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  1. TopTop #751
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    i am a little church

    i am a little church (no great cathedral)
    far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
    - i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
    i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

    my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
    my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
    (finding and losing and laughing and crying) children
    whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

    around me surges a miracle of unceasing
    birth and glory and death and resurrection:
    over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
    of hope, and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

    i am a little church (far from the frantic
    world with its rapture and anguish) at peace with nature
    - i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
    i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

    winter by spring, i lift my diminutive spire to
    merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
    standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
    (welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)


    - e.e.cummings
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  2. TopTop #752
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Our Eyes Are Sweet Obedient Dogs

    The mind must reach beyond time,
    not revise or think at all;
    thought is always late for truth.
    Take the one bright element
    from heaven on earth, the blazing
    word inside the throat of rivers
    and sky, desert and fields,
    that will not burn, and speak
    its flame without a sound.
    Fire catches in sight and feeds
    on gross imagination.
    We do not see for fear
    of burning here alive.

    - Chard de Niord
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  3. TopTop #753
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    October

    O hushed October morning mild,
    Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
    Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,
    Should waste them all.
    The crows above the forest call;
    Tomorrow they may form and go.
    O hushed October morning mild,
    Begin the hours of this day slow.
    Make the day seem to us less brief.
    Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
    Beguile us in the way you know.
    Release one leaf at break of day.
    At noon release another leaf;
    One from our trees, one far away.
    Retard the sun with gentle mist;
    Enchant the land with amethyst.
    Slow, slow!
    For the grapes' sake, if they were all,
    Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
    Whose clustered fruit must else be lost -
    For the grape' sake along the wall.

    - Robert Frost
    Last edited by Larry Robinson; 10-06-2010 at 08:14 AM.
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  4. TopTop #754
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Poem In October

    It was my thirtieth year to heaven
    Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
    And the mussel pooled and the heron
    Priested shore
    The morning beckon
    With water praying and call of seagull and rook
    And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall
    Myself to set foot
    That second
    In the still sleeping town and set forth.

    My birthday began with the water-
    Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
    Above the farms and the white horses
    And I rose
    In a rainy autumn
    And walked abroad in shower of all my days
    High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
    Over the border
    And the gates
    Of the town closed as the town awoke.

    A springful of larks in a rolling
    Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
    Blackbirds and the sun of October
    Summery
    On the hill's shoulder,
    Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
    Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
    To the rain wringing
    Wind blow cold
    In the wood faraway under me.

    Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
    And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
    With its horns through mist and the castle
    Brown as owls
    But all the gardens
    Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
    Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
    There could I marvel
    My birthday
    Away but the weather turned around.

    It turned away from the blithe country
    And down the other air and the blue altered sky
    Streamed again a wonder of summer
    With apples
    Pears and red currants
    And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
    Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
    Through the parables
    Of sunlight
    And the legends of the green chapels

    And the twice told fields of infancy
    That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
    These were the woods the river and the sea
    Where a boy
    In the listening
    Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
    To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
    And the mystery
    Sang alive
    Still in the water and singing birds.

    And there could I marvel my birthday
    Away but the weather turned around. And the true
    Joy of the long dead child sang burning
    In the sun.
    It was my thirtieth
    Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
    Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
    O may my heart's truth
    Still be sung
    On this high hill in a year's turning.

    - Dylan Thomas
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  5. TopTop #755
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    God Does Not Answer Prayer

    God does not answer prayer.
    It is a sacrilege to think so.

    An insult to the god-drenched hearts

    of all who pray through the night

    and in the morning are nonetheless

    handed a dead child.


    The churches in Salem used to burn heretics

    to increase attendance. Now those who feel

    their prayer didn't reach quite far enough,

    that they were not pure enough,

    are victims of a merciless atheism

    that says all good fortune comes from God

    though the brutal often prosper

    and it is not uncommon to torture

    the pure of heart.


    We pray for the best, forgetting

    the unpredictable unfolding

    that must occur for us to learn

    prayer for others works better

    than for ourselves. Jesus prays

    in the garden of Gethsemane

    and is refused. Ten thousand,

    ten million prayers rise in Latin,

    Arabic, Hindi, and Hebrew


    yet their husbands and wives,

    children and sisters, fathers and brothers

    do not survive well if at all

    though in their chest beats the strong sacred heart.


    No prayers are granted, none denied.

    True prayer reaches well beyond the edge of the world.

    It enters head bowed into the arms of the Beloved.


