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  1. TopTop #3421
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    For the Last Wolverine

    They will soon be down

    To one, but he still will be
    For a little while still will be stopping

    The flakes in the air with a look,
    Surrounding himself with the silence
    Of whitening snarls. Let him eat
    The last red meal of the condemned

    To extinction, tearing the guts

    From an elk. Yet that is not enough
    For me. I would have him eat

    The heart, and from it, have an idea
    Stream into his gnarling head
    That he no longer has a thing
    To lose, and so can walk

    Out into the open, in the full

    Pale of the sub-Arctic sun
    Where a single spruce tree is dying

    Higher and higher. Let him climb it
    With all his meanness and strength.
    Lord, we have come to the end
    Of this kind of vision of heaven,

    As the sky breaks open

    Its fans around him and shimmers
    And into its northern gates he rises

    Snarling complete in the joy of a weasel
    With an elk’s horned heart in his stomach
    Looking straight into the eternal
    Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all

    My way: at the top of that tree I place

    The New World’s last eagle
    Hunched in mangy feathers giving

    Up on the theory of flight.
    Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate
    To the death in the rotten branches,
    Let the tree sway and burst into flame

    And mingle them, crackling with feathers,

    In crownfire. Let something come
    Of it something gigantic legendary

    Rise beyond reason over hills
    Of ice screaming that it cannot die,
    That it has come back, this time
    On wings, and will spare no earthly thing:

    That it will hover, made purely of northern

    Lights, at dusk and fall
    On men building roads: will perch

    On the moose’s horn like a falcon
    Riding into battle into holy war against
    Screaming railroad crews: will pull
    Whole traplines like fibres from the snow

    In the long-jawed night of fur trappers.

    But, small, filthy, unwinged,
    You will soon be crouching

    Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion
    Of being the last, but none of how much
    Your unnoticed going will mean:
    How much the timid poem needs

    The mindless explosion of your rage,

    The glutton’s internal fire the elk’s
    Heart in the belly, sprouting wings,

    The pact of the “blind swallowing
    Thing,” with himself, to eat
    The world, and not to be driven off it
    Until it is gone, even if it takes

    Forever. I take you as you are

    And make of you what I will,
    Skunk-bear, carcajou, bloodthirsty

    Non-survivor.

    Lord, let me die but not die
    Out.

    - James L. Dickey
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  2. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  3. TopTop #3422
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Afterlife

    A man fell out of the tree in our backyard. I ran over
    to help him. “Would you like some tea?” I said. “I think
    I broke my back,” he said. “Perhaps some ice cream would
    be just the thing,” I said. “Lend me your hand,” he said.
    I gave him my hand and tried to pull him up. When he was
    upright, he said, “Where am I?” “You’re in my backyard,” I
    said. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” he said.
    “It’s just an ordinary yard, a small garden, a few flowers,”
    I said. “Yes, it’s a sorry sight. How can you stand to live
    here?” he said. “Oh, it’s my home,” I said. “Home? That’s
    a curious word,” he said. “Where do you live?” I said. “Live?
    Live? That’s a funny question,” he said. “I don’t live anywhere.”
    “What do you mean?” I said. “I’m a dead man. I just float
    around,” he said. “Well, I’ve never met a dead man. I’m
    pleased to meet you,” I said. “I think you’re supposed to
    scream or something,” he said. “Oh no, I’m really pleased,”
    I said. “It’s really kind of you to drop by.” “I didn’t
    drop by. It was the wind,” he said. “And then the wind stopped
    and I fell into the tree.” “How lucky for me,” I said. “You’ll
    be going with me, of course, when I leave. You’ll never be
    coming back,” he said.

    - James Tate
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  4. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  5. TopTop #3423
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    A Morning Offering

    I bless the night that nourished my heart
    To set the ghosts of longing free
    Into the flow and figure of dream
    That went to harvest from the dark
    Bread for the hunger no one sees.

    All that is eternal in me
    Welcomes the wonder of this day,
    The field of brightness it creates
    Offering time for each thing
    To arise and illuminate.

