Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Maker Of All things, Even Healings


All night
under the pines
the fox
moves through the darkness
with a mouthful of teeth
and a reputation for death
which it deserves.
In the spicy
villages of the mice
he is famous,
his nose
in the grass
is like an earthquake,
his feet
on the path
is a message so absolute
that the mouse, hearing it,
makes himself
as small as he can
as he sits silent
or, trembling, goes on
hunting among the grasses
for the ripe seeds.
Maker of All Things,
including appetite,
including stealth,
including the fear that makes
all of us, sometime or other,
flee for the sake
of our small and precious lives,
let me abide in your shadow–
let me hold on
to the edge of your robe
as you determine
what you must let be lost
and what will be saved.
- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

A Momentary Creed


I believe in the ordinary day
that is here at this moment and is me
I do not see it going its own way
but I never saw how it came to me
it extends beyond whatever I may
think I know and all that is real to me
it is the present that it bears away
where has it gone when it has gone from me
there is no place I know outside today
except for the unknown all around me
the only presence that appears to stay
everything that I call mine it lent me
even the way that I believe the day
for as long as it is here and is me
- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

Seychelles


Suddenly a green coast appears through
the freighter's portal. It's the first view of land
since the voyage began eight days ago from
the port of Mombasa, Kenya. At last, scenery
after so much bland horizon over the Indian
Ocean. The islands are called the Seychelles,
perfect canopies of palms, fruit grows ripe with
the colors of tropics, perfect invitation cards.
Silence hovers like the sun-dazed air, hidden
weeds grow flowers.The long voyage to India
once more.
The islands of my life appeared as blessing
after a long fever, how health pushed forward
from the locked door of an old house with the
resilient memory of how to find the new house.
How the writhing days with malaria stacked up
against all the divine story of who I thought I was.
I had nothing to fall back on except the smiling
current that took me by surprise to these islands.
I felt so grateful for the coming of surprise after
the poisoning of longing. After the tempest and
the salted wounds in dreams which I could
observe but not interpret, after the gust and gasps,
my heart ebbs toward a new tide. I can rise fearless
from my hammock, walk out on deck, walk upon
one island or another, rise out of the feverish haunting
of the deep sea in which I was the ghost. As wanderer
I had to meet my restless self and wake up to the island
that arises in that desperate faith of healing, waking up
to myself, nourished and refreshed.


- Rich Meyers

[Larry Robinson]

I am Avalokiteshvara

I am Avalokiteshvara.

I hear the cries of the suffering world.
I have no tools to help,
not one.
I cannot sleep,
no matter how
I adjust the pillow behind my head.
How can I be comfortable,
when they are not?
My head explodes with grief and pity,
shame and guilt.
How is it that we who can penetrate the farthest star
and dissect the tiniest atom
have not discovered in ourselves
the simple heart,
the heart that would rejoice
to remove the suffering
of those
in Syria,
in Sing Sing
in a warehouse for the aged on East 79th Street
those cast away everywhere
who cry out in thirst and hunger
and the need to be seen
as human?


- Nina Mermey Klippel

[Larry Robinson]

The Plan

My old friend, the owner
of a new boat, stops by
to ask me to fish with him.

And I say I will –- both of us
knowing that we may never
get around to it, it may be

years before we’re both
idle again on the same day.
But we make a plan, anyhow.

In honor of friendship
and the fine spring weather
and the new boat

and our sudden thought
of the water shining
under the morning fog.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Advice


An ink-black crow yelled at me, saying,

Be responsible for everything: your life, and the lives of others.

The war in Iraq, and children dying of starvation.

Your neighbor’s happiness – and the Amazon rainforest.

Your body’s health, and the community of elders in Tajikistan.

The bacterial network in the soil, and the fungal mat beneath the roots of trees.

The farm workers being slowly poisoned by pesticides, and the wilderness being stripped of its wildness.

I complained loudly that I was not big enough to hold the whole world.

Do not stop there, he cawed.