    - Stephen Levine
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  6. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  7. TopTop #756
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    To My Students

    You who can read,
    do not take it for granted;
    you who cannot,
    there are worlds, there are gods
    yet to be quickened in your dreams.
    The worlds await to form on your tongue,
    the gods to tremble in your ears.

    These little marks, black as fly-droppings
    on the page, and as small,
    speak to you - you do not hear.
    I cannot tell you the beginning of naming,
    only how it changes and magic
    sparks and sputters at the base of the skull.
    I do not know if there is answer;
    perhaps our speaking is enough.
    Men have died always alone;
    these small blemishes on the page
    their final legacy.
    Do not lose them,
    these the enchanted cinders
    of our stars.

    - Rafael Jesus Gonzalez

    (Rafael Jesus Gonzales turns 75 this coming Sunday, October 10, 2010)
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  8. Gratitude expressed by:

  9. TopTop #757
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Moss

    Maybe the idea of the world as flat isn't a tribal memory
    or an archetypal memory, but something far older - a
    fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory.

    Memory of leaping or crawling or shrugging rootlet by
    rootlet forward, across the flatness of everything.

    To perceive of the earth as round needed something else
    - standing up! - that hadn't yet happened.

    What a wild family! Fox and giraffe and wart hog, of
    course. But these also: bodies like tiny strings, bodies like
    blades and blossoms! Cord grass, Christmas fern, soldier
    moss! And here comes grasshopper, all toes and knees
    and eyes, over the little mountains of dust.

    When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn,
    I don't frighten her. And when I see the moss grazing
    upon the rock, I touch her tenderly,

    sweet cousin.

    - Mary Oliver
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  10. Gratitude expressed by:

  11. TopTop #758
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Postscript

    And some time make the time to drive out west
    Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
    In September or October, when the wind
    And the light are working off each other
    So that the ocean on one side is wild
    With foam and glitter and inland among stones
    The surface of the slate grey lake is lit
    By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
    Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
    Their fully grown headstrong looking heads
    Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
    Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
    More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
    A hurry through which known and strange things pass
    As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
    And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

    - Seamus Heaney
    (from Opened Ground)
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  12. TopTop #759
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Distance

    The distance between us
    is holy ground
    to be traversed
    feet bare
    hands raised
    in joyous dance
    so that once it is
    crossed
    the tracks of our pilgrimage
    shine in the darkness
    & light our coming together
    in a bright & steady light.

    - Rafael Jesús González
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  13. Gratitude expressed by:

  14. TopTop #760
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Past

    The past is an interest-bearing investment,
    an estate enclosing more territory each day,

    a delta always creating land.



    Now, in my 60s,

    I'm a great landowner,

    a don unable to survey

    all my holdings at once,

    even from the highest hill.



    To do so, I have to take

    to the winding back roads.

    Whole years I'd forgotten

    come into view.

    Everything is growing,

    rooted in soil.

    I didn't know the past blossomed

    with such passionate, poignant flowers

    or yielded such succulent fruit.



    Blossoms have faces and speak.

    Resurrected old homes straddle valleys.

    Memories graze on hillsides.

    I return from such excursions knowing

    there are still more such loops. How

    did the tiny sharecropper's yard

    I knew as a young man

    ever accrue to this? What Hand

    has watered the once-arid precincts

    and made them fertile?



    I wonder, hearing people say,

    “the past is dead”, when I find it so alive,

    nearly as unknown, at times,

    as what has not yet been dreamed,

    and though I do not live in the past,

    it is the foundation upon which I stand

    - Max Reif
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  15. TopTop #761
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    There Is No One Story and One Story Only

    The engineer’s story of hauling coal
    to Davenport for the cement factory, sitting on the bluffs
    between runs looking for whales, hauling concrete
    back to Gilroy, he and his wife renewing vows
    in the glass chapel in Arkansas after 25 years
    The flight attendant’s story murmured
    to the flight steward in the dark galley
    of her fifth-month loss of nerve
    about carrying the baby she’d seen on the screen
    The story of the forensic medical team’s
    small plane landing on an Alaska icefield
    of the body in the bag they had to drag
    over the ice like the whole life of that body
    The story of the man driving
    600 miles to be with a friend in another country seeming
    easy when leaving but afterward
    writing in a letter difficult truths
    Of the friend watching him leave remembering
    the story of her body
    with his once and the stories of their children
    made with other people and how his mind went on
    pressing hers like a body
    There is the story of the mind’s
    temperature neither cold nor celibate
    Ardent
    The story of
    not one thing only.

