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  1. TopTop #181
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Conscientious Objector

    I shall die, but that is all I shall do for Death.

    I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
    I hear the clatter on the barn door.
    He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
    business in the Balkans,
    many calls to make this morning.
    But I will not hold the bridle while he cinches the girth.
    And he may mount by himself: I will not give hime a leg up.

    Though he flick my shoulders with his whip, I will not
    Tell him which way the fox ran.
    With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
    The black boy hides in the swamp.
    I shall die, but that is all I shall do for Death; I am not
    on his payroll.

    I will not tell him the whereabouts of my friends, nor of
    my enemies either.
    Though he promise me much,
    I will not map him the route to any man’s door.
    Am I a spy in the land of the living that I should deliver
    men to Death?
    Brother, the password and the plans of our city are safe
    with me; never through me
    Shall you be overcome.

    - Edna St. Vincent Millay
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  2. TopTop #182
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Fuchsia

    Even in late November, if you watch closely,
    You can see a fuchsia begin to unfold in the morning sun.
    Creamy outer lips open to reveal, at first shyly,
    Then with great dignity, the stamen and pistil.

    Inner lips of deeper reds are licked by a golden tongue.
    Are they tasting the air? Are they beckoning the beloved?
    Are they praying?
    Surely it is too late in the year for bees .

    Then, miracle of miracles! An Anna's hummingbird
    Thrumming from behind the redwood
    With its ruby throat and day-glo green cloak
    Casually and delicately - but oh so precisely-
    Dips in that remarkable tongue to the very core of that sweet, small fire, blessing and being blessed.

    Jesus spoke of the lilies of the field.
    But until this morning, I didn't really understand.
    When you fully open your heart to the World,
    No matter how late it is,
    The World, like a lover, unlocks for you
    All the doors of its treasure house.

    - Larry Robinson
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  3. TopTop #183
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    I love the dark hours of my being.
    My mind deepens into them.
    There I can find, as in old letters,
    the days of my life, already lived,
    and held like a legend, and understood.

    Then the knowing comes: I can open
    to another life that's wide and timeless.

    So I am sometimes like a tree
    rustling over a gravesite
    and making real the dream
    of the one its living roots
    embrace:

    a dream once lost
    among sorrows and songs.


    - Ranier Maria Rilke
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  4. TopTop #184
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Truro Bear

    There’s a bear in the Truro woods.
    People have seen it - three or four,
    or two, or one. I think
    of the thickness of the serious woods
    around the dark bowls of the Truro ponds;
    I think of the blueberry fields, the blackberry tangles,
    the cranberry bogs. And the sky
    with its new moon, its familiar star-trails,
    burns down like a brand-new heaver,
    while everywhere I look on the scratchy hillsides
    shadows seem to grow shoulders. Surely
    a beast might be clever, be lucky, move quietly
    through the woods for years, learning to stay away
    from roads and houses. Common sense mutters:
    it can’t be true, it must be somebody’s
    runaway dog. But the seed
    has been planted, and when has happiness ever
    required much evidence to begin
    its leaf-green breathing?

    - Mary Oliver
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  5. TopTop #185
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Drinking Love

    Do you see what happens to you when you haven’t had a drink of love?

    Nasty weather spreads across your face
    until your eyes cloud with such sadness
    that children become frightened
    and even you own mirror won’t look back at you.

    The creatures around you, begin to worry about your loneliness
    And soon birds assemble in the tops of the trees
    Wondering what songs they might sing to bring solace to your soul.

    Even the angels become alarmed
    by your heedless rush to war with anyone
    and your gathering of stones to hurl
    at the innocent... and at yourself

    I see what happens to you when you haven’t been out drinking love
    carousing among the friends of forgiveness, in the taverns of love

    You step farther and farther back
    analyzing, calculating, ferreting out
    the hidden clauses you’re convinced are there
    in the simplest conversations.

    You weigh each word like a dead fish.

    You grab that cockeyed ruler of yours
    and from your darkness begin to measure the angles
    in a radiant heart you once trusted.

    This is how you get, my dear, when you
    foolishly refuse to drink from love's hand.

