Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[poetrytalks]

And mine:

The Alchemy of Age

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

©2004 Star Kissed Shadows, Sher Lianne Christian

[Larry Robinson]

Into October


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


- W.S. Merwin

[Timothy Gega]

"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language." ~ WH Auden

Gardenmaniac, your quote inspired me to come up with this little ditty yesterday.
Namaste

My Word Playground

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

©2014 Tim Gega

[Larry Robinson]

Oatmeal


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


- Galway Kinnell (1927-2014)


To hear the poet read this poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xv8EY2vWJg

[Larry Robinson]

Sometimes the Dead

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

- Lisa Shulman

[Larry Robinson]

The Hunkering


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

[Larry Robinson]

Let Evening Come


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

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

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

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

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

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

- Jane Kenyon

[Larry Robinson]

The Fall Almost Nobody Sees


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

[Michael Anthony]

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

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

-Michael Anthony-

[Larry Robinson]

The Peace of Wild Things


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


- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

There Is No One But Us


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


- Annie Dillard

[Larry Robinson]

Candles in Babylon


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


- Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

Do Not Be Ashamed


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


- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

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

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


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


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


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


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


- Annie Finch

[Larry Robinson]

Harvest


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

[Larry Robinson]

Does It Matter?

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

- Siegfried Sassoon

[Timothy Gega]

Does It Matter?

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

- Siegfried Sassoon

[Larry Robinson]

Endless Streams and Mountains


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The watching boat has floated off the page.

●

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

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

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

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

Later that month someone named Li Hui added,

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

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

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

In 1332 Chih-shun adds,

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

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

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

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

●

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

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

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

●

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

lead out and tip
the moist black line.

Walking on walking,
under foot earth turns.

Streams and mountains never stay the same.

---

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

- Gary Snyder

[Larry Robinson]

Politics


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


- William Butler Yeats

[Larry Robinson]

Please Call Me by My True Names


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Thich Nhat Hanh


https://plumvillage.org/news/our-bel...eid=fd3ed12f1a

[Larry Robinson]

Autumn


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


- Amy Lowell

[Larry Robinson]

Convergences


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


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


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


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


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


- Donald Hall

[Larry Robinson]

Crescent Moon


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

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

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

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


- Tim Walters

[Larry Robinson]

Autumn's Crucible


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



- Max Reif

[Larry Robinson]

Serving with Gideon

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

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

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

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


- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

Touched by An Angel

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

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

We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.
- Maya Angelou

[Larry Robinson]

Claim


Once during that year
when all I wanted
was to be anything other
than what I was,
the dog took my wrist
in her jaws. Not to hurt
or startle, but the way
a wolf might, closing her mouth
over the leg of another
from her pack. Claiming me
like anything else: the round luck
of her supper dish or the bliss
of rabbits, their infinite
grassy cities. Her lips
and teeth circled
and pressed, tireless
pressure of the world
that pushes against you
to see if you're there,
and I could feel myself
inside myself again, muscle
to bone to the slippery
core where I knew
next to nothing
about love. She wrapped
my arm as a woman might wrap
her hand through the loop
of a leash-as if she
were the one holding me
at the edge of a busy street,
instructing me to stay.


- Kasey Jueds

[Timothy Gega]

Claim


Once during that year
when all I wanted
was to be anything other
than what I was,
the dog took my wrist
in her jaws. Not to hurt
or startle, but the way
a wolf might, closing her mouth
over the leg of another
from her pack. Claiming me
like anything else:

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


- Kasey Jueds

adorable poem

[AllorrahBe]

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

adorable poem

[Timothy Gega]

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

Yes, AllorahBe, this poet has such a great imagination, (if even in a metaphorical way).