So Long and Thanks for All the Fish!
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I understand that. What I don't understand is this "where is the place where color meant nothing?" Maybe it means that there is no place? It seemed to be referring to America's past, so that's why I questioned it. Maybe just my interpretation, but what are others? I do appreciate your clarification of the meaning of that phrase. (Not the meaning of white)
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Well, yes and no. If you are talking about sunlight or transmitted light, then white contains all the colors, and darkness (black) is the absence of color. However the colors we see are mostly reflected colors. In this case, black is the sum of all colors, and white is the absence of color.
Patrick Brinton
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Don't Make Lists
Every day a new flower rises
from your body's fresh soil.
Don't go around looking
for fallen petals
in a fairy tale, when you've
got the golden plant
right here, now,
shooting forth in light from your eyes,
your awakening crown.
Don't make lists, or explore ancient accounts.
Forget everything you know
and open.
- Dorothy Walters
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End Of The World
When I was young in school in Switzerland, about the time of the Boer War,
We used to take it for known that the human race
Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died. I wrote a schoolboy poem
About the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shore
Of the last sea, alone, alone, alone, remembering all
His racial past. But now I don't think so. They'll die faceless in flocks,
And the earth flourish long after mankind is out.
- Robinson Jeffers
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1,000 Year Old Poem
In his hand,
a small book of Zen poetry
His strong voice
reading quietly
this one poem
Brings me into
the presence
of Cold Mountain
The Spiritual home
of the Immortals...
I am cleansed by the Spring
that flows from the mouth
of the poet's rock
Amazed by the wonder
of Heaven and Earth's
Mystery !
No longer a body of flesh
I become ONE with the wind
the glorious, pure, elements
of Nature !
for 1,000 years,
how did this poet's
treasured words
remain?
- Mary Barror
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This Is What Was Bequeathed Us
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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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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Happiness
Our ancestors in the earth are not
Ashamed of us. The strong smell
Of dirt, the delirious rabbits, the
Clocks are all disappearing. A
Prehistoric gift acquires the smell
Of salt. I grasp onto winter’s tail.
Some water plants are lying around.
Smell & taste, I have had good
Luck in love. The slippery roads,
The capricious numbers on a blazing
Road, meet me at the forest’s edge
Where we can go with our legs
Lopped off, strangers to the clean
Teeth and tongue of outward happiness.
- Noelle Kocot
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Per Diem
Spherically wondrous sunbeam
dwelling in the mansion
of the pine of chastity,
today we bought an ice pack
For Mildred’s injured foot.
Luminous shadow
in the plumflower chamber,
Edna quit her job yesterday,
got drunk, stayed drunk,
behaved like a defective monster
collapsing in the mansion
of self-pity. Meanwhile,
the great sea of compassion
rolled in rolled out, rolled in.
And the blue mountain
of itself remains,
and the blind shampooers
never tire of their work.
- James Tate
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I Hate Incense
Who can even discuss a master's methods?
Speaking of Dao, talking of Zen, your tongues grow long.
Old Ikkyu abhors your scrambling after marvels.
I make a pinched, sour face, all this incense thrown on the
Buddha.
- Ikkyu
(translated by Sarah Messer and Kidder Smith)
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An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
and on the opposite mountain I am searching
for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
both in their temporary failure.
Our voices meet above the Sultan’s Pool
in the valley between us. Neither of us wants
the child or the goat to get caught in the wheels
of the terrible 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 a son
has always been the beginning
of a new religion in these mountains.
- Yahuda Amichai
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And What If I Spoke Of Despair?
And what if I spoke of despair—who doesn’t
feel it? Who doesn’t know the way it seizes,
leaving us limp, deafened by the slosh
of our own blood, rushing
through the narrow, personal
channels of grief. It’s beauty
that brings it on, calls it out from the wings
for one more song. Rain
pooled on a fallen oak leaf, reflecting
the pale cloudy sky, dark canopy
of foliage not yet fallen. Or the red moon
in September, so large you have to pull over
at the top of Bayona and stare, like a photo
of a lover in his uniform, not yet gone;
or your own self, as a child,
on that day your family stayed
at the sea, watching the sun drift down,
lazy as a beach ball, and you fell asleep with sand
in the crack of your smooth behind.