You are also responsible for galaxies spinning on their axis, and the birth of stars.

Gravity, and the expansion of space.

All beliefs of every species, and the transformation of hydrogen from one form to another.

What then, I beseeched, does it mean to be responsible?

He looked at me from his perch on the branch outside my window,

first with one eye, then the other,

as if contemplating an answer simple enough for me to understand.

Care, he replied.

Care, Care, Care.


- Lion Goodman

[Larry Robinson]

The Vulnerability of Children


Lives inside all of us
the small animal heart beat,
the quiver of quickening,
the womb-bound baby's sensing
her possibilities.


On edge, unsure, but sure
someone is certain, we guard
our ignorance, hide it
like buried scat instead of the jewel
naïveté is, forgetting the blessing
of curiosity without contempt.


The boy bends over the microscope,
studies blossoms in stone,
the certain beat of a heart aware
of the miraculous. In that moment
fear of mistakes, knowledge of right
or wrong recede and the boy's vulnerability blesses him,


gifts him with precious perspective,
the vision of quotidian miracles
hidden in the mundane.
Possessed of wide-open
wonder, sweet sensitivity,
he enters, lives in eternity,
our original blessing.




- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

In memory of Angeles Arrien 1940-2014


A Morning Offering


I bless the night that nourished my heart
To set the ghosts of longing free
Into the flow and figure of dream
That went to harvest from the dark
Bread for the hunger no one sees.
All that is eternal in me
Welcome the wonder of this day,
The field of brightness it creates
Offering time for each thing
To arise and illuminate.
I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Wave of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.
May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.
May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.
- John O'Donohue

[Larry Robinson]

To This May

They know so much more now about
the heart we are told but the world
still seems to come one at a time
one day one year one season and here
it is spring once more with its birds
nesting in the holes in the walls
its morning finding the first time
its light pretending not to move
always beginning as it goes

- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

For Freedom
As a bird soars high
In the free holding of the wind,
Clear of the certainty of ground,
Opening the imagination of wings
Into the grace of emptiness
To fulfill new voyagings,
May your life awaken
To the call of its freedom.
As the ocean absolves itself
Of the expectation of land,
Approaching only
In the form of waves
That fill and pleat and fall
With such gradual elegance
As to make of the limit
A sonorous threshold
Whose music echoes back among
The give and strain of memory,
Thus may your heart know the patience
That can draw infinity from limitation.
As the embrace of the earth
Welcomes all we call death,
Taking deep into itself
The right solitude of a seed,
Allowing it time
To shed the grip of former form
And give way to a deeper generosity
That will one day send it forth,
A tree into springtime,
May all that holds you
Fall from its hungry ledge
Into the fecund surge of your heart.
-*John O’Donohue

[Larry Robinson]

In the Month of May
In the month of May when all leaves open,
I see when I walk how well all things
lean on each other, how the bees work,
the fish make their living the first day.
Monarchs fly high; then I understand
I love you with what in me is unfinished.
I love you with what in me is still
changing, what has no head or arms
or legs, what has not found its body.
And why shouldn't the miraculous,
caught on this earth, visit
the old man alone in his hut?
And why shouldn't Gabriel, who loves honey,
be fed with our own radishes and walnuts?
And lovers, tough ones, how many there are
whose holy bodies are not yet born.
Along the roads, I see so many places
I would like us to spend the night.
- Robert Bly

[Larry Robinson]

The Excesses of God


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


- Robinson Jeffers

[Larry Robinson]

The Vulnerability of Adults


We carry divine ignorance
in tiny pockets of our secret selves,
like polished stones, scoured
in the wide ocean of wonder.
Our secret: we are not certain.
Odd, to secret away our
common gift, common inheritance.


Birth brings the burden of love,
carried from the Unknowable,
calls for tenderness, the language of
kindness. Once aware, our
ignorance becomes a curse,
curiosity exposes inherent humanity
in a world of would-be gods.