    - Adrienne Rich
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  16. TopTop #762
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Excerpt for Little Gidding

    We shall not cease from exploration
    And the end of all our exploring
    Will be to arrive where we started
    And know the place for the first time.
    Through the unknown, unremembered gate
    When the last of earth left to discover
    Is that which was the beginning;
    At the source of the longest river
    The voice of the hidden waterfall
    And the children in the apple-tree
    Not known, because not looked for
    But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
    Between two waves of the sea.
    Quick now, here, now, always—
    A condition of complete simplicity
    (Costing not less than everything)
    And all shall be well and
    All manner of thing shall be well
    When the tongues of flame are in-folded
    Into the crowned knot of fire
    And the fire and the rose are one.

    - T.S. Eliot
    (The Four Quartets)
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  17. Gratitude expressed by:

  18. TopTop #763
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Let Me Be Beautiful Like Sea Glass

    Let my edges that cut be stroked by sand and salt
    let my slick surface coarsen till it’s crushed to bits
    let my colors soften as they scrape the bottom
    let the waves love me in their rough way
    let me be changed by that love
    let me not forget I held another
    yet fully inhabit my particularity
    let me be smooth enough to be rubbed by small fingers
    and slipped inside a pocket or a bowl
    let me prove that beauty is born when something breaks

    - Gwynn O’Gara
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  19. TopTop #764
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Hope

    Old spirit, in and beyond me,
    keep and extend me. Amid strangers
    friends, great trees and big seas breaking,
    let love move me. Let me hear the whole music,
    see clear, reach deep. Open me to find due words,
    that I may shape them to ploughshares of my own making.
    After such luck, however late, give me to give to
    the oldest dance.... Then to good sleep,
    and - if it happens - glad waking.

    - Philip Booth
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  20. TopTop #765
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    First Rain

    The first day of rain
    should be declared
    a natural holiday.

    All stops, somehow.
    A new season so simply turns.

    All is immediate.
    The instant of first wet on skin.
    Sounds dance and mingle.
    Soils, leaves, muddy waters
    blend into deeply breathed
    fragrances, become a
    raw tonic
    gone far too long.

    We go through the day
    cocooned.
    A fire perhaps,
    and time to enjoy it,
    if we are lucky.

    There’s something Sunday
    about the first day of rain,
    suspended between
    today and
    forever.

    Memories take us,
    deeper than words.
    Further back than
    recall can bring us.
    Leave us off to
    wander further beyond thought
    to pure feeling,
    back to some safety
    of somewhere we
    seem to have
    lost.

    Close the shops,
    silence the clocks.
    It’s the first day of rain.

    - Scott O'Brien
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  21. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  22. TopTop #766
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    For The Time Of Necessary Decision

    The mind of time is hard to read.
    We can never predict what it will bring,
    Nor even from all that is already gone
    Can we say what form it finally takes;
    For time gathers its moments secretly.
    Often we only know it's time to change
    When a force has built inside the heart
    That leaves us uneasy as we are.

    Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul
    Or the love where we once belonged
    Calls nothing alive in us anymore.
    We drift through this gray, increasing
    nowhere
    Until we stand before a threshold we know
    We have to cross to come alive once more.

    May we have the courage to take the step
    Into the unknown that beckons us;
    Trust that a richer life awaits us there,
    That we will lose nothing
    But what has already died;
    Feel the deeper knowing in us sure
    Of all that is about to be born beyond
    The pale frames where we stayed confined,
    Not realizing how such vacant endurance
    Was bleaching our soul's desire.

    - John O'Donohue
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  23. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  24. TopTop #767
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Fresh

    To move
    Cleanly.
    Needing to be
    Nowhere else.
    Wanting nothing
    From any store.
    To lift something
    You already had
    And set it down in
    A new place.
    Awakened eye
    Seeing freshly.
    What does that do to
    The old blood moving through
    Its channels?

    - Naomi Shihab Nye
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  25. TopTop #768
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    At Lake Scugog
    1.

    Where what I see comes to rest,

    at the edge of the lake,

    against what I think I see

    and, up on the bank, who I am

    maintains an uneasy truce

    with who I fear I am,

    while in the cabin’s shade the gap between

    the words I said

    and those I remember saying

    is just wide enough to contain

    the remains that remain

    of what I assumed I knew.


    2.

    Out in the canoe, the person I thought you were

    gingerly trades spots

    with the person you are

    and what I believe I believe

    sits uncomfortably next to

    what I believe.

    When I promised I will always give you

    what I want you to want,

    you heard, or desired to hear,

    something else. As, over and in the lake,

    the cormorant and its image

    traced paths through the sky.


