Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Forgetfulness


The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never
even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a
bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.


- Billy Collins

[Larry Robinson]

Someday I Will Tell a Great and Shining Truth

Someday I will tell a great and shining truth
that will buy back all my dignity.
My silver words like coins will drop into the
mouths of my enemies, killing their tongues like ancient
poisons stilled the breasts of enemy kings, confounding
their long-built case against me.
These words will buy back my soul.
Someday I will tell a great and shining truth, in whose
deep structures will finally be exposed
the war I come from: the war of babies fighting
terrible battles, using weapons unparalleled on any field
against foes disguised as friends,
agents of mass destruction vomiting out of their little
mouths: “I need, I need” they scream,
undoing the universe.
Frenzied flags of terror unfurl all around them, banners
of the war: “Be quiet, be quiet” screams back the valiant
army, meeting bravely the battle.
Fists fly, penises stiffen, juices flow, fingernails furrow—
but babies rally their unending forces,
crying simply out their need, their need, O God, their need,
unrelenting in the fray.
In panic the defending troops deploy their only hope:
they leave.
The terrible enemy is defeated, finally, by silence,
and the world is saved.
Someday I will tell a great and shining truth, and
all my burnt tribe, dragging their blankets behind them,
will enter into my heart once again, making me whole.

- Kalia Mussetter

[Larry Robinson]

An Arab Shepherd Is Searching For His Goat On Mount Zion


An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
And on the opposite hill I am searching for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
Both in their temporary failure.
Our two voices met above
The Sultan's Pool in the valley between us.
Neither of us wants the boy or the goat
To get caught in the wheels
Of the "Had Gadya" machine.

Afterward we found them among the bushes,
And our voices came back inside us
Laughing and crying.

Searching for a goat or for a child has always been
The beginning of a new religion in these mountains.


-Yehuda Amichai

[Larry Robinson]

In Memoriam, July 19, 1914
We aged a hundred years and this descended
In just one hour, as at a stroke.
The summer had been brief and now was ended;
The body of the ploughed plains lay in smoke.


The hushed road burst in colors then, a soaring
Lament rose, ringing silver like a bell.
And so I covered up my face, imploring
God to destroy me before battle fell.


And from my memory the shadows vanished
Of songs and passions—burdens I'd not need.
The Almighty bade it be—with all else banished—
A book of portents terrible to read.




- Anna Akhmatova
(Translated by Stephen Edgar)

[Larry Robinson]

"Mein Furhur, I Can Walk!"


And what did Dr. Strangelove have in mind
for border patrols and power struggles? His
first concern was to survive, his one hand
preventing the other from strangling him.
And H.G.Wells, did he imagine the Martian
invasion to be countered by a Islamic caliphate
takeover? Chaos runs amok, there's nowhere it
won't spread in this small world of conflicting
factions. Held hostage to the "news", we can
only expand our disbelief and threshold of pain.
Vengeance and fear and greed are the harshest
poisons that even blue-throat Vishnu, the preserver
could not swallow. Can you see any Phoenix rising in
this story? Words like "terrorist, insurgents, rebels,
extremists" are the smokescreen vocabulary that keeps
the dice rolling in the game with truth.
Crisis after crisis swarm for attention. Drones
and domes, spies and black boxes and be-headings and
new bombs no one can detect, carnage and collateral
damage-- the world is being shaved by a drunken barber.
Whatever species, we're all endangered. Oceans spoiled,
earth choked, abused, can a dream of a golden age and
peace survive? Will the profit-dazed horsemen of this stark
Epoch-collapse gallop faster into the nightmare?
After the generals, the tanks, the cameras and the news
teams move into fresh fields, the chorus of lament will
be silenced in favor of forgetting. Rages,warnings, cries
and prayers may whirl away into scenes in movies everyone
can watch.


- Rich Meyers

[tashee]

Rich Meyer has presented well the toxins of these times, the collective dementia arising from the "spectacular" world (described so preciently by Guy Debord). In contemplating his images of our deep suffering, a question arisies for me-- what is left to us here amid the detritus of a society gone so wrong, but each precious moment?

