Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Say Her Name


I am a woman carrying other women

in my mouth
behold a sister
a daughter
a mother
dear friend
spirits demystify
on my tongue
they gather to breath
and exhale a dance with the death we know
is not the end all these nameless
bodies haunted by pellet wounds in their chests
listen for them and the saying of a name you cannot pronounce
black and woman is a sort of magic
you cannot hash tag
the mere weight
of it too vast to be held
we hold ourselves
an inheritance felt between the hips
womb of soft darkness portal of light
watch them envy the revolution of our movement
how we break open to give life flow
while the terror of our tears the torment of our taste
my rage
is righteous my love is righteous
my name
be righteous here what I am not here to say
we too have died we know we are dying too
I am not here to say look at me how I died
so brutal a death I deserve a name to fit all the horror in
I am here to tell you how if they mentioned me
in their protest and their rallies
they would have to face their role in it too
my beauty too
I have died many times before
the blow to the body
I have bled
many months before the bullet to the flesh we know
the body is not the end
call it what you will
but for all the handcuffed wrists of us the shackled
ankles of us
the bend over to make room for you
of us how dare we speak anything less
then I love you
we who love just as loudly in the thunderous
rain as when the Sun shines golden on our skin
and the world kisses us unapologetically we
be so beautiful when we be- how you gonna be free
without me
your freedom tied up
with mine at the nappy edge of my soul
singing for all my sisters watch them stretch their
arms and my voice how they fly open chested
toward your ear
listen for
Rekia Boyd, Tanisha Anderson Yvette Smith
Aiyana Jones
Caleb Moore Shelly Frey
Miriam Carey Kendra James
Alberto Spruill, Tarika Wilson,
Shereese Francis
Shantel Davis, Malissa Williams
Darnisha Harris Michelle Cassell
Pearlie Golden, Kathryn Johnston
Eleanor Bumpers, Natasha McKenna
Sheneque Proctor
We
we will not vanish
and the baited breath of our brothers
show me show me
a man willing to fight beside me
my hand in his the color of courage
there is no mountaintop worth
seeing without us
meet me
in the trenches where we lay our bodies down
in the valley of a voice
say her name
- Aja Monet


To hear Aja read her powerful poem: https://youtu.be/aL_yzeM7wY0

[Larry Robinson]

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

- Dylan Thomas

[Larry Robinson]

Waking

A massive blue stallion rears before me

out of a midnight lake of dreams

Moonlight flows
like fire along his flanks, and

an inner blaze flares
from the dark mystery of his eyes

I turn and flee, afraid for the small life
clutched tight in my chest, knotted in my stomach

Branches tear at my coat
underbrush at my feet

Every step, the horse gains
his heavy breath close and closer, until

I stumble

He grabs my collar in his teeth
flings me over his shoulder, onto his back

and waits, trembling

for me to grab a handful of his wiry mane
press my knees together

urge him on


- Karl Frederick

[Larry Robinson]

Perhaps we are all lost a little

I miss my mother; she listened to me

Sent me Pablo Neruda’s Fully Empowered,

Hoping that I would be.

She called Sunday evenings to

Listen to my News of the Day, the Week

Or month.

How would fully empowered feel?

Able to use my soul to enrich others?

Able to connect people who need each other

To complete themselves and their work?

Able to relax into life so it may be enjoyed

More than fought through.

How could we NOT be at least a bit lost?

Men we are asked to trust lead us

Ever closer to world war and possible

Annihilation;

Other men, mostly men, take away

The civil rights we worked for a lifetime

Or more to put in place.

If we are not required to love each other,

At least should we not be required to

Respect each other? To share.

How can our world be good

If we do not treat each other kindly?

How can our future be bright

If we are not quite sure love is real.

I want to curl up

And cry with you.

There is so much pain

In a life

And so very much joy

If you seek it but

You have to seek that and hold on.

Beauty, is all around

If you get off your iPhone.

Please come and find me;

I’ll be looking everywhere for you

Because it matters when you can touch

Another soul and

Once you have met on the astral plain

You shall remain there together forever.

Or not. Which?

- Connie Madden

[Larry Robinson]

A Prayer

Refuse to fall down.
If you cannot refuse to fall down,
refuse to stay down.
If you cannot refuse to stay down,
lift your heart toward heaven,
and like a hungry beggar,
ask that it be filled,
and it will be filled.
You may be pushed down.
You may be kept from rising.
But no one can keep you
from lifting your heart
toward heaven -
only you.
It is in the middle of misery
that so much becomes clear.
The one who says nothing good
came of this,
is not yet listening.

- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

[Larry Robinson]

Three Gratitudes

Every night before I go to sleep
I say out loud
Three things that I’m grateful for,
All the significant, insignificant
Extraordinary, ordinary stuff of my life.

It’s a small practice and humble,
And yet, I find I sleep better
Holding what lightens and softens my life
Ever so briefly at the end of the day.

Sunlight, and blueberries,

Good dogs and wool socks,
A fine rain,
A good friend,
Fresh basil and wild phlox,
My father’s good health,
My daughter’s new job,
The song that always makes me cry,
Always at the same part,
No matter how many times I hear it.

Decent coffee at the airport,
And your quiet breathing,
The stories you told me,
The frost patterns on the windows,
English horns and banjos,
Wood Thrush and June bugs,
The smooth glassy calm of the morning pond,
An old coat,
A new poem,
My library card,
And that my car keeps running
Despite all the miles.

And after three things,
More often than not,
I get on a roll and I just keep on going,
I keep naming and listing,
Until I lie grinning,
Blankets pulled up to my chin,
Awash with wonder
At the sweetness of it all.


- Carrie Newcomer

[Larry Robinson]

Do not be defeated by the rain

Unbeaten by the rain
Unbeaten by the wind
Bested by neither snow nor summer heat
Strong of body
Free of desire
Never angry
Always smiling quietly
Dining daily on four cups of brown rice
Some miso and a few vegetables
Observing all things
With dispassion
But remembering well
Living in a small, thatched-roof house
In the meadow beneath a canopy of pines
Going east to nurse the sick child
Going west to bear sheaves of rice for the weary mother
Going south to tell the dying man there is no cause for fear
Going north to tell those who fight to put aside their trifles
Shedding tears in time of drought
Wandering at a loss during the cold summer
Called useless by all
Neither praised
Nor a bother
Such is the person
I wish to be
Miyazawa.jpg

- Kenji Miyazawa
(27 August 1896 – 21 September 1933)

[Larry Robinson]

I get up

(I don’t always want to)
I’m tired
I am run down
My thoughts run me down
The news runs me down
My country runs me down
Our history runs me down
But
Something pulls me from the safety of my sheets
Puts me in the shower
Dresses me and says
Show up
Sometimes I show up
Because Heather Heyer can’t
Sometimes I show up because
Anita Hill’s testimony still sends chills down my spine, because my friend who is a DREAMER is living in a constant state of fear, or because there are thousands of Puerto Rican Americans who have lost everything and are still living in darkness.

Sometimes I get up,
Because I’m tired of wondering why there are so many people who should not have a gun but
have a gun
Sometimes I get up
Because I know that equal pay for equal work does not exist.
And when I see that 1 in 4 black people in Florida cannot vote, it is clear to me that equal voting rights do not exist either.
Sometimes I get up
Because the land of the free is locking millions of human beings in cages, shackling women during childbirth, and putting our children in solitary confinement.

Sometimes I get up because
I know that Nazis are planning to march again, because Flint still has no clean drinking water.
Sometimes I get up
Because I know that 40 percent of our homeless population are LGBTQ youths and there is something wrong with that.
Sometimes I get up
Because I don’t want to have to teach my children how to do nuclear bomb drills, or what to wear to avoid sexual harassment or how to behave to avoid a “justifiable shooting” by the police.
Sometimes I get up
Because I hugged Trayvon Martin’s mother last year and told her I would keep going.
And sometimes I get up because I remember the time I read the Coretta Scott King line that said,
“Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.”