    I place on the altar of dawn:
    The quiet loyalty of breath,
    The tent of thought where I shelter,
    Wave of desire I am shore to
    And all beauty drawn to the eye.

    May my mind come alive today
    To the invisible geography
    That invites me to new frontiers,
    To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
    To risk being disturbed and changed.

    May I have the courage today
    To live the life that I would love,
    To postpone my dream no longer
    But do at last what I came here for
    And waste my heart on fear no more.

    - John O'Donohue
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  6. Gratitude expressed by 6 members:

  7. TopTop #3424
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Their Ages

    A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, so people imagine a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had.
    But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know.
    Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

    You grew up with three
    Angel brothers and sisters.
    My only child, I sought
    To reassure me, you that
    You were not alone.

    Nathan, Leah and Lily
    I named them.
    Today Nathan would be 44,
    Leah, 35 and Lily soon-to-be 30.
    All three were lost in an unwanted
    Gush of blood and pain, that sadly,

    Even your birth and good life
    Cannot mute.
    I kept them alive
    In my heart and yours,
    Though their visage remained
    Invisible. You grew

    Before my eyes, beautiful,
    Carnal, and complete. You grew
    Surrounded by angels,
    All that they might have been.

    Losing what might have been
    Is loss, too. Invisible
    Like a quiet disease.
    A future frustrated or denied
    Can fester in a heart,
    Can rot a psyche
    Unless mourned
    For all its unmoored dreams.

    So I named my babies,
    Grieved my angels. I gave
    Their memory to you
    To walk with you in
    The loneliness that is Life.
    I kept them alive and
    I always know their ages.

    - Rebecca del Rio
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  9. TopTop #3425
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    this amazing day

    i thank You God for most this amazing
    day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
    and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
    which is natural which is infinite which is yes

    (i who have died am alive again today,
    and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
    day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
    great happening illimitably earth)

    how should tasting touching hearing seeing
    breathing any-lifted from the no
    of all nothing-human merely being
    doubt unimaginable You?

    (now the ears of my ears awake and
    now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

    - e.e. cummings
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  10. Gratitude expressed by 6 members:

  11. TopTop #3426
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    There Is No One Story and One Story Only

    The engineer’s story of hauling coal
    to Davenport for the cement factory, sitting on the bluffs
    between runs looking for whales, hauling concrete
    back to Gilroy, he and his wife renewing vows
    in the glass chapel in Arkansas after 25 years
    The flight attendant’s story murmured
    to the flight steward in the dark galley
    of her fifth-month loss of nerve
    about carrying the baby she’d seen on the screen
    The story of the forensic medical team’s
    small plane landing on an Alaska icefield
    of the body in the bag they had to drag
    over the ice like the whole life of that body
    The story of the man driving
    600 miles to be with a friend in another country seeming
    easy when leaving but afterward
    writing in a letter difficult truths
    Of the friend watching him leave remembering
    the story of her body
    with his once and the stories of their children
    made with other people and how his mind went on
    pressing hers like a body
    There is the story of the mind’s
    temperature neither cold nor celibate
    Ardent
    The story of
    not one thing only.

    - Adrienne Rich
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  12. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  13. TopTop #3427
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    They carved “Nigger Lover”
    On the hood of our car
    After Dad came back from Selma
    He went because he said he had to
    Just like he’d done in ’44
    To him it was the same war
    Fought in a different uniform
    But you there
    Breaking windows
    Just remember:
    You have no right to right
    If you do wrong yourself
    And revenge is not justice
    Just wrong turned inside out

    - Mark Steensland
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  14. Gratitude expressed by 5 members:

  15. TopTop #3428
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    How could I forget?


    Headed to Vermont
    With a head full of Frost
    How did he last
    through all his tragedies
    to have tea with Nikita
    in his late eighties
    sent by Kennedy
    not that long ago
    a President looked to a poet
    and the Russians loved him
    because he was a farmer

    Yeats loved the soil too
    and of course O'Donohue
    and Seamus Heaney too
    the stock of fathers
    who could wield a spade
    so sons could wield a pen.

