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  1. TopTop #2191
    poetrytalks's Avatar
    poetrytalks
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    And mine:

    The Alchemy of Age

    When we look with soft eyes,
    the physical form becomes translucent with age.
    Bodies, veils to spirit worlds, wear thin.
    Life’s chafing smoothes hard edges and steeled egos.
    Opalescent colors show through transparency.
    Without youthful resistance feelings flow,
    bless with cleansing springs.
    Sorrow, when released,
    purifies the heart,
    reveals sweetness of being.
    Anger owned becomes ardor
    that can be ridden as a tiger
    through rain forests of divine desire.
    Self-examined elders eclipse
    psyches’ erroneous beliefs,
    transmute experience into wisdom,
    emerge as alchemists of soul.

    ©2004 Star Kissed Shadows, Sher Lianne Christian
    Last edited by Bella Stolz; 10-30-2014 at 01:41 PM.
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  3. TopTop #2192
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Into October


    These must be the colors of returning
    the leaves darkened now but staying on
    into the bronzed morning among the seed heads
    and the dry stems and the umbers of October
    the secret season that appears on its own
    a recognition without sound
    long after the day when I stood in its light
    out on the parched barrens beside a spring
    all but hidden in a tangle of eglantine
    and picked the bright berries made of that summer


    - W.S. Merwin
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  5. TopTop #2193
    Timothy Gega
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by gardenmaniac: View Post
    "A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language." ~ WH Auden
    Gardenmaniac, your quote inspired me to come up with this little ditty yesterday.
    Namaste

    My Word Playground

    The Dictionary is like crossing the Monkey Bars.
    The Thesaurus is like going down the waterslide with ease.
    The Swing is my imagination, flying fast and high or low and slow.
    The Green Grass is my lush carpet where I can rest or dream all day.
    And, the Tree of Knowledge sits in the center of it all.
    It’s fun to play here alone, but it’s also fun to have playmates too.
    My Time spent at the Word Playground is like a vacation paradise.

    ©2014 Tim Gega
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  7. TopTop #2194
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Oatmeal


    I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
    I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
    I eat it alone.
    I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
    Its consistency is such that is better for your mental health
    if somebody eats it with you.
    That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have
    breakfast with.
    Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary
    companion.
    Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal porridge,
    as he called it with John Keats.
    Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him:
    due to its glutinous texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime,
    and unsual willingness to disintigrate, oatmeal should
    not be eaten alone.
    He said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat
    it with an imaginary companion, and that he himself had
    enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser and John
    Milton.
    Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as
    wholesome as Keats claims, still, you can learn something
    from it.
    Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the
    "Ode to a Nightingale."
    He had a heck of a time finishing it those were his words "Oi 'ad
    a 'eck of a toime," he said, more or less, speaking through
    his porridge.
    He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his
    pocket,
    but when he got home he couldn't figure out the order of the stanzas,
    and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they
    made some sense of them, but he isn't sure to this day if
    they got it right.
    An entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket
    through a hole in his pocket.
    He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas,
    and the way here and there a line will go into the
    configuration of a Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up
    and peer about, and then lay \ itself down slightly off the mark,
    causing the poem to move forward with a reckless, shining wobble.
    He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about
    the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some
    stanzas of his own, but only made matters worse.
    I would not have known any of this but for my reluctance to eat oatmeal
    alone.
    When breakfast was over, John recited "To Autumn."
    He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words
    lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.
    He didn't offer the story of writing "To Autumn," I doubt if there
    is much of one.
    But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field go thim started
    on it, and two of the lines, "For Summer has o'er-brimmed their
    clammy cells" and "Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours,"
    came to him while eating oatmeal alone.
    I can see him drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glimmering
    furrows, muttering.
    Maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters.
    For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from lunch.
    I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and simultaneaously
    gummy and crumbly, and therefore I'm going to invite Patrick Kavanagh
    to join me.


    - Galway Kinnell (1927-2014)


    To hear the poet read this poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xv8EY2vWJg
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  9. TopTop #2195
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Sometimes the Dead

    Sometimes the dead
    drop in for a visit;
    Unannounced,
    they brush past me
    on the front step
    as I juggle groceries and keys.

