Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Beautiful Wreckage

What if I didn’t shoot the old lady
running away from our patrol,
or the old man in the back of the head,
or the boy in the marketplace?

Or what if the boy—but he didn’t
have a grenade, and the woman in Hue
didn’t lie in the rain in a mortar pit
with seven Marines just for food,

Gaffney didn’t get hit in the knee,
Ames didn’t die in the river, Ski
didn’t die in a medevac chopper
between Con Thien and Da Nang.

In Vietnamese, Con Thien means
place of angels. What if it really was
instead of the place of rotting sandbags,
incoming heavy artillery, rats and mud.

What if the angels were Ames and Ski,
or the lady, the man, and the boy,
and they lifted Gaffney out of the mud
and healed his shattered knee?

What if none of it happened the way I said?
Would it all be a lie?
Would the wreckage be suddenly beautiful?
Would the dead rise up and walk?

- W.D. Erhart

[Larry Robinson]

We’ve come a long way toward getting nowhere

My obsession with Jews is an obsession
with one Jew. I look at her walking
and wonder what anyone could have
against Jews, at her sleeping
or hunting for her keys in the morning,
which she does often, lose her keys
when she has to go to work, suggesting
she doesn’t want to, and maybe this
is the problem with Jews:
they don’t want to leave. Or they eat
lots of chicken. Or worry the black
of their skirts doesn’t match the black
of their tops. Or like children more
than babies. Or fret over their mothers.
My Jewish problem is figuring out
why America in 2016 has a dab
of 1930s German Fascism to it—
people at political rallies
yelling crap about the Jews.
If I thought it would do any good,
I’d go to Topeka or wherever
and bring Eve with her troubled wardrobe
and her love of chicken and fascination
with children between two and thirteen,
when they can talk but before
they’ve begun planning the murder
of their parents, bring her face-to-face
with the screamers and ask, So these
are the freckles you hate? I would—we have
a lot of Amex points and I’ve never been
to Topeka or wherever, and I’m sure wherever
is very nice. And whenever we travel
to wherever, whatever people say
and however they say it, Eve’s freckles
will be the same, kind of cute
and kind of Jewish,
just like all her other parts
that do and do not have freckles,
in an inventory I alone
get to take, though trust me—
after repeated inspection, I can attest
that underneath it all, she, like many
of the people you know or are,
is ticklish, wrinkly, sexy, scarred—
since Jews really are relentless
when it comes to being human.

- Bob Hicok

[Larry Robinson]

In This Broken Time


Tyrants will roar their victories,
painting their red dreams
on the lids of the nation—
And kindness will be kindness.
Greed will scoop out the soft places
with sharp spoons
leaving only hunger—
And mercy will be mercy.
Fear will cry its hot misguided wrath,
sending nightmares through the land,
shocking dreamers from their sleep in dread—
And courage will be courage.
Brutality will shake its tiny fist
gloved thick with power;
people will be killed in shameful ways,
the storms of grief and rage will howl—
And goodness will be goodness.
In the end, no matter the deceit,
no matter how compelling,
we can’t be broken from our truest selves—
we always circle back around
and find our honor where we left it.
Our people, our American people,
our many-colored threads
stretched tight in warp and weft
between that which knows
its own goodness
and that which does not—
Will claim the land again for our children
and the enemy’s children, too,
mending finally all the tears in the
cloth of who we once and still
so dream of being.

- Kalia Mussetter

[Larry Robinson]

Rain & Rachamim

I love the rain.
Makes me think of rachamim, of the Divine well spring of compassion.
Nothing better than falling asleep to the rain
the quiet rumble on the roof
like a cat purring on your lap
the gurgle of the gutters - the sound of all things wet and soggy outside
while we are warm under the covers
inside.

How lucky we are to have a roof over our heads
so that we can enjoy the rain and
so many other things –

Thank you God for the rain and our roofs
our shelter
from the storm.

Let your rachamim fall on all your creatures,
spread over us a shelter of rachamim
of compassion and
Shalom.

- George Gittleman

[Larry Robinson]

Passover Remembered


Pack nothing.
Bring only your determination to serve
and your willingness to be free.

Don't wait for the bread to rise.
Take nourishment for the journey,
but eat standing,
be ready to move at a moment's notice.

Do not hesitate to leave your old ways behind - fear, silence, submission.

Only surrender to the need of the time;
to love justice and walk humbly with your God.

Do not take time to explain to the neighbors.
Tell only a few trusted friends and family members.

Then begin quickly, before you have time to sink back into the old ways.

Set out in the dark.
I will send fire to warm and encourage you.
I will be with you in the fire
and I will be with you in the cloud.

You will learn to eat new food and find refuge in new places.
I will give you dreams in the desert
to guide you safely home to that place
you have not yet seen.

The stories you will tell one another around the fires in the dark
will make you strong and wise.

Outsiders will attack you and some who follow you,
and at times you will get weary
and turn on each other
from fear and fatigue and blind forgetfulness.

You have been preparing for this for hundreds of years.
I am sending you into the wilderness to make a new way
And to learn my ways more deeply.

Some of you will be so changed
by weathers and wanderings
that even your closest friends
will have to learn your features
as though for the first time.
Some of you will not change at all.

Some will be abandoned by your dearest loves
and misunderstood by those
who have known you since birth
and feel abandoned by you.

Some will find new friendship
in unlikely faces, and old friends
as faithful, and true
as the pillar of God's flame.

Sing songs as you go,
and hold close together.
You may at times grow confused
and lose your way.

Continue to call each other
By the names I’ve given you,
To help you remember who you are.
Touch each other and keep telling the stories.

Make maps as you go,
remembering the way back
from before you were born.

So you will be only the first
of many waves of deliverance on these desert seas.
It is the first of many beginnings
your Paschaltide.
Remain true to this mystery.

Pass on the whole story.

Do not go back.

I am with you now
and I am waiting for you.

- Alla Renee Bozarth

[Larry Robinson]

Paschal

Easter was the old North
Goddess of the dawn.
She rises daily in the East
And yearly in spring for the great

Paschal candle of the sun.
Her name lingers like a spot
Of gravy in the figured vestment
Of the language of the Britons.

Her totem the randy bunny.
Our very Thursdays and Wednesdays
Are stained by syllables of thunder
And Woden's frenzy.

O my fellow-patriots loyal to this
Our modern world of high heels,
Vaccination, brain surgery—
May they pass over us, the old

Jovial raptors, Apollonian flayers,
Embodiments. Egg-hunt,
Crucifixion. Supper of encrypted
Dishes: bitter, unrisen, a platter

Compass of martyrdom,
Ground-up apples and walnuts
In sweet wine to embody mortar
Of affliction, babies for bricks.

Legible traces of the species
That devises the angel of death
Sailing over our doorpost
Smeared with sacrifice.

- Robert Pinsky

[Larry Robinson]

Easter Exultet

Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision
shipwrecks you.
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
Be prepared
to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane.
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!
Honeymoon with Big Joy!

- James Broughton

[Ronaldo]

39819

[Sara S]

I especially like "upholstering a rut"!

[Larry Robinson]

On the fifth day
the scientists who studied the rivers
were forbidden to speak
or to study the rivers.

The scientists who studied the air
were told not to speak of the air,
and the ones who worked for the farmers
were silenced,
and the ones who worked for the bees.

Someone, from deep in the Badlands,
began posting facts.

The facts were told not to speak
and were taken away.
The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent.

Now it was only the rivers
that spoke of the rivers,
and only the wind that spoke of its bees,

while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees
continued to move toward their fruit.

The silence spoke loudly of silence,
and the rivers kept speaking,
of rivers, of boulders and air.

Bound to gravity, earless and tongueless,
the untested rivers kept speaking.

Bus drivers, shelf stockers,
code writers, machinists, accountants,
lab techs, cellists kept speaking.

They spoke, the fifth day,
of silence.

- Jane Hirshfield

[Larry Robinson]

The Fall of Rome
(for Cyril Connolly)


The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

- W. H. Auden

[kpage9]

some of us have specialized in rut upholstery--and o lord the range of styles and comfort levels!



I especially like "upholstering a rut"!

[Larry Robinson]

What Song Should We Sing

The massive overhead crane comes
when we wave to it, lets down
its heavy claws and waits tamely
within its power while we hook up
the slabs of three-quarter-inch
steel. Takes away the ponderous
reality when we wave again.
What name do we have for that?
What song is there for its voice?
What is the other face of Yahweh?
The god who made the slug and ferret,
the maggot and shark in his image.
What is the carol for that?
Is it the song of nevertheless,
or of the empire of our heart? We carry
language as our mind, but are we
the dead whale that sinks grandly
for years to reach the bottom of us?

