Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

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Fire Owl

Small feathered beacon in the sand
A ring of flame glowing orange on the water’s surface
The heat held barely at bay, as everything beneath the water rolls tighter in the shell
while the fire lays waste to the hillside and moves south

Singed in the flurry upwards, the tempest striking like an unseen match
The owl stares down at a world on fire
flesh beneath feather flaring red the ground shifting
as it melts down to rivers of steel and glass

The landmarks gone
Birds of prey and scavengers alike are wiped from the sky
There is only the rolling black smoke and scorching wind
the crackling, licking flames below swallowing the landscape whole

Then you spot a jagged migration
dropping like a single arrow through the wall of flame
Horses plummeting down a rock strewn canyon
leaving a wayward funnel of dust in their wake

Humans and animals cascading to the sea.
The air off the ocean blowing cool and fine;
a curtain of respite from the hell fire

The sand rises to meet you
as you drop with the prevailing current
your ears flapping in frenzy
while the sun drops through the smoke smoldering gold
and horses thunder onto the beach

Above, the fire hurtles to the highway,
taking everything in its path,
behind it, a long trail of embers rising to the tree line
as you take it all in with an unflinching gaze

An owl’s trauma
To have seen, to have nearly been seared from the sky,
To now be wary while waiting for loft.

To find the way back
to a life now gone.

To forever be reminded of the sand.

- Jane Carpenter

[Larry Robinson]

There’s More


It is enough to know
There’s More.
A universe of galaxies resplendent with creative power,
There’s More.
A rainbow reconciling every ecstasy of color,
There’s More.
A meal that satisfies the need of every living being,
There’s More.
A work that binds up shattered limbs and lives,
There’s More.
A mind that numbers every star and grain of sand,
There’s More.
A tree whose limbs are birds, whose roots are fingers of divinity.
There’s More.
A love that pours its hope through steep ravines of grief.
There’s More.
A life completed in the mercy of our finitude.
Yes, There’s More.
“There’s more,” the subtle body spoke,
and then became the More.


- Bill Everett

[Larry Robinson]

The Things That Return

I've been down this road a time or two. I've seen the green
grass the green grass and the rabbits running and the deer
coming down from the hills to eat the last of the garden's harvest.
I've trained my eyes to catch the gold of sunset,
the silver moon rising, (the silver moon) rising over dry grass
the dry grasses and the leaves that swirl in gusts of surprise
when the tired stars open their eyes wide and dream in 4/4 time.
I've seen the frost slip in without so much as a peep
and leave us wondering where the warm days have fled,
where the warm nights have hunkered down beneath the earth.
Beneath the earth to wait out another winter.
I have closed my eyes and wondered too where the days have gone,
how the days and the nights and the stars of my dreams have blinked out
and left me standing here before that night as black
as the waiting shadow of death - inscrutable as my lover's eyes
the day he said he needed to leave because it was just too hard.
I've waited thinking everything comes around, everything
revolves like the sun and the moon and the tiny round seeds
of the dandelion that rise each spring in my morning garden.
But some things go and never come back.
My darling children's rooms stand empty still.
Empty of them and their yarn tied braids and their lithe
moon spirit bodies shining in their beds at midnight.
And no turnings of the moon's bright face smiling through
veiled windows bring back the tiny fingers and toes,
the endless songs of honeyed childhood soprano.
My love has not returned, not come round through the eternal
revolving door of love's spring scent blossoming pink on cherry boughs.
The things that return it seems are the truths that ring round our cabin doors
ring round our frost-pained windows with each new season of life.
Not the personal grasping for yesterday's love that lies darkening
the fallen leaf, but fresh new petals, a different shade of rose,
a silver hand opening that leads fall toward winter -
that sometimes startles with its clarity as the crisp cold descends,
as the bright leaves flee before it toward their dark beds.

- Diane LaRae Bodach

[Larry Robinson]

A Concerto of Spice

The subtle hint of spice, a symphony in the air
A crescendo of turmeric against mustard, sharp notes
The melodious harmony of cardamom and cinnamon wafting, a waltz
The passion and tang of citrus as fluid as a ballad’s flute,
Ginger as strong as the strum of a bass
The crisp presence of mint like the presence of my mother, the conductor of the
ensemble
She taught me that the perfect hint of lemongrass orchestrates the soothing simplicity of
balance
The heat of paprika strong as the heat of attraction
Tart zest of lemon sharp as the power of speech
The crackle of dried peppers as loud as the laughter of my childhood
The smell mingles about now, I hear it
Her presence dissolving in the wind
Her frail hands stirring the pot, and her voice
Commanding, soothing
Echoing in the shadows of my mind
Her voice calling me into a simpler life
I smell it, and in the silence
The silence, she dissolves into the air around me.


- Zoya Ahmed

[Larry Robinson]

Wrong Kids
Are they back yet, are they back?

Back, who's back?

The children...

Children? What Children?

The Ones at the Border...

Which ones, which border?

The Mexican border, the children—are they back—back to their parents?

Someone said some---not all—but some.

That's too long...children can't wait that long. How can that be?

ID...they didn't have IDS.

But surely they had bracelets...in hospitals you always wear IDS.

They didn't know.

Who?

The guards—they didn't know. When the orders came, they said children had to go in another room. No one said anything about IDS.

Where? Where did they take them?

Away. No one knows. There are places. The buildings are not marked.

How could they do this. This is not right.

Don't ask me...there's nothing that can be done.

I will write. Do you know where to write?

No, no one knows these things.

I will write. I will write the Department of Justice.

Better check online...it's tricky...I tried to write...

You did? What happened?

Said it was the wrong address. It was Juvenile Hall...said I got the wrong kids.


- Jean Wong

[Larry Robinson]

Plums Failing Well


So what if plums fall
out of the tree, to lie
squashed and decomposing
on the earth? So what if
the only attention they receive
is from the ants and birds
who find something in them
to feed from still,
all spayed and color changed?
If they could breathe,
do you think they would say
more than so what?
This is good, to live
to the end as something
to get taken. What was
the ripeness for anyhow?
Why should chromosomes blink
and twitch inside the seed,
the pit at the middle, the vast
earth-shaped center of all
of this? So what if we lie
here or there as pith
in the cold night where the owl
hoots at the stirring that will
compute into the dark color
of that calling and the ground
we leak into,
small piece by small piece.


- Linda Gregg
(September 9, 1942 - March 20, 2019)

[Larry Robinson]

hieroglyphic stairway

it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I’m awake
because my great great grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?

surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?

as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?

did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?

what did you do
once
you
knew?

I’m riding home on the Colma train
I’ve got the voice of the milky way in my dreams

I have teams of scientists
feeding me data daily
and pleading I immediately
turn it into poetry

I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech

I am the desirous earth
equidistant to the underworld
and the flesh of the stars

I am everything already lost

the moment the universe turns transparent
and all the light shoots through the cosmos

I use words to instigate silence

I’m a hieroglyphic stairway
in a buried Mayan city
suddenly exposed by a hurricane

a satellite circling earth
finding dinosaur bones
in the Gobi desert
I am telescopes that see back in time

I am the precession of the equinoxes,
the magnetism of the spiraling sea

I’m riding home on the Colma train
with the voice of the milky way in my dreams

I am myths where violets blossom from blood
like dying and rising gods

I’m the boundary of time
soul encountering soul
and tongues of fire

it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I can’t sleep
because my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the earth was unraveling?

I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech

- Drew Dellinger

[Larry Robinson]

The Coal Shovel

My effortless touch of the wall device
then the whoosh of the furnace’s start
brought my father close this morning
No thermostat or gas heat for him


His was a coal burning hot air gravity furnace
a behemoth in the center of the basement
an octopus with its many asbestos
arms clinging to the basement ceiling


Winter mornings from bedroom to cellar
Dad trudged down worn wooden steps
always hopeful for some remaining fire
in the beast’s hungry gut


A look through the little window
then he’d swing open the sometimes hot
often cold cast iron door
the screech and clang our first hint of morning


Then rattle and shake the massive grate
white ash falling like heavy snow
to the tray below then ah-hah
there a glowing coal from last night’s feeding


Now the massive coal shovel scraped the cement floor
and the sound of that scrape, abrasive and shrill
leaped up the steps and every cold morning
woke us all, young and old


The inferno now safely raging
Dad closed the furnace door with a bang
that bang Mom’s signal to pour his coffee
that clang our last wake up bell


Our call to hot oat meal and flannel shirts
mackinaw jackets and hockey caps
four buckle overshoes and hand knit mittens
and maybe, just maybe enough snow


Enough dry snow for a Saturday morning thrill
sliding and screaming down the neighbor’s hill
on Donnie’s Flexible Flyer sled
with steel runners that curved up the back


If we had the snow but no Donnie
as sometimes happened - flying hell bent
with no control the scoop shovel
found a new life with my brother and I


For a few moments on cold winter mornings
free for a time from my dad’s strong hands
and away from the inferno that started all our days
that battered shovel was the fastest thing in Iowa


- Doug von Koss

[Larry Robinson]

There Are Those Who Love To Get Dirty


There are those who love to get dirty
and fix things.
They drink coffee at dawn,
beer after work,


And those who stay clean,
just appreciate things,
At breakfast they have milk
and juice at night.


There are those who do both,
they drink tea.


- Gary Snyder

[Larry Robinson]

A Jewish Cemetery In Germany


On a little hill amid fertile fields lies a small cemetery,
a Jewish cemetery behind a rusty gate, hidden by shrubs,
abandoned and forgotten. Neither the sound of prayer
nor the voice of lamentation is heard there
for the dead praise not the Lord.
Only the voices of our children ring out, seeking graves
and cheering
each time they find one--like mushrooms in the forest, like
wild strawberries.
Here's another grave! There's the name of my mother's
mothers, and a name from the last century. And here's a name,
and there! And as I was about to brush the moss from the name--
Look! an open hand engraved on the tombstone, the grave
of a kohen,
his fingers splayed in a spasm of holiness and blessing,
and here's a grave concealed by a thicket of berries
that has to be brushed aside like a shock of hair
from the face of a beautiful beloved woman.


- Yehuda Amichai

[Ronaldo]

46309

My background photo of Segal's holocaust memorial sculpture adjacent to Legion of Honor, SF.

[Larry Robinson]

self astronomy


a theory about emotions
they are like telescopes
you see yourself in one
everything is enormous


but if you turn it around
to find how others see you
a distant miniature
too faint to really discern


- Kevin Pryne

[Ronaldo]

Background Image by Lorna Simpson – "Deep Blue"


46321

[Larry Robinson]

After

after chopping off all the arms that reached out to me;
after boarding up all the windows and doors;

after filling all the pits with poisoned water;
after building my house on the rock of no,
inaccessible to flattery and fear;

after cutting off my tongue and eating it;
after hurling handfuls of silence
and monosyllable of scorn at my loves;

after forgetting my name;
and the name of my birthplace;
and the name of my race;

after judging and sentencing myself
to perpetual waiting,
and perpetual loneliness, I heard
against the stones of my dungeon of syllogisms,

the humid, tender, insistent
onset of spring.


- Octavio Paz
(translated by Robert Bly)

[Larry Robinson]

In The Caves of Swimmers

In the Gilf Kebir plateau in the Sahara side
of Egypt there is a cave containing rock paintings
of swimming figures. Did these figures represent
escaping an Ice Age climate change, a desert
drought, or a Paleolithic form of buoyancy found in
dreams? It's possible they were learning a way
of moving inside their lives amid the waters of
uncertainty. There is a sense that they are
practicing a devotional shape of their own dream
of life; it could be that they are swimming towards
God.

In the caves of our own current lives, whether
floating or drowning in a troubled ocean, aren't we
pulled by a magnet in the same divine direction?
From our own beds at night we may float the storm,
dive into an astral star wave, not to flee but answer
a distant beckoning. It has been called levitation, this
rising in a luminous night spell like the gesture of prayer
in a swimmer's breath that reaches for the shore.
It's been called astral projection, rising, lighter than bones,
above our bedroom walls, beyond ceilings of moons and
paths of stars like an ageless body swimming through
centuries of sleep.

- Rich Meyers

[Larry Robinson]

Atavism


1
Sometimes in the open you look up
where birds go by, or just nothing,
and wait. A dim feeling comes
you were like this once, there was air,
and quiet; it was by a lake, or
maybe a river you were alert
as an otter and were suddenly born
like the evening star into wide
still worlds like this one you have found
again, for a moment, in the open.


2
Something is being told in the woods: aisles of
shadow lead away; a branch waves;
a pencil of sunlight slowly travels its
path. A withheld presence almost
speaks, but then retreats, rustles
a patch of brush. You can feel
the centuries ripple generations
of wandering, discovering, being lost
and found, eating, dying, being born.
A walk through the forest strokes your fur,
the fur you no longer have. And your gaze
down a forest aisle is a strange, long
plunge, dark eyes looking for home.
For delicious minutes you can feel your whiskers
wider than your mind, away out over everything.

- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight

I found myself
suddenly voluminous,
three-dimensioned,
a many-roofed building in moonlight.

Thought traversed
me as simply as moths might.
Feelings traversed me as fish.

I heard myself thinking,
It isn’t the piano, it isn’t the ears.

Then heard, too soon, the ordinary furnace,
the usual footsteps above me.

Washed my face again with hot water,
as I did when I was a child.

- Jane Hirshfield

[Larry Robinson]

Betrothed

You hear yourself walking on the snow.
You hear the absence of the birds.
A stillness so complete, you hear
the whispering inside of you. Alone
morning after morning, and even more
at night. They say we are born alone,
to live and die alone. But they are wrong.
We get to be alone by time, by luck,
or by misadventure. When I hit the log
frozen in the woodpile to break it free,
it makes a sound of perfect inhumanity,
which goes pure all through the valley,
like a crow calling unexpectedly
at the darker end of twilight that awakens
me in the middle of a life. The black
and white of me mated with this indifferent
winter landscape. I think of the moon
coming in a little while to find the white
among these colorless pines.

- Jack Gilbert

[Larry Robinson]

the total thrust is global justice


The total thrust is
global justice
so we gotta fix the politics
and put a check upon its economics
or before you know it, a warrior-poet
may try to upend the
corporate agenda that's
got 'em blind to the real bottom line.
It's intense when you sense the only interests
on the docket
are fat cats with Republi-Crats
in their pocket.
It's crooked now
just look at how
the pundits are funded.
They're devious at CBS and, yes,
they'll choose the news that fits the script unless
I play tricks on the matrix.
(In case you can't guess shit,
I'm not to be messed with.)
The folks know my art form
comes straight from the heart for 'em.
A lyrical storm that departs from the norm
and transforms as I'm giving
rhymes for the minds in the times that we live in.
I can't hang with the anguish
and I don't want my language to languish
'cause there ain't nothing like Drew's
hip hop haikus
I got a mandate
to disturb
the urban landscape.

We got tyrannies
right here in these
States,
and you never know
when they'll go
right back to some tactics
like COINTELPRO.
If we could see through the lies
see how they brutalize
and get cops
to beat speech in the streets
and guard sweatshops.
I'm ending these industries.
Please can we factor the
effect of the
trajectory?
This whole place is racist
and sexist from North
Dakota down to Texas
with the twenty-first century's
youth in penitentiaries
and the night never seemed this dark
but now half of the stars
are behind prison bars.
Oh say can you see?
But if we can dream a new day it may be.
You had to know the baddest bro
with the phattest flow would shake up the status quo
with my adjectives and adverbs and ad libs.
Like Gandhi
protest is my modus operandi.
It's like Malcolm and Martin's
evolution with art
and revolution
'cause the total thrust is
global justice.


- Drew Dellinger

[Larry Robinson]

In this World


The hill pasture, an open place among the trees,
tilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses
are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill
dark floodwater moves down the river.
The sun sets. Ahead of nightfall the birds sing.
I have climbed up to water the horses
and now sit and rest, high on the hillside,
letting the day gather and pass. Below me
cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands,
slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world
men are making plans, wearing themselves out,
spending their lives, in order to kill each other.


- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Place

On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree

what for
not the fruit

the tree that bears the fruit
is not the one that was planted

I want the tree that stands
in the earth for the first time

with the sun already
going down

and the water
touching its roots

in the earth full of the dead
and the clouds passing

one by one
over its leaves

- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

Variation on a Theme


Thank you my life long afternoon
late in this spring that has no age
my window above the river
for the woman you led me to
when it was time at last the words
coming to me out of mid-air
that carried me through the clear day
and come even now to find me
for old friends and echoes of them
those mistakes only I could make
homesickness that guides the plovers
from somewhere they had loved before
they knew they loved it to somewhere
they had loved before they saw it
thank you good body hand and eye
and the places and moments known
only to me revisiting
once more complete just as they are
and the morning stars I have seen
and the dogs who are guiding me


- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

Poem Liturgy

There is an energy
That insists its way into words.

Mary Oliver knew about it
And so hid pencils in trees
Where she walked daily in the woods.
The mystery of that energy
might come, she knew
with its inescapable calling card,
and in the breeze of morning
send her to her knees

There close enough to earth and
under the daily office of sky

she could find what she needed to worship.

- Judith Stone

[Larry Robinson]

Paris

J'ai vu Paris dans l'ombre
Hypogée où l'on riait trop
Paris une grande améthyste
Ces soldats belges en troupe
Vieilles femmes habillées en Perrette
Après le pot-au-lait
L'officier-pilote raconte ses exploits
J'ai entendu la berloque
Mais quel sourire celui de celui qui eut sursis d'appel illimité
Ombre de la statue de Shakespeare sur le Boulevard Haussmann
Laideur des costumes civils des hommes qui ne sont pas partis
Les peintres travaillaient
Mon cœur t'adore

- Guillaume Apollinaire

[Larry Robinson]

The Excesses of God

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

- Robinson Jeffers

[Ronaldo]

I asked my friend Tom Bissinger to translate the poem, Paris. Tom's been to Paris, once as an extra in the 1969 film: "If It'sTuesday, This Must Be Belgium" with Suzanne Pleshette'.