Finding presence here and now, in the face of such fierce smoke and funhouse mirrors may be the most radical act of all. Let's breathe together, and know we are many, and take heart. There are cracks in the spectacular world. Love, Tashee

[Larry Robinson]

The Diameter Of The Bomb


The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won't even mention the howl of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.


- Yehuda Amichai


(translated by Chana Bloch & Stephen Mitchell)

[gardenmaniac]

ouch ...

The Diameter Of The Bomb


The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won't even mention the howl of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.


- Yehuda Amichai


(translated by Chana Bloch & Stephen Mitchell)

[Larry Robinson]

For Guy Davenport

Within the circles of our lives
we dance the circles of the years,
we dance the circles of the seasons
within the circles of the years,
the cycles of the moon

within the circles of the seasons,
the circles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again, we come and go,
changed, changing. Hands
join, unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy. The circles turn,
each giving into each, into all.
Only music keeps us here,

each by all the others held.
In the hold of hands and eyes
we turn in pairs, that joining
join each to all again.

And then we turn aside, alone
out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.


- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

- Emma Lazarus
New York City, 1883
(Inscribed on the Statue of Liberty)

[Larry Robinson]

The song and the flaming sword

Blue throated and beautiful
I had carried the poison
of war and ignorance for decades
before I heard that one song
that left me singing,
knowing then,
I could sing my way
back to the garden,
past the flaming
sword.

- Bill Denham

[Larry Robinson]

Ovid in Tears

Love is like a garden in the heart, he said.
They asked him what he meant by garden.
He explained about gardens. “In the cities,” he said,
“there are places walled off where color
and decorum are magnified into a civilization.
Like a beautiful woman,” he said.
How like a woman they asked. He remembered their wives
and said garden was just a figure of speech,
then called for drinks all around. Two rounds later
he was crying. Talking about how Charlemagne
couldn’t read, but still had made a world. About Hagia
Sofia and putting a round dome on a square
base after nine hundred years of failure.
The hand holding him slipped, and he fell.
“White stone in the while sunlight,” he said
as they picked him up. “Not the
great fires burning at the edge of the world.” His voice grew
fainter as they carried him away. “Both the melody
and the symphony. The imperfect dancing
in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.”


- Jack Gilbert

[Larry Robinson]

Identity Card

Put it on record.
I am an Arab
And the number of my card is fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth is due after summer.
What's there to be angry about?

Put it on record.
I am an Arab
Working with comrades of toil in a stone quarry.
I have eight children
For them I wrestle the loaf of bread,
The clothes and exercise books
From the dry rocks
And beg for no alms at your door,
Nor lower myself at your doorstep.
What's there to be angry about?

Put it on record.
I am an Arab
I am a name without a title,
Patient in a country where everything
Lives in a whirlpool of anger.
My roots
Took hold before the birth of time
Before the burgeoning of the ages,
Before cypress and olive trees,
Before the proliferation of weeds.


My father is from the family of the plough
Not from highborn nobles.
And my grandfather was a peasant
Without line or genealogy.
My house is a watchman's hut
Made of sticks and reeds.
Does my status satisfy you?
I am a name without a surname.

Put it on record.
I am an Arab.
Color of hair: jet black.
Color of eyes; brown.
My distinguishing features:
On my head the 'iqal cords over a keffiyeh
Scratching him who touches it.
My address:
I’m from a village, remote, forgotten,
Its streets without names
And all its men in the fields and quarry.

What's there to be angry about?

Put it on record.
I am an Arab.
You stole my forefather's vineyards
And land I used to till,
I and all my children,
And you left us and all my grandchildren
Nothing but these rocks.
Will your government be taking them too?
As is being said?

SO!
Put it on record at the top of page one:
I don't hate people,
I trespass on no one's property.

And yet, if I were to become hungry enough
I shall eat the flesh of my usurper.
Beware.
Beware of my hunger.
And of my anger!


- Mahmood Darwish

[Larry Robinson]

One Day


One day after another -
Perfect.
They all fit.