- Jack Gilbert

[Larry Robinson]

A Ritual to Read to Each OtherRelated Poem Content Details

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

There She Is

When I go into the garden, there she is.
The specter holds up her arms to show
that her hands are eaten off.
She is silent because of the agony.
There is blood on her face.
I can see she has done this to herself.
So she would not feel the other pain.
And it is true, she does not feel it.
She does not even see me.
It is not she anymore, but the pain itself
that moves her. I look and think
how to forget. How can I live while she
stands there? And if I take her life
what will that make of me? I cannot
touch her, make her conscious.
It would hurt her too much.
I hear the sound all through the air
that was her eating, but it is on its own now,
completely separate from her. I think
I am supposed to look. I am not supposed
to turn away. I am supposed to see each detail
and all expression gone. My God, I think,
if paradise is to be here
it will have to include her.

- Linda Gregg

[Larry Robinson]

What We Need Is Here

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

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

We Have A Beautiful Mother

We have a beautiful
Mother
Her hills
Are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
Hills.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her oceans
Are wombs
Her wombs
Oceans.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her teeth
The white stones
At the edge
Of the water
The summer
Grasses
Her plentiful
Hair.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her green lap
Immense
Her brown embrace
Eternal
Her blue body
Everything we know.

- Alice Walker

[Larry Robinson]

Auschwitz-Birkenau

To awaken here
Is to hear silence
Shrieking in cold,
Empty corridors, to awaken

In a heart hewn
By fear, a darkness
Closed to compassion.
Any kindness

Is all kindness--a treachery
We must enter, allow to enter us--
Ask us, "who are you here
In this hallowed hell?"

No where to step
Where ash hasn't fallen,
Where cruelty hasn't walked,
Fed on our tender fear.

Who am I in this
Enormous evil?
A dog waiting at a platform?
Or the child terrified of dogs,

Clutching a brother's hand?
A boy alive forever,
Forever frightened so we
Will know what we can do.

I move through ghosts, numb.
Like others, I am dumb,
In respectful, awful silence,
Save for voices screaming,

Who I am? Am I
The selfless priest crammed
In a standing cell, dying
For a stranger who survived?

Who am I here in history's
Hall of horrors? Walls lined
With visages, victims
Who haven't yet imagined

What we can do--will do.

Not Nazis, not
Germans, but humans
Did this. We
Do this now.

To awaken here is
To see that casual blue
Chip in the sky's
Somber gray soul,

Innocent opening
letting light flow down,
Bless this damned,
Degraded place.

To awaken here,
Is to know one's
Darkness, and not
Turning from it, see that light.

- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

<style type="text/css">p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px Helvetica; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000}p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px Helvetica; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000; min-height: 22.0px}span.s1 {font-kerning: none}span.Apple-tab-span {white-space:pre}</style>Education?

To define a child by A to Z
Refines the art of mockery;
Such pretense of intellect
Harbors collective disrespect;
Uniform charts on every wall
Imitate Apollo perfectly apall.
Yes this urgency to order
Pretends the goddess of disorder
Is not a worthy Nemesis,
And that her cousin Dionysius
Has forsworn wine: his bride Psyche
Become a bridesmaid of Nike.

- Brian McSweeney

[Larry Robinson]

The Destruction of Sennacherib

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

- Lord Byron

[Larry Robinson]

Poetry Contest for Adults and Youth


CALL FOR ENTRIES: The History of Sonoma County
A Poetry Contest for Adults and Youth
Deadline for entry: May 1, 2017
SCA announces a poetry contest, entitled "The History of Sonoma County" which invites local writers to submit poems about the history of Sonoma County. Poems selected from this contest will be displayed at Sebastopol Center for the Arts and winners will be invited to attend and read their winning poem at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts on June 10. The contest juror is Sonoma County Poet Laureate, Iris Jamahl Dunkle. Dunkle is the author of two poetry collections, Gold Passage (2013) and There's a Ghost in this Machine of Air (2015).
The entry deadline is Monday, May 1, 2017. Youth, teens and adults are invited to submit their work and may submit up to three entries per contestant. The fee for adults is $8 for members of the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, $10 for non-members, and $5 for youth entries age 18 and under.
Awards:


One juror will select the winning entries.
Three Winners will be selected in each of the following categories: Youth (K-5), Junior High (6-8), High School (9-12), Adult
Winners will read their poems at a reception June 10, 7:30pm,
Winning entries will be displayed at SCA
First place winners in all categories will each be awarded a $50 prize, Second place winners will receive a $25 prize and Third place winner will receive a $15 prize.
Winning entries may be published in SCA's "QuARTerly" and on the website.

Entry Guidelines:


Entries are online only to be uploaded at: www.jotform.com
All entries must be original, unpublished, and not previously exhibited or read at SCA.
All entries must be submitted in a font no smaller than 12 pt. Times New Roman (or equivalent).
Each entry must be submitted in a Word Doc or PDF file, on a single 8½ x 11" page, with margins no less than 1 inch around.
Writers may submit a maximum of 3 entries.
Writers must submit two copies of each entry, one blind copy (without any author identification for judging), and a second copy identifying the author and city of residency for display. Each entry must be named as follows: lastname.firstname.1name and lastname.firstname.noname (for the copy without a name.) For example:

Smith.Amy.1name and Smith.Amy.1noname
Smith.Amy.2name and Smith.Amy.2noname
Smith.Amy.3name and Smith.Amy.3noname


Due to volume considerations, a literary panel may prescreen entries.
Deadlines & Fees:
Entries must be submitted online by May 1, 2017.
Sebastopol Center for the Arts members: $8 per entry (membership is $40 annually).
Non-members: $10 per entry.
Youth age 18 and under $5 per entry.
Winners will be notified by May 25.
For more information, email [email protected] or 707-829-4797 or visit www.sebarts.org

[Larry Robinson]

The Charge of the Goddess

Now listen to the words of the Great Mother,
who was of old also called among men Artemis,
Astarte, Athene, Dione, Melusine, Aphrodite,
Cerridwen, Dana, Arianrhod, Isis, Bride,
and by many other names.
At her altars, the youth of Lacedaemon in Sparta made due sacrifice.


Whenever ye have need of any thing,
once in the month,
and better it be when the moon is full,
then shall ye assemble in some secret place, and adore the spirit of me,
who am Queen of all witches.


There shall ye assemble, ye who are fain to learn all sorcery,
yet have not won its deepest secrets;
to these will I teach things that are as yet unknown.


And ye shall be free from slavery;
and as a sign that ye be really free,
ye shall be naked in your rites;
and ye shall dance, sing, feast, make music and love, all in my praise.
For mine is the ecstasy of the spirit,
and mine also is joy on earth;
for my law is love unto all beings.


Keep pure your highest ideal;
strive ever towards it, let naught stop you or turn you aside;
for mine is the secret door which opens upon the land of youth,
and mine is the cup of wine of life,
and the cauldron of Cerridwen,
which is the Holy Grail of immortality.


I am the gracious Goddess,
who gives the gift of joy unto the heart of man.
Upon earth, I give the knowledge of the spirit eternal;
and beyond death, I give peace, and freedom,
and reunion with those who have gone before.


Nor do I demand sacrifice;
for behold, I am the Mother of all living,
and my love is poured out upon the earth.


Hear ye the words of the Star Goddess;
she in the dust of whose feet are the hosts of heaven,
whose body encircles the universe.


I who am the beauty
of the green earth and the white moon upon
the mysteries of the waters,
I call upon your soul to arise and come unto me.


For I am the soul of nature
that gives life to the universe.
From me all things proceed and unto me
they must return.
Let My worship be in the
heart that rejoices, for behold,
all acts of love and pleasure
are My rituals.


Let there be beauty and strength,
power and compassion,
honor and humility,
mirth and reverence within you.
And you who seek to know me,
know that the seeking and yearning
will avail you not,
unless you know the Mystery:
for if that which you seek,
you find not within yourself,
you will never find it without.


For behold,
I have been with you from the beginning,
and I am that which is attained
at the end of desire

- Traditional by Doreen Valiente, as adapted by Starhawk

[Larry Robinson]

Mother Church No. 3

Kin Kletso/Yellow House
Chaco Canyon, San Juan County, New Mexico
Anasazi Ruins, AD 1125-1130
for Henri, at 2

You step down into the Flat World
Then ask me to say it, to explain

How our name can mean both ancestor
And enemy. Your body begins in four directions.

Here, one calendar takes eighteen years.
I am three. One day is an eyelash.

Your body is a segment of prehistoric road,
A buried stairwell with only the top stair obvious.

We are alluvial, obsidian.
Sometimes the ground swells

With disappointment; sometimes we know our mountains
Will be renamed after foreign saints.

We sing nine-hundred-year-old hymns
That instruct us in how to sit still

For forty-nine years
Through a fifty-year drought.

We climb down through the hole anyway,
And agree to the arrangement.