    Having no need
    for doors locked or open,
    they make themselves at home,
    kick off their shoes, rest
    their bones
    on couch and creaking rocker.

    While I put away
    eggs and bread and cheese,
    they thumb through yesterday’s
    newspaper, old New Yorkers, dusty
    books of poetry, arguing idly
    over the TV remote.


    Sometimes the dead
    settle into the back seat;
    while I drive
    they lean out open windows,
    letting the wind blow through them.

    When it rains
    they press pale cheeks
    to cool glass, watching
    ghostly reflections of light
    on wet pavement.

    Sometimes I think
    they fiddle with the radio
    when I’m not looking.


    Why else would tears
    spring to my eyes
    at a song that was never ours?
    Why else would I cry
    at a certain turn in the road,
    where spreading arms of valley oaks
    reach out in empty embrace?

    Sometimes I doubt,
    but if the dead do not stop by,
    why do I put down my fork,
    the food in my mouth suddenly
    ashes and dust?


    Why, then, do I wrap myself
    in blankets at night,
    warding off the dull chill
    of a room that is at once empty
    and too full to bear?

    - Lisa Shulman
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  11. TopTop #2196
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Hunkering


    In October the red leaves going brown heap and
    scatter
    over hayfield and dirt road, over garden and circular
    driveway,
    and rise in a curl of wind disheveled as
    schoolchildren
    at recess, school just starting and summer done,
    winter’s
    white quiet beginning in ice on the windshield, in
    hard frost
    that only blue asters survive, and in the long houses
    that once
    more tighten themselves for darkness and
    hunker down.
    - Donald Hall
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  13. TopTop #2197
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Let Evening Come


    Let the light of late afternoon
    shine through chinks in the barn, moving
    up the bales as the sun moves down.

    Let the cricket take up chafing
    as a woman takes up her needles
    and her yarn. Let evening come.

    Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
    in long grass. Let the stars appear
    and the moon disclose her silver horn.

    Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
    Let the wind die down. Let the shed
    go black inside. Let evening come.

    To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
    in the oats, to air in the lung
    let evening come.

    Let it come, as it will, and don’t
    be afraid. God does not leave us
    comfortless, so let evening come.

    - Jane Kenyon
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  15. TopTop #2198
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Fall Almost Nobody Sees


    Everybody’s gone away.
    They think there’s nothing left to see.
    The garish colors’ flashy show is over.
    Now those of us who stay
    hunker down in sweet silence,
    blessed emptiness among
    red-orange shadblow
    purple-red blueberry
    copper-brown beech
    gold tamarack, a few
    remaining pale yellow
    popple leaves,
    sedge and fern in shades
    from beige to darkening red
    to brown to almost black,
    and all this in front of, below,
    among blue-green spruce and fir
    and white pine,
    all of it under gray skies,
    chill air, all of us waiting
    in the somber dank and rain,
    waiting here in quiet, chill
    November,
    waiting for the snow.
    - David Budbill
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  17. TopTop #2199
    Michael Anthony
    Guest

    A Short Poem

    You are quick to call me Brother,
    In your made up Brotherhood.
    But you don't know that I know,
    What you wish you understood.

    For you are not my Brother,
    I know when I am down.
    You're just an acquaintance,
    Nowhere to be found.

    -Michael Anthony-
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  19. TopTop #2200
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Peace of Wild Things


    When despair grows in me
    and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
    in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
    I go and lie down where the wood drake
    rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
    I come into the peace of wild things
    who do not tax their lives with forethought
    of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
    And I feel above me the day-blind stars
    waiting for their light. For a time
    I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.


    - Wendell Berry
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  20. TopTop #2201
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    There Is No One But Us


    There is no one but us.
    There is no one to send,
    nor a clean hand nor a pure heart
    on the face of the earth,
    but only us,
    a generation comforting ourselves
    with the notion that we have come at an awkward time,
    that our innocent fathers are all dead
    - as if innocence had ever been -
    and our children busy and troubled,
    and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready,
    having each of us chosen wrongly,
    made a false start, failed,
    yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures,
    and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved.
    But there is no one but us.
    There never has been.


