Poem for today

[Larry Robinson]

The Birthing
*
Call out the names in the procession of the loved.
Call from the blood the ancestors here to bear witness
to the day he stopped the car,
we on our way to a great banquet in his honor.
In a field a cow groaned lowing, trying to give birth,
what*he called front leg presentation,
the calf comes out nose first, one front leg dangling from his mother.
A fatal sign he said while rolling up the sleeves
of his dress shirt, and climbed the fence.
I watched him thrust his arms entire
into the yet to be, where I imagined holy sparrows scattering
in the hall of souls for his big mortal hands just to make way.
With his whole weight he pushed the calf back in the mother
and*grasped the other leg tucked up like a closed wing
against the new one’s shoulder.
And found a way in the warm dark to bring both legs out
into the world together.
Then heaved and pulled, the cow arching her back,
until a bull calf, in*a whoosh of blood and water,
came falling whole and still onto the meadow.
We rubbed his blackness, bloodying our hands.
The mother licked her newborn, of us oblivious,
until he moved a little, struggled.
I ran to get our coats, mine a green velvet cloak,
and his a tuxedo jacket, and worked to rub the new one dry
while he set out to find the farmer.
When it was over, the new calf suckling his mother,
the farmer soon to lead them to the barn,
leaving our coats just where they lay
we huddled in the car.
And then made love toward eternity,
Without a word drove slowly home. And loved some more.
*
*********************************************************Deborah Digges

[Larry Robinson]

Fog Drip


Fog drip, they say,
replenishes the aquifer.
Redwood needles pull
moisture from the mist,
guiding it down to the roots -
and below.

Even in the driest years
these patient old ones
remain ever green.

Some people are like that.
They find the goodness there is
and draw it down,
sustaining themselves
while feeding the deeper stream.

They don’t demand attention;
they don’t seek profit or approval.
Usually they don’t even know
they are doing this.
Do the redwoods know - or care -
where the water goes?

Francis of Assissi called down grace
by the simple act of gratitude.
The foxes and the sparrows
drank deeply from his fog drip.

Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Revenge

At times ... I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I'd rest at last
and if I were ready -
I would take my revenge!

But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who'd put
his right hand over
the heart's place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they'd set -
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.

Likewise ... I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn't bear his absence
and who his presents thrilled.

Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school...
asking about him
and sending him regards.

But if he turned
out to be on his own -
cut off like a branch from a tree -
without mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I'd add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness -
nor the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I'd be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street - as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.

- Taha Muhammad Ali

[Larry Robinson]

Let There Be New Flowering

let there be new flowering
in the fields let the fields
turn mellow for the men
let the men keep tender
through the time let the time
be wrested from the war
let the war be won
let love be
at the end

- Lucille Clifton

[Larry Robinson]

DEFENDING WALT WHITMAN


Basketball is like this for young Indian boys, all arms and legs
and serious stomach muscles. Every body is brown!
These are the twentieth-century warriors who will never kill,
although a few sat quietly in the deserts of Kuwait,
waiting for orders to do something, to do something.
God, there is nothing as beautiful as a jumpshot
on a reservation summer basketball court
where the ball is moist with sweat,
and makes a sound when it swishes through the net
that causes Walt Whitman to weep because it is so perfect.
There are veterans of foreign wars here
although their bodies are still dominated
by collarbones and knees, although their bodies still respond
in the ways that bodies are supposed to respond when we are young.
Every body is brown! Look there, that boy can run
up and down this court forever. He can leap for a rebound
with his back arched like a salmon, all meat and bone
synchronized, magnetic, as if the court were a river,
as if the rim were a dam, as if the air were a ladder
leading the Indian boy toward home.
Some of the Indian boys still wear their military hair cuts
while a few have let their hair grow back.
It will never be the same as it was before!
One Indian boy has never cut his hair, not once, and he braids it
into wild patterns that do not measure anything.
He is just a boy with too much time on his hands.
Look at him. He wants to play this game in bare feet.
God, the sun is so bright! There is no place like this.
Walt Whitman stretches his calf muscles
on the sidelines. He has the next game.
His huge beard is ridiculous on the reservation.
Some body throws a crazy pass and Walt Whitman catches it
with quick hands. He brings the ball close to his nose
and breathes in all of its smells: leather, brown skin, sweat,
black hair, burning oil, twisted ankle, long drink of warm water,
gunpowder, pine tree. Walt Whitman squeezes the ball tightly.
He wants to run. He hardly has the patience to wait for his turn.
"What's the score?" he asks. He asks, "What's the score?"
Basketball is like this for Walt Whitman. He watches these Indian boys
as if they were the last bodies on earth. Every body is brown!
Walt Whitman shakes because he believes in God.
Walt Whitman dreams of the Indian boy who will defend him,
trapping him in the corner, all flailing arms and legs
and legendary stomach muscles. Walt Whitman shakes
because he believes in God. Walt Whitman dreams
of the first jumpshot he will take, the ball arcing clumsily
from his fingers, striking the rim so hard that it sparks.
Walt Whitman shakes because he believes in God.
Walt Whitman closes his eyes. He is a small man and his beard
is ludicrous on the reservation, absolutely insane.
His beard makes the Indian boys righteously laugh. His beard
frightens the smallest Indian boys. His beard tickles the skin
of the Indian boys who dribble past him. His beard, his beard!
God, there is beauty in every body. Walt Whitman stands
at center court while the Indian boys run from basket to basket.
Walt Whitman cannot tell the difference between
offense and defense. He does not care if he touches the ball.
Half of the Indian boys wear t-shirts damp with sweat
and the other half are bareback, skin slick and shiny.
There is no place like this. Walt Whitman smiles.
Walt Whitman shakes. This game belongs to him.

*- Sherman Alexie

[Larry Robinson]

Invocation

Let us try what it is to be true to gravity,
to grace, to the given, faithful to our own voices,

to lines making the map of our furrowed tongue.
Turned toward the root of a single word, refusing

solemnity and slogans, let us honor what hides
and does not come easy to speech. The pebbles

we hold in our mouths help us to practice song,
and we sing to the sea. May the things of this world

be preserved to us, their beautiful secret
vocabularies. We are dreaming it over and new,

the language of our tribe, music we hear
we can only acknowledge. May the naming powers

be granted. Our words are feathers that fly
on our breath. Let them go in a holy direction.

- Jeanne Lohmann

[Larry Robinson]

Sometimes

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen to you

- Sheenagh Pugh

[Larry Robinson]

*Dear Joanne



Dear Joanne,


Last night Magda dreamed that she,

you, Jack, and I were driving around

Italy.

*

We parked in Florence and left

our dog to guard the car.

*

She was worried because he

doesn't understand Italian.

- Lew Welch

[Larry Robinson]

My Father's Face



a civilization
falling out of its accustomed

stand amidst the world.

He is a happening in the air around him
happening less

even as his face regains its youth
though he is dying.

Why not grimace?

He never liked to travel.
But his likings and dislikings going,

he could care less that he'd ever cared*


Elizabeth Arnold
(Civilization
Flood Editions)

[Larry Robinson]

Crying Poem

For the longest time,
I haven't been able to cry.
Tears start to come while I'm watching a movie tears
starts to come,
swelling my whole body a tulip starting to open under moon,
then the petals of my eyelids
stiffen
and something in me braces
and I don't cry.
When we crashed into a telephone pole
my dad yelled me not to cry,
I was terrified, almost killed –
but don't cry,
he said.
I couldn't cry because men don't cry.
When the dog bit me on the leg I couldn't cry,
when Joey died I couldn't cry –
how cool it would feel
to have a tear slide down the corner of my eye
on my cheek,
to the curve of my lip,
where I could taste it –
but I don't cry.
Something blocks the paths, channels
under my skin.
Tear ducts are red cracked clay,
for thirty years,
drought famine'd,
since I was eight when I got a beating for crying.
My heart an open furnace oven door,
rage seething for tears to cool it down,
but coal hoveling men keep feeding it
don't cry don't cry don't cry.
I want to untie my hands like a tired boxer's gloves
and lay them down on the table, gripped in their tight
clench of defense,
and I want to grow new hands
open flowers,
moistened by my tears.
I love the color blue
color brown.
I'd love
to touch my chapped cheeks
and whisper in tears
my compassion.
But I've always had to stop it up in me, hold my breath back,
keep my mouth shut tight
so as not to cry.
Man, I cry,
and it's a lie I don't.
I embrace my brother and pray shoulder to shoulder.
I kneel and kiss earth,
and I cry -- if only I could cry.
Don't translate my tears into thought,
I want to sob autumn tears on my window,
streaking the pane blurring the world.
I want to fill every hole in my heart with glimmering tear pools,
fill my kitchen sink with tears,
just thinking of me not crying all these years,
makes me want to cry,
but I been taught not to cry –
big people don't cry, people say,
ain't those alligator tears boy,
can't fool me with those tears –
bullshit!
Fooling no one but myself not crying
step aside –
I'm going to cry,
until my shirt is drenched,
and my hands shimmery wet
with tears,
running down my face on my arms,
my legs and breast,
and you have to look at me,
because I'm drowning your manly ways in my tears,
to get back my tears.
I'm crying until there isn't a single tear left
crying,
for what we been through not crying,
how we fooled ourselves thinking men don't cry.
I'm crying on the bus, in bed, at the dinner table, on the couch,
enough to float Noah's boat,
let out the robin of my heart,
bringing me back my own single shoot of greening
life again –
and you go fuck yourself
dry eyed days,
here I come,
giving you a Chicano monsoon season,
here comes this Chicano cry baby,
flooding prison walls,
my childrens' bedrooms,
splashing and tear slinging
tears up to my ankles,
planting rice and corn and beans
in fields glimmering with my tears,
and all you dry skinned nut-cracking ball whackers,
don't want to get your killer bone-breaking boots wet,
step aside,
because I'm bringing you rain.



