choice where a chicken doesn’t

Or a more sensible thought would have been
I’m meditating…..

Instead, I thought about breakfast
Fried eggs, actually
Which made me wonder where does all that bad cholesterol
Go when the egg becomes a chicken?
Which made me think about fried chicken
Which I don’t eat
So then I thought about oil
Why is hydrogenated oil so bad
But coconut oil is the new good?
Which made me think of other uses for coconut oil
But decided - better not go there
And then I remembered

I remembered

I’m meditating
Once again I repeated the name of God
Ehiyeh Asher Ehiyeh
I am that which I am

And I began to fall
Backward
Like a child floating slowly onto a lofty down comforter
Sinking slowly downward
Into myself
And for a minute
OK, for a one, one thousand, two, one thousand

I forgot

I forgot God’s name
My name
Chickens and eggs
And for one very brief moment
There was no pain
Anywhere
No floods, war, child slavery, taxes, discrimination
Broken cell phone service or emails to answer
There was just this blissful moment
Silence

Silence

And then I thought
“What was I thinking?”
Oh yeah, chickens
And then the chime rang
20 minutes…gone…already?
Like I said, it wasn’t a very fruitful meditation
Just chicken full


- Sally Churgel

[Timothy Gega]

Hilarious

Chicken Scratchings for the Soul


Like I said, it wasn’t a very fruitful meditation
Just chicken full


- Sally Churgel

[Larry Robinson]

Zazen, Wired & Tired
It’s like thrashing out past the breakers
into the opaque green swells,
the alien salt a thrill. The beach
is lightbulb-white, and sears
whoever lies down on it to rest.
An animal chooses this place
for its den and winters here,
sleeping month after month
in the musk of its own absence
so it can awaken more fully human.
Sitting zazen is like trying to be a tree.
I’m bad at it, impatient. I want the way
into the sap and wood to be violent, athletic,
so I keep my mind chopping at it, asking
how can I become the tree, if I am the tree?


- Chase Twichell

[Larry Robinson]

Auschwitz-Birkenau


To awaken here

Is to hear silence
Shrieking in cold,
Empty corridors, to awaken


In a heart hewn
By fear, a darkness
Closed to compassion.
Any kindness


Is all kindness--a treachery
We must enter, allow to enter us--
Ask us, "who are you here
In this hallowed hell?"


No where to step
Where ash hasn't fallen,
Where cruelty hasn't walked,
Fed on our tender fear.


Who am I in this
Enormous evil?
A dog waiting at a platform?
Or the child terrified of dogs,


Clutching a brother's hand?
A boy alive forever,
Forever frightened so we
Will know what we can do.


I move through ghosts, numb.
Like others, I am dumb,
In respectful, awful silence,
Save for voices screaming,


Who I am? Am I
The selfless priest crammed
In a standing cell, dying
For a stranger who survived?


Who am I here in history's
Hall of horrors? Walls lined
With visages, victims
Who haven't yet imagined


What we can do--will do.


Not Nazis, not
Germans, but humans
Did this. We
Do this now.


To awaken here is
To see that casual blue
Chip in the sky's
Somber gray soul,


Innocent opening
letting light flow down,
Bless this damned,
Degraded place.


To awaken here,
Is to know one's
Darkness, and not
Turning from it, see that light.


- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

Waiting For A Ride


Standing at the baggage passing time:
Austin Texas airport—my ride hasn’t come yet.
My former wife is making websites from her home,
one son’s seldom seen,
the other one and his wife have a boy and girl of their own.
My wife and stepdaughter are spending weekdays in town
so she can get to high school.
My mother ninety-six still lives alone and she’s in town too,
always gets her sanity back just barely in time.
My former former wife has become a unique poet;
most of my work,
such as it is is done.
Full moon was October second this year,
I ate a mooncake, slept out on the deck
white light beaming through the black boughs of the pine
owl hoots and rattling antlers,
Castor and Pollux rising strong
—it’s good to know that the Pole Star drifts!
that even our present night sky slips away,
not that I’ll see it.
Or maybe I will, much later,
some far time walking the spirit path in the sky,
that long walk of spirits—where you fall right back into the
“narrow painful passageway of the Bardo”
squeeze your little skull
and there you are again
waiting for your ride