    This is why the teachers of simplicity
    urge us – keep remembering god,
    keep remembering god, keep remembering
    so that you will come to know that he is here,
    gently watching, sweetly waiting for you to accept his help.

    And this is why Hafiz calls to you
    “Come, come, bring your cup.
    I have an endlessly leaking barrel of light and laughter
    which the beloved has strapped to my back.
    and I want, more than all the world,
    to quench your thirst.”

    Drink this freedom and you will know
    that the sanest, happiest, richest among us
    are those who want nothing more than to give love.

    - Hafiz
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  6. TopTop #186
    RexCasteel
    Guest

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    At first I laughed out loud. Now I sit, only shaking my head from side to side...

    Thank you, Larry.

    - R

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson: View Post
    Drinking Love

    Do you see what happens to you when you haven’t had a drink of love?

    Nasty weather spreads across your face
    until your eyes cloud with such sadness
    that children become frightened...

    - Hafiz
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  7. TopTop #187
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Dead List

    Black and cold outside, sunrise veiled by storm clouds.
    A robin perches high in the oak outside the kitchen window to begin his daily chatter. I say my customary “good morning” to him.

    Steam rises from my coffee cup; first sip tastes best.
    Always intrigued reading obituaries in the morning paper;
    people’s lives reduced to a handful of words.

    “I check the dead list,” Tony, my neighbor used to say; he was a World War I veteran, fought for Italy. “My name not on list. Good day today!” Sad when his name finally appeared; I miss him; made me laugh, his irreverence toward the pope; telling me my back spasms were because I wasn’t getting enough; the man in me laughing, the altar boy embarrassed.

    Sad when the old die; tragic when they’re young. Saw an infant’s coffin at a funeral once, it was carried by a single pallbearer. Philip, my best friend in the sixth grade died one rainy afternoon. The cave he had been digging collapsed in on him. Next day his desk was empty. Ma showed me his obituary. Young woman widowed last year; her husband killed in the war; she pregnant with their first; named the boy after his father.

    Timeless this checking of dead lists, lists from Thermopylae, from Waterloo, Bull Run, Normandy, Da Nang, Baghdad. A mother’s dread realized.

    We will not see the coffins bearing America’s colors return home. No day of mourning for them. Each blood sacrifice reduced to an item in the obits.

    I consider making another cup of coffee but the kitchen lights flicker as flashes of lightning crack, explode, rumble through the valley shattering the predawn peace. My house trembles, window panes shake. Without mercy rain and hail pound apple trees in the orchard their blossoms fall to the ground, fruit that will never be realized. A vicious wind fells the oak, its roots point toward heaven. I hear nothing more from the robin.

    - Armando Garcia-Dávila
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  8. TopTop #188
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Finding Intelligent Design

    "You don't have to look
    anything farther than the sinuses
    to refute Intelligent Design," my doctor says.
    Yet it's plain as my nose that
    Divinity has seated itself, like a satisfied old woman
    on the park bench of her psyche.

    So what of it?
    The design we seek in the material
    hides like a defiant child.

    Trapped as we are
    in three dimensions,
    with our intelligence,
    looking for Intelligence
    is like seeking a galaxy
    with a microscope.

    - Rebecca del Rio
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  9. TopTop #189
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    If Poetry Were Not Morality

    It is likely I would not have devoted myself to poetry in this world which remains insensitive to it, if poetry were not morality.
    Jean Cocteau, Past Tense

    I'm the kind of woman who
    when she hears Bobby McPherin sing without words
    for the first time on the car radio has to
    pull over and park with the motor
    running. And Cecil Taylor, I pulled over
    for him too, even though later the guy
    at the record store said he was just
    'a side man.' Something he did with silence and
    mixing classical with I'm-worried-about-this-but-I
    have-to-go-this-way-anyhow. This not letting me
    go. What did you do, the guy asked me, when you
    pulled over? Smiled, I said, sat

