Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Our Hearts Are Broken, Our Spirits Are Strong, Our Faith Is Triumphant


“Knee-bone, knee-bone, knee-bone….”


In the completely black darkness of the night and early morning, https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2015-06-23_13-30-46.png
in the deep recesses of moss-laden oak trees,
ponds and lagoons where our ancestors toiled for generations,
we drop down - our knees to the cold floor -
and we seek understanding,
we seek solace,
we seek a way out of this “no-way”.
Our sobbing voices utter unspoken prayers
as we gather in supplication
to the spirits that have brought us this far by faith.

Our hearts are broken, but we know comfort is there.

Our spirits are strong because we know guidance is there.

Our faith is triumphant because we know our beloved community is here.

“Knee-bone, knee-bone, knee-bone, Oh my Lord.”
- J. Herman Blake
Johns Island, South Carolina
June 18th, 2015

[Larry Robinson]

Summer

time - the bones of my life...
bone soup fulla marrow

how did a computer screen become my window?
deviceshttps://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2015-06-24_14-08-04.png
devices

i need flowers to cleanse my retina
flowers and hummingbirds,
hummingbirds and kestrels

i need hills to climb
views to share

i need slumber parties and brunches
a dose of laughter with my gratitude practice
like hemp oil on chicory
it just tastes good

- Claudia L’Amoreaux

[Larry Robinson]

I Dream A World


I dream a world where man
No other man will scorn,
Where love will bless the earth
And peace its paths adorn
I dream a world where all
Will know sweet freedom's way,
Where greed no longer saps the soul
Nor avarice blights our day.
A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free,
Where wretchedness will hang its head
And joy, like a pearl,
Attends the needs of all mankind-
Of such I dream, my world!


- Langston Hughes

[Ronaldo]

My mentor Glen Freeman (author of Kryptadia) was a friend of Langston Hughes and I honor them both with the poem you provided and John Cope's recent photo of Mt. Hood.

31755

[Larry Robinson]

A HAIKU FOR CHARLESTON


Gun shots fill the place,
A hallowed sanctuary,
Nine souls rise to grace.


- Waights Taylor

[Larry Robinson]

June 26, 2015

Rainbow flag goes up
Confederate flag comes down
Still much work to do


- Katherine Hastings

[Larry Robinson]

The Supremes


the joy, the sorrow


the sun
rainbow flags
ecstasy


arrows in the heart
all those years
of silence


now
why am I not shouting
why at last the tears



- Fran Claggett

[Larry Robinson]

Father Earth


There is a two-million year old man
No one knows.
They cut into his rivers
Peeled wide pieces of hide
From his legs
Left scorch marks
On his buttocks.
He did not cry out.
No matter what they did, he held firm.
Now he raises his stabbed hands
and whispers that we can heal him yet.
We begin the bandages,
The rolls of gauze,
The unguents, the gut,
The needle, the grafts.
We slowly, carefully turn his body
Face up,
And under him,
His lifelong lover, the old woman,
Is perfect and unmarked
He has laid upon
His two-million year old woman
All this time, protecting her
With his old back, his old scarred back.
And the soil beneath her
Is black with her tears.

- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

[BManna]

OmiGaia!
How did she do it?
Upending mythological-scale
notions of Home
planet, Gender
relations, Parent
identities, and Religious
icons, invoking new
commitments to Responsible human
lifeways and tender Compassion,
Grounding us in tactile daily tasks,
discharging species-level Grief, and
celebrating Fertility!
in only 26 unhurried, earth-shattering lines.
I'm splayed.


Father Earth...

[Shepherd]

I like the "Father Earth" title, and what follows. That title evokes the Sky Mother. Some cultures tends to use the metaphor of the Earth Mother, whereas other cultures speak of the Sky Mother.

A trouble I have with Christianity and some religions is that they are not sufficiently grounded, in my opinion. The deity is seen as too male and far away distant on Mt. Olympus or Mt. Zion. I named my farm after the wounded healer Kokopelli, the hump-backed flute player who walked the Earth connecting people with both his upbeat and his melancholic sounds. The tendency to genderize the Earth and ones deities has its limitations, so I appreciate
Clarissa for reversing the imagery with this poem and ending it with those pregnant "tears."




Father Earth

There is a two-million year old man
No one knows.
They cut into his rivers
Peeled wide pieces of hide
From his legs
Left scorch marks
On his buttocks.
He did not cry out.
No matter what they did, he held firm.
Now he raises his stabbed hands
and whispers that we can heal him yet.
We begin the bandages,
The rolls of gauze,
The unguents, the gut,
The needle, the grafts.
We slowly, carefully turn his body
Face up,
And under him,
His lifelong lover, the old woman,
Is perfect and unmarked
He has laid upon
His two-million year old woman
All this time, protecting her
With his old back, his old scarred back.
And the soil beneath her
Is black with her tears.

- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

[Larry Robinson]

Nirvana


At the retreat, Lee wasn't allowed
to speak or read for ten days, just
meditate. It was bliss at first
letting go of the chattering world.
The silence was like living inside
a rose. She felt strong and clean.
Up before dawn to contemplate, and
then the simple meal with others
she didn't know, but, now, with all this
love flowing through her she knew
she must love them too. They were all
part of the same Divine Being,
In a pond of red lotuses,
in a pond of blue lotuses,
in a pond of white lotuses,
is the utter purity of mindfulness
that is indifference, rightly
penetrated by wisdom. As the days
wore on she missed chocolate,
she missed coffee and cigarettes.
She missed the office and its
endless phone calls, she missed
her secretary and her delicious
gossip. Martinis! And her husband
who was chopping his way through
the rain forest in search of
a tiny, yellow frog. Meditation
was great, but ten days of it
would be enough to make one combust.
At lunch she looked around the room:
without speech, without emotion,
her fellow campers were like ghosts,
or maybe more like mental patients
dulled by too much medication and
electro-shock, sad and empty husks
of their former selves. The Teacher
sat by himself eating his bowl of rice.
Lee stood up and began to walk
down the long path to the parking lot.
She wasn't angy. She was excited
and started skipping and singing
at the sight of her getaway car.


- James Tate

[Larry Robinson]

Meanwhile, Music


Tree to tree the birds fly to perch and sing
amid the sway and swing of spring's busy wind,
while wars go on, while the sea rises and the ice melts.


In the midst of life narrowing to the onyx box,
the house of Anubis side by side with the house of music,
sun blesses the breakfast table.


All is perishing, and yet they sing, they sing.


- Elizabeth Carothers Herron

[Larry Robinson]

The Place Where We Are Right


From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.


The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.


But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plow
and a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.


- Yehuda Amichai
(translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell)

[Larry Robinson]

Under the Same Sun


Apart, we say, as a way
to soothe our separate souls,
"We're under the same moon."
Why not the same sun? The sun
whose light, too bright
cannot, will not shelter


or so we suppose. We chose
together, in so many languages,
the moon—softer, sweeter, it
smoothes the shadows. Still the sun
shines in broken Palestine and
Berlin at the same hour.


We shade our eyes, the luxury
of blinders, the refusal
to know what was caused,
In our name, what we allow.
We wait for the moon,
her soft absolution. Under


the same sun, we suffer
our simple losses, our separate
stupors. Our contours,
contrasts drawn sharp, certain,
so straight, we cannot
see how my soul touches,


reaches inside your body.
A soul, silver-sweet
as the moon, a body
radiant as the sun,
the one whose life
we live within and under.