- Robert Creeley

[Larry Robinson]

Looking Up

The evening sky rolls in
on open arms
just as it has done for
eons

Like breath itself
like water that holds light
like a golden moment
where we stop to
breathe-in to ourselves
that Sacred is here -
Now

In such moments
all of life is seen
our souls speak in a
unifying and quiet
tonal voice of the
connections to all
and the miraculous
beauty of belonging to
one another

Look up -
The clouds just might meet
your loving gaze


- P. Gregory Guss

[Larry Robinson]

Appellation Carneros
— for Judy White


A good merlot is equal parts blood and dust—
and when the Alchemist sets his spigot
into the throat of this valley’s mild behemoth
the bloodline surges through an almost eternal fall.

You and I climb the valley’s ridge and stone sober
stand in the anteroom of an old wilderness— escarpments,
low clouds, trails flooded with rain— but I mean
the other wilderness, the one where so much
can be suffered, though sometimes in a pleasant way*—
ah the absolute voluptuousness of not
knowing what the other one is thinking.

And the wine-maker smiles & waits, and waits & smiles—
finally he speaks: How would you like to fall blindly
into the hands of one another’s fate? he asks; and
In blindness you will taste your character and your dust.


- Lee Perron

[sandoak]

You might value the connections made in a recent movie review by Ari Siletz: https://iranian.com/posts/quot-apes-...s-of-war-35963.

Identity Card

Put it on record.
I am an Arab
And the number of my card is fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth is due after summer.
What's there to be angry about?

Put it on record.
I am an Arab
Working with comrades of toil in a stone quarry.
I have eight children
For them I wrestle the loaf of bread,
The clothes and exercise books
From the dry rocks
And beg for no alms at your door,
Nor lower myself at your doorstep.
What's there to be angry about?

Put it on record.
I am an Arab
I am a name without a title,
Patient in a country where everything
Lives in a whirlpool of anger.
My roots
Took hold before the birth of time
Before the burgeoning of the ages,
Before cypress and olive trees,
Before the proliferation of weeds...

[Larry Robinson]

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.


- Billy Collins

[Larry Robinson]

Putting Out the Fire

for John, who stocks the medicine cabinet of the heart

Hearing children shriek at play,
today, first time in 58 years,
I don't hear that burning boy,
Fire rising like vine, twining
up his thin limb. My mother
chasing him, racing flames
and winning. Wrestling the boy
She smothers the reason for
screams with a sheet, ripped
white from the line, fast as
fire. The koan says

Put out the fire across
the river. Impossible,like
this task of living,
loving the unloveable
in ourselves and each other.
Chasing the screaming child
who forever lives scarred,
Impossible to fix the past.

There is no fire, no river, only
impossible demands—
helping and healing while
we burn. We are the flames.
Every day, more of us
burns, turns to ash. It
is the world's way.

There is no fire, no
river. Only life
ripping through us,
a storm tide pushing
the river upstream, muddy
And roiling. Life,
a slow burn, like sleeping love.
Life, a burning river
Within. No fire to fight,
no fight.


- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

Blood on the Wheel

Ezekiel saw the wheel,
way up in the middle of the air.
TRADITIONAL GOSPEL SONG

Blood on the night soil man en route to the country prison
Blood on the sullen chair, the one that holds you with its pleasure

Blood inside the quartz, the beauty watch, the eye of the guard
Blood on the slope of names & the tattoos hidden

Blood on the Virgin, behind the veils,
Behind—in the moon angel's gold oracle hair

What blood is this, is it the blood of the worker rat?
Is it the blood of the clone governor, the city maid?
Why does it course in s's & z's?

Blood on the couch, made for viewing automobiles & face cream
Blood on the pin, this one going through you without any pain

Blood on the screen, the green torso queen of slavering hearts
Blood on the grandmother's wish, her tawdry stick of Texas

Blood on the daughter's breast who sews roses
Blood on the father, does anyone remember him, bluish?

Blood from a kitchen fresco, in thick amber strokes
Blood from the baby's right ear, from his ochre nose
What blood is this?