That’s when you can’t deny it. Water. Air.
They’re still here, like a mother’s palms,
sweeping hair off our brow, her scent
swirling around us. But now your own
car is pumping poison, delivering its fair
share of destruction. We’ve created a salmon
with the red, white, and blue shining on one side.
Frog genes spliced into tomatoes—as if
the tomato hasn’t been humiliated enough.
I heard a man argue that genetic
engineering was more dangerous
than a nuclear bomb. Should I be thankful
he was alarmed by one threat, or worried
he’d gotten used to the other? Maybe I can’t
offer you any more than you can offer me—
but what if I stopped on the trail, with shreds
of manzanita bark lying in russet scrolls
and yellow bay leaves, little lanterns
in the dim afternoon, and cradled despair
in my arms, the way I held my own babies
after they’d fallen asleep, when there was no
reason to hold them, only
I didn’t want to put them down.
- Ellen Bass
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Observer
I watch how other things travel
to get an idea how I might move.
A cloud sweeps by silently,
gathering other clouds.
A doodlebug curls in his effort to get there.
A horse snorts before stepping forward.
A caterpillar inches across the kitchen floor.
When I carry him outside on a leaf,
I imagine someone doing that to me.
Would I scream?
In the heart of the day
nothing moves.
No one is going anywhere
or coming back.
The blue glass on the table
lets light pass through.
Something shines
but nothing moves.
I watch that too.
- Naomi Shihab Nye
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This Is The Time
This is the time for holding still.
It is the space between breaths.
It is before you pick up the pen.
And after the last syllable.
It is the mountain lake unshattered.
It is before thought, that hungry fish,
rises crashing. It is after the ripples
have spent themselves on the silty shore.
It is precious.
Do not invent requirements.
Do not try to remember.
Holding still a while
will not kill you.
- Alice Klein
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Limitations
Bulldog on a leash, your bald owner defines your universe
how proud on your morning walk
past the Momofuko Milk Bar
aware of your boundary within leather lengths of constraint
what’s your name?
you bear the gait of a celebrity or even a saint
in the firmament of flesh,
someone like LeBron James, Meryl Streep
or my deceased Grandpa Moishe
who sang socialist hymns and preached baseball stats
and must have walked early morning avenues like you dog,
on the way to the steamy loft
where he sewed garments
twelve hours a day
- Barry Denny
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Benedicto
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous,
leading to the most amazing view.
May your rivers flow without end,
meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells,
past temples and castles and poets' towers
into a dark primeval forest
where tigers belch and monkeys howl,
through miasmal and mysterious swamps
and down into a desert of red rock,
and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm
where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs,
where deer walk across the white sand beaches,
where storms come and go
as lightning clangs upon the high crags,
where something strange and more beautiful
and more full of wonder than
your deepest dreams waits for you--
beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
- Edward Abbey
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1996, V
Some Sunday afternoon, it may be,
you are sitting under your porch roof,
looking down through the trees
to the river, watching the rain. The circles
made by the raindrops’ striking
expand, intersect, dissolve,
and suddenly (for you are getting on
now, and much of your life is memory)
the hands of the dead, who have been here
with you, rest upon you tenderly
as the rain rests shining
upon the leaves. And you think then
(for thought will come) of the strangeness
of the thought of heaven, for now
you have imagined yourself there,
remembering with longing this
happiness, this rain. Sometimes here
we are there, and there is no death.
- Wendell Berry
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Growing Old
In some summers there is so much fruit,
the peasants decide not to reap any more.
Not having reaped you, oh my days,
my nights, have I let the slow flames
of your lovely produce fall into ashes?
My nights, my days, you have borne so much!
All your branches have retained the gesture
of that long labor you are rising from:
my days, my nights. Oh my rustic friends!
I look for what was so good for you.
Oh my lovely, half-dead trees,
could some equal sweetness still
stroke your leaves, open your calyx?
Ah, no more fruit! But one last time
bloom in fruitless blossoming
without planning, without reckoning,
as useless as the powers of millenia.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translated by A. Poulin)
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One Hundred and Eighty Degrees
Have you considered the possibility
that everything you believe is wrong,
not merely off a bit, but totally wrong,
nothing like things as they really are?
