Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

MY SPIRITUAL PATH


I have lit a candle in an ancient cathedral
and felt the power of the thousands of prayers
that were said there.


I have leaned against the trunk
of a thousand year old bay tree
and pulsed with her energy.


I have swum
with the tiny yellow fish
and the large dolphins and heard them sing
to me.


I have looked into the eyes
of my newborn children
and grandchildren
and marveled at the wisdom and innocence
I saw there.


I have nestled in the embrace
of my sweet, sweet lover
and shuddered with delight
at her touch—
almost too much to bear
but bearing it.


I have said goodbye
to my closest friend
as she died
and cried at her leaving me.


I have danced and drummed
chanted and prayed
with the same circle of witchy women
for a dozen years every new moon
and felt the magic we make.


And almost every day
I am filled with great gratitude
to live such a blessed, blessed life.


- Lilith Rogers

[Larry Robinson]

Let Someone Catch You


It’s in the
falling
that we rise
in that fall-on-your-face
SPLAT
that we forget
who we think we should be
and in that emptiness
find our fullness


Don’t get mad at yourself
and leave
for failing to find perfection
as soon as possible
millionaire by thirty
PhD by thirty
saint/martyr by thirty


Let someone catch you
so they can be the hero
if that’s what they need
let yourself fall
if you really want
to save the world


- Lin Marie deVincent

[Larry Robinson]

Envoi
Lazarus woke to the miracle of no longer fearing failure.
He lifted his two sides from the ground as he tried
To speak, one part gathering darkness, one part humming.
When he walked out, he glimpsed a world never tried.
At the crucial point, there is yet more than one way
Of proceeding, but it seldom appears that way.


- Sandra Lim

[Larry Robinson]

<tbody>
In Sepia


Often you walked at night, house lights made
Nets of their lawns, your shadow
Briefly over them. You had been talking about
Death, over & over. Often
You felt dishonest, though certainly some figure
Moved in the dark yards, a parallel
Circumstance, keeping pace. By Death, you meant
A change of character: He is
A step
ahead, interlocutor, by whose whisper
The future parts like water,


Allowing entrance. That was a way of facing it
& circumventing it: Death
Was the person into whom you stepped. Life, then,
Was a series of static events;
As: here the child, in sepia, climbs the front steps
Dressed for winter. Even the snow
Is brown, &, no, he will never enter that house
Because each passage, as into
A new life, requires his forgetfulness. Often you
Would explore these photographs,


These memories, in sepia, of another life.
Their use was tragic,
Evoking a circumstance, the particular fragments
Of an always shattered past.
Death was process then, a release of nostalgia
Leaving you free to change.
Perhaps you were wrong; but walking at night
Each house got personal. Each
Had a father. He was reading a story so hopeless,
So starless, we all belonged.


- Jon Anderson




</tbody>

[Larry Robinson]

Dark August


So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky
of this black August. My sister, the sun,
broods in her yellow room and won't come out.


Everything goes to hell; the mountains fume
like a kettle, rivers overrun; still,
she will not rise and turn off the rain.


She is in her room, fondling old things,
my poems, turning her album. Even if thunder falls
like a crash of plates from the sky,


she does not come out.
Don't you know I love you but am hopeless
at fixing the rain ? But I am learning slowly


to love the dark days, the steaming hills,
the air with gossiping mosquitoes,
and to sip the medicine of bitterness,


so that when you emerge, my sister,
parting the beads of the rain,
with your forehead of flowers and eyes of forgiveness,


all with not be as it was, but it will be true
(you see they will not let me love
as I want), because, my sister, then


I would have learnt to love black days like bright ones,
The black rain, the white hills, when once
I loved only my happiness and you


- Derek Walcott

[Larry Robinson]

To Love the World


You know you love the world
When the scent of pine pitch makes you cry
When the sound of grass in wind
Is as good as heaven
Stream water feels like as a lover’s touch
And going indoors is hard to bear


You know you love the world
When wind through a hillside of cypresses
Sounds like God laughing
And breaking waves upon the shore
is your own pulse, ln your own body
Sounding on.


You know you love the world
When a swift, streaking overhead,
Carries you out into open space
And granite in your hand
Silently teaches you
The most ancient of religions


- Garth Gilchrist

[sandoak]

Wow, Larry.
Don't I wish I'd written this myself!


To Love the World

[Larry Robinson]

The Kookaburras

In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator.
In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting
to come out of its cloud and lift its wings.
The kookaburras, kingfishers, pressed against the edge of
their cage, they asked me to open the door.
Years later I wake in the night and remember how I said to them
no, and walked away.
They had the brown eyes of soft-hearted dogs.
They didn’t want to do anything so extraordinary, only to fly
home to their river.
By now I suppose the great darkness has covered them.
As for myself, I am not yet a god of even the palest flowers.
Nothing else has changed either.
Someone tosses their white bones to the dung-heap.
The sun shines on the latch of their cage.
I lie in the dark, my heart pounding.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Justice


Clutching a white cloth in her hand
She could no longer carry the weight
Of much more than one lifetime
In her diminutive black body
Struggling to stay erect upon
The hard wooden chair next to her son.


Her face wet with weeping
At the thought of his violating
So many young white women
Whom he believed he could
Have in no other way.


Even his slick defense, she knew
Would not save him from
Facing the consequences:
The voices of unexamined hatred
When they finally won out
Thrusting him toward
His own enactment of justice.

How could this be her son
His face now glazed over
And numbed into vacancy.
She was holding it all for him
And felt she might explode
Into so many pieces of a life undone.


She thought of the other mothers
The ones she had seen on TV
Oscar’s mother; Trayvon’s mother.....
How they somehow managed to appear strong
Would it be easier to bear, she wondered,
If he were the victim, not the perpetraor?


She looked through wet eyes
At the young woman on the stand
And the young woman looked back
In a second all lines blurred
Between such delinations.


There Justitia
Dropped her blindfold, her sword
Piercing the hearts of both women.
The courtroom dropped away
The scales hung in perfect balance.


- Fran Carbonaro

[Larry Robinson]

Late Fragment


And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

- Raymond Carver

[Larry Robinson]

Olema Blues


Sitting silently in zazen
an earworm love song with
big old hearts in my head,
the whole world morphed into music.


The room itself was a twelve bar blues fading
into crickets, or frogs, or
was that just my tinnitis?
A siren on Hiway 1, somewhere, a sinister guitar.

Alarmed, my caffeinated mind looked for
something solid. The redwood deck boards?
The gravel path? The gnarly eucalyptus trunk?
But no, all of it hummed with quantum motion,

And me? A shaky hammer striking emptiness,
emptiness resounding in sweet chorus for all with ears to hear,
Brown hills spinning show tunes faster than I
could possibly sing along.


- Barton Stone

[Larry Robinson]

Request


For a long time I was sure
it should be "Jumping Jack Flash," then
the adagio from Schubert's C major Quintet,
but right now I want Oscar Peterson's


"You Look Good to Me." That's my request.
Play it at the end of the service,
after my friends have spoken.
I don't believe I'll be listening in,


but sitting here I'm imagining
you could be feeling what I'd like to feel—
defiance from the Stones, grief
and resignation with Schubert, but now


Peterson and Ray Brown are making
the moment sound like some kind
of release. Sad enough
at first, but doesn't it slide into


tapping your feet, then clapping
your hands, maybe standing up
in that shadowy hall in Paris
in the late sixties when this was recorded,


getting up and dancing
as I would not have done,
and being dead, cannot, but might
wish for you, who would then


understand what a poem—or perhaps only
the making of a poem, just that moment
when it starts, when so much
is still possible—


has allowed me to feel.
Happy to be there. Carried away.


- Lawrence Raab

[Larry Robinson]

The Cheetah Mother


On the Serengeti Plain in East Africahttps://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2013-08-15_09-07-36.png
near Seronera
I saw a cheetah mother with two cubs
in their early years.
They lay in the unholy midday
equatorial heat under a thorn acacia.
Vertical sunrays traced lazy patterns of
scant shade onto the golden pool of yellow prairie grasses
dried by the African winds.
I was close.


Her black rimmed topaz eyes pierced and pinned me
to her wild gaze. Muscles twitched
under sheen of spotted skin. The playful
cubs clawed and pawed, bit her tail.
She cuffed and enfolded the,
panted and waited for the
dark night and the moon
on the cool side of midnight
to leave them hidden and
take up the exhausting, endless hunt
to keep them alive.


Into this deep-set well of ancestral motherhood
her immersion is explicit.
Absolute in the early years, this space of time
day, night, dark, light
merges into an endless arc of custodial care.
Govern, guide, protect, provide.


Through the twin lenses of my memory
the sensory image remains -
the mother and her cubs
forever etched in my mind.


- Maxine Collin Williams

[Larry Robinson]

When a country obtains great power,
it becomes like the sea:
all streams run downward into it.
The more powerful it grows,
the greater the need for humility.
Humility means trusting the Tao,
thus never needing to be defensive.


A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
He thinks of his enemy as the shadow that he himself casts.


If a nation is centered in the Tao,
if it nourishes its own people
and doesn't meddle in the affairs of others,
it will be a light to all nations in the world..


- Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching
(Stephen Mitchell translation)

[Larry Robinson]

Earth Changes


what response
can I give
to the universe


for all the mistakes
this mind
and body commit


when I watch
water skippers
on the surface


I am entranced
by all the circles
not just one


- Joyce Pointe

[Larry Robinson]

<tbody>
Before The World Was Made





If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.


What if I look upon a man
As though on my beloved,
And my blood be cold the while
And my heart unmoved?
Why should he think me cruel
Or that he is betrayed?
I'd have him love the thing that was
Before the world was made.