- Robin Coste Lewis

[Larry Robinson]

Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him

1. Do gorillas have birthdays?
Yes. Like the rainbow, they happen.
Like the air, they are not observed.

2. Do butterflies make a noise?
The wire in the butterfly’s tongue
hums gold.
Some men hear butterflies
even in winter.

3. Are they part of our family?
They forgot us, who forgot how to fly.

4. Who tied my navel? Did God tie it?
God made the thread: O man, live forever!
Man made the knot: enough is enough.

5. If I drop my tooth in the telephone
will it go through the wires and bite someone’s ear?
I have seen earlobes pierced by a tooth of steel.
It loves what lasts.
It does not love flesh.
It leaves a ring of gold in the wound.

6. If I stand on my head
will the sleep in my eye roll up into my head?
Does the dream know its own father?
Can bread go back to the field of its birth?

7. Can I eat a star?
Yes, with the mouth of time
that enjoys everything.

8. Could we Xerox the moon?
This is the first commandment:

I am the moon, thy moon.
Thou shalt have no other moons before thee.

9. Who invented water?
The hands of the air, that wanted to wash each other.

10. What happens at the end of numbers?
I see three men running toward a field.
At the edge of the tall grass, they turn into light.

11. Do the years ever run out?
God said, I will break time’s heart.
Time ran down like an old phonograph.
It lay flat as a carpet.
At rest on its threads, I am learning to fly.

- Nancy Willard

[Larry Robinson]

Horses at Midnight without a Moon


Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

- Jack Gilbert

[Larry Robinson]

Earth

Let the day grow on you upward
through your feet,
the vegetal knuckles,

to your knees of stone,
until by evening you are a black tree;
feel, with evening,

the swifts thicken your hair,
the new moon rising out of your forehead,
and the moonlit veins of silver

running from your armpits
like rivulets under white leaves.
Sleep, as ants

cross over your eyelids.
You have never possessed anything
as deeply as this.

This is all you have owned
from the first outcry
through forever;

you can never be dispossessed.

- Derek Walcott

[Ronaldo]

39979

This note and photo above were sent to me yesterday by Margaret Gore from Mohton, PA

Hi Ron, Thought I'd write a little story for you in the spirit of my dad's pen to paper.

Well, today after being prodded each Spring "To go out and get em", I took my foraging basket and set out into our ten acre wood in search of the elusive morel mushroom. My friend, Ron Rozewski, said he found them here many moons ago. After 30 + years of living here I have never seen a one. His advice was not to look for them but only "To look for what is there".

So now I can tell you what really is there... Using my fancy Komperdell hiking pole, I began across the lane up a steep slope to the upper edge of the property. There must be some up here I thought. The stand of trees include oak, popular, and other hardwoods here on Hardwood Lane. But rather than morels, I saw squirrel nests, holes from the many varieties of woodpeckers and tons of poison ivy. I was just happy not to run into any of the wild turkeys that gobble or the skunk I smelled the night before.

I came down the slope and entered the big woods through the thicket, past the pond. I noticed the spillway overflowed with the Spring rain and created another stream to cross. There were a few more large trees toppled by their roots during the Winter's storms too.

On a smaller scale, the ground was covered in ferns unfurling their fronds and I couldn't help thinking how I saw them being sold in the garden center just yesterday for $4.95 a pop. I could be rich I thought! Looking even closer, I found wildflowers in all their glory...trout lilies, May apples, solomon seal, jack-in-the pulpit, and on and on. I am rich to have this beauty on my land... I realized in an Ah Ha moment!

I kept walking toward the stream near the bottom of the property. I didn't remember the stand of beech trees that line her banks and the twinkle of the water made me stop for a pause. By now I forgot all about my mission of foraging mushrooms.

My little hike was complete and I decided to save the creek crossing and steep incline to the summit and Southern edge of the property for my next restless urge and adventure in my big backyard. I headed back home to my little house in the wood quite satisfied.

Thanks Ron for urging me to get up and see what's out there. Not the morels I searched for but a whole lot more!

Love to you my wise friend, Marjorie


Earth
...

[Larry Robinson]

Imagining

What if God isnʼt a noun
to be empowered and worshiped
but a verb of creation
powered by love?

What if every single tree
drawn in primary school
is a sacred work of art
worthy of joyful notice?

What if our lives are built
on a web of kindness,
a net,
which holds everything living.

What if the rocks are alive
singing strength and courage;
vibrating
from our feet right up to our heart?

What if we loved ourselves
as deeply as the mountain
who,
caressed by water,
surrenders herself
into sand?

What if our most loved,
intra-national pastime
is a game of entertainment
where we all win?

What if no one aspired
to be a millionaire
and money no longer had power
but was simply a means of tender-ness.

What if transforming our world
by imagining it
can
actually make it happen?

- Deborah Rodney

[Larry Robinson]

A Child is Something Else Again


A child is something else again. Wakes up
in the afternoon and in an instant he's full of words,
in an instant he's humming, in an instant warm,
instant light, instant darkness.

A child is Job. They've already placed their bets on him
but he doesn't know it. He scratches his body
for pleasure. Nothing hurts yet.
They're training him to be a polite Job,
to say "Thank you" when the Lord has given,
to say "You're welcome" when the Lord has taken away.

A child is vengeance.
A child is a missile into the coming generations.
I launched him: I'm still trembling.

A child is something else again: on a rainy spring day
glimpsing the Garden of Eden through the fence,
kissing him in his sleep,
hearing footsteps in the wet pine needles.
A child delivers you from death.
Child, Garden, Rain, Fate.

- Yehuda Amichai
(translated from the original Hebrew by Chana Block)

[Larry Robinson]

Mirror. Memory
The man and woman in a formal portrait
before me in the gallery,
born to the high summer of Flemish pride —

pride in their eyes, rendered with animal glues,
in the elaborate loops of their collars,
even pride in the painter

who only yesterday applied gesso
and tacked the canvas to make them ready for
a future of perpetual intrusion —

are not the ones I want to remember:
winter provincials listening for infant cries,
boiling a kettle in the predawn,

their faces misted and revealed
in the steel of it, their moment passing,
passing; nothing but sleep in their eyes.

- Eavan Boland

[Larry Robinson]

A Spring Day

On the eighth day of a spring month, in a time called the white year,
I tried to hold my mind and make it
still—
my mind that wanders aimlessly.
Repeatedly I tried, ever more dejectedly.
I wished to merge my mind
in the sky of unstained space;
I wished to float my body
lightly, in dancing clouds.
Like a breeze in the open air,
my mind yearns to drift, ill at ease
in rest.
Yet now, before the sun turns red
and sets,
may I leave this place, this gaping
state—
a field of lotus groves, spacious,
blissful,
a mind at ease and joyful.


- Kelsang Gyatso, seventh Dalai Lama
(Translated by Thupten Jinpa and Jas’ Elsner)

[Larry Robinson]

The Mushroom Hunters

Science, as you know, my little one, is the study
of the nature and behaviour of the universe.
It’s based on observation, on experiment, and measurement,
and the formulation of laws to describe the facts revealed.

In the old times, they say, the men came already fitted with brains
designed to follow flesh-beasts at a run,
to hurdle blindly into the unknown,
and then to find their way back home when lost
with a slain antelope to carry between them.
Or, on bad hunting days, nothing.

The women, who did not need to run down prey,
had brains that spotted landmarks and made paths between them
left at the thorn bush and across the scree
and look down in the bole of the half-fallen tree,
because sometimes there are mushrooms.

Before the flint club, or flint butcher’s tools,
The first tool of all was a sling for the baby
to keep our hands free
and something to put the berries and the mushrooms in,
the roots and the good leaves, the seeds and the crawlers.
Then a flint pestle to smash, to crush, to grind or break.

And sometimes men chased the beasts
into the deep woods,
and never came back.

Some mushrooms will kill you,
while some will show you gods
and some will feed the hunger in our bellies. Identify.
Others will kill us if we eat them raw,
and kill us again if we cook them once,
but if we boil them up in spring water, and pour the water away,
and then boil them once more, and pour the water away,
only then can we eat them safely. Observe.

Observe childbirth, measure the swell of bellies and the shape of breasts,
and through experience discover how to bring babies safely into the world.

Observe everything.

And the mushroom hunters walk the ways they walk
and watch the world, and see what they observe.
And some of them would thrive and lick their lips,
While others clutched their stomachs and expired.
So laws are made and handed down on what is safe. Formulate.

The tools we make to build our lives:
our clothes, our food, our path home…
all these things we base on observation,
on experiment, on measurement, on truth.

And science, you remember, is the study
of the nature and behaviour of the universe,
based on observation, experiment, and measurement,
and the formulation of laws to describe these facts.

The race continues. An early scientist
drew beasts upon the walls of caves
to show her children, now all fat on mushrooms
and on berries, what would be safe to hunt.