Paris
J'ai vu Paris dans l’ombre. I’ve seen shadowy Paris
Hypogée où l'on riait trop A subterranean chamber where one laughed too much
Paris une grande améthyste Paris a gleaming amethyst
Ces soldats belges en troupe like a troop of Belgian soldiers
Vieilles femmes habillées en Perrette old dames dressed in Perrette
Après le pot-au-lait. after their lattes (chocolate dessert, yogurt?)
L'officier-pilote raconte ses exploits The flight captain retells his exploits
J'ai entendu la berloque. I understood the berloque (?)
Mais quel sourire celui de celui qui eut sursis d'appel illimité but that grin of those who had deferred that boundless summons
Ombre de la statue de Shakespeare sur le Boulevard Haussmann Shakespeare’s shadow on the Boulevard Haussmann
Laideur des costumes civils des hommes qui ne sont pas partis the ugly polite dress of men who are still here
Les peintres travaillaient Painters work/ paint
Mon cœur t’adore. My heart (pun on dog) worships you


Paris

J'ai vu Paris dans l'ombre
Hypogée où l'on riait trop
Paris une grande améthyste
Ces soldats belges en troupe
Vieilles femmes habillées en Perrette
Après le pot-au-lait
L'officier-pilote raconte ses exploits
J'ai entendu la berloque
Mais quel sourire celui de celui qui eut sursis d'appel illimité
Ombre de la statue de Shakespeare sur le Boulevard Haussmann
Laideur des costumes civils des hommes qui ne sont pas partis
Les peintres travaillaient
Mon cœur t'adore

- Guillaume Apollinaire

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[Larry Robinson]

The stations of the cross

The stations of the cross are set—
so, too, the visions
of those few parishioners
who come to worship
this Good Friday evening (https://www.waccobb.net/forums/x-apple-data-detectors://0).
Three thunder-loud percussive shocks—
the scepter strikes the floor
and space cracks open
that here and now, all these centuries gone,
his words might still be felt and heard.
His simple words, then, illumined by a scripture passage
and a silent meditation, framed by clear bell tones.
There follows an offering of other words, mystic ones,
this time turned visual by a dancer’s supple body’s moves,
a second time of silence, then,
a longer time of sharing,
and simple singing,
together, as one by one,
in single file, this row of souls
makes its reverent way
from this station
of the cross
to the next
until their
ritual is
done—
until it
is finished.

It was the time of sharing,
that made the worship real:
dour and dark one voice,
rainbow light and wistful another
a fear of death in each
spoken, embraced or left unsaid,
measured and melodious, another
even in futile effort to bare a wound
that could not be born
before these few
nor before the cross itself,
thoughtful, redolent of real hope
this other worshiper’s words—
hope found for him in the personhood of god.
Jewels, all, these spoken words, before the cross
and smiles and laughter too were there
and memories brought back from childhood
and from Latin liturgy sung—
and there it ended in beauty
with an offering—unsought, unplanned—
a gift of grace—a single voice,
singing, in love, the Latin tongue—
Gregorian in its feel and subtle melody—
singing the beauty of the tree,
the beauty of that very tree
from which the cross of Christ had come,
that once living tree, now felled and dead,
that bore, this night, those centuries gone,
his dying body.


- Bill Denham

[Larry Robinson]

Exodus: The Never
Ending Story

Exodus
from America
is a phrase that one
is beginning to hear more
and more during these days.

The E word
sits in our DNA.
Yes, we’ll celebrate
the great escape from Egypt
but it’s never what is seems in the
land of those Mitzraims: Canaan, Rome, and
Spain, tragic illusions and heart-breaking dreams.

Yes, we’ll
celebrate spring and
renewal, the miracle of
creation, but along the tracks
of our pilgrimage we have had our
original tickets punched merely as travel
visas, affirming the truth that all beings on this
earth are undocumented immigrants walking hand

in hand
through the
the Sinai sand,
across the Edmond Pettis
Bridge and the parched desert
darkness toward the Rio Grand.
The hands that penned the Torah did not
begin with the creation or the fall but clearly
proclaimed the duty for us all to heed the next call
when the next Pharaoh starts to build the next wall.



* Mitzrayim: the Hebrew word for ancient Egypt/the ‘narrow
place” both in geography and the human heart.


- Bruce Silverman

[Larry Robinson]

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit,
the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that--pierced--died, withered, paused, and then regathered
out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

- John Updike

[Larry Robinson]

Tomorrow

Tomorrow
we are
bones and ash,
the roots of weeks
poking through
our skulls.


Today,
simple clothes,
empty mind,
full stomach,
alive, aware,
right here,
right now.


Drunk on music,
who needs wine?


Come on,
sweetheart,
let’s go dancing
while we’ve
still got feet.


- David Budbill

[Larry Robinson]

A Piece of the Storm
for Sharon Horvath

From the shadow of domes
in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one,
weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair
where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed.
That’s all
There was to it.
No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling
away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times,
a flowerless funeral.
No more than that
Except for the feeling
that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing
before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence,
sitting as you are now, might say:
“It’s time. The air is ready.
The sky has an opening.”

- Mark Strand




"Be joyful though you have considered all the facts."

[Larry Robinson]

Ode to This Small Joy

Someone discovered
the giraffe hums
at a harmonic rate
of 92 Hertz,
voice thrumming
the tower of spine
and trachea once
thought to be silent,
and her humming is
like monks chanting
holy and ascetic,
the vibrations rolling
up the vertebrae
gentle and slow,
a long-lashed
face lifting
from water to sky,
taut dark sides
veined with light
ready to crack
open the body.

- Maria Calabretta Cancio-Bello

[Larry Robinson]

vi

At the council of animals
our people are on trial
we are inconvenienced, angry—
they struggle pathetically with disease

the long list of extinct species is noted

an envoy from the ants arrives
and speaks of the time we,
or one of us, chose in drowsy
compassion to save an ant’s life

our case is referred to the plants

trees are emotion itself—so fully open
to the elements that they do not move, save
in the wind—always sumptuous, always
digging for more strength, more knowledge

yet they pause to ask us
Do you know were you come from?

What you walk on? Whither you go?

- Lee Perron

[Larry Robinson]

Now is the Time

Don’t let the jewels remain buried
at the bottom of the ocean

Dive deep
Hold your breath
Let another breath breathe you

Let the breath of the universe
propel you ever deeper
into the mystery of Being

Surrendering to the unknown
as it unfolds in your life

Moment by moment
Miracle by miracle

What jewels will you bring
to the surface to share with the world?

What gold did you find hidden
in the depths of the darkness?

Wear it as a crown,
a symbol of the wisdom
and power discovered
in the depths of your Being

Let the voice of love
find its expression
through your heart
broken or unbroken

No need to wait for perfection
to let your light shine
You’re already reflecting
the perfect light

Let the heart of compassion
flow as a river of mercy
into the wounds of humanity

Now is the time
Now is the time
Now is the time

- Kathleen Rose McTeigue

[Larry Robinson]

Music


When I was a child
I once sat sobbing on the floor
Beside my mother’s piano
As she played and sang
For there was in her singing
A shy yet solemn glory
My smallness could not hold
And when I was asked
Why I was crying
I had no words for it
I only shook my head
And went on crying
Why is it that music
At its most beautiful
Opens a wound in us
An ache a desolation
Deep as a homesickness
For some far-off
And half-forgotten country
I’ve never understood
Why this is so
But there’s an ancient legend
From the other side of the world
That gives away the secret
Of this mysterious sorrow
For centuries on centuries
We have been wandering
But we were made for Paradise
As deer for the forest
And when music comes to us
With its heavenly beauty
It brings us desolation
For when we hear it
We half remember
That lost native country
We dimly remember the fields
Their fragrant windswept clover
The birdsongs in the orchards
The wild white violets in the moss
By the transparent streams
And shining at the heart of it
Is the longed-for beauty
Of the One who waits for us
Who will always wait for us
In those radiant meadows
Yet also came to live with us
And wanders where we wander.


- Anne Porter

[Larry Robinson]

Under a Wild Green Fig Tree

I am going to eat seven pomegranate seeds
and lie down under a wild green fig tree
in a field that has been ploughed three times

because I want to sleep in fertile soil
sinking into dream time, dream space,
and slip past the door to the underworld,

which has been left ajar for questers
and adepts, for reckless night revelers
stumbling into the corridor of ghosts,

so I can wander the subterranean realm
and listen to Persephone’s hell songs,
music she could learn only in Hades—

the low, fateful lyrics of death,
the soul’s radical return to innocence,
the earth’s eternal movement and passage,

our deep human labor to become spirits,
our almost vegetal need to be reborn,
the cycle of loss, myth of regeneration.

- Edward Hirsch

[Ronaldo]

Not wild, but growing in the back yard.


46551


Under a Wild Green Fig Tree
...

[Larry Robinson]

Candles in Babylon

Through the midnight streets of Babylon
between the steel towers of their arsenals,
between the torture castles with no windows,
we race by barefoot, holding tight
our candles, trying to shield
the shivering flames, crying
"Sleepers Awake!"
hoping
the rhyme's promise was true,
that we may return
from this place of terror
home to a calm dawn and
the work we had just begun.

- Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

Hubble Photographs: After Sappho

It should be the most desired sight of all
the person with whom you hope to live and die

walking into a room, turning to look at you, sight for sight
Should be yet I say there is something

more desirable: the ex-stasis of galaxies
so out from us there’s no vocabulary

but mathematics and optics
equations letting sight pierce through time

into liberations, lacerations of light and dust
exposed like a body’s cavity, violet green livid and venous, gorgeous

—beyond good and evil as ever stained into dream
beyond remorse, disillusion, fear of death

or life, rage
for order, rage for destruction

beyond this love which stirs
the air every time she walks into the room

These impersonae, however we call them
won’t invade us as on movie screens

they are so old, so new, we are not to them
we look at them or don’t from within the milky gauze

of our tilted gazing
but they don’t look back and we cannot hurt them

- Adrienne Rich

[Larry Robinson]

What Would An Indigenous Grandmother Do?



<tbody>
I don’t want to change
my thoughts.
I want to change
the way I think.
I want to think
in images, in stories
spun as threads
arising long and slow
out of culture and
out of the Grandmother Spider
of indigenous mind.


I want to learn
to live in the old ways,
the ways of spirit.
I want to see
the signs and the
deep, precise wisdom
of the true ones –
ancestors, elders, any and all
trying to inform us that
there is a way -
there is a way
to heal,
there is a way
to see,
there is a way
to change direction,
there is a way
to give the children
what they need
to be safe
to be listening
to be healthy
to be whole.


I, too,
want to be whole
all the way into
death and, yes,
I’ll say it,
beyond death,
beyond it but not beyond
the cycle of being -
the ring, the hoop of
being together.
This is the place where
Love remains, where
Love sustains, where
Love comes
into and through
all things.
Love is spirit
flowing into the life
of the world.
Knowing this
I am left with a question
to pose to myself:
What would an
indigenous grandmother do?


</tbody>


- Maya Spector

[Larry Robinson]

Shirt


The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians


Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band


Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze


At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes--


The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out


Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.


A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once


He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers--


Like Hart Crane's Bedlamite, "shrill shirt
ballooning."
Wonderful how the patern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked


Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans


Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of
Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,


Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
to wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,


The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the
sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:


George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit


And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,


The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the
characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.


- Robert Pinsky

[Larry Robinson]

Tipping Point


Oh yes the trails of tears are now trails of blood.
Oh yes the defenseless will be shown no mercy.

Oh yes extinction builds fine walls.
Dead bodies of birds, butterflies, tiny frogs
starfish summer meadows spring flowers
the innocent oceans whole forests and jungles.

Their crime: to be beautiful.

Inside sanctuaries once inviolable for prayer
our brothers and sisters
kneeling sometimes with hands clasped or their heads to the ground
are gunned down.

Their crime: to pray to give thanks to God

Our sisters and brothers refugees and immigrants
are hunted terrorized condemned.

Their crimes: to seek peace safety a home for a family freedom

And those who are different in faith or form or who they love
are blamed for all the ills of the world

Their crime: to be different

Oh yes the dead bodies of dreamers
ripen in the desert, simmer in the sun
bleached white turn to dust.

Their crime: to dream.

beaten black and blue piles up. The river stinks
of blood rancid defenseless blood and tears.

A wall of death will not be enough.

Oh yes Saturn insatiable gorges on his children.
The homeless are scooped up like candy.
The refugees lapped like ice cream.
But it will never be enough.

This useless wall of useless fear and hate and greed.
The skull grins and squats on its ephemeral throne
on the wall of blood.

Surely we must ask ourselves have we had enough?
Is this the tipping point at last?

- Gail Onion

[Larry Robinson]

For My Mother

Once more
I summon you
Out of the past
With poignant love,
You who nourished the poet
And the lover.
I see your gray eyes
Looking out to sea
In those Rockport summers,
Keeping a distance
Within the closeness
Which was never intrusive
Opening out
Into the world.
And what I remember
Is how we laughed
Till we cried
Swept into merriment
Especially when times were hard.
And what I remember
Is how you never stopped creating
And how people sent me
Dresses you had designed
With rich embroidery
In brilliant colors
Because they could not bear
To give them away
Or cast them aside.
I summon you now
Not to think of
The ceaseless battle
With pain and ill health,
The frailty and the anguish.
No, today I remember
The creator,
The lion-hearted.

- May Sarton

[Larry Robinson]

Tracking at Auschwitz


Went tracking at Auschwitz,
looking for animal signs-
tracks, scat, anything.


There was plenty of human spoor but
the only life I saw
was a raptor
perch hunting
from a
bent steel post
of a once electrified
barbed wire
fence.


- George Gittleman

[Ronaldo]

Photo from Holocaust Memorial near Legion of Honor San Francisco.

46594


Tracking at Auschwitz


Went tracking at Auschwitz,
looking for animal signs-
tracks, scat, anything.


There was plenty of human spoor but
the only life I saw
was a raptor
perch hunting
from a
bent steel post
of a once electrified
barbed wire
fence.


- George Gittleman

[Larry Robinson]

To my granddaughters who visited the Holocaust Museum on the day of the burial of Yitzhak Rabin

Now you know the worst
we humans have to know
about ourselves, and I am sorry,

for I know that you will be afraid.
To those of our bodies given
without pity to be burned, I know

there is no answer
but loving one another,
even our enemies, and this is hard.

But remember:
when a man of war becomes a man of peace,
he gives a light, divine

though it is also human.
When a man of peace is killed
by a man of war, he gives a light.

You do not have to walk in darkness.
If you will have the courage for love,
you may walk in light. It will be

the light of those who have suffered
for peace. It will be
your light.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Half-and-Half


You can't be, says a Palestinian Christian
on the first feast day after Ramadan.
So, half-and-half and half-and-half.
He sells glass. He knows about broken bits,
chips. If you love Jesus you can't love
anyone else. Says he.


At his stall of blue pitchers on the Via Dolorosa,
he's sweeping. The rubbed stones
feel holy. Dusting of powdered sugar
across face, of date-stuffed' mamool.


This morning we lit the slim white candles
which bend over at the waist by noon.
For once the priests weren't fighting
in the church for the best spots to stand.
As a boy, my father listened to them fight.
This is partly why he prays in no language
but his own. Why I press my lips
to every exception.


A woman opens a window -- here and here and here
placing a vase of blue flowers,
on an orange cloth. I follow her.
She is making a soup from what she had left
in the bowl, the shriveled garlic and bent bean.
She is leaving nothing out.


- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

Kill The Poets

Kill the poets
Kill them all!
Who cares if the spirit calls?
Let me sit and scratch my balls.
Kill the poets
Kill them all!

Kill the poets
It's time to fight
Stunning metaphors
And sudden insight
The hidden meaning in a raven's call.
Me, I'm ready for some football!
Kill the poets
Kill them all!

Kill the painters
It's the same damn breed.
We've got TV so where's the need?
False perspective and plein air
Making us see what isn't there.
Look, reds are reds and blues are blues.
I'm happy with my Fox snooze.
Kill the painters
Let's get them too!

But these poets
They have got to go
Making us remember what we've always known
We like our dull and ordered lives -
Here come the poets with their long knives
We read our lines and play the part -
Some poet kicks over the apple cart

Kill the poets
It's a good start
Quick!
Take their heads
Before
They take your heart

- Jim Knowles

[Larry Robinson]

From the Diary of an Almost-Four-Year-Old


Tomorrow, the bandages
will come off. I wonder
will I see half an orange,
half an apple, half my
mother's face
with my one remaining eye?
I did not see the bullet
but felt its pain
exploding in my head.
His image did not
vanish, the soldier
with a big gun, unsteady
hands, and a look in
his eyes
I could not understand.


If I can see him so clearly
with my eyes closed,
it could be that inside our heads
we each have one spare set
of eyes
to make up for the ones we lose.


Next month, on my birthday,
I'll have a brand new glass eye,
maybe things will look round
and fat in the middle —
I've gazed through all my marbles,
they made the world look strange.


I hear a nine-month-old
has also lost an eye,
I wonder if my soldier
shot her too—a soldier
looking for little girls who
look him in the eye—
I'm old enough, almost four,
I've seen enough of life,
but she's just a baby
who didn't know any better.


- Hanan Ashwari





Dr. Hanan Ashrawi has been a central player in the struggle for a Palestinian homeland. A tireless campaigner for human rights, she has distinguished herself in both the academic and political arenas. Her academic expertise has played a vital role in the development and recognition of Palestinian culture, while her longstanding political activism on behalf of the Palestinian people has contributed greatly to the establishment of an independent and self-governing Palestine.

Dr. Ashrawi received her Bachelor and Master's degrees in literature in the Department of English at the American University of Beirut. After earning her Ph.D. in Medieval and Comparative Literature from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Dr. Ashrawi returned to her homeland in 1973 to establish the Department of English at Birzeit University on the West Bank. She edited the Anthology of Palestinian Literature. She is the author of The Modern Palestinian Short Story: An Introduction to Practical Criticism; Contemporary Palestinian Literature under Occupation; Contemporary Palestinian Poetry and Fiction; and Literary Translation: Theory and Practice.

[Larry Robinson]

I took her name…


I never thought to change my name.
Born knowing it was women I loved,
we did not have the custom reserved
for others. Marriage was not a possibility
even though we lived together,
worked together, shared everything—
dreams, clothes, dogs, bed.


After fifty four years,
during which life changed
around us, laws that had seemed
written in stone, opened up
new ways of thinking about our lives.
We married, thinking it was for the cause
but found it was really for us.


Still, we never thought to change
our names. Until…
Until, not the way we planned it,
(we were to be together, somehow)
she was gone. I alone remained
living for both of us, and I wrote a poem,
signed it as usual, then, almost without
thinking, added the hyphen
and her name became mine:


- fran claggett-holland

[Larry Robinson]

Are There Not Still Fireflies?

Are there not still fireflies
Are there not still four-leaf clovers
Is not our land still beautiful
our fields not full of armed enemies
our cities never bombed
by foreign invaders
never occupied
by iron armies
speaking iron tongues
Are not our warriors still valiant
ready to defend us
Are not our senators
still wearing fine togas
Are we not still a great people
in the greatest country in all the world
Is this not still a free country
Are not our fields still ours
our gardens still full of flowers
our ships with full cargoes
Why then do some still fear
the barbarians coming
coming coming
in their huddled masses
(What is that sound that fills the ear
drumming drumming?)
Is not Rome still Rome
Is not Los Angeles still Los Angeles
Are these not the last days of the Roman Empire
Is not beauty still beauty
And truth still truth
Are there not still poets
Are there not still lovers
Are there not still mothers
sisters and brothers
Is there not still a full moon
once a month
Are there not still fireflies
Are there not still stars at night
Can we not still see them
in bowl of night
signaling to us
our manifest destiny?

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

[M/M]

wondering when L Ferlinghetti wrote this poem I found this:
https://www.nationalbook.org/lawrence-ferlinghetti-accepts-the-2005-literarian-award/

at end of his talk in accepting the Literarian Award in 2005, he says:

The dominant American mercantile culture may globalize the world but it is not the mainstream culture of our civilization. The true mainstream is made, not of oil but of literarians, publishers, bookstores, editors, libraries, writers and readers, universities and all the institutions that support them. That is the real mainstream of our civilization.

It will survive, if anything survives, after the electricity goes off and electronic civilization fades away, when Nature strikes back in retaliation for what the dominant culture is doing to it. Coming to your local theater soon, the day after tomorrow. See you at the show.

I’ll end with a poem I wrote just before 9/11:

Are there not still fireflies?

(thank you to both Larry's :): )


Are There Not Still Fireflies?

Are there not still fireflies
Are there not still four-leaf clovers
Is not our land still beautiful
our fields not full of armed enemies
our cities never bombed
by foreign invaders
never occupied
by iron armies
speaking iron tongues
Are not our warriors still valiant
ready to defend us
Are not our senators
still wearing fine togas
Are we not still a great people
in the greatest country in all the world
Is this not still a free country
Are not our fields still ours
our gardens still full of flowers
our ships with full cargoes
Why then do some still fear
the barbarians coming
coming coming
in their huddled masses
(What is that sound that fills the ear
drumming drumming?)
Is not Rome still Rome
Is not Los Angeles still Los Angeles
Are these not the last days of the Roman Empire
Is not beauty still beauty
And truth still truth
Are there not still poets
Are there not still lovers
Are there not still mothers
sisters and brothers
Is there not still a full moon
once a month
Are there not still fireflies
Are there not still stars at night
Can we not still see them
in bowl of night
signaling to us
our manifest destiny?

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

[Larry Robinson]

Repeating History


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


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


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


We are all a history.
Redacted, invented
History of our innocence
And their guilt.


We carry culture, albeit
Ignorant of the original
Root, a curious explorer
Into darkness, into


Separation from a whole
Which held us, hewed a
Path toward empathy, a forked
Road now, moving


Away from each other,
Ourselves.


- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

The Farmer’s Wife
(In memory of Masako)


She sold tomatoes, corn and peppers
from the wooden stand
by their Fresno farm
surrounded by melon fields
and orange groves.
Apt at the calculator,
she figured out profits
no matter how meager.
In winter
she wore wool checkered shirts.
In summer
a light blouse sufficed
In the intense Central Valley heat.


By day
she hoisted crates of produce
and soothed customers.
In late evening
she walked with her husband
by the irrigation canals.
She could tie a kid’s shoes
tell a good story
or just listen.
She collected family photos
dolls
figurines
and laughed at the clutter.


She survived
sickness
the depression
the internment camp at Tule Lake
and raised four children
who became
doctors
teachers
entrepreneurs.


At eighty-three
she died well-loved
but not yet famous.


- Laura Blatt

[Larry Robinson]

To Earth the Mother of All


I will sing of the well-founded Earth,
mother of all, eldest of all beings.


She feeds all creatures that are in the world,
all that go upon the goodly land,
all that are in the paths of the seas, and all that fly;
all these are fed of her store.


Through you, O Queen, we are blessed
In our children, and in our harvest
and to you we owe our lives.


Happy are we who you delight to honor!


We have all things abundantly:
our houses are filled with good things,
our cities are orderly,
our sons exult with feverish delight.


(May they take no delight in war)


Our daughters with flower-laden hands
play and skip merrily over the soft flowers of the field.


(May they seek peace for all peoples)


Thus it is for those whom you honor,
O holy Goddess, Bountiful spirit!
Hail Earth, mother of the gods,
freely bestow upon us for this our song
that cheers and soothes the heart!


May we seek peace for all peoples of the well-founded earth


- Homeric Hymn XXX adapted by Elizabeth Roberts

[Larry Robinson]

Dance of the Macabre Mice

“In the land of turkeys in turkey weather” -W. Stevens


The president smiles to himself, he loves war
And another one is coming soon.
Each day we can feel the merriment mount
In government offices and TV studios
As our bombers fly off to distant countries.

The mortuaries are being scrubbed clean.
Soon they’ll be full of grim young men laid out in rows.
Already the crowd gurgles with delight
At the bird-sweet deceits, the deep-throated lies
About our coming battles and victories.

Dark-clad sharpshooters on rooftops
Are scanning the mall for suspicious pigeons,
Blind men waving their canes in the air,
Girls with short skirts and ample bosoms
Reaching deep into their purses for a lighter.

- Charles Simic

[Larry Robinson]

Hadeel's Song


Some words are hard to pronounce—
He-li-cop-ter is most vexing
(A-pa-che or Co-bra is impossible)
But how it can stand still in the sky
I cannot understand—
What holds it up
What bears its weight
(Not clouds, I know)
It sends a flashing light—so smooth—
It makes a deafening sound
The house shakes
(There are holes in the wall by my bed)
Flash-boom-light-sound—
And I have a hard time sleeping
(I felt ashamed when I wet my bed, but no one scolded me).


Plane—a word much easier to say—
It flies, tayyara,
My mother told me
A word must have a meaning
A name must have a meaning
Like mine,
(Hadeel, the cooing of the dove)
Tanks, though, make a different sound
They shudder when they shoot
Dabbabeh is a heavy word
As heavy as its meaning.


Hadeel—the dove—she coos
Tayyara—she flies
Dabbabeh—she crawls
My Mother—she cries
And cries and cries
My Brother—Rami—he lies
DEAD
And lies and lies, his eyes
Closed.
Hit by a bullet in the head
(bullet is a female lead—rasasa—she kills,
my pencil is a male lead—rasas—he writes)
What’s the difference between a shell and a bullet?
(What’s five-hundred-milli-meter-
Or eight-hundred-milli-meter-shell?)
Numbers are more vexing than words—
I count to ten, then ten-and-one, ten-and-two
But what happens after ten-and-ten,
How should I know?
Rami, my brother, was one
Of hundreds killed—
They say thousands are hurt,
But which is more
A hundred or a thousand (miyyeh or alf)
I cannot tell—
So big—so large—so huge—
Too many, too much.


Palestine—Falasteen—I’m used to,
It’s not so hard to say,
It means we’re here—to stay—
Even though the place is hard
On kids and mothers too
For soldiers shoot
And airplanes shell
And tanks boom
And tear gas makes you cry
(Though I don’t think it’s tear gas that makes my mother cry)
I’d better go and hug her
Sit in her lap a while
Touch her face (my fingers wet)
Look in her eyes
Until I see myself again
A girl within her mother’s sight.


If words have meaning, Mama,
What is Is-ra-el?
What does a word mean
if it is mixed
with another—
If all soldiers, tanks, planes and guns are
Is-ra-el-i
What are they doing here
In a place I know
In a word I know—(Palestine)
In a life that I no longer know?




- Hanan Ashwari


Two days ago Dr. Hanan Ashwari’s application for a visa to visit the US was denied with no explanation. https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-05-14/veteran-palestinian-negotiator-hanan-ashrawi-denied-visa-us

[Larry Robinson]

Visiting San Francisco

I wanted to curl up
in the comfortable cosmic melancholy of my past,
in the sadness of my past being passed.
I wanted to tour the museum of my antiquities
and look at the sarcophagi there.
I wanted to wallow like a water buffalo in the cool,
sagacious mud of my past,
so I wrote you and said I’d be in town and could we meet.
But you think my past is your present.
You wouldn’t relent, you wouldn’t agree
to dinner or a cup of coffee or even a bag of peanuts
on a bench in North Beach.
You didn’t want to curl up or tour or wallow with me.
You’re still mad, long after the days
have turned into decades, about the ways I let you down.
The four hundred thousand ways.
Maybe I would be, too.
But people have done worse to me.
I don’t think I’m being grotesque when I tell you
I’ve been flayed and slayed and force-fed anguish.
I’ve been a human cataract
plunging through a noose and going to pieces on the rocks.
I’ve been a seagull tethered to Alcatraz.
What can I say, what more can I say, how much more
vulnerable can I be, to persuade you
now that I’ve persuaded myself?
Why can’t you just let it go?
Well, at least I’m in San Francisco.
San Francisco, where the homeless are most at home—
crouching over their tucker bags under your pollarded trees—
because your beauty is as free to them
as to the domiciled in their
dead-bolt domiciles, your beauty is as free to
the innocent as to the guilty.
The fog has burned off.
In a cheap and windy room on Russian Hill
a man on the run unwraps the bandages
swaddling his new face, his reconstructed face,
and looks in the mirror and sees
the face of Humphrey Bogart. Only here
could such a thing happen.
It was really always you, San Francisco,
time won’t ever darken my love for you,
San Francisco.


- Vijay Seshadri

[Ronaldo]

My photos of the Bridge, old friend and and Native San Franciscan Tom Bissinger

46674


Visiting San Francisco
...

[Larry Robinson]

Living Mandala
At a Tshechu, annual sacred festival in Domkhar. Bhutan


1.
Follow me to a small country
where trees in new yellow leaf
stand before black mountains,
where clouds curdle above,
with sun seeping through.
Where distant Himalayas look
like the exquisitely chipped rim
of the world’s sugar bowl.
Sit with me and the local populace
in a monastic courtyard
while temple bells gong
and drums beat out
da-da-DUM-dum-dum.


2.
Watch while a dozen monks
in masks of the zodiac,
in yellow skirts with rainbow
petticoats, emerge from
the temple, their feet bare,
chests, too, but for richly
embroidered bibs and straps.
And on the grass and flagstones,
they dance, whirl and
twirl, lift feet, toss ribboned
crests, ears, horns, gin up winds
with the sticks they carry.
Rooster, ox, rat and all spin like clocks
and counter-clocks, the mandala
of their ring wheeling in a circle game.
The winds blow hot and cold.
The temple horns blow cool.
At last spent, each takes a solo exit,
helped up steps by other monks –
ones not drunk on dance.


3.
After the barest of intervals, the monk dancers
will be back in different masks
to again leave all on the flagstones.
They will repeat all day. Meanwhile
divine jesters will orchestrate with smirk
masks and phallus prods. They grin,
teach steps, poke people, invite themselves
onto audience laps. It’s understood these
tricksters must stay inside the gates.


Cymbals are singing and the monks are
back in red brocade, whirling, holding
swords of purification, and spinning.
Have I ever witnessed someone
dancing themselves into a frenzy
for the enlightenment of my soul?
Yes


- Phyllis Meshulam

[Larry Robinson]

Theories of Time and Space



You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one—
by—one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion—dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on a mangrove swamp—buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry—tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph—who you were—
will be waiting when you return

- Natasha Trethewey

[Larry Robinson]

Politics


How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.


- William Butler Yeats

[Larry Robinson]

On Aging Fiercely


I am going to seed

Look around

All these blessings need scattering

Somewhere

There is an art to Elderhood
It is time to ask the
IMPORTANT question:
Where do I spread all of these seeds
I have collected?

I thought it disloyal at first
To the holy worship of youth
But hiding the baubles of delight
Has become impossible.

The splashy bangles
Around my bones keep jangling
sounding like hooray hooray!
Or I admit sometimes ouch ouch!
Which is simply
An invitation
To slow the hell down

Who knew walking
s-l-o-w-l-y
Could be considered graceful
Or even seductive?
I lean towards the latter.

And I will carry no ordinary cane
Already a hand carved
Walking-stick inlaid with
Chakra colored stones waits kindly
Against the far wall.

One day I may use it

As my planting stick
Or perhaps an encouragement
To stand taller
To better see where
I am to scatter
All of the seed-blessing
That are filling my pockets.

- Kristy Hellum

[Ronaldo]

46695

[Larry Robinson]

Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf
Pine in North America


Tell me what it’s like to live without
curiosity, without awe. To sail
on clear water, rolling your eyes
at the kelp reefs swaying
beneath you, ignoring the flicker
of mermaid scales in the mist,
looking at the world and feeling
only boredom. To stand
on the precipice of some wild valley,
the eagles circling, a herd of caribou
booming below, and to yawn
with indifference. To discover
something primordial and holy.
To have the smell of the earth
welcome you to everywhere.
To take it all in, and then,
to reach for your knife.


- Matthew Olzmann

[Larry Robinson]

In The Month of May


In the month of May when all leaves open,
I see when I walk how well things
Lean on each other, how the bees work,
The fish make their living the first day.
Monarchs fly high, then I understand
I love you with what in me is unfinished.


I love you with what in me is still
Changing, what has no head or arms
Or legs, what has not found its body.
And why shouldn't the miraculous,
Caught on this earth, visit
The old man alone in his hut?


And why shouldn't Gabriel, who loves honey,
Be fed with our own radishes and walnuts?
And lovers, tough ones, how many there are
Whose holy bodies are not yet born.
Along the roads, I see so many places
I would like us to spend the night.

- Robert Bly

[Larry Robinson]

Waiting


The best way
to talk to God
is through those
sleeping
on the bus


Be they drunk
or derelict
or coming home
from work
or shopping


so dead tired
that their bones
open easily
to heaven


Those who
sleep on
the bus
are the
swiftest
couriers
of prayers


I find myself
on the same bus
with them
on many
nights


and
write a
note


on the
rhythm of
the bus
starting
and stopping


turning my breath
at each corner


It is always
the same
note to
God


I write


These days
bleed
through
my tongue
and pen


I want to
risk
my faith
with you


I want to ask
only one thing


for you to stop
carrying
the torn bodies
of children
past me


Please
let this end


I don't seek
your blessing
or tears


or any easy way
out of here


My hands
are empty
and barren
as I write


Just let this end



BeauWaiting


The best way
to talk to God
is through those
sleeping
on the bus


Be they drunk
or derelict
or coming home
from work
or shopping


so dead tired
that their bones
open easily
to heaven


Those who
sleep on
the bus
are the
swiftest
couriers
of prayers


I find myself
on the same bus
with them
on many
nights


and
write a
note


on the
rhythm of
the bus
starting
and stopping


turning my breath
at each corner


It is always
the same
note to
God


I write


These days
bleed
through
my tongue
and pen


I want to
risk
my faith
with you


I want to ask
only one thing


for you to stop
carrying
the torn bodies
of children
past me


Please
let this end


I don't seek
your blessing
or tears


or any easy way
out of here


My hands
are empty
and barren
as I write


Just let this end


- Beau Beausoleil

[Larry Robinson]

The Summer Noosphere


Wet nights, warm days are what we want in the summer noosphere.
Man's mind one with weather.
If this is true, life is good, or will be good.
Can I be encouraged that my sons will find mystery on the planet
as I did?

How sweet the slow spring! May already and the canopy not out yet.
Woods quiet all winter.
Now I can't distinguish the many bird songs from where I sit.
Red maple flowers and first sugar maple leaves are, to me, the Christ child
that's been coming.

The ancient poems and the new make the 1/10 inch of annual topsoil
from carbon dioxide loading.
As a humanist I want everyone pursuing happiness; as a naturalist
I sometimes pray for man's destruction. As a rationalist I admit
I lack data.

O to play slow and sure, even when the tune is fast. Inside an aquifer
of love for the audience.
Not to fear or even necessarily obey the changing wind's
direction. Being here I breathe and make the atmosphere as seen
from outer space.

The song of the world will often take you far from yourself. There
will be no self. How will you know yourself?
By knowing thyme and dandelion, the blue jay from the hawk,
the heron in its swamp, black cherries and the one pear at the junction of the trails.
They are yourself.

- Robert Ronnow

[Larry Robinson]

The Seven Streams

Come down drenched, at the end of May,
with the cold rain so far into your bones
that nothing will warm you
except your own walking
and let the sun come out at the day's end
by Slievenaglasha with the rainbows doubling
over Mulloch Mor and see your clothes
steaming in the bright air. Be a provenance
of something gathered, a summation of
previous intuitions, let your vulnerabilities
walking on the cracked sliding limestone
be this time, not a weakness, but a faculty
for understanding what's about
to happen. Stand above the Seven Streams
letting the deep down current surface
around you, then branch and branch
as they do, back into the mountain
and as if you were able for that flow,
say the few necessary words
and walk on, broader and cleansed
for having imagined.


- David Whyte

[Larry Robinson]

Family Syllabus

The butterfly is quickly seized and eaten just above their lifted heads
the children had trapped it in the house under glass and card
the father brought it to freedom in the center of the family garden
a Western scrub-jay straightway brought the lesson to a close

In the late afternoon the father glances over his shoulder
the jay and a waxing moon are sitting side by side on a phone wire
the jay says, I know everything that goes on in your garden
the moon says, I bring pale beauty to a darkened world.

- Lee Perron

[Larry Robinson]

Brothers in Arms


These mist covered mountains
Are a home now for me
But my home is the lowlands
And always will be
Someday you'll return to
Your valleys and your farms
And you'll no longer burn to be
Brothers in arms


Through these fields of destruction
Baptisms of fire
I've witnessed your suffering
As the battle raged higher
And though they did hurt me so bad
In the fear and alarm
You did not desert me
My brothers in arms


There's so many different worlds
So many different suns
And we have just one world
But we live in different ones


Now the sun's gone to hell and
The moon's riding high
Let me bid you farewell
Every man has to die
But it's written in the starlight
And every line in your palm
We are fools to make war
On our brothers in arms


- Mark Knopfler




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5JkHBC5lDs

[Larry Robinson]

Nothing Is Lost

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we love have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled.
Family jokes, outmoded anecdotes
each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears

Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar sent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night

- Noel Coward

[Ronaldo]

Comment from SpokenVerse:

If one could go back in history and eliminate one particular villain who damaged the world forever, my candidate would be Sigmund Freud. There has proved to be not a word of truth in anything he said, yet his works changed the world profoundly, particularly the way that people think about simple emotions. This poem is an example of that pernicious influence. Even worse examples are the 'confessional poets', bamboozled and victimised by psychoanalysts, the head-in-the-gas-oven school of poetry.