- William Butler Yeats





(https://m.poemhunter.com/william-butler-yeats/)


</tbody>

[Larry Robinson]

Rhapsody in A Minor

for my seventh decade, feeling distant still
from the final page but Death a familiar now
and Life a bursting seed in the never-old play
of light and shade in the everywhere somewhere
water flows, in the veins of a burgundy trillium say
April’s tracery, encasing sips of sun and air,
easing trails of scent into infinite mornings
dreams waving every which way
from the mind, the trees, a gay yellow beak
trilling intricate avian alchemies
peals of instinct and breath that end the instant
the robin is aware I discovered her nest
and I almost regret my craving eyes
added a quake of alarm to her warrior gaze
like the flightless owl, whose eyes flare wide
when my stranger hand opens his cage
not fooled when I looked away
oh no, defiant and glaring for stronger proof
it’s love I offer this day


- Cynthia Poten

[Larry Robinson]

The Mad Potter


Now at the turn of the year this coil of clay
Bites its own tail: a New Year starts to choke
On the old one's ragged end.I bite my tongue
As the end of me--of my rope of stuff and nonsense
(The nonsense held, it was the stuff that broke),
Of bones and light, of levity and crime,
Of reddish clay and hope - still bides its time.


Each of my pots is quite unusable,
Even for contemplating as an object
Of gross unuse. In its own mode of being
Useless, though, each of them remains unique,
Subject to nothing, and themselves unseeing,
Stronger by virtue of what makes them weak.


I pound at all my clay. I pound the air.
This senseless lump, slapped into something like
Something, sits bound around by my despair.
For even as the great Creator's free
Hand shapes the forms of life, so - what? This pot,
Unhollowed solid, too full of itself,
Runneth over with incapacity.
I put it with the others on the shelf.


These tiny cups will each provide one sip
Of what's inside them, aphoristic prose
Unwilling, like full arguments, to make
Its points, then join them in extended lines
Like long draughts from the bowl of a deep lake.
The honey of knowledge, like my milky slip,
Firms slowly up against what merely flows.


Some of my older pieces bore inscriptions
That told a story only when you'd learned
How not to read them: LIVE reverted to EVIL,
EROS kept running backwards into SORE.
Their words, all fired up for truth, got burned.
I'll not write on weak vessels any more.


My juvenalia? I gave them names
In those days: Hans was all handles and no spout;
Bernie believed the whole world turned about
Himself alone; Sadie was close to James
(But Herman touched her bottom when he could);
Paul fell to pieces; Peter wore away
To nothing; Len was never any good;
Alf was a flat, random pancake, May
An opened blossom; Bud was an ash-tray.
Even their names break off, though; Whatsisface,
That death-mask of Desire, and - you know! -
The smaller version of that (Oh, what was it? -
You know . . .) All of my pots now have to go
By number only. Which is no disgrace.


Begin with being - in an anagram
Of unending - conclude in some dark den;
This is no matter. What I've been, I am:
What I will be is what I make of all
This clay, this moment. Now begin again . . .
Poured out of emptiness, drop by slow drop,
I start up at the quarreling sounds of water.
Pots cry out silently at me to stop.


What are we like? A barrelfull of this
Oozy wet substance, shadow-crammed, whose smudges
Of darkness lurk within but rise to kiss
The fingers that disturb the gently edges
Of their bland world of shapelessness and bliss.


The half-formed cup cries out in agony,
The lump of clay suffers a silent pain.
I heard the cup, though, full of feeling, say
"O clay be true, O clay keep constant to
Your need to take, again and once again,
This pounding from your mad creator who
Only stops hurting when he's hurting you."


What will I then have left behind me? Over
The years I have originated some
Glazes that wear away at what they cover
And weep for what they never can become.
My Deadware, widely imitated; blue
Skyware of an amazing lightness; tired
Hopewear that I abandoned for my own
Good reasons; Hereware; Thereware; ware that grew
Weary of everything that earth desired;
Hellware that dances while it's being fired,
Noware that vanishes while being thrown.


Appearing to be silly, wisdom survives
Like tribes of superseded gods who go
Hiding in caves of triviality
From which they laughingly control our lives.
So with my useless pots: safe from the blow
Of carelessness, or outrage at their flaws,
They brave time's lion and his smashing paws.
- All of which tempts intelligence to call
Pure uselessness one more commodity.
The Good-for-Nothing once became our Hero,
But images of him, laid-back, carelessly
Laughing, were upright statues after all.
From straight above, each cup adds up to zero.


Clay to clay: Soon I shall indeed become
Dumb as these solid cups of hardened mud
(Dull terra cruda colored like our blood);
Meanwhile the slap and thump of palm and thumb
On wet mis-shapenness begins to hum
With meaning that was silent for so long.
The words of my wheel's turning come to ring
Truer than Truth itself does, my great
Ding Dong-an-sich that echoes everything
(Against it even lovely bells ring wrong):
Its whole voice gathers up the purest parts
Of all our speech, the vowels of the earth,
The aspirations of our hopeful hearts
Or the prophetic sibilance of song.


- John Hollander
(1929-2013)

[Larry Robinson]

When I Am Asked


When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.

It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.

I sat on a gray stone bench
in a lovingly planted garden,
but the day lilies were as deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the roses curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leaf fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.

I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingenue faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed my grief
in the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me.

- Lisel Mueller

[Larry Robinson]

Letter To Issa


Reflected
in the
dragonfly's eye...
mountains.
Issa (1763-1867)


Tell me, Issa,
what is a dragonfly's eye?


Is it a mirror
we walk through
each morning
to enter
our assumed world?


Is it a well
tunneling
into the depths of darkness
and strangely lit hovering landscapes
we call our dwelling place?


Is it a map of our own features
etched immutable
on a scarf of gold,
something to carry with us,
a reminder,
a talisman,
a conundrum daring us
to solve?


- Dorothy Walters

[Larry Robinson]

My Grandmother’s Hands


Looking at my hand as I write
I am drawn back
to the calmness of your stately image
the peace in your gentle embrace.


Knitting needles click
in the easy warm light of our living room.
Stories unfold
with the elegant flight of flesh and bone.


I know these hands.


Fingers intertwined
across generations and continents.
Safe in the soft strong grip of this sisterhood
I grew wings.


I feel those hands now
lifting me
guiding me
gifting me with a vision that comes easily.


Looking at my hand as I write
I remember your smile
the velvet touch of translucent skin
like a blessing.


You bloom in my heart like joy.


- Jennifer Horrigan

[Larry Robinson]

Zimmer Imagines Heaven
For Merrill Leffler

I sit with Joseph Conrad in Monet’s garden.
We are listening to Yeats chant his poems,
A breeze stirs through Thomas Hardy’s moustache,
John Skelton has gone to the house for beer,
Wanda Landowska lightly fingers the clavichord,
Along the spruce tree walk Roberto Clemente and
Thurman Munson whistle a baseball back and forth.
Mozart chants with Ellington in the roses.

Monet smokes and dabs his canvas in the sun,
Brueghel and Turner set easels behind the wisteria.
The band is warming up in the Big Studio:
Bean, Brute, Bird, and Serge on saxes,
Kai, Bill Harris, Lawrence Brown, trombones,
Little Jazz, Clifford, Fats on trumpets,
Klook plays drums, Mingus bass, Bud the piano.
Later Madam Schumann-Heink will sing Schubert,
The monks of Benedictine Abbey will chant.
There will be more poems from Emily Dickinson,
James Wright, John Clare, Walt Whitman.
Shakespeare rehearses players for King Lear.

At dusk Alice Toklas brings out platters
Of Sweetbreads a la Napolitaine, Salad Livoniere,
And a tureen of Gaspacho of Malaga.
After the meal Brahms passes fine cigars.
God comes then radiant with a bottle of cognac,
She pours generously into the snifters,
I tell Her I have begun to learn what
Heaven is about. She wants to hear.
It is, I say, being thankful for eternity.
Her smile is the best part of the day.


- Paul Zimmer

[Larry Robinson]

Hum for the Bolt


It could of course be silk. Fifty yards or so
of the next closest thing to water to the touch,
or it could just as easily be a shaft of wood


crumpling a man struck between spaulder and helm.
But now, with the rain making a noisy erasure
of this town, it is the flash that arrives


and leaves at nearly the same moment. It's what I want
to be in this moment, in this doorway,
because much as I'd love to be the silk-shimmer


against the curve of anyone's arm,
as brutal and impeccable as it'd be to soar
from a crossbow with a whistle and have a man


switch off upon my arrival, it is nothing
compared to the moment when I eat the dark
draw shadows in quick strokes across the wall


and start a tongue counting
down to thunder. That counting that says,
I am this far. I am this close.


- Jamall May

[Sara S]

Wow! Great one; and it made me go look up "spaulder"..........


Hum for the Bolt


It could of course be silk. Fifty yards or so
of the next closest thing to water to the touch,
or it could just as easily be a shaft of wood

crumpling a man struck between spaulder and helm.
But now, with the rain making a noisy erasure
of this town, it is the flash that arrives

and leaves at nearly the same moment. It's what I want
to be in this moment, in this doorway,
because much as I'd love to be the silk-shimmer

against the curve of anyone's arm,
as brutal and impeccable as it'd be to soar
from a crossbow with a whistle and have a man

switch off upon my arrival, it is nothing
compared to the moment when I eat the dark
draw shadows in quick strokes across the wall

and start a tongue counting
down to thunder. That counting that says,
I am this far. I am this close.

- Jamall May

[Larry Robinson]

Danny Boy
I dreamed my dead friend, Dan,
came back. All six feet of him,
dressed as usual, minus shoes.


I offered him some brown size twelves
my uncle left behind.
But he shook his head,


gave me a hug, so strong, so real,
I felt the buttons on his shirt,
the wale of his beige cords.


In stocking feet, we walked the streets
slowly, picking our way
across asphalt knobs and sharp stones.


Dan, you’re dead, a ghost, I said.
and placed my palm against his cheek
to feel slight stubble there.


What have you been doing
all this time? Your wife’s
remarried, your children are grown.


He grinned, It’s classified.
Put a finger to his lips, then gently
blessed my head.


I’ve been watching all of you,
as you watch TV, finding
things to make me smile or laugh.


When I awoke, I understood:
the dead, no longer in our shoes,
take our lives lightly.


Softly as moths,
they slip among us,
drawn by our joy,
suffusing us with their love.


- Anna Belle Kaufman

[gardenmaniac]

wow. that's it, just WOW.

thx Larry, for all you offer so freely, for the joy the sadness the light and the dark the wisdom the beauty the thought-provoking and so much more that you add to the mix of my daily grind.


Danny Boy

I dreamed my dead friend, Dan,
came back. All six feet of him,
dressed as usual, minus shoes....

[Michelle Noe]

Danny Boy

I dreamed my dead friend, Dan,
came back. All six feet of him,
dressed as usual, minus shoes....

