So Long and Thanks for All the Fish!
This site is now closed permanently to new posts.Click anywhere but the link to dismiss overlay!
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Jul 29, 2009
Last Online 02-07-2021
Gratitude expressed by 2 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Jan 13, 2007
Location: Sebastopol
Last Online 07-12-2020
Gratitude expressed by:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 19, 2005
Location: Guerneville
Last Online 03-15-2024
Gratitude expressed by 5 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Mar 22, 2008
Last Online 11-01-2022
You want to hear frogs singing their national anthem, visit the upper levels of Graton Casino"s parking structure at sunset. The concert there is angelic. There used to be a bullfrog farm nearby in times past. Don't know if their decendents are still singing.
Gratitude expressed by:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Jan 12, 2007
Location: Cotati
Last Online 04-24-2023
Gratitude expressed by 8 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
Becoming Old
Like leaves in autumn
Alexandra Hart
The days fall off the tree of my life.
Bright, some — dull-colored, others,
Which makes the brilliants shine.
All precious, gathering speed,
While I valiantly try to slow,
Never quite fast enough,
Never quite succeeding.
One day, closer, closer, my tree
Will be bare, the branches bony,
No longer dressed in anything
But the memories of my folly,
And those few bright moments that
Make it all worthwhile.
- Alexandra Hart
Last edited by Barry; 01-07-2016 at 01:25 PM.
Gratitude expressed by 7 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Oct 21, 2008
Last Online 02-09-2021
thank you!
complements my experience just a moment ago when I was in our parking area, looking at a bare maple (gum) tree. (Parenthetically, then I noticed its sister, same variety of maple and similar size, just 100 feet or so across the way, still almost completely clothed in many-colored leaves.
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 19, 2005
Location: Guerneville
Last Online 03-15-2024
Becoming Old
Like leaves in autumn
The days fall off the tree of my life.
Bright, some — dull-colored, others,
Which makes the brilliants shine.
All precious, gathering speed,
While I valiantly try to slow,
Never quite fast enough,
Never quite succeeding.
One day, closer, closer, my tree
Will be bare, the branches bony,
No longer dressed in anything
But the memories of my folly,
And those few bright moments that
Make it all worthwhile.
- Alexandra Hart
Gratitude expressed by 2 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
Catholicism
There’s a possum who appears here at odd times,
often walking up the path to the house
in the middle of the day like a little ghost
with a long tail and a blank expression on his face.
He likes to slip behind the woodpile,
but sometimes he gets so close to the window
where I am standing with a glass in my hand
that I start to review my sins, systematically
going from one commandment to the next.
What is it about him that causes me
to begin an examination of conscience,
calling to mind my failings in this time of reflection?
It could just be the twitching of the tail
and that white face, but his slow priestly pace
also makes a contribution, as do the tiny paws,
more like hands, really, with opposable thumbs
able to carry a nut or dig a hole in the earth
or lift a chalice above his head
or even deliver a document,
I am thinking as he nears the back door,
not merely a subpoena but an order
of excommunication with my name and a date
written in fine Italian ink
and signed with a flourish of the papal sash.
- Billy Collins
Gratitude expressed by 6 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Jul 22, 2014
I've seen that possum! And his excommunication document with my name on it! But it wouldn't have reached my conscious awareness without your original vision, Billy Collins. Thank you, Larry R. and Billy C.
Last edited by Barry; 01-08-2016 at 04:02 PM.
Gratitude expressed by 3 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
Monarch
yellow black stripedtiger worm
spits spider glue on
milkweed
then swings ass
to mouth to close
in on itself
waiting for glory
or just hangs
half
finished like the
rest of us.
- Richard Retecki
Last edited by Barry; 01-09-2016 at 01:44 PM.
Gratitude expressed by 4 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
To Be a Slave of Intensity
Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think. . .and think. . .while you are alive.
What you call “salvation’ belongs to the time before death.
If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten--
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of
Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you
will have the face of satisfied desire.
So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!
Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that
does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.
- Kabir
(version by Robert Bly)
Last edited by Bella Stolz; 01-11-2016 at 12:50 PM.
Gratitude expressed by 3 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
Black Boys Play The Classics
The most popular "act" in
Penn Station
is the three black kids in ratty
sneakers & T-shirts playing
two violins and a cello—Brahms.
White men in business suits
have already dug into their pockets
as they pass and they toss in
a dollar or two without stopping.
Brown men in work-soiled khakis
stand with their mouths open,
arms crossed on their bellies
as if they themselves have always
wanted to attempt those bars.
One white boy, three, sits
cross-legged in front of his
idols—in ecstasy—
their slick, dark faces,
their thin, wiry arms,
who must begin to look
like angels!
Why does this trembling
pull us?
A: Beneath the surface we are one.
B: Amazing! I did not think that they could speak this tongue.
- Toi Derricotte
Gratitude expressed by 6 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
Definition of the Frontiers
First there is the wind but not like the familiar wind but long and without lapses or falling away or surges of air as is usual but rather like the persistent pressure of a river or a running tide.
