Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Ronaldo]

[Larry Robinson]

Poetry Gives Off Smoke

Poetry gives off smoke
but it doesn’t die out.
It acts kind of crazy, flutteringly,
when it chooses us.
This fellow’s no fool,
sucking tranquillizers,
toting in a little briefcase
a boiled beet-root.
Right now he’d like a mousse
or baba au rhum,
but the Muse-
some kind of Muse! -
grabs him
by the scruff of the neck!
Thoughts drill a hole in his forehead,
and he’s mislaid the spoon-
and he’s a giant! Socrates, for the Lord’s sake...
in an Oblomov dust-jacket. O.K....
he’s no Apollo-
he’s puny and ugly,
skinny: he’s like a golden mushroom,
unsteady...
transparent.
But suddenly some sort of whistling
is in his ears, and then...
a period!
And like a slugger’s hook
across the chops of the ages,
a line!
And there
an insane little bird
falls off its feet,
a crazy rag-picker,
drunk,
a kind of society clown. But something gives her the word
and-
like branches in winter,
God rings from within, and her eyelids turn
to marble.
And here’s a bum
a shaman,
really-
from among the lunatics!
Pour him champagne,
bring him
women, not rum cakes!
Suddenly an order from within
will come through sternly, and he’s the instant
voice of the people, damned near
Savonarola!

Poetry acts kind of strange, it flutters
when it chooses us.
And it has no mercy, either,
afterwards. It stamps 'Pure Souls'
on us...but who’s the judge?
Yes,
for the horse-blinkered multitudes we’re 'decadents, '
but for ourselves, we ourselves are... are...
well, yes! Redemption!


- Yevgeny Yevtushenko


(Translated by James Dickey with Anthony Kahn)

[Larry Robinson]

Realism

God said, your name is mud
and the thing about mud is you
got to throw it down
repeatedly
to remove the air
and sometimes cut it
and rejoin it with another part.
If stars are made of dust,
it’s not the same stuff,
God said;
you can’t make a hut out of it,
only heaven,
and when I said dust to dust,
that’s not what I meant.

- Beth Bachmann

[Larry Robinson]

Nocturne

Because these are not the nights of empty hands,
because these are not the nights of dreams galloping
like gasoline fire over blue tar,
I wish you could see what I see
when I look at you,
I wish I could give you
the landscape in my soul, invisible
as the wishes I follow to your mouth --
an ocean mounting within me, the drowsy foam
and drone of velvet waters washing us closer
and farther apart, always both at once,
murmur of umber, bloodwings beating in bone.


You cannot see the waves breaking against welted shoals,
but in the rocking of our chair, maybe you hear
the whispering of the sea, biting acetylene,
or cries of tern and gull, brine-stung; maybe you hear
the uncaged waters gasping against hasp and hull,
salt fumes hissing, scalps flensed from bile-dark brine.
In your shirt's rustling, I hear sailcloth in wind,
ropes lashed and pulling against the mast.
In our chair's rasp against pine boards, I hear
the creak of oarlocks, a broken scull scraping against keel.
I hear spume soaking a bowsprit crisped with salt,
as I rock into your torso, your human shore.


Come nearer, nearer,
for I want to see what you see --
Dress me in burlap and bone,
wrap me in musk and dulse, in human moss,
shine me a lighthouse's scalding gold;
comfort me with wine and sole, come to me
with a severed branch of coral, a fistful of wet wings;
sing me the gauze of dusk and salt, nights full of sulfurous foam,
lead me through the narcotic dark to a bed
of coats, your stubbled face grazing my throat,
for I want to feel your eyelids touching my lips when I sleep,
I want to feel the bones of your silence pressing against my own.



- Suji Kwock Kim

[Larry Robinson]

Advice

Someone dancing inside us
has learned only a few steps:
the "Do-Your-Work" in 4/4 time,
the "What-Do-You-Expect" Waltz.
He hasn't noticed yet the woman
standing away from the lamp.
the one with black eyes
who knows the rumba.
and strange steps in jumpy rhythms
from the mountains of Bulgaria.
If they dance together,
something unexpected will happen;
if they don't, the next world
will be a lot like this one.