    - Brian McSweeney
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  17. TopTop #3429
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    True Fasting

    Shout it aloud, do not hold back.
    Raise your voice like a trumpet.
    Declare to my people their rebellion
    and to the descendants of Jacob their sins.
    For day after day they seek me out;
    they seem eager to know my ways,
    as if they were a nation that does what is right
    and has not forsaken the commands of its God.
    They ask me for just decisions
    and seem eager for God to come near them.
    ‘Why have we fasted,’ they say,
    ‘and you have not seen it?
    Why have we humbled ourselves,
    and you have not noticed?’
    Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please
    and exploit all your workers.
    Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
    and in striking each other with wicked fists.
    You cannot fast as you do today
    and expect your voice to be heard on high.
    Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
    only a day for people to humble themselves?
    Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
    and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
    Is that what you call a fast,
    a day acceptable to the Lord?

    Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
    to loose the chains of injustice
    and untie the cords of the yoke,
    to set the oppressed free
    and break every yoke?
    Is it not to share your food with the hungry
    and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
    when you see the naked, to clothe them,
    and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
    Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
    and your healing will quickly appear;
    then your righteousness will go before you,
    and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.
    Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;
    you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.

    If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
    with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
    and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
    and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
    then your light will rise in the darkness,
    and your night will become like the noonday.
    The Lord will guide you always;
    he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
    and will strengthen your frame.
    You will be like a well-watered garden,
    like a spring whose waters never fail.
    Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
    and will raise up the age-old foundations;
    you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
    Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.

    If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
    and from doing as you please on my holy day,
    if you call the Sabbath a delight
    and the Lord’s holy day honorable,
    and if you honor it by not going your own way
    and not doing as you please or speaking idle words,
    then you will find your joy in the Lord,
    and I will cause you to ride in triumph on the heights of the land
    and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.

    For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

    Isaiah 58
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  19. TopTop #3430
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Anchorage

    Seagulls cackle and cry

    into the light of day and night

    It's 2:30 am, we hear long sad
    piercing screams that cry us to sleep

    Like a hundred lost kittens meowing

    We are new to Alaska, first timers here
    just one day in

    On the 8am news we hear that the
    largest iceberg to date has broken off
    the Antarctic shelf

    Out the window we see people walking to work, a stray dog, a UPS truck drives by

    Oh, when did we stop listening to the birds

    We read that Moose have been seen walking on the streets of downtown Anchorage

    - Patricia LeBon Herb
    Last edited by Barry; 07-24-2017 at 02:02 PM.
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  20. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  21. TopTop #3431
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    After the War

    For Joseph Flum

    When he got to the farmhouse, he rifled through
    the cabinets, drawers, and cupboards,
    and his buddies did too. The place was abandoned,
    or so he thought, and his buddies did too.

    He tried to talk to people in town, and his buddies did too,
    but he was the only one whose Yiddish made it
    across into German. They took his meaning.
    He, in the farmhouse, took a camera and a gun,

    but his buddies, who knows. About the gun,
    it’s also hard to say, but after the war he took up
    photography, why not, and shot beautiful women
    for years. Got pretty good at it, and how.

    Won prizes and engraved plates, put them in a drawer, forgot
    the war, forgot his buddies, forgot the women, forgot the drawer.

    - Rachel Galvin
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  23. TopTop #3432
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Ego


    Ego is the measure of all things.
    Just beyond it, the immeasurable.

    Ego glimpses that eternal tract
    and everything it says about it boasts.

    It hasn’t been there. It claims a romp in the hay
    with a babe it saw up on the silver screen.

    The ego colonizes from afar the afar.
    Its real job lies the other way. Back

    in the direction of the earth we are to feed
    with the manure we are to be.

    Ego is the measure of all things, but one. From it it
    turns. Watch it bow magnanimously.