Goodbyes were crying events –
Goodbye to grandma, to my brother,
friends, my neighborhood,
teachers and other boys,
and I never shed a tear,
though I felt them coming up in me.
I bit my teeth down hard to hold the tears back,
lowered my face and thought about something else.
I kept hearing voices in me,
telling me not to cry, don't cry, don't cry!
Boys don't cry,
leave yourself open,
become liable to get an ax in your heart by some non-crying fool,
be a sissy,
puto, you be hurting
yourself if you cry.
I hurt when I didn't cry,
all those times when I didn't cry ashamed
to in front of people,
fearful others would think I'm not a man,
fearful I'd be made fun of,
whole groups of us heard tragic news
and no one cries,
because it ain't right –
we need to weep –
get up in the middle of the night,
and cry, like a endurance's hips and stomach convulse during
child birth, we need to give birth
to that terrible convulsion of tears,
weep for those we never wept for,
let the legs shake and your arms embrace you
in a junkie habit for tears,
weep for the poor in prison
taken from their families,
the fieldworker's daughter
eaten by cancer from pesticides,
and weep,
for all those homeless
who couldn't meet mortgage payments,
those sleeping under bridges,
and the hopeless,
cry our differences into a lake,
where we can all cleanse our goodbyes and apathy,
papas cry for their children,
let children cry in my arms,
men cry in my arms,
endurance cry in my arms,
let us all cry,
after lovemaking and fighting,
make cry a prayer,
a language made of whimpers and sniffles and sobs,
cry out loud, louder, cry baby, cry! Cry! Cry!


-- Jimmy Santiago Baca

[Larry Robinson]

Fall Song
*
Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,
*
the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back
*
from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere
*
except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle
*
of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This
*
I try to remember when time's measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn
*
flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay - how everything lives, shifting
*
from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.
*
- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

The Breathing Place

It must be built
by following your instinct,
as a seal finds its breathing hole in ice:
by letting yourself go into
moments that pull
like a magnet to North.
You listen quietly
until you know
the moment,
its song,
why it pulls a place in you
and like the seal
you may find an Eskimo spear
poised to strike
as you listen.

Then,
you visit your breathing place
where some moments
come, are lived quickly, and go;
others visit for years
and are still not over.

You must visit daily
so the path remains visible
as the doubts of others
try to entice you
to be their breathing place
try to make you forget
the place
you have struggled to find.

- Robert Smyth

[Larry Robinson]

The First Rain

The first rain reminds me
Of the rising summer dust.
The rain doesn't remember the rain of yesteryear.
A year is a trained beast with no memories.

Soon you will again wear your harnesses,
Beautiful and embroidered, to hold
Sheer stockings: you
Mare and harnesser in one body.

The white panic of soft flesh
In the panic of a sudden vision
Of ancient saints.

- Yehuda Amichai

(Translated from the Hebrew by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav, in A Life of Poetry: 1948 - 1994 New York, HarperCollins, 1994 )

[Larry Robinson]

Fossil Stone from Green River Shales, Wyoming

**********Knightia eocenica

This slab's an inland sea
for twenty-one ray-finned
fish, their skeletons

incused, a spawning shoal
caught in as much of forever
as this world affords. Delicate

ghostings of the Eocene,
mounted and lit on a facing
wall, they bear the finish

of art, iconic against
the sand-colored stone,
streaked with yellow ochre,

suggesting depths and not
the quiet catastrophic
bloom that sluiced the oxygen

from their gills, left them to rot,
flat in the shallows till the press
of time released them swimming

here, compassed in all directions—
a trick on the willing eye
as if the mouths still gape for air.

- Richard Foerster


(The Burning of Troy
BOA Editions, Ltd.)

[Larry Robinson]

Talking to Grief

*

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.

I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner ,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.

You think I don't know you've been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes . You need
your name ,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders ,
to consider
my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.

- Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

The Cure


Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

Seamus Heaney's translation of
"The Philoctetes," by Sophocles

[Larry Robinson]

THE PRICE OF EXPERIENCE



What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house , his wife, his children
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy
And in the withered field where the farmer plows for bread in vain

It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer's sun
And in the vintage and to sing on the wagon loaded with corn

It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted
To speak the laws of prudence to the homeless wanderer
To listen to the hungry raven's cry in wintry season
When the red blood is filled with wine and with the marrow of lambs

It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements
To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughterhouse moan;
To see a god on every wind and a blessing on every blast
To hear the sounds of love in the thunder storm
that destroys our enemies' house;
To rejoice in the blight that covers his field and the sickness
that cuts off his children

While our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door
and our children bring fruit and flowers

Then the groan and dthe dolor are quite forgotten
and the slave grinding at the mill
And the captive in chains and the poor in the prison
and the soldier in the field
When the shattered bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead

It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity:
Thus could I sing and thus rejoice: but it is not so with me


Van Morrison

[Larry Robinson]

Swear It

for Eva

My mother swore ripely, inventively
a flashing storm of American and Yiddish
thundering onto my head and shoulders.
My father swore briefly, like an ax
descending on the nape of a sinner.

But all the relatives on my father's
side, gosh, they said, goldarnit.
What happened to those purveyors
of soft putty cussing, go to heck,
they would mutter, you son of a gun.

They had limbs instead of legs.
Privates encompassed everything
from bow to stern. They did
number one and number two
and eventually, perhaps, it.

It has always amazed me there are
words too potent to say to those
whose ears are tender as baby
lettuces˜often those who label
us into narrow jars with salt and

vinegar, saying, People like them,
meaning me and mine. Never say
the K or N word, just quietly shut
and bolt the door. Just politely
insert your foot in the Other's face.

-- Marge Piercy

[Larry Robinson]

Candles in Babylon

Through the midnight streets of Babylon
between the steel towers of their arsenals,
between the torture castles with no windows,
we race by barefoot, holding tight
our candles, trying to shield
the shivering flames, crying
"Sleepers Awake!"
hoping
the rhyme's promise was true,
that we may return
from this place of terror
home to a calm dawn and
the work we had just begun.

-Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

Oceans

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.

And nothing
happens!
Nothing . . . Silence . . . Waves . . .

-- Nothing happens?
Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

- Juan Ramon Jimenez

[Larry Robinson]

Smokestack

I will not forgive
I can not forgive
Them
A dry tear traces the arroyo
Down Grandmother’s cheek
*
Grandfather says
I can not bear the smell
Of autumn - the burning of
Already dead leaves
*
They both agree that
Six million murdered
Was more than one too many
*
I was not there
But the smoke has laid down
Genetic codes in my nostrils
Until everything smells acrid
I cradle their suffering in my womb
*
I had never seen the smokestack
Until one day as I stood on the edge
Of an apple orchard in
Pleasant Hill cemetery it
Belched a thick smoke
*
Then smokestacks were everywhere
Chimneys and water towers
The crown of redwood trees
*
Why? I wailed but the fine ash
From their bones filled my ears
Silencing the answer
*
“I am here
I have always been here
I am the smokestack
I am the mortar and the brick
The fire the smoke
The ash”
*
The white words fall like apple
Blossoms around my ears
Lay down a path before my feet
*

-- Sally Churgel

[Larry Robinson]

In the Storm

Some black ducks
were shrugged up
on the shore.
It was snowing

hard, from the east,
and the sea
was in disorder.
Then some sanderlings,

five inches long
with beaks like wire,
flew in,
snowflakes on their backs,

and settled
in a row
behind the ducks --
whose backs were also

covered with snow --
so close
they were all but touching,
they were all but under

the roof of the duck's tails,
so the wind, pretty much,
blew over them.
They stayed that way, motionless,

for maybe an hour,
then the sanderlings,
each a handful of feathers,
shifted, and were blown away

out over the water
which was still raging.
But, somehow,
they came back

and again the ducks,
like a feathered hedge,
let them
crouch there, and live.

If someone you didn't know
told you this,
as I am telling you this,
would you believe it?

