Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Hospital Chaplain


In the other room,
that only masked nurses and doctors can enter,
he hears with the ears of his heart the last breaths of the dying.
The family, in the emptiness of the waiting room, clings to him even though they may not touch.


How do you comfort- in another room, or from six feet away?


Only a presence that is prayer
can fill that distance with the breath of love
that is the one breath,
shared breath,
first and last and living and dying and waiting
and right now.


May the dying one sense the presence of his loved ones filling that almost empty room.
And may they accompany
with attention and awe and broken-open hearts
the work of letting go.


May you be there,
helpless,
and so helpful,
to patients and families and staff and all -
an emptied instrument through which
ruach breath of Spirit blows unimpeded
a vessel of that ununderstandable peace.


- Ruah Bull

[american dream]

Beautiful, wonderful piece; a reminder of what truly matters - Thank you for sharing! (Also the one by Sherman Alexie; I love his books but didn't know that poem.

[Larry Robinson]

In a time of distance




The unexpected always happens in the way


The unexpected has always occurred:


While we are doing something else,


While we are thinking of altogether


Different things – matters that events


Then show to be every bit as unimportant


As our human concerns so often are;


And then, with the unexpected upon us,


We look at one another with a sort of surprise;


How could things possibly turn out this way


When we are so competent, so pleased


With the elaborate systems we’ve created –


Networks and satellites, intelligent machines,


Pills for every eventuality – except this one?


And so we turn again to face one another


And discover those things


We had almost forgotten,


But that, mercifully, are still there:


Love and friendship, not just for those


To whom we are closest, but also for those


Whom we do not know and of whom


Perhaps we have in the past been frightened;


The words brother and sister, powerful still,


Are brought out, dusted down,


Found to be still capable of expressing


What we feel for others, that precise concern;


Joined together in adversity


We discover things we had put aside:


Old board games with obscure rules,


Books we had been meaning to read,


Letters we had intended to write,


Things we had thought we might say


But for which we never found the time;


And from these discoveries of self, of time,


There comes a new realisation


That we have been in too much of hurry,


That we have misused our fragile world,


That we have forgotten the claims of others


Who have been left behind;


We find that out in our seclusion,


In our silence; we commit ourselves afresh,


We look for a few bars of song


That we used to sing together,


A long time ago; we give what we can,


We wait, knowing that when this is over


A lot of us – not all perhaps – but most,


Will be slightly different people,


And our world, though diminished,


Will be much bigger, its beauty revealed afresh.


- Alexander McCall Smith

[Larry Robinson]

Dust in the Wind
Recalled During Times of Covid 19


(with gratitude to Ken Burns)




To Amarillo came the initial
two-mile-high wave of dust
choking first the roosters
followed by the hens,
cows, swine, and humans.
Then it buried Oklahoma,


Its no-man’s-land above Texas’
panhandle suffocating shriveling.
Where were the rain clouds in ’32?
nothing whatsoever grew
“what didn’t grow we tried harder
to grow, no crop new, just more.”


(collapsing demand for so much
too-abundant over-fertile crop
blonde and auburn very sexy)


First, radios electric haywired,
you couldn’t shake hands at all
just before the dusters came
and all the little kids were freed
from school same as in the North
during the big snow storms up there.


Here on the plains just dust after
the buffalo grass was plowed under,
the water dried up, and the rain
stopped coming where there’d been
boom times of high golden wheat,
great big homes with telephones!



(collapsing demand for so much
too-abundant over-fertile crop
blonde and auburn very sexy)


Wheat went down to seventeen cent,
and “we seen droughts before, and
things’ll get better next year,” and
Roosevelt preached loudly “no fear”
while this ram of dust charged and
charged again and more than once again.


You were breathing in the black
blizzards, but, in between storms,
it couldn’t be more blue and beautiful,
the irony surrounding destructive force,
for the land had been swept clean of
its topsoil and an explosion of jackrabbits


(blonde and auburn very sexy)


Jackrabbits everywhere like lost soil moving,
and the screaming of rabbit, the jackrabbits
being clubbed by men, women and kids screaming.
Rabbits were replaced by ton on ton
upon ton of strangling black dust,
a third of the land was blowing.


Most of the starving cattle shot,
humans dispossessed and foreclosed.
Suicides landed like buzzards on families
until the Black Blizzard of 1934
rendered suicide mostly irrelevant.
Black so black “black’s” very essence.


Even fearless FDR feared
a new man-made sahara
no longer the good earth
this desert produced nomads
seekers after light and fruit.


(collapsed demand for so much
too-abundant over-fertile crop
blonde and auburn very sexy)



Black Sunday 1935 portended
further years of drought and of
depression, depression and
drought little doubt they would remain
as with the rain which never left
the clouds, they vowed not to leave
their homes, such as they were, only
movement here being four million
acres shifting, sliding, blowing.
Little girls in flour sack without
a piece of bread, daddy’s too proud
to take charity or seek a loan.


California no dust and the sun
no black wind or dust pneumonia.
3 out of 4 stoically remain behind
leave others to the migration,
defeat and shame carrying dust
by the lungful into Needles,
San Berdoo, Oakland, Merced,
picking oranges, prunes, grapes
when they could and all the while
hacking up remnants of the plains.


I’d thought they all had left,
that Oklahoma was no more,
Arkansas a wasteland,
the Panhandle holding nothing,
that California held all surviving.
But Roosevelt made Democrats of
the plains while the dispossessed
in California became the Okies, and
“Okie go back, we don’t want you!”
the sign of those California times.


Back home, 1937 in the Dust Bowl,
the worst followed a snow storm,
dust increasing four days straight,
tidal waves of dust devouring towns.
What is worse, the dirt or the water?



Then government paid farmers
not to grow their crops,
erosion cut in half, but
the rains came and so did
the grasshoppers like a moving earth.
more rain and the snow,
better farming, less erosion,
and sunflowers lit the land again.
and the wheat outgrew the children,
what rain! what good rain!
what good nourishing rain!
what a wonderful wheat crop!


(blonde and auburn very sexy)


The speculators returned;
they planted malignant seeds
for later dust storms carrying
once again in ‘51 the lesson,
“Listen to the land and not to us!”


- Ed Coletti

[Larry Robinson]

Aubade for the the Quiet House

I awaken to a still-dark room
No sound to acknowledge a new day

The silent saluki across my feet
is, like me, not moving but awake
His eyes as always awaiting my move

Was it like this yesterday and the day
before? was it dark and silent?

Will it be like this tomorrow
or will we be able to move freely
call out an aubade to the morning

Open to what once was as natural
as the sun falling across your face
As natural as another day of living

- fran claggett-holland

[Larry Robinson]

The Rhythm of Each


I think each comfort we manage-
each holding in the night, each opening
of a wound, each closing of a wound, each
pulling of a splinter or razored word, each
fever sponged, each dear thing given
to someone in greater need-each
passes on the kindness we've known.


For the human sea is made of waves
that mount and merge till the way a
nurse rocks a child is the way that child
all grown rocks the wounded, and how
the wounded, allowed to go on, rock
strangers who in their pain
don't seem so strange.


Eventually, the rhythm of kindness
is how we pray and suffer by turns,
and if someone were to watch us
from inside the lake of time, they
wouldn't be able to tell if we are
dying or being born.


- Mark Nepo

[Larry Robinson]

In The Time Of The Virus


In the fullness of time you said
by which I remembered
all life is vibration, a sine wave
an ebb and flow
Even a virus has rhythm
gathering and tightening, loosening
and letting go


On the valley oaks the nubs of leaves
are a promise of shade
In the orchards
blossoms promise apples


and in the fullness of time
you will bend to see
your granddaughter’s first smile
the gap where your grandson lost
his first tooth


In the fullness of time
we will greet and hold each other
close as the season’s light
and shadows close
as the fingers of my hand
raised now to wave to you


- Elizabeth C. Herron

[Larry Robinson]

Our Chrysalis Moment




This is our chrysalis moment
Where the transformation begins.


Every caterpillar must do it eventually;
Or die,
Never to sprout their colorful wings in the air
And fly.


So like the caterpillar,
We may as well surrender.
Cocooning in our homes
Our world turned upside down.


Inside, we can no longer spread
our vicious disease of consumption
No longer run mindlessly toward our destruction.
Inside there is stillness
Inside, there is rest.


Outside, the air is clearing,
The rains are falling.
You can feel the peace,
Settling on the land at last.


And Yes, there is death.
For there’s always a dissolution.
Old systems falling away,
That were already pretty slimy.


It may be frightening
All the uncertainty and loss.
But even in the darkness
Imaginal cells are awakening
Weaving a new web .


Recognizing that this is finally
Our time.
Our time to be heard
Our time to make new sense
Our time to do things differently


And when at last the dream awakens
To its nascent beginnings,
The chrysalis melts away.


A caterpillar no longer,
We spread our tender wings
And fly.


- Anodea Judith

[Larry Robinson]

No Man Is An Island


No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.


If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were.


Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

- John Donne

[Larry Robinson]

Passover

Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses . . .
and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.
- Exodus 12: 7 & 13

They thought they were safe
that spring night; when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?
Forty years in the desert
without a home, without a bed,
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.

Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the desert sky.

- Lynn Ungar

[Larry Robinson]

Passover


Tell me: how is this night different
From all other nights?
How, tell me, is this Passover
Different from other Passovers?
Light the lamp, open the door wide
So the pilgrim can come in,
Gentile or Jew;
Under the rags perhaps the prophet is concealed.
Let him enter and sit down with us;
Let him listen, drink, sing and celebrate Passover;
Let him consume the bread of affliction,
The Paschal Lamb, sweet mortar and bitter herbs.
This is the night of differences
In which you lean your elbow on the table,
Since the forbidden becomes prescribed,
Evil is translated into good.