- Bill Holm

[Larry Robinson]

Earth, You Have Returned to Me

Can you imagine waking up
every morning on a different planet,
each with its own gravity?

Slogging, wobbling,
wavering. Atilt
and out-of-sync
with all that moves
and doesn’t.

Through years of trial
and mostly error
did I study this unsteady way — 

changing pills, adjusting the dosage,
never settling.

A long time we were separate,
O Earth,
but now you have returned to me.

- Elaine Equi

[Larry Robinson]

Paradigm Shift
Millions of spiritual creatures
walk the earth

Unseen, both when we wake,
and when we sleep.
Milton (Paradise Lost)

Although my favorite things have always been: ocean, river, rock, sky, moon, wind
they have more poignancy for me
now that the survival of earth is so frantically upon us.

When I was a girl
I was chastised for seeing too much.
For seeing “into the insides of things,”
as I told my parents who could not understand
what I meant and thought “where does this child hail from?”

The snow on the pines on the mountain tops of Vermont.
Their branches covered in icicles so pure
I thought they were hanging with loaded stars clinking together
become bells…this magic I always saw and held in my palms.

Now the skin of the earth, the soil,
is poisoned.
The blood of the earth, the waters,
are poisoned
and whales beach themselves in utter disbelief.
The eyes of the earth, the sky,
fade and stars hide at night.
Elephant, tiger, antelope, turtle, salmon.
Animals live in such fear that they are almost
statues covering the earth.

Brother and sister wolf, bear, moose writhe
from the waste and need of men to hang their stuffed heads on walls
and proudly pose for photos with the bodies of animals they have killed
and cover floors with their pelts.
The blood on their hands invisible to them but visible
to the spirits who live quietly on this earth
watching, recording their incomprehensible tasks of death.

The first people who lived on this continent
took only what they needed for food, clothing, shelter.
Spoke, prayed to the animal at night before a hunt,
their graceful hands and faces outlined in moonlight.
This morning, although there are tears on my pillow when I wake,
I see brown bear standing erect, magnificent in my dreams.
All the animals of the earth cover the earth once again
joined in circles of streaming light.

- Pamela Singer Yesbick

[Larry Robinson]

Imagining

What if God isnʼt a noun
to be empowered and worshiped
but a verb of creation
powered by love?

What if every single tree
drawn in primary school
is a sacred work of art
worthy of joyful notice?

What if our lives are built
on a web of kindness,
a net,
which holds everything living.

What if the rocks are alive
singing strength and courage;
vibrating
from our feet right up to our heart?

What if we loved ourselves
as deeply as the mountain
who,
caressed by water,
surrenders herself
into sand?

What if our most loved,
intra-national pastime
is a game of entertainment
where we all win?

What if no one aspired
to be a millionaire
and money no longer had power
but was simply a means of tender-ness.

What if transforming our world
by imagining it
can
actually make it happen?

- Deborah Rodney

[Larry Robinson]

The Dying Poet’s Address to Young People

You young people of times to come
And of new dawns over cities which
Have yet to be built, also you
Who are still unborn, listen
To my voice, the voice of a man who died
And not gloriously.

But
Like a farmer who has not tended his land
And like a lazy carpenter who ran away
Leaving the rafters uncovered.

Thus did I
Waste my time, squander my days and now
I must ask you
To say everything that was not said
To do everything that was not done, and quickly
To forget me, please, so that
My bad example does not lead you astray.

Ah why did I
Sit down at table with those who produced nothing
And share the meal which they had not prepared?

And why did I mix
My best sayings with their
Idle chatter? While outside
Unschooled people were walking around
Thirsty for instruction.

Ah why
Do my songs not rise from the places where
The cities are nourished, where they build ships, why
Do they not rise from the fast moving
Locomotives like smoke which
Stays behind in the sky?

Because for people who create and are useful
My talk
Is like ashes in the mouth and a drunken mumbling.
Not a single word
Can I offer you, you generations of time to come
Not one indication could I give, pointing
With my uncertain finger, for how could anyone
Show the way who has not
Traveled it himself?