Belief isn't always easy.
But this much I have learned --
if not enough else --
to live with my eyes open.

I know what everyone wants
is a miracle.
This wasn't a miracle.
Unless, of course, kindness --

as now and again
some rare person has suggested --
is a miracle.
As surely it is.

~ Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

There is no war in my neighborhood


There is no war in my neighborhood.
***********I walk freely to the grocery store,
***********stop and chat with the printer
***********who runs his press
in the store front window
for all to see—
an old Heidelberg windmill,
black and shiny—
We talk printing
and poetry;
he smokes
a British
cigarette.

There is no war in my neighborhood.
***********My neighbor’s garden,
***********like a patch of heaven—
***********or how I imagine it must be, there—
***********an ever changing feast of flowers
and colors I cannot even name
***********but the dahlias I do know—
oh, that rainbow
of dahlias,
***********that gift.

There is no war in my neighborhood
***********I am free to feel my pain,
***********no fear of IEDs,
***********or occupying forces,
***********vengeance killings
***********and the rest.
***********But that does not mean
***********I cannot imagine yours.
***********I can and do
***********and know the lies
***********that justify these things.
***********Then what am I to do?
***********I’ll try to live as best I can
***********and vote the bastards out.
- Bill Denham

[Larry Robinson]

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

David Whyte

[Larry Robinson]

Why should not old men be mad? - Yeats


Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly fisher's wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell
And that no better can be had
Know why an old man should be mad.
-W. B. Yeats

[Larry Robinson]

This place is large enough for both of us

the river-fog will do for privacy

this is my third and last address to you



with the hands of a daughter I would cover you

from all intrusion even my own

saying rest to your ghost



with the hands of a sister I would leave your hands

open or closed as they prefer to lie

and ask no more of who or why or wherefore



with the hands of a mother I would close the door

on the rooms you've left behind

and silently pick up my fallen work



- Adrienne Rich

[Larry Robinson]

In Blackwater Woods


Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things;
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it’
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

The Mystery


What I love most

is the way you turn your head

toward what you hear,

cocking it slightly down,

looking up under your lashes.

That quality of attention

is what I love, the moment

when you forget yourself,

place your own thoughts

aside, deliberately

and immediately, and let in

the other, the mystery,

whatever it is: a goldfinch

in early morning, singing;

somebody's single engine plane

sounding its notes unseen

behind a windbreak of cedars;

the soft plush of air that lifts

a pair of dragonflies

wheeling past your tea cup,

quivering bluer than water or sky.

Your ear is tuned to the world

and its tenuous frequencies,

nothing is too fragile for you,

nothing too worn. Even my lips,

chapped with winter: when they open

you dip your head to listen.

*

Molly Fisk

[Larry Robinson]

What's Under A River

Hundreds of stones.
Under the stones, what's left of centuries:
sand, silt, the bones of spawned salmon
and old steelhead
- calcium leaching into the water -
and under the shadows of bone: a carved bed,
indigenous rock
opening and softening
but so slowly no one can hear it.
Under the stolid rock is motion again, the migration
of ghosts, nations moving, hauling their minerals,
smoke and imagination -
and deeper,
farther,
under it all:
love, resting -
and diamonds, burning.

~ Molly Fisk

[Larry Robinson]

Prayer for Joe's Taco Lounge, Mill Valley

Fig-sized red and orange all-year Christmas bulbs
splash their holy light on the plastic-coated tablecloths
and glint against the bottled throats of every brand

of hot sauce — El Yucateco, Tapatio, Dona Maria's
Mole, singing their fiery songs on a shelf that lines the room,
nestled among a hundred ceramic Madonnas —

Tamazula, Cholula and Crystal beside the beatific
faces of the Mother of us all — and still lives of hard
plastic fruit not invented in this country, not even

in the Forties, and so many crosses, empty and occupied,
paintings of Jesus and the Lord. Oh, Bufalo,
Valentina, Tabasco, Habañero, guard the bas-relief

bull's head glowering out of its red velvet frame, bless
the photograph of somebody's mother, and the bluefin
tuna leaping on the wall, river of traffic flowing

past the plate glass, sanctify each hot tortilla,
each yellow plastic basket lined with greasy paper,
watch over the customers tonight as they bend

their heads to quesadillas and burritos, Del Fuerte,
if you are listening, carry us safely into tomorrow,
we will praise you by the artificial light of every

electrified tabletop candle, Oh gods of the spoon-shaped,
the smooth-skinned, searing chiles, comfort us —
keep us warm.

- Molly Fisk

from 88, Fall 2004

[Sonomamark]

Thanks for these, Larry. I feel inspired to propose one for tomorrow...


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

[Larry Robinson]

One Home


Mine was a Midwest home—you can keep your world.
Plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code.
We sang hymns in the house; the roof was near God.

The light bulb that hung in the pantry made a wan light,
but we could read by it the names of preserves—
outside, the buffalo grass, and the wind in the night.

A wildcat sprang at Grandpa on the Fourth of July
when he was cutting plum bushes for fuel,
before Indians pulled the West over the edge of the sky.

To anyone who looked at us we said, “My friend”;
liking the cut of a thought, we could say “Hello.”
(But plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code.)

The sun was over our town; it was like a blade.
Kicking cottonwood leaves we ran toward storms.
Wherever we looked the land would hold us up.

- William E. Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

America
*

*
America, you ode for reality!
Give back the people you took.

Let the sun shine again
on the four corners of the world

you thought of first but do not
own, or keep like a convenience.

People are your own word, you
invented that locus and term.

Here, you said and say, is
where we are. Give back

what we are, these people you made,
us, and nowhere but you to be.

Robert Creeley

[Larry Robinson]

I will be traveling for the next few weeks, so this will be the last poem I post until mid-December. Blessings to all.
Larry

Rise and Fall

Let go of fear
and rest in that which is.
For peace, like love,
comes to those who allow it.

Let go of fear
and rest in stillness.
Watch the breath rise...
and fall.

Watch the tide rise...
and fall.
Watch towers rise...
and fall.

Watch walls rise...
and fall.
Watch statues rise...
and fall.

Watch empires rise...
and fall.
Watch the breath rise...
and fall.

Let go of fear
and rest in the arms
of the One
who has always held you,
the One who holds
atoms and empires
and oceans and stars.

Let go of fear
and dance the dance that is yours alone.
Become what you are
and see what happens next.

- Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

The Formation of Soils

For forty million years a warm, warm rain --

then the sea got up to try to relax.

Vulnerable volcanoes had just melted away.

He worked below, translating the author's imps and downs,
his ups and demons --;
pines grew skyward though the pines were not.

Thus began long episodes of quiet,

nickel laterites not ready
for the slots.

It took periods of soft showers attacking the dream
under the silt-covered sun,

Osiris washing his fragments,
Leda swimming with her vagabonds.

Everyone is made essentially the same way.

Through notebooks of tight red dirt
Franciscans walked upside down under us:

aluminum oxides, incidents of magma,

and I had to go down in the earth for something --

Iron sediments spread over the foothills where Caliban
had his flat;

I was wearing the brown sweater when we spoke,
my heart and the one below translating his heart out.

But by that time, what.

Experience had been sent up, at an angle.

- Brenda Hillman

["Mad" Miles]

Welcome Back Larry! It's good to know you're well and to read your always thoughtful and well-crafted selections. I've never been an avid reader of poetry, I'm more into novels, so having your contributions to so conveniently check out has added to my literary experience. Thank you and Merry Whatever!!!

"Mad" Miles


:yippee:

[Larry Robinson]

Awake

Waking today
just before winter
when I try to name the color of grasses,
how I feel of their beauty,
there is no word.
I think of the time before there were
words
when you would know morning mist
by the feel
of your loved one's skin and hair,
and when someone came from the forest
of dry leaves
you would know by their scent
even if they carried no wood.
Or the heat of their body skin in summer.
Or if they came the winding way
down the mountains
they would be covered in cloud
returning to the fold
or if they had gone farther, to the ocean,
you'd know them by their far-seeing eyes.
and when some travelers return
and are shining with light
you know, without saying, that they
have been
in touch with other worlds.
I have no wealth to speak of
other than this,
all this, just to praise the dry grasses
and their color that can't be spoken
in words.


- Linda Hogan

[Larry Robinson]

"Out of darkness and dread
Shall come dawn and the birds...
Love shall fold warm like a cloak
Round the shuddering earth
Till the sound of its woe cease...
Reach me your hand,
This is the meaning of all that we
Suffered in sleep,-the white peace
Of the waking." Edna St.Vincent Millay
(1915)

[Larry Robinson]

Bedtime Story

The apple, the lips, the drop of blood,
the thorn, the bloom in the young girl's
cheeks. A rosy warmth, you feel the heart,
the rocking motion, blanket's weight.
This is the start of a small dream, lazy
campfire, gypsy song, this is the song
of the peddler's wagon, peek of stocking,
lusty daughter. This is desire lapping the edge,
dark red flowers, smell of smoke. These
are the songs of the drunken men, eating
sausages made from blood. This is you
in your father's arms. Are you dreaming now?
Are you dreaming yet? There's darkness
ahead, shadowy wolves, their jaundiced
eyes, their long slick tongues. Can you hear
the bells, do you feel the pull? The night air
chills, you reach for fire. You see the daughter
sent to the stream, buckets swinging back and
forth. This is a dream. The start of a dream.
Who is the girl? The wolves advance.