    - Bruce Moody
    Last edited by Barry; 07-26-2017 at 01:02 PM.
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  24. TopTop #3433
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Being a Lake

    He has never dreamed of being a lake
    in the high mountains, and now he wonders why.
    Surely there could be no better, in the way
    of dreamy aspirations: to be clear and cold
    and swim through by trout. To allow the sunlight
    far into your depths, to have depths no one
    Will ever visit. To be ceilinged by ice
    and many feet of snow in winter, to shine pure blue
    into the pure blue of the sky, to show the stars
    the stars, to be drunk by wild animals.
    And to admit an occasional human,
    who, because of the memory of having been there,
    might dream of being there. Being there.
    Not a visitor but a dreamer, dreaming
    this very lake is what he's always wanted to be.

    - Robert Wrigley
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  25. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  26. TopTop #3434

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Thank you, Larry. This shifts the paradigm in the regenerative direction....

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson: View Post
    Being a Lake...
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  27. TopTop #3435
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Traveling At Home

    Even in a country you know by heart
    it’s hard to go the same way twice.
    The life of the going changes.
    The chances change and make a new way.
    Any tree or stone or bird
    can be the bud of a new direction. The
    natural correction is to make intent
    of accident. To get back before dark
    is the art of going.

    - Wendell Berry
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  28. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  29. TopTop #3436
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Brought to Tears

    I weep in the middle of a story more often
    than in the midst of real life events.
    In story the meaning is so compressed.
    Whole lives crowd into a few pages.
    The bible is an entire library, and
    you can carry it in a backpack.

    Every story has direction
    every detail has intention
    if only in rhythm or ornamentation.
    And by the end, a story makes
    some kind of sense;
    even if it is unbearable.
    Both the beauty and the suffering!

    In my life so much is arrived at by
    meandering paths, all the branching
    directions., Sometimes the meaning
    Is missed or unclear. Other times I go by a way
    that is not chosen, but imposed
    the way snowflakes express themselves:
    we can see, but only under a magnifying glass
    that hidden forces inform their crystalline beauty.

    In our common lives front-page news is random:
    The Pope, or the symphony will be in town.
    Or the County Fair, an advance in neuroscience or
    Another ecological disaster strikes, usually
    in a region already decimated by poverty,
    A new planet has been discovered with moons,
    a five-year-old wins a spelling bee.
    A gourmet recipe delights foodies. Or wine.
    And all this happens simultaneously. Random
    violence repeating itself the world over,
    not resolving. And there is so much suffering
    like starvation, it overwhelms . It overwhelms.

    In story, an author’s intention is more clear:
    an ecology of lives and their patterns, the
    designs leave a glittering trail like a snail
    a narrative of the way we found. Of suffering
    redeemed. Of lessons learned. Or a poem,
    Its word music bringing us to tears.

    - Judith Stone
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  30. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  31. TopTop #3437
    Ronaldo's Avatar
    Ronaldo
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Name:  Brought-to-Tears.jpg
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    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson: View Post
    Brought to Tears
    ....
    - Judith Stone
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  33. TopTop #3438
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Hope Is Not For The Wise

    Hope is not for the wise, fear is for fools;
    Change and the world, we think, are racing to a fall,
    Open-eyed and helpless, in every newscast that is the news:
    The time’s events would seem mere chaos but all
    Drift the one deadly direction. But this is only
    The August thunder of the age, not the November.
    Wise men hope nothing, the wise are naturally lonely
    And think November as good as April, the wise remember
    That Caesar and even Augustus had heirs,
    And men lived on; rich unplanned life on earth
    After the foreign wars and the civil wars, the border wars
    And the barbarians; music and religion, honor and mirth
    Renewed life’s lost enchantments. But if life even
    Had perished utterly, Oh perfect loveliness of earth and heaven.

    - Robinson Jeffers
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  35. TopTop #3439
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Vinny’s Garden



    It was one of many on the street lined with sycamores;

    fifteen square feet of patchy grass sprinkled with seeds,

    an invitation to starlings, sparrows and pigeons, all

    oblivious to each other’s feasting, yet not interfering. A cat

    crouched quietly beside a yellow rose bush; two squirrels

    cavorted about in great haste chiding one another; people

    strolled by with indifference to the living harmony.