The men go running on after beasts.

The scientists walk more slowly, over to the brow of the hill
and down to the water’s edge and past the place where the red clay runs.
They are carrying their babies in the slings they made,
freeing their hands to pick the mushrooms.

- Neil Gaiman

[Larry Robinson]

Planetarium

Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750–1848)
astronomer, sister of William; and others.

A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them

a woman ‘in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles’

in her 98 years to discover
8 comets

she whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled
in those spaces of the mind

An eye,

‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’
from the mad webs of Uranusborg

encountering the NOVA

every impulse of light exploding

from the core
as life flies out of us

Tycho whispering at last
‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’

What we see, we see
and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus

I am bombarded yet I stand

I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.

- Adrienne Rich

[Larry Robinson]

Why Regret?

Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn't it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster's New International, perhaps having just
eaten of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
"The perfected lover does not eat."
Didn't you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren't you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring's offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn't it outdo the pleasure of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

- Galway Kinnell

[Dorothy Friberg]

I wanted to look up a few of the poets words in the now defunct dictionary but I appreciate the brilliant images this Irish poet portrays. Thanks again Larry for awakening my soul this morning.


Why Regret?

Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?...

[Larry Robinson]

Races

You are a Brother
And a Sister
In the colors of Life
Some people believe
They are races
Human races
Whatever that may be
Races are for running
The competitive edge
Distrust and confusion
Leaving alterations
In innocent faces
We are natural Life
A part of Mother Earth's design
A blending of colors
To make the difference
In the teaching
of meanings
We are colors in the family
of Life.

- John Trudell

[Larry Robinson]

Crazy Jane and God


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

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

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

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

- William Butler Yeats

[Larry Robinson]

Refuse to Shrink



Have you Cried enough in this lifetime

To reclaim the watersheds?

To heal the rainforest ?

Encourage all grief to pour forth

Spread yourself wide

Refuse to shrink

from your oceanic nature.

- Kristy Hellum

[Larry Robinson]

The Road

Here is the road: the light
comes and goes then returns again.
Be gentle with your fellow travelers
as they move through the world of stone and stars
whirling with you yet every one alone.
The road waits.
Do not ask questions but when it invites you
to dance at daybreak, say yes.
Each step is the journey; a single note the song.

- Arlene Gay Levine

[Ronaldo]

40114

[Larry Robinson]

The Dignity of the Races

the innocent faces
of the many races
cause explosive reactions
in the brains of many
leaving traces
of negative thoughts and feelings
that were taught
from the beginning

the work is
letting the fog
cover angry lessons
save smiles and tears
till the landscape clears
and walk the peaceful plank
that many think they can’t
because those faces
stand in the way
of happiness, their happiness

I know, for I have seen
how they go on without realizing
that happiness resides
in all the faces
for everyone
has their own happiness
and their own dignity
the dignity of the races

- Jayro Dyer

[Larry Robinson]

Eulogy



My mother was a dictionary.

She was one of the last fluent speakers of our tribal language.

She knew dozens of words that nobody else knew.

When she died, we buried all of those words with her.

My mother was a dictionary.

She knew words that had been spoken for thousands of years.

She knew words that will never be spoken again.

She knew songs that will never be sung again.

She knew stories that will never be told again.

My mother was a dictionary.

My mother was a thesaurus,

My mother was an encyclopedia.

My mother never taught her children the tribal language.

Oh, she taught us how to count to ten.

Oh, she taught us how to say “I love you.”

Oh, she taught us how to say “Listen to me.”

And, of course, she taught us how to curse.

My mother was a dictionary.

She was one of the last four speakers of the tribal language.

In a few years, the last surviving speakers, all elderly, will also be gone.

There are younger Indians who speak a new version of the tribal

language.

But the last old-time speakers will be gone.

My mother was a dictionary.

But she never taught me the tribal language.

And I never demanded to learn.

My mother always said to me, “English will be your best weapon.”

She was right, she was right, she was right.

My mother was a dictionary.

When she died, her children mourned her in English.

My mother knew words that had been spoken for thousands of years.

Sometimes, late at night, she would sing one of the old songs.

She would lullaby us with ancient songs.

We were lullabied by our ancestors.

My mother was a dictionary.

I own a cassette tape, recorded in 1974.

On that cassette, my mother speaks the tribal language.

She’s speaking the tribal language with her mother, Big Mom.

And then they sing an ancient song.

I haven’t listened to that cassette tape in two decades.

I don’t want to risk snapping the tape in some old cassette player.

And I don’t want to risk letting anybody else transfer that tape to

digital.

My mother and grandmother’s conversation doesn’t belong in the

cloud.

That old song is too sacred for the Internet.

So, as that cassette tape deteriorates, I know that it will soon be dead.

Maybe I will bury it near my mother’s grave.

Maybe I will bury it at the base of the tombstone she shares with my

father.

Of course, I’m lying.

I would never bury it where somebody might find it.

Stay away, archaeologists! Begone, begone!

My mother was a dictionary.

She knew words that have been spoken for thousands of years.

She knew words that will never be spoken again.

I wish I could build tombstones for each of those words.

Maybe this poem is a tombstone.

My mother was a dictionary.

She spoke the old language.

But she never taught me how to say those ancient words.

She always said to me, “English will be your best weapon.”

She was right, she was right, she was right.

- Sherman Alexie

[Larry Robinson]

Poetry Repair

The sign said, Poetry Body & Fender Repair
In smaller print Domestic Only
and even smaller print
Experienced English Major on Duty

My dented poem about lost youth and food coloring
had a few problems so I pushed it in the open door

“May we be of service, sir?”
My poem has a slow leak and now and then the steering is loose

“That’s dreadful. Have you discerned anything else, sir?”
Well, it start ok but it slows down when I change direction

“Has it been repaired before, sir?”
Too many times I’m afraid

“Sir, it appears your poem has met with a collision.”
How can you tell?

There is a plethora of indications. We can hear
a whispering murmur, a susurrus actually
from under the hood. And it’s dripping verbs at an appalling rate.”

Plethora? Susurrus? Appalling? I don’t use words like that.

“There you have it. That’s your problem sir. Good day.”

- Doug von Koss

[Larry Robinson]

When you think about it, mostly, a cage is air -

When you think about it, mostly, a cage is air - 
so what is there
to be afraid of?
A cage of air. Baudelaire said
Poe thought America was one giant cage.
To the poet, a nation is one big cage?
And isn’t the nation mostly filled with air?
Try to put a cage around your dream.
The cage escapes the dream.
I see it streak and stream.

- Sandra Simonds

[Larry Robinson]

Tabernacle

Since they shared the same
monogram, Jim
Crow & Jesus
often found themselves

getting the other’s dress shirts
back from the wash.
This was after Jim
had made it big

& could afford such
small luxuries. He
& Jesus mostly met
Sundays in church

where Jesus came for the singing
but stayed for the sermon
& to see whether the preacher
ever got it right.

Jim, you guessed it,
came for the collection plate
& after stayed
for the hot

plates of the Ladies
Auxiliary (no apostrophe).
To one
folks prayed,

the other they obeyed.

- Kevin Young

[Larry Robinson]

The Dominguez Escalante Expedition


When the Dominguez Escalante Expedition
couldn’t find a way
to cross the river,
they left a vast expanse
of redrock

empty

at the center
of their map.

Our lives
are like that,
we know so much,
words can describe so much,

and yet,
at our infinite center,
there is
an emptiness
a space
where all
that truly matters
lives.

- Trout Black

[Larry Robinson]

The Sadness At The Heart Of The Nation

Waking up after bad dreams,
loss, grief, unable to reach you;
I think of the sadness at the heart
of the nation. Where song fades out.
How there is a train to prison
that young men ride each day.
We are torn from each other, lost,
some rageful, as we dive down
into our unconscious wounds, awake to
our present reality. There is
no one here in the darkness.
The great storms carry thunder snow.
New rains cause flooding in the west.
There is a sadness at the heart.
The painters will show us colors
and textures of our inner life.
We hope for vibrancy, movement,
our shadows illuminated.
In the distance, musicians
begin to write, sing, chant
of our dark mystery, our protest,
and we honor and embrace
a sadness that will not end soon enough.
There are drums, now, to be played.
We are the strong, grieving, drummers
of our American world. And so I go
downtown early, for a cup of coffee,
5:30 in the morning, and driving,
hear Dave Carlson's band,
Tazmanian Devils, on KRSH radio,
"Roots, Blues, Americana",
playing a live version of "Not Fade Away",
as good as it gets rock 'n roll,
magical in the early dark,
the crowd cheering at the end.
And I think I'm going to be all right again,
even with this sadness at the heart of the nation.