The life we must bear
to know or burn together
in elected ignorance.


- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

Poem #108
Downwind, pine and cedar recklessly enter the clouds.
Everywhere stir the multitude and alarm the crowd.
I can't do the tricks of "person" and "environment."
One cup of murky dregs gets me drunk.
- Ikkyu
(translated by Sarah Messer and Kidder Smith)

[Larry Robinson]

O, America!

O, America, the blood you are bleeding is oil.

Where is the old red gone
that once infused your flag?
Where is the courage for honesty –
that blue handed out once like a dancer
so generously?

Where is white? Where is the place where color
meant nothing?

O, America, aren’t you ashamed
to place a gun where courage should be?

Aren’t you lost in the insubstantial lies of futures
eaten like vegetables from a dump!

And underneath your skin, are you not still –
like the dove and the wolf
and the spider and the oat –
only human too! And fairly! Fairly!

Spend some heart this way.
Bend with the wind that holds the flag together in the air
for all to see,
not just some.

On this field of promise
make again the palm held out
upon which each of us arrived.

Grant us communion, flag.
Give us a whole.
Give us ourselves together once again
in quality.


Our stars.

- Bruce Moody

[Shepherd]

What an appropriate poem for today. So much is in decline in this country. Today is a good day to honor the old-fashioned American values and lament that they are not being adequately followed. "Bleeding" oil is indeed accurate. And too many guns. May this poem help wake us up to our calling to "think globally and work locally."


O, America!

O, America, the blood you are bleeding is oil...

[Larry Robinson]

<tbody>

<tbody>
The Dugout


</tbody>









<tbody>
They like it here
shaded from the sun, drinking Gatorade
in the dugout among the solitude
of brothers.


After one strikes out
or misses a ball,
angry fathers climb the gated fence
that separates spectators
from players and curse.
All night only the male crickets chirp,


nocturnal and cold-blooded.
They take on the temperature
of their surroundings.
They run the top of one wing
along the teeth
at the bottom of the other.


Their wings up and open
like acoustical sails, the sound relentless
and unending.


</tbody>


</tbody>


- Jill Bialosky

[REALnothings]

chilling! powerful image, I love the image of the safety of the dugout.

The lines about angry dads also call to mind the Texas mom who tried to arrange the murder of her daughter's cheerleader rival, or whatever it was. I guess a lot of people still need to read Gibran's "Your children are not your children..." God help us all, ♥
​
I feel this is a mighty poem, with a mighty symbol/contrast which has been under everyone on Earth's eyes/nose, etc, since time immemorial, yet until today, I'VE NEVER EVER SEEN THIS THOUGHT EXPRESSED BY ANYONE! So obvious (and powerful), now that we see it.

[Shandi]

When was this ever in America? "Where is white? Where is the place where color meant nothing?


O, America!

O, America, the blood you are bleeding is oil...

[Roland Jacopetti]

When was this ever in America? "Where is white? Where is the place where color meant nothing?

White is the sum of all colors.

[Shandi]

I understand that. What I don't understand is this "where is the place where color meant nothing?" Maybe it means that there is no place? It seemed to be referring to America's past, so that's why I questioned it. Maybe just my interpretation, but what are others? I do appreciate your clarification of the meaning of that phrase. (Not the meaning of white)


White is the sum of all colors.

[pbrinton]

Well, yes and no. If you are talking about sunlight or transmitted light, then white contains all the colors, and darkness (black) is the absence of color. However the colors we see are mostly reflected colors. In this case, black is the sum of all colors, and white is the absence of color.

Patrick Brinton


White is the sum of all colors.

[Larry Robinson]

Don't Make Lists


Every day a new flower rises
from your body's fresh soil.
Don't go around looking
for fallen petals
in a fairy tale, when you've
got the golden plant
right here, now,
shooting forth in light from your eyes,
your awakening crown.


Don't make lists, or explore ancient accounts.
Forget everything you know
and open.

- Dorothy Walters

[Larry Robinson]

End Of The World


When I was young in school in Switzerland, about the time of the Boer War,
We used to take it for known that the human race
Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died. I wrote a schoolboy poem
About the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shore
Of the last sea, alone, alone, alone, remembering all
His racial past. But now I don't think so. They'll die faceless in flocks,
And the earth flourish long after mankind is out.


- Robinson Jeffers

[Larry Robinson]

1,000 Year Old Poem


In his hand,
a small book of Zen poetry
His strong voice
reading quietly
this one poem
Brings me into
the presence
of Cold Mountain
The Spiritual home
of the Immortals...
I am cleansed by the Spring
that flows from the mouth
of the poet's rock
Amazed by the wonder
of Heaven and Earth's
Mystery !
No longer a body of flesh
I become ONE with the wind
the glorious, pure, elements
of Nature !
for 1,000 years,
how did this poet's
treasured words
remain?

- Mary Barror

[Larry Robinson]

This Is What Was Bequeathed Us


This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth, the beloved left
and, leaving,
Left to us.


No other world
But this one:
Willows and the river
And the factory
With its black smokestacks.


No other shore, only this bank
On which the living gather.


No meaning but what we find here.
No purpose but what we make.


That, and the beloved’s clear instructions:
Turn me into song; sing me awake.


- Gregory Orr

[Larry Robinson]

Old Man, Old Man


Young men, not knowing what to remember,
Come to this hiding place of the moons and years,
To this Old Man. Old Man, they say, where should we go?
Where did you find what you remember? Was it perched in a tree?
Did it hover deep in the white water? Was it covered over
With dead stalks in the grass? Will we taste it
If our mouths have long lain empty?
Will we feel it between our eyes if we face the wind
All night, and turn the color of earth?
If we lie down in the rain, can we remember sunlight?


He answers, I have become the best and worst I dreamed.
When I move my feet, the ground moves under them.
When I lie down, I fit the earth too well.
Stones long underwater will burst in the fire, but stones
Long in the sun and under the dry night
Will ring when you strike them. Or break in two.
There were always many places to beg for answers:
Now the places themselves have come in close to be told.
I have called even my voice in close to whisper with it:
Every secret is as near as your fingers.
If your heart stutters with pain and hope,
Bend forward over it like a man at a small campfire.

- David Wagoner

[Larry Robinson]

Happiness

Our ancestors in the earth are not
Ashamed of us. The strong smell
Of dirt, the delirious rabbits, the
Clocks are all disappearing. A

Prehistoric gift acquires the smell
Of salt. I grasp onto winter’s tail.
Some water plants are lying around.
Smell & taste, I have had good

Luck in love. The slippery roads,
The capricious numbers on a blazing
Road, meet me at the forest’s edge
Where we can go with our legs

Lopped off, strangers to the clean
Teeth and tongue of outward happiness.


- Noelle Kocot

[Larry Robinson]

Per Diem



Spherically wondrous sunbeam

dwelling in the mansion

of the pine of chastity,

today we bought an ice pack

For Mildred’s injured foot.

Luminous shadow

in the plumflower chamber,

Edna quit her job yesterday,

got drunk, stayed drunk,

behaved like a defective monster

collapsing in the mansion

of self-pity. Meanwhile,

the great sea of compassion

rolled in rolled out, rolled in.

And the blue mountain

of itself remains,

and the blind shampooers

never tire of their work.