In flickers of not-knowing lives
Light-bright naïveté, the guileless
Birthright of babies, blessing
of the birds, sand, spiders–
Our blessing, hidden from view, by
learned blindness, lost wonder.


- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

Lake Shore In Half Light


There is a question I want to ask
and I can’t remember it
I keep trying to
I know it is the same question
it has always been
in fact I seem to know
almost everything about it
all that reminds me of it
leading to the lake shore
at daybreak or twilight
and to whatever is standing
next to the question
as a body stands next to its shadow
but the question is not a shadow
if I knew who discovered
zero I might ask
what there was before


- W.S. Merwin

[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


In memory of Farley Mowatt: 1921-2014

[sandoak]

Have you seen the movie Snow Walker, based on a Farley Mowat story? It's one of my very favorite movies. Box Office has the dvd, which includes footage of the author in the special features.

The Moment

....

In memory of Farley Mowatt: 1921-2014

[Larry Robinson]

Enough

I may never see
the sun rise glow
on Fujiyama.

Or the shadows
of sunset
from Machu Picchu.

But I have seen
the morning light
on the lake with you,

and it is enough.

- Doug von Koss

[Larry Robinson]

My Mother is a Talking Poem
My mother is a talking poem
her inside turned out.
the threads that weave her thoughts together
unravel into surrender,
lifted up on currents of dark wings
that caress the night sky

Her tongue is loosened and her words fall out
here and there, fumbling their way
from dreams to memories
to visits from loved ones long-departed.
She strings them together in open-eyed wonder
at the sounds they impress upon the air.
She laughs at her own inner secrets.

The angels of music and poetry visit her at night.
They are singing loose the keynote
that anchors her body to this earth.

In their presence I allow her words
to meander around inside of me
I open to drink in the sounds of her voice
My blue petals imprinted with each inflection.
Under their spell
I have become my mother’s Forget-Me-Not
each memory bud blessed
with the cross-pollination
of her meter and her rhyme.

- Julie Ann Schrader

[Larry Robinson]

Mothers' Day Proclamation
Mother's Day was originally started after the Civil War, as a protest to the carnage of that war, by women who had lost their sons. Here is the original Mother's Day Proclamation from 1870:

[Larry Robinson]

mothers

his eyes are different, she says

just yesterday
her son honed his skills
on those silly video games
racking up points
winning, laughing

today, barely twenty,
he returns from war
a sniper-hero
fingers no longer itching
for video triggers

his eyes are different, she says

- Vilma Olsvary Ginzberg

[Larry Robinson]

Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front


Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy somethin
they will call you. When they wnat you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Imagine The Angels of Bread
This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.

This is the year that those
who swim the border’s undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.

If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.

So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.
- Martin Espada

[qidancing]

Thanks Larry!!

One of my favorite poems from one of my favorite poets. I've read this over and over for many years, and it always inspires, and unfortunately always seems so insightful about the state of the world.

Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die...

[Larry Robinson]

Permanently

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

Each Sentence says one thing—for example, “Although it was a dark rainy day when the Adjective walked by,
I shall remember the pure and sweet expression on her face until the day I perish from the green, effective earth."

Or, “Will you please close the window, Andrew?”

Or, for example, “Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on the window sill has changed color recently to a light yellow,
due to the heat from the boiler factory which exists nearby.”

In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, “And! But!”
But the Adjective did not emerge.

As the Adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat—
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.

- Kenneth Koch

[Larry Robinson]

I Call Your Name

Before dawn I begin naming
the ten thousand things, one-
by-one, touching each with my mind
as they take their place in this world.
Orion, Cassiopeia, the moon hanging
like a scimitar over the horizon’s edge,
and the milky swoosh arching over,
all these find their places in the predawn sky.
Soon I call the crow out of the black nest
and the jay, blue against the rose light.
Then come the tall pines, needles and cones
and bark plates blackened from last year’s fire.
The soft whisper of the wind
rustling the dry oak leaves
and stirring the spiny holly
waken with the early light.
When the sun comes up, my words rush
to fill the land and space with forms,
lines, and shadows defining each thing
with its proper name and lineage.
Where are you in all these words?
I call your name to awake you
from the lures of the dark knight.
I call your name. Come to me.
*
*
-*Newton Smith

[Larry Robinson]

A Chunk of Amethyst

Held up to the window light the Amethyst has
elegant corridors, that give and take light. The discipline
of its many planes suggest that there is no use trying to live
forever. Its exterior is jagged, but in the inner house all is
in order. Its corridors become ledges, solidified thoughts that
pass each other.