    and smiled. If the heart could be that simple. The photo
    of Gandhi's last effects taped near
    my typewriter: eyeglasses, sandals, writing paper
    and pen, low lap sized writing desk and something
    white in the foreground like a bedroll.
    Every so often, I glance at this, just paper torn
    from a book, and wish I could get down to
    that, a few essentials, no
    more. So when I left this place it would be
    humbly, as in those welfare funerals my mother
    used to scorn because the county always bought

    the cheapest coffins, no satin lining, and if you
    wanted the dead to look comfortable
    you had to supply your own
    pillow. I still admire her hating to see the living
    come off cheap in their homage to any life. She
    was Indian enough so the kids used to
    taunt me home with "Your mother's a squaw!"
    Cherokee she said. And though nobody
    told me, I knew her grandfather had to be
    one of those chiefs who could never

    get enough horses. Who, if he had two hundred,
    wanted a hundred more and a hundred more
    after that. Maybe he'd get up in the night and go
    out among them, or watch their grazing
    from a distance under moonlight. He'd pass his mind
    over them where they pushed their muzzles into
    each other's flanks and necks and their horseness
    gleamed back at him like soundless music until
    he knew something he couldn't know
    as only himself, something not to be told again
    even by writing down the doing

    of it. I meet him like that sometimes,
    wordless and perfect, with more horses than he
    can ride or trade or even know why
    he has. His completeness needs to be stern, measuring
    what he stands to lose. His eyes
    are bronze, his heart is bronze with the mystery
    of it. Yet it will change his sleep
    to have gazed beyond memory, I think, without sadness or
    fear onto the flowing backs of horses. I look down
    and see that his feet are bare, and I
    have never seen such beautiful prideless feet set
    on the earth. He must know what he's doing, I think, he
    must not need to forgive himself the way I do

    because this bounty pours onto me
    so I'm crushed by surrender, heaped and
    scattered and pounded into the dust with wanting more,
    wanting feet like that to drive back
    the shame that wants to know why
    I have to go through the world like an overwrought
    magnet, like the greedy Braille of so many
    about-to-be-lost memories. Why can't I just
    settle down by the side of the road and turn the music
    up on one of those raw, uncoffined voices of
    the dead --Bob Marley, Billie Holiday or the way Piaf
    sang 'Je Ne Regrette Rien" so that when

    the purled horse in the music asks what I want with it
    we are swept aside by there being no answer except
    not to be dead to each other, except for
    those few moments to belong beyond deserving to
    that sumptuousness of presence, so the heart
    stays simple like the morality of
    a robin, the weight of living so clear a mandate
    it includes everything about this junkshop
    of a life. And even some of our soon-to-be-deadness
    catches up to us
    as joy, as more horses than we need.

    - Tess Gallagher
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  10. TopTop #190
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    THE USES OF BEAUTY

    1

    Sundays, Father would take us
    to a slough behind the Mississippi.
    There, among the cypress stumps,
    we'd fish the afternoon away.
    Sitting with pole in hand one day,
    I heard a splash and turned my head
    to see a nearby pool alive!.
    Its liquid silver boiled up
    gleaming, rainbow forms
    that broke the surface,
    then dove down again
    in streamlined arcs.

    Had the sun itself
    divided into shards
    and come down here?
    Were these Apollo's fish,
    swimming in their sacred pool?

    Picking up my net, I trapped
    those flashing wonders, one by one,
    exulting in each success. Soon
    no more living miracles
    disturbed the water.
    We took them home.
    I don't remember
    if we even
    fried them up.

    2

    The first time I saw mountains,
    we were driving through the Ozarks,
    from St. Louis to Hot Springs.
    The highway wound. Suddenly,
    an overlook: valley, hills and sky;
    a million trees, a haze; a harmony.
    We parked, got out. My spirit
    flew, expanding,
    out into that great bowl;
    and returned in silent wonder.

    And then my thoughts caught up.
    My body remembered knots.
    My mind churned out the question:
    ”What do you do with all that Beauty?”

    3

    Half a century has passed.
    If I were with that boy
    I used to be, I’d tell him
    “Beauty’s all there is;”
    then take him in my arms
    and hold him till he quieted
    enough to know it’s true.