Wow!

[Larry Robinson]

The Life of a Day


Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality quirks which can easily be seen if you look closely. But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people. But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle. For some reason we like to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don’t want to reach our last one for a long time. We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when we are convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.


- Tom Hennen

[Larry Robinson]

Freedom's Plow


When a man starts out with nothing,
When a man starts out with his hands
Empty, but clean,
When a man starts to build a world,
He starts first with himself
And the faith that is in his heart-
The strength there,
The will there to build.
First in the heart is the dream-
Then the mind starts seeking a way.
His eyes look out on the world,
On the great wooded world,
On the rich soil of the world,
On the rivers of the world.
The eyes see there materials for building,
See the difficulties, too, and the obstacles.
The mind seeks a way to overcome these obstacles.
The hand seeks tools to cut the wood,
To till the soil, and harness the power of the waters.
Then the hand seeks other hands to help,
A community of hands to help-
Thus the dream becomes not one man’s dream alone,
But a community dream.
Not my dream alone, but our dream.
Not my world alone,
But your world and my world,
Belonging to all the hands who build.
A long time ago, but not too long ago,
Ships came from across the sea
Bringing the Pilgrims and prayer-makers,
Adventurers and booty seekers,
Free men and indentured servants,
Slave men and slave masters, all new-
To a new world, America!
With billowing sails the galleons came
Bringing men and dreams, women and dreams.
In little bands together,
Heart reaching out to heart,
Hand reaching out to hand,
They began to build our land.
Some were free hands
Seeking a greater freedom,
Some were indentured hands
Hoping to find their freedom,
Some were slave hands
Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom,
But the word was there always:
Freedom.
Down into the earth went the plow
In the free hands and the slave hands,
In indentured hands and adventurous hands,
Turning the rich soil went the plow in many hands
That planted and harvested the food that fed
And the cotton that clothed America.
Clang against the trees went the ax into many hands
That hewed and shaped the rooftops of America.
Splash into the rivers and the seas went the boat-hulls
That moved and transported America.
Crack went the whips that drove the horses
Across the plains of America.
Free hands and slave hands,
Indentured hands, adventurous hands,
White hands and black hands
Held the plow handles,
Ax handles, hammer handles,
Launched the boats and whipped the horses
That fed and housed and moved America.
Thus together through labor,
All these hands made America.
Labor! Out of labor came villages
And the towns that grew cities.
Labor! Out of labor came the rowboats
And the sailboats and the steamboats,
Came the wagons, and the coaches,
Covered wagons, stage coaches,
Out of labor came the factories,
Came the foundries, came the railroads.
Came the marts and markets, shops and stores,
Came the mighty products moulded, manufactured,
Sold in shops, piled in warehouses,
Shipped the wide world over:
Out of labor-white hands and black hands-
Came the dream, the strength, the will,
And the way to build America.
Now it is Me here, and You there.
Now it’s Manhattan, Chicago,
Seattle, New Orleans,
Boston and El Paso-
Now it’s the U.S.A.
A long time ago, but not too long ago, a man said:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL--
ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR
WITH CERTAIN UNALIENABLE RIGHTS--
AMONG THESE LIFE, LIBERTY
AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.
His name was Jefferson. There were slaves then,
But in their hearts the slaves believed him, too,
And silently too for granted
That what he said was also meant for them.
It was a long time ago,
But not so long ago at that, Lincoln said:
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT THAT OTHER’S CONSENT.
There were slaves then, too,
But in their hearts the slaves knew
What he said must be meant for every human being-
Else it had no meaning for anyone.
Then a man said:
BETTER TO DIE FREE
THAN TO LIVE SLAVES
He was a colored man who had been a slave
But had run away to freedom.
And the slaves knew
What Frederick Douglass said was true.
With John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, Negroes died.
John Brown was hung.
Before the Civil War, days were dark,
And nobody knew for sure
When freedom would triumph
"Or if it would," thought some.
But others new it had to triumph.
In those dark days of slavery,
Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom,
The slaves made up a song:
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
That song meant just what it said: Hold On!
Freedom will come!
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
Out of war it came, bloody and terrible!
But it came!
Some there were, as always,
Who doubted that the war would end right,
That the slaves would be free,
Or that the union would stand,
But now we know how it all came out.
Out of the darkest days for people and a nation,
We know now how it came out.
There was light when the battle clouds rolled away.
There was a great wooded land,
And men united as a nation.
America is a dream.
The poet says it was promises.
The people say it is promises-that will come true.
The people do not always say things out loud,
Nor write them down on paper.
The people often hold
Great thoughts in their deepest hearts
And sometimes only blunderingly express them,
Haltingly and stumblingly say them,
And faultily put them into practice.
The people do not always understand each other.
But there is, somewhere there,
Always the trying to understand,
And the trying to say,
"You are a man. Together we are building our land."
America!
Land created in common,
Dream nourished in common,
Keep your hand on the plow! Hold on!
If the house is not yet finished,
Don’t be discouraged, builder!
If the fight is not yet won,
Don’t be weary, soldier!
The plan and the pattern is here,
Woven from the beginning
Into the warp and woof of America:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT HIS CONSENT.
BETTER DIE FREE,
THAN TO LIVE SLAVES.
Who said those things? Americans!
Who owns those words? America!
Who is America? You, me!
We are America!
To the enemy who would conquer us from without,
We say, NO!
To the enemy who would divide
And conquer us from within,
We say, NO!
FREEDOM!
BROTHERHOOD!
DEMOCRACY!
To all the enemies of these great words:
We say, NO!
A long time ago,
An enslaved people heading toward freedom
Made up a song:
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
The plow plowed a new furrow
Across the field of history.
Into that furrow the freedom seed was dropped.
From that seed a tree grew, is growing, will ever grow.
That tree is for everybody,
For all America, for all the world.
May its branches spread and shelter grow
Until all races and all peoples know its shade.
KEEP YOUR HAND ON THE PLOW! HOLD ON!


- Langston Hughes

[Beverly Riverwood]

That posting was so perfect for the 50th anniversary of the March and the great address that Obama has just delivered. Keep on Marching!

[gardenmaniac]

"Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, it's about learning how to dance in the rain." Langston Hughes


Freedom's Plow...

[Larry Robinson]

Roll Call


Red wolf came, and passenger Pigeon,
and Dodo Bird, all the gone or endangered
came and crowded around in a circle,
the Bison, the Irish Elk waited
silent, the Great White Bear fluid and strong,
sliding from the sea, streaming and creeping
into the gathering darkness, nose down
bowing to earth its tapered head,
where the Black-footed Ferret, paws folded,
stood in the center surveying the multitude
and spoke for us all: “Dearly beloved,” it said.

- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

The Rescued


Sitting on the lawn bench at Memorial Hospital
I heard the sound of helicopter wings above and
watched the whirling blades soften to land so
gracefully on the hospital rooftop. To be rescued
from disaster I imagine is to be sealed in total
surrender, to be carried helpless by metallic wings
hovering over the patchwork map below of other
mortals' houses, lawns and garages. It is a succumbing
to the fullness of disbelief, a strange, crushing, emptying
of anything certain.
Maybe the broken and bewildered body must cling
to some sense of deliverance, by an angel or a
mothership. It must give itself over to an astral magnet
that pulls as it has before in dreams into a field
of guidance. One may have to go blind to any palpable
thing, paralyzed to touch the world with any
interpretation or labeling by thought.
Every day for years in Vietnam the wounded were
lifted to hospitals. Did those torn and shattered forms
lodge some principle of impermanence, slightly ahead
of death, already an event in the realm of the transient?
Was there an endless void in their eyes, body trapped
in air with no other earth to imagine? Maybe they overcame
fear by sensing that ascension was possible, by grasping
a resource beyond flesh that eased them into leaving
this world.
There are no dog-tags that identify this ineffable
experience,no names for the portals the rescued may
pass through to enter complete acceptance. On any
day the body can prove to be perishable but I imagine
it is the soul that allows its journey the next mile. I have
not been carried through the mortal sky to the fallen
gate of this one life I've known. No, I have never been
close enough to God's ear to whisper,"Thy will be done."


- Rich Meyers

[meherc]

SELF-PORTRAIT

It doesn't interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

I have been told, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.

- David Whyte

For Dixon

[Larry Robinson]

Blackberry-Picking


Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.


- Seamus Heaney
(1939-2013)

[tashee]

Rest In Peace, dear Seamus Heaney.


Blackberry-Picking


Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.


- Seamus Heaney
(1939-2013)

[Larry Robinson]

I Said To My Friend


When I knew you would die
sooner, rather than later, much later,
after the transplant you never got,
I said to my friend, who is 89 (but
says she is 90, and who can begrudge
her that extra year when she's
lived so many?) "I'm glad
I'm with you,
you're experienced with this." "Oh, no,"
she tells me. "You never get experienced
with death. Each one is
new." So true as I watch you
move on without me. Later,
Erica and I see you walking down a
Portland sidewalk, pulling
a suitcase behind you.
You always did keep moving.


- Rebecca Del Rio


(For Diana Mercedes Del Drago
March 3, 1946-August 21, 2013)

[Larry Robinson]

September 1, 1939


I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.


Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.


Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.


Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.


Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.


The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.


From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?


All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.


Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.


- W.H. Auden

[Larry Robinson]

Postscript


And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.


- Seamus Heaney
(13 April 1939-30 August 2013)

[Larry Robinson]

September Meditation


I do not know if the seasons remember their history or if the days and
nights by which we count time remember their own passing.
I do not know if the oak tree remembers its planting or if the pine
remembers its slow climb toward sun and stars.
I do not know if the squirrel remembers last fall's gathering or if the
bluejay remembers the meaning of snow.
I do not know if the air remembers September or if the night remembers
the moon.
I do not know if the earth remembers the flowers from last spring or if
the evergreen remembers that it shall stay so.
Perhaps that is the reason for our births - to be the memory for
creation.
Perhaps salvation is something very different than anyone ever expected.
Perhaps this will be the only question we will have to answer:
"What can you tell me about September?"