This chunk of Amethyst is a cool thing, hard as a
dragon's tongue. The sleeping times of the whole human race
lie hidden there. When the fingers fold the chunk into the
palm, the palm hears organ music, the low notes that makes the
sins of the whole congregation resonate, and catches the
criminal five miles away with a tinge of doubt.

With all its planes, it turns four or five faces toward
us at once, and four or five meanings enter the mind.

The exhilaration we felt as children returns...We feel the
wind on the face as we go down hill, the sled's speed
increasing.

- Robert Bly

[Larry Robinson]

The Future


For God’s sake, be done
with this jabber of “a better world.”
What blasphemy! No “futuristic”
twit or child thereof ever
in embodied light will see
a better world than this, though they
foretell inevitably a worse.
Do something! Go cut the weeds
beside the oblivious road. Pick up
the cans and bottles, old tires,
and dead predictions. No future
can be stuffed into this presence
except by being dead. The day is
clear and bright, and overhead
the sun not yet half finished
with his daily praise.


- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

To Say Nothing But Thank You


All day I try to say nothing but thank you,
breathe the syllables in and out with every step I
take through the rooms of my house and outside into
a profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden
where the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups.

I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring
and to the cold wind of its changes. Gratitude comes easy
after a hot shower, when my loosened muscles work,
when eyes and mind begin to clear and even unruly
hair combs into place.

Dialogue with the invisible can go on every minute,
and with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as I
remember who I am, a woman learning to praise
something as small as dandelion petals floating on the
steaming surface of this bowl of vegetable soup,
my happy, savoring tongue.

- Jeanne Lohmann

[Larry Robinson]

Just This


When I think of the patience I have had
back in the dark before I remember
or knew it was night until the light came
all at once at the speed it was born to
with all the time in the world to fly through
not concerned about ever arriving
and then the gathering of the first stars
unhurried in their flowering spaces
and far into the story the planets
cooling slowly and the ages of rain
then the seas starting to bear memory
the gaze of the first cell at its waking
how did this haste begin this little time
at any time this reading by lightning
scarcely a word this nothing this heaven


- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

Upon The Fall Of Troy

Nothing occurs this morning,
nothing save the near drowning of Odysseus,
who keeps pressing on nonetheless
until, under the tangled bower
of the boughs of the wild and the tame
twin olives, he covers himself with a duff of leaves,
and grey-eyed Athena grants him rest.

Let us then dream with Odysseus
the rest of our lives,
as he did upon such parlous storm.
The door will open
and all our daughters pour in.
And thus the plain day begins.

I hope I wish you well as
I bury my nose in my affairs.
Odd jobs to be done about this place,
A thing or two to write
and the chain of old responsibilities.

If you think the chores and itches of Job
are required, sit down and have
this tea with me. Mercy also is a sacred cup.
It empties suffering. And peace
is neither tedious nor bland.

What burned the capitol down
is long over the horizon.
The earthquake shock trembled mountains,
I can tell you that. But I neither
remember nor recall the indulgence.

So settle with me here. The dogs
may scramble up our knees
and we may forget what we meant to say.
This smile, this smile may depart when we must write:

“They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead.”
It strikes us dumb, our systems shake
and bow down under the heavy news
of the end of the love of our lives.
Words that tell us, yes, there is nothing left to come.
We weep so deeply. Because that, that is the final tremor.

- Bruce Moody