- Gary Snyder

[gardenmaniac]

existential meltdown in 64 beats

fleeting moments

joys and sorrows whizzing by then gone forever
do what you can work hate love and desire enjoy

damage repair
such is life in the vacuum of endless space eternal time
partake of the fullness of life prepare for an endless nothing

[Larry Robinson]

Magnitudes


Earth’s Wrath at our assaults is slow to come
But relentless when it does. It has to do
With catastrophic change, and with the limit
At which one order more of Magnitude
Will bring us to a qualitative change
And disasters drastically different
From those we daily have to know about.

As with the speed of light, where speed itself
Becomes a limit and an absolute;
As with the splitting of the atom
And a little later of the nucleus;
As with the millions rising into billions—
The piker’s kind in terms of money, yes,
But a million² in terms of time and space
As the universe grew vast while the earth
Our habitat diminished to the size
Of a billiard ball, both relative
To the cosmos and to the numbers of ourselves,
The doubling numbers, the earth could accommodate.

We stand now in the place and limit of time
Where hardest knowledge is turning into dream,
And nightmares still contained in sleeping dark
Seem on the point of bringing into day
The sweating panic that starts the sleeper up.
One or another nightmare may come true,
And what to do then? What in the world to do?


- Howard Nemerov

[Larry Robinson]

GARDENER’S REMORSE

The garden looked better with that plant gone.
I had pulled the twisted thing up!
Roots and all were now in the street.
It was just all wrong I thought.
Wrong. Really wrong from the very first day.

I had searched and shopped for the scrubby thing.
“A plant perfect for the drought,” the salesman said.
“Slow growing, light or shade, hardy in all climates,
can withstand high heat and low water.”

It wasn’t attractive that first day but those were dry times in ’88
in my few square feet of California.
Like an arranged marriage, I might learn to love this strange cross
between a mutant bonsai cypress
and a poison berry bush from a Disney cartoon.

Three drought years had gone by and one blessed wet one
and that miserable plant still occupied
its almost hallowed ground in my garden.
It seemed an unwelcome peace keeper
separating the exploding South African Gazanias
from the radiant Icelandic poppies.

If it weren’t for its miniscule faded pink blossoms

Doug Van Koss

(pink like the tiny shy flowers on an old doll’s dress)
and if it weren’t for its miniature berries
(that even the sparrows avoided)
and if it weren’t for its seeds looking like crushed
wheat germ kernels on the kitchen floor
I’d say the ugly thing hadn’t moved a cell in four years.
Slow growing? Well, I guess!

I pulled the damn thing up without a tinge of remorse.
Good riddance I thought, to be done with old ugly.
The next day, pondering the cleared spot in the garden,
I heard a voice that had been dead for many years.
“Oh, Dougie, you pulled up a slow growing plant?
How would you like it if someone did that to you?”

- Doug von Koss

[Larry Robinson]

Traveling Toward Solstice


The gold of autumn,
deep and burnished,
is not the superficial sizzle
of summer.
Light seems to rise
from deep in the soul
of the Universe;
filtered through layers
of beginnings and endings;
polished by the year’s hopes
and disappointments.
It moves inexorably
toward Solstice
embracing death
and rebirth.

- Ann Marie Cheney

[Larry Robinson]