<tbody>
We will spend the night recounting
Far-off events full of wonder,
And because of all the wine
The mountains will skip like rams.
Tonight they exchange questions:
The wise, the godless, the simple-minded and the child.
And time reverses its course,
Today flowing back into yesterday,
Like a river enclosed at its mouth.
Each of us has been a slave in Egypt,
Soaked straw and clay with sweat,
And crossed the sea dry-footed.
You too, stranger.
This year in fear and shame,
Next year in virtue and in justice.




</tbody>
- Primo Levi

[Larry Robinson]

Paschal


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


- Robert Pinsky

[Larry Robinson]

Easter Morning In Wales

A garden inside me, unknown, secret,
Neglected for years,
The layers of its soil deep and thick.
Trees in the corners with branching arms
And the tangled briars like broken nets.

Sunrise through the misted orchard,
Morning sun turns silver on the pointed twigs.
I have woken from the sleep of ages and I am not sure
If I am really seeing, or dreaming,
Or simply astonished
Walking toward sunrise
To have stumbled into the garden
Where the stone was rolled from the tomb of longing.

- David Whyte

[Larry Robinson]

Passover Remembered


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pass on the whole story.

Do not go back.

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

- Alla Renee Bozarth

[Larry Robinson]

He Is Risen
They tell that a man
so loving & just
that many take him
for benevolent god
was killed because his teaching
so loving & just threatened
the very foundations of empire
& that against all law of life
three days later resurrected,
not unheard of in myth
but wondrous still.
His teaching still threatens empires
& many who dare follow it
are persecuted & killed,
& his resurrection is nothing
less than revolution.
- Rafael Jesús Gonzáles
Ha resucitado

Cuentan que un hombre
tan amoroso y justo
que muchos lo toman
por benévolo dios
fue muerto porque su enseñanza
tan amorosa y justa amenazaba
los meros cimientos del imperio
y que contra toda ley de la vida
tres días después resucitó,
cosa no inaudita en el mito
pero asombrosa aun.Su enseñanza aun amenaza imperios
y muchos que atreven seguirla
son perseguidos y muertos
y la resurrección de él es nada
menos que revolución.
- Rafael Jesús González

[Larry Robinson]

Antidotes To Fear Of Death


Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars


Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.


Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:


No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.


And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:


To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.

- Rebecca Elson

[Larry Robinson]

threshing floor


the veil is thin today, branches reach
for you, bursting with spring, caressing
your grief, even as we are dying,
blossoms with tongues whisper
it's going to be alright, though
we leave you in confusion.
how can this be? we, no longer
struggling for the next breath
now suspended on a sacred breeze.


listen to plants, to birds' insistent calls
feel your earth spin and the sky open
to a great pause, the stillness within a shift.
yes, nothing will ever be the same
you may have one day or many
no matter: inhale, exhale, let go
and wander between what used to be
necessities, no need to outshine
yourself anymore.


trust the cycle intensifying now.
you are infected and waking up,
you are churning on a threshing floor
of loss as new seeds ricochet, burrow,
sprout, grow up and out of the
teeming masses, the mulch of it all.
there's no denying the unknown
or so much life, climbing like a
hungry vine out of your waiting.


- fran carbonaro

[Larry Robinson]

If I Could

If only for a moment
I would silence the world’s motors
and the roar of the airplane would not be so much as a hum
and the thunder of the locomotive would become less than a moan

No blaring horn
no screeching brakes
no screaming police sirens would come from the avenue

The din of industry would cease
and the factory would fall into a coma
the miracles of the dawn and the dusk
would reclaim their sacred stillness

Children would play a game of statues
the wino realizing the gift of his existence would leave his bottle corked

The right would swing to the left, and the left would not know where to turn
Politician would be left without plots to hatch
and the devil would run out of tricks

Shouts would turn to whispers
whispers to prayers
and prayers to meditation
chicks, in their nests, would sleep

And in every canton and hamlet
in every town and city
one would only hear the rhythmic breathing

of deep slumber and the throbbing of their own heart
and the only sounds interrupting this immense meditation
would be the wisps of butterfly wings
and a prayerful chant
quietly echoing throughout the land

“Love.” “Love.” “Love.”

- Armando Garcia-Davila

[Larry Robinson]

Assisted Loving


She had accommodated to these corridors
In this home that was not her home
The facts she faced even without the music
Told her that the choices were slim


They told her this was her home now
Even her church and her world
Between the hymns and the hearse
There was still life, they told her


She knocked on his door, number 221
Romance astir on what's left of her mind
An eternity later he opened the door
Smile greets smile, a human animal reflex


"You remind me of my wife," he said to his wife
She blinked twice, her heart fanned itself
"Get your typed paper from the night table,"
He blinked, "Are you on it - is that why?"


"I am Ruth, your Ruth, nothing but Ruth."
On a sheet of paper typed by his helpful son
He found her name at the top properly identified
Below her all his other ID'd family and friends


Looking at her name kindled spark upon spark
Memories in used clothing popped in and out
He sat down on his bed and opened his arms
As tens of thousands of times before, she moved in


Together they completed the hug of a lifetime
The kiss was still familiar, still warm, still home
Another eternity came and went through the walls
She had accommodated to these corridors


- Arnie Reisman

[Larry Robinson]

A Home

Where I live
the smoke will arrive
again, half million
heartbeats skip in unison
rising into a warm autumn wind
we will keep watch
knowing well what we can
and cannot do to help
each other extinguish the flames
of fear

Where I live
the rivers will rise
again, cresting beyond empty
store fronts caving in with log jams
leftover debris from last
century’s clear cutting until we resettle nearby, without possessions
but grateful

Where I live
people will gather
again, making sacred circles
of hand selected stones
a funeral for the Grey Whales
like prayers, flower blossoms are scattered over the beautiful
swelling tides of grief

Where I live
beaches were outlawed
but not churches
so that we walked to the bluffs
standing silent in eucalyptus and pine once more feeling the grace and beauty of the only struggle there has
ever been;

To know what is good and right
and choosing to live
in that place.

- Kristy Hellum

[Larry Robinson]

spring: bulldozer and white birds


the 1959 Ford bulldozer
last pushed ants' nests, tree-stumps
and a bag of old shoes
then came to rest,
abandoned for five decades


but today seven egrets soared
in at seven angles to alight
on its engine cover and wait --
three spreading wings to catch
sunheat, three debating wind-drift,
one taking notes.


At 4:15 they arose
and dispersed over a meadow green with
spring buds -- four marveling at dragonflies,
two puzzled by squirrels,
one memorizing hillscapes


then careened across
a church steeple to land
near a pond
for a symposium
on breeding and tadpoles.


At dusk they rose
to the roofpeak of an abandoned house
-- three content that
at dawn sun's peek-a-boo rise will
come as always, three unmindful
of the prospect, and one asleep
on one leg
dreaming of mice.


- David Beckman

[Larry Robinson]

Coronavirus in Springtime


Everywhere the signs: tiny plum blossoms blushing
on the sidewalk, clang of crimson tulips, lilac smelling
of your daughter’s skin after a bath. The sky
thick cotton candy from an earlier rain, grass
chartreuse overnight from winter’s bone. In the same
song, the invisible one, the other melody line
louder than beginnings: humans cooped
up in apartments, no money, fear devouring
breath, emptiness and loss in every corner of the planet.


I want to go back to a simpler time, when fires
and floods caused destruction you could see:
a scorched hillside park, metallic smoke in your mouth,
rising creek waters up to the door. Unseen, when so little
has changed to the eye, except everything
downside up, is the push below,
lifting us like the tiny seed to be
born in every minute, wild like the deer
again and again and again.


- Claire Drucker

[Larry Robinson]

Love This Miraculous World


Our understandable wish
to preserve the planet
must somehow be
reduced
to the scale of our
competence.
Love is never abstract.
It does not adhere
to the universe
or the planet
or the nation
or the institution
or the profession,
but to the singular
sparrows of the street,
the lilies of the field,
“the least of these
my brethren.”
Love this
miraculous world
that we did not make,
that is a gift to us.


- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Everything Is Going to Be All Right

How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.

- Derek Mahon

[Larry Robinson]

Oceans


I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.


And nothing
happens!
Nothing . . . Silence . . . Waves . . .


- Nothing happens?
Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?


- Juan Ramon Jimenez

[REALnothings]

WOW!
:heart::waccosun:

[Larry Robinson]

Mornings In Confinement

Here’s what I want to write:
That confinement has made me
A better person, been a gift
Allowed for consideration,
Commitment to quiet
Contemplation and revelation

Here’s the truth:
Every morning I open
My eyes, listen to my heart
And hear either the tiger
Pacing and plotting
Escape. Or the housecat
Drawn to dream, to sleep
This solitary time away.

I open my eyes to sun
Or dense, deep clouds,
A remembrance of wonder.
I consider sleep and awakening
As sisters fatigued with fighting,

Knowing, like siblings,
That one day, they will separate
Not knowing that one day,
They will mourn their separation,
Recognize that, all along,
Each carried a secret
Key to the heart of the other.

- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet




Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give it back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.

Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the guardians who have known you before time, who will be there after time. They sit before the fire that has been there without time.

Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people who accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought down upon them.

Don’t worry.

The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.

Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.