- James Tate

[Larry Robinson]

I Hate Incense

Who can even discuss a master's methods?
Speaking of Dao, talking of Zen, your tongues grow long.
Old Ikkyu abhors your scrambling after marvels.
I make a pinched, sour face, all this incense thrown on the
Buddha.

- Ikkyu
(translated by Sarah Messer and Kidder Smith)

[Larry Robinson]

An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
and on the opposite mountain I am searching
for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
both in their temporary failure.
Our voices meet above the Sultan’s Pool
in the valley between us. Neither of us wants
the child or the goat to get caught in the wheels
of the terrible Had Gadya machine.

Afterward we found them among the bushes
and our voices came back inside us, laughing and crying.

Searching for a goat or a son
has always been the beginning
of a new religion in these mountains.

- Yahuda Amichai

[Larry Robinson]

And What If I Spoke Of Despair?

And what if I spoke of despair—who doesn’t32087
feel it? Who doesn’t know the way it seizes,
leaving us limp, deafened by the slosh
of our own blood, rushing
through the narrow, personal
channels of grief. It’s beauty
that brings it on, calls it out from the wings
for one more song. Rain
pooled on a fallen oak leaf, reflecting
the pale cloudy sky, dark canopy
of foliage not yet fallen. Or the red moon
in September, so large you have to pull over
at the top of Bayona and stare, like a photo
of a lover in his uniform, not yet gone;
or your own self, as a child,
on that day your family stayed
at the sea, watching the sun drift down,
lazy as a beach ball, and you fell asleep with sand
in the crack of your smooth behind.
That’s when you can’t deny it. Water. Air.
They’re still here, like a mother’s palms,
sweeping hair off our brow, her scent
swirling around us. But now your own
car is pumping poison, delivering its fair
share of destruction. We’ve created a salmon
with the red, white, and blue shining on one side.
Frog genes spliced into tomatoes—as if
the tomato hasn’t been humiliated enough.
I heard a man argue that genetic
engineering was more dangerous
than a nuclear bomb. Should I be thankful
he was alarmed by one threat, or worried
he’d gotten used to the other? Maybe I can’t
offer you any more than you can offer me—
but what if I stopped on the trail, with shreds
of manzanita bark lying in russet scrolls
and yellow bay leaves, little lanterns
in the dim afternoon, and cradled despair
in my arms, the way I held my own babies
after they’d fallen asleep, when there was no
reason to hold them, only
I didn’t want to put them down.

- Ellen Bass

[Larry Robinson]

Observer

I watch how other things travelhttps://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2015-07-16_11-17-53.png
to get an idea how I might move.
A cloud sweeps by silently,
gathering other clouds.
A doodlebug curls in his effort to get there.
A horse snorts before stepping forward.
A caterpillar inches across the kitchen floor.
When I carry him outside on a leaf,
I imagine someone doing that to me.
Would I scream?
In the heart of the day
nothing moves.
No one is going anywhere
or coming back.
The blue glass on the table
lets light pass through.
Something shines
but nothing moves.
I watch that too.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

This Is The Time

This is the time for holding still.
It is the space between breaths.
It is before you pick up the pen.
And after the last syllable.
It is the mountain lake unshattered.
It is before thought, that hungry fish,
rises crashing. It is after the ripples
have spent themselves on the silty shore.
It is precious.
Do not invent requirements.
Do not try to remember.
Holding still a while
will not kill you.

- Alice Klein




https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2015-07-17_13-57-53.png

[REALnothings]

love this one, had it on our fridge! :heart:

[Roland Jacopetti]

Actually, holding still a while is more likely to help you cure yourself.



This Is The Time

This is the time for holding still

...

Holding still a while
will not kill you.

- Alice Klein

[Larry Robinson]

Limitations

Bulldog on a leash, your bald owner defines your universehttps://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2015-07-18_08-05-46.png

how proud on your morning walk

past the Momofuko Milk Bar

aware of your boundary within leather lengths of constraint

what’s your name?

you bear the gait of a celebrity or even a saint

in the firmament of flesh,

someone like LeBron James, Meryl Streep

or my deceased Grandpa Moishe

who sang socialist hymns and preached baseball stats

and must have walked early morning avenues like you dog,

on the way to the steamy loft

where he sewed garments

twelve hours a day


- Barry Denny

[Larry Robinson]

Benedicto

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2015-07-20_11-08-25-1.png
leading to the most amazing view.
May your rivers flow without end,
meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells,
past temples and castles and poets' towers
into a dark primeval forest
where tigers belch and monkeys howl,
through miasmal and mysterious swamps
and down into a desert of red rock,
and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm
where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs,
where deer walk across the white sand beaches,
where storms come and go
as lightning clangs upon the high crags,
where something strange and more beautiful
and more full of wonder than
your deepest dreams waits for you--
beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

- Edward Abbey

[Larry Robinson]

1996, V

Some Sunday afternoon, it may be,
you are sitting under your porch roof,
looking down through the trees
to the river, watching the rain. The circles
made by the raindrops’ striking
expand, intersect, dissolve,

and suddenly (for you are getting on
now, and much of your life is memory)
the hands of the dead, who have been here
with you, rest upon you tenderly
as the rain rests shining
upon the leaves. And you think then

(for thought will come) of the strangeness
of the thought of heaven, for now
you have imagined yourself there,
remembering with longing this
happiness, this rain. Sometimes here
we are there, and there is no death.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Growing Old


In some summers there is so much fruit,
the peasants decide not to reap any more.
Not having reaped you, oh my days,
my nights, have I let the slow flames
of your lovely produce fall into ashes?

My nights, my days, you have borne so much!
All your branches have retained the gesture
of that long labor you are rising from:
my days, my nights. Oh my rustic friends!

I look for what was so good for you.
Oh my lovely, half-dead trees,
could some equal sweetness still
stroke your leaves, open your calyx?

Ah, no more fruit! But one last time
bloom in fruitless blossoming
without planning, without reckoning,
as useless as the powers of millenia.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

(Translated by A. Poulin)

[Larry Robinson]

One Hundred and Eighty Degrees

Have you considered the possibilityhttps://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2015-07-23_13-44-40.png
that everything you believe is wrong,
not merely off a bit, but totally wrong,
nothing like things as they really are?
If you've done this, you know how durably fragile
those phantoms we hold in our heads are,
those wisps of thought that people die and kill for,
betray lovers for, give up lifelong friendships for.
If you've not done this, you probably don't understand this poem,
or think it's not even a poem, but a bit of opaque nonsense,
occupying too much of your day's time,
so you probably should stop reading it here, now.
But if you've arrived at this line,
maybe, just maybe, you're open to that possibility,
the possibility of being absolutely completely wrong,
about everything that matters.
How different the world seems then:
everyone who was your enemy is your friend,
everything you hated, you now love,
and everything you love slips through your fingers like sand.

- Federico Moramarco

[Larry Robinson]

On Memorizing A Poem


In the beginning was the Word--
there's creativity involved,
inot just duplicating
a page of print
in your brain.
You can't clip
these unique flowers
of the ages
and stuff them in
some mental vase.
You have to plant them
inside.
First reading scatters
seeds, atoms,
whirling with life,
even ones that
seem inert.
Repetition becomes
a steady hand holding
a watering can.
Imperceptibly, every word
germinates and sprouts.
Tendrils begin to reach out,
join hands, solidify
a clause, link it with the body
of a sentence, until
each word is tropically bonded,
no longer exists alone.
A stanza coheres. The force
flows on, spirit leaps
across a gap to the next stanza,
back to the one before!
Each reading, connections firmer.
New ones arise, flourish
like bougainvillea. Roads appear.
Signs. Turn Left Here.
Paths and gardens of knowing
form in the brain. Flowering vines
perfume the air above the brain!
Finally, a world
lives inside to be invoked,
called forth like genie
from bottle.
Every poem or story
made one’s own
initiates its keeper
into the long line
stretching back
to ancient campfires.
Every teller chants with Homer,
Valmiki, bards whose names
we do not know, carries
the Light in eyes
onward.


