Poem of the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Dear friends,
I have been out of the country and (blessedly) incommunicado for the past three weeks. I appreciate the messages of concern and apologize for not letting you know why I haven't posted the daily poems. I am back - a bit heavier in body (from cucina Italiana) but lighter in spirit. Here is today's poem. Many blessings to all of you.
Larry

Eagle Poem

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren't always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circles in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon, within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

- Joy Harjo

[Larry Robinson]

Forgiveness

The one who forgives restores,
even though it seems a small segment,
the wholeness of being.

Everyone's history
is, without doubt, part of the world's history,
is, in fact, the world's history.

In other words,
whatever a man or a woman does,
even in secret, touches,
no, even more, shapes all humanity.

- Jaime Sabines
(translated by Rebeca del Rio)

El perdón

El que perdona restaura
aunque solo parezca serlo en pequeña escala,
la integridad de ser...

La historia de cada persona
sin duda parte de la historia mundial,
es historia mundial.

En otras palabras,
cualquier cosa que un hombre o una mujer hace,
aunque fuera en secreto, toca,
más aún, modela a la humanidad completa.


- Jaime Sabines

[Melodymama]

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[Larry Robinson]

Today

The ordinary miracles begin. Somewhere
a signal arrives: “Now,” and the rays
come down. A tomorrow has come. Open
your hands, lift them: morning rings
all the doorbells; porches are cells for prayer.
Religion has touched your throat. Not the same now,
you could close your eyes and go on full of light.

And it is already begun, the chord
that will shiver glass, the song full of time
bending above us. Outside, a sign:
a bird intervenes; the wings tell the air,
“Be warm.” No one is out there, but a giant
has passed through town, widening streets, touching
the ground, shouldering away the stars.

- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

A Map to the Next World

for Desiray Kierra Chee

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for

those who would climb through the hole in the sky.


My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged

from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.


The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It

must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.


In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it

was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.


Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the

altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.


Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our

children while we sleep.


Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born

there of nuclear anger.


Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to

disappear.


We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to

them by their personal names.


Once we knew everything in this lush promise.



What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the
map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav-

ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.


An imperfect map will have to do, little one.


The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s

small death as he longs to know himself in another.


There is no exit.


The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a

spiral on the road of knowledge.


You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking

from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh

deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.


They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.


And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world

there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.


You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song

she is singing.


Fresh courage glimmers from planets.


And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you

will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.


When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they

entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.


You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.


A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the

destruction.


Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our

tribal grounds.


We were never perfect.


Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was

once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.


We might make them again, she said.


Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.


You must make your own map.

- Joy Harjo

[Larry Robinson]

DO NOT BE ASHAMED

You will be walking some night
in the comfortable dark of your yard
and suddenly a great light will shine
round about you, and behind you
will be a wall you never saw before.
It will be clear to you suddenly
that you were about to escape,
and that you are guilty: you misread
the complex instructions, you are not
a member, you lost your card
or never had one. And you will know
that they have been there all along,
their eyes on your letters and books,
their hands in your pockets,
their ears wired to your bed.
Though you have done nothing shameful,
they will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel and weep
and say you should have been like them.
And once you say you are ashamed,
reading the page they hold out to you,
then such light as you have made
in your history will leave you.
They will no longer need to pursue you.
You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.
They will not forgive you.
There is no power against them.
It is only candor that is aloof from them,
only an inward clarity, unashamed,
that they cannot reach. Be ready.
When their light has picked you out
and their questions are asked, say to them:
"I am not ashamed." A sure horizon
will come around you. The heron will begin
his evening flight from the hilltop.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Can You Imagine?

For example, what the trees do
not only in lightning storms
or the watery dark of a summer night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now--whenever
we're not looking. Surely you can't imagine
they just stand there looking the way they look
when we're looking; surely you can't imagine
they don't dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade--surely you can't imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptyness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can't imagine
patience, and happiness, like that.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

The Want of Peace

All goes back to the earth,
and so I do not desire
pride of excess or power,
but the contentments made
by men who have had little:
the fisherman’s silence
receiving the river’s grace,
the gardener’s musing on rows.

I lack the peace of simple things.
I am never wholly in place.
I find no peace or grace.
We sell the world to buy fire,
our way lighted by burning men,
and that has bent my mind
and made me think of darkness
and wish for the dumb life of roots.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

What Is Poetry

The medieval town, with frieze
Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow

That came when we wanted it to snow?
Beautiful images? Trying to avoid

Ideas, as in this poem? But we
Go back to them as to a wife, leaving

The mistress we desire? Now they
Will have to believe it

As we believed it. In school
All the thought got combed out:

What was left was like a field.
Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.

Now open them on a thin vertical path.
It might give us--what?--some flowers soon?

- John Ashbery

[Larry Robinson]

Vocation

This dream the world is having about itself
includes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,
a groove in the grass my father showed us all
one day while meadowlarks were trying to tell
something better about to happen.

I dreamed the trace to the mountains, over the hills,
and there a girl who belonged wherever she was.
But then my mother called us back to the car:
she was afraid, she always blamed the place,
the time anything my father planned.

Now both my parents, the long line through the plain,
the meadowlarks, the sky, the world's whole dream
remain, and I hear him say while I stand between the two,
helpless, both of them part of me:
"Your job is to find what the world is trying to be."

- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

The Excesses of God
Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to be equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.
- Robinson Jeffers

[Larry Robinson]

Still I Rise

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

- Maya Angelou

[Larry Robinson]

Sometimes A Man Stands Up During Supper

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house,
dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.

- Ranier Maria Rilke

[Larry Robinson]

I will be on retreat until May 28, so this will the last poem until then. Blessings,
Larry

Wait

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours, Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the end.

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

- Galway Kinnell