- Deborah Bogen

[Larry Robinson]

Shoveling Snow With Buddha

In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.
Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
for what he does, or does not do.
Even the season is wrong for him.
In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid?
Is this not implied by his serene expression,
that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?
But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.
This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.
He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.
All morning long we work side by side,
me with my commentary
and he inside his generous pocket of silence,
until the hour is nearly noon
and the snow is piled high all around us;
then, I hear him speak.
After this, he asks,
can we go inside and play cards?
Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk
and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table
while you shuffle the deck.
and our boots stand dripping by the door.
Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes
and leaning for a moment on his shovel
before he drives the thin blade again
deep into the glittering white snow.
*
- Billy Collins

[Larry Robinson]

MAYBE

Sweet Jesus, talking
his melancholy madness,
stood up in the boat
and the sea lay down,

silky and sorry.
So everybody was saved
that night
But you know how it is

when something
different crosses
the threshold -- the uncles
mutter together,

the women walk away,
the young brother begins
to sharpen his knife.
Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes
like the wind over the water --
sometimes, for days,
you don't think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon,
after the multitude was fed,
one or two of them felt
the soul slip forth

like a tremor of pure sunlight,
before exhaustion,
that wants to swallow everything,
gripped their bones and left them

miserable and sleepy;
as they are now, forgetting
how the wind tore at the sails
before he rose and talked to it --

tender and luminous and demanding
as he always was--
a thousand times more frightening
than the killer sea.


- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Beyond the Snow Belt
*

Over the local stations, one by one,
Announcers list disasters like dark poems
That always happen in the skull of winter.
But once again the storm has passed us by:
Lovely and moderate, the snow lies down
While shouting children hurry back to play,
And scarved and smiling citizens once more
Sweep down their easy paths of pride and welcome.

And what else might we do? Les us be truthful.
Two counties north the storm has taken lives.
Two counties north, to us, is far away, -
A land of trees, a wing upon a map,
A wild place never visited, - so we
Forget with ease each far mortality.

Peacefully from our frozen yards we watch
Our children running on the mild white hills.
This is the landscape that we understand, -
And till the principle of things takes root,
How shall examples move us from our calm?
I do not say that is not a fault.
I only say, except as we have loved,
All news arrives as from a distant land.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

The Beekeeper's Apprentice

You want the mountain to speak
and when it speaks, first accounting
for the daily pressures a mountain must face,
then recounting (as you've been here before)
in its half-bored, half-languid drawl,
how its formative years were spent
alone, with only negative models, valleys
or those weedy, dog-rotten rills,
those ever underachieving foothills,
you suddenly want the flowers to speak.

To believe that one's loneliness flowers
thus ex nihilo-like from a lack
of sympathy would be conversely
like shouting duck-duck, goose-goose
beauteous forms of substance wild
in a twilit suburban alley
and believing that children will come
bearing expectations and glee.

No one you've ever met behaves this way,
so your wanting the flowers to speak
cannot be used as an example of anything
except the business at hand which
being a beekeeper's apprentice
is getting to know how to handle the bees.

If you were the beekeeper, well . . .

to say you know all a man can do with his hands,
to say you've espied a loosed apiary swooning, swooning,
to say farewell my blossom without appearing too needy,

if you were the beekeeper
you'd have come all this way to hear how this too is difficult.

- Jean-Paul Pecqueur

The Case Against Happiness
Alice James Books

[Larry Robinson]

**** year’s end

*

****

**** fallen persimmons

*

growing mold under the tree --

*

**** where did the year go?

*

*

*

**** fog forming

*

just inches above a field --

*

**** tomorrow’s frost

*

*

*

**** year’s end!

*

dawn broke misty and cold

*

**** -- longer days ahead

*

*

- andrew zarrillo

*

[Larry Robinson]

Could this be the year?


Could this be the year the troops come home
from every battle every land everywhere -
home to love healing peace?

Could this be the year we build more homes than bombs
make more cookies than bullets
write more poems than balance sheets?

Could this be the year that no child goes hungry
no woman abused no man homeless
nobody unloved?

Could this be the year that the salmon swim
the songbirds sing the coyotes dance
in greater numbers than we have ever known?

Could this be the year we stop serving the machine
the machine begin serving us
we begin serving life?

Could this be the year the ancient promise comes true
you know the one I mean of peace on earth
good will to all?

- Larry Robinson

[purplepig]

no

Could this be the year?


Could this be the year the troops come home
from every battle every land everywhere -
home to love healing peace?
{snip}

[Larry Robinson]

Testament: When I Lived on Earth

.

a letter, in verse, to those who might want to come here

When I lived on earth
I knew so many pleasures!
Just opening my eyes was one of them.

The river of sorrow, of course,
was always in danger of flooding, too,
but four concrete joys come quickly to mind,
to suggest to you the incomparable
life that was available,
when I lived on earth.


1. Paradise

Paradise is the name
for the time before the Fall —
not the one of theology, but
that happend to me
when I was seven or eight,
that separated me,
trapped under its terrible wreckage,
from myself and everyone else.


Paradise is the world, perfect and ever-new,
all clocks smashed or never invented —
getting up every day to play,
and nothing was wrong or could be wrong
because the everyday angels had not yet arrived,
and we played enchanted until the far horizon of the day,
then waited safely in our nests
for another forever, tomorrow, to play again,
and even a billboard advertising cigarettes
would take me to an exotic world
with date palms and camels and pyramids,
because I couldn't read.


2. The Light

The Light is the glint of Paradise
that remains, no matter what,
somewhere in my field of vision
wherever I am — the angel of the Present,
rendering every landscape holy,
every room a shrine,

letting me know the shape of Perfection
that is latent in every moment of every day,

and my human work,
to sculpt that Perfection to fruition
from the raw materials of time and space
with the tough yet vulnerable
hands of my heart.

That Light is Being
and nothing I can do
can ever improve upon it or change it,

and that fact renders all effort
impossible from the start,
but it also makes me an artist,
a child of Don Quixote,

whose every breath is to unwrap
that Beauty from a mere glint
until it manifests
in the very composition of matter
of the work at hand.

It is the legacy of the Paradise of childhood,
all that is left of the Risen World
to reconstitute Heaven from,

and even if the black
cloud of despair had engulfed my world
and I were lying in a shadowed bed
or walking a last mile on death row,

the Light, that glint,
would be there behind the cloud,
smiling, winking.

3. Women

And yes, I told you I would speak
of the beauty of women
when I lived on earth,
and I got to walk the earthly streets
and sit in cafes
and observe these creatures
coming and going,

and the geometry of their forms
and the way it was augmented
and counterpointed by their attire
were a miracle and a revelation to my mind

that in 5 decades I was never quite able to assimilate
without the whole thing new again
next time I walked out
amid the parade of humanity.

Columbus steering his water-course
over the outrageously rounded earth
could not have known a new world
more stunning than the one I find
in a world peopled by women,

and that golden ratio, too,
is the perfection of the Light
and a reconstitution of Paradise,

4. The Infinite Possibility

and the last thing I wanted to tell you
about when I lived on earth

is how all things are possible
and there are no limits
to what can be erased
of misfortune and misery,
and what bliss,
what indescribable Bliss remains,

and how Existence itself
is a Sun pulsing, mighty its rays,
and we are all part of that Engine of Love,

and when we forget, when we forget...
I don't know how we forget,
there are yet mysteries I don't understand,
but when the bricks of the city
and the windows of our souls
grow black with the grime of life,
and our inner eye sees but the residue
of friction, disappointment and failure
and the seeming impossibility of our dreams
and even, sometimes, of living a normal, ordinary day

I tell you,
it can all be erased
as if it never was, and what is left
is the Original Shining!

I want to tell you this to give you hope
no matter where you're reading this.
Though you'll have to experience it yourself,
I can give you two clues where to look:

the heart, the spiritual
muscle of the heart,
when it works overtime in prayer,
can move the universe
and bring God close;

And there were beings,
when I lived on earth —
a very, very few,
and mostly very quiet —
who could look at you
and vaporize your sorrow
in that glance.

CODA:

This is what I wanted you to know
about when I lived on earth,

in case you're contemplating coming here,
or in case you're here and have forgotten,
like we all forget.

And everything else —
the taste of coffee or hot bread,
the vision of sunrise,
the sharp stab of a cold day,
the expanse of the sea —

these too are reminders of the Light and Paradise,
and of the Infinite Possibility
that were here,
that I loved,
when I lived on earth.