Astonishment




Oarlocks knock in the dusk, a rowboat rises
and settles, surges and slides.
Under a great eucalyptus,
a boy and girl feel around with their feet
for those small flattish stones so perfect
for scudding across the water.
*
A dog barks from deep in the silence.
A woodpecker, double-knocking,
keeps time. I have slept in so many arms.
Consolation? Probably. But too much
consolation may leave one inconsolable.
*
The water before us has hardly moved
except in the shallowest breathing places.
For us back then, to live seemed almost to die.
One day a darkness fell between her and me.
When we woke, a hawthorn sprig
stood in the water glass at our bedside.
*
There is a silence in the beginning.
The life within us grows quiet.
There is little fear. No matter
how all this comes out, from now on
it cannot not exist ever again.
We liked talking our nights away
in words close to the natural language,
which most other animals can still speak.
*
The present pushes back the life of regret.
It draws forward the life of desire. Soon memory
will have started sticking itself all over us.
We were fashioned from clay in a hurry,
poor throwing may mean it didn’t matter
to the makers if their pots cracked.
*
On the mountain tonight the full moon
faces the full sun. Now could be the moment
when we fall apart or we become whole.
Our time seems to be up—I think I even hear it stopping.
Then why have we kept up the singing for so long?
Because that’s the sort of determined creature we are.
Before us, our first task is to astonish,
and then, harder by far, to be astonished.


- Galway Kinnell

[Larry Robinson]

New Tracks
All that marks the rain-pocked sand
are the small holes of sand crabs,
the occasional scallop shell, a beached
jellyfish and the skidding foam from the tide.

On the sandbar a line of pelicans
stand watch as the sandpipers swarm
the edge of the water like ants
as the whitecaps trace the horizon.

The rain has passed for now
and the clouds are breaking overhead,
moving off like the tide withdrawing.
The blue beyond is a depth we don’t know.

When the tide comes in, all this
will be swept away again
and the beach will be cleared
for a new day and new tracks in the sand.

- Newton Smith

[Larry Robinson]

On Being Asked For A War PoemI think it better that in times like theseA poet's mouth be silent, for in truthWe have no gift to set a statesman right;He has had enough of meddling who can pleaseA young girl in the indolence of her youth,Or an old man upon a winter’s night. - William Butler Yeats

[Larry Robinson]

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.


- Izumi Shikibu


(Translated by Jane Hirshfield )

[Larry Robinson]

A Local Storm


The first whimper of the storm
At the back door, wanting in,
Promised no such brave creature
As threatens now to perform
Black rites of the witch Nature
Publicly on our garden.


Thrice he hath circled the house
Murmuring incantations,
Doing a sort of war dance.
Does he think to frighten us
With his so primitive chants
Or merely try our patience?


The danger lies, after all,
In being led to suppose--
With Lear-- that the wind dragons
Have been let loose to settle
Some private grudge of heaven's.
Still, how nice for our egos.


- Donald Justice

[Larry Robinson]

The Rhythm of Each


I think each comfort we manage-
each holding in the night, each opening
of a wound, each closing of a wound, each
pulling of a splinter or razored word, each
fever sponged, each dear thing given
to someone in greater need-each
passes on the kindness we've known.


For the human sea is made of waves
that mount and merge till the way a
nurse rocks a child is the way that child
all grown rocks the wounded, and how
the wounded, allowed to go on, rock
strangers who in their pain
don't seem so strange.


Eventually, the rhythm of kindness
is how we pray and suffer by turns,
and if someone were to watch us
from inside the lake of time, they
wouldn't be able to tell if we are
dying or being born.


- Mark Nepo

[Larry Robinson]

Eating Poetry


Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.


The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.


The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.


Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.


She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.


I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.


- Mark Strand

[Larry Robinson]

Sweet Darkness


When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.


When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.


There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.


You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.


Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.


Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness


to learn


anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive


is too small for you.


- David Whyte

[Larry Robinson]

The Women


In morning, the four women sit at the café
year after year
telling their stories,
eating salads and cakes with tea
and hopeful conversation.


Together
they raised children,
rescued languorous marriages
or did not.


Together
they planned weddings,
welcomed grandchildren,
packed their lifetimes
into sturdy boxes
and downsized their expectations
in brightly colored tops.


At that table in the cafe, together,
they sacrificed and suffered and celebrated
each lightly hued day.


In mourning, the three women sit at the cafe
year after year
retelling stories,
eating salads and cakes with tea
and wistful conversation.


Together
they recalled dates,
rescued their children's marriages
or did not.


Together
they planned outings,
welcomed grandchildren,
packed their lifetimes
into well used boxes
and planned for their exercising
in newly greying shoes.


At that table in the cafe, together,
they suffered with sighs and surrendered
each unlikely day.


- Michael Gerber