- Max Reif

[Larry Robinson]

We Raise Our Hands

We raise our hands not in suplication
but desperation, rage, demand,
protest against the bloody hands
of the criminals & the government
impossible to distinguish the ones from the other.
"I am tired of so many scoldings,"
said the prosecutor. Well, be more tired jet,
Mr. Prosecutor for we want
our children, ours of the people
that alive were taken
& live we want them back.
We will go on raising our hands
with the "43" now a motto of the injustice
that we suffer & is no longer tolerable
that we suffer any longer.

Meanwhile the president
visits the U. S. of A. to discuss
security & the economy.
Whose security & economy?
Ask for more weapons for crime
& repression? The security of the rich?
Assuring them profits at our cost?
Surrender the economy to foreign enterprises
of "Free trade"? Do not confuse us
with flags now stained, dirtied with outrage.
Tired are we & we raise out hands
crying like la Llorona for our children
who alive were taken & alive we want them back.

© Rafael Jesús González 2015


Alzamos las manos

Alzamos las manos no en súplica
sino desesperación, en rábia, en demanda,
en protesta contra las manos sangrientas
de los criminales y del gobierno
imposible distinguir los unos del otro.
"Ya estoy cansado de tantos regaños,"
dijo el procurador. Pues cánsese más,
Sr. Procurador que queremos
a nuestros hijos, nuestros del pueblo
que vivos se los llevaron
y vivos los queremos.
Seguiremos alzando las manos
con el "43" ya un lema de la injusticia
que sufrimos y ya no es tolerable
que suframos más.

Mientras tanto el presidente
visita los EE. UU. para discutir
la seguridad y la economía.
¿Seguridad y economía de quien?
¿Pedir más armas para el crimen
y la represión? ¿Seguridad de los ricos?
¿Asegurarles ganancias a costo nuestro?
¿Entregar la economía a empresas extranjeras
del "libre comercio"? No nos confundan
con banderas ya manchadas, sucias de injuria.
Cansados estamos nosotros y alzamos las manos
clamando como la Llorona por nuestros hijos
que vivos se los llevaron y vivos los queremos.

© Rafael Jesús González 2015

[AliceHelene]

Actually, holding still a while is more likely to help you cure yourself

Right, Roland, that's the point I was trying to get across.

[Larry Robinson]

Fireflies

In the dry summer field at nightfall,https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2015-07-26_14-21-45.png
fireflies rise like sparks.
Imagine the presence of ghosts
flickering, the ghosts of young friends,
your father nearest in the distance.
This time they carry no sorrow,
no remorse, their presence is so light.
Childhood comes to you,
memories of your street in lamplight,
holding those last moments before bed,
capturing lightning-bugs,
with a blossom of the hand
letting them go. Lightness returns,
an airy motion over the ground
you remember from Ring Around the Rosie.
If you stay, the fireflies become fireflies
again, not part of your stories,
as unaware of you as sleep, being
beautiful and quiet all around you.

- Marilyn Kallet

[Larry Robinson]

In Cemetery Pere Lachaise

I want to write about the way, in this City
of the Dead, a who's who from
Napoleonic heirs to their victims, the famed
and infamous, the important and
self-important share this crumbling hillside
village, made magnificent by time and weather.

But all I see is rain and a
British ex-pat killing time near the not-yet
occupied tomb of a still-living photographer.
A stranger with all the time a free and aging
man could want and no money, he passes
time in the luxury of this place where
no one is bothered by money and what it
cannot heal anymore. This stranger

without motive guides us in
the labyrinth of stones and crypts, gives
due attention to the known and unknown,
who like us, wander in the cemetery
of life, bumping shoulders
with loss and living.

- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

Song


The chimney sweepershttps://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2015-07-29_13-13-22.png
Wash their faces and forget to wash the neck;
The lighthouse keepers
Let the lamps go out and leave the ships to wreck;
The prosperous baker
Leaves the rolls in hundreds in the oven to burn;
The undertaker
Pins a small note on the coffin saying, "Wait till I return,
I've got a date with Love."
And deep-sea divers
Cut their boots off and come bubbling to the top,
And engine-drivers
Bring expresses in the tunnel to a stop;
The village rector
Dashes down the side-aisle half-way through a psalm;
The sanitary inspector
Runs off with the cover of the cesspool on his arm --
To keep his date with Love.


- W.H. Auden

[Larry Robinson]

A Summer Night
Out on the lawn I lie in bed,
Vega conspicuous overhead
In the windless nights of June,
As congregated leaves complete
Their day’s activity; my feet
Point to the rising moon.
Lucky, this point in time and space
Is chosen as my working-place,
Where the sexy airs of summer,
The bathing hours and the bare arms,
The leisured drives through a land of farms
Are good to a newcomer.
Equal with colleagues in a ring
I sit on each calm evening
Enchanted as the flowers
The opening light draws out of hiding
With all its gradual dove-like pleading,
Its logic and its powers:
That later we, though parted then,
May still recall these evenings when
Fear gave his watch no look;
The lion griefs loped from the shade
And on our knees their muzzles laid,
And Death put down his book.
- W.H. Auden

[Larry Robinson]

Drought


I
Can you spare some water?https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2015-07-31_09-08-47.png
I’m down to rock bottom.


No water for horses.
Can’t even begin to think
about keepin’ the fruit trees alive.
Never been like this before.

Mid-December and the only fires
on my neighbors’ minds
are those that could
scar these hills again.
Crisp clear days
hardwoods aglow
but at night
no fires are needed.

Gardens long ago withered
wells gone dry
high country lakes dead and desolate
drained for the first planting
of winter crops in the valley below.

II
Among the Hopi Indians
when the rain doesn’t fall
each man and woman asks
What did I do wrong?
Did I stumble in the sacred dance?
lay down cornmeal with an evil thought?

Many seasons ago when
no rain had fallen
on the land and the spirit
for so long
I set out on a journey
in search of a rainmaker.
(It must be my fault.
It is because of me
the clouds always pass.)

Rabbis reverends roshis
and then atop the high mesas of Arizona
I ask the Hopi elder Grandfather David
what I can do.
A long night in the kiva
the feet of dancing kachinas
shaking the earth
and he says
Return to your home
Purify your heart
Ask nothing for yourself.

Simple and direct.
An impossible task
a quest for heroes
who left our world long ago
but what else to do?

III
Now years later
so many lives bone dry
dreams crushed by reality
visions incomplete
anger and bitterness seeping in
through the fault lines of the heart
and still no rain.

I search the radio dial
for a hopeful sign
and hear Smokey the Bear
died in a cage in Washington D.C.
He was 25 years old.

Discouraged but undaunted
I consult the Talmud at random
and find: ‘The rain falls from above
but it begins below.’

As always
It comes down to
letting the rain fall.
Dear friends,
please do what you can.