- Burton D. Carley

[Larry Robinson]

Arches National Park


the parthenon before Greece in stone
the Colliseum before Rome in stone
royalty waiting at a bus stop in stone
george washington from mars in stone
abandoned ancient ships from the future buried in stone
cities in stone, lost technologies in stone
petrified dunes on an impossible beach
a drug-induced carnival ride in stone
fantasy feral felines in stone
fins from an ocean of extinction in stone
silent prows moored in a sandstone marina
harbor seals in stone, elephants, jaguars
a leviathan's jaw in stone
alien deities, mad carvings, unfinished temples in stone
weathered hieroglyphs in sheer rockfaces
Giza as childsplay in stone
the pinched faces of slumbering giants in stone
God's sandcastle in stone
the universal secrets of flesh, of love, of desire
our softest places folding outward and inward in stone
conestoga wagons in stone heading across the plain
beehives in stone
wrinkles, creases, cracks, impossible arcs of air and water
the balancing act of thunder and lightning in stone
the Courthouse in stone standing for Truth
the One Law standing against our hubris
our feeble monuments to facility
our delusional ideal of permanence
in this place we know nothing of time


- Gary Horvitz

[Larry Robinson]

A Conversation with God
Hello God.
I think it's time for you and me
to have a little chat.
You know, I've prayed
year after year
for forgiveness
and in Your kindness,
You have always loved and forgiven me,
even though I keep making mistakes..

But here, today, while I am quiet -
alone with You
and with my prayers
alone with my heart.
God, I want to hear
Your voice.

Now, Eternal One,
ii Your Omnipotence
Tell me the good things
You know about me.
Tell me
about the times my smile
brought smiles to others;
when my words brought love
to another;
The times my "please" and "thank you"
brightened someone's day.

And Holy One,
while You are telling me these good things,
while You have forgiven me,
Dear, Sweet, Loving God.
Teach me to forgive
myself.

- Marylou Shira Hadditt

[Larry Robinson]

Cold Solace

When my mother died,
one of her honey cakes remained in the freezer.
I couldn’t bear to see it vanish,
so it waited, pardoned,
in its ice cave behind the metal trays
for two more years.

On my forty-first birthday
I chipped it out,
a rectangular resurrection,
hefted the dead weight in my palm.

Before it thawed,
I sawed, with serrated knife,
the thinnest of slices —
Jewish Eucharist.

The amber squares
with their translucent panes of walnuts
tasted — even toasted — of freezer,
of frost,
a raisined delicacy delivered up
from a deli in the underworld.

I yearned to recall life, not death —
the still body in her pink nightgown on the bed,
how I lay in the shallow cradle of the scattered sheets
after they took it away,
inhaling her scent one last time.

I close my eyes, savor a wafer of
sacred cake on my tongue and
try to taste my mother, to discern
the message she baked in these loaves
when she was too ill to eat them:

I love you.
It will end.
Leave something of sweetness
and substance
in the mouth of the world.

- Anna Belle Kaufman

[Larry Robinson]

Sweet Fate




We were talking about fate,
the choices we made—
or didn’t—
How, given another chance,
we’d start out the same
but would somehow come to different ends.
It’s a useless exercise,
measuring fate,
when its sugar has already dissolved
in our tea
the cup drained
years ago.


They delivered polio vaccines
in sugar, too,
remember?
The cubes were
stained red
by the medicine.
The whole family lined up for it—
even Pop—
the whole neighborhood,
a line around the school,
saving us all
the hell of a horrible fate.


Interventions are possible;
stay optimistic,
if you can.
I say this for my own benefit
as much as yours.


Would it only be ten years later—
less?—
sugar cubes
would hold a different kind of medicine?
clear on the outside,
tilting the angles on the in,
altering
a generation’s course.


It’s always been that way, you know,
the old make way for the new,
even when the new aren’t ready,
nor the old.


A few stimulants
to get the ball rolling
is all it takes.


If I had it to do again,
I’d be a comedian,
preach the gospel of laughing till it hurts,
Or a rabbi,
sell used stories
to old car salesmen,
Or an agnostic poet
who writes everyday
about almost nothing
except God
and gets no investment tax credits
for his efforts.

I’d go back to college, too,
find Jesus,
Krishna,
Buddha,
study art
science
sex
geography
Fate.


Maybe if I plotted a trajectory,
an actual career path,
I’d end up
in Rome
rabbi to the Pope.
Shake things up in Washington, too.
And why not Jerusalem while I’m at it?
And Pyongyong, as well!


Anything is possible
if fate gives you a push,
and there’s enough something in the sugar
to instigate the dream.


- Gary Turchin

[Larry Robinson]

Act of Union
I


To-night, a first movement, a pulse,

As if the rain in bogland gathered head

To slip and flood: a bog-burst,

A gash breaking open the ferny bed.

Your back is a firm line of eastern coast

And arms and legs are thrown

Beyond your gradual hills. I caress

The heaving province where our past has grown.

I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder

That you would neither cajole nor ignore.

Conquest is a lie. I grow older

Conceding your half-independent shore

Within whose borders now my legacy

Culminates inexorably.


II


And I am still imperially

Male, leaving you with pain,

The rending process in the colony,

The battering ram, the boom burst from within.

The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column

Whose stance is growing unilateral.

His heart beneath your heart is a war-drum

Mustering force. His parasitical

And ignorant little fists already

Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked

At me across the water. No treaty

I foresee will salve completely your tracked

And stretch-marked body, the big pain

That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again
- Seamus Heaney




(In 1975's Act Of Union, Seamus Heaney took the map of Britain and Ireland and turned it into an image of a married couple lying in bed together, Ireland surrounded and mastered by the masculine Britain.The Act Of Union, he said once before reading the poem, was both a political and a sexual concept."To put it metaphorically, and yet historically, Ireland, the feminine country, was entered by England, possessed by England, planted with English seed, withdrawn from by England, and left pregnant with an independent life called Ulster, kicking within her."He sometimes despaired of his fellow-citizens in the North. In an ITV documentary made at about this time he said: "We're a society, if you like, that's fallen from grace. This is limbo land at best, and at worst the country of the damned.")

[gardenmaniac]

I thank Gary for writing, and Larry for posting this gem. I especially love the thought of measuring anything,

"... when its sugar has already dissolved in our tea, the cup drained years ago."


Sweet Fate




We were talking about fate,
the choices we made—
or didn’t—
How, given another chance,
we’d start out the same
but would somehow come to different ends.
It’s a useless exercise,
measuring fate,
when its sugar has already dissolved
in our tea
the cup drained
years ago.


They delivered polio vaccines
in sugar, too,
remember?
The cubes were
stained red
by the medicine.
The whole family lined up for it—
even Pop—
the whole neighborhood,
a line around the school,
saving us all
the hell of a horrible fate.


Interventions are possible;
stay optimistic,
if you can.
I say this for my own benefit
as much as yours.


Would it only be ten years later—
less?—
sugar cubes
would hold a different kind of medicine?
clear on the outside,
tilting the angles on the in,
altering
a generation’s course.


It’s always been that way, you know,
the old make way for the new,
even when the new aren’t ready,
nor the old.


A few stimulants
to get the ball rolling
is all it takes.


If I had it to do again,
I’d be a comedian,
preach the gospel of laughing till it hurts,
Or a rabbi,
sell used stories
to old car salesmen,
Or an agnostic poet
who writes everyday
about almost nothing
except God
and gets no investment tax credits
for his efforts.

I’d go back to college, too,
find Jesus,
Krishna,
Buddha,
study art
science
sex
geography
Fate.


Maybe if I plotted a trajectory,
an actual career path,
I’d end up
in Rome
rabbi to the Pope.
Shake things up in Washington, too.
And why not Jerusalem while I’m at it?
And Pyongyong, as well!


Anything is possible
if fate gives you a push,
and there’s enough something in the sugar
to instigate the dream.


- Gary Turchin

[Larry Robinson]

The Second Coming


Turning and turning on the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: Somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again, but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


- William Butler Yeats

[Larry Robinson]

Before Evil


Before evil
my own goodness shrinks
before self-righteousness
my voice quavers
before those who know an angry God
with contempt for life
I tremble,
before those who hold
in their minds, in their hands
the lives of others
in hostage for their own,
before absolute Right
I am wrong
I am naked
without weapons
except for this determination
not to be defeated, but instead
to affirm the best in us,
to acknowledge our own power
to survive against whatever odds
and to seize the day
for love, for beauty, for humanity,
to make this day and the days following,
not theirs, not made by those who destroy,
but our own. We are the builders.
This day is in our hands.


- Doug Stout

[Larry Robinson]

Restless


I am here, oh Lord,
Command me.
But wait. Before you say anything,
I have an idea.
Let's say that this certain thing is
the divine manifestation
of your Will.
You know it's True.
What's that? Oh. Of course. Sorry.
I'll listen now.
But you know it's a good idea!
How could it not be?
I mean, ultimately yours, right?
What? Yes. You're rights. Sorry.
I'll be quiet now.
But then, You see
(I mean of course You see)
in serving this certain thing I would be
serving You!
I know. I'll settle down now.
See. I'm being still. Oh Lord,
Command me.
I'm ready this time.
Really.
But you know, I've been thinking. . .


- Chris Caswell

[Larry Robinson]

Fire On The Hills


The deer were bounding like blown leaves
Under the smoke in front of the roaring wave of the brushfire;
I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
Down the black slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,
Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders.
He had come from far off for good hunting
With fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was merciless
Blue and the hills merciless black,
The somber-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than mercy.

- Robinson Jeffers

[Larry Robinson]

For Tom Sharp


Once there was a time when it was necessary
to remove ourselves from nature. Once.
To distinguish, to see within
these selves is the objective. It's second nature


now. This chain-of-being buried
& nearly forgotten. Paved over in sediment
like walled in cities, lessons in childhood,
other experiences qualified or in need of


the missing link. "Man is held highest on Earth
& below the Angels." The intention:
toward God. Then later, toward a controlled state -
technology. The competition is fierce


& it is not. An Angel (many?) who inhabits
the rock suggests you skip its flat surface
on the river. Interfacing the world of eyes,
you pick it up: sentient self awareness


beyond the organs of particularity. Yes, you are
the rock & each plant & animal whose dust
compresses here. A moment of your time.
It is easiest to relate to the air. You fill of it.


& who & what it has been wears your blood
like a coat - becoming it, becoming warm.
You begin to see the choices, how desire determines
the who of you. The chain dissolves into Angels.


You skip the rock across the river, letting go.
We have become both worlds now.