    - Troy Jollimore
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  26. TopTop #769
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Chinese Peaks
    For Donald Hall

    I love the mountain peak
    but I know also its rolling
    foothills
    half-invisible
    in mist and fog.

    The Seafarer gets up
    long before dawn to read.
    His soul
    is a whale feeding
    on the Holy Word.

    The soul who loves the peak
    also inhales the deep
    breath rising
    from the mountain
    buried in mist.

    - Robert Bly
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  27. TopTop #770
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Man Watching


    I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
    so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
    that a storm is coming,
    and I hear the far-off fields say things
    I can't bear without a friend,
    I can't love without a sister.

    The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
    across the woods and across time,
    and the world looks as if it had no age:
    the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
    is seriousness and weight and eternity.

    What we choose to fight is so tiny!
    What fights with us is so great!
    If only we would let ourselves be dominated
    as things do by some immense storm,
    we would become strong too, and not need names.

    When we win it's with small things,
    and the triumph itself makes us small.
    What is extraordinary and eternal
    does not want to be bent by us.
    I mean the Angel who appeared
    to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
    when the wrestlers' sinews
    grew long like metal strings,
    he felt them under his fingers
    like chords of deep music.

    Whoever was beaten by this Angel
    (who often simply declined the fight)
    went away proud and strengthened
    and great from that harsh hand,
    that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
    Winning does not tempt that man.
    This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
    by constantly greater beings.

    - Rainer Maria Rilke
    (Translation by Robert Bly
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  28. Gratitude expressed by:

  29. TopTop #771
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    I Found Myself in Walmart


    Spiritually speaking
    I was on a candy high.
    Perhaps that is why
    I found myself foraging
    basket in hand
    (while most others pushed
    oversized carts
    toward a supersized Nirvana)
    among the cocoa harvests
    of foreign lands.

    You followed me reluctantly.
    You love Wal-Mart
    but you were puzzled.

    "Eric" you said patiently
    "what do you need?"

    As you spoke
    a shaft of light crashed
    like a Chinese paratrooper
    through the store's skylight.
    It bounced off high stacked shelves.
    It barged its way between
    overweight shoppers
    illuminating spandex mysteries.
    It flashed upon my eyes
    and I knew.

    I knew that while our bodies
    did not so often
    pound love into speaking flames-
    that I still wanted you,
    only you,
    just you,
    not even candy.
    Not cut-price plastic hole fillers,
    not anything blue, green or yellow
    seen on a T.V. in aisle 3
    nor did I need more coffee
    or anything.

    How even here
    in this warehouse of hope and light
    we could find each other
    like Adam discovering Eve
    and Eve peeking at Adam
    in their Garden of Eden
    for the first time.
    And how like Adam
    I had found God.

    - Eric Ashford
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  30. TopTop #772
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Why Bodhidharma Went to Howard Johnson's


    "Where is your home," the interviewer asked him.

    Here.

    "No, no," the interviewer said, thinking it a problem of translation,
    "when you are where you actually live."

    Now it was his turn to think, perhaps the translation?

    - Jane Hirshfield
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  31. TopTop #773
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Oil and Ash

    What’s organic emits carbon when burned so animal
    dung or dried seaweed picked from rocks or a child left
    too long in the sun will all eventually rise toward the place
    we used to think god lived: among the clouds on a big chair.

    So apparently it’s come to this: the way to save the sky is sell
    the sky to those who would release ash into it, through pipes.

    I understand this economically, and I’d rather not
    mention the resemblance to prostitution, but when I open my
    mouth it also fills with something called sky, each inhalation
    drags sky across the fine hairs of my nostrils stirring them

    in patterns resembling the locomotion of centipedes.
    The inverted trees of my lungs filter sky into blood a shade

    darker than a cardinal, blood so red it seems it should sing.
    The seashell whorls of my ears hold barely two-thimbles-
    worth of sky but without those twin pockets of stratosphere
    thrumming my drums the world would fall as silent as a world

    where they had inexplicably fed their own kind into steel machines.
    Later, visiting archaeologists might ponder what had driven them

    to do such a thing? There might be conjecture about belief systems
    or native religions but for the first thousands of years there would be
    nothing but the sound of ash sifting through dried leaves, a sound that is
    in some ways similar—but also different—from the sound of falling snow.

    - Michael Bazze
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  32. TopTop #774
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Rippling and Astir


    There's a rippling
    in the air

    stealing



    across the hillside

    misty sheets

    slant and race



    towards

    this terrible

    thirst.