Blood on the fender, in the sender's shoe, in his liquor sack
Blood on the street, call it Milagro Boulevard, Mercy Lanes #9
Blood on the alien, in the alligator jacket teen boy Juan

There is blood, there, he says
Blood here too, down here, she says
Only blood, the Blood Mother sings

Blood driving miniature American queens stamped into rage
Blood driving rappers in Mercedes blackened & whitened in news
Blood driving the snare-eyed professor searching for her panties
Blood driving the championship husband bent in Extreme Unction

Blood of the orphan weasel in heat, the Calvinist farmer in wheat
Blood of the lettuce rebellion on the rise, the cannery worker's prize

Blood of the painted donkey forced into prostitute zebra,
Blood of the Tijuana tourist finally awake & forced into pimp sleep again

It is blood time, Sir Terminator says,
It is blood time, Sir Simpson winks,
It is blood time, Sir McVeigh weighs.

Her nuclear blood watch soaked, will it dry?
His whitish blood ring smoked, will it foam?
My groin blood leather roped, will it marry?
My wife's peasant blood spoked, will it ride again?

Blood in the tin, in the coffee bean, in the maquila oración
Blood in the language, in the wise text of the market sausage
Blood in the border web, the penal colony shed, in the bilingual yard

Crow blood blues perched on nothingness again
fly over my field, yellow-green & opal
Dog blood crawl & swish through my sheets

Who will eat this speckled corn?
Who shall be born on this Wednesday war bed?

Blood in the acid theater, again, in the box office smash hit
Blood in the Corvette tank, in the crack talk crank below

Blood boat Navy blood glove Army ventricle Marines
in the cookie sex jar, camouflaged rape whalers
Roam & rumble, investigate my Mexican hoodlum blood

Tiny blood behind my Cuban ear, wine colored & hushed
Tiny blood in the death row tool, in the middle-aged corset
Tiny blood sampler, tiny blood, you hush up again, so tiny

Blood in the Groove Shopping Center,
In blue Appalachia river, in Detroit harness spleen

Blood in the Groove Virus machine,
In low ocean tide, in Iowa soy bean

Blood in the Groove Lynch mob orchestra,
South of Herzegovina, south, I said

Blood marching for the Immigration Patrol, prized & arrogant
Blood spawning in the dawn break of African Blood Tribes, grimacing
& multiple—multiple, I said

Blood on the Macho Hat, the one used for proper genuflections
Blood on the faithful knee, the one readied for erotic negation
Blood on the willing nerve terminal, the one open for suicide

Blood at the age of seventeen
Blood at the age of one, dumped in a Greyhound bus

Blood mute & autistic & cauterized & smuggled Mayan
& burned in border smelter tar

Could this be yours? Could this item belong to you?
Could this ticket be what you ordered, could it?

Blood on the wheel, blood on the reel
Bronze dead gold & diamond deep. Blood be fast.


- Juan Felipe Herrera

[Larry Robinson]

Flare


1.
Welcome to the silly, comforting poem.

It is not the sunrise,
which is a red rinse,
which is flaring all over the eastern sky;

it is not the rain falling out of the purse of God;

it is not the blue helmet of the sky afterward,

or the trees, or the beetle burrowing into the earth;

it is not the mockingbird who, in his own cadence,
will go on sizzling and clapping
from the branches of the catalpa that are thick with blossoms,
that are billowing and shining,
that are shaking in the wind.


2.

You still recall, sometimes, the old barn on your
great-grandfather's farm, a place you visited once,
and went into, all alone, while the grownups sat and
talked in the house.
It was empty, or almost. Wisps of hay covered the floor,
and some wasps sang at the windows, and maybe there was
a strange fluttering bird high above, disturbed, hoo-ing
a little and staring down from a messy ledge with wild,
binocular eyes.
Mostly, though, it smelled of milk, and the patience of
animals; the give-offs of the body were still in the air,
a vague ammonia, not unpleasant.
Mostly, though, it was restful and secret, the roof high
up and arched, the boards unpainted and plain.
You could have stayed there forever, a small child in a corner,
on the last raft of hay, dazzled by so much space that seemed
empty, but wasn't.
Then--you still remember--you felt the rap of hunger--it was
noon--and you turned from that twilight dream and hurried back
to the house, where the table was set, where an uncle patted you
on the shoulder for welcome, and there was your place at the table.


3.
Nothing lasts.
There is a graveyard where everything I am talking about is,
now.

I stood there once, on the green grass, scattering flowers.