- Bill Vartnaw

[tashee]

This is an astonishing poem-- I would like to see more poems from Mr. Vartnaw. I'm not familiar with his work, but I would like to be.


For Tom Sharp


Once there was a time when it was necessary
to remove ourselves from nature. Once.
To distinguish, to see within
these selves is the objective. It's second nature


now. This chain-of-being buried
& nearly forgotten. Paved over in sediment
like walled in cities, lessons in childhood,
other experiences qualified or in need of


the missing link. "Man is held highest on Earth
& below the Angels." The intention:
toward God. Then later, toward a controlled state -
technology. The competition is fierce


& it is not. An Angel (many?) who inhabits
the rock suggests you skip its flat surface
on the river. Interfacing the world of eyes,
you pick it up: sentient self awareness


beyond the organs of particularity. Yes, you are
the rock & each plant & animal whose dust
compresses here. A moment of your time.
It is easiest to relate to the air. You fill of it.


& who & what it has been wears your blood
like a coat - becoming it, becoming warm.
You begin to see the choices, how desire determines
the who of you. The chain dissolves into Angels.


You skip the rock across the river, letting go.
We have become both worlds now.


- Bill Vartnaw

[Larry Robinson]

Song: The Kiss


We were walking through
A department store in Paris,
Escaping the rain,
The sort of French rain
That changes in intensity
If you look at it,
Then changes back if you don't.
You went to lingerie,
And I to electronics,
And then we met again. It was there
That you noticed them, in furnishings,
Relaxing on a couch, his arm
Draped around her shoulder.
She pecked him on the cheek.
He didn't seem to notice.
Practicing for marriage,
You said, a bit too wryly
I thought, then stared at them
With You. He was pompadoured,
Italian, rough and beautiful,
With muscles so prominent
They seemed to be tattooed,
And you must have felt a twinge
Moving up your throat
To your face, for it settled
Into a smile, half adoration,
Half resignation. And she, Italianate,
Shapely as that ivory statue
Pygmalian called "my virgin beauty,"
With hair so long and black
I could almost see myself
Reflected in it, and behind me
You watching me watching
Her small breasts move
Beneath her black t-shirt.
Then on we went, you to where
The silk scarves were,
All the rage that year,
And I to toys to see
What passed for toys those days,
And then we met again,
By the escalator, and out
The revolving doors we went,
Hand in hand, for this was Paris,
Where even the middle-aged
Will behave like young lovers
In the rain, waiting for bad weather
To bring them to their youth again.
And there they were, standing
In the rain that hadn't changed
For an hour. They were kissing,
Their tongues wrestling
In that eternal battle
No one wins or loses.
His hand was on her breast,
Cupping it; her hand on top of his,
As if to keep it there forever
Were a commitment they'd just now taken on.
And you said, laughing,
If you let me kiss him
I'll let you kiss her!
Then we set out again,
Hand in hand, thirty years married,
Across the busy Seine,
And then I was the one laughing,
And you, I thought for a moment
You were crying,
But it was only the rain in Paris,
Relentless and unchanging.
- Steve Orlen

[Larry Robinson]

Earth Prayer

O Endless Creator, Force of Life, Seat of the Unconscious, Dharma,
Atman, Ra, Qalb, Dear Center of our Love, Christlight, Yahweh, Allah,
Mawu, Mother of the Universe…

Let us, when swimming with the stream, become the stream…
Let us, when moving with the music, become the music…
Let us, when rocking the wounded, become the suffering..

Let us live deep enough till there is only one direction…
and slow enough till there is only the beginning of time…
and loud enough in our hearts till there is no need to speak…

Let us live for the grace beneath all we want,
let us see it in everything and everyone,
till we admit to the mystery that when I look deep enough into you,
I find me,
and when you dare to hear my fear in the recess of your heart,
you recognize it as your secret, which you thought no one else knew…

O let us embrace that unexpected moment of unity as the atom of God…
Let us have the courage to hold each other when we break and worship what unfolds…

O nameless spirit that is not done with us,
let us love without a net beyond the fear of death
until the speck of peace we guard so well becomes the world…

- Mark Nepo

[Larry Robinson]

Remembering the Big Bang


Before everything flew apart, separated,
it all happened at once. Spring ice storms
and summer thunderheads. Dead of winter
Gray ground and mockingbirds high


in the redwoods telling everyone their song
was wonderful, worth stealing. Time was compact,
pressed tight so that birth and death overlapped
and, at any moment, love happened over and over.


Inside there was no outside. The day
your mother threw your brother down
the backstairs isn't separate
From the afternoon, several years


From now, under a cloudless sky,
The Mediterranean folds you into
her turquoise, malachite embrace, returns
you to the dark, salty womb of beginnings.


Death, impersonal—even a daughter's,
love too, passion
on a starless Sonoran night
as the cicadas buzzed,


sleep a restless, burning dream.
Before the Big Bang, everything
Holy and secular,
A story and a history,


told, over and over and at once,
No words, spoken or sung.
No separation,
no one, no other.


- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

Exit Signs


Wherever I am I notice exit signs.
(Most seem to be printed in TIMES CAPITAL.)
I particularly like the lighted ones,
even though they can distract you from the movie.
The green ones are the most common,
although there are a fair number of red ones.
Once in a great while
you can see a luminous blue one,
glowing like a sapphire in the dark.
Even printed paper signs taped above a doorway
give me a warm feeling.


I must admit, though, that doors saying
“Emergency Exit Only!” give me pause.
When you open them, all kinds of things happen:
lights flash, bells and sirens go off
and people get very upset.
Sometimes they yell at you or
threaten to eject you from the premises.
I open them anyway.


But my favorite exit sign
is the story of Shakyamuni
who planted himself under the bo tree
vowing to sit until he awakened -
and kept his vow!
That one shines like a beacon
through the darkest night.


- Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Quest For Truth


I see it was always
impossible.
By Grace I knew
You suddenly
in a room one day.

As soon as I stepped
out of that room, I stepped
back into myself


and 42 years later,
I laugh that I ever
donned the visored helmet,
picked up my lance and
mounted my donkey Rosinante


to go out in
this world of whizzing steelt
to try and follow You.


I laugh, and
go on trying.


- Max Reif

[poetrytalks]

Hi Larry,
Thank you for this. I have an exit sign story. Years back I was flying to Phoenix
and had a choice of seats. I thought, is there divine order as to whether it
is my "time to exit", so I can leave it up to destiny? Or-should I choose a seat
near the exit, so I could get out quickly. I don't know if it was a practice then
for the passenger by the sign to help everyone get out. I was not aware of it
if so. I decided to "play it safe" and picked a seat at one of the exits. When
the plane rumbled to a start, the exit sign fell off and landed on my head.
Divine leela for sure.
Sher




Exit Signs


Wherever I am I notice exit signs.
(Most seem to be printed in TIMES CAPITAL.)
I particularly like the lighted ones,
even though they can distract you from the movie.
The green ones are the most common,
although there are a fair number of red ones.
Once in a great while
you can see a luminous blue one,
glowing like a sapphire in the dark.
Even printed paper signs taped above a doorway
give me a warm feeling.


I must admit, though, that doors saying
“Emergency Exit Only!” give me pause.
When you open them, all kinds of things happen:
lights flash, bells and sirens go off
and people get very upset.
Sometimes they yell at you or
threaten to eject you from the premises.
I open them anyway.


But my favorite exit sign
is the story of Shakyamuni
who planted himself under the bo tree
vowing to sit until he awakened -
and kept his vow!
That one shines like a beacon
through the darkest night.


- Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

A Thousand Little Irritants


The way mail piles up
the way we argue
the way we fail
and keep failing
the way we age
and carry grudges
the way we hurt ourselves
and each other
the way we smell
or others smell
the way we have to wait
the way we have to hurry
the way no one cares
the way we don’t care
the way our government doesn’t understand
the way our understanding doesn’t matter
the way we live or don’t live
the way we die
or will die

and tomorrow
the Sun
like a giant ball of wonder
will bounce up
happy and yellow
inventing each day
like it’s the only thing that matters


- Gary Turchin

[Larry Robinson]

An Autumn Sunset
I

Leaguered in fire
The wild black promontories of the coast extend
Their savage silhouettes;
The sun in universal carnage sets,
And, halting higher,
The motionless storm-clouds mass their sullen threats,
Like an advancing mob in sword-points penned,
That, balked, yet stands at bay.
Mid-zenith hangs the fascinated day
In wind-lustrated hollows crystalline,
A wan Valkyrie whose wide pinions shine
Across the ensanguined ruins of the fray,
And in her hand swings high o’erhead,
Above the waster of war,
The silver torch-light of the evening star
Wherewith to search the faces of the dead.

II

Lagooned in gold,
Seem not those jetty promontories rather
The outposts of some ancient land forlorn,
Uncomforted of morn,
Where old oblivions gather,
The melancholy unconsoling fold
Of all things that go utterly to death
And mix no more, no more
With life’s perpetually awakening breath?
Shall Time not ferry me to such a shore,
Over such sailless seas,
To walk with hope’s slain importunities
In miserable marriage? Nay, shall not
All things be there forgot,
Save the sea’s golden barrier and the black
Close-crouching promontories?
Dead to all shames, forgotten of all glories,
Shall I not wander there, a shadow’s shade,
A spectre self-destroyed,
So purged of all remembrance and sucked back
Into the primal void,
That should we on the shore phantasmal meet
I should not know the coming of your feet?


- Edith Wharton

[Larry Robinson]

First Rain


The first day of rainhttps://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2013-09-22_10-32-24.png
should be declared
a natural holiday.


All stops, somehow.
A new season so simply turns.


All is immediate.
The instant of first wet on skin.
Sounds dance and mingle.
Soils, leaves, muddy waters
blend into deeply breathed
fragrances, become a
raw tonic
gone far too long.


We go through the day
cocooned.
A fire perhaps,
and time to enjoy it,
if we are lucky.


There's something Sunday
about the first day of rain,
suspended between
today and
forever.


Memories take us,
deeper than words.
Further back than
recall can bring us.
Leave us off to
wander further beyond thought
to pure feeling,
back to some safety
of somewhere we
seem to have
lost.


Close the shops,
silence the clocks.
It's the first day of rain.