- Steve Sanfield

[REALnothings]

powerful poem! Thank you!
brings this to mind (allied in spirit)

And the breath of God, through the Masters and saints,
brought the rains and the sun in due season.
And when floods came or drought,
they did not huddle in fear or curse the sky,
but looked into their hearts to find the sin
and adjusted their sacrifice to the laws of Nature and God.
(Francis Brabazon, STAY WITH GOD, p. 125)

[Larry Robinson]

Sympathy


I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!


I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!


I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!


- Paul Lawrence Dunbar

[Larry Robinson]

On Grief


When you lose someone you love,
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you becomes fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence
Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.


Flickers of guilt kindle regret
For all that was left unsaid or undone.


There are days when you wake up happy;
Again inside the fullness of life,
Until the moment breaks
And you are thrown back
Onto the black tide of loss.
Days when you have your heart back,
You are able to function well
Until in the middle of work or encounter,
Suddenly with no warning,
You are ambushed by grief.


It becomes hard to trust yourself.
All you can depend on now is that
Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.


Gradually, you will learn acquaintance
With the invisible form of your departed;
And when the work of grief is done,
The wound of loss will heal
And you will have learned
To wean your eyes
From that gap in the air
And be able to enter the hearth
In your soul where your loved one
Has awaited your return
All the time.


- John O'Donohue

[Larry Robinson]

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe


Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry
is where we are ourselves
(though Sterling Brown said
“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I'”),
digging in the clam flats
for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.
Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)
is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.
Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,
and are we not of interest to each other?


- Elizabeth Alexander

[Larry Robinson]

Post time


What my father loved about the track —https://espn.go.com/photo/2012/0503/espnw_g_tickets_300.jpg
time compressed into three-minute segments,
the idea of someone losing his shirt
or a few bucks, or winning big …

He loved the last-minute window,
gamblers tense to place the last winning bet,
and all the losing tickets he stepped on
walking to the boy who ran to get his car.

Once, at ten, sleepless, I carried to his room
some nameless fear I wanted him to soothe.
He told me his secret: to lie on one side
and concentrate to keep away the dread.

I used to think only of my father’s anger.
Now I think of his loneliness.
- Robin Becker

[Larry Robinson]

Enough of This
Enough of this—names, titles, roles—
all the bits and pieces
that shored up this self
now crumbling beyond repair.
Let them go.
Watch the memories
and moments
spill like beads
from a broken string
too worn to knot again or replace.
One thing after another,
once piled up like a barricade
against who knows what.
Books, concepts, causes,
travels or acquired tastes—
all futile fumblings
for something to hold on to,
each a willful distraction
from what is happening now.
What matters in this moment?
Not these words but
the wind whistling,
the empty sky, the smell
and touch of grass,
and the clear taste
of water from this glass.

- Newton Smith

[Eller]

I enjoy the images and appreciate the sentiment expressed
However, what if...

that empty sky now burns,
the grass crunches below our feet
and the clear taste of water is befouled?

Perhaps those causes we fight for are not just futile fumblings or willful distractions...


Enough of This
Enough of this—names, titles, roles—
all the bits and pieces
that shored up this self
now crumbling beyond repair.
Let them go.
Watch the memories
and moments
spill like beads
from a broken string
too worn to knot again or replace.
One thing after another,
once piled up like a barricade
against who knows what.
Books, concepts, causes,
travels or acquired tastes—
all futile fumblings
for something to hold on to,
each a willful distraction
from what is happening now.
What matters in this moment?
Not these words but
the wind whistling,
the empty sky, the smell
and touch of grass,
and the clear taste
of water from this glass.

- Newton Smith

[REALnothings]

wow, love this esp!:


Let them go.
Watch the memories
and moments
spill like beads
from a broken string
too worn to knot again or replace.
One thing after another,
once piled up like a barricade
against who knows what.
Books, concepts, causes,
travels or acquired tastes—
all futile fumblings
for something to hold on to,
each a willful distraction


- Newton Smith

[Larry Robinson]

How Could I Ever Forget That Flash

How could I ever forget that flash of light! https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2015-08-06_12-05-43.png


https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2015-08-06_12-03-46-1.png
In a moment, thirty thousand people ceased to be,
The cries of fifty thousand killed
At the bottom of crushing darkness;
Through yellow smoke whirling into light,
Buildings split, bridges collapsed,
Crowded trams burnt as they rolled about
Hiroshima, all full of boundless heaps of embers.
Soon after, skin dangling like rags;
With hands on breasts;
Treading upon the broken brains;
Wearing shreds of burn cloth round their loins;
There came numberless lines of the naked,
all crying.
Bodies on the parade ground, scattered like
jumbled stone images of Jizo;
Crowds in piles by the river banks,
loaded upon rafts fastened to the shore,
Turned by and by into corpses
under the scorching sun;
in the midst of flame
tossing against the evening sky,
Round about the street where mother and
brother were trapped alive under the fallen house
The fire-flood shifted on.
On beds of filth along the Armory floor,
Heaps, and God knew who they were?
Heaps of schoolgirls lying in refuse
Pot-bellied, one-eyed, with half their skin peeled
off bald.
The sun shone, and nothing moved
But the buzzing flies in the metal basins
Reeking with stagnant ordure.
How can I forget that stillness
Prevailing over the city of three hundred thousands?
Amidst that calm,
How can I forget the entreaties
Of departed wife and child
Through their orbs of eyes,
Cutting through our minds and souls?
- Mitsuyoshi Toge


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

[Larry Robinson]

Hiroshima

How vast the seas of destruction,
the horror!
How ever could our countries speak again?
How could there be another spring?
The depth of such pain,
The unimaginable resilience
of this world!

Is there within us the
same?

- Scott O'Brien

[REALnothings]

beautiful! man, did you grab me with this!


Is there within us the
same?

[Larry Robinson]

Ode To Gaiety

Go gloom
Begone glum and grim
Off with the drab drear and grumble
It's time
its pastime
to come undone and come out laughing
time to wrap killjoys in wet blankets
and feed them to the sourpusses

Come frisky pals
Come forth wily wags
Loosen your screws and get off your rocker
Untie the strait lacer
Tie up the smarty pants
Tickle the crosspatch with josh and guffaw
Share quips and pranks with every victim
of grouch pomposity or blah

Woe to the bozo who says No to
tee hee ho ho and ha ha
Boo to the cleancut klutz who
wipes the smile off his face
Without gaiety
freedom is a chastity belt
Without gaiety
life is a wooden kimono

Come cheerful chums
Cut up and carry on
Crack your pots and split your sides
Boggle the bellyacher
Convulse the worrywart
Pratfall the prissy poos and the fuddy duds
Take drollery to heart or end up a deadhead
at the guillotine of the mindless

Be wise and go merry round
whatever you cherish
what you love to enjoy what you live to exert
And when the high spirits
call your number up
count on merriment all the way to the countdown
Long live hilarity euphoria and flumadiddle
Long live gaiety
for all the laity

- James Broughton

[Larry Robinson]

The Word That Is a Prayer


One thing you know when you say it:
all over the earth people are saying it with you;
a child blurting it out as the seizures take her,
a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital.
What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin:
at a street light, a man in a wool cap,
yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window;
he says, Please.
By the time you hear what he's saying,
the light changes, the cab pulls away,
and you don't go back, though you know
someone just prayed to you the way you pray.
Please: a word so short
it could get lost in the air
as it floats up to God like the feather it is,
knocking and knocking, and finally
falling back to earth as rain,
as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch,
collecting in drains, leaching into the ground,
and you walk in that weather every day.