- Joy Harjo

[Larry Robinson]

On Healing


I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self
and wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance,
long, difficult repentance, realisation of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

- D. H Lawrence

[Larry Robinson]

Letter to My Great, Great Grandchild


after Matthew Olzmann


Oh button, don’t go thinking we loved pianos
more than elephants, air conditioning more than air.
We loved honey, just loved it, and went into stores
to smell the sweet perfume of unworn leather shoes.


Did you know, on the coast of Africa, the Sea Rose
and Carpenter Bee used to depend on each other?


The petals only opened for the Middle C their wings
beat, so in the end, we protested with tuning forks.


You must think we hated the stars, the empty ladles,
because they conjured thirst. We didn’t. We thanked


them and called them lucky, we even bought the rights
to name them for our sweethearts. Believe it or not,


most people kept plants like pets and hired kids
like you to water them, whenever they went away.


And ice! Can you imagine? We put it in our coffee
and dumped it out at traffic lights, when it plugged up


our drinking straws. I had a dog once, a real dog,
who ate venison and golden yams from a plastic dish.


He was stubborn, but I taught him to dance and play
dead with a bucket full of chicken livers. And we danced


too, you know, at weddings and wakes, in basements
and churches, even when the war was on. Our cars


we mostly named for animals, and sometimes we drove
just to drive, to clear our heads of everything but wind.


- J.P. Grasser

[Larry Robinson]

Singularity


(after Stephen Hawking)


Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?


so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money —


nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone


pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.


For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you. Remember?


There was no Nature. No
them. No tests


to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf or if


the coral reef feels pain. Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;


would that we could wake up to what we were
— when we were ocean and before that


to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not


at all — nothing


before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.


Can molecules recall it?
what once was? before anything happened?


No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with


is is is is is


All everything home


- Marie Howe

[Larry Robinson]

On the Fifth Day




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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


They spoke, the fifth day,
of silence.


- Jane Hirshfield

[Larry Robinson]

The Season of Oxymorons


In the midst of the pandemic lockdown
the beautiful spring day sings through the leaves.


Grateful to taste the cream in the milk,
I muster the will to let go.


Socially distant. Together apart.
The Bunny who lays eggs and the Angel of death.


Mask of goodwill. Virgin forest tp.
Wasp nest in my head, picking up the phone.


I dig into the catacombs of my study,
read fictions about longevity.


Wet leaves and dark clouds whisper, summer.
The virus will rest this summer? Will I?


The bees keep going back to sleep.
I put on my armor to grocery shop.


I haven’t seen the sky this blue in years.
Is there a vaccine for lack of compassion?


Everyday uncertainty’s fresh. In a land
of too much, it’s hard to gauge what’s enough.


The poppies blink, the old aunties.
People discover birdsong and Crow.


Howling with neighbors I haven’t met yet, and dogs—
the only thing that keeps me sane.


- Gwynn O’Gara

[Larry Robinson]

Quarantine


In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking — they were both walking — north.


She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.


In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.


Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:


Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.


- Eavan Boland
( september 24, 1944 - April 29, 2020)

[Larry Robinson]

Quarantine, 1918


There were towns
that knew about the flu before
it arrived; they had time to imagine the germs
on a stranger’s skirts, to see how death
could be sealed in an envelope,
how a fever could bloom in the evening,
and take a life overnight.
A few villages, deep in the mountains,
posted guards on their roads,
and no one was allowed to come or go,
not even a grandmother carrying a cake;
no mail was accepted and all the words
and packages families sent
to one another went unopened,
unanswered. Trains were told
not to stop, so they glowed for a moment
before swaying
towards some other place. The food
at the corner store never came
from out of town and no one went
to see a distant auntie
or state fair. For awhile, the outside world
existed in imagination, in memory,
in books or suitcases, deep in closets.
There was nothing but the town itself,
hiding from what was possible,
and the children cutting dolls
from paper, their scissors sharp.


- Faith Shearin

[Larry Robinson]

Scripture With Your Tea

I tell you, if you read scripture with your tea, as do I every morning
then you are I
in that the rose inside us knows the rose we see and scent
is the selfsame rose all along.

Likewise, if your God is the God Of Vengeance what a fool I’d be to deny mine is not the same.

But, oh, I hope you don’t kill me because of your prayers.
Plagues make room for everyone so we don’t need to shoulder one another aside.

But, even in a crowd, we practiced natural decorum, as a baby’s wail is understood as natural in almost any circumstance.

We need patience now more than ever
and the volcano of this world practices it
like the good instruction, the rose of instruction, it is.

The gamble of the stock market can wait, for the fatal gamble to wander off.

Each of us has eyes we do not see now.
And in the meantime and for a while, our heads shrouded in quarantine, imagination is the book
we read about one another.

Our seclusion is not a bad thing, but a retreat in a cave from whose door imagination rolls the
boulder every living moment to a dawn that denies us the coming day of the-same-old-thing.

Bruce grows still now.
He knows as know you, and all of us,
that each of us can do the rest,
right the rest,
know the rest.

Life gave us that.



- Bruce Moody

[Larry Robinson]

Come as You Are

Come to the party;
wear your blanched jeans
sun-seared to silk
an arranged marriage of rock and knee.

Bring your piano hands
burnished with soil,
your compost-painted fingernails
cupping a mug to keep you warm.

May truth roll from your tongue,
your breath bear pale green words
stained with sour grass
your chin a looking glass for buttercups.

Bring your perfumed breath
essence of onion and honest sweat
simmered in the field of communal toil
back bent like the winter birch.

Don't forget your coal-daubed feet
fresh from the ashes
stories secreted
in the knotholes of your toes.

Bring your hair, dandelion-twined
spider webs that ride your cuffs
sow bug and dung beetle
dreaming in the pocket of your grandma's apron.

Pack your wind-chiseled heart
with its needlepoint of scars.
Don't clean up
come as you are.

- Sande Anfang

[Larry Robinson]

Cinco de Mayo


Cinco de Mayo celebrates a burning people,

those whose land is starved of blood,

civilizations which are no longer

holders of the night. We reconquer with our feet,

with our tongues, that dangerous language,

saying more of this world than the volumes

of textured and controlled words on a page.

We are the gentle rage; our hands hold

the stream of the earth, the flowers

of dead cities, the green of butterfly wings.

Cinco de Mayo is about the barefoot, the untooled,

the warriors of want who took on the greatest army

Europe ever mustered—and won.

I once saw a Mexican man stretched across

an upturned sidewalk

near Chicago's 18th and Bishop one fifth of May day.

He brought up a near-empty bottle

to the withering sky and yelled out a grito

with the words: ¡Que viva Cinco de Mayo!

And I knew then what it meant—

what it meant for barefoot Zapoteca indigenas

in the Battle of Puebla and what it meant for me

there on 18th Street (https://www.waccobb.net/forums/x-apple-data-detectors://1) among los ancianos,

the moon-faced children and futureless youth

dodging the gunfire and careening battered cars,

and it brought me to that war

that never ends, the war Cinco de Mayo

was a battle of, that I keep fighting,

that we keep bleeding for, that war

against a servitude that a compa

on 18th Street (https://www.waccobb.net/forums/x-apple-data-detectors://2) knew all about

as he crawled inside a bottle of the meanest

Mexican spirits.


- Luis Rodriguez

[Larry Robinson]

Bound to Words


Even in isolation
I am bound to words
already written
already spoken
not negating but
subtly changing the
atmosphere we live
and breathe in

And do we live and breathe
the purity of air, the
breeze and blossoming trees
that signal spring came
a month ago and we didn’t
notice because we were practicing
social distancing, hoping one day
to get it right

They ask, are you lonely
and I say no, I am not lonely
but I miss the fulness of the life
we lived for so many years
I miss it as if you were still here
when I went on living
just as if you would be here
in this house when I got home

How could I be lonely when my
heart is filled with memory
and promise when those I love
who never met you but know
your voice when I read my poems
to them and I can’t explain
how it is to have you with me
here inside these words of isolation


- fran claggett-holland

[Larry Robinson]

For The Death Of 100 Whales


In April, 1954, TIME magazine described seventy-nine bored American G.I.s stationed at a NATO base in Iceland murdering a pod of one hundred killer whales. In a single morning the soldiers, armed with rifles, machine guns, and boats, rounded up and then shot the whales to death.



Hung midsea
Like a boat mid-air
The liners boiled their pastures:
The liners of flesh,
The Arctic steamers
Brains the size of a teacup
Mouths the size of a door


The sleek wolves
Mowers and reapers of sea kine.
THE GIANT TADPOLES
(Meat their algae)
Lept
Like sheep or children.
Shot from the sea's bore.


Turned and twisted
(Goya!!)
Flung blood and sperm.
Incense.
Gnashed at their tails and brothers
Cursed Christ of mammals,
Snapped at the sun,
Ran for the Sea's floor.


Goya! Goya!
Oh Lawrence
No angels dance those bridges.
OH GUN! OH BOW!
There are no churches in the waves,
No holiness,
No passages or crossings
From the beasts' wet shore.


Michael McClure
(Oct. 20, 1932 - May 4, 2020)

[Larry Robinson]

The Raincoat




When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled to take me
to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
and move more in a body unclouded
by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
songs to her the whole forty-five minute
drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
five minutes back from physical therapy.
She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. Today,
at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
another spine appointment, singing along
to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.


- Ada Limón

[Larry Robinson]

Dear Mama




when did we become friends?
it happened so gradual i didn't notice
maybe i had to get my run out first
take a big bite of the honky world and choke on it
maybe that's what has to happen with some uppity youngsters
if it happens at all


and now
the thought stark and irrevocable
of being here without you
shakes me


beyond love, fear, regret or anger
into that realm children go
who want to care for/protect their parents
as if they could
and sometimes the lucky ones do


into the realm of making every moment
important
laughing as though laughter wards off death
each word given
received like spanish eight


treasure to bury within
against that shadow day
when it will be the only coin i possess
with which to buy peace of mind


- Wanda Coleman

[Larry Robinson]

Cave Painting At Font du Gaume


Of course, even his bones
are now dust,
his flowing mane
taken by the wind,
those sturdy hooves
and solid flesh consumed
and reborn in endless forms.