So all I can do, who have thus
Wasted my life, is tell you
To obey not a single command that comes
From our rotten mouths and to take
No advice from those
Who have failed so badly, but
To decide for yourselves what is good for you
And what will help you
To cultivate the land which we let go to ruin, and
To make the cities
Which we poisoned
Places for people to live in.

Bertolt Brecht

[Larry Robinson]

Inscription for the Door

I have no enemies left,
only some friends who are late.
Come in, hang your coat
beside the fire and pull a chair to its edge.
We shall drink tea and clear the path
leading back to the heart’s first address.
You may have news of these nations beginning
at last to revolve beside each other like seasons
or word of the fires out of control south of us,
where the poor are burning the lies keeping them poor.
Why are those three ragged strangers still kneeling
Over their ashes, invite them, bring them in,
they can rest here beside this oven of bread.
Children sleep in the corners, taking notes.
A woman is dressing in the room overhead,
her footsteps are tablets I open to sleep.
The new wind is full of branches tonight,
Leaving no holes in the darkness.
Enter. I have no enemies left any more,
Only some friends who are late.

- Eugene Ruggles

[Larry Robinson]

This Compost
1

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

2

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.

What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will
none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.


- Walt Whitman

[Larry Robinson]

The Singing

I can hear her through
the thin wall, singing,
up before the sun:
two notes, a kind
of hushed half-breathing,
each time the baby
makes that little moan —

can hear her trying
not to sing, then singing
anyway, a thing so old
it might as well
be Hittite or Minoan,

and so soft no one
would ever guess
that I myself once
sang that very song:

back when my son
and then his brother
used to cry all night
or half the morning,
though nothing in all
the world was wrong.

And now how strange:
to be the man from next door,
listening, as the baby cries
then quiets, cries and quiets
each time she sings
their secret song,

that would sound the same ten
thousand years ago,
and has no
meaning but to calm.

- Patrick Phillips

[Larry Robinson]

Throw Yourself Like Seed

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit
sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
that brushes your heel as it turns going by,
the man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant.

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
but to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
is the work; start then, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,
don't turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,
and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what's alive in the furrow, what's dead in yourself,
for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;
from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

- Miguel De Unamuno
(translated by Robert Bly)

[Larry Robinson]

St. Roach

For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you,
for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth,
they showed me by every action to despise your kind;
for that I saw my people making war on you,
I could not tell you apart, one from another,
for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you,
for that all the people I knew met you by
crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling
water on you, they flushed you down,
for that I could not tell one from another
only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender.
Not like me.

For that I did not know your poems
And that I do not know any of your sayings
And that I cannot speak or read your language
And that I do not sing your songs
And that I do not teach our children
to eat your food
or know your poems
or sing your songs

But that we say you are filthing our food
But that we know you not at all.
Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time.
You were lighter than the others in color, that was
neither good nor bad.
I was really looking for the first time.
You seemed troubled and witty.
Today I touched one of you for the first time.
You were startled, you ran, you fled away
Fast as a dancer, light, strange and lovely to the touch.
I reach, I touch, I begin to know you.

- Muriel Rukeyser

[Ronaldo]

Lets not forget Don Marquis's Archie. On a more serious note:

"Cockroaches in the home environment are a health hazard not only because of the risks posed by cockroach antigens to asthma sufferers, but also because they can carry disease-causing germs and because some of the methods traditionally used to eliminate them cause additional health hazards."
(https://www.nchh.org/WhatWeDo/HealthHazardsPreventionandSolutions/Insects.aspx)

St. Roach...

[wisewomn]

Reminded me of this:

In the Kitchen, at Midnight
Ted Kooser
From: Sure Signs

I snap on the light

and a cockroach zips over the floor like a skateboard
and without slowing down skims under the door to the cupboard,
becoming a can of tomatoes.
How Ovid would love it!
Cockroach, wherever you are, whatever shape you've assumed, I take you for my model.
I want to eat poisons and live, to breathe poisons yet run like the wind,
to laugh my brown way through thousands of years of no cancer or wars or Republicans, and,
once in a while, in the night,
I'd like a light flashing on like the bomb,
if only for memory's sake

St. Roach...