4.
Nothing is so delicate or so finely hinged as the wings
of the green moth
against the lantern
against its heat
against the beak of the crow
in the early morning.

Yet the moth has trim, and feistiness, and not a drop
of self-pity.

Not in this world.


5.
My mother
was the blue wisteria,
my mother
was the mossy stream out behind the house,
my mother, alas, alas,
did not always love her life,
heavier than iron it was
as she carried it in her arms, from room to room,
oh, unforgettable!

I bury her
in a box
in the earth
and turn away.
My father
was a demon of frustrated dreams,
was a breaker of trust,
was a poor, thin boy with bad luck.
He followed God, there being no one else
he could talk to;
he swaggered before God, there being no one else
who would listen.
Listen,
this was his life.
I bury it in the earth.
I sweep the closets.
I leave the house.


6.
I mention them now,
I will not mention them again.

It is not lack of love
nor lack of sorrow.
But the iron thing they carried, I will not carry.

I give them--one, two, three, four--the kiss of courtesy,
of sweet thanks,
of anger, of good luck in the deep earth.
May they sleep well. May they soften.

But I will not give them the kiss of complicity.
I will not give them the responsibility for my life.


7.
Did you know that the ant has a tongue
with which to gather in all that it can
of sweetness?

Did you know that?


8.

The poem is not the world.
It isn't even the first page of the world.

But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.
It knows that much.

It wants to open itself,
like the door of a little temple,
so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed,
and less yourself than part of everything.


9.
The voice of the child crying out of the mouth of the
grown woman
is a misery and a disappointment.
The voice of the child howling out of the tall, bearded,
muscular man
is a misery, and a terror.


10.
Therefore, tell me:
what will engage you?
What will open the dark fields of your mind,
like a lover
at first touching?

11.
Anyway,
there was no barn.
No child in the barn.

No uncle no table no kitchen.

Only a long lovely field full of bobolinks.


12.
When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider
the orderliness of the world. Notice
something you have never noticed before,

like the tambourine sound of the snow-cricket
whose pale green body is no longer than your thumb.

Stare hard at the hummingbird, in the summer rain,
shaking the water-sparks from its wings.

Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no.
Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also,
like the diligent leaves.

A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.

Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.

Live with the beetle, and the wind.

This is the dark bread of the poem.
This is the dark and nourishing bread of the poem.


- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

A Great Rose Tree


This is the day and the year
of the rose. The whole garden


is opening with laughter. Iris
whispering to cypress. The rose


is the joy of meeting someone.
The rose is a world imagination


cannot imagine. A messenger from
the orchard where the soul lives.


A small seed that points to a great
rose tree! Hold its hand and walk


like a child. A rose is what grows
from the work the prophets do.


Full moon, new moon. Accept the
invitation spring extends, four


birds flying toward a master. A rose
is all these, and the silence that


closes and sits in the shade, a bud.


- Jelalludin Rumi
(Ghazal (Ode) 1348
Version by Coleman Barks, with Nevit Ergin)

[Larry Robinson]

Zimmer Imagines Heaven
For Merrill Leffler

I sit with Joseph Conrad in Monet’s garden.
We are listening to Yeats chant his poems,
A breeze stirs through Thomas Hardy’s moustache,
John Skelton has gone to the house for beer,
Wanda Landowska lightly fingers the clavichord,
Along the spruce tree walk Roberto Clemente and
Thurman Munson whistle a baseball back and forth.
Mozart chants with Ellington in the roses.

Monet smokes and dabs his canvas in the sun,
Brueghel and Turner set easels behind the wisteria.
The band is warming up in the Big Studio:
Bean, Brute, Bird, and Serge on saxes,
Kai, Bill Harris, Lawrence Brown, trombones,
Little Jazz, Clifford, Fats on trumpets,
Klook plays drums, Mingus bass, Bud the piano.
Later Madam Schumann-Heink will sing Schubert,
The monks of Benedictine Abbey will chant.
There will be more poems from Emily Dickinson,
James Wright, John Clare, Walt Whitman.
Shakespeare rehearses players for King Lear.