    - Annie Dillard
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  21. TopTop #2202
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Candles in Babylon


    Through the midnight streets of Babylon
    between the steel towers of their arsenals,
    between the torture castles with no windows,
    we race by barefoot, holding tight
    our candles, trying to shield
    the shivering flames, crying
    "Sleepers Awake!"
    hoping
    the rhyme's promise was true,
    that we may return
    from this place of terror
    home to a calm dawn and
    the work we had just begun.


    - Denise Levertov
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  23. TopTop #2203
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Do Not Be Ashamed


    You will be walking some night
    in the comfortable dark of your yard
    and suddenly a great light will shine
    round about you, and behind you
    will be a wall you never saw before.
    It will be clear to you suddenly
    that you were about to escape,
    and that you are guilty: you misread
    the complex instructions, you are not
    a member, you lost your card
    or never had one. And you will know
    that they have been there all along,
    their eyes on your letters and books,
    their hands in your pockets,
    their ears wired to your bed.
    Though you have done nothing shameful,
    they will want you to be ashamed.
    They will want you to kneel and weep
    and say you should have been like them.
    And once you say you are ashamed,
    reading the page they hold out to you,
    then such light as you have made
    in your history will leave you.
    They will no longer need to pursue you.
    You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.
    They will not forgive you.
    There is no power against them.
    It is only candor that is aloof from them,
    only an inward clarity, unashamed,
    that they cannot reach. Be ready.
    When their light has picked you out
    and their questions are asked, say to them:
    "I am not ashamed." A sure horizon
    will come around you. The heron will begin
    his evening flight from the hilltop.


    - Wendell Berry
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  24. TopTop #2204
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Samhain
    (The Celtic Halloween)
    In the season leaves should love,
    since it gives them leave to move

    through the wind, towards the ground
    they were watching while they hung,
    legend says there is a seam
    stitching darkness like a name.


    Now when dying grasses veil
    earth from the sky in one last pale
    wave, as autumn dies to bring
    winter back, and then the spring,
    we who die ourselves can peel
    back another kind of veil


    that hangs among us like thick smoke.
    Tonight at last I feel it shake.
    I feel the nights stretching away
    thousands long behind the days
    till they reach the darkness where
    all of me is ancestor.


    I move my hand and feel a touch
    move with me, and when I brush
    my own mind across another,
    I am with my mother's mother.
    Sure as footsteps in my waiting
    self, I find her, and she brings


    arms that carry answers for me,
    intimate, a waiting bounty.
    "Carry me." She leaves this trail
    through a shudder of the veil,
    and leaves, like amber where she stays,
    a gift for her perpetual gaze.


    - Annie Finch
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  26. TopTop #2205
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Harvest


    It’s autumn in the market—
    not wise anymore to buy tomatoes.
    They’re beautiful still on the outside,
    some perfectly round and red, the rare varieties
    misshapen, individual, like human brains covered in red oilcloth—
    Inside, they’re gone. Black, moldy—
    you can’t take a bite without anxiety.
    Here and there, among the tainted ones, a fruit
    still perfect, picked before decay set in.
    Instead of tomatoes, crops nobody really wants.
    Pumpkins, a lot of pumpkins.
    Gourds, ropes of dried chilies, braids of garlic.
    The artisans weave dead flowers into wreaths;
    they tie bits of colored yarn around dried lavender.
    And people go on for a while buying these things
    as though they thought the farmers would see to it
    that things went back to normal:
    the vines would go back to bearing new peas;
    the first small lettuces, so fragile, so delicate, would begin
    to poke out of the dirt.
    Instead, it gets dark early.
    And the rains get heavier; they carry
    the weight of dead leaves.
    At dusk, now, an atmosphere of threat, of foreboding.
    And people feel this themselves; they give a name to the season,
    harvest, to put a better face on these things.
    The gourds are rotting on the ground, the sweet blue grapes are finished.
    A few roots, maybe, but the ground’s so hard the farmers think
    it isn’t worth the effort to dig them out. For what?
    To stand in the marketplace under a thin umbrella, in the rain, in the cold,
    no customers anymore?
    And then the frost comes; there’s no more question of harvest.
    The snow begins; the pretense of life ends.
    The earth is white now; the fields shine when the moon rises.
    I sit at the bedroom window, watching the snow fall.
    The earth is like a mirror:
    calm meeting calm, detachment meeting detachment.
    What lives, lives underground.
    What dies, dies without struggle.
    - Louise Gluck
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  28. TopTop #2206
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Does It Matter?