Even so, through two hundred centuries
of darkness and lamplight
he is still running free
across that vast savannah of time.


And the hand that captured,
in a few spare lines
on the limestone wall,
that wild grace,
sending it down through the years -
hand of my ancestor,
hand of our ancestor -
has long since returned
to the formless.


A day will come,
certainly,
when all this
will be gone:
you and I,
the painting,
even the wall,
carved by ages of
drip and flow,
through uplifted memories
of countless tiny beings
who spent their short lives
in that primordial sea.


And yet this beauty -
this grace -
offers itself to us
in this moment,
the only time we have.


- Larry Robinson49380

[Roland Jacopetti]

Beautiful, Larry! Made my day, as you often do. Roland


Cave Painting At Font du Gaume...

[Larry Robinson]

The Women at the Well




We are the women at the well;49393

We who draw up the sacred water
under a red sun
as a child pulls at our skirts.

We gather, share stories,
spill our laments onto the ground
where they seep to the underworld.

Weathered hands raise and
lower the bucket endlessly,
refreshing dry vessels,
and, at times, hope.

We are the courageous
who dare to work the bucket
into the earth’s dark places,

We labor to raise earth’s vein of tears,
Where we have hidden our sorrows.

And by doing so,

Both honor and purify the darkness;

This I know: we do the holy work.

- ann masai

[Larry Robinson]

The Stare’s Nest By My Window


The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening, honey bees
Come build in the empty house of the stare.


We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare


A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.


We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; oh, honey-bees
Come build in the empty house of the stare.


- W.B. Yeats

[Larry Robinson]

Black 101


“How are you afraid of a man
running away from you?”
-Toni Morrison


Fear is a magnetizer.
It changes the polarity of black bodies.
Makes them highly attractive to
bullets, police batons, tasers,
white rage, white guilt,
and blue-eyed blondes.


Fear is a multiplier.
It turns children into men,
men and women into monsters,
and non-compliant teens
into dangerous gangs
and threatening mobs.


Fear is a magician.
It turns Hip Hop into gangster rap,
plastic toys into guns,
cigarillos, cellphones,
wallets, brazenness,
and extended index fingers
into high caliber weapons.


Fear is a revisionist history class.
It turns people of color into the
enslavers, confederate soldiers,
lynch mobs, klansmen, night riders
and terrorists.


Fear is a sniper.
It takes dead aim, aims to kill,
kills for sport and pleasure,
is pleased to take souvenirs,
and stuffs and mounts its trophies.


- Frank X Walker

[Larry Robinson]

Because Of You




Because of you,
when I awoke I left my bed earlier than usual.
There is so much to say hello to and wish a good morning.
Because of you
I had cereal, blueberries ,walnuts and a little cream
that I ate slowly, thoughtfully mindfully.
Because of you
I turned off the classical music station
and listened to what was left of the dawn chorus.
Because of you
I have poems pressed between the pages of my heart.
Because of you
I signed petitions against climate change, and
pledges to protect children ,immigrants and the earth.
Because of you
I walked through the garden noticing that
many roses now have put on their dancing shoes,
those bright luminous petals..
Because of you
I felt the dearness of friendship in the beauty around us
the gratefulness for you and roses and blueberries and this world.
And I know that you are a part of all the things that I love,
And I write because of you-
Because of you.


- Gail Onion

[Larry Robinson]

How Much


Low stream flows, deceptively gentle
incubate fish eggs, keep them safe,
while storms would sweep them away
toward predators downstream.


Birthing salmon and steelhead, fins flinch,
shudder in waters too calm for swimming
to tributaries, their birth canals.


In the main stem, they dig up
each other's eggs, lay their own. Animals
fond of ikura, meaning salmon eggs
and also how much, quickly feast.


Sword of storm, sword of calm hangs above.
How often we celebrate, scoop caviar,
lives swallowed like casual swords
cutting through first life.


Custom of delicate spoons, as if fearing
fragility of wealth, prone to slip away
overnight, glistening pearly ounces, as if
taking less dignifies the taking, as if


life's thrashings disappear beneath
glistening dishes of roe, as if
too much would reveal our gaze
deciding who survives cycles,
dying, regenerating.


Fish ache to fly upstream like birds
swim through clouds like blooms
welcome the sun, as fawns bond
in faint cries to their does.
Doe and fawn graze, lie on grass,
each blade holding its own weight.


- Lynn Axelrod

[Larry Robinson]

I Ask My Mother to Sing




She begins, and my grandmother joins her.
Mother and daughter sing like young girls.
If my father were alive, he would play
his accordion and sway like a boat.


I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,
nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch
the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers
running away in the grass.


But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into water,
then rock back, and fill with more.


Both women have begun to cry.
But neither stops her song.


- Li-Young Lee

[Larry Robinson]

To Be Of Use


The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.


I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.


I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.


The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.


- Marge Piercy

[Larry Robinson]

We Wear the Mask


We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.


Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.


We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!


- Paul Laurence Dunbar

[Larry Robinson]

This Moment


At this moment of cruel uncertainty
Planet Earth seems pretty steady
In its turning and circling
Gifting our eyes
With the illusion of the sun rising
And later on descending
During the moment we label
As 7pm
When we lift our hands in unison
And applaud
The unflinching
Front line workers.
In the growing dimness
Of 8pm
We even howl in gratitude
We stretch out our arms
As if to hold them
And those they serve
The ill
Dying
Grieving.
We could also
If so inclined
Both embrace and dissolve
Our collective pain
By trusting the illusive paradox
That all exists only
In the boundless
Present moment.
Embodying this riddle
We can still praise
Our planet’s comforting
Consistent motion
The conjurer
Of our more familiar notion of time
Including the returning
Deceptive rise
Of lovely healing dawn.


- A.W. Gerber

[Larry Robinson]

Kentucky River Junction

to Ken Kesey & Ken Babbs


Clumsy at first, fitting together
the years we have been apart,
and the ways.

But as the night
passed and the day came, the first
fine morning of April,

it came clear:
the world that has tried us
and showed us its joy

was our bond
when we said nothing.
And we allowed it to be

with us, the new green
shining.

*

Our lives, half gone,
stay full of laughter.

Free-hearted men
have the world for words.

Though we have been
apart, we have been together.

*

Trying to sleep, I cannot
take my mind away.
The bright day

shines in my head
like a coin
on the bed of a stream.

*

You left
you're welcome.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

In the Time of Pandemic

It is the time of virus and testing,
of outbreaks and epicenters,
time of rates of infection
and death tolls of loved ones.

It is the time of face masks
and closures, of quarantines
and distance to flatten
alarming bell curves.

And it is the time of desperate
shopping and panicky selling,
of markets collapsing,
of gun sales booming.

Faced with such facts,
what does our populist leader do
but stand up to the cameras
and bully the Press.
He huffs and he puffs
and his great balloon brain
unleashes its forked tongue…
and still his apologists cheer.

Oh woe is my country.
Here sheltered in place,
armed with no medical knowledge,
no wealth or position,
no radio program or newspaper column,
no podcast or facebook,
locked down and stymied,
I mine what little I know:

That lies come home to roost
at the door of their maker.
That the goldfinch of truth
can be trusted to sing.

That dear ones we’ve lost
bequeath us the memory
of what made them beloved,
and aspiring to give new life
to these very qualities is all we have
now to requite our better angels.


- Bill Greenwood

[Larry Robinson]

Ashes, Ashes
All Fall Down


from 1347-1353
The Black Plague,
(Yersinia pestis), claimed one third of the population of Europe.


Born in a time of darkness,
she’s laid low in her cedar cradle.
Buboes flare at pit and groin as
on her cheeks, false roses bloom.
A parching fever carries her
beyond her mother’s grace
even before the dance
of rattling bones begins.


And who’s to blame?
an aggravated God,
the sinner, self-proclaimed,
flaying his flesh with
with cat-o’-nine tails,
the sailors dragging pestilence
ashore in duffel bags,
the ghetto of immigrants
rounded up like banished
books and burned to ashes?
When no one’s left
to oversee the barricades,
nor any left to dig the graves,
who will be left to blame?

Blame the Basilisk,
denizen of the dark ages,
dealer of death and ruination
He wears the thorn-face of a rooster,
strapping thighs of dragon,
the whip tail of a tortured serpent.
A foul miasma is his breath;
a single drop of blood is dose
enough to poison every well.
Every field he passes is a
withering reminder of his
dreadful domination.

You dare not
Dare Not
look into the
mirrors of his eyes.
The sight of your reflection
will strike you to the ground.


- b.armstrong

[Larry Robinson]

the sonnet-ballad


Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
They took my lover's tallness off to war,
Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess
What I can use an empty heart-cup for.
He won't be coming back here any more.
Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew
When he went walking grandly out that door
That my sweet love would have to be untrue.
Would have to be untrue. Would have to court
Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange
Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort)
Can make a hard man hesitate—and change.
And he will be the one to stammer, "Yes."
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?


- Gwendolyn Brooks

[Larry Robinson]

Memorial Day for the War Dead




Memorial day for the war dead. Add now
the grief of all your losses to their grief,
even of a woman that has left you. Mix
sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,
which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning
on one day for easy, convenient memory.


Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread,
in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.
"Behind all this some great happiness is hiding."
No use to weep inside and to scream outside.
Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding.


Memorial day. Bitter salt is dressed up
as a little girl with flowers.
The streets are cordoned off with ropes,
for the marching together of the living and the dead.
Children with a grief not their own march slowly,
like stepping over broken glass.


The flautist's mouth will stay like that for many days.
A dead soldier swims above little heads
with the swimming movements of the dead,
with the ancient error the dead have
about the place of the living water.


A flag loses contact with reality and flies off.
A shopwindow is decorated with
dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.
And everything in three languages:
Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.


A great and royal animal is dying
all through the night under the jasmine
tree with a constant stare at the world.


A man whose son died in the war walks in the street
like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.
"Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”


- Yehuda Amichai

[Larry Robinson]

Concurrence



Each day's terror, almost
a form of boredom - madmen
at the wheel and
stepping on the gas and
the brakes no good -
and each day one,
sometimes two,morning-glories,
faultless,blue, blue sometimes
flecked with magenta, each
lit from within with
the first sunlight.


- Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

One


The mosquito is so small
it takes almost nothing to ruin it.
Each leaf, the same.
And the black ant, hurrying.
So many lives, so many fortunes!
Every morning, I walk softly and with forward glances
down to the ponds and through the pinewoods.
Mushrooms, even, have but a brief hour
before the slug creeps to the feast,
before the pine needles hustle down
under the bundles of harsh, beneficent rain.


How many, how many, how many
make up a world!
And then I think of that old idea: the singular
and the eternal.
One cup, in which everything is swirled
back to the color of the sea and sky.
Imagine it!


A shining cup, surely!
In the moment in which there is no wind
over your shoulder,
you stare down into it,
and there you are,
your own darling face, your own eyes.
And then the wind, not thinking of you, just passes by,
touching the ant, the mosquito, the leaf,
and you know what else!
How blue is the sea, how blue is the sky,
how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is, even you,
even your eyes, even your imagination.


- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

In Praise of Four-Letter Words


We yell shit
when the egg carton slips
and the ivory globes
splatter on blue tile.
And when someone leaves you
bruised as a dropped pear, you spit
that fucker, fucking bastard, motherfucker.
And if you just got fired, the puppy
swallowed a two-inch nail, or
your daughter needs another surgery,
you might walk around murmuring
fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
under your breath like reciting a rosary.


Cock and cunt — we spew them out
as though they were offal,
as though that vulnerable
bare skin of the penis, that swaying it does
like a slender reed in a pond, the vulva
with its delicate mauve or taupe
or cinnamon fluted petals were the worst
things we know. You’d think we despise
the way they slide together,
can’t bear all those nerves
bunched up close as angels
seething on the head of a pin.


And suck, our yes
to the universe, first hunger, whole
mammalian tribe of damp newborns
held in contempt for the urgent rooting,
the nubbly feel of the nipple in the mouth,
fine spray on the soft palate.


What does it mean
to bring another’s body
into our body, whether through our mouth
or that other mouth — to be taken in?
When life cracks us
like a broken tooth,
when it wears us down
like the tread of old tires,
when it creeps over us
like shower mold, isn’t this
what we cry for?


Maybe all that shouting
is shouting to God, to the universe,
to anyone who can hear us.
In lockdown within our own skins
we’re banging on the bars with tin spoons,
screaming in the only language strong
enough to convey the shock
of our shameful need. Fuck! —
we look around us in terrified amazement —
Goddamn! Goddamn! Holy shit!


- Ellen Bass

[Larry Robinson]

Hello, How Are You?


Tears without knowing why
Grief, deep grief for all the dark
the shadow side of humankind that
ends up spewing their disbeliefs on
my being and the being of my beloveds


Grief, for all the wars and all
the epidemics and all the human
throwaways...the un-important, the poor, the brown
the native, the jew, the muslim..


Grief for all that comes upon the shores
of our lives on this precious planet
that we are so readily destroying
out of greed, ignorance and self centeredness.
It is not my problem, it is their problem
Who is the they if not us
Grief, leaving this planet to my children and grand children


I want clear skies
I want equity for women, for workers, for justice
I want good food raised without pesticides
I want health care that is honest and not
in the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies


Grief for all that is unseen and seen
It is mirrored in my heart.
Just these tears that don’t seem to have a label
an origin, a reason...some deep pool of dark that arises
faces of the homeless reflected
faces of the abandoned reflected
faces of soldiers in foreign countries killing each other
faces of families in mourning
I am in mourning
That is the source of my tears
I want a global resurrection and reincarnation
of cooperation
of loving one another
of caring for each other
for non judgments
for kindness
for a sincere Hello
How are you?


- Corlene Van Sluizer

[Larry Robinson]

Only A Pawn In Their Game

A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCjGSbm2LFc
A finger fired the trigger to his name
A handle hid out in the dark
A hand set the spark
Two eyes took the aim
Behind a man’s brain
But he can’t be blamed
He’s only a pawn in their game

A South politician preaches to the poor white man
“You got more than the blacks, don’t complain
You’re better than them, you been born with white skin,” they explain
And the Negro’s name
Is used it is plain
For the politician’s gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain't him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game

The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid
And the marshals and cops get the same
But the poor white man’s used in the hands of them all like a tool
He’s taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
'Bout the shape that he’s in
But it ain't him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game

From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks
And the hoof beats pound in his brain
And he’s taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back, with his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide 'neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain't a-got no name
But it ain't him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game

Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught
They lowered him down as a king
But when the shadowy sun sets on the one
That fired the gun
He’ll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epitaph plain
Only a pawn in their game

- Bob Dylan

[REALnothings]

Nobel Prize for his poetry (lyrics) RICHLY deserved! :heart:


A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood
A finger fired the trigger to his name
A handle hid out in the dark
A hand set the spark
Two eyes took the aim
Behind a man’s brain
But he can’t be blamed
He’s only a pawn in their game

[M/M]

Dylan's latest, Murder Most Foul, adds Light....

Annotated lyrics for a deeper delve into our history:
https://genius.com/Bob-dylan-murder-most-foul-lyrics


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NbQkyvbw18

[Larry Robinson]

Pilgrim



I bow to the lark
and its tiny
lifted silhouette
fluttering
before infinity.

I promise myself
to the mountain
and to the foundation
from which
my future comes.

I make my vow
to the stream
flowing beneath,
and to the water
falling
toward all thirst,

and
I pledge myself
to the sea
to which it goes
and to the mercy
of my disappearance,

and though
I may be
left alone
or abandoned by
the unyielding present
or orphaned
in some far
unspoken place,

I will speak
with a voice
of loyalty
and faith
to the far shore
where everything
turns to arrival,

if only in the sound
of falling waves
and I will listen
with sincere
and attentive eyes and ears
for a final invitation,

so that I can
be that note half-heard
in the flying lark song,
or that tint
on a far mountain
brushed with the subtle
grey of dawn...

A river gone by,
still looking
as if it hasn’t …


- David Whyte

[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]

The Morning’s News

The morning’s news drives sleep out of the head
at night. Uselessness and horror hold the eyes
open to the dark. Weary, we lie awake
in the agony of the old giving birth to the new
without assurance that the new will be better.
I look at my son, whose eyes are like a young god’s,
they are so open to the world.
I look at my sloping fields now turning
green with the young grass of April. What must I do
to go free? I think I must put on
a deathlier knowledge, and prepare to die
rather than enter into the design of man’s hate.
I will purge my mind of the airy claims
of church and state. I will serve the earth
and not pretend my life could better serve.
Another morning comes with its strange cure.
The earth is news. Though the river floods
and the spring is cold, my heart goes on,
faithful to a mystery in a cloud,
and the summer’s garden continues its descent
through me, toward the ground.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

The Cure At Troy

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

- Seamus Heaney’s translation of
"The Philoctetes," by Sophocles

[american dream]

So relevant now!

The Cure At Troy

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
...

[Larry Robinson]

Wake Up U.S. America!


When a ball player kneels upon the turf
to protest for justice when a bar-room song
made sacred is played, he is vilified
& fired. But when police take their knees
to the necks of their victims or shoot them,
more often than not it is called
"In the line of duty." Do we not see
because we sleep or are we blind
like we like to portray justice?
Unbind her eyes that she may see
that her scales are out of balance,
that she is not color-blind & if she is
to correct it. In the vision of the Tao
black & white are equal, one no more
of value than the other but her scales
are weighted to the white, all shades of black
not counting for much. Is it because we sleep?
If it is only sleep, Wake up U.S. America!
If it is that we refuse to see, may the gods help us.



- Rafael Jesús González






¡Despierta EE.UU. América!


Cuando un jugador de pelota se hinca sobre la hierba
para protestar por la justicia cuando se toca
una canción de cantina hecha sagrada, se le denigra
y despide. Pero cuando la policía ponen la rodilla
al cuello de sus víctimas o les disparan,
más veces que no se le llama
"Cumpliendo su deber." ¿No vemos
porque dormimos o somos ciegos
como nos gusta representar a la justicia?
Quitémosle la venda de los ojos para que vea
que su báscula está fuera de balance,
que no es daltónica y si lo es
que lo corrija. En la visión del Tao
lo negro y lo blanco son equivalentes, uno no más
de valor que el otro pero su báscula
se desequilibra a favor de lo blanco, todo matiz de negro
no contando por mucho. ¿Será porque dormimos?
Si solamente es que dormimos ¡Despierta EE.UU. América!
Si es que nos negamos a ver ¡Que nos ayuden los dioses!