- Scott O'Brien

[Larry Robinson]

Making Porridge



Soak dried apricots to expand
and meet the day; toast oats
to drive out the rancid; add
milk for the moisture of life;
a dash of salt for rock-bottom support;
a handful of blueberries― their star-like
openings touching our origins. Peel an
apple for nakedness of soul, and bow
to its core, whose seeds of wisdom
can be tapped as needed.


Bring all these to a slow simmer.
Let them bubble and mingle
well to give of their sweetness.


Sprinkle wheatgerm from their
fields of brown waves; yogurt to foster
bovine patience. Cradle the bowl.
Enjoy its warmth and wafting scents.
Chew carefully to overcome
a lifetime of hurrying.


Choose your own way
and whether it tastes bitter
or sweet, embrace it!
- Raphael Block

[ronliskey]

"Natural Holliday" That's brilliant!


First Rain
The first day of rain
should be declared
a natural holiday.

[Larry Robinson]

This Earth, My Brother


The dawn crack of sounds known
rending our air
shattering our temples toppling
raising earthwards our cathedrals of hope,
in demand of lives offered on those altars
for the cleansing that was done long ago.
Within the airwaves we carry
our hutted entrails; and we pray;
shrieks abandoned by lonely road-sides
as the gunmen’s boots tramp.
I lift up the chalice of hyssop and tears
to touch the lips of the thirsty
sky-wailing in a million spires
of hate and death; we pray
bearing the single hope to shine
burnishing in the destiny of my race
that glinting sword of salvation.
In time my orchestra plays my music
from potted herbs of anemone and nim
pour upon the festering wounds of my race,
to wash forever my absorbent radiance
as we search our granary for new corn.
There was that miracle we hoped for
that salvation we longed for
for which we said many prayers
offered many offerings.

In the seasons of burning feet
of bad harvest and disastrous marriages
there burns upon the glint edge of that sword
the replica of the paschal knife.
The sounds rounded our lonely skies
among the nims the dancers gather their cloths
stretching their new-shorn hides off offered cows
to build themselves new drums.
Sky-wailing from afar the distant tramp
of those feet in rhythm
miming underneath them violence.
Along the roads lined with mimosas
the mangled and manacled are dragged
to the cheers of us all.
We strew flowers at the feet of the conquerors
beg for remission of our sins…

…He will come out of the grave
His clothes thrown around him;
worms shall not have done their work.
His face shall beam the radiance of many suns.
His gait the bearing of a victor,
On his forehead shall shine a thousand stars
he will kneel after the revelation
and die on this same earth.

And I pray
That my hills shall be exalted
And he who washes me,
breathes me
shall die.
They led them across the vastness
As they walked they tottered
and rose again. They walked
across the grassland to the edge of the mound
and knelt down in silent prayer;
they rose again led to the mound,
they crouched
like worshippers of Muhammed.
Suddenly they rose again
stretching their hands to the crowd
in wasteful gestures of identity
Boos and shrieks greeted them
as they smiled and waved
as those on a big boat journey.
A sudden silence fell
as the crowd pushed and yelled
into the bright sharp morning of a shooting.

They led them unto the mound
In a game of blindman’s bluff
they tottered to lean on the sandbags
Their backs to the ocean
that will bear them away.
The crackling report of brens
and the falling down;
a shout greeted them
tossing them into the darkness.

and my mountains reel and roll
to the world’s end.


- Kofi Awoonor
(1935-2013)

[Larry Robinson]

Aimless Love

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2013-09-25_14-34-46.png
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor's window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.

The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.

No lust, no slam of the door --
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.

No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor --
just a twinge every now and then

for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.

But my heart is always propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.

After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,

so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

- Billy Collins

[ronliskey]

This morning I fell in love with a poem.


Aimless Love

[ronliskey]

...at last the noble lifter lowered his life-long burden

--for a brief moment of guilt-ridden relief.

as he stretched his pain for the first time ever, he saw that he too had been leaning hard on others

--oh so hard.

humbly he gathered his burden again, it was lighter.

he no longer carried it alone. he never had.

the burden became his gift to the world

-- to all who had carried him for so long.


Which Are You?

[Larry Robinson]

One More Time


When willful, we think
that truth moves from
our head to our heart
to our hands.


But bent by life,
it becomes clear that
love moves the other way:
from our hands to our
heart to our head.


Ask the burn survivor
with no hands who dreams
of chopping peppers and
onions on a spring day.


Or the eighty-year-old jazz
man who loses his hands
in a fog. He can feel them
but no longer entice them
to their magic.


Or the thousand-year-old
Buddha with no arms
whose empty eyes will
not stop bowing to the
unseeable center.


Truth flows from us,
or so we think, only
to be thrown back
as a surf of love.


Ask the aging painter
with a brush taped to his
crippled hand—wanting,
needing to praise it all
one more time.


- Mark Nepo

[Larry Robinson]

Unvarnished


my mother said
when the morning sky is pink
the circus will come to town

my mother never explained
moon splattered stories
laid out frame by frame
edges smoothed and tucked away

my mother never believed
the hazy terrain of
theories
predictions

diagnoses

my mother trusted
life's murky plot
held in service
of an unvarnished reality

my mother expected
night to fall hard
the circus
to move on

- Les Bernstein

[Larry Robinson]

Epitaph
When I die
Give what's left of me away
To children
And old men that wait to die.

And if you need to cry,
Cry for your brother
Walking the street beside you.
And when you need me,
Put your arms
Around anyone
And give them
What you need to give to me.

I want to leave you something,
Something better
Than words
Or sounds.

Look for me
In the people I've known
Or loved,
And if you cannot give me away,
At least let me live on in your eyes
And not on your mind.

You can love me most
By letting
Hands touch hands,
By letting
Bodies touch bodies,
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.

Love doesn't die,
People do.
So, when all that's left of me
Is love,

Give me away.


- Merrit Malloy

[Larry Robinson]

<tbody>



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.







</tbody>
- Ikkyu

[Larry Robinson]

October


The first rain fell early this morning
disappeared into the dry peaks
like quiet tears shed by abandoned gods
who still keep watch, waiting for prayers

The rains will keep falling now
the river will slowly rise, and the silence
Gray winds will sift long psalms of mist
soft fingers searching for prayers


- Cynthia Poten

[Larry Robinson]

Eleventh Hour


start over
one giant step
back to square one
the first hop-scotch box
where I balance precariously
on one foot... barely breathing
only this time shyly smiling instead
of biting my lip and twitching my face
it doesn’t matter now if I lose my balance
and fall completely outside the box and never
again follow the rules of a game created by men
strutting on the cutting edge of lust and destruction
today I trade in reason for the willingness to surrender
the sequential and linear for the outbreath of thirty three
whirling dervishes at the center of my soul’s insistent longings
finally knowing I may enter any square at any time (or not)
and finding myself (and you) at the portal of the eleventh
hour which is just a room without walls, floors or ceiling
safely resting in a rapidly expanding limitless space of
requiescence where we find no pushing or pulling of
any kind only a forgiveness and abiding trust in
the unfolding of each moment bubbling into
the next and the next one bursting with a
light of its own which is something like
love and is accompanied by a hum
so deep it can only travel thru all
matter and carries you with it
until you have completely
forgotten your self and
simply ripple out into
circles beyond
any death


- Fran Carbonaro

[Beverly Riverwood]

Fran, you are a wonderful poet. I loved reading this poem, and am sending it on to my daughter/poet. All the best, Bev Riverwood

Eleventh Hour

start over
one giant step
back to square one
the first hop-scotch box
where I balance precariously
on one foot... barely breathing...

[Larry Robinson]

Start seeing everything as God
But keep it a secret
Become like a man who is awestruck
and nourished, listening to a golden nightingale
sing in a beautiful foreign language
while God nests invisibly upon its tongue.
Hafiz, who can you tell in this world
That when a dog runs up to you
wagging its ecstatic tail,
you bend down and whisper in its ear
"Beloved, I am so glad that you are happy to see me,
Beloved, I am so glad, so very glad, that you have come."


- Hafiz

[Larry Robinson]

Ghost Road Song


for my father, 11/19/1927 – 6/27/2009


I need a song.
I need a song like a river, cool and dark and wet,
like a battered old oak; gnarled bark,
bitter acorns,
a song like a dragonfly:
shimmer - hover - swerve -
like embers, too hot to touch.


I need a song like my father’s hands:
scarred, callused, blunt,
a song like a wheel,
like June rain, seep of solstice,
tang of waking earth.


I need a song like a seed:
a hard and shiny promise,
a song like ashes:
gritty, fine, scattered;
a song like abalone, tough as stone,
smooth as a ripple at the edge of the bay.


I need a song so soft, it won’t sting my wounds,
so true, no anger can blunt it,
so deep, no one can mine it.


I need a song with a heart wrapped in barbed wire.


I need a song that sheds no tears,
I need a song that sobs.
I need a song that skates along the edge of black ice,
howls with coyotes,
a song with a good set of lungs,
a song that won’t give out, give up,
give in, give way:
I need a song with guts.


I need a song like lightning, just one blaze of insight.


I need a song like a hurricane,
spiraled winds of chaos,
a snake-charming song,
a bullshit-busting song,
a shut-up-and-listen-to-the-Creator song.
I need a song that rears its head up like a granite peak
and greets the eastern sky.


I need a song small enough to fit in my pocket,
big enough to wrap around
the wide shoulders of my grief,
a song with a melody like thunder,
chords that won’t get lost,
rhythm that can’t steal away.
I need a song that forgives me my lack of voice.


I need a song that forgives my lack of forgiveness.


I need a song so right
that the first note splinters me like crystal,
spits the shards out into the universe
like sleek seedlings of stars; yes,
that’s the song
I need,


the song to accompany you
on your first steps
along the Milky Way,
that song with ragged edges,
a worn-out sun;
the song that lets a burnt red rim
slip away into the Pacific,
leaves my throat
healed at last.


- Deborah Miranda

[Larry Robinson]

What The Dog Perhaps Hears


If an inaudible whistle
blown between our lips
can send him home to us,
then silence is perhaps
the sound of spiders breathing
and roots mining the earth;
it may be asparagus heaving,
headfirst, into the light
and the long brown sound
of cracked cups, when it happens.
We would like to ask the dog
if there is a continuous whir
because the child in the house
keeps growing, if the snake
really stretches full length
without a click and the sun
breaks through clouds without
a decibel of effort,
whether in autumn, when the trees
dry up their wells, there isn't a shudder
too high for us to hear.
What is it like up there
above the shut-off level
of our simple ears?
For us there was no birth cry,
the newborn bird is suddenly here,
the egg broken, the nest alive,
and we heard nothing when the world changed.