    Does it matter? - losing your legs?
    For people will always be kind,
    And you need not show that you mind
    When others come in after hunting
    To gobble their muffins and eggs.
    Does it matter? - losing you sight?
    There’s such splendid work for the blind;
    And people will always be kind,
    As you sit on the terrace remembering
    And turning your face to the light.
    Do they matter-those dreams in the pit?
    You can drink and forget and be glad,
    And people won't say that you’re mad;
    For they know that you've fought for your country,
    And no one will worry a bit.

    - Siegfried Sassoon
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  30. TopTop #2207
    Timothy Gega
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson: View Post
    Does It Matter?

    Does it matter? - losing your legs?
    For people will always be kind,
    And you need not show that you mind
    When others come in after hunting
    To gobble their muffins and eggs.
    Does it matter? - losing you sight?
    There’s such splendid work for the blind;
    And people will always be kind,
    As you sit on the terrace remembering
    And turning your face to the light.
    Do they matter-those dreams in the pit?
    You can drink and forget and be glad,
    And people won't say that you’re mad;
    For they know that you've fought for your country,
    And no one will worry a bit.

    - Siegfried Sassoon
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  32. TopTop #2208
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Endless Streams and Mountains


    Clearing the mind and sliding in
    to that created space,
    a web of waters steaming over rocks,
    air misty but not raining,
    seeing this land from a boat on a lake
    or a broad slow river,
    coasting by.

    The path comes down along a lowland stream
    slips behind boulders and leafy hardwoods,
    reappears in a pine grove,

    no farms around, just tidy cottages and shelters,
    gateways, rest stops, roofed but unwalled work space,
    —a warm damp climate;

    a trail of climbing stairsteps forks upstream.
    Big ranges lurk behind these rugged little outcrops—
    these spits of low ground rocky uplifts
    layered pinnacles aslant,
    flurries of brushy cliffs receding,
    far back and high above, vague peaks.
    A man hunched over, sitting on a log
    another stands above him, lifts a staff,
    a third, with a roll of mats or a lute, looks on;
    a bit offshore two people in a boat.

    The trail goes far inland,
    somewhere back around a bay,
    lost in distant foothill slopes
    & back again
    at a village on the beach, and someone’s fishing.

    Rider and walker cross a bridge
    above a frothy braided torrent
    that descends from a flurry of roofs like flowers
    temples tucked between cliffs,
    a side trail goes there;

    a jumble of cliffs above,
    ridge tops edged with bushes,
    valley fog below a hazy canyon.

    A man with a shoulder load leans into the grade.
    Another horse and a hiker,
    the trail goes up along cascading streambed
    no bridge in sight—
    comes back through chinquapin or
    liquidambars; another group of travelers.
    Trail’s end at the edge of an inlet
    below a heavy set of dark rock hills.
    Two moored boats with basket roofing,
    a boatman in the bow looks
    lost in thought.

    Hills beyond rivers, willows in a swamp,
    a gentle valley reaching far inland.

    The watching boat has floated off the page.



    At the end of the painting the scroll continues on with seals and
    poems. It tells the a further tale:

    “—Wang Wen-wei saw this at the mayor’s house in Ho-tung
    town, year 1205. Wrote at the end of it,

    ‘The Fashioner of Things
    has no original intentions
    Mountains and rivers
    are spirit, condensed.’

    ‘. . . Who has come up with
    these miraculous forests and springs?
    Pale ink
    on fine white silk.’

    Later that month someone named Li Hui added,

    ‘. . . Most people can get along with the noise of dogs
    and chickens;
    Everybody cheerful in these peaceful times.
    But I—why are my tastes so odd?
    I love the company of streams and boulders.’

    T’ien Hsieh of Wei-lo, no date, next wrote,

    ‘. . . The water holds up the mountains,
    The mountains go down in the water . . .’

    In 1332 Chih-shun adds,

    ‘. . . This is truly a painting worth careful keeping.
    And it has poem-colophons from the Sung and the
    Chin dynasties. That it survived dangers of fire and
    war makes it even rarer.’