[Larry Robinson]

Rain

A teacher asked Paul
what he would remember
from third grade, and he sat
a long time before writing
"this year sumbody tutched me
on the sholder"
and turned his paper in.
Later she showed it to me
as an example of her wasted life.
The words he wrote were large
as houses in a landscape.
He wanted to go inside them
and live, he could fill in
the windows of "o" and "d"
and be safe while outside
birds building nests in drainpipes
knew nothing of the coming rain.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

The Mother

You thought that you
would be treated like a person.

You thought that you would
be classed
as a human being.
someone with needs
and feelings.

Just because you had
lived here
for 20 years,
no major transgressions,
no record of
significant misdoings.

Even though you had worked
for years as a seamstress,
or sometimes at
Hardy's,
taking orders,
helping out in the kitchen.

Even though your
eldest daughter
now works in a bank
while she finishes her degree,
and the young ones
do well in school.

They said
you might be
a rapist, or
a terrorist
ready to harm
their country,
the place where their ancestors settled
so many years ago.

Once your ancestors
owned this land,
they took it away
and now it is theirs.

Now they are building
a wall,
one very, very high,
to keep you out.

They say it will be
beautiful.

I wonder if there
are walls in heaven.

- Dorothy Walters

[Larry Robinson]

Snake

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

- D.H. Lawrence

Taormina, 1923

[Roland Jacopetti]

One of my all-time favorites - thanks, Larry!
Roland

Snake...

[Larry Robinson]

The Ordinary Life

To rise early, reconsider, rise again later
to papers and the news. To smoke a few if time
permits and, second-guessing the weather,

dress. Another day of what we bring to it—
matters unfinished from days before,
regrets over matters we've finished poorly.

Just once you'd like to start out early,
free from memory and lighter for it.
Like Adam, on that first day: alone

but cheerful, no fear of the maker,
anything his for the naming; nothing
to shrink from, nothing to shirk,

no lot to carry that wasn't by choice.
And at night, no voice to keep him awake,
no hurry to rise, no hurry not to.

- Tracy K. Smith
(America’s newest Poet Laureate)

[Larry Robinson]

A Healing contract


When chaos erupts
May sanity prevail in our nation
Keep asking; what do you dearly love?

When chaos erupts
may we depend on Beauty
and remember the healing contract
we made with poetry.

The intimacy of light in the morning
has your name on it.

Seek sanctuary
with the salmon
waiting under black shadowed ledges.

When chaos erupts
may we depend on
each other.

- Kristy Hellum

[Larry Robinson]

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

- Robert Hayden

[Ronaldo]

Colorado Rockies, two weeks ago.

...

[Larry Robinson]

Hawker in the Square in Florence


If imagination weren’t truth and stories weren’t blueprints
for ways to escape the hawker of Magdalene key rings
haranguing me near the Basilica Santa Maria Novella
in Florence, I would be a grand inquisitor
or architect of holy names.

The Cathedral with its Christmas candy facade
would never exist in a universe
where functionality ruled the roost.
But, yes, this church alive with pigeons—worshippers
and street folks gossiping in the square.

Nine hundred years of palaver.

The hawker, a young black man, wearing a brocaded fez
speaks English, but will not hear my words,
No bro’ my friend, fly away, leave me be.

He replies his wife is pregnant and sick
with three kids in Senegal.

Liar, liar pants on fire.

He grabs my wrist.

No, not very hard.

His hands are calloused,
poverty and determination deep-set in his eyes.

If stories weren’t emeralds,
if flesh wasn’t temporal,
mercenaries in armor would obliterate
verbs with state-of-the-art shrapnel.

But in the realm of fiction
there is space for time, pain and
hardcore bullshit to coincide
like contentious Medieval factions
(the pope and the Medici for instance)
and discover what words cannot.