At dusk Alice Toklas brings out platters
Of Sweetbreads a la Napolitaine, Salad Livoniere,
And a tureen of Gaspacho of Malaga.
After the meal Brahms passes fine cigars.
God comes then radiant with a bottle of cognac,
She pours generously into the snifters,
I tell Her I have begun to learn what
Heaven is about. She wants to hear.
It is, I say, being thankful for eternity.
Her smile is the best part of the day.


- Paul Zimmer

[Larry Robinson]

Flying over clearcut hills


brown wounds scraped raw
don’t require bandaids, antibiotics
Mama Earth heals herself
slowly, by the measure of human time
confident in her immune system
inviting exposure to nutrient sun, water,
coyote scat
Tiny trees and grass stubble earth skin
She always wins in the end
not by force or violence
tho she can thunder and quake
but more by
simply and patiently growing life
over and over again


just because she can


- Monnie Reba Efross

[Larry Robinson]

Come to Hiroshima


to those who with no shame condone
annihilation of whole cities or nations
please come to Hiroshima
come in early August when the heat is worst
make sure you're there on the sixth
when the sweat running down your back
somehow feels appropriate
see the museum - learn what you can
imagine as deeply as possible what happened
and try to understand - why


to those who think we need atomic bombs
newer better more useable ones
as certain leaders now claim
please come to Hiroshima
walk through Peace Park
this epicenter - cemetery of ironic serenity
contemplate - meditate - try to understand
would we have done this to whites - dear Christians
here by the riverside thousands staggered to water
"mizu! mizu!" some couldn't even ask
for what could possibly relieve the burning


to those who think that war is still okay
sleepy as people used to be about slavery
come see the shattered wrecked dome
left in jagged shambles to remind us
see at sunset the paper lanterns
red blue and gold - inscribed with dreams
people lovingly made in the park all day
watch them float downstream candles aglow
like thousands of vanished souls
or beautiful hopes - for what might be possible
please come to Hiroshima
and bring pictures of your loved ones


- Ron Hertz

[Larry Robinson]

The Second Coming


Turning and turning on the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: Somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again, but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


- William Butler Yeats

[Chris Dec]

This incredible poem, after so many years, still manages to stab me in the heart when I read it. One of the best.
I am at once the falcon and the falconer, trying to hear myself.
Thank you, Larry, once again, for your dedication to doing this every day.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning on the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: Somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again, but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

- William Butler Yeats

[Larry Robinson]

Wildpeace

Not the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)

Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.

- Yehuda Amichai


(Translation by Chana Bloch, in This Same Sky, ed. by Naomi Shihab Nye)

[Larry Robinson]

The Weeping




I have shut my windows.
I do not want to hear the weeping,
but from behind the gray walls,
nothing is heard but the weeping.

There are few angels that sing,
there are few dogs that bark,
a thousand violins fit in the palm of the hand.

But the weeping is an immense dog,
the weeping is an immense angel,
the weeping is an immense violin,
tears strangle the wind,
nothing is heard but the weeping.

- Frederico Garcia Lorca
translation by Kenneth Rexroth
from “Casida del Llanto”

[Chris Dec]

Typing in the Dark

For W.B. Yeats

Don't feel sorry for me
I have only 24 hours to live every day.

I'm looking for letters that glow in the dark,
hidden among the dead letters...
THEY will spell out the real poem I need to write.
for my other mind is being held ransom by the very light of day.

No time to eat
I am commanded by voices in my gurgling digestive acids
Ancient and crying, they bubble into hallucinations:
I heard my crazy mother call my name...
I heard my cat child crying... dying last week
how could he have made his way
back to my belly so soon?

Can my words rescue them
Can my words do any good at all.

No pen is mightier than any sword
There's no contest in dim alleys
Ask someone who works the night shift
of any of the public services that handle the dying.
Some swords squeak clean, some words leak blood
My pen is too sane to hear.

I tune in to the cosmic noise
I turn down the volume of their cries to a low low lull
and cover my ears to dull the lull

Oh, mother, brother, tried to drown the voices in their heads...
They could do no good at all.

Ah to save the world is a crazy notion
But I am still typing on my last night before morning
hoping to write the poem that will save the world from darkness.


Chris Dec © 1989

The Second Coming

Turning and turning on the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: Somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again, but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

- William Butler Yeats