So I show up
Some days I am only able to show up for myself when I close my eyes and say,
“Breathe. You are are worthy. You can do this. And you will be okay.”
And on the days when I can do more …
I do more
I listen more
I learn more
I give more of my time.
I give more of my dollars.
I give more of my heart.
I give more spirit.
I give more of my …
Self
Because
To not show up
To stay silent
To do nothing
Is to tell the world that I think it is fine the way it is
And I do not think the world is fine the way it is

- Cleo Wade

[Larry Robinson]

Anguish Longer Than Sorrow

If destroying all the maps known
would erase all the boundaries
from the face of this earth
I would say let us
make a bonfire
to reclaim and sing
the human person

Refugee is an ominous load
even for a child to carry
for some children
words like home
could not carry any possible meaning
but
displaced
border
refugee
must carry dimensions of brutality and terror
past the most hideous nightmare
anyone could experience or imagine

Empty their young eyes
deprived of a vision of any future
they should have been entitled to
since they did not choose to be born
where and when they were
Empty their young bellies
extended and rounded by malnutrition
and growling like the well-fed dogs of some
with pretensions to concerns about human rights
violations

Can you see them now
stumble from nowhere
to no
where
between
nothing
and
nothing

Consider
the premature daily death of their young dreams
what staggering memories frighten and abort
the hope that should have been
an indelible inscription in their young eyes

Perhaps
I should just borrow
the rememberer’s voice again
while I can and say:
to have a home is not a favour.

- Keorapetse Kgositsile
(Former Poet Laureate of South Africa:
September 19,1938 – January 3, 2018)

[Larry Robinson]

Tension

"Never use the word suddenly just to
create tension." - Writing Fiction

Suddenly, you were planting some yellow petunias
outside in the garden,
and suddenly I was in the study
looking up the word oligarchy for the thirty-seventh time.

When suddenly, without warning,
you planted the last petunia in the flat,
and I suddenly closed the dictionary
now that I was reminded of that vile form of governance.

A moment later, we found ourselves
standing suddenly in the kitchen
where you suddenly opened a can of cat food
and I just as suddenly watched you doing that.

I observed a window of leafy activity
and, beyond that, a bird perched on the edge
of the stone birdbath
when suddenly you announced you were leaving

to pick up a few things at the market
and I stunned you by impulsively
pointing out that we were getting low on butter
and another case of wine would not be a bad idea.

Who could tell what the next moment would hold?
Another drip from the faucet?
Another little spasm of the second hand?
Would the painting of the bowl of pears continue

to hang on the wall from that nail?
Would the heavy anthologies remain on their shelves?
Would the stove hold its position?
Suddenly, it was anyone's guess.

The sun rose ever higher.
The state capitals remained motionless on the wall map
when suddenly I found myself lying on a couch
where I closed my eyes and without any warning

began to picture the Andes, of all places,
and a path that led over the mountain to another country
with strange customs and eye-catching hats
suddenly fringed with little colorful, dangling balls.

- Billy Collins

[Larry Robinson]

At the Age of 18-Ode to Girls of Color


At the age of 5

I saw how we always pick the flower swelling with the most color.

The color distinguishes it from the rest, and tells us:

This flower should not be left behind.

But this does not happen in the case of colored girls.

Our color makes hands pull back, and we, left to grow alone,

stretching our petals to a dry sun.


At the age of 12

I blinked in the majesty of the color within myself,

blinded by the knowledge that a skinny black girl, a young brown teen,

has the power to light Los Angeles all night,

the radiance to heal all the scars left on this city's pavement.

Why had this realization taken so long,

When color pulses in all that is beauty and painting and human?

You see, long ago, they told me

that snakes and spiders have spots and vibrant bodies if they are poisonous.

In other words, being of color meant danger, warning, 'do not touch'.

At the age of 18

I know my color is not warning, but a welcome.

A girl of color is a lighthouse, an ultraviolet ray of power, potential, and promise

My color does not mean caution, it means courage

my dark does not mean danger, it means daring,

my brown does not mean broken, it means bold backbone from working

twice as hard to get half as far.

Being a girl of color means I am key, path, and wonder all in one body.

At the age of 18

I am experiencing how black and brown can glow.

And glow I will, glow we will, vibrantly, colorfully;

not as a warning, but as promise,

that we will set the sky alight with our magic.

- Amanda Gorman

(Amanda Gorman is America’s first national Youth Poet Laureate)

[Larry Robinson]

A Quality of Face


Maybe it’s how kindness rests there

First on the forehead

Pausing not to land determinedly

Flowing out to the corners of your eyes

Creating small rivulets

Ebbing inward and onward

Drifting from the corners of your mouth

Floating down toward the bass violin

How kindness resonates, first

in your profile, then

in the curve of grained wood

Meeting and greeting the other, with

a small uplift of the mouth, and

a bowed note


- Rebecca Evert

[Larry Robinson]

For C.