- Rafael Jesús González

[Larry Robinson]

I look at the World


I look at the world
From awakening eyes in a black face—
And this is what I see:
This fenced-off narrow space
Assigned to me.


I look then at the silly walls
Through dark eyes in a dark face—
And this is what I know:
That all these walls oppression builds
Will have to go!


I look at my own body
With eyes no longer blind—
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that's in my mind.
Then let us hurry, comrades,
The road to find.


- Langston Hughes

[Larry Robinson]

It Is I Who Must Begin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvCjA8qRhwM


It is I who must begin.

Once I begin, once I try —

here and now,

right where I am,

not excusing myself

by saying things

would be easier elsewhere,

without grand speeches and

ostentatious gestures,

but all the more persistently

— to live in harmony

with the “voice of Being,” as I

understand it within myself

— as soon as I begin that,

I suddenly discover,

to my surprise, that

I am neither the only one,

nor the first,

nor the most important one

to have set out

upon that road.

Whether all is really lost

or not depends entirely on

whether or not I am lost.

- Václav Havel

[M/M]

It Is I Who Must Begin

- Václav Havel

Beautiful, thank you! Some more wisdom from Václav Havel... who lived what he wrote....
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/71441.V_clav_Havel

[Larry Robinson]

The looters came to my town
Rounded us like animals
Tore our families
Chained us in mass
Stuffed us in boats across the sea
Sold us like cattle,
Branded our skin


The looters came to my town
We grew the sugar for their fine tea
Grew their cotton
paved their roads
Raised their children
While ours were gone
They handed us freedom
In segregated worlds
Built jails for our young boys


The looters came to my town
They came to my hood
They stopped me on the street
They took my freedom,
Shot me from behind
Yet they are mad about haircuts


The looters came to my town
Their views made laws
Fear within
I wrote a check,
A knee crushing me
I am on the ground
I am through, officer
I can’t breathe


- Ana Horta

[Larry Robinson]

A Crack


Beyond the insular shell

Marking recent existence,

A crack has been made

Where the seed of soul is sprouting,

Opening wide.

There stands

Weeping in recognition

Of what it was unable to see

Imprisoned in a shell

That blocked the light of truth

From illuminating

The shared sorrows

Of the Great Heart.

It weeps in gratitude

At the hints of a forgotten togetherness,

Weeping of the Original Community

From which it’s been sheltered

For so long.

There it weeps

In remembrance

Of abandoned kin

Songs never to be heard

that once resonated in all.

Songs sung

By the old growth forests

And rivers

By the Rhinos

And passenger pigeons,

By another indigenous language

Lost each week.

Waters flow once more.

This time

A knowing

That all rivers

Reach the sea,

Where what was

Once forgotten

Is now remembered

And separateness dissolves

Into those streaming waters

Rolling down the cheeks

Of the world

In the direction of the Heart,

Spreading thin and becoming

Part of the song

Where it recognizes that

All tears

Pour

From the same set of eyes.


- Devin Jenkins

[Larry Robinson]

America: A Prophecy (excerpt)


The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations;
The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up;
The bones of death, the cov'ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry'd.
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst;
Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field:
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;
Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open.
And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge;
They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream.
Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night;
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.
For Everything that lives is holy. For Everything that lives is holy.
- William Blake

[Larry Robinson]

A New National Anthem




The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National
Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good
song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets’
red glare” and then there are the bombs.
(Always, always there is war and bombs.)
Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw
even the tenacious high school band off key.
But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call
to the field, something to get through before
the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas
we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge
could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps
the truth is that every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we blindly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do
like the flag, how it undulates in the wind
like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled,
brought to its knees, clung to by someone who
has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon,
when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly
you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can
love it again, until the song in your mouth feels
like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung
by even the ageless woods, the shortgrass plains,
the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left
unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright,
that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on,
that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving
into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit
in an endless cave, the song that says my bones
are your bones, and your bones are my bones,
and isn’t that enough?


- Ada Limón

[REALnothings]

Certainly echoes my sentiments. I tried to promote "This Land Is Your Land" as a new national anthem, a few years back. And I designed a new flag, too. It had people's faces on it, all ethnicities, all ages... :heart::heart::heart:

[Larry Robinson]

Anthem


The birds they sang at the break of day
"Start again", I heard them say:
Don't dwell on what has passed away
or what is yet to be.


Ah, the wars they will be fought again,
the holy dove, she will be caught again,
bought and sold and bought again
the dove is never free.


We asked for signs, the signs were sent
the birth betrayed, the marriage spent,
Yeah, the widowhood of every government
signs for all to see.


I can't run no more with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places say their prayers out loud,
but they've summoned, they've summoned up a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me.


You can add up the parts, you won't have the sum,
you can strike up the march, there is no drum,
Every heart, every heart to love will come
but like a refugee.


Ring the bells that still can ring,
forget your perfect offering,
there is a crack, a crack in everything
that's how the light gets in.


That's how the light gets in,
that's how the light gets in.


- Leonard Cohen

[REALnothings]

49603

[REALnothings]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8-BT6y_wYg&feature=emb_logoAnd even greater on this video, I think...right now, it feels as if this is the greatest 8-minutes of video I've ever seen. The WONDERFUL humanity of Mr. Cohen, and his harmony with his ensemble and gratitude to them...and the incredible SOUL of the song itself...made, if possible, even MORE poignant by current events!
:heart:

[Larry Robinson]

To Change The World Enough


To change the world enough
you must cease to be afraid
of the poor.
We experience your fear as the least pardonable of
humiliations; in the past
it has sent us scurrying off
daunted and ashamed
into the shadows.
Now,
the world ending
the only one all of us have known
we seek the same
fresh light
you do:
the same high place
and ample table.
The poor always believe
there is room enough
for all of us;
the very rich never seem to have heard
of this.
In us there is wisdom of how to share
loaves and fishes
however few;
we do this everyday.
Learn from us,
we ask you.
We enter now
the dreaded location
of Earth's reckoning;
no longer far
off
or hidden in books
that claim to disclose
revelations;
it is here.
We must walk together without fear.
There is no path without us


- Alice Walker

[Larry Robinson]

You Must Cease<o:p></o:p>
gratitude to Alice Walker for “to Change the World Enough”… and for her lines “you must cease to be afraid” and “fresh… high place”, “to change the world” which inspired<o:p></o:p>


You must cease to be afraid<o:p></o:p>
or your life will stay small and trembling<o:p></o:p>
and what you have to give<o:p></o:p>
will shrivel and finally be<o:p></o:p>
as if it never was.<o:p></o:p>
To truly live,<o:p></o:p>
to live your part that the mystery needs<o:p></o:p>
in order to change the world,<o:p></o:p>
you must enlarge your heart<o:p></o:p>
to its definition of courage.<o:p></o:p>
You must hold hands with your trembling child<o:p></o:p>
and walk together with every hand<o:p></o:p>
every size and shape and color <o:p></o:p>
every hand of our one human race <o:p></o:p>
towards the fresh high place<o:p></o:p>
where we all belong<o:p></o:p>
and where the light there <o:p></o:p>
makes us all see<o:p></o:p>
and all be bravely known <o:p></o:p>

- Kathleen Kraemer<o:p></o:p>

[Larry Robinson]

Bridges


The past didn't go anywhere.
It's right here, right now.

I always thought that anybody who told me I couldn't live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that if I remembered would get them in serious trouble.

That packaging of time is a journalistic convenience that they use to trivialize and to dismiss important events and important ideas.

I defy that.

Time is an enormous long river
And I'm standing in it just as you're standing in it.

My elders were the tributaries and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to and every song they created and every poem that they laid down flows down to me.

And if I take the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, if I take the time to reach out,
I can build that bridge between my world and theirs.
I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world.

Bridges from my time to your time
As my elders from their time to my time.

And we all put into the river
And we let it go
And it flows away from us, and away from us

Until it no longer has our name on it, our identity;
it has its own utility, it own use.

And people will take what they need and make it part of their lives.


- Utah Philips

[wisewomn]

So wonderful to hear the Golden Voice of the Great Southwest again, Larry! Thank you for this.


Bridges
...

- Utah Philips

[Larry Robinson]

The Bees

In the street outside a school
what the children learn
possesses them.
Little boys yell as they stone a flock of bees
trying to swarm
between the lunchroom window and an iron grate.
The boys sling furious rocks
smashing the windows.
The bees, buzzing their anger,
are slow to attack.
Then one boy is stung
into quicker destruction
and the school guards come
long wooden sticks held out before them
they advance upon the hive
beating the almost finished rooms of wax apart
mashing the new tunnels in
while fresh honey drips
down their broomsticks
and the little boy feet becoming expert
in destruction
trample the remaining and bewildered bees
into the earth.


Curious and apart
four little girls look on in fascination
learning a secret lesson
and trying to understand their own destruction.
One girl cries out
“Hey, the bees weren’t making any trouble!”
and she steps across the feebly buzzing ruins
to peer up at the empty, grated nook
“We could have studied honey-making!”



- Audre Lorde

[Larry Robinson]

Threshold

It has happened.
You thought you had some control
of your life
and that you were in a place
you understood
in a time that moved
from a past you knew
to a future that followed
in a more or less straight line.
But here you are at the edge
of a shore, the shallow waves
washing over your feet
taking the sand you stand on
away and suddenly you wonder
if all the ground beneath you
is disappearing.
You have stepped through the threshold.
The door closed and locked behind you.
You are on the other side.
You try to forget it, distract yourself,
but nothing works.
You check your messages.
The doctor’s office left a number
on your phone.
Is it is a blood test result,
survival rate for treatment,
or days left to live?
Now you are alone.
After the panic subsides you stand there
looking around.
Everything is fresh,
colors are vivid,
you can smell scents,
even subtle ones,
and your hearing is sharp.
You feel the breeze on your skin
and the tickle of hairs moving
across your brow.
You are pierced through
with the inexplicable joy
at having nothing.
The sand forms around your foot
and the water wipes out all traces of your path.
Everywhere you turn there is something new
and the space around you
holds you gently
as it spills out and becomes
a part of the expanding world.
So many things are remarkable now.
Here is the freedom that always frightened you.
You have forgotten your name
and it does not matter.