This wind is from the other side and has an odor unlike the odor of the winds with us but like time if time had odor and were cold and carried a bitter and sharp taste like rust on the taste of snow or the fragrance of thunder.
When the air has this taste of time the frontiers are not far from us.
Then too there are the animals. There are always animals under the small trees. They belong neither to our side nor to theirs but are wild and because they are animals of such kind that wildness is unfamiliar in them as the horse for example or the goat and often sheep and dogs and like creatures their wandering there is strange and even terrifying signaling as it does the violation of custom and the subversion of order.
There are also the unnatural lovers the distortion of images the penetration of mirrors and the inarticulate meanings of the dreams. The dreams are in turmoil like a squall of birds.
Finally there is the evasion of those with whom we have come. It is at the frontiers that the companions desert us—that the girl returns to the old country
that we are alone.
- Archibald McLeish
Last edited by Bella Stolz; 01-13-2016 at 12:52 PM.
Gratitude expressed by 2 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
For the New Year, 1981
I have a small grain of hope—
one small crystal that gleams
clear colors out of transparency.
I need more.
I break off a fragment
to send you.
Please take
this grain of a grain of hope
so that mine won’t shrink.
Please share your fragment
so that yours will grow.
Only so, by division,
will hope increase,
like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
unless you distribute
the clustered roots, unlikely source—
clumsy and earth-covered—
of grace.
- Denise Levertov
Gratitude expressed by 5 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
Dear Ashraf Fayadh,
Outside my window men speak
in a tongue I do not completely
understand. These are the men
who work the soil, the vineyards,
who pray to another god and the
god’s mother, who sing you are
never alone. We are all orphans
searching for light, harmony lost
to the stark meaning of man-made
laws. In our hearts, the poem of
Love is perfected, is the most holy
relic of Time. Dear Ashraf Fayadh,
may you live happily among the
living, neither lashed nor beheaded,
on little islands of wonder, feeling
for all the gods what they are
incapable of feeling, each word,
each brush stroke, a golden bee
bathed in the breath of heaven.
- Katherine Hastings
Note: Ashraf Fayadh is a Saudia Arabian artist and poet who has been sentenced to death, accused of promoting atheism in his 2008 book of poems Instructions Within.
Last edited by Barry; 01-15-2016 at 02:22 PM.
Gratitude expressed by 4 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
I would I might Forget that I am I
Sonnet VII
I would I might forget that I am I,
And break the heavy chain that binds me fast,
Whose links about myself my deeds have cast.
What in the body’s tomb doth buried lie
Is boundless; ’tis the spirit of the sky,
Lord of the future, guardian of the past,
And soon must forth, to know his own at last.
In his large life to live, I fain would die.
Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food,
But calling not his suffering his own;
Blessèd the angel, gazing on all good,
But knowing not he sits upon a throne;
Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood,
And doomed to know his aching heart alone
- George Santayana
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
Prayer
I want a god
as my accomplice
who spends nights
in houses
of ill repute
and gets up late
on Saturdays
a god
who whistles
through the streets
and trembles
before the lips
of his lover
a god
who waits in line
at the entrance
of movie houses
and likes to drink
café au lait
a god
who spits
blood from
tuberculosis and
doesn’t even have
enough for bus fare
a god
knocked
unconscious
by the billy club
of a policeman
at a demonstration
a god
who pisses
out of fear
before the flaring
electrodes
of torture
a god
who hurts
to the last
bone and
bites the air
in pain
a jobless god
a striking god
a hungry god
a fugitive god
an exiled god
an enraged god
a god
who longs
from jail
for a change
in the order
of things
I want a
more godlike
god
- Francisco X. Alarcon
February 21, 1954-January 15, 2016
(Translation by Francisco Aragon)
Last edited by Barry; 01-17-2016 at 04:48 PM.
Gratitude expressed by 6 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Jun 17, 2005
Last Online 02-05-2021
Gratitude expressed by 2 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
Coretta Scott King
Watching her funeral on TV, 2006
four tall white men
southerners all
presidents all
bush carter clinton bush
stand together today
in a congregation of accolades
to honor a small black woman
sweet soprano voice of peace
silenced finally
resting beneath a mound of
scarlet roses sun-yellow lilies
bright and passionate as her courage
no mere appendage
to her towering royal mate
she rose from his ashes
spoke with steely purpose
for the softest of virtues
endured assaults
of spiked and forked tongues
hearth-destroying bombs
to raise to dignity
the petty lives of garbage collectors
the poverty-enveloped
the forgotten children
the unjustly deprived
without bomb or tank she moved nations
lacking armor she prevailed
her only uniform the light of care
her only bugle the call for peace
she stood in silence
walked in grace
for you, now, sister in peace,
we stand in the fist of silence
walk in hope of grace
- Vilma Olivary Ginzberg
Last edited by Barry; 01-18-2016 at 12:50 PM.
Gratitude expressed by 3 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Jul 29, 2009
Last Online 02-07-2021
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
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
(7/17/1937-1/17/2016)
Last edited by Bella Stolz; 01-19-2016 at 01:41 PM.