- Max Reif

*

[Larry Robinson]

Gift

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I walked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

- Czeslaw Milosz

[Larry Robinson]

Messenger

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

- Mary Oliver

[AuRoRa]

Dear Jimmy,

WOW! What an amazing poem and expression...thank U so much from me, and from women everywhere who so appreciate a man...who can feel, cry, laugh, play, enjoy, engage, be open, be loving, be as wonderful as U and they R...We women want these kind of men 2 play and create with...so Yea!

Thank U...and have U started crying yet? If so, will U write about that?

AuRoRa



Crying Poem

For the longest time,
I haven't been able to cry.
Tears start to come while I'm watching a movie tears
starts to come,
swelling my whole body a tulip starting to open under moon,
then the petals of my eyelids
stiffen
and something in me braces
and I don't cry.
When we crashed into a telephone pole
my dad yelled me not to cry,
I was terrified, almost killed –
but don't cry,
he said.
I couldn't cry because men don't cry.
When the dog bit me on the leg I couldn't cry,
when Joey died I couldn't cry –
how cool it would feel
to have a tear slide down the corner of my eye
on my cheek,
to the curve of my lip,
where I could taste it –
but I don't cry.
Something blocks the paths, channels
under my skin.
Tear ducts are red cracked clay,
for thirty years,
drought famine'd,
since I was eight when I got a beating for crying.
My heart an open furnace oven door,
rage seething for tears to cool it down,
but coal hoveling men keep feeding it
don't cry don't cry don't cry.
I want to untie my hands like a tired boxer's gloves
and lay them down on the table, gripped in their tight
clench of defense,
and I want to grow new hands
open flowers,
moistened by my tears.
I love the color blue
color brown.
I'd love
to touch my chapped cheeks
and whisper in tears
my compassion.
But I've always had to stop it up in me, hold my breath back,
keep my mouth shut tight
so as not to cry.
Man, I cry,
and it's a lie I don't.
I embrace my brother and pray shoulder to shoulder.
I kneel and kiss earth,
and I cry -- if only I could cry.
Don't translate my tears into thought,
I want to sob autumn tears on my window,
streaking the pane blurring the world.
I want to fill every hole in my heart with glimmering tear pools,
fill my kitchen sink with tears,
just thinking of me not crying all these years,
makes me want to cry,
but I been taught not to cry –
big people don't cry, people say,
ain't those alligator tears boy,
can't fool me with those tears –
bullshit!
Fooling no one but myself not crying
step aside –
I'm going to cry,
until my shirt is drenched,
and my hands shimmery wet
with tears,
running down my face on my arms,
my legs and breast,
and you have to look at me,
because I'm drowning your manly ways in my tears,
to get back my tears.
I'm crying until there isn't a single tear left
crying,
for what we been through not crying,
how we fooled ourselves thinking men don't cry.
I'm crying on the bus, in bed, at the dinner table, on the couch,
enough to float Noah's boat,
let out the robin of my heart,
bringing me back my own single shoot of greening
life again –
and you go fuck yourself
dry eyed days,
here I come,
giving you a Chicano monsoon season,
here comes this Chicano cry baby,
flooding prison walls,
my childrens' bedrooms,
splashing and tear slinging
tears up to my ankles,
planting rice and corn and beans
in fields glimmering with my tears,
and all you dry skinned nut-cracking ball whackers,
don't want to get your killer bone-breaking boots wet,
step aside,
because I'm bringing you rain.



Goodbyes were crying events –
Goodbye to grandma, to my brother,
friends, my neighborhood,
teachers and other boys,
and I never shed a tear,
though I felt them coming up in me.
I bit my teeth down hard to hold the tears back,
lowered my face and thought about something else.
I kept hearing voices in me,
telling me not to cry, don't cry, don't cry!
Boys don't cry,
leave yourself open,
become liable to get an ax in your heart by some non-crying fool,
be a sissy,
puto, you be hurting
yourself if you cry.
I hurt when I didn't cry,
all those times when I didn't cry ashamed
to in front of people,
fearful others would think I'm not a man,
fearful I'd be made fun of,
whole groups of us heard tragic news
and no one cries,
because it ain't right –
we need to weep –
get up in the middle of the night,
and cry, like a endurance's hips and stomach convulse during
child birth, we need to give birth
to that terrible convulsion of tears,
weep for those we never wept for,
let the legs shake and your arms embrace you
in a junkie habit for tears,
weep for the poor in prison
taken from their families,
the fieldworker's daughter
eaten by cancer from pesticides,
and weep,
for all those homeless
who couldn't meet mortgage payments,
those sleeping under bridges,
and the hopeless,
cry our differences into a lake,
where we can all cleanse our goodbyes and apathy,
papas cry for their children,
let children cry in my arms,
men cry in my arms,
endurance cry in my arms,
let us all cry,
after lovemaking and fighting,
make cry a prayer,
a language made of whimpers and sniffles and sobs,
cry out loud, louder, cry baby, cry! Cry! Cry!


-- Jimmy Santiago Baca

[Larry Robinson]

Mozart, for Example

All the quick notes
Mozart did not have time to use
before he entered the cloud-boat

Are falling now from the beaks
of the finches
that have gathered from the joyous summer

into the hard winter
and, like Mozart, they speak of nothing
but light and delight,

though it is true the heavy blades of the world
are still pounding underneath.
And this is what you can do too, maybe,

if you live simply, and with a lyrical heart
in the cumbered neighborhoods, or even,
as Mozart sometimes managed to, in a palace,

offering tune after tune after tune
making some hard-hearted prince
prudent and kind, just by being happy.

Mary Oliver

[kimpeck]

foreward, backward, stop, park.
headlights shining in the dark.
motor running by my head.
my cat's roadway is my bed!!

swiped from a children's magazine, one of my grandaughter's, no doubt..

"A Poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits"

be well

Kimpeck

[kimpeck]

Dear Jimmy,

WOW! What an amazing poem and expression...thank U so much from me, and from women everywhere who so appreciate a man...who can feel, cry, laugh, play, enjoy, engage, be open, be loving, be as wonderful as U and they R...We women want these kind of men 2 play and create with...so Yea!

Thank U...and have U started crying yet? If so, will U write about that?

AuRoRa




well, yeah.. I hafta remind myself that I DO NOT cry at movies.. I did cry when my wife passed.. a burden I still bare.. MEN do not cry.. well, yes we do.. I cry every day.. alone, in the morning.. crying is good.. it lubricates the psyche..

if you love you will cry..

cry for love..

be well

Kimpeck

[Larry Robinson]

To Those Born After Us


I. Truly, I live in a time of darkness!
The innocent word is foolish. A smooth brow
Suggests lack of sensitivity. Those who are laughing
Just haven’t heard the terrible news yet.

What kind of times are these,
When a conversation about trees is almost a crime,
Because so many misdeeds are left unspoken?
That person there – calmly crossing the street,
Is probably no longer available
To his friends who are in trouble.

It’s true: I’m still earning a living.
But that’s pure coincidence.
Nothing in what I do justifies my eating my fill.
By chance, I am spared. (When my luck runs out, I’m lost).

People say to me: Eat and drink! Be glad that you can.
But how can I eat and drink, when what I eat
Is taken from the mouths of the hungry, and the
Water I drink deprives one who is thirsty?
But still…I eat and I drink.

I would like to be wise.
In ancient books one can read what is wise:
To not participate in the conflicts of the world,
To be without fear, in the short time we have,
Also to get along without violence,
To requite evil with good,
To not satisfy one’s wishes, but to forget them –
These things are considered wise.
All of them are beyond me.
Truly I live in a time of darkness!

II. I came into the cities at a time of disorder,
A time of hunger.
I came among people at a time of uproar,
And I was outraged with them.
So passed the time
I was given on Earth.

I took food between battles,
And laid down to sleep among killers.
I was careless in love,
And regarded nature without patience.
So passed the time
I was given on Earth.


In my time, all roads led to a swamp.
My language gave me away to the executioner.
I could do very little. But the rulers
Sat more securely without me – that was my hope.
So passed the time
I was given on Earth.

III. You, who are the ones who will rise up
From the flood in which we went down,
Remember,
When you speak of our weaknesses,
The dark times from which you escaped.

We travelled, changing countries more often than shoes,
Through the wars between classes, in despair
Because we found injustice, but no outrage.

And yet we do know this:
Hatred, even of meanness,
Distorts the visage.
Anger, even at injustice,
Makes hoarse the voice. Alas,
Though we wanted to prepare the ground for kindness,
We didn’t know how to be kind ourselves.

But you, when the time comes,
When human beings can help one another,
Remember us
With forbearance.

- Bertolt Brecht

[Larry Robinson]

You who never arrived

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected
turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods-
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,-
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,
gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows?
perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, seperate, in the evening...