- Ellery Akers

[Larry Robinson]

Blackberries
https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2015-08-11_13-48-05.png
It must be August.
Brambles have taken over the roads,
have conquered the verges
and now invade the rest.
The long fingernails of blackberry canes
run down the blackboard of my car.
"Sweeeeeeeet!" they shriek,
"Sweet, sweeeeeet,"
until I am driven mad with lust,
abandon the vehicle,
heedless of clothing or skin
and plunge into Sleeping Beauty's barrier,
a briar hoard of juice.

Drunk with sugar,
rival to hornets and wasps
I bumble from berry to berry,
wade in, then back out
against an ebb tide of claws.
Stigmata bloom: my blood or the plant's?
Perhaps a blend of both.
Later, at home, consuming crumble or tart,
I wonder at fine red road maps
etched on forearms and shins;
sweetness purchased at a price
I did not know
I was paying at the time.

It must be August.
Endings and beginnings
stand back to back.
Harvest's gloss eclipses
winter's pending loss,
and tangled caverns of seasons past
buttress this moment's bounty;
when Then and Yet-to-Be mingle--
dead cane and subtle seed--
and haunt the sweet sharp syrup
of this summer's day seduction.

- Jane L. Mickelson

[Larry Robinson]

Green Apples


In August we carried the old horsehair mattresshttps://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2015-08-12_12-11-38.png
To the back porch
And slept with our children in a row.
The wind came up the mountain into the orchard
Telling me something:
Saying something urgent.
I was happy.
The green apples fell on the sloping roof
And rattled down.
The wind was shaking me all night long;
Shaking me in my sleep
Like a definition of love,
Saying, this is the moment,


Here, now.


- Ruth Stone

[Larry Robinson]

Starfish


This is what life does. It lets you walk up tohttps://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2015-08-13_13-40-10.png
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?


Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.


And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.


Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.


So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.


- Eleanor Lerman

[Larry Robinson]

Ancestors & Angels

I write words to catch up to the ancestors
An angel told me the only way
to walk through fire
without getting burned
is to become fire.
Some days angels whisper
In my ear as I walk
Down the street and I fall in love
With every person I meet,
And I think, maybe this
Could be a bliss
Like when Dante met
Beatrice.
Other days all I see
is my collusion
with illusion.
Ghosts of projection
masquerading
as the radiant angel
of love.
You know I feel like
the ancestors
brought us together.
I feel like the ancestors
Brought us here and they
Expect great things.
They
expect us to say what
we think and
live how
we feel and follow the hard paths
that bring us near joy.
They expect us
to nurture
all the children.

I write poems to welcome angels
and conjure ancestors.
I pray to the angels of politics
and love.
I pray for justice sake
not to be relieved of my frustrations,
at the same time burning sage
and asking for patience.
I march with the people
to the border
between nations
where
everything stops
except
the greed of corporations.

Thoughts like comets
calculating the complexity
of the complicity.

There is so much noise in the oceans
the whales can’t hear each other.
We’re making them crazy,
driving dolphins insane.
What kind of ancestors
are we?

Thoughts like comets
leaving craters
in the landscape of my consciousness.

I pray to the ancestors and angels.

Meet me in the garden.
Meet me where spirit walks softly
in the cool of the evening.
Meet me in the garden
under the wings of the bird
of many colors.
Meet me
in the garden
of your longing.

Every breath
is a pilgrimage.

Every
breath
is a pilgrimage
to you.

I pray
to be
a conduit.

An angel told me:

The only way
to walk through fire—

become fire.
- Drew Dellinger

[Sara S]

Hate to take lines out of context, but these few are sooo great:

Sara


Ancestors & Angels

...
I march with the people
to the border
between nations
where
everything stops
except
the greed of corporations.
...
- Drew Dellinger

[REALnothings]

takes me there! thanks for the wings! \♥/

[Larry Robinson]

In Search of the Very First Seed


It is time to tend the garden again.
It is wise not to wait too long.
I have learned my lesson,
But it wasn’t easy!
For I have been bloodied clearing the bramble of neglect.

Sometimes I think I know what I am doing
and the garden laughs, “Ha you silly soul!”
I was lulled by the pause of darkness,
I grew fat and lost my way
But the garden is still there...waiting.

It is time to tend the garden again.
Its a dirty, filthy...lovely job.
I’d get help but everyone has their own garden to tend.
I thought my garden was a mess, then I saw others
and had to reconsider.

It is time to tend the garden again.
I am in search of the very first seed -
I think it came from the vapor like everything else.
I wonder - is LIFE a specialty of condensation?
I think my garden will teach me.

- Jeff Rooney

[Larry Robinson]

Pride


If I claim I was a terrible, horrible,
Evil no-good person,
It would be a lie, and it would be
Wanting always to be the best or the worst.
So now I’m destined to wander,
My bag full of pride a lot lighter,
And if I say I am done
With whatever ails me,
That would also be a lie.
I am not done, will never be done
Till the day I die,
But I am content to be human,
Naked and shaking with love
At the moment, and the next moment,
I just can’t say.


- Noelle Kocot

[Larry Robinson]

Peach

Having endured the annual descent into bleak Novemberhttps://freshorganicgardening.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/peach-tree.jpg
and winter – even a California winter –
with its diminished imagination of the edible,
the monotonous shuffle of apples and tasteless bananas,
I long to hear from those messengers
from the Other World of summer.

Asparagus appears first, quickly reserving a space on the grill
for its partner, the fresh salmon (once the price comes down).

Later on I’ll thrill to the advent of vine-ripe tomatoes,

especially the black crims that go so well in Greek salad,

and those glorious red peppers.

But when July announces mid-summer,
Sweet Jesus, the peaches arrive!
A joyous procession of yellow peaches, white peaches,
miniature peaches, peaches with every kind of exotic name.

I admire them, kiss and fondle them,
check them every few hours until they reach that fine line
between ripe and overripe.

I like to make a sliced peach, almond butter and cream cheese sandwich, with really dark, French roast coffee, cream, no sugar!

Call me silly, call me compulsive, say, “Get a life!”
I call myself peach lover, peach aficionado,
devotee of all things round and pink.
Oh great apparition of the mother-goddess herself!
I prostrate myself to you 108 times.
I have lived another year.

- Barry Spector

[Larry Robinson]

The Moment



<tbody>
And not once,
but many times over,
again and again,
how we disappeared
into that deep well
of darkness, shuddering beneath that load of silence,
clinging to our narrow ledge.


Yet the darkness, sometimes,
unfolded as light.
Our atoms dissolved in it,
each separate molecule opening
into a radiant disk of feeling.


How still we became,
witness and thing seen,
spectacle and observer,
each point admitting an untrammeled flood.



</tbody>
- Dorothy Walters

[Larry Robinson]

The Second Music


Now I understand that there are two melodies playing,
one below the other, one easier to hear, the other
lower, steady, perhaps more faithful for being less heard
yet always present.
When all other things seem lively and real,
this one fades. Yet the notes of it
touch as gently as fingertips, as the sound
of the names laid over each child at birth.
I want to stay in that music without striving or cover.
If the truth of our lives is what it is playing,
the telling is so soft
that this mortal time, this irrevocable change,
becomes beautiful. I stop and stop again
to hear the second music.
I hear the children in the yard, a train, then birds.
All this is in it and will be gone. I set my ear to it as I would to a heart.