Gratitude expressed by 8 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
There’s A Beat
There’s a beat,
and a sound there,
you hear it,
and a tone when we feel it,
a meter to the planet,
and such majesty to life.
There’s the song of our emotions
in the syncopation of our confusions,
and the cry of our devotions
to the heart’s expansive score.
There’s a melody to take us
through the storms of our rehearsals,
through the seasons we must improvise
a counterpoint to dying.
Oh holy music made of love and suffering,
bathe us in your colors.
Let the silence still us
to the ache in our fingers and our bones.
Let us find the harmony,
the notes that plot a passage,
that spell a message of reflection and protection,
if only we will trust and pay attention,
trust and pay attention
to the intervals that link us,
the relations that give meaning
in our symphony of loss.
- Tim Hicks
Gratitude expressed by:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
Bedrock
a message from my father
may I counsel you
from this distance
25 years after cremation
most of the fire extinguished
ashes scattered in four directions
our cup of sorrows aged like wine
allow me to cradle your head
and look into your eyes
allow me to make my amends
to soothe the hurt i caused
to nudge you toward a new calm
here, in the eye of the storm
now, let’s get down to bedrock
there is no perspective to defend
nor angle on which to balance
nothing to fix or forgive
your life is enough
hold it in your lap like a newborn
never cease to be amazed
by the shimmer
of your own soul
expect nothing
greet everything
raise the cup, drink deeply
- Fran Carbonaro
Gratitude expressed by 10 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
Blessed Disillusion
I thought it would be sudden,
instead it is gradual, graceful.
The sky falls leisurely.
A Chagall sky, it breaks
apart, slices of cobalt,
creamy eddies of clouds
drift down like feathers,
freed. Little by little,
pieces liberate, float down like ash
wafting away from the whole.
Here, chunks of indigo, shot
through with streaks of sunset, morning
silver. Venus shines in my hands.
Mars burns my eyes.
The sky lies at my feet
slices and wedges.
I pick them up, wonder,
turn them in my hands,
Warp and weft without the whole.
It happens unhurriedly. I always thought
it would be sudden. The sky would fall.
Instead it slips gradually from its moorings.
Overhead measureless emptiness
wheels and turns.
- Rebecca del Rio
Last edited by Bella Stolz; 01-22-2016 at 12:55 PM.
Gratitude expressed by 6 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
MushroomsRising surreptitiously in the nightthese low lives cower in shadegossiping and whispering musty secrets.They conspire with rotting wood;some shake mute bells in cow dung.some come with death in damp pouches.You know them allthese bloodless friends of nightwho make no sound under the knife. - Robert Samarotto
Gratitude expressed by 3 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
Outside
The least little sound sets the coyotes walking,
walking the edge of our comfortable earth.
We look inward, but all of them
are looking toward us as they walk the earth.
We need to let animals loose in our houses,
the wolf to escape with a pan in his teeth,
and streams of animals toward the horizon
racing with something silent in each mouth.
For all we have taken into our keeping
and polished with our hands belongs to a truth
greater than ours, in the animal´s keeping.
Coyotes are circling around our truth.
- William Stafford
Gratitude expressed by 3 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
For the Family and Friends of a Suicide
As you huddle around the torn silence,
Each by this lonely deed exiled
To a solitary confinement of soul,
May some glow from what has been lost
Return like the kindness of candlelight.
As your eyes strain to sift
This sudden wall of dark
And no one can say why
In such a forsaken, secret way,
This death was sent for...
May one of the lovely hours
Of memory return
Like a field of ease
Among these graveled days.
May the Angel of Wisdom
Enter this ruin of absence
And guide your minds
To receive this bitter chalice
So that you do not damage yourselves
By attending only at the hungry altar
Of regret and anger and guilt.
May you be given some inkling
That there could be something else at work
And that what to you now seems
Dark, destructive, and forlorn,
Might be a destiny that looks different
From inside the eternal script.
May vision be granted to you
To see this with the eyes of providence.
May your loss become a sanctuary
Where new presence will dwell
To refine and enrich
The rest of your life
With courage and compassion.
And may your lost loved one
Enter into the beauty of eternal tranquility,
In that place where there is no more sorrow
Or separation or mourning or tears.
- John O'Donohue
Gratitude expressed by 2 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
Monet Refuses the Operation
Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
- Lisel Mueller
Gratitude expressed by 4 members:
Real Name: (not displayed to guest users)
Join Date: Aug 20, 2006
Last Online 06-22-2022
Tree Marriage
In Chota Nagpur and Bengal
the betrothed are tied with threads to
mango trees, they marry the trees
as well as one another, and
the two trees marry each other.
Could we do that some time with oaks
or beeches? This gossamer we
hold each other with, this web
of love and habit is not enough.
In mistrust of heavier ties,
I would like tree-siblings for us,
standing together somewhere, two
trees married with us, lightly, their
fingers barely touching in sleep,
our threads invisible but holding.
- William Meredith
Gratitude expressed by 3 members: