Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Postscript

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

- Seamus Heaney

[Larry Robinson]

Return

A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.
I will go down to the lovely Sur Rivers
And dip my arms in them up to the shoulders.
I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers
In the ocean wind over the river boulders.
I will touch things and things and no more thoughts,
That breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the sky,
The insect clouds that blind our passionate hawks
So that they cannot strike, can hardly fly.
Things are the hawk’s food and noble is the mountain,
Oh noble
Pico Blanco, steep sea-wave of marble.

- Robinson Jeffers

[Larry Robinson]

Advice For The Fall Equinox


Walking in balance is not easy —
to step so lightly
the grasses are not bent,
to step so firmly
one’s track points
a way through the thicket.

Indeed it seems our nature to be
off balance,
one foot stepping so lightly
one so firmly
that lost in the desert
we always walk in a circle.

There are worse fates; let us then
learn to walk the circle in joy.
The seasons turn & return
one upon the other
& there is nowhere to go;
the Earth is Home enough;
the walk, all too brief,
leads Nowhere.

To learn to walk in balance
practice the dance.

Consejo para el Equinoccio Otoñal


Andar en equilibrio no es fácil —
pisar tan ligeramente
que la hierba no se doble,
pisar tan firmemente
que nuestra huella señale
el camino por la maleza.

En verdad nuestra naturaleza parece
ser sin balance,
un pie pisando tan ligeramente
el otro tan firme
que perdidos en el desierto
siempre caminamos en círculo.

Hay peores destinos; entonces
aprendamos a caminar el círculo en gozo.
Las estaciones voltean y vuelven
y no hay a donde ir;
la Tierra es hogar suficiente;
el camino, demasiado breve,
a nada nos lleva.

Para aprender a andar en balance
practica el baile.

- Rafael Jesús González

[Larry Robinson]

Tense Times

Tense times for me,
and sleep’s acting like a newly love-struck teen.
I shall disregard the state my heart’s in
and my mind’s upheavals like water bubbling
past the boiling point.

I am a part of the universe with which the universe is angry,
a part of the earth of which the earth feels utterly ashamed,
a wretched human towards whom
other humans cannot maintain neutrality.

Neutrality: an illusion
like all the graces of which humans speak, so shamelessly theoretical.
Truth is an inadequate term, just like Man,
and love bumps about,
a miserable fly
trapped in a glass box.
Freedom is very relative:
all said and done we live in a ball-shaped prison
barred with ozone.
Set free, our fate
is certain death.

I am incapable of laughing.
Completely incapable of smiling, even.
Incapable, at the same time, of crying.
Incapable of acting like a human being,
which doesn’t upset me in the slightest
though it hurts so
to have a body covered with light down,
to walk on two limbs,
to depend wholly on your mind,
to be drawn after your desires to the furthest point,
to have your freedom trapped,
to have others decide to kill you,
to miss those closest to you
without a chance to say farewell.

What good does Farewell do
but leave a sad impression?
What good’s meeting?
What good’s love?
What good is it to be this alive
while others die from sorrow
over you?

I saw my father for the last time through thick glass
then he departed, for good.
Because of me, let’s say.
Let us say because he could not bear the thought
I’d die before him.
My father died and left death to besiege me
without it frightening me sufficiently.
Why does death scare us to death?
My father departed after a long time
spent on the surface of this planet.
I didn’t say farewell as I should have
nor grieve for him as I should have
and was incapable of tears,
as is my habit, which grows uglier with time.

The soldiers besiege me on all fronts
in uniforms of poor color.
Laws and regimes and statutes besiege me.
Sovereignty besieges me,
a highly concentrated instinct that living creatures cannot shake.
My loneliness besieges me.
My loneliness chokes me.
I am choked by depression, nervousness, worry.
Remorse, that I’m a member of the human race, kills me.
I was unable to say goodbye to all those I love
and who departed, even temporarily.
I was unable to leave a good impression of a last meeting.
Then I yielded to the rifles of longing
leveled my way.
I refused to raise my hand
and became incapacitated.
Then I was bound by sorrow
that failed to force me to tears.

The Knowing gnaws at me from within,
killing every shot I have at survival.
The Knowing is killing me slowly
and it’s much too late for a cure.

- Ashram Fayadh

Fayadh is a Palestinian poet, living in exile in Saudi Arabia. In 2015, he was sentenced to death for cursing against Allah and the prophet Muhammad, insulting Saudi Arabia and distributing a book of his poems that promoted atheism. The above is the first poem he wrote while imprisoned.

Hundreds of leading authors, artists and actors, including the director of Tate Modern, Chris Dercon, the British poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, and actor Helen Mirren appealed for his release. More than 60 international arts and human rights groups, including Amnesty International and the writers’ association PEN International, launched a campaign calling on the Saudi authorities and western governments to save him. Readings of his poetry in support of his case took place in 44 countries.

His sentence was later commuted to eight years, 800 lashes and a personal renunciation of his work.

[Larry Robinson]

The Ripening

This Living
has softened the hard fruit
of my being

Everyday, tenderness
claims more of me
taking me holy
into ripeness

Let me not
fall from the branch
ripe but untasted

Rather, let the Beloved
pluck me in ripeness
and pierce me with His bite

Releasing the juicy
fullness of my life
to run down His arm
like tears of gratitude,
like tears of devotion

But,
if fall I must
untasted
melting into the earth

Let that nourishing decay
be my devotion
spreading out in a pool
of returning

the essential elements
of my being

- Kay Crista

[Larry Robinson]

Pablo Maestro




Neruda
justice is your breath
fearless in knowing
tattooed by the wind
love carved in faith
the poet of poets
your song completed the world


I began with the best
you were the first.
At eleven I found
“Twenty Love Poems
and One Song Of Despair”.
Transmuted by the thoughts you think
with the feelings I felt
I came to be
in flight with your flight
a peace making song of grapes


Nobel man of Nobel Prize
Chilean forever
embracing your wounded land
fixing its broken mouth
tending its tragic de-petalled daisies


You inhabit me
afire
your words dialogue
with my inner wisdom
you know of distant sadness
and in my voice that has humbled itself
into a homeless poem of exile
a searing truth lives where God flames.
Justice finds its place in your hand.
With each of your words we breathe in freedom
and breath out pain.


I was twenty one when
with Carlos Fuentes,
at the New York Hilton
we met in a strange cadence
of slow motion.
Your wife, Matilde, in the background
looked on accustomed to the routine
as I sat beguiled at your feet
amongst many others,
and in my wiser years as a poet
I’ve continued at your feet
still translating into Nerudian
when I don’t want facts
to interfere with truth


Last night, Pablo maestro,
I slept in the same dream as you
a merciful atonement
of making love in a quiet poem
where in each other’s exhiles
we to one another sang


When you were dying
your forever betraying government
cut off your phone from all the world,
as the wood fences from all your homes
bore the packed, scratched tributes
for the humble for whom you sang
to the famous that sang for you


This is a small “song of despair”
as I wash my face with your tears
I again know your rhymes
visionary of hot rhythms
your drum is my heart beat
and your voice is my song!


- Jana Klenburg

[Larry Robinson]

Omens

Out here, we read everything as a sign.
The coyote in its scruffed coat,
bending to eat a broken persimmon on the ground.
The mess of crows that fills the apple tree,
makes a racket, lifts off.
In between, quiet.
The winter fog is a blank.
I wish I could make sense
of the child’s empty bed,
the bullet hole though my brother’s heart.
The mailman drops a package
on the front stoop and the neighbor’s dog
won’t stop barking. I tread
down the stairs, lightly.
Because we can’t know
what comes next, we say,
The plum tree is blooming early.
There are buck antlers lying in the grass.
A mountain lion left its footprints by the bridge.


- Danusha Lameris

[Larry Robinson]

Making Passage

It’s like swimming across a river
with our eyes closed, this passage
through the center of our life.

Sometimes we have to navigate
from the inside out—when the stars
hide their light, when we cannot see the bank

on the other side, when the hounds
of our past bark on the shoreline
braying their mournful song at our leaving.

It is the stillness at the heart of the fire
that guides—the voice of our angel of mercy
that rings out when we look over our shoulder

at the old life with longing. You cannot go back,
she says, that place is gone now. And for a moment,
we freeze in the river sure we will drown,

forgetting which way is up and down,
forward and back, as the roar of the roiling rapids
pours through us, our heart filled

with all the questions that have refused
to leave us alone. And then something
remembers itself, lifts our shoulders above

the swirling cauldron of in-between,
and we simply let go of the fight to stay.
The tangled paradoxes flow on through

the body of the river, and we are carried
by an invisible current that draws us closer
and closer to the edge of a new world.

On our knees, we find root and ground,
give thanks for this fertile soil, seeded
with our dreams, thirsty for our arrival.

- Laura Weaver

[Larry Robinson]

Father’s Memory of a Mexican Mining Camp


Softly, it always began softly.
Then slowly swelled to a wail.
Men’s voices. Maybe seven of them
up on the hill behind the house.


A breeze through the windows
stirred the curtains like clouds.
I was five, or six. Around midnight
it would start—such a doleful sound.


They were drinking. It was Saturday
and the mines were closed. Their song
would wake me—their longing.
It was a language I knew,


though I couldn’t make out the words.
But the music—that was theirs.
Some ancient secret. A string of notes
piecing together who they once were.


My twin brother slept soundly.
I was alone with this mystery.
It haunts me even now, this lament
to their gods. If flowers were songs—


if the marigold sang, it would mourn
like this. I imagine them still
sitting on a dark hill chanting
their dirge. Some nights I wake—


I hear them. I don’t remember
my dreams, so I dutifully make
my way to the window.
All I see are clouds and mist.


- Cindy Williams Gutiérrez

[Larry Robinson]

For a Coming Extinction


Gray Whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing


I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day


The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours


When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices


Join your word to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important


- W. S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

Twenty-One Love Poems [Poem III]


Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time
for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp
in time tells me we’re not young.
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,
my limbs streaming with a purer joy?
did I lean from any window over the city
listening for the future
as I listen here with nerves tuned for your ring?
And you, you move toward me with the same tempo.
Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark
of the blue-eyed grass of early summer,
the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring.
At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever.
At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.


- Adrienne Rich

[Larry Robinson]

The CrisisTHESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.


- Tom Paine
(December 23, 1776)

[Larry Robinson]

The Daily News

reading the obituaries
the world goes on
at a far center
a universe dies
a compression of lifetime
into words
sometimes
a photo
of someone
smiling

- Les Bernstein

[Larry Robinson]

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Ecclesiastes says “for everything there is a season.”https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2018-10-08_10-20-15.png
You say “It’s tax season;
it’s baseball season; it’s allergy season;
I’ve got to season the steak on the barbie;
besides, I don’t have time to change the world.”

Goethe tells us of the genius, power and magic in boldness.
You say “What can I do, anyway?
The foxes are guarding the henhouse;
the juggernaught is out of control;
we’re all just snowflakes in a windstorm.”

The mountain asks “Which snowflake, falling,
will be the one to send down the avalanche
to change this entire landscape?”

- Larry Robinson

[Roland Jacopetti]

Great job, Larry! Anna and I love you!
Roland

[Larry Robinson]

Dream Song #16

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes    ...    Yo no sé!
- César Vallejo

They sniffed us out of the holes with the animals
they had programmed and there are blows in life so
powerful we just don’t know and there were trenches
and there was water and it poured in through our mouths

and out of our ears and there were things we saw in the
sand at that moment of sinking: mountains and daisies
and tulips and rivers and the bodies of the people we
had been and the bodies of the people we had loved

and we felt hooks coming through the trenches and we
felt hooks coming through the sand and I saw hooks coming
through my child’s clothes and I wanted him to know that they
would never be able to scoop us out of the sand but of course

it wasn’t true they had scooped us out of the sand and our
mouths were so full of dirt it is what they do when you’re
dead and they made us spit and they beat us until our mouths
were empty and they paid us for constructing the mountain and

it was me and L and we looked for S and we looked for J and J
and we looked for O and we looked for R and we looked for J
and S in the holes in which the bodies of those we loved were
hiding or dying or sinking or stealing some shelter some little

worm’s worth of cover to keep their bodies from dissolving
into the maniac murmurs of this impossible carcass economy

- Daniel Borzutzky

[Larry Robinson]

In Praise of Earth

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

- Joy Harjo

[Larry Robinson]

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]

What We Need


on earth we need nothing new no gizmo style fads

no media distraction what we need is old

ancient primal primitive pagan we need torah runes testament

vedas dharma chant gregorian taiko drum salutations to the sun

we need what we have been given from the beginning Word

rolling thunder god condensing out of Spirit

the deep the water the firmament the air the fire

the whispering whistling wind of Spirit pulsing in all matter

what we need radiates from the sun the stars from the Bodhi tree

the burning bush speaking to our hearts

with our drums we call back to the cosmos

what we need is what we knew as Bushmen who heard the angels

who saw the light shining from within all things

what we need is to remember who we are what we know

with our bare feet on the earth our round heads below the dome of the sky

make one endless gracious bow to the great being of Love

who gives us life on earth life in the stars

make one endless gracious bow to what we know

the truth of love the love of truth

- Theresa Roach Melia

[Larry Robinson]

My Father’s Studio, 2005
As if browsing in a gallery,
I flip through canvases leaning against the wall
behind my father’s studio. A clear October day,

the air breezeless, birdless. Silence
still cloys like oily mud, two months
since the flood. The studio’s siding sags;

the back door won’t close. I look in:
heaps of clothes rotting, shelves of LPs,
their jackets fused, some swollen books,

and, further back in muck and shadow,
forty years of work my father made,
and catalogues, and slides, and reviews.

I step back into the sunlight,
look through the canvases again,
remember my father working on them,

and time unravels and I see myself
doing the things a ghost does,
shuffling inside the narrow frame

of a world of ruined images. Yes,
I remember these paintings.
They were good. And I remind myself:

he’s already repainting them.
They’re still good.
Stop acting like a ghost.



- Brad Richard

[Larry Robinson]

For Warmth

I hold my face in my two hands.
No, I’m not crying.
I hold my face in my two hands,
to keep my loneliness warm,
two hands protecting,
two hands nourishing,
two hands preventing
my soul from leaving me in anger.

- Thich Nhat Hanh

[Larry Robinson]

In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

- Theodore Roethke

[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>Stories


Let me think of the way that story goes
About the king of time and his long robes.
The world is breathless for good storytelling.
Always words find their way out of us
And our mouths shape them firm and forever.
Sometimes songs come into us flowing from streams
Towards places sounds have never been.
Always other voices are speaking through us.
Stories wander the royal road of dreams
With their silent language. Words arrive
The way the shaman came, the first teller,
Then came the prophets and their retelling.
Many sounds faded, forgotten or ripened to return

Again when synchronicity could acquire its sense of timing.

Words find their warmth in the moist mouth of revelation.
These stories cross the far horizons and in time find each other.
That occurrence is a gift as written records tell the tales
On stone, on leaf, parchment and on the page of living memory.
Stories are our eternal bread. They reveal the divine passwords
At the gates that open to the center of our lives.


- Richard Meyers

[Larry Robinson]

The Source

Water is the least environmentally impactful
bev*erage and bottled water is the most environmen*tally
responsible packaged drink choice.
- INTERNATIONAL BOTTLED WATER ASSOCIATION

Far from these woods and this river, far from the Source,
in a made place not easy to comprehend,
harder than woods and river but much less hard,
where sky and grass are priceless or must be shared,
and shade is rectilinear and smooth;
where the scourge teems upward in tall elaborate mounds,
and doom seeps outward, settling a dull gray crust
over what once were woods and river like these;
in the back of a double-locked shelter in a room where salt
and bread are kept safe from the rain, from rats and starlings,
in a humming iron chest that holds inside it
fresh weather like that of a day between fall and winter;
on a crowded shelf of that chest stands a vessel pressed
from molecules of degraded plantlife and creatures;
and there, in that thin vessel—that is where
the creature, exiled forever from the Source,
further and further cut off from woods and river,
keeps for itself eight handfuls of the river.
It opens the door of the chest. It stands and drinks.
The once-living bottle is see-through like the contents,
the label of vegetable fiber the color of envy.

- Joshua Mehigan

[Larry Robinson]

Indigo Blue

Must it always be this way?
The heart blood red, always red
hot and thick and steamy?

I know the hearts on fire today
passion, courage, fierce rhythm and heat
but tell me, can’t the heart just once
find another color

Green maybe
as winter moss just after the rain
or the green of chamomile just before it blossoms

The green of jasmine leaves
flowing through the eyes
then through my heart

Or maybe the heart can be butter yellow
the yellow of a whole pound of it
at a Sunday breakfast with friends

And why not a heart sun yellow
as beautiful and full of hope as that
single chrysanthemum corsage
at the homecoming dance so long ago

It’s primary, this thought
a green heart, a yellow heart, and yes
a heart vermillion red

But they won’t do for me today
Today is more complex
I need a blue I cannot name
a blue from another place

No, don’t give me your sky blue of a western afternoon
Full of soft birds and wind
And forget yours flowers of violet and periwinkle

If I can’t do red today
I’m farther still from soft blue petals

My heart today is that other blue
darker than blueberries crushed underfoot
and darker than grapes
abandoned on the vine

This is a blue past midnight
almost past caring
try indigo blue heading to black

Today my heart filled with
sorrow, pain and helplessness
hidden from light and growing dark
is indigo blue heading to black
a blue so dark, even God can’t see it clearly

My country is being torn apart
And I am unable to stop the madness

Yes, my heart is indigo blue
today

- Doug von Koss

[Larry Robinson]

Ongoing

Never mind the distances traveled, the companion
she made of herself. The threadbare twenties not
to be underestimated. A wild depression that ripped
from January into April. And still she sprouts an appetite.
Insisting on edges and cores, when there were none.
Relationships annealed through shared ambivalences.
Pages that steadied her. Books that prowled her
until the hard daybreak, and for months after.
Separating new vows from the old, like laundry whites.
Small losses jammed together so as to gather mass.
Stored generations of filtered quietude.
And some stubbornness. Tangles along the way
the comb-teeth of the mind had to bite through, but for what.
She had trained herself to look for answers at eye level,
but they were lower, they were changing all the time.

- Rita Dove

[Larry Robinson]

Dust On My Forehead

My outrage is not helping my country
My dismissal of this absurdity
is not strengthening my resolve
My denigration of “those people”
joins me
with them
Go ahead
make your own conclusions
I too want a fair world
I too want to live in a country
where elected officials care
about the poor and the sick
I want our rivers and oceans
and immigrants and children
protected.
Can I see this in a kinder way?
Can I be more Zen and let my kind face beam out to you?
Can I speak more patiently like a Christian?
Can I be more respectful like a Muslim?
Can I be more Jewish
with impassioned arguments?
Can I dance more like a Sufi?
Can I bow down on this earth
and leave the brown dusted
on my forehead
not brushing the precious
soil off the knees of my jeans?
Like Ash Wednesday
or a tattoo or a black
band worn around my arm
you will see my attempts
my way
to make peace
with this troubling world
It involves placing my forehead
on the earth
in my garden
or the patch of weeds
in my driveway or the sand near the creek
- look closely
- into my eyes
- they are brown
The speckles left over from all that kneeling
and bending
and giving thanks.

- Kristy Hellum

[Larry Robinson]

Autumn


Hints of autumnhttps://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2018-10-21_14-49-59.png
are peeking at me—
a few golden leaves
among the numerous green.
Daylight is diminishing
while darkness grows longer.
Vegetable plants are
at least half spent—

just like me—
in the midst of
life’s autumn,
at least half spent.
This body is stiffening
despite yoga stretches
and nature walks.
Tiredness increases
despite longer nightly sleep
and occasional naps.

The desire to do
is metamorphosing
into the desire
to just be . . .
to rest, to count blessings,
to smile at this rich,
fulfilling life’s
gifts and ironies,
to feel abiding love
for dear ones
abiding on the other side;
to remember abundant good times
and marvel that
many difficult challenges
and tribulations have
actually passed;

to appreciate the opportunity
to slow down, rest, and
contemplate life’s transitions
during the long, dark nights
and short golden days
of autumn.

- Zahira Rabinowitz

[Peggy]

Just what I needed today. TY.

[Larry Robinson]

When There Were Ghosts

On the Mexico side in the 1950s and 60s,
There were movie houses everywhere

And for the longest time people could smoke
As they pleased in the comfort of the theaters.

The smoke rose and the movie told itself
On the screen and in the air both,

The projection caught a little
In the wavering mist of the cigarettes.

In this way, every story was two stories
And every character lived near its ghost.

Looking up we knew what would happen next
Before it did, as if it the movie were dreaming

Itself, and we were part of it, part of the plot
Itself, and not just the audience.

And in that dream the actors’ faces bent
A little, hard to make out exactly in the smoke,

So that María Félix and Pedro Armendáriz
Looked a little like my aunt and one of my uncles—

And so they were, and so were we all in the movies,
Which is how I remember it: Popcorn in hand,

Smoke in the air, gum on the floor—
Those Saturday nights, we ourselves

Were the story and the stuff and the stars.
We ourselves were alive in the dance of the dream.

- Alberto Ríos

[Larry Robinson]

Flammable


Like roadside weeds, dried
leeched of color
bleached pale,


foxtail, wild oat, rattlesnake grass
their thin throated rasp
and rustle lost in the breeze.

Unheard, unseen,
men and women mass
waiting, fuel for the match—

the spark of anger
flicked into the crowd
leaps to life, becomes

a rolling wave of flame
roaring across the shocked land

thick air, clogged with smoke
the vengeful bones of those who burn.

When they are but ashes
smothering the land
winter skies will weep

and in the spring
roadside flowers will blaze
bright with color.

- Lisa Shulman

[Larry Robinson]

Autumn Passage

On suffering, which is real.
On the mouth that never closes,
the air that dries the mouth.

On the miraculous dying body,
its greens and purples.
On the beauty of hair itself.

On the dazzling toddler:
“Like eggplant,” he says,
when you say “Vegetable,”

“Chrysanthemum” to “Flower.”
On his grandmother’s suffering, larger
than vanished skyscrapers,

September zucchini,
other things too big. For her glory
that goes along with it,

glory of grown children’s vigil,
communal fealty, glory
of the body that operates

even as it falls apart, the body
that can no longer even make fever
but nonetheless burns

florid and bright and magnificent
as it dims, as it shrinks,
as it turns to something else.

- Elizabeth Alexander

[Larry Robinson]

Better Than Expected

Things were not as bad as I had thought.
The scrape in the fender of the rented car
could be hidden with a little white paint
before I returned it to the agency.

This CD of new age music, which I just liked it first,
with its that synthetic wind of pulsing jellyfish,
does a remarkable job of slowing down my heart.

Merely to have survived to this point
is already the most unlikely triumph;
to still be breathing and trying to improve.

Things are definitely better than expected.
I'm not on trial for anything.
I have given up on the idea of great success.
The oncologist says the X Ray shows no “abnormalities.”

We are always trying to come to a decision,
always in a place where we are making up our minds
whether this soup is good, the flowers pretty,
whether we are fortunate, or poor.

All my life I have been
loved by women,
held up by water,
ignored by war.
I have outlasted the voluntary numbness
I required to remain alive.

Why shouldn't I be able,
why shouldn't I be able now
to walk down the street,

under the overhanging trees,
and raise my arms and say
that the ring shaking down from the leaves
is not an inconvenience but it's joy?

- Tony Hoagland
(November 19, 1953 - October 23, 2018)

[Larry Robinson]

The New Dark Ages

Thunderstorms stir me up—
the stillness right before
the first close tremor,
the pond shivering
at the height of summer,
the field full-blown, going to seed.
But this storm scares me.
A foreign climate occupies the land.
When nature was God, in my childhood,
I wasn't afraid. Snow buried the town,
the river flooded it,
lightning set the woods on fire.
In months the damage bandaged itself
with mosses and ferns.
This storm comes from another
world, here by mistake,
its rain blistering the birch leaves.
Has it been weaponized?
No one knows what to expect
of a storm with human parents.

- Chase Twichell

[Larry Robinson]

Sometimes


Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest

breathing
like the ones
in the old stories

who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,

you come
to a place
whose only task

is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests

conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and

to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,

questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,

questions
that have patiently
waited for you,

questions
that have no right
to go away.

- David Whyte

[Larry Robinson]

Ground of Truth


Does greed win?
Can it outrun justice?
Does it subsume truth?
I think it eats itself like a hungry boar
Gobbling away at itself until
It destroys every vestige, every morsel, every crumb.
Left are the teeth of truth
Telling the stories that lies cannot obliterate.
The tongue may deceive but the eyes cannot
Disguise a malicious intent just as
The rose cannot perfume away the rot of evil.
Ah, but the lilies of the field in all their glory
Stand tall as sentinels of truth and goodness.
Their beauty covers greed’s detritus
As it becomes the scented soil of tomorrow’s dreams
And Truth sprouts anew to show us in rainbow hues
The arc of justice and honesty.


- Pat Morgan

[Larry Robinson]

The Diameter Of The Bomb

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won't even mention the howl of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.

- Yehuda Amichai

(translated by Chana Bloch & Stephen Mitchell)

[Larry Robinson]

On a Day Like Today


We are feeling the first
glint of shock that our
ancestors felt the day they
were expelled from Spain.

Now our restive hands
are sensing the first drops
of pelting rain that fell on
loved ones who boarded an
unspeakable train.

We remember those who wore
yellow stars and perhaps those
times are not so far away.

Maybe soon on a day like today
we will see crescent moons on
the sleeves of those who have
no place to pray.

Glance upwards at the angry
sky casting an ominous pall
over the frightened heads of
brown-skinned children who
are pleading: why?

The latest version of “it can’t
happen here” is no longer
news from a distant
shore; it’s here at our door.

My hope is that you and I will
awaken and be vigilant on
behalf of all that we hold to
be dear,

And my prayer is that our tired
eyes can see and our broken
hearts can hear.

- Bruce Silverman

[Larry Robinson]

were they singing

were they
singing, praying, daydreaming
was the Rabbi droning on
maybe they were sleeping
I used to fall asleep in church

the embrace of shabes peace
brought them to the shul that day
where unsuspected terror struck

senseless serial assaults
spike my blood pressure
even evoke a momentary outrage
then fade
often before the next news cycle begins

this one
threatens my balance
spinning dizzy falling
on my knees immobile
stuck in centuries old tear soaked mud
not ready to resurrect

what is this sorrow
I am not a Jew
what is this compulsion to
tightly hold this pain
as if letting go would shatter a trust
but with whom

tomorrow
time
the grand arbiter
may work its magic
begin to crowd out
yesterday’s biddings

but today
aware the sound of breaking glass
has never cost me more than
just an inconvenience
today
eighty years since Kristallnacht
today I am a Jew

- JoAnn Smith

[Larry Robinson]

At a Country Funeral


Now the old ways that have brought us
farther than we remember sink out of sight
as under the treading of many strangers
ignorant of landmarks. Only once in a while
they are cast clear again upon the mind
as at a country funeral where, amid the soft
lights and hothouse flowers, the expensive
solemnity of experts, notes of a polite musician,
persist the usages of old neighborhood.
Friends and kinsmen come and stand and speak,
knowing the extremity they have come to,
one of their own bearing to the earth the last
of his light, his darkness the sun’s definitive mark.
They stand and think as they stood and thought
when even the gods were different.
And the organ music, though decorous
as for somebody else’s grief, has its source
in the outcry of pain and hope in log churches,
and on naked hillsides by the open grave,
eastward in mountain passes, in tidelands,
and across the sea. How long a time?
Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide my
self in Thee. They came, once in time,
in simple loyalty to their dead, and returned
to the world. The fields and the work
remained to be returned to. Now the entrance
of one of the old ones into the Rock
too often means a lifework perished from the land
without inheritor, and the field goes wild
and the house sits and stares. Or it passes
at cash value into the hands of strangers.
Now the old dead wait in the open coffin
for the blood kin to gather, come home
for one last time, to hear old men
whose tongues bear an essential topography
speak memories doomed to die.
But our memory of ourselves, hard earned,
is one of the land’s seeds, as a seed
is the memory of the life of its kind in its place,
to pass on into life the knowledge
of what has died. What we owe the future
is not a new start, for we can only begin
with what has happened. We owe the future
the past, the long knowledge
that is the potency of time to come.
That makes of a man’s grave a rich furrow.
The community of knowing in common is the seed
of our life in this place. There is not only
no better possibility, there is no
other, except for chaos and darkness,
the terrible ground of the only possible
new start. And so as the old die and the young
depart, where shall a man go who keeps
the memories of the dead, except home
again, as one would go back after a burial,
faithful to the fields, lest the dead die
a second and more final death.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught

You've got to be taught to hate and fear
You've got to be taught from year to year
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade
You've got to be carefully taught

You've got to be taught before it's too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You’ve got to be carefully taught

- Richard Rogers

[REALnothings]

You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught...


WONDERFUL choice! :heart:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPf6ITsjsgk

Here is the song on YouTube One of the most memorable from childhood! I can tell because of the indelible memory of it, and the tears that well up, still.

[Larry Robinson]

Autumn

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all the other stars in the loneliness.

We're all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one….it's in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
Infinitely calm, hold up all this falling.


- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translated from the German by Robert Bly)

[Larry Robinson]

In the Event of Another Morning

In the event of another morning,
I ask all those inclined to a violent act,
of whatever sort, physical, psychological, economic,
to remember your mother’s breast and
the soft sound of her breath in your ear.
If you lost your mother, remember your longing and your pain.
Remember your beating heart and your dying day.

In the event of another morning,
I ask all those inclined to a violent act
to remember the pinprick of recognition
in the perception of their hallowed face.
Remember that time dismisses all beings equally
and honor is the coin of the realm.

In the event of another morning,
consider allowing yourself to be held
by those whom you would harm, feeling
the gentle warmth of their arms, and
the yearning of your heart.

In the event of another morning,
let not the hardship of the sowing
rob you of the richness of the harvest
that will come with your patience.

In the event of another morning,
might we know together the fresco of our passions
and study the patterns of our birthright.

In the event of another morning,
there will be lessons and we would be wise to listen.

In the event of another morning, may the sun rise on your forgiving face.

- Tim Hicks

[Larry Robinson]

The Earth Is Dying

The earth is dying.
We sit in hospice, we few
who are willing
to bear witness.
People say –
My life is fine,
difficult at times,
but fine.
The rent gets paid.
There is food in the refrigerator.
The sun rose this morning.

But in my lifetime
half the creatures of the sea
have died.
The plankton is full of plastic.
Turtles eat it and are full
of plastic as well, and sometimes
they are trapped in the plastic islands
filling our heating oceans.
The glaciers are disappearing,
almost before our eyes.

You don’t want to hear this.
I don’t want to hear this.
But how will the children breathe
when the oxygen producers are gone?
How will they live
when there is no clean water to drink?

Oh, I will be gone by then,
dead and beyond caring.
But I have children,
and my children have children,
still wide-eyed and excited
by life and possibility.

We are called
to bear the unbearable.
She is dying, and so
we are dying.
Will you be with Her?
Will you give Her
your tears?

- Maya Spector

[Larry Robinson]

This Is How I Voted Today


This is how I voted today.
I went to the woods and dug a hole
under fern in leaf rot and luminous fungi

into which I pressed my mouth and screamed
a long hot uncreated vowel containing
the first and last letters of every alphabet.
I signed my vote with my tears,
it was ratified by planetary silence
groans of Adam's first wife from far below
heaved out of the groundlessness
where she is gowned in seamless glistening mycellia.

Only then did I realize what I'd voted for
the abolition of Republicans and Democrats,
the downfall of spires and hierarchies,
the dissolution of superpacs and
$50,000 a plate dinner parties
in Hollywood and the Hamptons,
the deconstruction of the Constitution into a single
proto-Hebraic rune,
inscribed on a cavern wall somewhere under
the vast and indecipherable border
between Mexico and Arizona.

The overthrow of male and female hegemony,
the annihilation of both capitalism and socialism,
the eradication of black and white by a rainbow of tears,
the renaissance of family farms and local small-business collectives
spawning an exquisite tapestry of bio-regional economies where
no mention is ever made of "government."

Where politics evaporates into folk music story-telling
fermented cabbage useful tools
and the gentle heroics of mere listening.

I voted for the mule that Jesus rode into the city
proclaiming forgiveness of all debts
which is the same mule Laotzu rode out
beyond the wall of China.

Which is also the mule that Rumi sat backwards on
stumbling Westward into exile
gazing Eastward toward eternal loss--
that mule I tell you will be president!

I voted to compost and manure the floor of the Senate
entangling every politician in a web of hemp moss
mushrooms and deer pellets.
I voted to turn the dome of Congress all abuzz
into a giant hummingbird feeder.

I voted for the reclamation of all human skin
with musky forests of golden fur.

My vote was the sound of Yes in every tongue
the co-whispering of all leaves
the council of trees
the un-clink of gold and emeralds returning to
veins in stone the echo of a primal Sigh
that meant to sing the color green
but accidentally created the stars.

- Fred LaMotte

[REALnothings]

AMEN!
:heart:
And add this one to it, as well!


https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2018-11-07_08-42-45.png

I know the voice of depression
Still calls to you.

I know those habits that can ruin your life
Still send their invitations.

But you are with the Friend now
And look so much stronger.

You can stay that way
And even bloom!

Keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From your prayers and work and music
And from your companions' beautiful laughter.

Keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From the sacred hands and glance of your Beloved
And, my dear,
From the most insignificant movements
Of your own holy body.

Learn to recognize the counterfeit coins
That may buy you just a moment of pleasure,
But then drag you for days
Like a broken man
Behind a farting camel.

You are with the Friend now.
Learn what actions of yours delight Him,
What actions of yours bring freedom
And Love.

Whenever you say God's name, dear pilgrim,
My ears wish my head was missing
So they could finally kiss each other
And applaud all your nourishing wisdom!

O keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From your prayers and work and music
And from your companions' beautiful laughter

And from the most insignificant movements
Of your own holy body.

Now, sweet one,
Be wise.
Cast all your votes for Dancing!

~ Hafiz


From:
https://www.thebarefootjourney.com/single-post/2015/12/22/Cast-All-Your-Votes-for-Dancing


(https://www.thebarefootjourney.com/single-post/2015/12/22/Cast-All-Your-Votes-for-Dancing)

[Larry Robinson]

The Ancient Ones


From the beginning
We have been with you.
We are the Ancient Ones
And we remember.

We remember the time when there was only love,
The time when all breathing was one. 

We remember the seed of your being 

Planted in the belly of the vast black night. 


We remember the red cave of deep slumber, 

The time of forgetting, 

The sound of your breath, 

The pulse of your heart. 


We remember the force of your longing for life,

The cries of your birth 

Bringing you forth.

We are the Ancient Ones 

And we have waited 
and watched.
You say that you cannot remember that time


That you have no memory of us. 

You say that you cannot hear our voices 

That our touch no longer moves you. 

You say there can be no return 


That something has been lost, 

That there is only 
silence.
We say the time of waiting is over. 

We say the silence has been broken. 


We say there can be no forgetting now. 

We say, 
Listen.
We are the bones of your grandmother's grandmothers. 

We have returned now, 

We say you cannot forget us now, 


We say we are with you
And you are us. 


Remember,
Remember.

- Patricia Reis

[Dorothy Friberg]

Tell that to Trump!

[Larry Robinson]

Adrift

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

- Mark Nepo

[Larry Robinson]

They


The Bishop tells us: 'When the boys come back
They will not be the same; for they'll have fought
In a just cause: they lead the last attack
On Anti-Christ; their comrades' blood has bought
New right to breed an honourable race,
They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.'



'We're none of us the same!' the boys reply.
'For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind;
Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die;
And Bert's gone syphilitic: you'll not find
A chap who's served that hasn't found some change.'
And the Bishop said: 'The ways of God are strange.'

- Siegfried Sassoon

[Larry Robinson]

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I am the mother of sorrows,
I am the ender of grief;
I am the bud and the blossom,
I am the late-falling leaf.


I am thy priest and thy poet,
I am thy serf and thy king;
I cure the tears of the heartsick,
When I come near they shall sing.


White are my hands as the snowdrop;
Swart are my fingers as clay;
Dark is my frown as the midnight,
Fair is my brow as the day.


Battle and war are my minions,
Doing my will as divine;
I am the calmer of passions,
Peace is a nursling of mine.


Speak to me gently or curse me,
Seek me or fly from my sight;
I am thy fool in the morning,
Thou art my slave in the night.


Down to the grave will I take thee,
Out from the noise of the strife;
Then shalt thou see me and know me—
Death, then, no longer, but life.


Then shalt thou sing at my coming,
Kiss me with passionate breath,
Clasp me and smile to have thought me
Aught save the foeman of Death.


Come to me, brother, when weary,
Come when thy lonely heart swells;
I’ll guide thy footsteps and lead thee
Down where the Dream Woman dwells.


- Paul Laurence Dunbar
(June 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906) was an African-American poet, novelist, and playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His parents were slaves. He died at 33 from tuberculosis.

[Larry Robinson]

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb, for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not they hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

- Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) spent much of his short, adult life as a volunteer soldier for the British military during World War I.
He wrote vivid and terrifying poems about modern warfare. Owen was killed by machinegun fire just days before the end of the war.

[REALnothings]

What a powerful poem!

Leonard Cohen used the same images to decry the slaughter of part of a generation in the Vietnam era, in his song "Story of Isaac." Here are the lyrics of the first 3 verses (masterful, imo! There's a 4th verse I don't really care for.), and below, a link to a YouTube video of Cohen singing the song:

The door it opened slowly,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtdYnhnoGI0
My father he came in,
I was nine years old.
And he stood so tall above me,
His blue eyes they were shining
And his voice was very cold.
He said, "I've had a vision
And you know I'm strong and holy,
I must do what I've been told."
So he started up the mountain,
I was running, he was walking,
And his axe was made of gold.

Well, the trees they got much smaller,
The lake a lady's mirror,
We stopped to drink some wine.
Then he threw the bottle over.
Broke a minute later
And he put his hand on mine.
Thought I saw an eagle
But it might have been a vulture,
I never could decide.
Then my father built an altar,
He looked once behind his shoulder,
He knew I would not hide.

You who build these altars now
To sacrifice these children,
You must not do it anymore.
A scheme is not a vision
And you never have been tempted
By the Devil or the Lord.
You who stand above them now,
Your hatchets blunt and bloody,
You were not there before,
When I lay upon a mountain
And my father's hand was trembling
With the beauty of the word.

[Larry Robinson]

Cinders

With every breath I take
I inhale the ash of homes
where families convened,
the trees that exhaled oxygen
and gave birds a place to rest
I breathe in the Safeway, the Taco Bell
that exploded in the dead of night
and the remains of squirrels and spiders
and grasshoppers, who had nowhere to run
as flames surrounded them


A hundred miles from the fire
There’s not a cloud in the sky
Yet it’s still gray. And cold.
Two small birds chatter outside my office
They can’t stay inside today,
or wear masks to filter the air


A year ago the smoke came from our county
The pall it created spread thick and wide
Today we inhale misery from far away
The singed dreams of our neighbors
Knowing that nothing will ever be as it was
But that from the ashes springs renewal

- Michael Shapiro

[Larry Robinson]

The Laughter of Women

The laughter of women sets fire
to the Halls of Injustice
and the false evidence burns
to a beautiful white lightness

It rattles the Chambers of Congress
and forces the windows wide open
so the fatuous speeches can fly out

The laughter of women wipes the mist
from the spectacles of the old;
it infects them with a happy flu
and they laugh as if they were young again

Prisoners held in underground cells
imagine that they see daylight
when they remember the laughter of women

It runs across water that divides,
and reconciles two unfriendly shores
like flares that signal the news to each other

What a language it is, the laughter of women,
high-flying and subversive.
Long before law and scripture
we heard the laughter, we understood freedom.

- Lisel Mueller

[Larry Robinson]

velociraptor


she puts her clawed finger to her
terrifying lips & whispers

tell them
tell them predators
only hunt when hungry

of course she means wild predators
not the domesticated cat
contaminated by human whim

when we’re hungry we hunt
when we’re successful we kill
when we kill we eat
then we’re not hungry
all our neighbors relax
we enjoy each other’s beauty

she is light on her feet
the plodding protoceratops lifts his heart
seeing the speed of her dance
across the plain

scents of grasses mingle
with the soft grinding of cretaceous teeth
the rumbling of digestion
heavy legs impressing the soil
bending the blades

the sun falls abundantly & warm
soft colors of skin undulating over muscles
scaled, feathered & fragrant
everyone’s motions fascinate everyone’s eyes
a symphony of effort & repose

velociraptor rejoices
it’s a good day & all around are big & small bodies
breathing, singing praises of abundance & suspense
light on her feet she dances
light on her feet she entertains
she is entertained
not hunting

- Sandy Eastoak

[Larry Robinson]

Compassion

Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don't want it. What seems conceit,
bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign
of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on
down there where the spirit meets the bone.

- Miller Williams

[Larry Robinson]

The Tubbs Fire from Freestone

It was midnight and I could not sleep.
My window open and barely a hint of smoke,
a gas grill, I thought, or the first fire
this season in a neighbor’s wood stove.
Terrible winds were in the trees
a death rattle shaking of
the pull-down shades
in an open window.
I still did not know why
I could not, could not sleep
in the yet ocean-moist autumn air.

The next morning I woke to a world
now bone dry and strange, oddly metallic,
a coppery sky and its dull shining.
I took a photo of that eerie color
escaping the clouds and burning
into my consciousness.
I drove inland as I always do for coffee
to spark-plug the day. And I saw it,
and pulled over. Blood orange
the sun as I had never seen before.
It scared me the way heat-
lightning did that first time,
of no warning and not knowing
what it was.

I took another picture of that
sun, red siren of warning,
signaling an already charred
County and its remains,
its kiln dried bone fragments,
skeletons of an old world.
A choking smoke
beginning of this other!

It will take years and lifetimes
to sift through the black presence:

the raku-glazed shards,
the inky charcoal earth, now toxic,
the fire bombing of treasures,
landmarks exploded, and everywhere
cars are deader than doornails.

We are all breathing-in melted electronics.
whole stoves, refrigerators, computers,
plus bibles, trees, dead birds. Whole libraries
vanish into our lungs along with the deer.
Black clouds of ash descend
as entire neighborhoods
become unfamiliar, are bequeathed
to the bravery of first responders
still evacuating residents, and
their animals, and fighting fire.
Ambulances scream: a horrible
midnight parade that went on until morning.
Freeways packed, all the way to San Francisco!
A trauma stained beginning of that day
begins a collective story of dying and rising
together for years, companions of that ash.

- Judith Stone

[Larry Robinson]

It’s Always Been About Wind


It’s early and the top of the oak
wet with dew is swaying, calling me
as it did when I was a boy, and
the birds, singing before we wake,
are the hearts of those who’ve
suffered, reborn as soft things
that sit in trees.

As for me, I’ve become
a hollow bone through which
things long needing to be said
are sung, though I often don’t
know what they mean.

I have been carved out, one
heartache at a time, to make
a clear sound. I don’t cite this
as a principle, just what
happened to me.

I lean my head to the wind
and my heart sings. Then
I eat the song.

- Mark Nepo

[Larry Robinson]

How to be a Poet (to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity…

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensional life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Darling


1.

I break this toast for the ghost of bread in Lebanon.
The split stone the toppled doorway.

Someone's kettle has been crushed.
Someone's sister has a gash above her right eye.

And now our tea has trouble being sweet.
A strawberry softens, turns musty,

overnight each apple grows a bruise.
I tie both shoes on Lebanon's feet.

All day the sky in Texas that has seen no rain since June
is raining Lebanese mountains, Lebanese trees.

What if the air grew damp with the names of mothers?
The clear-belled voices of first graders

pinned to the map of Lebanon like a shield?
When I visited the camp of the opposition

near the lonely Golan, looking northward toward
Syria and Lebanon, a vine was springing pinkly from a tin can

and a woman with generous hips like my mother's
said, "Follow me."

2.

Someone was there. Someone not there now
was standing. In the wrong place
with a small moon-shaped scar on his cheek
and a boy by the hand.
Who had just drunk water, sharing the glass.
Not thinking about it deeply
though they might have, had they known.
Someone grown, and someone not grown.
Who imagined they had different amounts of time left.
This guessing-game ends with our hands in the air,
becoming air.
One who was there is not there, for no reason.
Two who were there.

It was almost too big to see.

3.

Our friend from Turkey says language is so delicate
he likens it to a darling.

We will take this word in our arms.
It will be small and breathing.
We will not wish to scare it.
Pressing lips to the edge of each syllable.
Nothing else will save us now.
The word "together" wants to live in every house.


- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

Communion, NYC
September 25, 2001, for A.

He is breathing the dust
of his neighbors.
At night he wakes
to cough a path of air
down his throat between
their body motes.
In the day he walks streets
fluttered with faces they once wore
and flags. Grief-
cry, battle-cry, wind.

**
Their ashes
line his lungs now,
stir on his air,
sting on his unskinned eye.
He drinks the tea
they make of his tears,
serves it to others
whose names he does not know.

***
In his dream, death is finally worn
on the surface. A small black square
above each head and to the right:
undeniable.

***
He wakes to clear his throat in the night.
Death is inside him now,
released
from its long exile in the grave.
His body is the charnel ground,
his breath the white white vulture
churning ash into bread
bread into touch
touch passed from stranger
to stranger
through the dust
of fallen walls.

- Kim Rosen

[Larry Robinson]

Thanksgiving in the Anthropocene

Thank you, instant mashed potatoes, your bland taste
makes me feel like an average American. Thank you,

incarcerated Americans, for filling the labor shortage
and packing potatoes in Idaho. Thank you, canned

cranberry sauce, for your gelatinous curves. Thank you,
Ojibwe tribe in Wisconsin, your lake is now polluted

with phosphate-laden discharge from nearby cranberry
bogs. Thank you, crisp green beans, you are my excuse

for eating apple pie à la mode later. Thank you, indigenous
migrant workers, for picking the beans in Mexico’s farm belt,

may your children survive the season. Thank you, NAFTA,
for making life dirt cheap. Thank you, Butterball Turkey,

for the word, butterball, which I repeat all day butterball,
butterball, butterball because it helps me swallow the bones

of genocide. Thank you, dark meat, for being so juicy
(no offense, dry and fragile white meat, you matter too).

Thank you, 90 million factory-farmed turkeys, for giving
your lives during the holidays. Thank you, factory-farm

workers, for clipping turkey toes and beaks so they don’t scratch
and peck each other in overcrowded, dark sheds. Thank you,

genetic engineering and antibiotics, for accelerating
their growth. Thank you, stunning tank, for immobilizing

most of the turkeys hanging upside down by crippled legs.
Thank you, stainless steel knives, for your sharpened

edge and thirst for throat. Thank you, de-feathering
tank, for your scalding-hot water, for finally killing the last

still-conscious turkeys. Thank you, turkey tails, for feeding
Pacific Islanders all year round. Thank you, empire of

slaughter, for never wasting your fatty leftovers. Thank you,
tryptophan, for the promise of an afternoon nap;

I really need it. Thank you, store-bought stuffing,
for your ambiguously ethnic flavor, you remind me

that I’m not an average American. Thank you, gravy,
for being hot-off-the-boat and the most beautiful

brown. Thank you, dear readers, for joining me at the table
of this poem. Please join hands, bow your heads, and repeat

after me: “Let us bless the hands that harvest and butcher
our food, bless the hands that drive delivery trucks

and stock grocery shelves, bless the hands that cooked
and paid for this meal, bless the hands that bind

our hands and force-feed our endless mouth.
May we forgive each other and be forgiven.”

- Craig Santos Perez

[Larry Robinson]

Grace


Though the world is dented and dinged
and scuffed and scorned,
we trim the beans and peel the potatoes,
and the kitchen is warm and full
of laughter. We hum as we work
and break into scraps of song.
All day our hands are joyful
as they prepare the meal to come.
There are wars and battles even now,
not all of them fought with guns,
some waged intimately in our thoughts,
our scraped up hearts. And still,
this scent of apple pie, sweetening
as it bakes, this inner insistence
that love is not only possible,
it is every bit as real as our fear.
Whether the host has brought
out his best wine and his best crystal glasses
or water in chipped clay cups,
there is every reason
to be generous, to serve not only
our family, our friends, ourselves,
but also those we don’t yet know how to love
and those parts of ourselves we
have tried to keep separate.
Tonight the host has hidden bait
in the dinner—we all are caught.
Scent of sage, scent of mushrooms
and cream. The bite of cranberry.
Never mind the potatoes cooked too long.
Blessings seep into all the imperfect places,
even if you can’t name the blessings—
consider them secret ingredients.
The point is not to understand the feast,
but to eat, to eat it together.

- Rosemerry Trommer

[Larry Robinson]

Ode to Gratitude

Thanks to the word
that gives thanks.
Thanks to the gratitude
for how excellently
the word melts snow or iron.

The planet seemed full of threats
until soft
as a translucent
feather,
or sweet as a sugary petal,
from lip to lip,
it passed,
thank you,
magnificent, filling the mouth,
or whispered,
hardly voiced,
and the soul became human again,
not a window,
some clear shine
penetrated the forest:
it was possible again to sing beneath the leaves.

Gratitude, you are medicine
opposing
scorn’s bitter oxides,
light melting the cruel altar.

Perhaps
you are also
the carpet
uniting
the most distant men,
passengers spread out
through nature
and the jungle
of unknown men,
merci,
as the delirious train
penetrates a new country,
eradicating frontiers,
spasibo,
joined with the sharp-cusped
volcanoes, frost and fire,
thanks, yes, gracias, and the Earth
turns into a table,
a single word swept it clean,
plates and cups glisten,
forks jingle,
and the flatlands seem like tablecloths.

Thanks, gracias,
you travel and return,
you rise
and descend.
It is understood, you don’t
permeate everything,
but where the word of thanksgiving
appears like a tiny petal,
proud fists hide
and a penny’s worth of a smile appears.

- Pablo Neruda

[REALnothings]

:heart:Gracias! :heart:

[Larry Robinson]

When Giving Is All We Have

One river gives
Its journey to the next.

We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.

We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.

You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me

What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made

Something greater from the difference.

- Alberto Ríos

[Larry Robinson]

What the Birds Know

once we have looked away
once we have mourned
and banished all smoldering thoughts
about the tribe of blackened trees
replacing the known world
for now and another season
and the last long fingers of smoke
have been ushered out by wind
a ticking begins
no one has seen them arrive in such numbers
the birds are neither lost nor passing through
they are simply linked tight
to the lingering scents
the promise of white fruits
protein concealed by bark
so were the ways of ancestors
who began their journeys
as specks in the distance
some fifty thousand years ago
riding miles of smoky gold
along a known line of hunger
growing closer and closer
the black beat of instinct
working a migration upstream
against the flow of smoke
into the source and its multiple riches
one preens its dusk-and-opal plumage
others tap like a knock on the door
whose answer is advice provided
by the ages
long as genetic fibers coiled
in every cell beak and bone
muscle and shiny eye
the birds are awake to the growth
and abundance soon to follow
with the diligence
of all known colors unfurling
from the soil’s chocolatey darkness
from the trees re-greening come spring
from the blackness

- Maya Khosla
(Maya Khosla is Sonoma County’s Poet Laureate)

[Larry Robinson]

Our Fire Circle Tree

Every Wednesday in Sebastopol, California, a small group
of men meet around an outdoor fire at the foot of an old Gravenstein apple tree


We are witnessed and inspired by this age-old tree
some branches lost to storm or time
some covered with cankers and galls
a trunk hollowed to a twisted shell
by fire and little creatures
yet still claiming its sacred ground

And upon the rising of the sun season

its blood stirs 

buds burst into exquisite white blossoms

and it emerges as a bride

ready to renew her vows to life once again

when the bees grant their blessing



Then upon the rising of the moon season

it settles into awe and gratitude 

knowing that its union, unlike the salmon’s,

will not claim its life

and silently revels in the dreams

of what is yet to come

- Jean-Pierre Swennen

[Larry Robinson]

Fire and Ice Revisited Following the October 2017 Blaze That Consumed Our House (apologies to Robert Frost)

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what Frost tasted of desire
He held with those who favor fire.
But added if it must end twice,
His understanding of man’s hate
Informed him for destruction ice
Is also great and would suffice.
But in my present case I note
The first becomes my final vote.
What’s been started from a flicker
Gets it done a whole lot quicker.

- Ed Coletti

[Larry Robinson]

To Create An Enemy


Start with an empty canvas
Sketch in broad outline the forms of
men, women, and children.

Dip into the well of your own
disowned darkness
with a wide brush and
stain the strangers with the sinister hue
of the shadow.

Trace onto the face of the enemy the greed,
hatred, carelessness you dare not claim as
your own.

Obscure the sweet individuality of each face.

Erase all hints of the myriad loves, hopes,
fears that play through the kaleidoscope of
every finite heart.

Twist the smile until it forms the downward
arc of cruelty.

Strip flesh from bone until only the
abstract skeleton of death remains.

Exaggerate each feature until man is
metamorphasized into beast, vermin, insect.

Fill in the background with malignant
figures from ancient nightmares - devils
demons, myrmidons of evil.

When your icon of the enemy is complete
you will be able to kill without guilt,
slaughter without shame.

The thing you destroy will have become
merely an enemy of G-D, an impediment
to the sacred dialectic of history.


- Sam Keen

[Larry Robinson]

For the Children

They were unutterably lovely, the aliens,
when finally we knew them, when at last we understood
they had lived and moved among us from the beginning

in bodies the image of ours, through smoother, eyes wider,
as if the world were a little darker for them, or more wonderous,
and we loved them as wildly and deeply and helplessly

as our first loves, our dreams, our lost ones, all at once,
though we knew they were wilder and deeper than we were, and freer,
and loving them only deepened our loneliness.

When they gathered on evening corners, faintly luminous,
and their murmurring rose in urgency, calling on stars,
we feared they would leave us for worlds far, far beyond us,

though we dared not ask, in their language so eerily ours,
Will you carry us with you?—lest they look away, bored
with our dullness, our burdensome love, our ignorant dying.

What could we, after all, with our dim minds, our narrowed snesoria,
know of the lightning of their thoughts, the storm of their joys?—
or their sorrows, for sorrow was theirs, they were lords of sorrow.

Why in the world these creatures, immortal and perfect,
should be so gloomy and aimless was beyond us,
yet they grew so slowly into the unprecedented lives

we had thought they would seize instantly as their right
that it seemed the long long future brooding over them
was so heavy they could hardly bear it forward one little step.

And at last they dismissed the fantastic travels, faster then light,
that had landed them only here, and their magic technologies
that had taught them, it seemed, what anyone could have told them,

and they ceased to gather on corners, dreaming of rescuers,
and glanced, if at all, only sidelong at the stars.
Maybe some earthly pathogen had worn them,

or the weakness of our yellow sun had left tem so wan
that even their radiant children could not tell them from us
when they sat with us, sipping at coffee, a little more patiently now,

enduring our sadness, our sad adoration, even our sad relief
that life was a little less possible than once we had hoped,
and gratefully meeting our eyes, since who else in the universe knew

that they were as luminous and unutterably lovely
as our first loves, our dreams, our lost ones all at once,
so impossible they were beautiful, so beautiful they were true?

- James Richardson

[Larry Robinson]

The Carrying
The sky’s white with November’s teeth,
and the air is ash and woodsmoke.
A flush of color from the dying tree,
a cargo train speeding through, and there,
that’s me, standing in the wintering
grass watching the dog suffer the cold
leaves. I’m not large from this distance,
just a fence post, a hedge of holly.
Wider still, beyond the rumble of overpass,
mares look for what’s left of green
in the pasture, a few weanlings kick
out, and theirs is the same sky, white
like a calm flag of surrender pulled taut.
A few farms over, there’s our mare,
her belly barrel-round with foal, or idea
of foal. It’s Kentucky, late fall, and any
mare worth her salt is carrying the next
potential stake’s winner. Ours, her coat
thicker with the season’s muck, leans against
the black fence and this image is heavy
within me. How my own body, empty,
clean of secrets, knows how to carry her,
knows we were all meant for something.

- Ada Limon

[Larry Robinson]

She is Spitting a Mouthful of Stars
(nikâwi’s song)

She is Spitting a Mouthful of Stars
She is laughing more than the men who beat her
She is ten horses breaking open the day
She is new to her bones
She is holy in the dust


She is spitting a mouthful of stars
She is singing louder than the men who raped her
She is waking beyond the Milky Way
She is new to her breath
She is sacred in this breathing


She is spitting a mouthful of stars
She is holding the light more than those who despised her
She is folding clouds in her movement
She is new to this sound
She is unbroken flesh


She is spitting a mouthful of stars
She is laughing more than those who shamed her
She is ten horses breaking open the day
She is new to these bones
She is holy in their dust.

- Gregory Scofield

[Larry Robinson]

Sacred Wine

Sit with the pain in your heart, he said.

Hold it like a sacred wine in a golden cup.

The wine may break you and if it does, let it.

To be human is to be broken,

and only from brokenness can one be healed.

The ancestors say:

the world is full of pain,

and each is allotted a portion.

If you do not carry your share,

then others are forced to carry it for you,

And the suffering you bring

to the world is your sin,

But the suffering you bring

to yourself will be your hell.

Sit with the pain in your heart, he said.

Hold it there like a sacred wine in a golden cup.

- Greg Kimura

[Larry Robinson]

American Song

I'm in sweatpants, pouring boiling water
over grounds that smell of soil
and autumn ferment.
The radio is pouring out Bye bye
Miss American Pie
so I scoop up the cat for a dance.
Hey Jackson, this country has lost
its mind and I don't know
what to do I whisper,
right into his soft pink ear.
He stares at me quizzically,
his narrow face part lynx,
part fallen angel and I don't know what
he says back except it looks like
I want to eat you.
All these years I've spent
pouring words onto the page,
while the work of the street goes on
outside my window:
traffic and yelling and mariachi and wafting
smoke from my neighbor's barbeque,
and kids walking to school and their parents
running after them with homework they forgot.
The poem works or it doesn't,
my life has meaning, or not,
and it all keeps pouring through anyway,
like lava, molten, relentless.
And yes, I am caught
in the honey of my time
like a bug trapped in amber,
and I make what I can of the struggle.
Okay Jackie, I say to my disdainful,
needy familiar.
We're well on our way
toward the mouth of the falls now,
so let me be poured like oil
or wine or cool sweet water,
over the lip of the world,
into the heart of the song.