    - Max Reif
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  11. TopTop #191
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Spiritual Chickens

    A man eats a chicken every day for lunch, and each day the ghost of another chicken joins the crowd in the dining room. If he could only see them! Hundreds and hundreds of spiritual chickens, sitting on chairs, tables, covering the floor, jammed shoulder to shoulder. At last there is no more space and one of the chickens is popped back across the spiritual plain to the earthly. The man is in the process of picking his teeth. Suddenly there is a chicken at the end of the table, strutting back and forth, not looking at the man but knowing he is there, as is the way with chickens. The man makes a grab for the chicken but his hand passes right through her. He tries to hit the chicken with a chair and the chair passes through her. He calls in his wife but she can see nothing. This is his own private chicken, even if he fails to recognize her. How is he to know this is a chicken he ate seven years ago on a hot and steamy Wednesday in July, with a little tarragon, a little sour cream? The man grows afraid. He runs out of his house flapping his arms and making peculiar hops until the authorities take him away for a cure. Faced with the choice between something odd in the world or something broken in his head, he opts for the broken head. Certainly, this is safer than putting his opinions in jeopardy. Much better to think he had imagined it, that he had made it happen. Meanwhile, the chicken struts back and forth at the end of the table. Here she was, jammed in with the ghosts of six thousand dead hens, when suddenly she has the whole place to herself. Even the nervous man has disappeared. If she had a brain, she would think she had caused it. She would grow vain, egotistical, she would look for someone to fight, but being a chicken she can just enjoy it and make little squawks, silent to all except the man who ate her, who is far off banging his head against a wall like someone trying to repair a leaky vessel, making certain that nothing unpleasant gets in or nothing of value falls out. How happy he would have been to be born a chicken, to be of good use to his fellow creatures and rich in companionship after death. As it is he is constantly being squeezed between the world and his idea of the world. Better to have a broken head--why surrender his corner on the truth?--better just to go crazy.

    - Stephen Dobyns
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  12. TopTop #192
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Cleaning Up After the Poetry Salon

    It's not always easy.

    Proper nouns are manageable.
    They stack well.
    Biggest on the bottom -
    The Great Plains, Idaho, Mt. Rainier -
    then the smaller stuff left behind -
    Boxcars, photographs, you know.

    Adjectives are remarkably tough to clean up.
    The dry ones catch on the furniture,
    bury themselves in cracks
    hide in the pocket of an old sweater.
    They crumble to awkward, ungainly,
    unmanageable, yes fragile
    pieces …that somehow cunningly avoid
    the shedding broom some poet has
    left behind.
    And wet ones like sticky and slimy - yikes!

    Cleaning up the leavings of Wendell Berry?
    it's a grange meeting hall.
    Rich black dirt everywhere,
    corn stalks, the lingering thick odor of
    compost and just a hint of cow manure
    on your shoes and your best carpet.

    And Jesus! Those poems about stars -
    the poets have no idea.
    Whole constellations left behind -
    Watch it with the Pleides, they have sharp points
    And yes, the Dog Star does bite.

    My rule would be -
    you brought 'em, you take 'em home.

    Food is good in a poem.
    Mom's apple pie and romantic dinner's for two
    are usually digested by the salon - no leftovers.
    It's the ethnic dishes with strange names
    luedafisk, sauerkraut, gefiltafish
    and anything made with hot peppers
    Well, you know.

    Poets - a little consideration -
    slip in some sponges, maybe
    a mop or really - just a mouthful of food,
    a spoonful -
    yes, spoons for everybody.

    And come on,
    no animals bigger than a cat or small dog.
    polar bears and coyotes are disasters.

    Oh I could go on…
    mixed metaphors sliding
    down the walls and tangled
    in the drapes.

    Cliches hiding their heads in the corners.
    shy, embarrassed marmots standing by dead seals.
    stinking sea weed and sharks behind the sofa
    And fish - fish beyond number -
    flopping on the floor.

    Verbs are easy - they move around
    so much - just
    open the door and they
    take care of themselves.

    But poets,
    It's the birds left behind…
    Egret, Robin, wrens, a flock of seagulls,
    a murder of crows…
    For God's sake leave a window open.