    - Marvin Blaustein
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  36. TopTop #3440
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Living

    in the earth-deposits

    of our history

    Today a backhoe divulged

    out of a crumbling flank of earth
    one bottle

    amber

    perfect

    a hundred-year-old
    cure for fever

    or melancholy

    a tonic
    for living on this earth

    in the winters of this climate

    Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
    she must have known she suffered

    from radiation sickness
    her body bombarded for years

    by the element
    she had purified
    It seems she denied to the end
    the source of the cataracts on her eyes
    the cracked and suppurating skin

    of her finger-ends
    till she could no longer hold

    a test-tube or a pencil

    She died a famous woman

    denying
    her wounds
    denying
    her wounds

    came

    from the same source as her power

    - Adrienne Rich
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  38. TopTop #3441
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Way Back

    Why is it I can only trust people
    Who have had their heart broken
    100 times who have been
    tortured in foreign jails who have
    repeated their time in rehab over
    and over their
    families going broke
    whose life companions have
    died in their arms or
    whose newborn arrived still or with
    unexpected chromosomes or
    those living in countries ruled by hateful
    tyrants and with forced circumstance
    could not leave?
    Perhaps it is because they have not stopped singing
    Perhaps because they have come back
    They have come back singing
    It is they who left that blood
    red twine along the
    labyrinth
    for me
    to find
    my way
    back.

    - Kristy Hellum
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  40. TopTop #3442
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

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    (Illustrated by Ronaldo)
    Last edited by Barry; 08-03-2017 at 02:20 PM.
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  41. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

  42. TopTop #3443
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Good Life

    When some people talk about money
    They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
    Who went out to buy milk and never
    Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
    For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
    Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
    Like a woman journeying for water
    From a village without a well, then living
    One or two nights like everyone else
    On roast chicken and red wine.

    - Tracy K. Smith
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  44. TopTop #3444
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Blazing Trees



    You have only to see

    the blazing sunset through

    the trees to be

    in that dazzling presence

    and catch a voice saying

    “Take off your masks!”



    With a clatter they land

    all around, but you barely

    notice because the fire

    in your heart is bursting

    toward that bright glow

    on the horizon.



    And when its last

    glimmering rays are gone—

    from human sight—

    you're left with a gateway

    that will open

    even in your dark hour.

    - Raphael Block
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  46. TopTop #3445
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Be Music, Night

    Be music, night,

    That her sleep may go
    Where angels have their pale tall choirs

    Be a hand, sea,
    That her dreams may watch
    Thy guidesman touching the green flesh of the world

    Be a voice, sky,
    That her beauties may be counted
    And the stars will tilt their quiet faces
    Into the mirror of her loveliness

    Be a road, earth,
    That her walking may take thee
    Where the towns of heaven lift their breathing spires

    O be a world and a throne, God,
    That her living may find its weather
    And the souls of ancient bells in a child's book
    Shall lead her into Thy wondrous house

    - Kenneth Patchen
    Last edited by Barry; 08-06-2017 at 04:12 PM.
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  48. TopTop #3446
    Ronaldo's Avatar
    Ronaldo
     

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

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  50. TopTop #3447
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    How Could I Ever Forget That Flash

    How could I ever forget that flash of light!

    In a moment, thirty thousand people ceased to be,
    The cries of fifty thousand killed
    At the bottom of crushing darkness;