—SpokenVerse

https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/-nothing-is-lost-by-noel-coward-poetry-reading-6269871


Nothing Is Lost

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we love have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled.
Family jokes, outmoded anecdotes
each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears

Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar sent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night

- Noel Coward

[eddierosenthal]

I turn to Robert Bly, who comments ( American Poetry, pg. 34)

"Our poetry took a wrong turning years ago. Some centuries have a profound spiritual movement: poetry, when vigorous, always a part of it. We know ours is a century of technical obsession, of business mentality, of human effort dissipated among objects, of experience, of a destructive motion outward. Yet there is also a movement in the opposite direction that is even more powerful. THe best thought in this century moves inward. This movement has been sustained by Freud, by great poetry of Europe and South America, by painting, by the most intelligent men. This is the important movement. The weakness of our poetry is that ait does not share in this movement. "

So it seems to me that you cannot put blame for poor poetry on Freud, as well there are some ( Sylvia Plath) who wrote some great poetry, and by some is not considered a confessional poet.

Blanket statements about Freud will lead to a spirited debate? Blanket statements about poets and their poetry will lead to another type of debate. One is probably technical, the other is probably subjective, with a smattering of authoritative remarks which also can be disputed.

I view Robert Bly as one who is wise in matters of poetry, but not necessarily Freud. In matters of poetry i trust my instinct to lead me to entertain its source.


Comment from SpokenVerse:

If one could go back in history and eliminate one particular villain who damaged the world forever, my candidate would be Sigmund Freud. ...

[Larry Robinson]

Song of the Open Road


9
https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2019-05-31_12-15-12.pngAllons! whoever you are come travel with me!
Traveling with me you find what never tires.

The earth never tires,
The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first,
Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d,
I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

Allons! we must not stop here,
However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling we cannot remain here,
However shelter’d this port and however calm these waters we must not anchor here,
However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted to receive it but a little while.

- Walt Whitman
(today is Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday)

[Ronaldo]

My dear friend Melvin Goldfield loved Walt Whitman and made numerous protraits of him.
Here are some accompanying a song

46773

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDUbyVShBTA

[Larry Robinson]

Deep Bows

I know that spring is here
When the fields are buttered
With flowers, and melting with water

When tall common egrets
stretch their necks out and
curve them into the curving hills.
Or let their white robed shoulders
Bow down to the cool wet grasses

The table of creation has been set again.
They dine in monastic silence
while the cows eat, too
While the kites fly,
while the hawks hunt
and Red-winged blackbirds
take a long deep breath of sky
and exhale above the marshes.
And punctuate them with song!

Perhaps they are calling us into their world
Saying listen to our languages,
Sing with us our sounds
And be wholly here with us
in the mystery,
And feel how rich it is this
springtime poem that is, for now
the recurrence of the world.

- Judith Stone

[Larry Robinson]

The Laughing Child


When she looked down from the kitchen window
into the back yard and the brown wicker
baby carriage in which she had tucked me
three months old to lie out in the fresh air
of my first January the carriage
was shaking she said and went on shaking
and she saw I was lying there laughing
she told me about it later it was
something that reassured her in a life
in which she had lost everyone she loved
before I was born and she had just begun
to believe that she might be able to
keep me as I lay there in the winter
laughing it was what she was thinking of
later when she told me that I had been
a happy child and she must have kept that
through the gray cloud of all her days and now
out of the horn of dreams of my own life
I wake again into the laughing child


- W. S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

Magpies Recognize Themselves in the Mirror


The night sounds like a murder
of magpies and we’re replacing our cabinet knobs
because we can’t change the world, but we can
change our hardware. America breaks my heart
some days, and some days it breaks itself in two.
I watched a woman have a breakdown in the mall
today and when the security guard tried to help her
what I could see was all of us
peeking from her purse as she threw it
across the floor into Forever 21. And yes,
the walls felt like another way to hold us in
and when she finally stopped crying,
I heard her say to the fluorescent lighting, Some days
the sky is too bright. And like that we were her
flock in our black coats and white sweaters,
some of us reaching our wings to her
and some of us flying away.


- Kelli Russell Agodon

[Larry Robinson]

Forever

Sweet summers we stayed outdoors
until we could no longer tell
the trees from the dark between them
and the brigade of fireflies failed
in its quest to prolong the day.
There was a name for what stepped in
when time stopped in daylight’s
slow embrace of farewell,
kind reprieve to our outdoor games
until the moment night’s blanket covered
the last corner of earth’s cradle
and the blanket itself came alive
with singing: that name was forever.
We did not speak the name, but
our minds were filled with forever.
My friend and I once tried
to say to how long it had been
since the day we’d first met.
We strained, but the effort flooded
the beds of our minds. Origins
lay too dim in memory’s forest.
“Two years ago,” we murmured—
another name for forever.

- Max Reif

[Larry Robinson]

The Booby Prize

My friend Jana tells me "knowing
Is the Booby Prize."
Once known the answer ossifies into Certainty.
Can we know Life
Without wanting
To trap it, cage it?
The heart’s rhythm arrives -
Constant waves carrying
The rich soup of the soul.
Each wave, each beat, its own universe
Each one its own gift, its necessary
Step in Creation’s dance.
We, who are frozen in ideas
And answers
Crave change, but belief
Blocks Life’s insistent responses.

Has our terrible
Demand for certainty caused
This chaos, this burning planet?
Is our home dying to free herself from
Our Absolute Knowing?
Every day our only habitat baptizes us
In Fire, winds and floods.
Every moment our planet pleads and punishes.
Her heart breaks, whispers, “Listen. If you must be sure:
Be certain of Change.
Cherish Wind, Water, Air, Love all your living Companions. Here are
The only gods, the one
Absolute you need.”

- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

Rearmament

These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur
of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it
seem monstrous
To admire the tragic beauty they build.
It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and
kissing.
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future ... I should do foolishly. The beauty
of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.


- Robinson Jeffers

[Larry Robinson]

The Answer


Then what is the answer? - Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know the great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their
tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least
ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for
evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal peace or happiness. These dreams will not be
fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear the whole
remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his
history … for contemplation or in fact…
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the divine beauty of
the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in
despair when his days darken.


- Robinson Jeffers

[gardenmaniac]

hmm... I have been told that understanding is the Booby Prize ... no matter, I do love this poem!


The Booby Prize

My friend Jana tells me "knowing
Is the Booby Prize."
Once known the answer ossifies into Certainty.
Can we know Life
Without wanting
To trap it, cage it?
The heart’s rhythm arrives -
Constant waves carrying
The rich soup of the soul.
Each wave, each beat, its own universe
Each one its own gift, its necessary
Step in Creation’s dance.
We, who are frozen in ideas
And answers
Crave change, but belief
Blocks Life’s insistent responses.

Has our terrible
Demand for certainty caused
This chaos, this burning planet?
Is our home dying to free herself from
Our Absolute Knowing?
Every day our only habitat baptizes us
In Fire, winds and floods.
Every moment our planet pleads and punishes.
Her heart breaks, whispers, “Listen. If you must be sure:
Be certain of Change.
Cherish Wind, Water, Air, Love all your living Companions. Here are
The only gods, the one
Absolute you need.”

- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

The Fifth Glass

This afternoon, my ex-wife came to visit,
With her new wife - and we all
Set up a table on the back porch.

We were having wine and cheese
Purchased on our long trip,
A big loop locally - and we all, somehow,
Thought we were one wine glass short.

When we talked about it later,
We all agreed…And, yes, they had told me
To bring the glass out, and, yes, I did.
Like we were one glass short.

And, yet, there were only four of us.
In attentive silence, we examined
That fifth glass, the one that all of us
Had said was missing…

Then, we clinked our glasses, and we
Shared that wine amongst ourselves,
A good one, from a Calistoga winery.
And we all said…

Well, she’s not here, anyway…


- Jon Jackson

[Larry Robinson]

Planet Sunburn


It becomes a joke before we even understand it, relegated to a kingdom of cliché:
the whole global warming thing—— it’’s that moment speeding
down a mountain road when you realize
the brakes are gone, when you swim over and past
the shark net barrier into darkening water——
the other morning in southern Australia koalas staggered onto public highways
in 120 degree heat,
begging passing humans for water——
the air crackled with heat
even after a flood of crows
rode the sun to the rim of distance——
as though nature was just joking around,
all those species about to go
extinct or insane only theoretical,
nothing to dry the moisture from your fields, drain the animals from forests
and fish from the sea——
and you, every once
in a while, could just
write a check
or watch a special on PBS, making everything all right.