- Jack Crimsons

[Larry Robinson]

On Memorizing A Poem

In the beginning was the Word.
Creation is involved here.
This is not “print-on-a-page”.
These are the flowers
of the ages.

Nor can you clip them
and stuff them
in some mental vase.
You have to plant them inside!

First-reading scatters
the seeds of words,
atoms whirling with life,
even the ones that seem inert.

Then: repetition
becomes the steady hand
holding the watering can.

Imperceptibly, every word sprouts.
Secret tendrils grow day by day,
reach out, join hands,

become part of something larger,
a clause, a sentence. Finally,
each word so tropically
bonded with others,
it no longer exists
as a separate thing.

A stanza coheres. The force
continues to flow onward,
new critical mass accrues,
the spirit leaps

across the gap to the next,
back to the one before!
Every reading, connections
establish themselves more firmly.
New ones arise,
flourish like bougainvillea.
Roads appear: Turn Left Here.
Paths and gardens of knowing
form in the brain. Bouquets
climb up into the air,
perfume the air, above the brain!

Finally, a newly-created world
lives within you
to be invoked when needed,
called forth like a genie from a 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 this line,
the Light in eyes,
onward

- Max Reif

[Larry Robinson]

Simonides of Crete

I read Simonides of Crete.
His words twenty-five centuries ago
speak as living stone:

“Across the pale stillness
of water, keel-carven,
these lovely eyes of desire
drag the ship to her doom.”

He speaks from a character of firm kindness
and, as you can see, also from a respect for the strong arm of nature.

He speaks of climbing the rock walls to Virtue,
and how only those with sweat, with clenched concentration and courage
reach the peak,
but also how blithe her attendant there are
as they celebrate their hymns.

And, likewise (for even the Gods had their defects),
how to never expect perfection from any mortal –
forgiving those especially whose luck was bad.

And how finally (how fate-grave all Greek poetry is!)
Prosperity may vanish
or overturn.
The light-lifting wing of a dragonfly
is not more swift.

I like hard Greek conclusions. Except that, of course,
Fate may, but spirit does not,
ever
really
conclude.

- Bruce Moody

[Larry Robinson]

Reversal of Fortune

Somewhere in the crevice between dusk and dawn
just before the grey glow of daylight creeps
through the blinds, awakening my ache
for just one more hour of sleep,
and you

Your hand reaches down from the heavens,
once again stroking my forehead
from the bridge of my nose to the hairline
smoothing out worry lines etched
since childhood, erasing mental litter,
like waves of the ocean washing the shore

The very shore where we strolled on
our first date, your large hand cradling mine,
my own hand saying “yes,” while we spoke
in low tones as I’m speaking to you now
across the divide:

You wouldn’t believe that the country you fled
to find refuge from uniformed men goose-stepping
through your dreams, insisting
in the native tongue you detested
that you are one of them and there is no escape

That very land that worshipped blond and blue-eyed boys
is now led by a woman, is embracing
a million desperate dark-skinned people,
and the grandchildren of your uncles and aunts
wash swastikas off buildings, place bronze plaques
on sidewalks announcing the truth of their clotted past
lest they forget

While the country where you sought and found asylum –
remember the woman lifting her torch to the huddled masses –
has closed its borders in a great forgetting of fake news
and alternative facts

Did you know what was coming? Is that why, twenty years
before the buried grenades of terror and hate
burst forth like fireworks in America’s spacious skies,
you returned to die in your homeland’s pastoral countryside?


The same countryside abutting the Black Forest
my family crossed on foot through perilous nights
to Amsterdam’s port, to the bowels of a ship,
to my country tis of thee, just before the glass shattered in yours?

By what miracle did we find each other’s hands in the dark,
did I allow the fingers of the enemy to caress away nightmares
of men in striped pajamas with yellow stars?

And by what quirk of fate are you gone, but the dreams are back
just before dawn, so I escape through the crack in search of
hallowed ground, where I can finally kneel at your grave,
sing you to sleep, and rest my head on the grassy mound.

- Linda Blachman

[Larry Robinson]

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

- Phillip Larkin

[Larry Robinson]

A World in Pain

later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere

- Warshan Shire

[Chris Dec]

Lost in the Mail

Madeleine Bell, at 2240
in her wavy print dress
hobbled up to the mailbox and
inspected each piece:
another sympathy card
for her run over dog,
this from her bridge partner,
Mrs. Scanlon.
I could tell.
It was small and white and quickly read,
then quickly closed.
And it made her eyes water
and she squeezed them to dry in the fading sun.
Now her shoulders
slumped even more
as she made her way home,
those wavy blue stripes,
not unlike, I imagined,
tire treads running
the length of her back.

Raymond, next door, shuffled his stack
and covering the papers from his ex-wife’s attorney
(so I wouldn’t see the divorce became final)
with a large yellow envelope from which he withdrew
a Polaroid snapshot of:
Single white female
seeks romantic long evenings,
non-smokers only,
I wished him luck on this one,
as I had every week.

And my own empty box,
except for the Guardian
telling me to pay up,
it was, once again
another spent year
measured in stamps.

But the three of us stopped to look up from our leaving
and caught each others eyes just at the moment
that the sky turned suddenly a bright shade of Mercurochrome
swabbing our hurting world.

C.Dec, 1991

[Larry Robinson]

In My Wallet I Carry a Card

In my wallet I carry a card
which declares I have the power to marry.

In my wallet I carry a card
which declares I may drive.

In my wallet I carry a card
that says to a merchant I may be trusted to pay her.

In my wallet I carry a card
that states I can borrow a book in the town where I live.

In my hand I carry a card.
Its lines declare I am cardless, carless,
stateless, and have no money.

It is buoyant and edgeless.
It names me one of the Order of All Who Will Die.

- Jane Hirshfield

[Larry Robinson]

Where I'm From
(after George Ella Lyon)

I am from smooth clay,
from the rope swing over the riverbank.
I am from the acacia tree outside the sunstruck window.
(Blur of yellow,
the air particulated
like La Grande Jatte.)
I am from the old hammock,
brittle in the walnut shade
where I lay unseen all summer.

I'm from Gravenstein apple orchard,
from delicate dust and blackberry thicket.
I'm from warm trumpet brass
and the green Victorian,
from slim brown wrists and peeling white paint.
I'm from question authority
and you can't hug a child
with nuclear arms.

I am from the comfrey and the ivy,
from Occidental and the car won't start.
From the rosehip garland my mother strung
in the stillness of the graveyard noon,
the maps of the moon and the ocean floor.
Under the house were boxes of books
limned by mildew,
the old photographs of faces
strangely young, before the eclipse
of the present overtook them.
They were smiling.
They didn't know
what in the world to expect.

- Yosha Bourgea

[Larry Robinson]

At 3 AM

The world is so quiet
The sun is still asleep
Stars are yawning
Stillness…..silence?

No –

Rivers rush
Earth quakes
Volcanoes spew
Tornadoes roar
Hurricanes flood
Drought cracks
The earth is not silent
The earth is not asleep
We are silent
We are not awake

- Rebecca Evert

[Larry Robinson]

Watching

for my father

You and I used to talk about
Lear and his girls
(I read it in school,

you saw it on the Yiddish stage
where the audience yelled:
Don't believe them,

they're rotten) —
that Jewish father and his
suburban daughters.

Now I'm here with the rest,
smelling the silences,
watching you

disappear.
What will it look like?
Lost on the bed

without shoes, without lungs,
you won't talk
except to the wall: I'm dying,

and to the nurse: Be
careful, I
may live.

What does a daughter say
to the bones
that won't answer —

Thank you to the nice man?
Daddy?
The last time

we went to the Bronx Zoo,
the elephants were smelly as ever,
all those warm Sundays,

the monkeys as lewd.
But they put the penguins
behind curved glass

with a radiant sky
painted on the far wall.
And all those birds

lined up with their backs to us
watching the wrong
horizon.

- Chana Bloch
(3/15/1940 - 5/19/2017)

[Larry Robinson]

Secondary Boycott Ode

I had never seen anything like it. I was walking
out of the office of the braces doctor,
in the same building as the acne doctor,
I was on my way to the lunch counter
that had sandwiches on soft bread
with the crusts cut off—& people were blocking
the doors, following each other around
in a circle, like our junior high marching band,
& they were in the way, between me
& my sandwich. I went up to a lady who was watching,
& asked her what was happening,
& she told me about the segregated
lunch counters in the South—this was
a secondary boycott, of Woolworth’s. & I asked,
how do they choose who walks, & she said,
Anyone can. I had never seen anyone
saying no with their body, with their feet.
When I stepped toward the circle, a man walked a little
faster, & a woman walked a little slower,
& there was a space for me, to sing
without making a sound, at last to be
unfaithful to my family,
stepping out on silence.