    All green things

    are dressed in

    see-through pearls.



    Droplets pounce

    dance polkas on

    wooden fenceposts.



    Brushing, rushing

    shimmering

    bush and tree



    limbs flap, sway

    opening to

    volleys' intensity.



    A hushed soaring

    roars.


    - Raphael Block
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  33. TopTop #775
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Ripening

    The longer we are together
    the larger death grows around us.
    How many we know by now
    who are dead! We, who were young,
    now count the cost of having been.
    And yet as we know the dead
    we grow familiar with the world.
    We, who were young and loved each other
    ignorantly, now come to know
    each other in love, married
    by what we have done,
    as much as by what we intend.
    Our hair turns white with our ripening
    as though to fly away in some
    coming wind, bearing the seed
    of what we know. It was bitter to learn
    that we come to death as we come
    to love, bitter to face
    the just and solving welcome
    that death prepares. But that is bitter
    only to the ignorant, who pray
    it will not happen. Having come
    the bitter way to better prayer, we have
    the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
    to know you by the signs of this world!

    - Wendell Berry
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  34. Gratitude expressed by:

  35. TopTop #776
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Sick and Old, Same As Ever:
    a Poem to Figure It All Out

    Splendor and ruin,
    sorrow and joy,
    long life or early death:
    when this human realm's
    a figment of prank
    and whimsy,

    is it really so strange
    if I'm soon a bug's arm
    or rat's liver?
    And chicken skin
    or crane plumage-
    what would it hurt?

    In yesterday's winds,
    I was happy to begin
    my long journey,
    but today, in all this sunlit
    warmth of spring,
    I feel better.

    And now that I'm packed
    and ready for that
    distant voyage,
    what does it matter
    if I linger on a little while
    longer here?

    - Po Chu-I
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  36. TopTop #777
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    This is what was bequeathed us:
    This earth the beloved left
    And, leaving,
    Left to us.

    No other world
    But this one:
    Willows and the river
    And the factory
    With its black smokestacks.

    No other shore, only this bank
    On which the living gather.

    No meaning but what we find here.
    No purpose but what we make.

    That, and the beloved’s clear instructions:
    Turn me into song; sing me awake.

    - Gregory Orr
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  37. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  38. TopTop #778
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Tor House

    If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:

    Perhaps of my planted forest a few

    May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard

    With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.

    Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art

    To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.

    But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years:

    It is the granite knoll on the granite

    And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel

    River-valley, these four will remain

    In the change of names. You will know it by the wild sea-fragrance of wind

    Though the ocean may have climbed or retired a little;

    You will know it by the valley inland that our sun and our moon were born from

    Before the poles changed; and Orion in December

    Evenings was strung in the throat of the valley like a lamp-lighted bridge.

    Come in the morning you will see white gulls

    Weaving a dance over blue water, the wane of the moon

    Their dance-companion, a ghost walking

    By daylight, but wider and whiter than any bird in the world.

    My ghost you needn’t look for; it is probably

    Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite, not dancing on wind

    With the mad wings and the day moon.

    - Robinson Jeffers
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  39. TopTop #779
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Old Man, Old Man

    Young men, not knowing what to remember,
    Come to this hiding place of the moons and years,
    To this Old Man. Old Man, they say, where should we go?
    Where did you find what you remember? Was it perched in a tree?
    Did it hover deep in the white water? Was it covered over
    With dead stalks in the grass? Will we taste it
    If our mouths have long lain empty?
    Will we feel it between our eyes if we face the wind
    All night, and turn the color of earth?
    If we lie down in the rain, can we remember sunlight?

    He answers, I have become the best and worst I dreamed.
    When I move my feet, the ground moves under them.
    When I lie down, I fit the earth too well.
    Stones long underwater will burst in the fire, but stones
    Long in the sun and under the dry night
    Will ring when you strike them. Or break in two.
    There were always many places to beg for answers:
    Now the places themselves have come in close to be told.
    I have called even my voice in close to whisper with it:
    Every secret is as near as your fingers.
    If your heart stutters with pain and hope,
    Bend forward over it like a man at a small campfire.

    - David Wagoner
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  40. Gratitude expressed by:

  41. TopTop #780
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Where The Mind Is Without Fear

    Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,
    Where knowledge is free,
    Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
    By narrow domestic walls,
    Where words come out from the depth of truth,
    Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection,
    Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
    Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit,
    Where the mind is led forward by thee
    Into ever-widening thought and action,
    Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!

    - Rabindranath Tagore
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