- Michael Shorb

[Larry Robinson]

what to do with your goat in a drowning world


hear the helicopters come over the roof
water's up to my attic windows
and I'm stuck here with my goat
I can see my neighbor in the hole on his roof
he's got two dachsies and a tomcat
just across the rushing river is his sister
she's cradling her baby and a rooster
circling helicopters circling helicopters
will take me but not my goat
will lift me up from muck and flood
but they won't take my neighbor's dogs or cat
or his sister's baby's rooster
helicopters overhead nation to the rescue
take the people damn their friends
I'm not going without my goat
he's not going without his pets
baby won't leave without her rooster
lord oh lord why don't we have an ark
that's the helicopters leaving
that's the nation to the rescue
leaving us here in the dark


- Andrei Codrescu

[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]

Dear friends,
As you may know, over 70 gray whales have washed up dead on the Pacific shores this year, 13 of them in the San Francisco Bay Area. Most have died of starvation, some by collision with ships.
My heart is breaking as we witness what may be the beginning of the end of this magnificent species that has shared this planet with us for as long as we have been human. Our world will be a poorer place without them.
My friends Doug von Koss, Francis and Judith Weller, Elizabeth Herron and I are planning a memorial service and grief ritual for the whales July 20 at a beach in Sonoma County. We don’t know the time or specific location yet, but will let you know soon. If you are touched as we are by this tragedy we invite you to join us.
In solidarity with all beings,
Larry









Dying Thoughts Of A Beached Whale


I lie resting half into the sand
And she pulses against me
As softly as the edge of the sea
Envelopes the edge of the land;


She pushes but never overmounts
My naked flank like a rock
Or the sunken support of a dock
Stuck just where the tide runs out


And the blank dark ceiling above
Shows vision and memory
That astrology and astronomy
Reveal, but these are alive with love.


- Christopher Woodall

[Larry Robinson]

Dia de Amor: Magdalena Bay



Red streaked dawn across sun spattered waves
wind in our faces,
Panga boats bounce ahead toward deeper water.

They say the blow
of the gray whale
looks like a heart,
a spray of love so delicate
it bursts into flares of passion
nurturing
a steadily burning warmth.

We approach them slowly,
these gray whales,
engaging in the heaving dance
on the sea
of boat and beings.

Barnacled down their backs
rising hugely,
white filigree on shining thick black skin,
rolling in blue water,
grace in their mountainous girth.

Heads raising from the bay
glancing into our eyes,
penetrating to our very core.

Swimming beneath the boat,
nudging the keel playfully,
rising to blow with abandon.

Closing between us
they invite our hand to skin
for an eternal moment,
drowning in the swell of joined connection,
knowing our deeper selves
seen and blessed.

Two diverse beings
neither suffocating the other
into an indistinguishable confluent cocoon,
nor drawing separately far apart,
the gossamer line between
linking hearts
stretches and silently kisses.

Rumi says:
wash our eyes with awe.

Tears of thanks,
I am a native of this Earth's oceans
once again.

- Alan Cohen

[Larry Robinson]

Why Tara Turns Green

Some parts of your body are alive,https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2019-06-13_12-11-59.png
and some are numbed by shame.
The real purpose of meditation
is to wake up God
in your supernova toes,
arouse your bones’ erotic photons,
let each neutrino ring
like a mindfulness bell
in your rib cage,
make every proton rhythmic
with its star,
inspire a leukocyte to waltz
with a red dwarf.
This is how ancestors dance
with angels in your blood.
Have you received a morning glory’s
promiscuous smile,
a kiss from the dust on your sole?
O yogini, O devoted monk,
I know you’ve been trying to sing
without lips, “I am not this body!”
But Adam was a breath of mud.
His first wife, Lilith, liked to ride
on top, and Jesus died
on the Tree of Life shouting,
“I won’t leave anything behind!”
He claimed each sparkle
of your semen and each tear
you mingle with marrow and loam.
The half-chewed morsel
of bagel in your mouth
is the kingdom of his perfect joy.
Don’t you know he has a secret name
that means, “Miracle of Worms”?
The Bodhi Tree is the Body Tree.
That’s why Tara turns green
when her fingers stroke the ground.
It’s why we share food,
pray for sacred land and water,
laugh when we see babies,
whirl and spin like wizened leaves
at sunset when we die.



- Alfred K. LaMotte

[Larry Robinson]

Father

Father, there is a hole in my back
Where your hand did not rest,
Where the skin did not sense your presence
Where the bone did not grow
to meet your touch
Hence I stand,
shoulders slumped
protected heart
Unsure in the world



Father, our Father, now I see, there’s a hole in your back too.

- Rebecca Evert

[Larry Robinson]

Yesterday


My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand

he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know

even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes

he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father

he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me

oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father's hand the last time
he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me

oh yes I say

but if you are busy he said
I don't want you to feel that you
have to
just because I'm here

I say nothing

he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don't want to keep you

I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know

though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do


- W. S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

Just Now I Heard My Father Singing

Just now I heard my father singing
an old, old song he used to sing
when his hands were busy
with something, as mine were until
I heart that voice: he has been dead
for eight years!

Just now I heard my father’s laughter.
That, too, came from my mouth.

- Alden Nowlan

[Larry Robinson]

the gift


you were sitting there
not rocking, in that chair
by the window
i wanted to say goodbye
it was time to go
my womanhood just
beginning to lift off
smoke curling from
the cigarette dangling
between your bent fingers
i wanted to say goodbye
to that heavy thing
you carried on your chest
the air stifled, close
it was time to go
i slowly found your side
leaning in to kiss
your cheek, leaning
into the barbed wire
and left the gift
of my lips between
your cheekbone
and your clenched jaw
“i will see you in a
few weeks” i said
and waited for you
to lift your face
your eyes met mine
and the words
“kiss of death”
fell from your mouth
they sounded soft
almost tender
we were frozen
in time, the light
slanting in long strips
thru venetian blinds
it was just the two of us
a strip of dark, a line
of light, a thin wire
between us
the tightrope on
which i walked
to the door
it was time to go


- Fran Carbonaro

[Larry Robinson]

The End of the Line

They never had much realitynor do I remember believing
in them. I assumed they were
meant for other people and I
liked the French twist that called
them cliches. This stock of ragged
sayings have often to do with ageing
and we rummage through them like
old clothes, assuming that whether large
or small they will eventually fit. Does a
creaky elevator take the old dog down to
the floor where he can't learn new tricks?
Is youth really wasted on the young or
does energy restlessly want to experience
a later stage? Who says that all things
come to an end? Anyone who's been on
a crowded train knows that the rails that
carry our bodies past nameless stations
go on and on forever. At life's end they say
there's a bucket to kick, a farm to buy and
a maker you must meet.
We listen all our lives to this babble that
doesn't care for ambiguity except for the one
where death waits until some obscure fat lady
sings. Idiotic idioms set up the language props
for unremarkable dramas with the same ending,
hammering the nails in, putting imagination on
hold. My ears tune into rhythm of the train riding
rails that speak of continuous journey. I believe
in an interminable soul but it makes no difference
to others. Mortality may eavesdrop on my sense
of time and sooner or later somebody will nudge
me insisting that the next stop is where I must get
off. Being foolish and accommodating, I will grab my
bags and step down on a vacant platform with no
village or hotel in sight.


- Rich Meyers

[Larry Robinson]

I dreamed that

A large whale, a leviathan, writhed in the ocean
close to the land where I stood, digging downward
Into the deep waters.

In darkness, I watched with trepidation, witnessing
The enormity of this extraordinary act unfolding
Before my eyes, the force so great, it created a hole

In the ocean that did not, and would not, fill. The
Empty space deepened, seemingly unending, such
That the earth upon which I stood might soon

Break off into the blackened deep from its force.
I sensed and still sense, feared and still fear that this
cosmic whale with the gaping mouth of a crocodile

was and is devouring the great sea itself, showing us
the hole In the reality we have wrought, where we
are headed, and where the very land upon which we

Stand will be shaken by a forbidding hand that will
thrust us into the perilous pit of our own foolhardy
undoing.

- Bruce Silverman

[Larry Robinson]

Perhaps The World Ends Here


The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat
to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it
has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at
the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to
be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around
our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down
selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the
table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in
the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents
for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering
and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying,
eating of the last sweet bite.


- Joy Harjo
(Joy Harjo is America’s new Poet Laureate)

47007

See more about Joy here (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/joy-harjo)

[Larry Robinson]

Juneteenth


Know the enemy is in charge
and the exposer in chief is at large
and the presider of cruel justice
is orange haired Madame DJ DeFarge

So good to give up polarity
and see the victims of the systems
are you and me in history
wherever you happen to be

Celebrate the exposé
and make note of the failings
cast on both sides of the line
and know that party means faction
in this country of yours and mine

and counter to our law
we are making war by the score
on our children's credit card
creating victims in all directions
to which they shall pay evermore.

In sum
of parties, we need one
not of branding and division
scoring who lost, who won
but of e pluribus unum

- David Bean

[Larry Robinson]

Once the World Was Perfect Once the world was perfect, and we were happy in that world.Then we took it for granted.Discontent began a small rumble in the earthly mind.Then Doubt pushed through with its spiked head.And once Doubt ruptured the web,All manner of demon thoughtsJumped through—We destroyed the world we had been givenFor inspiration, for life—Each stone of jealousy, each stoneOf fear, greed, envy, and hatred, put out the light.No one was without a stone in his or her hand.There we were,Right back where we had started.We were bumping into each otherIn the dark.And now we had no place to live, since we didn’t knowHow to live with each other.Then one of the stumbling ones took pity on anotherAnd shared a blanket.A spark of kindness made a light.The light made an opening in the darkness.Everyone worked together to make a ladder.A Wind Clan person climbed out first into the next world,And then the other clans, the children of those clans, their children,And their children, all the way through time—To now, into this morning light to you. - Joy Harjo