- Sharon Olds

[Chris Dec]

I am touched by this memory poem.Today, Memorial Day, I think of my father who wasn't just called to service, to kill Germans and Japanese humans, and without question... it was more of a huge planetary movement and every young man at the time was swept into it. He fathered five of us, all marching against war, dodging drafts, spitting on his blind allegiance to his unquestioned values. Today, I set to permanent rest his old values, and I honor all peace warriors: those who have lost faith and hope and even lives, fighting the GOOD fight. We are the real brave soldiers now, and always faithful to human life, justice, peace and equality.

[Larry Robinson]

Psalm

Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!
How many clouds float past them with impunity;
how much desert sand sifts from one land to another;
how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil
in provocative hops!

Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers
or alights on the roadblock at the border?
A humble robin - still, its tail resides abroad
while its beak stays home. If that weren’t enough, it won't stop bobbing!

Among innumerable insects, I'll single out only the ant
between the border guard's left and right boots
blithely ignoring the questions "Where from?" and “Where to?"

Oh, to register in detail, at a glance, the chaos
prevailing on every continent!
Isn't that a privet on the far bank
smuggling its hundred-thousandth leaf across the river?
And who but the octopus, with impudent long arms,
would disrupt the sacred bounds of territorial waters?

And how can we talk of order overall?
when the very placement of the stars
leaves out doubting just what shines for whom?

Not to speak of the fog's reprehensible drifting!
And dust blowing all over the steppes
as if they hadn't been partitioned!
And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves,
that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters!

Only what is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.

- Wislawa Szymborska
(translated by Anya Kucharev)

[Ronaldo]

40320

[Larry Robinson]

Poetry Gives Off Smoke

Poetry gives off smoke
but it doesn’t die out.
It acts kind of crazy, flutteringly,
when it chooses us.
This fellow’s no fool,
sucking tranquillizers,
toting in a little briefcase
a boiled beet-root.
Right now he’d like a mousse
or baba au rhum,
but the Muse-
some kind of Muse! -
grabs him
by the scruff of the neck!
Thoughts drill a hole in his forehead,
and he’s mislaid the spoon-
and he’s a giant! Socrates, for the Lord’s sake...
in an Oblomov dust-jacket. O.K....
he’s no Apollo-
he’s puny and ugly,
skinny: he’s like a golden mushroom,
unsteady...
transparent.
But suddenly some sort of whistling
is in his ears, and then...
a period!
And like a slugger’s hook
across the chops of the ages,
a line!
And there
an insane little bird
falls off its feet,
a crazy rag-picker,
drunk,
a kind of society clown. But something gives her the word
and-
like branches in winter,
God rings from within, and her eyelids turn
to marble.
And here’s a bum
a shaman,
really-
from among the lunatics!
Pour him champagne,
bring him
women, not rum cakes!
Suddenly an order from within
will come through sternly, and he’s the instant
voice of the people, damned near
Savonarola!

Poetry acts kind of strange, it flutters
when it chooses us.
And it has no mercy, either,
afterwards. It stamps 'Pure Souls'
on us...but who’s the judge?
Yes,
for the horse-blinkered multitudes we’re 'decadents, '
but for ourselves, we ourselves are... are...
well, yes! Redemption!


- Yevgeny Yevtushenko


(Translated by James Dickey with Anthony Kahn)

[Larry Robinson]

Realism

God said, your name is mud
and the thing about mud is you
got to throw it down
repeatedly
to remove the air
and sometimes cut it
and rejoin it with another part.
If stars are made of dust,
it’s not the same stuff,
God said;
you can’t make a hut out of it,
only heaven,
and when I said dust to dust,
that’s not what I meant.

- Beth Bachmann

[Larry Robinson]

Nocturne

Because these are not the nights of empty hands,
because these are not the nights of dreams galloping
like gasoline fire over blue tar,
I wish you could see what I see
when I look at you,
I wish I could give you
the landscape in my soul, invisible
as the wishes I follow to your mouth --
an ocean mounting within me, the drowsy foam
and drone of velvet waters washing us closer
and farther apart, always both at once,
murmur of umber, bloodwings beating in bone.


You cannot see the waves breaking against welted shoals,
but in the rocking of our chair, maybe you hear
the whispering of the sea, biting acetylene,
or cries of tern and gull, brine-stung; maybe you hear
the uncaged waters gasping against hasp and hull,
salt fumes hissing, scalps flensed from bile-dark brine.
In your shirt's rustling, I hear sailcloth in wind,
ropes lashed and pulling against the mast.
In our chair's rasp against pine boards, I hear
the creak of oarlocks, a broken scull scraping against keel.
I hear spume soaking a bowsprit crisped with salt,
as I rock into your torso, your human shore.


Come nearer, nearer,
for I want to see what you see --
Dress me in burlap and bone,
wrap me in musk and dulse, in human moss,
shine me a lighthouse's scalding gold;
comfort me with wine and sole, come to me
with a severed branch of coral, a fistful of wet wings;
sing me the gauze of dusk and salt, nights full of sulfurous foam,
lead me through the narcotic dark to a bed
of coats, your stubbled face grazing my throat,
for I want to feel your eyelids touching my lips when I sleep,
I want to feel the bones of your silence pressing against my own.



- Suji Kwock Kim

[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]

Earth, You Have Returned to Me

Can you imagine waking up
every morning on a different planet,
each with its own gravity?

Slogging, wobbling,
wavering. Atilt
and out-of-sync
with all that moves
and doesn’t.

Through years of trial
and mostly error
did I study this unsteady way — 

changing pills, adjusting the dosage,
never settling.

A long time we were separate,
O Earth,
but now you have returned to me.

- Elaine Equi

[Larry Robinson]

Paradigm Shift
Millions of spiritual creatures
walk the earth

Unseen, both when we wake,
and when we sleep.
Milton (Paradise Lost)

Although my favorite things have always been: ocean, river, rock, sky, moon, wind
they have more poignancy for me
now that the survival of earth is so frantically upon us.

When I was a girl
I was chastised for seeing too much.
For seeing “into the insides of things,”
as I told my parents who could not understand
what I meant and thought “where does this child hail from?”

The snow on the pines on the mountain tops of Vermont.
Their branches covered in icicles so pure
I thought they were hanging with loaded stars clinking together
become bells…this magic I always saw and held in my palms.

Now the skin of the earth, the soil,
is poisoned.
The blood of the earth, the waters,
are poisoned
and whales beach themselves in utter disbelief.
The eyes of the earth, the sky,
fade and stars hide at night.
Elephant, tiger, antelope, turtle, salmon.
Animals live in such fear that they are almost
statues covering the earth.

Brother and sister wolf, bear, moose writhe
from the waste and need of men to hang their stuffed heads on walls
and proudly pose for photos with the bodies of animals they have killed
and cover floors with their pelts.
The blood on their hands invisible to them but visible
to the spirits who live quietly on this earth
watching, recording their incomprehensible tasks of death.

The first people who lived on this continent
took only what they needed for food, clothing, shelter.
Spoke, prayed to the animal at night before a hunt,
their graceful hands and faces outlined in moonlight.
This morning, although there are tears on my pillow when I wake,
I see brown bear standing erect, magnificent in my dreams.
All the animals of the earth cover the earth once again
joined in circles of streaming light.

- Pamela Singer Yesbick

[Larry Robinson]

Imagining

What if God isnʼt a noun
to be empowered and worshiped
but a verb of creation
powered by love?

What if every single tree
drawn in primary school
is a sacred work of art
worthy of joyful notice?

What if our lives are built
on a web of kindness,
a net,
which holds everything living.

What if the rocks are alive
singing strength and courage;
vibrating
from our feet right up to our heart?

What if we loved ourselves
as deeply as the mountain
who,
caressed by water,
surrenders herself
into sand?

What if our most loved,
intra-national pastime
is a game of entertainment
where we all win?

What if no one aspired
to be a millionaire
and money no longer had power
but was simply a means of tender-ness.

What if transforming our world
by imagining it
can
actually make it happen?

- Deborah Rodney

[Larry Robinson]

The Dying Poet’s Address to Young People

You young people of times to come
And of new dawns over cities which
Have yet to be built, also you
Who are still unborn, listen
To my voice, the voice of a man who died
And not gloriously.

But
Like a farmer who has not tended his land
And like a lazy carpenter who ran away
Leaving the rafters uncovered.

Thus did I
Waste my time, squander my days and now
I must ask you
To say everything that was not said
To do everything that was not done, and quickly
To forget me, please, so that
My bad example does not lead you astray.

Ah why did I
Sit down at table with those who produced nothing
And share the meal which they had not prepared?

And why did I mix
My best sayings with their
Idle chatter? While outside
Unschooled people were walking around
Thirsty for instruction.

Ah why
Do my songs not rise from the places where
The cities are nourished, where they build ships, why
Do they not rise from the fast moving
Locomotives like smoke which
Stays behind in the sky?