- Rainer Maria Rilke

(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

[Larry Robinson]

What We Need Is Here

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Enlightenment Is A Gamble

Time to cash in your chips
put your ideas and beliefs on the table.
See who has the bigger hand
you or the Mystery that pervades you.

Time to scrape the mind's shit
off your shoes
undo the laces
that hold your prison together
and dangle your toes into emptiness.

Once you've put everything
on the table
once all of your currency is gone
and your pockets are full of air
all you've got left to gamble with
is yourself.

Go ahead, climb up onto the velvet top
of the highest stakes table.
Place yourself as the bet.
Look God in the eyes
and finally
for once in your life
lose.
- Adyashanti

[Larry Robinson]

Heavy

That time
I thought I could not
go any close to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had His hand in this,

as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel
(brave even among lions),
"It's not the weight you carry

but how you carry it —
books, bricks, grief —
it's all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not
put it down."
So I went practicing,
have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled—
roses in the wind
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?

Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Today I Awoke

Today I awoke, finally I see the Self has re-turned to the Self.
The Self is none other than the Self.
I am deathless. I am endless. I am free.
The birds outside sing...
The birds outside sing and there am I.
The seeing of leaves on the trees, that seeing am I.
The body breathes, breathing am I.
I am awake and I know that I am awake.
Seen from the old eyes, everything is asleep, a game, a delusion.
But now I am awake. I am the play. I am the game. I am the delusion.
I am the enlightenment I sought, looking everywhere.
Nothing is separate, nothing is alone.
I am all that I see. All that I smell, taste, touch, feel, think and know.
I am awake and this awakeness is the same as Shyakyamuni Buddha's.
Today the leaf has returned to the root.
I am all name and form and beyond all name and form.
I am Spirit, no longer trapped in a body.
I am free. I am free because I am awake.
So ordinary. Who would have thought ? Who could have guessed?
I am home. I am really home. Ten thousand life times.
Ten thousand life times but today I am home.
Ten thousand life times but today I am home.
This is not an experience. This is me.
I am awake. Finally, I am awake.
Nothing has changed, but I am awake.
Before I tasted the root many times and felt, how delicious.
Today I became the root. How ordinary.

- Adyashanti


*

[SEELOVE]

Thank you Larry i have been reading you for a while and I AM greatful.

[Larry Robinson]

Worship

A white heron
Hiding itself
In the snowy field,
Where even the winter grass
Cannot be seen.

Dogen

[Larry Robinson]

Let America Be America Again



Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where it is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That anyone be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free".)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek-
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the people! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean-
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today-O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home-
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free".

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay-
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again-
The land that never has been yet-
And yet must be-the land where every one is free.
The land that's mine-the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME-
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose-
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath-
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain-
All, all the stretch of these great green states-
And make America again!

Langston Hughes

[Larry Robinson]

Praying

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

New Year Prayer

This robust heart involved
with too many worlds
for its own good,
this portion of creation
constantly trying
to make its self singular,
this chef at home in the kitchen
among the gleam of knives,
sommelier
among eclectic bottles,
sometimes dreaming
as a hermit among leaves,
drinking the centuries
of inherited silence,
sometimes the
social host opening
the doors and lighting
the candles,
often a father lifting his daughter
high up above him
and then
the husband
sheltered by night
attempting
to talk and talk again,
too often now
as the years go by
the son worrying
for a father sitting
Atlantic miles away,
in a silent
remembered parallel.

And now this
other parallel,
this symmetry
inside
for everything
on the outside,
the writer in winter
at his desk,
caught in the light,
beneath the window,
bringing together
the last and the first,
the middle and the edge,
the near and the far,
the troubled lives
all calling for the one line
and the one life,
for creation came together
in a central
unspoken wish,
to be held
and made one
like a god's blessing
out of nowhere,
the pen
somehow
touching a wound
that heals them all.

- David Whyte

[Larry Robinson]

The Road not Taken
By Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no feet had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference

[Larry Robinson]

Song of Zazen


All beings are primarily Buddhas.
It is like water and ice:
There is no ice apart from water;
There are no Buddhas apart from beings.

Not knowing how close the truth is to them,
Beings seek for it afar -- what a pity!
They are like those who, being in the midst of water,
Cry out for water, feeling thirst.

They are like the son of the rich man,
Who, wandering away from his father,
Goes astray amongst the poor.
It is all due to their ignorance
That beings transmigrate in the darkness
Of the Six Paths of existence.

When they wander from darkness to darkness,
How can they ever be free from birth-and-death?

As for the Dhyana practice as taught in the Mahayana,
No amount of praise can exhaust its merits.
The Six Paramitas--beginning with the Giving, Observing the Precepts,
And other good deeds, variously enumerated,
Such as Nembutsu, Repentance, Moral Training, and so on -
All are finally reducible to the practice of Dhyana.

The merit of Dhyana practice, even during a single sitting,
Erases the countless sins accumulated in the past.
Where then are the Evil Paths to misguide us?
The Pure Land cannot be far away.

Those who, for once, listening to the Dharma
In all humility,
Praise it and faithfully follow it,
Will be endowed with innumerable merits.

But how much more so when you turn your eyes within yourselves
And have a glimpse into your self-nature!
You find that the self-nature is no-nature -
The truth permitting no idle sophistry.
For you, then, open the gate leading to the oneness of cause and effect;
Before you, then, lies a straight road of non-duality and non-trinity.

When you understand that form is the form of the formless,
Your coming-and-going takes place nowhere else but where you are
When you understand that thought is the thought of the thought-less
Your singing-and-dancing is no other than the voice of the Dharma
How boundless is the sky of Samadhi
How refreshingly bright is the moon of the Fourfold Wisdom
Being so is there anything you lack?
As the Absolute presents itself before you
The place where you stand is the Land of the Lotus,
And your person - the body of the Buddha.


- Hakuin

[Larry Robinson]

What Is Left Behind

We used to pick cicada shells off bark and chain-link fences,
move them to our shirts—half-fascinated, half-horrified
by the air-swelled eyes and barbed hook-feet—

the horror of possibility. We weren't scared then to pinch them,
hear them crunch between our fingers, the violent crackles
of more than dry leaf, flecks of membrane

stuck to the skin of our thumbs, the bulbous eyes gone.
We never studied the skeletons' wingless shapes,
didn't put our mouths close, moisten the ghost-bodies

with our breath, even tongues, to see if they tasted sweet
like burnt sugar, to see if we too could breathe life
into lifelessness, make the head turn, the legs claw.

But we've learned there were careful steps
that pulled fresh bodies, green-bellied with leaf-veined wings,
through slits and left the shells behind, still malleable,

the adults soft beside, wings hardening to flight,
the shell drying too. We knew nothing of process,
only that something had happened and left a fragile shape.

- Bronwen Butter Newcott


Bronwen Butter Newcott
Prairie Schooner
Fall 2006

[Larry Robinson]

Sabbaths 1998, VI


By expenditure of hope,
Intelligence, and work,
You think you have it fixed.
It is unfixed by rule.
Within the darkness, all
Is being changed, and you
Also will be changed.

Now I recall to mind
A costly year: Jane Kenyon,
Bill Lippert, Philip Sherrard,
All in the same spring dead,
So much companionship
Gone as the river goes.

And my good workhorse Nick
Dead, who called out to me
In his conclusive pain
To ask my help. I had
No help to give. And flood
Covered the cropland twice.
By summer's end there are
No more perfect leaves.

But won't you be ashamed
To count the passing year
At its mere cost, your debt
Inevitably paid?
For every year is costly,
As you know well. Nothing
Is given that is not
Taken, and nothing taken
That was not first a gift.

The gift is balanced by
Its total loss, and yet,
And yet the light breaks in,
Heaven seizing its moments
That are at once its own
And yours. The day ends
And is unending where
The summer tanager,
Warbler, and vireo
Sing as they move among
Illuminated leaves.

- Wendell Berry

[SEELOVE]

“In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was IN ME an INVINCIBLE Summer.”—Albert Camus

[SEELOVE]

There are people who will walk away from you.
Or hurt you.
Or not love you.
Or not 'see' you.

And hear me when I tell you this
- when people try to walk away from you:
let them go.

Don't try to talk another person into staying with you,
loving you,
calling you,
caring about you,
coming to see you,
staying attached to you.

I mean hang up the phone if you need to.
When people turn from you,
let them go.
They're on their way to somewhere
or something else:

somewhere
or
something that does not include you
and
let me tell why that is okay...

Your destiny is never tied to anybody
or anything thatleft.

People leave you because
they are not joined to you.

And if they are not joined to you,
it's best they do not stay.
Let them go.

And it only means their part in your story
is over.
And it's good to know when people's part
is over so you don't keep trying to push
something that doesn't need to be.

Let me tell you something.

I've got the gift of good-bye.

It's the tenth spiritual gift,
and I believe in good-bye.