- Annie Lighthart

[Larry Robinson]

Learning

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

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

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

- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

To The Reader: If You Asked Me

I want you with me, and yet you are the end
of my privacy. Do you see how these rooms
have become public? How we glance to see if—
who? Who did you imagine?
Surely we’re not here alone, you and I.

I’ve been wandering
where the cold tracks of language
collapse into cinders, unburnable trash.
Beyond that, all I can see is the remote cold
of meteors before their avalanches of farewell.

If you asked me what words
a voice like this one says in parting,
I’d say, I’m sweeping an empty factory
toward which I feel neither hostility nor nostalgia.
I’m just a broom, sweeping.

- Chase Twichell

[Larry Robinson]

Three Seasons

In the early seventies
Greg and I moved back to the land.
Here, no National Guard, no protests
on the steps of Bank of America,
no hash to smuggle into Isla Vista.
We watched leaves turn copper and vermilion
while rutting elk bellowed through air so still
even the aspen refused to quiver.
The radio played country western.
The local paper came twice a month.
Outside, winter drifts swallowed
fence posts. Inside, I couldn’t feed
the smoke-stained fireplace enough
to warm the house and didn’t think
about the rifle tucked behind
his Gibson guitar in the bedroom closet.
Nights shortened, river ice shattered,
and every morning another newborn calf
shimmered among rangy herds
grazing in spring melt.
With pickax and shovel, Greg
tilled thawing dirt for our garden
but never opened the packet of seeds.
When he told me he wanted to leave this place,
I thought he meant our home.
It didn’t occur to me to hide the bullets.


- Teetle Clawson

[Larry Robinson]

Point Reyes


Sandpipers at the margin
in the moon -
Bright fan of the flat creek
On dark sea sand,
rock boom beyond:
The work of centuries and wars,
a car,
Is parked a mile above
where the dirt road ends.
In naked gritty sand,
Eye-stinging salty driftwood campfire
smoke, out far.
It all begins again.
Sandpipers chasing the shiny surf
in the moon light -
By a fire at the beach.


- Gary Snyder

[Larry Robinson]

So Many Gifts


There are so many gifts
Still unopened from your birthday,
There are so many hand-crafted presents
That have been sent to you by God.

The Beloved does not mind repeating,
"Everything I have is also yours."

Please forgive Hafiz and the Friend
If we break into a sweet laughter
When your heart complains of being thirsty
When ages ago
Every cell in your soul
Capsized forever
Into this infinite golden sea.

Indeed,
A lover's pain is like holding one's breath
Too long
In the middle of a vital performance,

In the middle of one of Creation's favorite
Songs.

Indeed, a lover's pain is this sleeping,
This sleeping,
When God just rolled over and gave you
Such a big good-morning kiss!

There are so many gifts, my dear,
Still unopened from your birthday.

O, there are so many hand-crafted presents
That have been sent to your life
From God.

- Hafiz

[Larry Robinson]

Quartz Clock

The ideas of a physicist
can be turned into useful objects:
a rocket, a quartz clock,
a microwave oven for cooking.
The ideas of poems turn into only themselves,
as the hands of the clock do,
or the face of a person.
It changes, but only more into the person.


- Jane Hirshfield

[Larry Robinson]

Inquiry


Is it wrong to be so in love with coffee?
Is it wrong to add a shot of Irish Cream?
Is it wrong to not return the drug store lip gloss
that was already opened when I
handed it to the checkout lady?
I really didn’t see….
Its slick pyramid smells
of sickly sweet gardenia and as I
slide its surface across my lips I
imagine who might have torn the plastic wrapper:
A homeless woman seeking
just one ounce of glamor.
A single mother scrambling
to reach an interview.
A clutch of laughing,
purple-shadowed teens.


Is it wrong to sit here,
hail falling on gravel and skylight,
my children absent, learning of biomes and ABCs,
and absorb the stain of
someone else’s invisible longing
upon my fire- and spirit-warmed face?


- Amy Elizabeth Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

If You are a Man

If you are a man, and believe in the destiny of mankind
then say to yourself: we will cease to care
about property and money and mechanical devices,
and open our consciousness to the deep, mysterious life
that we are now cut off from.
The machine shall be abolished from the earth again;
it is a mistake that mankind has made;
money shall cease to be, and property shall cease to perplex
and we will find the way to immediate contact with life
and with one another.
To know the moon as we have never known
yet she is knowable.
To know a man as we have never known
a man, as never yet a man was knowable, yet still shall be.


- D.H. Lawrence

[Larry Robinson]

Photograph


my grandsons
spinning in their joy
universe
keep them turning turning
black blurs against the window
of the world
for they are beautiful
and there is trouble coming
round and round and round


- Lucille Clifton

[Larry Robinson]

The Fisherman


Although I can see him still.
The freckled man who goes
To a grey place on a hill
In grey Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast his flies,
It's long since I began
To call up to the eyes
This wise and simple man.
All day I'd looked in the face
What I had hoped 'twould be
To write for my own race
And the reality;
The living men that I hate,
The dead man that I loved,
The craven man in his seat,
The insolent unreproved,
And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer,
The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear,
The clever man who cries
The catch-cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.


Maybe a twelvemonth since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man,
And his sun-freckled face,
And grey Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark under froth,


And the down-turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream;
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream;
And cried, 'Before I am old
I shall have written him one
poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.'


- William Butler Yeats

[Larry Robinson]

Waving Goodbye


A new suitcase in one hand,
car keys in the other and finally
off to college for the first time.

Looking back past the walnut tree
a last glance at the old house
his family still waving good-bye
good-bye from behind
the screened-in porch.

Shifting gears on Main Street,
thinking of things left behind
his old room and a medal from track
closet full of memories and old clothes
all still too good
to give away.

Homecoming for the thanksgiving feast
stunned at the barrenness of his room
just one change of socks and underwear remaining
in the top right drawer of the otherwise
empty chest.

Staring down the hallway at Christmas,
past the presents and the lighted tree
he saw his room was gone
the doorway and the door
across from his brother’s room.

At spring break under the walnut tree
staring again at the screened-in porch
he was certain
the house was gone.

Trying one last time in June
the porch was gone
the tree was gone
Main Street no where
to be found.

Driving away past his disappearing high school
he wondered was there a medal from track?
Had he ever had a brother?

Clutching the wheel in front
he knew he must hurry
his road disappearing
his town disappearing
and in the rear view mirror,
was that his life?
slowly waving
good-bye, good-bye?

- Doug von Koss

[Larry Robinson]

Squirrels


Something blurred, warmed
in the eye’s corner, like woodsmoke
becoming tears;
but when you turned to look


the stoop was still, the pumpkin
and tacky mum pot wouldn’t talk —
just a rattle
at the gutter and a sense


of curtains, somewhere, pulled.
Five of   them later, scarfing the oak’s
black bole,
laying a dream of snakes.


Needy and reticent
at once, these squirrels in charred November
recall, in Virgil,
what it is to feel:


moods, half-moods,
swarming, then darting loose; obscure
hunches that refuse
to speak, but still expect


in some flash of   luck
to be revealed. The less you try
to notice them,
the more they will know of  you.