Because for people who create and are useful
My talk
Is like ashes in the mouth and a drunken mumbling.
Not a single word
Can I offer you, you generations of time to come
Not one indication could I give, pointing
With my uncertain finger, for how could anyone
Show the way who has not
Traveled it himself?

So all I can do, who have thus
Wasted my life, is tell you
To obey not a single command that comes
From our rotten mouths and to take
No advice from those
Who have failed so badly, but
To decide for yourselves what is good for you
And what will help you
To cultivate the land which we let go to ruin, and
To make the cities
Which we poisoned
Places for people to live in.

Bertolt Brecht

[Larry Robinson]

Inscription for the Door

I have no enemies left,
only some friends who are late.
Come in, hang your coat
beside the fire and pull a chair to its edge.
We shall drink tea and clear the path
leading back to the heart’s first address.
You may have news of these nations beginning
at last to revolve beside each other like seasons
or word of the fires out of control south of us,
where the poor are burning the lies keeping them poor.
Why are those three ragged strangers still kneeling
Over their ashes, invite them, bring them in,
they can rest here beside this oven of bread.
Children sleep in the corners, taking notes.
A woman is dressing in the room overhead,
her footsteps are tablets I open to sleep.
The new wind is full of branches tonight,
Leaving no holes in the darkness.
Enter. I have no enemies left any more,
Only some friends who are late.

- Eugene Ruggles

[Larry Robinson]

This Compost
1

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

2

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.

What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will
none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.


- Walt Whitman

[Larry Robinson]

The Singing

I can hear her through
the thin wall, singing,
up before the sun:
two notes, a kind
of hushed half-breathing,
each time the baby
makes that little moan —

can hear her trying
not to sing, then singing
anyway, a thing so old
it might as well
be Hittite or Minoan,

and so soft no one
would ever guess
that I myself once
sang that very song:

back when my son
and then his brother
used to cry all night
or half the morning,
though nothing in all
the world was wrong.

And now how strange:
to be the man from next door,
listening, as the baby cries
then quiets, cries and quiets
each time she sings
their secret song,

that would sound the same ten
thousand years ago,
and has no
meaning but to calm.

- Patrick Phillips

[Larry Robinson]

Throw Yourself Like Seed

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit
sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
that brushes your heel as it turns going by,
the man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant.

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
but to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
is the work; start then, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,
don't turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,
and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what's alive in the furrow, what's dead in yourself,
for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;
from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

- Miguel De Unamuno
(translated by Robert Bly)

[Larry Robinson]

St. Roach

For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you,
for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth,
they showed me by every action to despise your kind;
for that I saw my people making war on you,
I could not tell you apart, one from another,
for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you,
for that all the people I knew met you by
crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling
water on you, they flushed you down,
for that I could not tell one from another
only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender.
Not like me.

For that I did not know your poems
And that I do not know any of your sayings
And that I cannot speak or read your language
And that I do not sing your songs
And that I do not teach our children
to eat your food
or know your poems
or sing your songs

But that we say you are filthing our food
But that we know you not at all.
Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time.
You were lighter than the others in color, that was
neither good nor bad.
I was really looking for the first time.
You seemed troubled and witty.
Today I touched one of you for the first time.
You were startled, you ran, you fled away
Fast as a dancer, light, strange and lovely to the touch.
I reach, I touch, I begin to know you.

- Muriel Rukeyser

[Ronaldo]

Lets not forget Don Marquis's Archie. On a more serious note:

"Cockroaches in the home environment are a health hazard not only because of the risks posed by cockroach antigens to asthma sufferers, but also because they can carry disease-causing germs and because some of the methods traditionally used to eliminate them cause additional health hazards."
(https://www.nchh.org/WhatWeDo/HealthHazardsPreventionandSolutions/Insects.aspx (https://www.nchh.org/WhatWeDo/HealthHazardsPreventionandSolutions/Insects.aspx))


St. Roach...

[wisewomn]

Reminded me of this:

In the Kitchen, at Midnight
Ted Kooser (https://muse.jhu.edu/results?section1=author&search1=%20Ted%20Kooser)
From: Sure Signs
(https://muse.jhu.edu/book/26721)
I snap on the lighthttps://www.WaccoBB.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2017-06-13_15-04-47.png
and a cockroach zips over the floor like a skateboard
and without slowing down skims under the door to the cupboard,
becoming a can of tomatoes.
How Ovid would love it!
Cockroach, wherever you are, whatever shape you've assumed, I take you for my model.
I want to eat poisons and live, to breathe poisons yet run like the wind,
to laugh my brown way through thousands of years of no cancer or wars or Republicans, and,
once in a while, in the night,
I'd like a light flashing on like the bomb,
if only for memory's sake


St. Roach...

[Larry Robinson]

Rain

A teacher asked Paul
what he would remember
from third grade, and he sat
a long time before writing
"this year sumbody tutched me
on the sholder"
and turned his paper in.
Later she showed it to me
as an example of her wasted life.
The words he wrote were large
as houses in a landscape.
He wanted to go inside them
and live, he could fill in
the windows of "o" and "d"
and be safe while outside
birds building nests in drainpipes
knew nothing of the coming rain.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

The Mother

You thought that you
would be treated like a person.

You thought that you would
be classed
as a human being.
someone with needs
and feelings.

Just because you had
lived here
for 20 years,
no major transgressions,
no record of
significant misdoings.

Even though you had worked
for years as a seamstress,
or sometimes at
Hardy's,
taking orders,
helping out in the kitchen.

Even though your
eldest daughter
now works in a bank
while she finishes her degree,
and the young ones
do well in school.

They said
you might be
a rapist, or
a terrorist
ready to harm
their country,
the place where their ancestors settled
so many years ago.

Once your ancestors
owned this land,
they took it away
and now it is theirs.

Now they are building
a wall,
one very, very high,
to keep you out.

They say it will be
beautiful.

I wonder if there
are walls in heaven.

- Dorothy Walters

[Larry Robinson]

Snake

https://www.WaccoBB.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2017-06-15_12-20-02.pngA snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

- D.H. Lawrence

Taormina, 1923

[Roland Jacopetti]

One of my all-time favorites - thanks, Larry!
Roland


Snake...

[Larry Robinson]

The Ordinary Life

To rise early, reconsider, rise again later
to papers and the news. To smoke a few if time
permits and, second-guessing the weather,

dress. Another day of what we bring to it—
matters unfinished from days before,
regrets over matters we've finished poorly.

Just once you'd like to start out early,
free from memory and lighter for it.
Like Adam, on that first day: alone

but cheerful, no fear of the maker,
anything his for the naming; nothing
to shrink from, nothing to shirk,

no lot to carry that wasn't by choice.
And at night, no voice to keep him awake,
no hurry to rise, no hurry not to.

- Tracy K. Smith
(America’s newest Poet Laureate)

[Larry Robinson]

A Healing contract


When chaos erupts
May sanity prevail in our nation
Keep asking; what do you dearly love?

When chaos erupts
may we depend on Beauty
and remember the healing contract
we made with poetry.

The intimacy of light in the morning
has your name on it.

Seek sanctuary
with the salmon
waiting under black shadowed ledges.

When chaos erupts
may we depend on
each other.

- Kristy Hellum

[Larry Robinson]

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

- Robert Hayden

[Ronaldo]

40509
Colorado Rockies, two weeks ago.


...

[Larry Robinson]

Hawker in the Square in Florence


If imagination weren’t truth and stories weren’t blueprints
for ways to escape the hawker of Magdalene key rings
haranguing me near the Basilica Santa Maria Novella
in Florence, I would be a grand inquisitor
or architect of holy names.

The Cathedral with its Christmas candy facade
would never exist in a universe
where functionality ruled the roost.
But, yes, this church alive with pigeons—worshippers
and street folks gossiping in the square.

Nine hundred years of palaver.

The hawker, a young black man, wearing a brocaded fez
speaks English, but will not hear my words,
No bro’ my friend, fly away, leave me be.

He replies his wife is pregnant and sick
with three kids in Senegal.

Liar, liar pants on fire.

He grabs my wrist.

No, not very hard.

His hands are calloused,
poverty and determination deep-set in his eyes.

If stories weren’t emeralds,
if flesh wasn’t temporal,
mercenaries in armor would obliterate
verbs with state-of-the-art shrapnel.

But in the realm of fiction
there is space for time, pain and
hardcore bullshit to coincide
like contentious Medieval factions
(the pope and the Medici for instance)
and discover what words cannot.

Ah, to buy the man’s tourist crap or not?

- Barry Denny

[Dorothy Friberg]

And don't give money to beggars on street corners either!