It's not that I'm hateful,
it's that I'm faithful,
and I know whatever I need,
I will have available to me,
without convincing it
to be a part of
my life.

LET IT GO.

If you are holding on to something
that doesn't belong
and is not good for you,
then you need to.....

LET IT GO.

If you are holding on to past hurts
and pains......

LET IT GO.

If someone can't treat you right,
love you back,
and
see your worth.....

LET IT GO.

If someone has angered you........

LET IT GO.

If you are holding on to thoughts
of hatred or
revenge......

LET IT GO.

If you are involved in a wrong relationship
or
addiction......

LET IT GO.

If you are holding on to a job
that no longer meets
your needs or talents.....

LET IT GO.

If you have a bad attitude.......

LET IT GO.

If you keep judging others
to make yourself feel
better.....

LET IT GO.

If you're stuck in the past
and G-d is trying to take
you to a new spiritual level.....

LET IT GO.

If you are struggling with the healing
of a broken
relationship.......

LET IT GO.

If you keep trying to help someone
who won't even try
to help themselves......

LET IT GO.

If you're feeling depressed
and stressed........

LET IT GO.

If there is a particular situation
that you are used
to handling yourself and G-d is saying

"take your hands off of it,"
then you need to......

LET IT GO.

Let the past be the past.
Forget the former things.
Our Divine One,
our Creator is doing new things for 2007!!!

LET IT GO.

I invite you to take an opportunity,
during the next
60 seconds,
to stop whatever you are doing,
and send
loving,
healing,
abundant,
happy,
and warm thoughts to
the one who sent this to you.
Know that they are turning toward you,
not away from you.
They care for you.
They are not keeping you or judging you.
They are inviting you to grow with them,
and to LET IT GO.


Finally,
stop and think
of those things or those
precious people in your life
who were brought to you.

Take a moment to appreciate someone kind,
someone gracious,
someone who loves you,
and thank G-d
and
pray for them.:runLeopard::pray::crying2::beatingheart:

[Larry Robinson]

And Oh -That The Man I Am Might Cease To Be -


No, now I wish the sunshine would stop.
and the white shining houses, and the gay red flowers on
the balconies
and the bluish mountains beyond, would be crushed out
between two valves of darkness;
the darkness falling, the darkness rising, with muffled
sound
obliterating everything.

I wish that whatever props up the walls of light
would fall, and darkness would come hurling heavily down,
and it would be thick black dark for ever.
Not sleep, which is grey with dreams,
nor death, which quivers with birth,
but heavy, sealing darkness, silence, all immovable.

What is sleep?
It goes over me, like a shadow over a hill,
but it does not alter me, nor help me.
And death would ache still, I am sure;
it would be lambent, uneasy.
I wish it would be completely dark everywhere,
inside me, and out, heavily dark
utterly.

- D.H. Lawrence

[Larry Robinson]

A Homecoming

One faith is bondage. Two
are free. In the trust
of old love, cultivation shows
a dark, graceful wilderness
at its heart. Wild
in that wilderness, we roam
the distances of our faith,
safe beyond the bounds
of what we know. O love,
open. Show me
my country. Take me home.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

The Word

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

between "green thread"
and "broccoli" you find
that you have penciled "sunlight."

Resting on the page, the word
is as beautiful, it touches you
as if you had a friend

and sunlight were a present
he had sent you from some place distant
as this morning -- to cheer you up,

and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing,

that also needs accomplishing
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue

but today you get a telegram,
from the heart in exile
proclaiming that the kingdom

still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,

- to any one among them
who can find the time,
to sit out in the sun and listen.

-Tony Hoagland

[Barry]

The Word

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

between "green thread"
and "broccoli" you find
that you have penciled "sunlight."
...
Thanks for sharing this poem with us! :sunshine:

[Larry Robinson]

Crazy Jane and God


That lover of a night
Came when he would,
Went in the dawning light
Whether I would or no;
Men come, men go;
All things remain in God.

Banners choke the sky;
Men-at-arms tread;
Armoured horses neigh
Where the great battle was
In the narrow pass:
All things remain in God.

Before their eyes a house
That from childhood stood
Uninhabited, ruinous,
Suddenly lit up
From door to top:
All things remain in God.

I had wild Jack for a lover;
Though like a road
That men pass over
My body makes no moan
But sings on:
All things remain in God

- William Butler Yeats

[Larry Robinson]

THROUGH THE SMOKE HOLE
for Don Allen
I

There is another world above this one; or outside of this one; the way to
it is thru the smoke of this one, & the hole that smoke goes
through. The ladder is the way through the smoke hole; the
ladder holds up, some say, the world above; it might have
been a tree or pole; I think it is merely a way.

Fire is at the foot of the ladder. The fire is in the center. The walls are
round. There is also another world below or inside this one.
The way there is down thru smoke. It is not necessary to
think of a series.

Raven and Magpie do not need the ladder. They fly thru the smoke holes
shrieking and stealing. Coyote falls thru; we recognize him
only as a clumsy relative, a father in old clothes we don’t
wish to see with our friends.

It is possible to cultivate the fields of our own world without much thought
for the others. When men emerge from below we see them
as the masked dancers of our magic dreams. When men dis-
appear down, we see them as plain men going somewhere
else. When men disappear up we see them as great heroes
shining through the smoke. When men come back from above
they fall thru and tumble; we don’t really know them; Coyote,
as mentioned before.

II

Out of the kiva come
masked dancers or
plain men.
plain men go into the ground.

out there outside all the chores
wood and water, dirt,
wind, the view across the flat,
here, in the round
no corners
head is full of magic figures -
woman your secrets aren't my secrets
what I cant say I wont
walk round
put my hands flat down
you in the round too.
gourd vine blossom.
walls and houses drawn up
from the same soft soil.

thirty million years gone
drifting sand.
cool rooms pink stone
worn down fort floor, slat sighting
heat shine on jumna river

dry wash, truck tracks in the riverbed
coild sand pinion.

seabottom
riverbank
sand dunes
the floor of a sea once again.

human fertilizer,
underground water tunnels,
skinny dirt gods,
grandmother berries,
out
through the smoke hole.
(for childhood and youth are vanity
a Permian reef of algae,

out through the smoke hole
swallowd sand
salt mud
swum bodies, flap
to the limestone blanket -

lizard tongue,lizard tongue

wha, wha, wha flying
in and out thru the smoke hole

plain men
come out of the ground.

- Gary Snyder

[Larry Robinson]

Last night, as I was sleeping,


Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt -- marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt -- marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt -- marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night, as I slept,
I dreamt -- marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.


- Antonio Machado

[SEELOVE]

Pardon the error if i AM making one i don't sleep a lot and have a lot on my mind... Perhaps i already posted this?

ALL beauty is but ART unknown to thee,
ALL chance DIRECTION that thou cans't not SEE,
ALL disCORD HARMONY misunderstood,
ALL partial evil UNIVERSIAL GOoD,

Alexander Pope
(what does evil spell backwards anyway?)

[Larry Robinson]

WE HAVE NOT COME TO TAKE PRISONERS

We have not come here to take prisoners,
But to surrender ever more deeply
To freedom and joy.

We have not come into this exquisite world
To hold ourselves hostage from love.

Run my dear,
From anything
That may not strengthen
Your precious budding wings.

Run like hell my dear,
From anyone likely
To put a sharp knife
Into the sacred, tender vision
Of your beautiful heart.

We have a duty to befriend
Those aspects of obedience
That stand outside of our house
And shout to our reason
"O please, O please,
Come out and play."

For we have not come here to take prisoners
Or to confine our wondrous spirits,

But to experience ever and ever more deeply
Our divine courage, freedom and
Light!

- Hafiz

[Larry Robinson]

The Love of Morning

It is hard sometimes to drag ourselves
back to the love of morning
after we've lain in the dark crying out
O God, save us from the horror . . . .

God has saved the world one more day
even with its leaden burden of human evil;
we wake to birdsong.
And if sunlight's gossamer lifts in its net
the weight of all that is solid,
our hearts, too, are lifted,
swung like laughing infants;

but on gray mornings,
all incident - our own hunger,
the dear tasks of continuance,
the footsteps before us in the earth's
beloved dust, leading the way - all,
is hard to love again
for we resent a summons
that disregards our sloth, and this
calls us, calls us.

- Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

Primary Wonder

Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.

- Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

The Fist

There are days
when the sun goes down
like a fist,
though of course

if you see anything
in the heavens this way
you had better get

your eyes checked
or, better still,
your diminished spirit.
The heavens

have no fist,
or wouldn't they have been
shaking it
for a thousand years now,

and even
longer than that,
at the dull, brutish
ways of mankind -

heaven's own
creation?
Instead: such patience!
Such willingness

to let us continue!
To hear,
little by little,
the voices -

only, so far, in
pockets of the world -
suggesting the possibilities

of peace?