- Alison Luterman

[Larry Robinson]

Sometimes A Wild God


Sometimes a wild god comes to the table.
He is awkward and does not know the ways
Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver.
His voice makes vinegar from wine.
When the wild god arrives at the door,
You will probably fear him.
He reminds you of something dark
That you might have dreamt,
Or the secret you do not wish to be shared.
He will not ring the doorbell;
Instead he scrapes with his fingers
Leaving blood on the paintwork,
Though primroses grow
In circles round his feet.
You do not want to let him in.
You are very busy.
It is late, or early, and besides…
You cannot look at him straight
Because he makes you want to cry.
The dog barks.
The wild god smiles,
Holds out his hand.
The dog licks his wounds
And leads him inside.
The wild god stands in your kitchen.
Ivy is taking over your sideboard;
Mistletoe has moved into the lampshades
And wrens have begun to sing
An old song in the mouth of your kettle.
‘I haven’t much,’ you say
And give him the worst of your food.
He sits at the table, bleeding.
He coughs up foxes.
There are otters in his eyes.
When your wife calls down,
You close the door and
Tell her it’s fine.
You will not let her see
The strange guest at your table.
The wild god asks for whiskey
And you pour a glass for him,
Then a glass for yourself.
Three snakes are beginning to nest
In your voicebox. You cough.
Oh, limitless space.
Oh, eternal mystery.
Oh, endless cycles of death and birth.
Oh, miracle of life.
Oh, the wondrous dance of it all.
You cough again,
Expectorate the snakes and
Water down the whiskey,
Wondering how you got so old
And where your passion went.
The wild god reaches into a bag
Made of moles and nightingale-skin.
He pulls out a two-reeded pipe,
Raises an eyebrow
And all the birds begin to sing.
The fox leaps into your eyes.
Otters rush from the darkness.
The snakes pour through your body.
Your dog howls and upstairs
Your wife both exults and weeps at once.
The wild god dances with your dog.
You dance with the sparrows.
A white stag pulls up a stool
And bellows hymns to enchantments.
A pelican leaps from chair to chair.
In the distance, warriors pour from their tombs.
Ancient gold grows like grass in the fields.
Everyone dreams the words to long-forgotten songs.
The hills echo and the grey stones ring
With laughter and madness and pain.
In the middle of the dance,
The house takes off from the ground.
Clouds climb through the windows;
Lightning pounds its fists on the table.
The moon leans in through the window.
The wild god points to your side.
You are bleeding heavily.
You have been bleeding for a long time,
Possibly since you were born.
There is a bear in the wound.
‘Why did you leave me to die?’
Asks the wild god and you say:
‘I was busy surviving.
The shops were all closed;
I didn’t know how. I’m sorry.’
Listen to them:
The fox in your neck and
The snakes in your arms and
The wren and the sparrow and the deer…
The great un-nameable beasts
In your liver and your kidneys and your heart…
There is a symphony of howling.
A cacophony of dissent.
The wild god nods his head and
You wake on the floor holding a knife,
A bottle and a handful of black fur.
Your dog is asleep on the table.
Your wife is stirring, far above.
Your cheeks are wet with tears;
Your mouth aches from laughter or shouting.
A black bear is sitting by the fire.
Sometimes a wild god comes to the table.
He is awkward and does not know the ways
Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver.
His voice makes vinegar from wine
And brings the dead to life.

- Tom Hirons

[Larry Robinson]

The Well


My sons gathered theirs
and walked on
because they had to
and we say thank you and thank you
and thank you
until our hearts stop bleeding

I packed my life and turned
with my stuff and my man
and drove away
from friends gathered
and I shout thank you and thank you
and thank you
until I can hear

My friend stopped writing poems forever
and turned and left the earth
and still I sing thank you and thank you
and thank you
until I can bear our silence

For there in the deep
of gratitude
is
birdsong headlong falling into fullness
hearthwarm clasp of hands familiar
held close hearts beating time
pull of ocean tide
that holds me holy
on nighttime breath of knowing
who I am
in the arms of these
in the face of loss
and abundance

There in the well of
gratitude
where tears know
the worth of every drop

There I know
thank you.

- Sashana Kane Proctor
.

[Larry Robinson]

Enriching the Earth

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. Against the shadow
of veiled possibility my workdays stand
in a most asking light. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind's service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Basket of Figs

Bring me your pain, love. Spread
it out like fine rugs, silk sashes,
warm eggs, cinnamon
and cloves in burlap sacks. Show me

the detail, the intricate embroidery
on the collar, tiny shell buttons,
the hem stitched the way you were taught,
pricking just a thread, almost invisible.

Unclasp it like jewels, the gold
still hot from your body. Empty
your basket of figs. Spill your wine.

That hard nugget of pain, I would suck it,
cradling it on my tongue like the slick
seed of pomegranate. I would lift it

tenderly, as a great animal might
carry a small one in the private
cave of the mouth.

- Ellen Bass

[Larry Robinson]

Cause Of Death: Fox News

Toward the end he sat on the back porch,
sweeping his binoculars back and forth
over the dry scrub-brush and arroyos,

certain he saw Mexicans
moving through the creosote and sage
while the TV commentators in the living room,

turned up loud enough for a deaf person to hear,
kept pouring gasoline on his anxiety and rage.

In the end he preferred to think about illegal aliens,
about welfare moms and healthcare socialists,
than about the uncomfortable sensation of the disease

crawling through his tunnels in the night,
crossing the river between his liver and his spleen.
It was just his luck

to be born in the historical period
that would eventually be known
as the twilight of the white male dinosaur,

feeling weaker and more swollen every day,
with the earth gradually looking more like hell
and a strange smell rising from the kitchen sink.

In the background those big male voices
went on and on, turning the old crank
about hard work and god, waving the flag

and whipping the dread into a froth.
Then one day my father had finished
his surveillance, or it had finished him,

and the cable-TV guy
showed up at the house apologetically
to take back the company equipment:

the complicated black box with the dangling cord,
and the gray rectangular remote control,
like a little coffin.

- Tony Hoagland

[Larry Robinson]

Raking the Leaves with Jack
for Jack Ridl and all the rakers

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2018-12-09_14-20-37.png
Pulling the rake through the cottonwood leaves,
I think of Jack in Michigan pulling his rake
through beech, birch, oak and ash leaves.
I stop to lean on my rake and I think
of him stopping to lean on his rake
and talk to the gods. I’m not so sure I believe
in gods, but I believe in Jack. I believe in kindness.

I believe in friendship that grows despite distance.
I believe that these rhythms of raking and making piles
bring us closer together—all of us rakers, all of us
who step into the slow cadence of pull and reach,
and pull and reach. There is something unifying
in this annual act of tidying the world. Every day
the news is full of all we can’t set right. But we
can drag the rake through the yard so that we
can see the path again. And we can set the rake
aside and stare at the sky and think of all
the people we love and all the people
we’ll never know who join us in this simple act,
reach and pull, reach and pull, reach and pull,
the sound of metal tines grating, the beat
of our own hearts scraping against our chests.


- Rosemerry Trommer

[Larry Robinson]

language lesson for young angels

the wooden stone fiber box
in which they sleep
in which they dream
the box in which their possessions
keep them
the box is called a house
how’s?
no house
with heart force they say home
ho om
the metal rubber vinyl fiber box
the box in which they roll over
the strips of tar that they lay down
burning smell machine cooking
the thick black goo
the metal box is called automobile
haut oh mo veal?
no aw toe mo beel
with heart force they say my car
mihigh karr
and we funnels of the everlasting godhead’s
grace
we guardians of the young of all species
we warrior shield against wayward meteors
we vibration balancers of all tectonic plates
we singers of the constant Glory
we are called angels
han gelz?
no angels

- Theresa Roach Melia

[Larry Robinson]

Cabin Poem

I've decided to make up my mind
About nothing, to assume the water mask,
To finish my life disguised as a creek,
An eddy, joining at night the full,
Sweet flow, to absorb the sky,
To swallow the heat and cold, the moon
And the stars, to swallow myself
In ceaseless flows.

- Jim Harrison,

[Larry Robinson]

In Autumn

Sometimes seeing what is not there,
other times not seeing what is,
our legs become tangled,
our hands can’t stop wringing
against themselves. Still,
we live mid-stagger
with pure hearts,
let no one’s ignorance
fool you. People do not
become buddhas. Buddhas
do not become human life.
Unborn and undying
like a torn leaf
in an autumn shower,
when was wholeness
ever not whole?

- Peter Levitt

[Larry Robinson]

Mind the Gap


The sign on the platform
of the London underground
reads: Mind the gap.
The phraseology –
so polite,
so formal,
so British –
made me smile
when I saw it
for the first time.
Now, I am listening to
Tibetan Buddhist teacher
Pema Chodron speaking
about the bardos of
life, death and after death.
She says the definition
of bardo is gap,
the in-between state,
transition.
And so, I recall the instruction
on that London
underground platform,
revealing the most profound
of teachings.
Yes.
Mind the gap.

- Maya Spector

[Larry Robinson]

Between Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice, Today

I read a Korean poem
with the line “Today you are the youngest
you will ever be.” Today I am the oldest
I have been. Today we drink
buckwheat tea. Today I have heat
in my apartment. Today I think
about the word chada in Korean.
It means cold. It means to be filled with.
It means to kick. To wear. Today we’re worn.
Today you wear the cold. Your chilled skin.
My heart kicks on my skin. Someone said
winter has broken his windows. The heat inside
and the cold outside sent lightning across glass.
Today my heart wears you like curtains. Today
it fills with you. The window in my room
is full of leaves ready to fall. Chada, you say. It’s tea.
We drink. It is cold outside.

- Emily Jungmin Yoon

[Larry Robinson]

To Posterity

1.

Indeed I live in the dark ages!
A guileless word is an absurdity. A smooth forehead betokens
A hard heart. He who laughs
Has not yet heard
The terrible tidings.

Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
And he who walks calmly across the street,
Is he not out of reach of his friends
In trouble?

It is true: I earn my living
But, believe me, it is only an accident.
Nothing that I do entitles me to eat my fill.
By chance I was spared. (If my luck leaves me
I am lost.)

They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad you have it!
But how can I eat and drink
When my food is snatched from the hungry
And my glass of water belongs to the thirsty?
And yet I eat and drink.

I would gladly be wise.
The old books tell us what wisdom is:
Avoid the strife of the world
Live out your little time
Fearing no one
Using no violence
Returning good for evil --
Not fulfillment of desire but forgetfulness
Passes for wisdom.
I can do none of this:
Indeed I live in the dark ages!

2.

I came to the cities in a time of disorder
When hunger ruled.
I came among men in a time of uprising
And I revolted with them.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.

I ate my food between massacres.
The shadow of murder lay upon my sleep.
And when I loved, I loved with indifference.
I looked upon nature with impatience.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.

In my time streets led to the quicksand.
Speech betrayed me to the slaughterer.
There was little I could do. But without me
The rulers would have been more secure. This was my hope.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.

3.

You, who shall emerge from the flood
In which we are sinking,
Think --
When you speak of our weaknesses,
Also of the dark time
That brought them forth.

For we went,changing our country more often than our shoes.
In the class war, despairing
When there was only injustice and no resistance.

For we knew only too well:
Even the hatred of squalor
Makes the brow grow stern.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we
Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness
Could not ourselves be kind.

But you, when at last it comes to pass
That man can help his fellow man,
Do no judge us
Too harshly.


- Bertolt Brecht

(translated by H. R. Hays )

[Larry Robinson]

Magos


Pensar que yo, Baltasar de Caldea,
tenedor de las cosas sacras,
dejé los observatorios,
cargado de incienso,
para ir allí.
Aun hasta al punto de encuentro fue largo;
para Melchor de Nubia cargado de oro,
para Gaspar de Tarso cargado de mirra,
fue aun más largo.
Y de allí a Judea
y más allá condujo el lucero-
a la morada de animales,
lugar natal del infante mendigo.
Si era dios,
como todo dios,
ha de haber llegado a mal fin.
¿Qué significaban los agüeros?
Tal vez sería el viaje mismo,
oír de los leones de Nubia,
de los ríos de Tarso;
y sobre todo,
sí, tal vez sobre todo,
el ofrendar.

Magos

To think that I, Balthazar of Chaldea,
keeper of the sacred things,
left the observatories,
laden with frankincense,
to come there.
Even to the point of meeting it was long;
for Melchior of Nubia laden with gold,
for Gaspar of Tarshish laden with myrrh,
it was longer.
And from there to Judea
and the star led on -
to the abode of animals,
birthplace of the infant beggar.
If he was a god,
like all gods,
he must have come to a bad end.
What meant the auguries?
Perhaps it was the trip itself,
to hear of the lions of Nubia,
of the rivers of Tarshish;
and above all,
yes, perhaps above all,
the gifting.



- Rafael Jesús González

[Larry Robinson]

To Those Who Have Lost Everything

crossed
in despair
many deserts
full of hope

carrying
their empty
fists of sorrow
everywhere

mouthing
a bitter night
of shovels
and nails

“you’re nothing
you’re shit
your home’s
nowhere”—

mountains
will speak
for you

rain
will flesh
your bones

green again
among ashes
after a long fire

started in
a fantasy island
some time ago

turning
Natives
into aliens

- Francisco X. Alarcón

[Larry Robinson]

December, 2018

How can it be? so late in the year.
I feel myself spinning
in ever increasing speed
toward the black hole of solstice
like a piece of discarded meat
gets spun
toward the drain and the grind
of the garbage disposal.

Bears retreat to caves.
Makes sense.
Although the waning light
brings every remaining yellow and red leaf
still clinging to the tree
sharply into focus
and heightens yearning
to a fever pitch
which we translate
into frenzied purchases.

All the resolutions of the past year
are now revealed
as fantasy
once again
I haven’t changed.
All the money spent on transforming me
into something else
is noted in the spreadsheet
- a fool’s golden attempts.

So drawn towards sleep
in this waning light
which panics me further
for what nightmares might
arise and become real enough
to reach through the screen
of projected dreams
and kill me.

- Barbara Hirschfeld

[Larry Robinson]

Awakened

In advanced age, my health worsening,
I woke up in the middle of the night
and experienced a feeling of happiness
so intense and perfect that in all my life
I had only felt its premonition.
And there was no reason for it.
It didn’t obliterate consciousness;
the past, which I carried, was there,
together with my grief.
And it was suddenly included,
was a necessary part of the whole.
As if a voice were repeating:
“You can stop worrying now;
everything happened just as it had to.
You did what was assigned to you,
and you are not required anymore
to think of what happened long ago.”
The peace I felt was a closing of accounts
and was connected with the thought of death.
The happiness on this side was
like an announcement of the other side.
I realized that this was an undeserved gift
and I could not grasp by what grace
it was bestowed on me.

- Czeslaw Milosz

[Larry Robinson]

Happiness

So early it’s still almost dark out.
I’m near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy
has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren’t saying anything,
these boys.
I think if they could,
they would take
each other’s arm.
It’s early in the morning,
and they are
doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale
over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn’t enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly.
And goes beyond, really,
any early morning
talk about it.

- Raymond Carver

[Larry Robinson]

Credo

I cannot find my way: there is no star
In all the shrouded heavens anywhere;
And there is not a whisper in the air
Of any living voice but one so far
That I can hear it only as a bar
Of lost, imperial music, played when fair
And angel fingers wove, and unaware,
Dead leaves to garlands where no roses are.
No, there is not a glimmer, nor a call,
For one that welcomes, welcomes when he fears,
The black and awful chaos of the night;
For through it all, -- above, beyond it all, --
I know the far-sent message of the years,
I feel the coming glory of the Light!

- Edwin Arlington Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Solstice Color

The other day I looked into my airtight sealed jar of sugar in which
Little tiny, crystalline, black specks moved in the glacial field of white
The tiniest ants I’d ever seen.

If we saw a photo negative of our heart
Would we see tiny black specks moving about
In the vast divine field of white light?
Black holes where our grief and disappointments and yearnings are
Sucked into a black abyss of silence?
If we could look deep into those black silences would we see
Tiny crystalline specs of white light?
Like the solstice where in the deep, dark winter night
We light candles and wait for the return of light

My neighbors have two black sheep and
Two white sheep with black hoods of fur,
A black bull with white horns and a black cat with a white left leg and paws
And a black and white sheep dog
They roam and eat in a brilliant green field where
Red autumn leaves fall in the blue sky after gray mornings

Their black and white coats amid the grand scheme of color
Makes me wonder if the way through our darkest nights
Is not through the dark, or the light, but
Though the noisy, chaotic cacophony of color that is our life
The red sorrows, the yellow bliss, green yearning, turquoise love

In the duel nature of our lives, the myriad black and white choices
That we face daily are not separated by gray nuances
But filled and connected by brilliant luminescent color

Like baking white sugar and flour and black chocolate chips
Into a sweet delicacy that gives us colorful delight


- Sally Churgel

[Larry Robinson]

Noel

When snow is shaken
From the balsam trees
And they’re cut down
And brought into our houses

When clustered sparks
Of many-colored fire
Appear at night
In ordinary windows

We hear and sing
The customary carols

They bring us ragged miracles
And hay and candles
And flowering weeds of poetry
That are loved all the more
Because they are so common

But there are carols
That carry phrases
Of the haunting music
Of the other world
A music wild and dangerous
As a prophet’s message

Or the fresh truth of children
Who though they come to us
From our own bodies
Are altogether new
With their small limbs
And birdlike voices

They look at us
With their clear eyes
And ask the piercing questions
God alone can answer.

- Anne Porter

[Larry Robinson]

Where refugees seek deliverance that never comes,
And the heart consumes itself, if it would live,
Where little children age before their time,
And life wears down the edges of the mind,
Where the old man sits with mind grown cold,
While bones and sinew, blood and cell, go slowly down to death,
Where fear companions each day's life,
And Perfect Love seems long delayed,
Christmas is waiting to be born:
In you, in me, in all mankind.

- Howard Thurman

[Larry Robinson]

Of Virgin Births

Smile upon your child Mary, Jewish woman of Nazareth. You gave birth to Jesus, remained a
virgin, and rose to be worshiped by his followers. Your son was born at the death of the year. His
coming brought light to the world.

Smile upon your child Coatlicue, earth mother of Mesoamerica, worshiped by the Aztecs. You
gave birth to Huitzilopochtli god of the sun, who brought light to the world, and you remained a
virgin.

Ride Balthasar, ride Melchior, and Gaspar. Follow the star to the manger baring your gifts for
the god-child.

O priest of Huitzilopochtli raise your obsidian knife and bring it down onto the chest of the
sacrificed. Extract his heart with swift skill, that this gift will please and continue to bring the
sun.

And Jesus died a bloody and torturous death that his followers may know life.

Rise over the horizon Huitzilopochtli and bring sun that your followers may grow maize to
sustain themselves. And rise Jesus, rise from the dead, and give of your body and blood that your
followers may sustain themselves.

- Armando García-Dávila.

[Larry Robinson]

Another Christmas Story


What if Mary was María
dark skinned and tired
trudging through the desert
pregnant and far from home?


What if Joseph was José
and there was no donkey
but the burden of fear weighed the same?


What if there was no money
for Joseph or José,
and what if the birth pangs grew sharper
for Mary or María?


What if there were no beds
for any of them,
no shelter, no warmth,
only dust and cold stars glittering above?


What if Bethlehem was Texas?


What if the baby was born
in a manger
or a detention center
this Jesus, this Jesús
this child of God?


Would he be revered
or ripped from his mother’s arms,
this Jesus, this Jesús
this child of God?


Wouldn’t the angels rejoice
at this divine spark
born into the world?


Would we?


- Lisa Shulman