- Lisel Mueller

[Larry Robinson]

Night Heralds


There are beatings in life so bad – I don’t know –
beatings as from God’s hatred – as if
the depths of everything we ever put up with
jammed in the soul! – I don’t know –

Not many – but they exist…. trenches cut
into the fiercest face and the strongest back.
They are the horses of Attila,
night heralds sent us by Death,

mad crazes of the Savior of the soul
away from a loving faith Fate damned,
bloody blows – rifle cracks –
like bread that burns hot from the oven.

And Man – poor poor Man! He turns his eyes –
as when someone for attention behind one claps hands –
he turns his crazy eyes, and everything alive
clogs like a bog of guilt in that glare.

There are blows in life so hard – I don’t know –

- César Vallejo
(From Los Heraldos Negros
Translated by Bruce Moody)

[Larry Robinson]

Mother Lode

in a dream I discovered jewels
buried deep in magma
glistening through rock and mud
colored and shimmering
pulsing like stars

the magma became flesh
the jewels our shared minerals and molecules
collective struggles under murky loads
pulsing like heartbeats

it won’t work to mine them out with picks and pulleys
or frack them with blasts of chemicals
or slice them with lasers and scalpels
they belong where they are embedded embodied
inside safe waiting

waiting soft stillness
settling to reveal sparkles
unfurling furiously from the deep
our essence
our future

have you discovered them yet?

in a dream I discovered jewels
buried deep in magma
glistening through rock and mud
colored and shimmering
pulsing like stars

the magma became flesh
the jewels our shared minerals and molecules
collective struggles under murky loads
pulsing like heartbeats

it won’t work to mine them out with picks and pulleys
or frack them with blasts of chemicals
or slice them with lasers and scalpels
they belong where they are embedded embodied
inside safe waiting

waiting soft stillness
settling to reveal sparkles
unfurling furiously from the deep
our essence
our future

have you discovered them yet?


- Sharon Bard

[Larry Robinson]

Abstraction / Mandala / Morning LIght


the single stone
at the foot of the mountain
the hole in the sky
where the day goes
the hole in the earth
where the breath goes
the wholeness of being
where the psyche moves
toward

you get the quiet
the solitude

awake and yes

alone

what joy
there is
though
in quiet
some kind of freedom and not a disaster at all

a gift of silence
a gift of motion
a gift of lean words and times and belly

move around the fire
into words

morning light
sun out there
somewhere soon

broken is the shadow side
of together
broken is the shadow side
of home
broken is the winter within


- Jack Crimmins

[Larry Robinson]

Here Today

Here today
Gone tomorrow

A grey hair
Falls onto a white page

Me reading
The sign & the symbol

Not many days left
In my personal calendar


- Robert Leverant

[Sara S]

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. -Crowfoot, Native American warrior and orator (1821-1890)




Abstraction / Mandala / Morning LIght


the single stone
at the foot of the mountain
the hole in the sky
where the day goes
the hole in the earth
where the breath goes
the wholeness of being
where the psyche moves
toward

you get the quiet
the solitude

awake and yes

alone

what joy
there is
though
in quiet
some kind of freedom and not a disaster at all

a gift of silence
a gift of motion
a gift of lean words and times and belly

move around the fire
into words

morning light
sun out there
somewhere soon

broken is the shadow side
of together
broken is the shadow side
of home
broken is the winter within


- Jack Crimmins

[Larry Robinson]

The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer


I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my
inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission
to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it.
I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts,
and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing,
and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven's favor,
in spite of the best advice. If I have been caught
so often laughing at funerals, that was because
I knew the dead were already slipping away,
preparing a comeback, and can I help it?
And if at weddings I have gritted and gnashed
my teeth, it was because I knew where the bridegroom
had sunk his manhood, and knew it would not
be resurrected by a piece of cake. ‘Dance,’ they told me,
and I stood still, and while they stood
quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced.
‘Pray,’ they said, and I laughed, covering myself
in the earth's brightnesses, and then stole off gray
into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan.
When they said, ‘I know my Redeemer liveth,’
I told them, ‘He's dead.’ And when they told me
‘God is dead,’ I answered, ‘He goes fishing ever day
in the Kentucky River. I see Him often.’
When they asked me would I like to contribute
I said no, and when they had collected
more than they needed, I gave them as much as I had.
When they asked me to join them I wouldn't,
and then went off by myself and did more
than they would have asked. ‘Well, then,’ they said
‘go and organize the International Brotherhood
of Contraries,’ and I said, ‘Did you finish killing
everybody who was against peace?’ So be it.
Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony
thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what
I say I don't know. It is not the only or the easiest
way to come to the truth. It is one way.


- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

In Love

In violent flight
from tree to feed
her whole body
a heartbeat
an armor of feathers
with one fine eye
fierce she comes again
to flower.

- Danielle Bryant

[Larry Robinson]

A Poem on Hope

It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,
For hope must not depend on feeling good
And there is the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.
You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality
Of the future, which surely will surprise us,
…And hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction
Any more than by wishing. But stop dithering.
The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?
Tell them at least what you say to yourself.

Because we have not made our lives to fit
Our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,
The streams polluted, the mountains overturned. Hope
Then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
Of what it is that no other place is, and by
Your caring for it as you care for no other place, this
Place that you belong to though it is not yours,
For it was from the beginning and will be to the end

Belong to your place by knowledge of the others who are
Your neighbors in it: the old man, sick and poor,
Who comes like a heron to fish in the creek,
And the fish in the creek, and the heron who manlike
Fishes for the fish in the creek, and the birds who sing
In the trees in the silence of the fisherman
And the heron, and the trees that keep the land
They stand upon as we too must keep it, or die.

This knowledge cannot be taken from you by power
Or by wealth. It will stop your ears to the powerful
when they ask for your faith, and to the wealthy
when they ask for your land and your work.
Answer with knowledge of the others who are here
And how to be here with them. By this knowledge
Make the sense you need to make. By it stand
In the dignity of good sense, whatever may follow.
Speak to your fellow humans as your place
Has taught you to speak, as it has spoken to you.
Speak its dialect as your old compatriots spoke it
Before they had heard a radio. Speak
Publicly what cannot be taught or learned in public.

Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up
From the pages of books and from your own heart.
Be still and listen to the voices that belong
To the streambanks and the trees and the open fields.
There are songs and sayings that belong to this place,
By which it speaks for itself and no other.

Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground
Underfoot. Be it lighted by the light that falls
Freely upon it after the darkness of the nights
And the darkness of our ignorance and madness.
Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you,
Which is the light of imagination. By it you see
The likeness of people in other places to yourself
In your place. It lights invariably the need for care
Toward other people, other creatures, in other places
As you would ask them for care toward your place and you.

No place at last is better than the world. The world
Is no better than its places. Its places at last
Are no better than their people while their people
Continue in them. When the people make
Dark the light within them, the world darkens.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Prairie Restoration Project


The Midwest is a huge flat kitchen table I am sitting at,
drinking rusty water, looking at a huge flat field
out the window. The field’s the actual
size of loneliness, emptied of people.
With my looking, I try to gather
its birds picking at some seeded thing, its combed
pattern of plow-strokes, its gravel on a road
dividing field from field, to pull them all in close
against the way looking at it feels
like a dispersal. As if to feel how each
bit of gravel could be back
with its mountain again or deep in the ground,
or at least to understand how it isn’t, & won’t be
in this life, I roll the fragments
between thumb and forefinger, every
jagged edge and ridge, each smooth lip,
scallop, curve, non-descript
pebbles upon pebbles of it. Where have you been. Loneliness
whose sheep I gather from pasture,
herding them now into a very small pen. Always, one
is missing, or I lost count, counted wrong, never knew
how many we started off with. When is it
that the singular became
this countless many, as if a thing bearing
no name to begin with
had shattered. What’s that called, at the beginning—
whatever grew in the field or grazed there.
How we blink and chew and find ourselves
cubicle-hunched, tightened under humming fluorescents,
shrinking down in rented mud. Dutifully visiting
the raised square of dirt someone called garden, poking it
with little heart, having signed the shitty contract
for the dim apartment where the appliances
only half-work, and each passing night
breaks their backs even further. I counted wrong.
I remember what a mountain was
was dry macaroni glued to a sheet of paper
in a kitchen in the later part of the last century. I picked
the pieces off each by each in boredom or nervousness;
they ticked dryly against the side of a paper cup.
How many fields like this there are ahead of us, blue
with the absence of tallgrass.
I am sitting at the table, and what do I know of sheep.
- Ari Banias

[Larry Robinson]

Traveling Through Cultures of Eyes


I passed through a city where I was seen.
A city of living in the eyes,
a city of presence.
where to look carefully is a developed art,
a slow, thoughtful practice.

There is the good solid warmth of the white-coated waiter
as he brings each course of dishes and heavy white napkins.
Belen’s youth smiles her delight into our eyes.
Alcira tells the story from Bergman’s last film and our eyes
well up in a long look of recognized grief.
Otilia’s eyes pierce mine with her passionate concern,
What is happening to my friend’s child?
The grandmother putting on her white scarf at Plaza de Mayo,
where the mothers of the disappeared have kept meeting for thirty years,
returns my honoring look with a long tender sweet smile,
so familiar I remember my grandmother’s eyes.
Alicia’s eyes catapult a stream of aliveness.
Her eyes suspend time, holding me locked into the dance.
The man with his white shirtsleeves rolled up,
who murmurs gently in English as we dance
meets my eyes with anticipation without intrusion,
in this city where the dance of eyes always precedes the dance.

The journey home is to pass through cultures of eyes.
In D.C., the eyes bore holes in the polished floors,
or ricochet across faces as fast as the clicking heels.
Back in Maine, eyes glance by with a comfortable vagueness.

The loss is stunning.

Just let me find the eyes of the graying curly haired man
who passed by in the Barrancas de Belgrano,
looking with a slow focused intelligence,
without a thread of seduction, just a look of consideration,
a breath of mature presence passing by.
I could live my life with a man who looked at me that way.