    But eagle, oh my friends, the eagle
    he glowers there
    from the chandelier
    Royally pissed!
    A moment in a poem
    then forgotten
    in the closed room.

    I know, I know.
    I'm making a new mess now -
    I'll need some help here with
    Idaho and that eagle.

    For the rest
    I brought 'em.
    I'll take 'em home.

    - Doug von Koss
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  13. TopTop #193
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Walking Through a Wall

    Unlike flying or astral projection, walking through walls is a totally earth-related craft, but a lot more interesting than pot making or driftwood lamps. I got started at a picnic up in Bowstring in the northern part of the state. A fellow walked through a brick wall right there in the park. I said “Say, I want to try that.” Stone walls are best, then brick and wood. Wooden walls with fiberglass insulation and steel doors aren’t so good. They won’t hurt you. If your wall walking is done properly, both you and the wall are left intact. It is just that they aren’t pleasant somehow. The worst things are wire fences, maybe it’s the molecular structure of the alloy or just the amount of give in a fence. I don’t know, but I’ve torn my jacket and lost my hat in a lot of fences. The best approach to a wall is, first, two hands placed flat against the surface; it’s a matter of concentration and just the right pressure. You will feel the dry, cool inner wall with your fingers, then there is a moment of total darkness before you step through to the other side.

    - Louis Jenkins
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  14. TopTop #194
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    we are running

    running and
    time is clocking us
    from the edge like an only
    daughter.
    our mothers stream before us,
    cradling their breasts in their
    hands.
    oh pray that what we want
    is worth this running,
    pray that what we’re running
    toward
    is what we want.

    - Lucille Clifton
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  15. TopTop #195
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Amazing Peace

    Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
    And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
    Flood waters await us in our avenues.

    Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to
    avalanche
    Over unprotected villages.
    The sky slips low and grey and threatening.

    We question ourselves.
    What have we done
    to so affront nature?
    We worry God.
    Are you there? Are you there really?
    Does the covenant you made with us still hold?

    Into this climate of fear and apprehension,
    Christmas enters,
    Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
    And singing carols of forgiveness
    high up in the bright air.
    The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
    Come the way of friendship.

    It is the Glad Season.
    Thunder ebbs to silence
    and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.
    Flood waters recede into memory.
    Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us
    As we make our way to higher ground.

    Hope is born again in the faces of children
    It rides on the shoulders of our aged
    as they walk into their sunsets.
    Hope spreads around the earth,
    brightening all things,
    Even hate which crouches,
    breeding in dark corridors.

    In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.
    At first it is too soft.
    Then only half heard.
    We listen carefully as it gathers strength.
    We hear a sweetness.
    The word is Peace.
    It is loud now.
    It is louder.
    Louder than the explosion of bombs.

    We tremble at the sound.
    We are thrilled by its presence.
    It is what we have hungered for.
    Not just the absence of war.
    But true Peace.
    A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.
    Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.

    We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.
    We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.
    We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come.
    Peace.
    Come and fill us and our world with your majesty.
    We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
    Implore you to stay a while with us.
    So we may learn by your shimmering light
    How to look beyond complexion and see community.

    It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.

    On this platform of peace, we can create a language
    To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.

    At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ
    Into the great religions of the world.
    We jubilate the precious advent of trust.
    We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope.
    All the earth's tribes loosen their voices
    To celebrate the promise of Peace.

    We, Angels and Mortals, Believers and Non-Believers,
    Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
    Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
    Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves
    And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.


    Peace, My Brother.
    Peace, My Sister.
    Peace, My Soul.