- Newton Smith

[Larry Robinson]

Freedom's Plow


When a man starts out with nothing,
When a man starts out with his hands
Empty, but clean,
When a man starts to build a world,
He starts first with himself
And the faith that is in his heart-
The strength there,
The will there to build.


First in the heart is the dream-
Then the mind starts seeking a way.
His eyes look out on the world,
On the great wooded world,
On the rich soil of the world,
On the rivers of the world.


The eyes see there materials for building,
See the difficulties, too, and the obstacles.
The mind seeks a way to overcome these obstacles.
The hand seeks tools to cut the wood,
To till the soil, and harness the power of the waters.
Then the hand seeks other hands to help,
A community of hands to help-
Thus the dream becomes not one man’s dream alone,
But a community dream.
Not my dream alone, but our dream.
Not my world alone,
But your world and my world,
Belonging to all the hands who build.


A long time ago, but not too long ago,
Ships came from across the sea
Bringing the Pilgrims and prayer-makers,
Adventurers and booty seekers,
Free men and indentured servants,
Slave men and slave masters, all new-
To a new world, America!


With billowing sails the galleons came
Bringing men and dreams, women and dreams.
In little bands together,
Heart reaching out to heart,
Hand reaching out to hand,
They began to build our land.
Some were free hands
Seeking a greater freedom,
Some were indentured hands
Hoping to find their freedom,
Some were slave hands
Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom,
But the word was there always:
Freedom.


Down into the earth went the plow
In the free hands and the slave hands,
In indentured hands and adventurous hands,
Turning the rich soil went the plow in many hands
That planted and harvested the food that fed
And the cotton that clothed America.
Clang against the trees went the ax into many hands
That hewed and shaped the rooftops of America.
Splash into the rivers and the seas went the boat-hulls
That moved and transported America.
Crack went the whips that drove the horses
Across the plains of America.
Free hands and slave hands,
Indentured hands, adventurous hands,
White hands and black hands
Held the plow handles,
Ax handles, hammer handles,
Launched the boats and whipped the horses
That fed and housed and moved America.
Thus together through labor,
All these hands made America.


Labor! Out of labor came villages
And the towns that grew cities.
Labor! Out of labor came the rowboats
And the sailboats and the steamboats,
Came the wagons, and the coaches,
Covered wagons, stage coaches,
Out of labor came the factories,
Came the foundries, came the railroads.
Came the marts and markets, shops and stores,
Came the mighty products moulded, manufactured,
Sold in shops, piled in warehouses,
Shipped the wide world over:
Out of labor-white hands and black hands-
Came the dream, the strength, the will,
And the way to build America.
Now it is Me here, and You there.
Now it’s Manhattan, Chicago,
Seattle, New Orleans,
Boston and El Paso-
Now it’s the U.S.A.


A long time ago, but not too long ago, a man said:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL-
ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR
WITH CERTAIN UNALIENABLE RIGHTS-
AMONG THESE LIFE, LIBERTY
AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.
His name was Jefferson. There were slaves then,
But in their hearts the slaves believed him, too,
And silently took for granted
That what he said was also meant for them.
It was a long time ago,
But not so long ago at that, Lincoln said:
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT THAT OTHER’S CONSENT.
There were slaves then, too,
But in their hearts the slaves knew
What he said must be meant for every human being-
Else it had no meaning for anyone.
Then a man said:
BETTER TO DIE FREE
THAN TO LIVE SLAVES
He was a colored man who had been a slave
But had run away to freedom.
And the slaves knew
What Frederick Douglass said was true.


With John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, Negroes died.
John Brown was hung.
Before the Civil War, days were dark,
And nobody knew for sure
When freedom would triumph
'Or if it would,' thought some.
But others new it had to triumph.
In those dark days of slavery,
Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom,
The slaves made up a song:
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
That song meant just what it said: Hold On!
Freedom will come!
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
Out of war it came, bloody and terrible!
But it came!
Some there were, as always,
Who doubted that the war would end right,
That the slaves would be free,
Or that the union would stand,
But now we know how it all came out.
Out of the darkest days for people and a nation,
We know now how it came out.
There was light when the battle clouds rolled away.
There was a great wooded land,
And men united as a nation.


America is a dream.
The poet says it was promises.
The people say it is promises-that will come true.
The people do not always say things out loud,
Nor write them down on paper.
The people often hold
Great thoughts in their deepest hearts
And sometimes only blunderingly express them,
Haltingly and stumblingly say them,
And faultily put them into practice.
The people do not always understand each other.
But there is, somewhere there,
Always the trying to understand,
And the trying to say,
'You are a man. Together we are building our land.'


America!
Land created in common,
Dream nourished in common,
Keep your hand on the plow! Hold on!
If the house is not yet finished,
Don’t be discouraged, builder!
If the fight is not yet won,
Don’t be weary, soldier!
The plan and the pattern is here,
Woven from the beginning
Into the warp and woof of America:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT HIS CONSENT.
BETTER DIE FREE,
THAN TO LIVE SLAVES.
Who said those things? Americans!
Who owns those words? America!
Who is America? You, me!
We are America!
To the enemy who would conquer us from without,
We say, NO!
To the enemy who would divide
And conquer us from within,
We say, NO!
FREEDOM!
BROTHERHOOD!
DEMOCRACY!
To all the enemies of these great words:
We say, NO!


A long time ago,
An enslaved people heading toward freedom
Made up a song:
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
The plow plowed a new furrow
Across the field of history.
Into that furrow the freedom seed was dropped.
From that seed a tree grew, is growing, will ever grow.
That tree is for everybody,
For all America, for all the world.
May its branches spread and shelter grow
Until all races and all peoples know its shade.
KEEP YOUR HAND ON THE PLOW! HOLD ON!


- Langston Hughes

[Larry Robinson]

Emancipation

Fling out your banners, your honors be bringing,https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2020-06-19_14-25-05.png
Raise to the ether your paeans of praise.
Strike every chord and let music be ringing!
Celebrate freely this day of all days.


Few are the years since that notable blessing,
Raised you from slaves to the powers of men.
Each year has seen you my brothers progressing,
Never to sink to that level again.


Perched on your shoulders sits Liberty smiling,
Perched where the eyes of the nations can see.
Keep from her pinions all contact defiling;
Show by your deeds what you're destined to be.


Press boldly forward nor waver, nor falter.
Blood has been freely poured out in your cause,
Lives sacrificed upon Liberty's alter.
Press to the front, it were craven to pause.


Look to the heights that are worth your attaining
Keep your feet firm in the path to the goal.
Toward noble deeds every effort be straining.
Worthy ambition is food for the soul!


Up! Men and brothers, be noble, be earnest!
Ripe is the time and success is assured;
Know that your fate was the hardest and sternest
When through those lash-ringing days you endured.


Never again shall the manacles gall you
Never again shall the whip stroke defame!
Nobles and Freemen, your destinies call you
Onward to honor, to glory and fame.


- Paul Laurence Dunbar

[Larry Robinson]

The Times They Are A-Changin


Come gather 'round people
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7qQ6_RV4VQ
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'


Come writers and critics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhuf_OvH8B8
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'


Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'


Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’


- Bob Dylan

[Larry Robinson]

unwritten summer poem




digs underground to five feet, skirts a 33-degree Fahrenheit aquifer and turns
left at a mole crossing


hides in mushroom-and-lichen-lined tunnel where millipede and ferret
wrestle, disturbing the peace


probes northwest where three badgers and a chipmunk make competing
offers on groundhog two-bedroom


questions decision to stay below for the long haul


does a 180 to upward trajectory in hope that air will give clarity


breaks into open and implores convocation of irises to suggest an identity:
sonnet? villanelle? haiku? other?


they request 11 unrhymed lines, the longest having 35 words and the
shortest, two -- oh, and five question marks


knows writing is hard enough without those absurd requirements


burrows down again to rest and think: travel all the way to earth's core where
silence should be complete and poetry unneeded or rise again to surface and
in spite of everything get to work?


heads up again to chance


the light.