Hawker in the Square in Florence
...
Ah, to buy the man’s tourist crap or not?
- Barry Denny

[Larry Robinson]

Song for the Summer Solstice:

Oak burns steady and hot and longhttps://www.WaccoBB.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2017-06-20_11-55-30.png
and fires of oak are traditional tonight
but we light a fire of pitch pine
which burns well enough in the salt wind
whistling while ragged flames lick the dark
casting our shadows high as the dunes.

Come into the fire and catch,
come in, come in. Fire that burns
and leaves entire, the silver flame
of the moon, trembling mercury laying
on the waves a highway to the abyss,
the full roaring furnace of the sun at zenith
of the year and potency, midsummer's eve.

Come dance in the fire, come in.
This is the briefest night and just
under the ocean the fires of the sun
roll toward us.

Come step into the fire, come in,
come in, dance in the flames of the festival
of the strongest sun at the mountain top
of the year when the wheel starts down.
Dance through me as I through you.
Here in the heart of fire in the caves
of the ancient body we are aligned
with the stars wheeling, the midges swarming
in the humid air like a nebula, with the clams
who drink the tide and the heartwood clock
of the oak and the astronomical clock
in the blood thundering through the great heart
of the albatross. Our cells are burning
each a little furnace powered by the sun
and the moon pulls the sea of our blood.
This night the sun and moon dance
and you and I dance in the fire of which
we are the logs, the matches, and the flames.

- Marge Piercy

[Dorothy Friberg]

Beautiful images. Thank you!

Song for the Summer Solstice:

Oak burns steady and hot and longhttps://www.WaccoBB.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2017-06-20_11-55-30.png
and fires of oak are traditional tonight
but we light a fire of pitch pine
which burns well enough in the salt wind
whistling while ragged flames lick the dark
casting our shadows high as the dunes.

Come into the fire and catch,
come in, come in. Fire that burns
and leaves entire, the silver flame
of the moon, trembling mercury laying
on the waves a highway to the abyss,
the full roaring furnace of the sun at zenith
of the year and potency, midsummer's eve.

Come dance in the fire, come in.
This is the briefest night and just
under the ocean the fires of the sun
roll toward us.

Come step into the fire, come in,
come in, dance in the flames of the festival
of the strongest sun at the mountain top
of the year when the wheel starts down.
Dance through me as I through you.
Here in the heart of fire in the caves
of the ancient body we are aligned
with the stars wheeling, the midges swarming
in the humid air like a nebula, with the clams
who drink the tide and the heartwood clock
of the oak and the astronomical clock
in the blood thundering through the great heart
of the albatross. Our cells are burning
each a little furnace powered by the sun
and the moon pulls the sea of our blood.
This night the sun and moon dance
and you and I dance in the fire of which
we are the logs, the matches, and the flames.

- Marge Piercy

[Larry Robinson]

Summer Solstice
The garden is so full of its good green life -
Baby tomatoes swelling on the vine –
Pansies coming, rhododendrons going.
Cosmos opening up towards the sun –
Light lingers far into the evening now.
It is easy to ignore the return of the dark.
We won’t notice that
tomorrow’s daylight lessens.
Summer is here, with its
warm days and baseball,
beach trips and wine in outdoor cafes.
Why should we watch for shadowy fingers
reaching around the edge of the doorframe?
Dazzled by the light
We turn a blind eye to what comes this way.
Up the dusty road -
a stranger in a slouching hat,
approaches slowly and relentlessly
slicing through the heat shimmers.
Take your time, friend.
Your pockets may be filled with blood-red rubies
but we are not yet ready for your gifts.
Take your time.

- Maya Spector

[Larry Robinson]

First Light


From way down deep some dog is howling,

to the moon, to his mate, to his misery

From way down deep in my dream I hear him

and when I open my eyes I hear him

Neither awake nor asleep, I lie here

like the sky and listen,

Unsure if it’s coming from me

or from the bottomless woods.


- Mike Tuggle

(Mike Tuggle was Sonoma County’s Poet Laureate in 2008 and 2009)

[Larry Robinson]

For Mike Tuggle


and the days months years crawled by
leaving an unexpected week
on my wall

where were you all this time?

here is your name
fading on my to-do list

I meant to call

suddenly you are gone

and the Cazedero redwoods whisper your name
to the nighthawks
and the weeping moon

and dim do I hear you
strong-legged and Okie-drawled
singing
to the absolute elsewhere


- Vilma Olivary Ginzberg

[Ronaldo]

40640


For Mike Tuggle ...

[Larry Robinson]

Mennonites

We keep our quilts in closets and do not dance.
We hoe thistles along fence rows for fear
we may not be perfect as our Heavenly Father.
We clean up his disasters. No one has to
call; we just show up in the wake of tornadoes
with hammers, after floods with buckets.
Like Jesus, the servant, we wash each other's feet
twice a year and eat the Lord's Supper,
afraid of sins hidden so deep in our organs
they could damn us unawares,
swallowing this bread, his body, this juice.
Growing up, we love the engravings in Martyrs Mirror:
men drowned like cats in burlap sacks,
the Catholic inquisitors,
the woman who handed a pear to her son,
her tongue screwed to the roof of her mouth
to keep her from singing hymns while she burned.
We love Catherine the Great and the rich tracts
she gave us in the Ukraine, bright green winter wheat,
the Cossacks who torched it, and Stalin,
who starved our cousins while wheat rotted
in granaries. We must love our enemies.
We must forgive as our sins are forgiven,
our great-uncle tells us, showing the chain
and ball in a cage whittled from one block of wood
while he was in prison for refusing to shoulder
a gun. He shows the clipping from 1916:
Mennonites are German milksops, too yellow to fight.
We love those Nazi soldiers who, like Moses,
led the last cattle cars rocking out of the Ukraine,
crammed with our parents - children then -
learning the names of Kansas, Saskatchewan, Paraguay.
This is why we cannot leave the beliefs
or what else would we be? why we eat
'til we're drunk on shoofly and moon pies and borscht.
We do not drink; we sing. Unaccompanied on Sundays,
those hymns in four parts, our voices lift with such force
that we lift, as chaff lifts toward God.

- Julia Kasdorf

[Larry Robinson]

Meditations At Lagunitas


All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry .

- Robert Hass

[Ronaldo]

40667


Meditations At Lagunitas...

[Larry Robinson]

What Were They Like?

Did the people of Viet Nam
use lanterns of stone?
Did they hold ceremonies
to reverence the opening of buds?
Were they inclined to quiet laughter?
Did they use bone and ivory,
jade and silver, for ornament?
Had they an epic poem?
Did they distinguish between speech and singing?

Sir, their light hearts turned to stone.
It is not remembered whether in gardens
stone gardens illumined pleasant ways.
Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom,
but after their children were killed
there were no more buds.
Sir, laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.
A dream ago, perhaps. Ornament is for joy.
All the bones were charred.
it is not remembered. Remember,
most were peasants; their life
was in rice and bamboo.
When peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies
and the water buffalo stepped surely along terraces,
maybe fathers told their sons old tales.
When bombs smashed those mirrors
there was time only to scream.
There is an echo yet
of their speech which was like a song.
It was reported their singing resembled
the flight of moths in moonlight.
Who can say? It is silent now.

- Denise Levertov

[Dorothy Friberg]

I'm not sure it is silent. Many are still haunted by those experiences. Who can measure the damage done to so many? :heart: My nephew, working in underwater demolitions was personally traumatized when he had to set demolitions to destroy a bridge carrying escaping citizens. I admire the resilience of all those who survived this tragic war and I pray that our leaders could learn from it's lessons. A prayer falling on the granite brains of our officials who continue to do what they do.


What Were They Like?
...
When bombs smashed those mirrors
there was time only to scream.
...
Who can say? It is silent now.

- Denise Levertov

[Jude Iam]

When the people lead, the 'leaders' will follow.
All people need to well understand the phrase "cannon fodder" and read All Wars are Bankers Wars


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hfEBupAeo4
and LOTS of other ways to unpack this truth which MUST BE UNDERSTOOD BY ALL so the 1% must actually do the fighting for their own murderous profits. peace, jude

[Larry Robinson]

Love Comes Quietly

Love comes quietly,
Finally drops around me,
On me, in the old way.

What did I know,
Thinking myself able to go alone
All the way?

- Robert Creely

[Larry Robinson]

Naming the Children

He remembers good night and good morning
He remembers my wife, Gail, which is the wind,
Who sits beside him, stroking his thin right hand.

From the back of the car through the neighborhoods
He recites the names of his children
In Russian, Hebrew and English. The names squeeze through

The damaged arteries, past the house in Odessa
Over the remarkable ocean to New York.
Mischa will be Morris. Hodya will be Ida.

Ten years later my mother, Beatrice Florence,
Stares into polished stone. At last
She sees herself, nee Bryna Fagel, beautiful bird.

Which is how it is in America,
Over the graves of our parents, how we are named.

- Steve Orlen