Ah, to buy the man’s tourist crap or not?

- Barry Denny

[Dorothy Friberg]

And don't give money to beggars on street corners either!

Hawker in the Square in Florence
...
Ah, to buy the man’s tourist crap or not?
- Barry Denny

[Larry Robinson]

Song for the Summer Solstice:

Oak burns steady and hot and long

and fires of oak are traditional tonight
but we light a fire of pitch pine
which burns well enough in the salt wind
whistling while ragged flames lick the dark
casting our shadows high as the dunes.

Come into the fire and catch,
come in, come in. Fire that burns
and leaves entire, the silver flame
of the moon, trembling mercury laying
on the waves a highway to the abyss,
the full roaring furnace of the sun at zenith
of the year and potency, midsummer's eve.

Come dance in the fire, come in.
This is the briefest night and just
under the ocean the fires of the sun
roll toward us.

Come step into the fire, come in,
come in, dance in the flames of the festival
of the strongest sun at the mountain top
of the year when the wheel starts down.
Dance through me as I through you.
Here in the heart of fire in the caves
of the ancient body we are aligned
with the stars wheeling, the midges swarming
in the humid air like a nebula, with the clams
who drink the tide and the heartwood clock
of the oak and the astronomical clock
in the blood thundering through the great heart
of the albatross. Our cells are burning
each a little furnace powered by the sun
and the moon pulls the sea of our blood.
This night the sun and moon dance
and you and I dance in the fire of which
we are the logs, the matches, and the flames.

- Marge Piercy

[Dorothy Friberg]

Beautiful images. Thank you!

Song for the Summer Solstice:

Oak burns steady and hot and long

and fires of oak are traditional tonight
but we light a fire of pitch pine
which burns well enough in the salt wind
whistling while ragged flames lick the dark
casting our shadows high as the dunes.

Come into the fire and catch,
come in, come in. Fire that burns
and leaves entire, the silver flame
of the moon, trembling mercury laying
on the waves a highway to the abyss,
the full roaring furnace of the sun at zenith
of the year and potency, midsummer's eve.

Come dance in the fire, come in.
This is the briefest night and just
under the ocean the fires of the sun
roll toward us.

Come step into the fire, come in,
come in, dance in the flames of the festival
of the strongest sun at the mountain top
of the year when the wheel starts down.
Dance through me as I through you.
Here in the heart of fire in the caves
of the ancient body we are aligned
with the stars wheeling, the midges swarming
in the humid air like a nebula, with the clams
who drink the tide and the heartwood clock
of the oak and the astronomical clock
in the blood thundering through the great heart
of the albatross. Our cells are burning
each a little furnace powered by the sun
and the moon pulls the sea of our blood.
This night the sun and moon dance
and you and I dance in the fire of which
we are the logs, the matches, and the flames.

- Marge Piercy

[Larry Robinson]

Summer Solstice
The garden is so full of its good green life -
Baby tomatoes swelling on the vine –
Pansies coming, rhododendrons going.
Cosmos opening up towards the sun –
Light lingers far into the evening now.
It is easy to ignore the return of the dark.
We won’t notice that
tomorrow’s daylight lessens.
Summer is here, with its
warm days and baseball,
beach trips and wine in outdoor cafes.
Why should we watch for shadowy fingers
reaching around the edge of the doorframe?
Dazzled by the light
We turn a blind eye to what comes this way.
Up the dusty road -
a stranger in a slouching hat,
approaches slowly and relentlessly
slicing through the heat shimmers.
Take your time, friend.
Your pockets may be filled with blood-red rubies
but we are not yet ready for your gifts.
Take your time.

- Maya Spector

[Larry Robinson]

First Light


From way down deep some dog is howling,

to the moon, to his mate, to his misery

From way down deep in my dream I hear him

and when I open my eyes I hear him

Neither awake nor asleep, I lie here

like the sky and listen,

Unsure if it’s coming from me

or from the bottomless woods.


- Mike Tuggle

(Mike Tuggle was Sonoma County’s Poet Laureate in 2008 and 2009)