    In the mid-seventeenth century one Wang To had a look at it:

    ‘My brother’s relative by marriage, Wên-sun, is learned and
    has good taste. He writes good prose and poetry. My broth-
    er brought over this painting of his to show me . . .’

    The great Ch’ing dynasty collector Liang Ch’ing-piao owned it,
    but didn’t write on it or cover it with seals. From him it went into
    the Imperial collection down to the early twentieth century. Chang
    Ta-ch’ien sold it in 1949. Now it’s at the Cleveland Art Museum,
    which sits on a rise that looks out toward the waters of Lake Erie.



    Step back and gaze again at the land:
    it rises and subsides—

    ravines and cliffs like waves of blowing leaves—
    stamp the foot, walk with it, clap! turn,
    the creeks come in, ah!
    strained through boulders,
    mountains walking on the water,
    water ripples every hill.

    —I walk out of the museum—low gray clouds over the lake—
    chill March breeze.



    Old ghost ranges, sunken rivers, come again
    stand by the wall and tell their tale,
    walk the path, sit the rains,
    grind the ink, wet the brushes, unroll the
    broad white space:

    lead out and tip
    the moist black line.

    Walking on walking,
    under foot earth turns.

    Streams and mountains never stay the same.



    Note: A hand scroll by this name showed up in Shansi province, central China, in
    the thirteenth century. Even then the painter was unknown, “a person of the Sung
    Dynasty.” Now it’s on Turtle Island. Unroll the scroll to the left, a section at a time, as
    you let the right side roll back in. Place by place unfurls.

    - Gary Snyder
    Last edited by Barry; 11-12-2014 at 03:02 PM.
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  34. TopTop #2209
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Politics


    How can I, that girl standing there,
    My attention fix
    On Roman or on Russian
    Or on Spanish politics?
    Yet here's a travelled man that knows
    What he talks about,
    And there's a politician
    That has read and thought,
    And maybe what they say is true
    Of war and war's alarms,
    But O that I were young again
    And held her in my arms!


    - William Butler Yeats
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  35. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  36. TopTop #2210
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Name:  tch.jpeg
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    Please Call Me by My True Names


    Don't say that I will depart tomorrow -
    even today I am still arriving.

    Look deeply: every second I am arriving
    to be a bud on a Spring branch,
    to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
    learning to sing in my new nest,
    to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
    to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

    I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
    to fear and to hope.

    The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
    of all that is alive.

    I am the mayfly metamorphosing
    on the surface of the river.
    And I am the bird
    that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

    I am the frog swimming happily
    in the clear water of a pond.
    And I am the grass-snake
    that silently feeds itself on the frog.

    I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
    my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
    And I am the arms merchant,
    selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

    I am the twelve-year-old girl,
    refugee on a small boat,
    who throws herself into the ocean
    after being raped by a sea pirate.
    And I am the pirate,
    my heart not yet capable
    of seeing and loving.

    I am a member of the politburo,
    with plenty of power in my hands.
    And I am the man who has to pay
    his "debt of blood" to my people
    dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.

    My joy is like Spring, so warm
    it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
    My pain is like a river of tears,
    so vast it fills the four oceans.

    Please call me by my true names,
    so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once,
    so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

    Please call me by my true names,
    so I can wake up,
    and so the door of my heart
    can be left open,
    the door of compassion.

    - Thich Nhat Hanh


    https://plumvillage.org/news/our-bel...eid=fd3ed12f1a
    Last edited by Bella Stolz; 11-14-2014 at 03:01 PM.
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  37. Gratitude expressed by 6 members:

  38. TopTop #2211
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Autumn


    All day I have watched the purple vine leaves
    Fall into the water.
    And now in the moonlight they still fall,
    But each leaf is fringed with silver.


    - Amy Lowell
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  39. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  40. TopTop #2212
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Convergences


    At sixteen he dismisses his mother with contempt.
    She hears with dread the repulsive wave’s approach
    and her fifty-year-old body smothers under water.


    An old man loses half his weight, as if by stealth,
    but finds in his shed his great-grandfather’s knobbly cane,
    and hobbles toward youth beside the pond’s swart water.


    She listens to the dun-colored whippoorwill’s
    three-beat before dawn, and again when dusk
    enters the cornfield parched and wanting water.