After the clash of elevator gates
And the long sinking, she emerges where,
A slight thing in the morning’s crosstown glare,
She looks up toward the window where he waits,
Then in a fleeting taxi joins the rest
Of the huge traffic bound forever west.

On such grand scale do lovers say good-bye—
Even this other pair whose high romance
Had only the duration of a dance,
And who, now taking leave with stricken eye,
See each in each a whole new life forgone.
For them, above the darkling clubhouse lawn,

Bright Perseids flash and crumble; while for these
Who part now on the dock, weighed down by grief
And baggage, yet with something like relief,
It takes three thousand miles of knitting seas
To cancel out their crossing, and unmake
The amorous rough and tumble of their wake.

We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse
And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share
The frequent vistas of their large despair,
Where love and all are swept to nothingness;
Still, there’s a certain scope in that long love
Which constant spirits are the keepers of,

And which, though taken to be tame and staid,
Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,
A passion joined to courtesy and art
Which has the quality of something made,
Like a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent,
Like a rose window or the firmament.
- Richard Wilbur

[Dorothy Friberg]

Nice visuals Larry, and once again I am sent to consult my dictionary.

For C.

After the clash of elevator gates ...

- Richard Wilbur

[Larry Robinson]

Blessing

this is not the truth
about the end but a hint about
beginning When the Buddha

had sat alone
for nearly forever
beneath the tree of many names
when he had taken into himself
all the suffering there is
and will always be then
he did not despair
he turned away
from the empty air
that starving saints exhale
he laughed at the idea
of nothing What he saw
clear and unmistakable
before him and really on all sides
was a lake and the lake shone
and there was Iight in it
and he knew that to hold
all that water in his gaze
would mislead him
about his own
size unless he entered the water
and bathed
for there is no enlightenment
without immersion


And so after so long the Buddha

entered enlightenment
which is not the end
but the end of being alone


and the Buddha whom the world
had thought sufficient
unto himself was not
for that was what
enlightenment taught

And at the end of
so long alone
the Buddha slowly turned
toward all the others
who were also alone
and she opened her arms
and around them all the water
stretched and shone

- Eleanor Wilner

[Larry Robinson]

Half Life


We walk through half our life
as if it were a fever dream
barely touching the ground
our eyes half open
our heart half closed.


Not half knowing who we are
we watch the ghost of us drift
from room to room
through friends and lovers
never quite as real as advertised.


Not saying half we mean
or meaning half we say
we dream ourselves
from birth to birth
seeking some true self.


Until the fever breaks
and the heart can not abide
a moment longer
as the rest of us awakens,
summoned from the dream,
not half caring for anything but love.


- Stephen Levine

[Larry Robinson]

Love Hides


Love hides in crevices that go unnoticed. It dangles from
the worn threads of faith that drop from religion’s coattail.

It lies in splinters, beaten by the club of family strife and
the slow decay of relationships.

It stares wistfully from outside shattered windows of illness and mortality.

It sits amidst the debris left behind in silken cobwebs by
spirit’s door and in breath-less moments when the body can

do no more. It even lurks in moments of anger and hating.
Love hides in crevices: unperturbed and waiting.

- Bruce Silverman

[Ronaldo]

Background photo: Margrethe Mather—1920

[Larry Robinson]

Where Papi’s Angel Speaks to Me About Love


mijo—i know you have seen the night
as an excuse to hold your body like a bottle

and drink yourself to sleep in the morning
the sun will rise bright as an infant fear

in your throat you will not die as much
as you wish for it you will get lucky

friends will envy you with their stomachs
whether or not you deserve it you will lose

women you loved wrong and i know what
that’s like—to love until you lose hope

in yourself no one wants to talk about it
how at the border they offered us clean

criminal records our first ride on an airplane
if we went back to motherland el salvador

it’s so hard to leave and of course your tio
he went back for a girl said he would try again

the right way but there is never a right way
to leave we would have never left if there

was a choice to make but men leave to survive
leaving is what makes us & you will become

a man all the wrong ways which is to say
there is no right way after your tio left

they let me go—into the blinding street
with nothing not even a bus route always

an orphan this time without a family
to call a motherland only an address

my eighth grade dropout’s command of
language & survival—mijo—i made it

there is no need for a map if fear is your
new face learn to kiss him with your eyes

open without a border between your lips

- Willie Palomo

[Larry Robinson]

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you


- e.e. cummings

[Larry Robinson]

How Many Generations ‘Til Mary?