    Through yellow smoke whirling into light,
    Buildings split, bridges collapsed,
    Crowded trams burnt as they rolled about
    Hiroshima, all full of boundless heaps of embers.
    Soon after, skin dangling like rags;
    With hands on breasts;
    Treading upon the broken brains;
    Wearing shreds of burn cloth round their loins;
    There came numberless lines of the naked,
    all crying.
    Bodies on the parade ground, scattered like
    jumbled stone images of Jizo;
    Crowds in piles by the river banks,
    loaded upon rafts fastened to the shore,
    Turned by and by into corpses
    under the scorching sun;
    in the midst of flame
    tossing against the evening sky,
    Round about the street where mother and
    brother were trapped alive under the fallen house
    The fire-flood shifted on.
    On beds of filth along the Armory floor,
    Heaps, and God knew who they were?
    Heaps of schoolgirls lying in refuse
    Pot-bellied, one-eyed, with half their skin peeled
    off bald.
    The sun shone, and nothing moved
    But the buzzing flies in the metal basins
    Reeking with stagnant ordure.
    How can I forget that stillness
    Prevailing over the city of three hundred thousands?
    Amidst that calm,
    How can I forget the entreaties
    Of departed wife and child
    Through their orbs of eyes,
    Cutting through our minds and souls?

    - Mitsuyoshi Toge


    Mitsuyoshi Toge, born in Hiroshima in 1917, was a Catholic and a poet. He was in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city on August 6, 1945, when he was 24 years old. Toge died at age 36. His firsthand experience of the bomb, his passion for peace, and his realistic insight into the event made him a leading poet in Hiroshima. This poem is from Hiroshima-Nagasaki: A Pictorial Record of the Atomic Destruction (1978).
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  51. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  52. TopTop #3448
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    The Answer

    Then what is the answer? - Not to be deluded by dreams.
    To know the great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their
    tyrants come, many times before.
    When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least
    ugly faction; these evils are essential.
    To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for
    evil; and not be duped
    By dreams of universal peace or happiness. These dreams will not be
    fulfilled.
    To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear the whole
    remains beautiful. A severed hand
    Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his
    history … for contemplation or in fact…
    Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the divine beauty of
    the universe. Love that, not man
    Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in
    despair when his days darken.

    - Robinson Jeffers
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  53. Gratitude expressed by 3 members:

  54. TopTop #3449
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Listening


    Lately
    I have been listening to trees.

    I asked them
    if they have been talking to me
    all along.

    “We’ve been murmuring,”
    I heard.
    “Contentedly,
    as you’ve been listening
    to others,
    to Emil’s spirit voice,
    to Grandfather Fire,
    to your hilltop Roble.

    “Who you listen to,
    who you hear,
    depends upon you,
    where you are in your listening.

    “Everything,
    of course,
    has a voice.”

    - Trout Black
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  55. Gratitude expressed by 4 members:

  56. TopTop #3450
    Larry Robinson's Avatar
    WaccoBB Poet Laureate

    Re: Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

    Choosing Who To Be

    You, who wake up each morning remembering who you are,
    must think it strange that I, upon awakening
    have no idea who I am, or what I’m doing in this room,
    in this bed, beneath these covers.

    It takes hours to put together a functioning identity,
    like a woman trying on dozens of outfits to find just the right combination
    for a night on the town.

    With no basis to work from,
    no map or structure to follow,
    I try on dozens of masks,
    deciding who to be today.

    The mayor of a small town?
    A policeman in riot gear?
    An oncologist in a white coat giving her patient bad news?
    A reporter following a story about a missing child?
    A corporate executive deciding to clear a rainforest for a palm oil plantation?

    When any identity will do, how will I choose?
    And who is doing the choosing?

    I could be a star, shining in the blackness of space,
    a diatom at the bottom of the ocean,
    a comet on its path around the sun,
    or the color of sunlight.

    One day I became a granite boulder in the middle of a playground,
    enjoying playful children scrambling over me, laughing
    and jumping off my peak into the ocean of sand surrounding me.

    On another, I became the scent of night-blooming jasmine,
    wafting on soft air, entering nostrils of animals,
    and thrilling delicate moths attuned to my molecular structure.

    You, who have only one fixed center, may feel envious of my freedom.
    And I envy you for your stability and fortitude.
    To be the same, day after day, takes courage and stamina.

    In my incarnations, newly chosen with each sunrise,
    I have lived a million lives, each one unique, precious as a gemstone.
    And yet, I have no companions on this journey.

    Be grateful for who you are, and what you have chosen.

    - Lion Goodman
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