If you've done this, you know how durably fragile
those phantoms we hold in our heads are,
those wisps of thought that people die and kill for,
betray lovers for, give up lifelong friendships for.
If you've not done this, you probably don't understand this poem,
or think it's not even a poem, but a bit of opaque nonsense,
occupying too much of your day's time,
so you probably should stop reading it here, now.
But if you've arrived at this line,
maybe, just maybe, you're open to that possibility,
the possibility of being absolutely completely wrong,
about everything that matters.
How different the world seems then:
everyone who was your enemy is your friend,
everything you hated, you now love,
and everything you love slips through your fingers like sand.
- Federico Moramarco
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On Memorizing A Poem
In the beginning was the Word--
there's creativity involved,
inot just duplicating
a page of print
in your brain.
You can't clip
these unique flowers
of the ages
and stuff them in
some mental vase.
You have to plant them
inside.
First reading scatters
seeds, atoms,
whirling with life,
even ones that
seem inert.
Repetition becomes
a steady hand holding
a watering can.
Imperceptibly, every word
germinates and sprouts.
Tendrils begin to reach out,
join hands, solidify
a clause, link it with the body
of a sentence, until
each word is tropically bonded,
no longer exists alone.
A stanza coheres. The force
flows on, spirit leaps
across a gap to the next stanza,
back to the one before!
Each reading, connections firmer.
New ones arise, flourish
like bougainvillea. Roads appear.
Signs. Turn Left Here.
Paths and gardens of knowing
form in the brain. Flowering vines
perfume the air above the brain!
Finally, a world
lives inside to be invoked,
called forth like genie
from bottle.
Every poem or story
made one’s own
initiates its keeper
into the long line
stretching back
to ancient campfires.
Every teller chants with Homer,
Valmiki, bards whose names
we do not know, carries
the Light in eyes
onward.
- Max Reif
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We Raise Our Hands
We raise our hands not in suplication
but desperation, rage, demand,
protest against the bloody hands
of the criminals & the government
impossible to distinguish the ones from the other.
"I am tired of so many scoldings,"
said the prosecutor. Well, be more tired jet,
Mr. Prosecutor for we want
our children, ours of the people
that alive were taken
& live we want them back.
We will go on raising our hands
with the "43" now a motto of the injustice
that we suffer & is no longer tolerable
that we suffer any longer.
Meanwhile the president
visits the U. S. of A. to discuss
security & the economy.
Whose security & economy?
Ask for more weapons for crime
& repression? The security of the rich?
Assuring them profits at our cost?
Surrender the economy to foreign enterprises
of "Free trade"? Do not confuse us
with flags now stained, dirtied with outrage.
Tired are we & we raise out hands
crying like la Llorona for our children
who alive were taken & alive we want them back.
© Rafael Jesús González 2015
Alzamos las manos
Alzamos las manos no en súplica
sino desesperación, en rábia, en demanda,
en protesta contra las manos sangrientas
de los criminales y del gobierno
imposible distinguir los unos del otro.
"Ya estoy cansado de tantos regaños,"
dijo el procurador. Pues cánsese más,
Sr. Procurador que queremos
a nuestros hijos, nuestros del pueblo
que vivos se los llevaron
y vivos los queremos.
Seguiremos alzando las manos
con el "43" ya un lema de la injusticia
que sufrimos y ya no es tolerable
que suframos más.
Mientras tanto el presidente
visita los EE. UU. para discutir
la seguridad y la economía.
¿Seguridad y economía de quien?
¿Pedir más armas para el crimen
y la represión? ¿Seguridad de los ricos?
¿Asegurarles ganancias a costo nuestro?
¿Entregar la economía a empresas extranjeras
del "libre comercio"? No nos confundan
con banderas ya manchadas, sucias de injuria.
Cansados estamos nosotros y alzamos las manos
clamando como la Llorona por nuestros hijos
que vivos se los llevaron y vivos los queremos.
© Rafael Jesús González 2015
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Fireflies
In the dry summer field at nightfall,
fireflies rise like sparks.
Imagine the presence of ghosts
flickering, the ghosts of young friends,
your father nearest in the distance.
This time they carry no sorrow,
no remorse, their presence is so light.