How many generations from
the wars of streets that
steal one’s children,
the daily violence of poverty,
the grinding stone of racism,
must one be before
she can follow Mary Oliver
down the green path
to the grasshopper’s house?

Between civilization and anarchy
only seven meals—
how many missing meals
must be replaced
before the chaos forced
upon the living earth
can be felt
by the hungry man?

How many generations of
enough bread, enough water,
enough freedom from
fear-blind soldiers—
especially when
they’re called police—
will carve a space of safety
in which to see and write
the fog-drunk woods, the hawk,
the running dear?

How can people burned as fuel
surely as a rainforest;
ghosted people trapped outside,
people in a gristmill turning
making plenty we enjoy—
even now as I am writing,
you are reading,
on this quiet page—
find a way to care
or even think
about the wild geese?

- Kalia Mussetter

[REALnothings]

I'm listening on mp3 to Ann Patchett's novel, Run. Yesterday I heard a very moving passage in which an 11 year-old African-American girl named Kenya muses on the differences in opportunity between life in her and her mom's apartment in Roxbury and those of her half-brothers (it's complicated) in whose upscale, stately home she's just spent a night. Wish I could find the passage online to quote. Her half-brothers' place is light, her apartment is always dark. The new place is quiet, her apartment is always noisy with people going up and down the stairs, often cursing or muttering, with sirens waking her up all night...it's quiet a compelling description of the differences...the same sorts of things expressed and lamented in this poem.

[Larry Robinson]

Dancing In Front Of The Guns

We’re facing the guns again, we have faced them before
Humanity’s longing after so many deaths
For something more human than war
But part of me whispers “Take your body and run away.
Leave the vision to somebody else,” then I hear myself say,

I’d rather be dancing at the edge of my grave.
I’d rather be holding you close as we march forward loving and brave.
I’d rather be singing in the face of my fear.
I’d rather be dancing in front of the guns as long as I’m here.
Life is so dangerous that there’s little to fear
Life is so possible, every breath a frontier
They’ve brought out the guns once again ‘cuz they haven’t a clue
That we could be dancing, the whole human race, each one must choose
And I’d rather be dancing at the edge of my grave…

To the drum of my heartbeat pounding up through my feet
With millions of lovers urging me on as we take to the streets
As we face the terror, if I leave here before my time
One thing’s for certain, I’ll go dancing and I’ll go alive!
And I’d rather be dancing at the edge of my grave…

- Libby Roderick

[Larry Robinson]

On a Lamp Post Long Ago

I don’t know what to think of first
in the list

of all the things that are disappearing: Fishes, birds, trees, flowers, bees,

and languages too. They say that if historical rates are averaged, a language will die
every four months.

In the time it takes to say I love you, or move in with someone, or admit to the child
you’re carrying, all the intricate words of a language become extinct.

There’s too many things to hold in the palm of the brain.

Your father uses the word thing to describe many different nouns and we guess
the word he means. When we get it right, he nods as if it’s obvious.

When we get it wrong, his face closes like a fist.

Out walking in the neighborhood, there’s a wide metal lamp post
that has scratched into it, Brandy Earlywine loves Jack Pickett and then there
come the hearts. The barrage of hearts scratched over and over as if,

just in case we have forgotten the word love, we will know its symbol. As if,
Miss Earlywine wanted us to know that, even after she and Mr. Pickett

have passed on, their real hearts stopped—the ones that don’t look anything
like those little symbols—they frantically, furiously, late one night under

the streetlight while their parents thought they were asleep, inscribed
onto the body of the something like a permanent tree, a heart—

so that even after their bodies ceased to be bodies,

their mouths no longer capable of words, that universal shape will tell you
how she felt, one blue evening, long ago, when there were still 7,000

languages that named and honored the plants and animals each in their
own way, when your father said thing and we knew what it meant,

and the bees were big and round and buzzing.

- Ada Límon

[Larry Robinson]

What Do Women Want?