But today, it is enough to put on my foul weather gear
and head out into this spring pelting rain
wide eyed, watching everything with my strong gaze.


The black crow walking intently on the brilliant new green.
My beloved oak pregnant with legions of budding leaves.
My bay stoked into storm silvered eruptions.
The roiling ocean of sky
hurtles over my wide open eyes,
receiving all of this.
And every detail of this spring storm
looks right back at me,
straight into my eyes, steady,
and unflinching.

- Elizabeth Garber

[Larry Robinson]

I will be traveling and mostly out of internet range so this is the last poem I will be posting for the next three weeks. Many blessings to us all.
Larry


Earth Dweller


It was all the clods at once become
precious; it was the barn, and the shed,
and the windmill, my hands, the crack
Arlie made in the ax handle: oh, let me stay
here humbly, forgotten, to rejoice in it all;
let the sun casually rise and set.
If I have not found the right place,
teach me; for, somewhere inside, the clods are
vaulted mansions, lines through the barn sing
for the saints forever, the shed and windmill
rear so glorious the sun shudders like a gong.

Now I know why people worship, carry around
magic emblems, wake up talking dreams
they teach to their children: the world speaks.
The world speaks everything to us.
It is our only friend.

- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

A Brief For The Defense


Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.


- Jack Gilbert

[gardenmaniac]

welcome back, Larry; what an auspicious reemergence. we (at least my part of 'we') missed you. I trust that you are well, rested, and happy to be back.


A Brief For The Defense
...

[Larry Robinson]

Homage to a Yoga Mat

I am the yogi, you are the mat
however long I've been gone, however I arrive
you are there to meet me

you don't expect perfectionhttps://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2013-11-06_12-17-36.png
you don't judge my form or habits
you ask only that I show up

you are the arms that refuse no embrace
you accept salty beads of sweat and tears
dropping warm from a fevered brow

wherever I've been in this battered world
however armored I am, you take me in
such is your power to heal me

each day I practice
I vow to peel back the stories
that can get congested around my heart

you need only that I lean into my pain
you ask nothing but my simple breath
and the heart of a spiritual pilgrim

ready to be tenderized and rejoined
into your ocean of compassion
for all beings great and small

- andrew zarrillo

[Larry Robinson]

Sailing to Byzantium


I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations--at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.


II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.


III

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.


IV

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form a Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords or ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

- William Butler Yeats

[Larry Robinson]

Advice


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


- Bill Holm

[Larry Robinson]

The Real Work


What I would say in one sentence is that, for Americans, the real work is becoming native to North America. The real work is becoming native in your heart, coming to understand we really live here, that this is really the continent we're on and that our loyalties are here, to these mountains and rivers, to these plant zones, to these creatures. The real work involves developing a loyalty that goes back before the formation of any nation state, back billions of years and thousands of years into the future. The real work is accepting citizenship in the continent itself.


- Gary Snyder

[Larry Robinson]

Kristallnaght


The SS guard hit Zindel Grynszpan on the head and he fell
Into a ditch. Father, he heard the voice of his son, you must
Go on. Zindel took the hand of his son and climbed out of
The trench. With his wife, a son and daughter on his side
They continued the march. But the SS guards did not stop
The savage whipping of the deportees. Blood was flowing
On all sides.


The Grynszpan family were Polish Jews from Hanover.
When the Nazis came to power they became outcasts.
In October 1938 they were expelled from Germany
And deported to Poland in a group of 12,000 Jews.
They were taken by train to the frontier town Neubenschen
And from there on foot to the German-Polish border.
When they reached the border heavy rain started to fall.


The Nazis confiscated their money. They had no food to eat.
Polish officers arrived and began to inspect their papers.
They admitted the refugees with Polish passports,
Housing them in military stables. Old, sick and children
Were herded together in most inhuman conditions.


One of the first things that Zindel did in Poland was to send
A postcard to his seventeen year old son Hirsch in Paris.
When Hirsch Grynszpan read the family’s tribulations
He became furious. His heart was filled with rage and hatred
And he decided to avenge their sufferings. On the morning
Of November 7, Hirsch entered a gunsmith’s shop on rue
Faubourg Saint-Martin and purchased a 6.35 calibre pistol
With a box of 25 bullets, for 235 Francs.


Then he took a ride on the Metro to the Solferino stop
And walked to the German Embassy at 78 rue de Lille.
Hirsch told the receptionist that he has some documents with him.
He was received by Ernst vom Rath, the third secretary.
When the German diplomat closed the door Hirsch pulled out
The gun. “You are a filthy Kraut”, he said, “and in the name of
12,000 persecuted Jews here is the document”. He fired five
Bullets from point blank range at vom Rath. The diplomat died
Two days later of his wounds.


The assassination came as a godsend thing for the Nazis.
Hitler denounced it as part of a global Jewish conspiracy
Against Germany. It became a pretext for the well-orchestrated
Pogrom of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass.
During the night of November 9-10, 1938, in every place
Throughout the Third Reich, Storm Troops attacked Jews
And Jewish institutions.


Hitler’s henchmen burnt down or destroyed in Germany
Nearly two hundred synagogues. They burst into Jewish houses,
Broke the glass of Jewish businesses and beat up Jews wherever
They found them. About ninety people were murdered
And thousands of others were wounded in the street violence.
The Nazis also arrested thirty thousand Jews and sent them
To concentration camps in Buchenwald, Dachau,
And Sachsenhausen. And on top of all this, the Reich
Cynically imposed a billion mark penalty
On the Jewish Community to pay for the damages.


In Berlin hundreds of truncheon swinging storm troops
Led the mob in smashing up the glass plate windows
Of Jewish stores. In the Jewish neighbourhoods of German
Cities the Nazis lit bonfires. They threw on them to burn
Torah scrolls, prayer books and whole libraries. Thousands
Of Germans joined the Storm Troops in the atrocities.
But many resented the pogrom. People watched in horror
The roundup; they cried silently behind their curtains.


On a third floor balcony in Leipzig
Storm Troops shattered a balustrade and pushed
An upright oak wood piano over the edge. It plunged like
A black wingless dragon and fell helplessly to the street.
It crashed on the pavement with a shocking clamour.
Its wooden casing had split. The strings stripped bare
Stood in the middle of the wreckage as an orphan harp
Screaming with a heartbreaking outcry.


- Paul Hartal

[gardenmaniac]

Lest we forget . . .



Kristallnaght

The SS guard hit Zindel Grynszpan on the head and he fell
Into a ditch. . .

[REALnothings]

As the horrid 20th century recedes, let us affirm with all the passion of our hearts and spirits, a world born from its ashes, in which such things are impossible, ANYWHERE. ♥

[Larry Robinson]

In Praise of Earth


We kept on dancing last summer though the dancing had been called subversive.
We weren't alone at the end of this particular world and knew
it wouldn't be the last world, though wars
had broken out on all sides.
We kept on dancing and with us were the insects who had gathered at the grounds
in the grasses and the trees. And with us were the stars and
a few lone planets who had been friends
with the earth for generations.
With us were the spirits who wished to honor this beloved earth in any beautiful
manner. And with us at dawn was the Sun who took the lead
and then we broke for camp, for stickball
and breakfast.
We all needed praise made of the heart's tattoo as it inspired our feet or wings,
someone to admire us despite our tendency to war, to terrible
stumbles. So does the red cliff who is the heart
broken to the sky.
So do the stones who were the first to speak when we arrived. So does the flaming
mountain who harbors the guardian spirits who refuse to abandon
us. And this Earth keeps faithfully to her journey, carrying us
around the Sun,
All of us in our rags and riches, our rages and promises, small talk and suffering.
As we go to the store to buy our food and forget to plant, sing so
that we will be nourished in turn. As we walk out
into the dawn,
With our lists of desires that her gifts will fulfill, as she turns our tears
into rivers of sweet water, we spiral between dusking and
dawn, wake up and sleep in this lush palace of creation,
rooted by blood, dreams, and history.
We are linked by leaf, fin, and root. When we climb through the sky to each
new day our thoughts are clouds shifting weather within us.
When we step out of our minds into ceremonial language we are humbled and amazed,
at the sacrifice. Those who forget become the people of stone who guard
the entrance to remembering. And the Earth keeps up her
dancing and she is neither perfect nor exactly in time.
She is one of us.
And she loves the dance for what it is. So does the Sun who calls the Earth
beloved. And praises her with light.

- Joy Harjo

[Larry Robinson]

In Praise of the Earth

Let us bless
The imagination of the Earth,
That knew early the patience
To harness the mind of time,
Waited for the seas to warm,
Ready to welcome the emergence
Of things dreaming of voyaging
Among the stillness of land.

And how light knew to nurse
The growth until the face of the Earth
Brightened beneath a vision of color.

When the ages of ice came
And sealed the Earth inside
An endless coma of cold,
The heart of the Earth held hope,
Storing fragments of memory,
Ready for the return of the sun.

Let us thank the Earth
That offers ground for home
And hold our feet firm
To walk in space open
To infinite galaxies.

Let us salute the silence
And certainty of mountains:
Their sublime stillness,
Their dream-filled hearts.

The wonder of a garden
Trusting the first warmth of spring
Until its black infinity of cells
Becomes charged with dream;
Then the silent, slow nurture
Of the seed's self, coaxing it
To trust the act of death.

The humility of the Earth
That transfigures all
That has fallen
Of outlived growth.

The kindness of the Earth,
Opening to receive
Our worn forms
Into the final stillness.

Let us ask forgiveness of the Earth
For all our sins against her:
For our violence and poisonings
Of her beauty.

Let us remember within us
The ancient clay,
Holding the memory of seasons,
The passion of the wind,
The fluency of water,
The warmth of fire,
The quiver-touch of the sun
And shadowed sureness of the moon.

That we may awaken,
To live to the full
The dream of the Earth
Who chose us to emerge
And incarnate its hidden night
In mind, spirit, and light.

- John O'Donohue

[Larry Robinson]

Singing Images of Fire


A hand moves, and the fire's whirling takes different
shapes.
. . . all things change when we do.
The first word, Ah, blossomed into all others.
Each of them is true.


- Kukei
(translated by Jane Hirshfield)