    - Maya Angelou
    Last edited by Larry Robinson; 01-21-2017 at 02:29 AM.
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  16. TopTop #196
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Bad Old Days

    The summer of nineteen eighteen
    I read The Jungle and The
    Research Magnificent. That fall
    My father died and my aunt
    Took me to Chicago to live.
    The first thing I did was to take
    A streetcar to the stockyards.
    In the winter afternoon,
    Gritty and fetid, I walked
    Through the filthy snow, through the
    Squalid streets, looking shyly
    Into the people’s faces,
    Those who were home in the daytime.
    Debauched and exhausted faces,
    Starved and looted brains, faces
    Like the faces in the senile
    And insane wards of charity
    Hospitals. Predatory
    Faces of little children.
    Then as the soiled twilight darkened,
    Under the green gas lamps, and the
    Sputtering purple arc lamps,
    The faces of the men coming
    Home from work, some still alive with
    The last pulse of hope or courage,
    Some sly and bitter, some smart and
    Silly, most of them already
    Broken and empty, no life,
    Only blinding tiredness, worse
    Than any tired animal.
    The sour smells of a thousand
    Suppers of fried potatoes and
    Fried cabbage bled into the street.
    I was giddy and sick, and out
    Of my misery I felt rising
    A terrible anger and out
    Of the anger, an absolute vow.
    Today the evil is clean
    And prosperous, but it is
    Everywhere, you don’t have to
    Take a streetcar to find it,
    And it is the same evil.
    And the misery, and the
    Anger, and the vow are the same.

    - Kenneth Rexroth
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  17. TopTop #197
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Red Wheelbarrow

    so much depends
    upon

    a red wheel
    barrow

    glazed with rain
    water

    beside the white
    chickens


    - William Carlos Williams
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  18. TopTop #198
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Imagining

    What if God isnʼt a noun
    to be empowered and worshiped
    but a verb of creation
    powered by love?

    What if every single tree
    drawn in primary school
    is a sacred work of art
    worthy of joyful notice?

    What if our lives are built
    on a web of kindness,
    a net,
    which holds everything living.

    What if the rocks are alive
    singing strength and courage;
    vibrating
    from our feet right up to our heart?

    What if we loved ourselves
    as deeply as the mountain
    who,
    caressed by water,
    surrenders herself
    into sand?

    What if our most loved,
    intra-national pastime
    is a game of entertainment
    where we all win?

    What if no one aspired
    to be a millionaire
    and money no longer had power
    but was simply a means of tender-ness.

    What if transforming our world
    by imagining it
    can
    actually make it happen?

    - Deborah Rodney
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  19. TopTop #199
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Some Questions about the Storm

    What's the bird ratio overhead?
    Zero: zero. Maybe it's El Niño?

    The storm, was it bad?
    Here the worst ever. Every tree hurt.

    Do you love trees?
    Only the gingko, the fir, the birch.

    Yours? Do you name your trees?
    Who owns the trees? Who's talking

    You presume a dialogue. Me and You.
    Yes. Your fingers tap. I'm listening.

    Will you answer? Why mention trees?
    When the weather turned rain into ice, the leaves failed.

    So what? Every year leaves fail. The cycle. Birth to death.
    In the night the sound of cannon, and death everywhere.

    What did you see?
    Next morning, roots against the glass.

    Who's talking now and in familiar language? Get real.
    What's real is the broken crown. The trunk shattered.

    Was that storm worse than others?
    Yes and no. The wind's torque twisted open the tree's tibia.

    Fool. You're talking about vegetables. Do you love the patio
    tomato? The Christmas cactus?
    Yes. And the magnolia on the roof, the felled crabapple, the topless
    spruce.

    - Hilda Raz
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  20. TopTop #200
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
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    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Street Cleaner

    She had a purpose
    Cleaning the streets
    Some days it was dirt
    Some days it was trash
    And some days it was
    Rose petals
    From the funeral marches
    Strewn on the road
    By insane motheres and fathers
    Who lost their sons and daughter
    Infants and grand-children
    To war

    She heard the voices
    Which arose from the dead
    Bodies never buried

    With her broom in hand
    She dutifully
    Made circles of rose petals
    In the quiet places
    To honor them
    A touch of beauty
    She thought
    In this time of darknes
    Then she moved on
    Her palm frond broom in hand
    Cleaning

    - Corlene Van Sluizer
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  21. TopTop #201
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
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    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Terza Rima

    In this great form, as Dante proved in Hell,
    There is no dreadful thing that can't be said
    In passing. Here, for instance, one could tell

    How our jeep skidded sideways toward the dead
    Enemy soldier with the staring eyes,
    Bumping a little as it struck his head,

    And then flew on, as if towards Paradise.