    He imagines but cannot bring himself to believe
    that the dead woman enters his house disguised
    or that the young rabbi made vin rouge from water.


    Within the poem he and she—hot, cold, and luke—
    converge into flesh of vowels and consonant bones
    or into uncanny affection of earth for water.


    - Donald Hall
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  41. Gratitude expressed by:

  42. TopTop #2213
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Crescent Moon


    Last night I spied the crescent moon again
    Her beautiful delicate face hovering shyly over the trees
    Is it really a month since last we danced together?

    Returning later I look in vain for her
    She has already slipped away behind the trees

    This morning I seem to see her everywhere
    The curve of the cat's leg in the sun
    The swirl of water circling in the sink
    The smile of a friend

    So nice to glimpse her through the trees
    So nice of her to think of me.


    - Tim Walters
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  43. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  44. TopTop #2214
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Autumn's Crucible


    In autumn’s cool chamber,
    Beauty builds a fire.
    Pen-point becomes
    flint, and paper tinder
    when the leaves are
    paler than the thin
    afternoon moon
    that’s as transparent
    as a cloud
    and the evergreens stand by
    watching their deciduous cousins
    self-immolate,
    each burning
    unique.
    Autumn's long farewell
    leaves time
    to fare
    well.



    - Max Reif
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  45. Gratitude expressed by:

  46. TopTop #2215
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Serving with Gideon

    Now I remember: in our town the druggist
    prescribed Coca-Cola mostly, in tapered
    glasses to us, and to the elevator
    man in a paper cup, so he could
    drink it elsewhere because he was black.

    And now I remember The Legion—gambling
    in the back room, and no women but girls, old boys
    who ran the town. They were generous,
    to their sons or the sons of friends.
    And of course I was almost one.

    I remember winter light closing
    its great blue fist slowly eastward
    along the street, and the dark, then, deep
    as war, arched over a radio show
    called the thirties in the great old U.S.A.

    Look down, stars—I was almost
    one of the boys. My mother was folding
    her handkerchief; the library seethed and sparkled;
    right and wrong arced; and carefully
    I walked with my cup toward the elevator man.


    - William Stafford
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  47. Gratitude expressed by 5 members:

  48. TopTop #2216
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Touched by An Angel

    We, unaccustomed to courage
    exiles from delight
    live coiled in shells of loneliness
    until love leaves its high holy temple
    and comes into our sight
    to liberate us into life.

    Love arrives
    and in its train come ecstasies
    old memories of pleasure
    ancient histories of pain.
    Yet if we are bold,
    love strikes away the chains of fear
    from our souls.

    We are weaned from our timidity
    In the flush of love's light
    we dare be brave
    And suddenly we see
    that love costs all we are
    and will ever be.
    Yet it is only love
    which sets us free.
    - Maya Angelou
    Last edited by Barry; 11-20-2014 at 02:56 PM.
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  49. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  50. TopTop #2217
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    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. Claiming me
    like anything else: the round luck
    of her supper dish or the bliss
    of rabbits, their infinite
    grassy cities. Her lips
    and teeth circled
    and pressed, tireless
    pressure of the world
    that pushes against you
    to see if you're there,
    and I could feel myself
    inside myself again, muscle
    to bone to the slippery
    core where I knew
    next to nothing
    about love. She wrapped
    my arm as a woman might wrap
    her hand through the loop
    of a leash-as if she
    were the one holding me
    at the edge of a busy street,
    instructing me to stay.


    - Kasey Jueds
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  51. TopTop #2218
    Timothy Gega
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson: View Post
    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. Claiming me
    like anything else:

    of a leash-as if she
    were the one holding me
    at the edge of a busy street,
    instructing me to stay.


    - Kasey Jueds
    adorable poem
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  52. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  53. TopTop #2219
    AllorrahBe
    Guest

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    I could almost feel her hot breath on my wrist as she encircled it with her jaw...
    so real!


    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Timothy Gega: View Post
    adorable poem
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  54. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  55. TopTop #2220
    Timothy Gega
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by AllorrahBe: View Post
    I could almost feel her hot breath on my wrist as she encircled it with her jaw...
    so real!
    Yes, AllorahBe, this poet has such a great imagination, (if even in a metaphorical way).
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