- David Beckman

[Larry Robinson]

None Can Breathe<o:p></o:p>

In Memory of George Floydhttps://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2020-06-22_13-58-56.png<o:p></o:p>
Murdered by those hired to protect him: May 25, 2020<o:p></o:p>


When any one of us can’t breathe<o:p></o:p>
None of us can<o:p></o:p>
When the knee crushes the neck <o:p></o:p>
We are all crushed by tyranny<o:p></o:p>
The knee is the clapper stolen from <o:p></o:p>
Freedom’s bell<o:p></o:p>

His cry, I can’t breathe<o:p></o:p>
Is your own wretched cry<o:p></o:p>
See Me<o:p></o:p>
Hear Me<o:p></o:p>
Love me for who I am<o:p></o:p>
Love my soul for that is <o:p></o:p>
All that I am<o:p></o:p>

His call for Mama, Mama<o:p></o:p>
Is your own cry for Mama <o:p></o:p>
Mama Gaia, Pachamamaå<o:p></o:p>
Hold us, support us<o:p></o:p>
Mama Ishtar, Isis, <o:p></o:p>
Kuan Yin, Kali, <o:p></o:p>
Bast, Brigid<o:p></o:p>
Protect us<o:p></o:p>
Mama Shekinah<o:p></o:p>
Be with us always<o:p></o:p>
Mama Tara<o:p></o:p>
Free us<o:p></o:p>

Mama, help me breathe<o:p></o:p>
You have 8 minutes and 46 seconds<o:p></o:p>
Before it’s too late<o:p></o:p>
Blow breath into the blue<o:p></o:p>
Lips of the baby<o:p></o:p>

Blow breath into the <o:p></o:p>
Broken hearted mamas whose<o:p></o:p>
Children have died at the rope,<o:p></o:p>
The baton, the gun, the knee<o:p></o:p>
Blow breath into every closed<o:p></o:p>
Blue uniformed heart<o:p></o:p>

Don’t think it can’t <o:p></o:p>
Be your neck<o:p></o:p>
And don’t you dare believe<o:p></o:p>
It can’t be your knee<o:p></o:p>
We all have within us<o:p></o:p>
Illumined wisdom<o:p></o:p>
And wounded souls<o:p></o:p>

For all of us<o:p></o:p>
All that our aggrieved souls<o:p></o:p>
Need are just two words<o:p></o:p>
I’m sorry<o:p></o:p>
I’m sorry<o:p></o:p>
I am so sorry!<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
If it is not said to you <o:p></o:p>
When you need it most<o:p></o:p>
Take your own tender heart <o:p></o:p>
Into your hands<o:p></o:p>
And whisper<o:p></o:p>
I’m sorry my heart<o:p></o:p>
I’m sorry my friend<o:p></o:p>
Please Forgive<o:p></o:p>
Please Love<o:p></o:p>
Please <o:p></o:p>

- Sally Churgel

[Larry Robinson]

We Who Dream Know There Are No Borders

“ . . . my cells, which are my stars . . .” Frida Kahlo

Spring Lake, Santa Rosa, CA

Haloed by redwoods, a vulture sky,
and plump, comical geese,
the soul-body of Guadalupe shimmers.

North on our backs, around our necks,
in our skin, snuggled in suitcases,
constant in cages, flowing underground.

With September’s feathered heat and bountiful
barbeques. Tunneling cold tickles
our legs through the water’s massage.

Girls and boys play-fight for swan, burger, and
unicorn floats. Reborn in dream-water
lovers cradle one another, kids scream.

Late afternoons a breeze from the Pacific.
Geese gabble in, splash down with cartoon faces.
Without wings we made it. Lost a few. Lost a lot.

Among thorns roses, food trucks, vineyards,
hoodies woven with sweat and song, spirit-
water blessings, fresh sweet miracles,
we who dream know there are no borders.

- Gwynn O’Gara

[Larry Robinson]

Acres of Ancestry


For the descendants of Africans living in the USA pursuing justice for 1.5 million acres of Black-owned land.
As long as I have a pig and garden, no one can tell me what to do.
—Fannie Lou Hamer


Mine our lineages
You will find fortitude and insistence
I grew up on Heirs Property
A family blessing and a United States problem


Took 15 years for me to come back down
My granddaddy’s dirt road and see
His wild green field free
And Black like me


Secretly purchased marshland
From his father who was born a sharecropper
My daddy tells me how my grandma and granddaddy
Turned a swamp into firm land for a house


Hogs, cows, vegetables, broom grass, and chickens
How Granddaddy Silas did this with mental
And soul injuries on brown and Pall Mall since age 13
How Grandma Lizzie listened to neighbor stories on the porch


How her children and granddaddy watched fields reap
How she prayed over our family
How they knew the land like God
Now


I’m thinking about the Combahee River Raid and Ma Tubman
How she kept saying:
My people ARE free
Now


My mind is jumping loops of Grandma Thelma boiling pine


“Trust a doctor for who?”


How one day the police pulled up the drive and I watched
With eight-year-old eyes as granddaddy said, “Get the Hell
Off this land” No blink


How my kin and the Earth ground me
Make me ask what’s 12
When I’m seeing 20/20
And the neon sign of stars read:


Sankofa: The Land says return to me
Sankofa: The Land says return to me
Sankofa: Mine your lineage for fortitude


I insist


Ain’t nothing wrong with us
But we been contortin’ and bendin’ Black
To earn our way to freedom
But these days


The little one and I are outside
Growing squash and sage in grandma and granddaddy’s field
We watch the birds
We sway with the pine


Seem like every time
I go outside I find
An artifact
Smooth blue glass, oyster shells, and brick


The USDA got rules and regulations
We mine our lineages for fortitude and insistence
In this place of European land grants
Black codes and unjust generational wealth


We are a listening people
Who know without having to speak
And we don’t mind watching the wind do work
Clear as day, in a vision, my Granddaddy Silas comes to me:


Chile, who you asking for freedom?
Don’t you know how to aim?
How to grow?
Don’t you know you Black as God
As the dirt all green grows up out of?
Don’t you know buildings go up and down every day?
Nature can takeover all dem ting dem folk
Worshippin’ and you ain’t a thing beggin’ to be seen, chile, BREATHE
You was born free


- Marlanda Dekine-Sapient Soul

[Larry Robinson]

Sometimes

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.


A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.


Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.


- Sheenagh Pugh

[Larry Robinson]

Hymn To Time


Time says “Let there be”
every moment and instantly
there is space and the radiance
of each bright galaxy.


And eyes beholding radiance.
And the gnats’ flickering dance.
And the seas’ expanse.
And death, and chance.


Time makes room
for going and coming home
and in time’s womb
begins all ending.


Time is being and being
time, it is all one thing,
the shining, the seeing,
the dark abounding.


- Ursula K. Le Guin

[Larry Robinson]

The North Star


When ritual bonds fracture,
handshakes endanger;
When veneer peels, reveals
the sudden care
for the jailed, the homeless,
as mere self-protection;
When our rulers rule clueless,
no skill but deception,
jockeys for advantage
regard-less, care-less,
while their murdochs*
disgrace the fourth estate;
When factions war
in the uncivil twilight
like fissured siblings
at their father’s funeral;


When our economic engine
of consumer consumption
lurches us sputtering
down the bouldered cliff,
while, all out
of touch,
mad men at the wheel
scheme to give us
the business
as usual,
Hit the gas raving “Go Go Go!”—
that’s all they know—


What will we do?
What will it take, this obscure future
that abruptly demands us?
Where should we start but to find
our own center, deeply in touch,
One by one. Together.



- Paul DeMarco


*Murdoch - a Scottish term for describing a man who is “a selfish old beast”

[Larry Robinson]

Waiting on the Mayflower


“what, to the american slave, is your 4th of july?”—Frederick Douglass



i. august 1619

arrived in a boat, named
and unnamed, twenty, pirated

away from a portuguese
slaver, traded for victuals.

drowned in this land of fresh,
volatile clearings and folk

with skin like melted
cowrie shells. soon shedding

servitude. soon reaping
talents sown on african soil.

after indenture, christians,
colonists. not english, but

not yet not-white. antoney
and isabella, whose marriage

stretched the short shadows
of america’s early afternoon

into the dusky reaches of evening,
whose conjugal coitus spent

first the choice coin of africa
on rough virginian citizenship,

baptized their son, william,
into the church of england.


ii. december 1638

fear must have shuddered
into boston on the backs

of true believers—men and
women of an unadorned god—

deep in the heavy black fabric
of their coats and dresses like

a stench. black a mark of
pride they wore as if branded,

never dreaming they could
take it off. envy anticipated

their advent. glittered at them,
settling in, from the knife

blades of the massachusetts.
seeped like low-pitched

humming from the fur
lining the natives’ warm

blankets. but desire docked
in 1638. in from the harbor

flocked a people whose eyes
sparked like stars, even near

death. whose hair promised
a mixture of cotton and river

water and vines, a texture
the fingers ached for. who

wholly inhabited a skin the
midnight color of grace

that clarified the hue of the
pilgrims’ woolen weeds. fear

and envy claimed pride of place,
put desire’s cargo to good use.


iii. march 1770

that night, crispus attucks
dreamed. how he’d attacked

his would-be master and fled
in wild-eyed search of self-

determination. discarded
virginia on the run and ran

out of breath in salt-scented
boston. found there, if not

freedom, fearlessness. a belief
in himself that rocked things

with the uncontrolled power
of the muscular atlantic, power

to cradle, to capsize. awoke
angry again at the planter

who’d taken him for a mule
or a machine. had shouldered

a chip the size of concord
by the time the redcoat dared

to dare him. died wishing he’d
amassed such revolutionary

ire in virginia. died dreaming
great britain was the enemy.


iv. july 4th: last
but not least

17-, 18-, 19-76 and still
this celebration’s shamed

with gunpowder and words
that lie like martyrs in cold

blood. africa’s descendents,
planting here year after year

the seeds of labor, sweating
bullets in this nation’s warts,

have harvested the rope,
the rape, the ghetto, the cell,

the fire, the flood, and the
blame for you-name-it. so

today black folks barbeque
ribs and smother the echoes

of billie’s strange song in
sauces. drink gin. gladly

holiday to heckle speeches
on tv. pretend to parade.

turn out in droves for distant
detonations, chaos, controlled

as always, but directed
away from us tonight. stare

into the mirror of the sky
at our growing reflection,

boggled by how america
gawks at the passing pinpoints

of flame, but overlooks the vast,
ebony palm giving them shape

- Evie Shockley

[Larry Robinson]

Antilamentation


Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punch line, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.


- Dorianne Laux