    - Richard Wilbur
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  22. TopTop #202
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Autumn Passage

    On suffering, which is real.
    On the mouth that never closes,
    the air that dries the mouth.

    On the miraculous dying body,
    its greens and purples.
    On the beauty of hair itself.

    On the dazzling toddler:
    “Like eggplant,” he says,
    when you say “Vegetable,”

    “Chrysanthemum” to “Flower.”
    On his grandmother’s suffering, larger
    than vanished skyscrapers,

    September zucchini,
    other things too big. For her glory
    that goes along with it,

    glory of grown children’s vigil.
    communal fealty, glory
    of the body that operates

    even as it falls apart, the body
    that can no longer even make fever
    but nonetheless burns

    florid and bright and magnificent
    as it dims, as it shrinks,
    as it turns to something else.

    - Elizabeth Alexander
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  23. TopTop #203
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    *Monet Refuses the Operation
    *
    Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
    around the streetlights in Paris
    and what I see is an aberration
    caused by old age, an affliction.
    I tell you it has taken me all my life
    to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
    to soften and blur and finally banish
    the edges you regret I don't see,
    to learn that the line I called the horizon
    does not exist and sky and water,
    so long apart, are the same state of being.
    Fifty-four years before I could see
    Rouen cathedral is built
    of parallel shafts of sun,
    and now you want to restore
    my youthful errors: fixed
    notions of top and bottom,
    the illusion of three-dimensional space,
    wisteria separate
    from the bridge it covers.
    What can I say to convince you
    the Houses of Parliament dissolve
    night after night to become
    the fluid dream of the Thames?
    I will not return to a universe
    of objects that don't know each other,
    as if islands were not the lost children
    of one great continent.* The world
    is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
    becomes water, lilies on water,
    above and below water,
    becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
    and white and cerulean lamps,
    small fists passing sunlight
    so quickly to one another
    that it would take long, streaming hair
    inside my brush to catch it.
    To paint the speed of light!
    Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
    burn to mix with air
    and changes our bones, skin, clothes
    to gases.* Doctor,
    if only you could see
    how heaven pulls earth into its arms
    and how infinitely the heart expands
    to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
    *
    - Lisel Mueller
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  24. TopTop #204
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Praise What Comes

    surprising as unplanned kisses, all you haven't deserved
    of days and solitude, your body's immoderate good health
    that lets you work in many kinds of weather. Praise

    talk with just about anyone. And quiet intervals, books
    that are your food and your hunger; nightfall and walks
    before sleep. Praising these for practice, perhaps

    you will come at last to praise grief and the wrongs
    you never intended. At the end there may be no answers
    and only a few very simple questions: did I love,

    finish my task in the world? Learn at least one
    of the many names of God? At the intersections,
    the boundaries where one life began and another

    ended, the jumping-off places between fear and
    possibility, at the ragged edges of pain,
    did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy?

    - Jeanne Lohmann
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  25. TopTop #205
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Gautama Christ

    The names of God and especially those of His representative
    Who is called Jesus or Christ according to holy books and
    someone's mouth
    These names have been used, worn out and left
    On the shores of rivers of of human lives
    Like the empty shells of a mollusk.
    However when we touch these sacred but exhausted
    Names, these wounded scattered petals
    Which have come out of the oceans of love and fear
    Something still remains, a sip of water,
    A rainbow footprint that still shimmers in the light.

    While the names of God were used
    By the best and the worst, by the clean and the dirty
    By the white and the black, by bloody murderers
    And by victims flaming gold with napalm
    While Nixon with his hands
    Of Cain blessed those whom he condemned to death,
    While fewer and fewer divine footprints were found
    on the beach
    People began to study colors,
    The future of honey, the sign of uranium
    They looked with anxiety and hope for the possibilities
    Of killing themselves or not killing themselves, of organizing
    themselves into a fabric
    Of going further on, of breaking through limits without stopping

    What we came across in these blood thirsty times
    With their smoke of burning trash, their dead ashes
    As we weren't able to stop looking
    We often stopped to look at the names of God
    We lifted them with tenderness because they reminded us
    Of our ancestors, of the first people, those who said the prayers
    Those who discovered the hymn that united them in misfortune
    And now seeing the empty fragments which sheltered those
    ancient people
    We feel those smooth substances,
    Worn out and used up by good and by evil.