- Nate Klug

[Larry Robinson]

The Otter and the Seaweed


This is what you need to know:
you need to know that otters wrap themselves
in seaweed so they won’t,
while sleeping at night, float out to sea . . .
Are you imagining this?
Can you see the otters actually doing this?
Does it break your heart a little?
Does it seduce you just a bit
into loving more
this odd hard world?
Oh otters, wrap yourselves tight! And sleep,
exactly like you do, floating but seaweed-held
in our salty living waters! Oh otters,
wrap yourselves tight! And you,
the one who doesn’t, the one who doesn’t
tether himself down right,
we are with you as you float away,
we are with you as you sleep
and lose yourself in the night.


- Teddy Macker

[Larry Robinson]

Poem for the day:

September

Detaching myself this autumn day
from world news, I turn to
the ravens and finches for
authentic reports. Walnuts drop,
cracking open just enough
for beaks to pry their meat
or squirrels to glean and plant
in their secret gardens.

"Last days for baths
in the fountain," broadcast the finches.
Eating and drinking, everyday toil,
I think how we share
a similar life, except for wars,
crime and generations of greed.

From what book do they learn
to sing? to roost each night
on a favorite branch, or turn up
half-way to the border, their annual
winter circuit balancing each
hemisphere with pinioned precision
and plumed, imponderable grace?

- Andrea English

[Larry Robinson]

Repeating History


In Krakow, on the hour
A trumpeter recalls
an interrupted call, warning invasion,
The alarm arrested by an arrow
piercing the psyche
of a people. Repeat


Everywhere, injuries
enshrined, history felt
Repeatedly, wounds
remembered. The wounded,
dead forgotten by the bowman,
marksman, indifferent
bomber. Forgotten by the one
who ordered the arrow.


We repeat, but cannot
delete fear, erase blood.
We repeat slights and stabs,
rapes and rage of the ages.


All of us are history
Redacted, invented
Stories of our innocence
And their guilt.


We carry our persistent culture,
Our ignorance of a fragile
Original root—a curious explorer
Into darkness, into


Separation from a whole
Which held us. Hewing a
Path toward more, a forked
Road, we move


Away from each other,
Away from ourselves.


- Rebecca del Rio

[Mindful Negotiator]

Repeating History...Thanks for sharing this particularly beautiful, poignant, and haunting soft cry for the species to wake up. It moves me to register my discomfort and terror over the continued enshrining of 9-11 debris around the country. These memorials "am become death - the destroyer of worlds." They divide, condemn, justify the culture of bigotry-ridden permanent warfare.

Forgive me, Larry if these comments are inappropriate for your poetry postings. But today's poem moved me deeply and touched a nerve, as one who walked through WTC daily for five years as a young man, and who now quakes at the horrors being wrought in the name of our loss and grief.

[Larry Robinson]

Drought

The fir tree points
claw needles up
imploring rain
for greening
dry branches display
their prickle fingers
thirsting for mist
or thunder
Here ,now,there
brown spots appear
and nesting birds
peck up their beaks
Cawing for worm and water
Calling for nourishment
The fir tree groans
a stanza of its own
Rooted to ground
Beneath a cloudless sky
Rain…please…rain
Bless its sturdy stance
from root to tip
The fir stands
Defiant in all climate
every day is drier
There is fire on the way

- Maryann Schacht

[Larry Robinson]

No One Leaves Home


no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough
the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere


is safer than here


- Warshan Shire



<tbody>
Warsan Shire (https://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=fW7Nd6g%2Bv3sS8ktPoJ2G%2BoFUkQmrBEmD) is a Kenyan-born Somali poet, writer and educator based in London. Born in 1988, Warsan has read her work extensively all over Britain and internationally – including recent readings in South Africa, Italy, Germany, Canada, North America and Kenya- and her début book, ‘TEACHING MY MOTHER HOW TO GIVE BIRTH (https://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=oKGC0bRsHvstpltEKbm7vI3qhXuwtmYi)’ (flipped eye), was published in 2011. Her poems have been published in Wasafiri, Magma and Poetry Review and in the anthology ‘The Salt Book of Younger Poets’ (Salt, 2011). She is the current poetry editor at SPOOK magazine. In 2012 she represented Somalia at the Poetry Parnassus, the festival of the world poets at the Southbank, London. She is a Complete Works II poet. Her poetry has been translated into Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Warsan is also the unanimous winner of the 2013 Inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize.


</tbody>

<tbody>




</tbody>

[Larry Robinson]

The New Colossus


Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"




- Emma Lazarus
New York City, 1883
(Inscribed on the Statue of Liberty)

[Larry Robinson]

In Tribute to Etty Hillesum - Author of An Interrupted Life, Murdered at Auschwitz 10/30/43


(1)
There are enemies
who want to make
your world narrow
and they say
it’s not so bad, there are
plenty of shops that serve your kind,

but the fences tighten
and each morning the boundary gets closer
and there is no place left to go.

Etty, wakes to learn
the forest in her city
is closed to Jews.

The pleasure of a picnic
has been stolen
and to love life is a criminal transgression.

The few trees outside the window,
she writes
must be a forest for us now.

We must become full on meager
scraps of God’s world
trafficking illegal joy.


(2)
In 1942
they loaded cattle cars with Jews.
Etty said,
“All right. So now I learn
to travel light.

She took the Bible and
Letters to a Young Poet
by Rainer Maria Rilke.

She said
“We’ll live
until we’re dead,”
and in the dark
she sat and read.


- Simone Denny

[Larry Robinson]

Prayer


Do you really think
that God cares
who wins the Super Bowl
or the lottery or the war
or who gets the parking place
or the promotion?


Don't waste your prayers
asking for special favors
of the One who has given
us our days and our nights,
our time on earth,
sequoias and poppies,
blue whales and blue herons
and - even more - each other.


Here is the only prayer I know
worth the breath.
Say it with me:
Wow!
Thank you!
Amen!


- Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Mystic

They call all experience of the senses mystic, when the
experience is considered.
So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it
the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth
and the insistence of the sun.

All of which things I can surely taste in a good apple.
Though some apples taste preponderantly of water, wet and sour
and some of too much sun, brackish sweet
like lagoon-water, that has been too much sunned.

If I say I taste these things in an apple, I am called mystic, which
means a liar.
The only way to eat an apple is to hog it down like a pig
and taste nothing
that is real.

But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake.
Hogging it down like a pig I call the feeding of corpses.

- D.H. Lawrence

[Larry Robinson]

School Prayer


In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon

and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life
- wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell - on Earth my home,

and in the mansions of the stars.

- Diane Ackerman

[Larry Robinson]

There, She is Gone! Here She Comes!


I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side
spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for
the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength, I
stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck
of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle
with each other.

Then someone at my side says: "There, she is gone"!

"Gone where"?

Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in
mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side
and she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to
her destined port.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the
moment when someone at my side says, "There, she is gone"!
there are other eyes watching her coming, and other
voices ready to take up the glad shout: "Here she comes"!

- Henry Van Dyke

[Ronaldo]

Sent this to a friend who likes ships.
32865


There, She is Gone! Here She Comes!

I am standing upon the seashore....

[Larry Robinson]

For Guy Davenport

Within the circles of our lives
we dance the circles of the years,
we dance the circles of the seasons
within the circles of the years,
the cycles of the moon

within the circles of the seasons,
the circles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again, we come and go,
changed, changing. Hands
join, unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy. The circles turn,
each giving into each, into all.
Only music keeps us here,

each by all the others held.
In the hold of hands and eyes
we turn in pairs, that joining
joining each to all again.

And then we turn aside, alone
out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.

- Wendell Berry