Keep looking.
Behold, how the fist opens
with invitation.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

The Time Has Come

the time has come
to break all my promises
tear apart all chains
and cast away all advice

disassemble the heavens
link by link
and break at once
all lovers' ties
with the sword of death

put cotton inside
both my ears
and close them to
all words of wisdom

crash the door and
enter the chamber
where all sweet
things are hidden

how long can i
beg and bargain
for the things of this world
while love is waiting

how long before
i can rise beyond
how i am and
what i am

- Jelalludin Rumi

-- Ghazal 1591
Translated by Nader Khalili
"Rumi, Fountain of Fire"
Cal-Earth Press, 1994

[Larry Robinson]

Wildpeace

Not the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)

Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.

- Yehuda Amichai


(Translation by Chana Bloch, in This Same Sky, ed. by Naomi Shihab Nye)

[Larry Robinson]

A Zero-Circle

Be helpless and dumbfounded,
unable to say yes or no.

Then a stretcher will come
from grace to gather us up.

We are too dulleyed to see the beauty.
If we say "Yes we can," we¹ll be lying.

If we say "No, we don¹t see it,"
that "No" will behead us
and shut tight our window into spirit.

So let us not be sure of anything,
beside ourselves, and only that, so
miraculous beings come running to help.

Crazed, lying in a zero-circle, mute,
we will be saying finally,
with tremendous eloquence, "Lead us."

When we¹ve totally surrendered to that beauty,
we¹ll become a mighty kindness.
- Jelalludin Rumi
-- Mathnawi IV, 3748-3754
Coleman Barks
Say I am You
Maypop, 1994

[Larry Robinson]

The Place I Want to Get Back To

is where
in the pinewoods
in the moments between
the darkness

and first light
two deer
came walking down the hill
and when they saw me

they said to each other, okay,
this one is okay,
let's see who she is
and why she is sitting

on the ground, like that,
so quiet, as if
asleep, or in a dream,
but, anyway, harmless;

and so they come
on their slender legs
and gazed upon me
not unlike the way

I go out to the dunes and look
and look and look
into the faces of the flowers;
and then one of them leaned forward

and nuzzled my hand, and what can my life
bring me that could exceed
that brief moment?
For twenty years

I have gone every day to the same woods,
not waiting, exactly, just lingering.
Such gifts, bestowed,
can't be repeated.

If you want to talk about this
come to visit. I live in the house
near the corner, which I have named
Gratitude.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Every day, priests minutely examine the Law
And endlessly chant complicated sutras.
Before doing that, though, they should learn
How to read the love letters sent by the wind
and rain, the snow and moon.

- Ikkyu

(Ikkyu and the Crazy Cloud Anthology, trans. by Sonya Arutzen)

[Larry Robinson]

Learning

A piccolo played, then a drum.
Feet began to come - a part of the music. Here comes a horse,
clippety clop, away.

My mother said, "Don't run -
the army is after someone
other than us. If you stay
you'll learn our enemy."

Then he came, the speaker. He stood
in the square. He told us who
to hate. I watched my mother's face,
its quiet. "That's him," she said.

- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

The Birthing
*
Call out the names in the procession of the loved.
Call from the blood the ancestors here to bear witness
to the day he stopped the car,
we on our way to a great banquet in his honor.
In a field a cow groaned lowing, trying to give birth,
what*he called front leg presentation,
the calf comes out nose first, one front leg dangling from his mother.
A fatal sign he said while rolling up the sleeves
of his dress shirt, and climbed the fence.
I watched him thrust his arms entire
into the yet to be, where I imagined holy sparrows scattering
in the hall of souls for his big mortal hands just to make way.
With his whole weight he pushed the calf back in the mother
and*grasped the other leg tucked up like a closed wing
against the new one’s shoulder.
And found a way in the warm dark to bring both legs out
into the world together.
Then heaved and pulled, the cow arching her back,
until a bull calf, in*a whoosh of blood and water,
came falling whole and still onto the meadow.
We rubbed his blackness, bloodying our hands.
The mother licked her newborn, of us oblivious,
until he moved a little, struggled.
I ran to get our coats, mine a green velvet cloak,
and his a tuxedo jacket, and worked to rub the new one dry
while he set out to find the farmer.
When it was over, the new calf suckling his mother,
the farmer soon to lead them to the barn,
leaving our coats just where they lay
we huddled in the car.
And then made love toward eternity,
Without a word drove slowly home. And loved some more.
**********************************************************

Deborah Digges

[Larry Robinson]

Advice to a Prophet

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?--
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone's face?

Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

- Richard Wilbur

[Larry Robinson]

Kissing a Horse

Of the two spoiled, barn-sour geldings
we owned that year, it was Red--
skittish and prone to explode
even at fourteen years--who'd let me
hold to my face his own: the massive labyrinthine
caverns of the nostrils, the broad plain
up the head to the eyes. He'd let me stroke
his coarse chin whiskers and take
his soft meaty underlip
in my hands, press my man's carnivorous
kiss to his grass-nipping upper half of one, just
so that I could smell
the long way his breath had come from the rain
and the sun, the lungs and the heart,
from a world that meant no harm.

- Robert Wrigley

[Larry Robinson]

Come, come

Come, come, whoever you are -
wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving
(it doesn't matter.)
Even if you've broken your vow a hundred times,
come, come again and yet again.
- Jelalludin Rumi

[Larry Robinson]

The Wish to Be Generous

All that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man's evil, or dwindle
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know
my little light taken from me into the seed
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Cargo

You enter life a ship laden with meaning, purpose and
gifts
sent to be delivered to a hungry world,
and as much as the world needs your cargo,
you need to give it away.

Everything depends on this.
But the world forgets its needs,
and you forget your mission, and
the ancestral maps used to guide you
have become faded scrawls on the parchment of dead
Pharaohs.

The cargo weighs you heavy the longer it is held.
Spoilage becomes a risk.
The ship sputters from port to port and at each you
ask:
"Is this the way?"
But the way cannot be found without knowing the cargo,
and the cargo cannot be known without recognizing
there is a way.

It is simply this:
You have gifts.
The world needs your gifts.
You must deliver them.
The world may not know it is starving,
but the hungry know,
and they will find you
when you discover your cargo
and start to give it away.

- Greg Kimura

[Larry Robinson]

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray,
that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.
Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth
piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years
of unrequited toil shall be sunk,
and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash
shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,
as was said three thousand years ago,
so still it must be said
"the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice toward none, with charity for all,
with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,
let us strive on to finish the work we are in,
to bind up the nation's wounds,
to care for him who shall have borne the battle
and for his widow and his orphan,
to do all which may achieve and cherish
a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

- Abraham Lincoln
(from his second inaugural address, March 4, 1865)

[Larry Robinson]

Does one really have to fret
About enlightenment?
No matter what road I travel
I'm going home.

- Shinsho

[Larry Robinson]

Talking to Grief

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.

I should trust you.
I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.

You think I don't know you've been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider
my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.

Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

Laughter

What is laughter? What is laughter?
It is God waking up! O it is God waking up!
It is the sun poking its sweet head out
From behind a cloud
You have been carrying too long,
Veiling your eyes and heart.

It is Light breaking ground for a great Structure
That is your Real body - called Truth.

It is happiness applauding itself and then taking flight
To embrace everyone and everything in this world.

Laughter is the polestar
Held in the sky by our Beloved,
Who eternally says,

"Yes, dear ones, come this way,
Come this way towards Me and Love!

Come with your tender mouths moving
And your beautiful tongues conducting songs
And with your movements - your magic movements
Of hands and feet and glands and cells - Dancing!

Know that to God's Eye,
All movement is a Wondrous Language,
And Music - such exquisite, wild Music!"

O what is laughter, Hafiz?
What is this precious love and laughter
Budding in our hearts?

It is the glorious sound
Of a soul waking up!

- Hafiz

[Larry Robinson]

Security

Tomorrow will have an island. Before night
I always find it. Then on to the next island.
These places hidden in the day separate
and come forward if you beckon.
But you have to know they are there before they exist.

Some time there will be a tomorrow without any island.
So far, I haven't let that happen, but after
I'm gone others may become faithless and careless.
Before them will tumble the wide unbroken sea,
and without any hope they will stare at the horizon.

So to you, Friend, I confide my secret:
to be a discoverer you hold close whatever
you find, and after a while you decide
what it is. Then, secure in where you have been,
you turn to the open sea and let go.

- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

Looking, Walking, Being

"The World is not something to
look at, it is something to be in."
Mark Rudman

I look and look.
Looking's a way of being: one becomes,
sometimes, a pair of eyes walking.
Walking wherever looking takes one.

The eyes
dig and burrow into the world.
They touch
fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor.
World and the past of it,
not only
visible present, solid and shadow
that looks at one looking.

And language? Rhythms
of echo and interruption?
That's
a way of breathing.

breathing to sustain
looking,
walking and looking,
through the world,
in it.
- Denise Levertov