    - Pablo Neruda
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  26. TopTop #206
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    A Penitent Considers Another Coming of Mary

    For Reverend Theodore Richardson

    If Mary came would Mary
    Forgive, as Mothers may,
    And sad and second Saviour
    Furnish us today?

    She would not shake her head and leave
    This military air,
    But ratify a modern hay,
    And put her Baby there.

    Mary would not punish men—
    If Mary came again.

    - Gwendolyn Brooks
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  27. TopTop #207
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    What, Friends, Is A Life?

    for Gabe Gudding

    Killing a chicken for dinner always prompted
    A quarrel about who had to do it. Today

    You can take tours of virtual slave ships.
    Many people are drawn to the dead

    On their holidays. Because of its abundance
    A large section of Birkenau was named Canada.

    You could get good boots there & sometimes
    A silk shawl or a jar of pickled herring. But it was

    In America that fake birds were first made
    To attract native fowl. The most familiar kinds

    Of camouflage make one thing appear to be two,
    Two things one & so on. Camouflage artists

    Make it an arduous challenge to see a figure
    On a ground (blending) or to distinguish one

    Category of object from another (mimicry).
    Less familiar but far more effective is dazzle

    Camouflage in which a single thing appears
    To be a hodgepodge of disparate components.

    At Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the actors say
    The audience always pays better attention

    When it’s raining. Mother loved the sun,
    She said, because its rays felt like ink to her

    Fingers. Honestly I don’t understand many
    People. But, Friends, if you plan on dying

    By your own hand, don’t use pills. Swallowing
    Is simply another way of marking time.

    - Mark Yakich
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  28. TopTop #208
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    I, Too

    I, too, sing America.

    I am the darker brother.
    They send me to eat in the kitchen
    When company comes,
    But I laugh,
    And eat well,
    And grow strong.

    Tomorrow,
    I’ll be at the table
    When company comes.
    Nobody’ll dare
    Say to me,
    “Eat in the kitchen,”
    Then.

    Besides,
    They’ll see how beautiful I am
    And be ashamed—

    I, too, am America.

    - Langston Hughes
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  29. TopTop #209
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Reverse Living

    Life is tough.
    It takes up a lot of your time. All your weekends.
    And what do you get at the end of it -
    Death - A great reward.
    I think that the life cycle is all backwards.
    You should die first. Get it out of the way.
    Then you live 20 years in an old folks home.
    You get kicked out when you're too young.
    You get a good watch. You go to work.
    You work for 40 years until you are young enough to enter college.
    You learn to party until you are ready for High School.
    You go to High School, Grade School,
    You become a little kid.
    You play, you have no responsibilities.
    You become a little baby.
    You go back into the womb.
    You spend the last nine months floating
    Only to finish off as a gleam in somebodies eye.

    - Lynne Vance
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  30. TopTop #210
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Hour Glass

    It was but twelve months ago that the hour glass that is 2008 was turned. And now we watch in anticipation as the final grains of sand follow one another to end the year.

    A man with a long white beard who needs a cane to help him remain on his feet takes the hand of the child in diapers standing on his plump little legs.
    “Don’t get too comfortable,” warns the old man, “it passes quickly.”

    And a nation down on its luck looks back, shamed by the misdeeds of its president. “We can do what is right!” It screams out to its neighbors around the earth, “we have chosen a leader so different from all of the rest, you will see. You will see!”

    And even though it is the dead of winter and the longest and coldest nights of the year are upon us, we nonetheless continue a measured and steady trek toward spring and day by day hope slowly approaches.

    Ah yes, the hour glass of 2009 will be turned in a few short hours its top globe filled not so much by the sands of time as the hopes of a people.

    - Armando Garcia-Dávila
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