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.
- Kim Addonizio

[Larry Robinson]

Reinventing America

The city was huge. A boy of twelve could walk
for hours while the closed houses stared down at him
from early morning to dusk, and he'd get nowhere.
Oh no, I was not that boy. Even at twelve I knew
enough to stay in my own neighborhood,
I knew anyone who left might not return.
Boys were animals with animal hungers
I learned early. Better to stay close to home.
I'd try to bum cigarettes from the night workers
as they left the bars in the heavy light of noon
or I'd hang around the grocery hoping
one of the beautiful young wives would ask me
to help her carry her shopping bags home.
You're wondering what I was up to. Not much.
The sun rose late in November and set early.
At times I thought life was rushing by too fast.
Before I knew it I'd be my half-blind uncle
married to a woman who cried all day long
while in the basement he passed his time working
on short-wave radio calls to anywhere.
I'd sneak down and talk to him, Uncle Nathan,
wiry in his boxer's shorts and high-topped boots,
chewing on a cigar, the one dead eye catching
the overhead light while he mused on his life
on the road or at sea. How he loved the whores
in the little Western towns and the Latin ports!
He'd hold his hands out to approximate
their perfect breasts. The months in jail had taught him
a man had only his honor and his ass
to protect. "You turn your fist this way," he said,
taking my small hand in both of his, "and fire
from the shoulder, so," and he'd extend it out
to the face of an imaginary foe.
Why he'd returned to this I never figured out,
though life was ample here, a grid of crowded blocks
of Germans, Wops, Polacks, Jews, wild Irish,
plus some square heads from the Upper Peninsula.
Six bakeries, four barber shops, a five and dime,
twenty beer gardens, a Catholic church with a shul
next door where we studied the Talmud-Torah.
Wonderful how all the old hatreds bubbled
So quietly on the back burner you could
forget until one day they tore through the pool halls,
the bowling alley, the high school athletic fields
leaving an eye gone, a long fresh, livid scar
running to touch a mouth, young hands raw or broken,
boys and girls ashamed of what they were, ashamed
of what they were not. It was merely village life,
exactly what our parents left in Europe
brought to America with pure fidelity.

- Philip Levine

[Larry Robinson]

Birdsong From Inside The Egg


Sometimes a lover of God may faint
in the presence. Then the beloved bends
and whispers in his ear, "Beggar, spread out
your robe. I'll fill it with gold.

I've come to protect your consciousness.
Where has it gone? Come back into awareness!"

This fainting is because
lovers want so much.

A chicken invites a camel into her henhouse,
and the whole structure is demolished.

A rabbit nestles down
with its eyes closed
in the arms of a lion.

There is an excess
in spiritual searching
that is profound ignorance.

Let the ignorance be our teacher!
The Friend breathes into one
who has no breath.

A deep silence revives the listening
and the speaking of those two
who meet on the riverbank.

Like the ground turning green in a spring wind,
like birdsong beginning inside the egg.

Like this universe coming into existence,
the lover wakes, and whirls
in a dancing joy,

then kneels down
in praise.


- Jellaludin Rumi
(translation by Coleman Barks)

[Larry Robinson]

Expand

Are you disheartened by the state of the world?
Do you worry about the life you are bequeathing your children and their children?
Do the bleak winter days give you the blues?

Take heart!

Rumi’s Caravan is coming to bring you comfort and joy.

Let the timeless wisdom and beauty of poetry in the ecstatic tradition soothe your soul and uplift your spirits.

Join us Saturday, February 10 at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts. Performances at 2pm and 7pm.

I guarantee that you will be glad you came.

Larry

Click here to buy your tickets: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3201925

Ps. You are encouraged to wear lavish attire.

Proceeds support the Sebastopol Center for the Arts in its mission to bring more beauty into the world.

[Larry Robinson]

The Starlight Night

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then! — What? — Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

[Larry Robinson]

Fire In The Earth

And we know, when Moses was told
in the way he was told,
“Take off your shoes”, he grew pale from that simple

reminder of fire in the dusty earth.
He never recovered
his complicated way of loving again

and was free to love in the same way
the fire licking at his heels loved him.
As if the lion earth could roar

and take him in one movement.
Every step he took
from there was carefully placed.

Everything he said mattered as if he knew
the constant witness of the ground
and remembered his own face in the dust

the moment before revelation.
Since then thousands have felt
the same immobile tongue with which he tried to speak.

Like the moment you too saw, for the first time,
your own house turned to ashes.
Everything consumed so the road could open again.

Your entire presence in your eyes
and the world turning slowly
into a single branch of flame.

- David Whyte