Childhood comes to you,
memories of your street in lamplight,
holding those last moments before bed,
capturing lightning-bugs,
with a blossom of the hand
letting them go. Lightness returns,
an airy motion over the ground
you remember from Ring Around the Rosie.
If you stay, the fireflies become fireflies
again, not part of your stories,
as unaware of you as sleep, being
beautiful and quiet all around you.
- Marilyn Kallet
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In Cemetery Pere Lachaise
I want to write about the way, in this City
of the Dead, a who's who from
Napoleonic heirs to their victims, the famed
and infamous, the important and
self-important share this crumbling hillside
village, made magnificent by time and weather.
But all I see is rain and a
British ex-pat killing time near the not-yet
occupied tomb of a still-living photographer.
A stranger with all the time a free and aging
man could want and no money, he passes
time in the luxury of this place where
no one is bothered by money and what it
cannot heal anymore. This stranger
without motive guides us in
the labyrinth of stones and crypts, gives
due attention to the known and unknown,
who like us, wander in the cemetery
of life, bumping shoulders
with loss and living.
- Rebecca del Rio
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Song
The chimney sweepers
Wash their faces and forget to wash the neck;
The lighthouse keepers
Let the lamps go out and leave the ships to wreck;
The prosperous baker
Leaves the rolls in hundreds in the oven to burn;
The undertaker
Pins a small note on the coffin saying, "Wait till I return,
I've got a date with Love."
And deep-sea divers
Cut their boots off and come bubbling to the top,
And engine-drivers
Bring expresses in the tunnel to a stop;
The village rector
Dashes down the side-aisle half-way through a psalm;
The sanitary inspector
Runs off with the cover of the cesspool on his arm --
To keep his date with Love.
- W.H. Auden
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A Summer Night
Out on the lawn I lie in bed,
Vega conspicuous overhead
In the windless nights of June,
As congregated leaves complete
Their day’s activity; my feet
Point to the rising moon.
Lucky, this point in time and space
Is chosen as my working-place,
Where the sexy airs of summer,
The bathing hours and the bare arms,
The leisured drives through a land of farms
Are good to a newcomer.
Equal with colleagues in a ring
I sit on each calm evening
Enchanted as the flowers
The opening light draws out of hiding
With all its gradual dove-like pleading,
Its logic and its powers:
That later we, though parted then,
May still recall these evenings when
Fear gave his watch no look;
The lion griefs loped from the shade
And on our knees their muzzles laid,
And Death put down his book.
- W.H. Auden
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Drought
I
Can you spare some water?
I’m down to rock bottom.
No water for horses.
Can’t even begin to think
about keepin’ the fruit trees alive.
Never been like this before.
Mid-December and the only fires
on my neighbors’ minds
are those that could
scar these hills again.
Crisp clear days
hardwoods aglow
but at night
no fires are needed.
Gardens long ago withered
wells gone dry
high country lakes dead and desolate
drained for the first planting
of winter crops in the valley below.
II
Among the Hopi Indians
when the rain doesn’t fall
each man and woman asks
What did I do wrong?
Did I stumble in the sacred dance?
lay down cornmeal with an evil thought?
Many seasons ago when
no rain had fallen
on the land and the spirit
for so long
I set out on a journey
in search of a rainmaker.
(It must be my fault.
It is because of me
the clouds always pass.)
Rabbis reverends roshis
and then atop the high mesas of Arizona
I ask the Hopi elder Grandfather David
what I can do.
A long night in the kiva
the feet of dancing kachinas
shaking the earth
and he says
Return to your home
Purify your heart
Ask nothing for yourself.
Simple and direct.
An impossible task
a quest for heroes
who left our world long ago
but what else to do?
III
Now years later
so many lives bone dry
dreams crushed by reality
visions incomplete
anger and bitterness seeping in
through the fault lines of the heart
and still no rain.
I search the radio dial
for a hopeful sign
and hear Smokey the Bear
died in a cage in Washington D.C.
He was 25 years old.
Discouraged but undaunted
I consult the Talmud at random
and find: ‘The rain falls from above
but it begins below.’
As always
It comes down to
letting the rain fall.
Dear friends,
please do what you can.
- Steve Sanfield
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