Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

What We Need Is Here


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


- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Darkness and Light, Dueling


Jimmy Santiago Baca examines shades of darkness.
Perhaps those who christened the mourning cloak
butterfly saw hope in that glowing yellow hem.
I always had my own interpretation for the classic
terra cotta heart, determinedly sprouting
blooms and new growth, despite being wrapped
in pain. We are formed from star stuff –
how could we not be filled with light?
Tender in this uncertain time, we dart uneasily
between the loneliness of the darkest woods and
the intermittent and blinding bright lure of hope.


The differences, degrees of loss, of angst, are
pored over. Penned and parsed. The difficulties
are infinitely more daunting for some,
with inequalities shamefully unmasked.
That annoying salvo that “We are all in the same
boat.” causes fury that from your grand yacht,
you don’t have to see those struggling
for a grip on a piece of driftwood.
None of these dialogues or diatribes may matter.
Hopefully, they will galvanize some into action.
Even we optimists will allow for some fear,
as well as an excruciating deep sorrow.
The cost of so many souls. And then the anger
stockpiled by generations of ancestors.
Prayers for timely antidotes.


- pamela warren williams

[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

[Barry]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx-dbZIpchg





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuFGYz-25gg

[Larry Robinson]

'Colored’


The Spanish cognate ‘colorado’
looks like it means ‘colored’
but in reality means ‘red’
and triggers images of love,
perhaps, maybe of blood.
Applied to the skin this color
used to mean, ‘an Indian’,
another racist designation that
has fallen out of use which now
means ‘a person born in India’.

Native Americans did in fact
come here from Asia, an origin
that until recently could get
them classified as ‘yellow peril’,
understood to be referring
to ‘people from the Far East’,
actually, from here, far West.

Some original indigenous
tribes migrated farther south
into the world we know
as Latin America, although
the language this implies
is not what’s spoken there
by the inhabitants called ‘brown’
—by some, ‘the noble race’—
indeed, ‘people of the earth’.

Tellingly, however, none
of these groups self-identify
by the colors Europeans
from the other side of Iceland
painted them.
Consider how
our forefathers flee hunger,
persecution, write treatises
and speak sin-cere-ly about
freedom…then found it on
white privilege…whereupon
the shackling roots of slavery
reach deeper into every mind.

In my lifetime ‘black’ people
worked hard to counter many
‘evil’ connotations of their color
and they affirmed it’s ‘beautiful’.
Alas. It keeps on meaning,
‘I can’t breathe.’

But finally today, we are bearing
witness to a moment that our newly
great George Floyd has given us

when Martin Luther King’s content
of character stands forth from its granite
as if quickening his Dream of Promise
so I say here and now to you that

I believe we will get there

to where the knee of justice

on the neck of brutality

breaks the back of racism

with liberty once and for all

thus together let us get to work.


- Bill Greenwood

[wisewomn]

Would you cite your source, please?

https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/where-native-americans-come

(https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/where-native-americans-come)https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/where-native-americans-come



No, Bill, Native Americans did not come from Asia. Origin stories and research in the past decade has proven that.

[podfish]

No, Bill, Native Americans did not come from Asia. Origin stories and research in the past decade has proven that.you're going to leave it there ???? where did they come from, then?

[Larry Robinson]

"next to of course god america i


love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh


say can you see by the dawn's early my


country 'tis of centuries come and go


and are no more what of it we should worry


in every language even deafanddumb


thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gory


by jingo by gee by gosh by gum


why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-


iful than these heroic happy dead


who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter


they did not stop to think they died instead


then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"


He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water


- e. e. cummings

[Larry Robinson]

The Real Work


What I would say in one sentence is that, for Americans, the real work is becoming native to North America. The real work is becoming native in your heart, coming to understand we really live here, that this is really the continent we're on and that our loyalties are here, to these mountains and rivers, to these plant zones, to these creatures. The real work involves developing a loyalty that goes back before the formation of any nation state, back billions of years and thousands of years into the future. The real work is accepting citizenship in the continent itself.


- Gary Snyder

[Larry Robinson]

Awakening


the best thinking
in self and others
causes much deliberation
between sisters and brothers
when thinking and feelings
get in the ring
and when they are apart
each does its own thing.


It’s not hard to arrive
at the point of inception
as we weave through the vibes
to avoid frustration
but even when we’re cool and collected
a moment comes – we feel rejected
sparks fly and suddenly
it’s not the expected.


This speaks of the human condition
obsessions, addictions, divisions
we cry for benedictions as we hack.
A tale of being split, that’s our stint
but check the glint in the crack.


All things considered
what is the mission
why do we think, how is it we feel
we’re on the brink of a revolution
in need of a new deal
oh but don’t keel, a wind comes,
the sails move, imagine, create
culture shift – our next meal.


- Jayro Dyer

[Larry Robinson]

School Prayer
In the name of daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,
I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder
as an architect of peace.
In the name of the sun and its minors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons of the firefly
and the apple, I will honor all life
wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell—on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars


- Diane Ackerman

[Larry Robinson]

This Is What You Shall Do


This is what you shall do:
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to every one that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants,
argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people,
take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men,
go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families,
read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,
re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,
dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
and your very flesh shall be a great poem
and have the richest fluency not only in its words
but in the silent lines of its lips and face
and between the lashes of your eyes
and in every motion and joint of your body.


- Walt Whitman

[Larry Robinson]

The Leap


50 years ago

At age 19
Intoxicated by Kerouac’s
On The Road
We went down to the
Railroad tracks
Behind the University
And the Graveyard
Hopping our first freight

Moving just slow enough
For my buddy to
Grab the ladder
Picking up speed
With me behind
Me barely able to
Catch up and
Grab hold

The momentum scarily
Swinging my legs underneath
Toward the wheels
But mercifully slamming against
The solid axle block

Clambering up the ladder
To the top of the boxcar
Flattened out up there
Our spirits soaring
With the thrill of
Adventure and Freedom
The winter air
A piercing chill
The sky having grown dark
As we’re pulling into the
Wilmington rail yard
Another freight
One track over
Pulling out of the yard

Now the two trains
Momentarily in synch
One slowing down
The other speeding up
My buddy
Crazy with adrenaline
Signals me to jump
From the one to the other
Before I can object
He’s made the leap
To me the gap looks too wide
Yet following his lead
I too make the leap

Now a bright spotlight
From the engine up front
Swings back
Lighting us up and
Our train
with brakes
Squealing
Seemingly stopping
On a dime

Our hands and feet
Barely touch the rungs
As we go flying
Down the ladder
Angry shouts behind us
As we crash onto the midnight
Sidewalks of Wilmington
Hiding behind a dumpster
Hearts thumping mightily in
Our chests
Giving way to relief
Of not being caught

Prior to this
In late night dorm bull sessions
We had talked about The Leap
That most adults never take
Choosing instead safety and
Stultification
We vowed we would make
The Leap
Only years later learning about
The Call to Adventure and
The Hero’s Journey
Embedded in the very
DNA of young males
The imperative to test themselves
Against the rules
Against the boundaries
Against their deepest fears
Against all common good sense

Do not presume such energy
No longer lurks
It can be a dangerous drive
In a dangerous time
Beware of charismatic leaders
Willing to capitalize on the
Vulnerability of youth
For their own ends
For good
or
For evil

- David Van Nuys

[gardenmaniac]

ah, yes:

1964 in Panther Hollow

intoxicated by same
but lacking male DNA

I did little more than
watch and dream ...


The Leap


50 years ago...

[Barry]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9D3ZK9oeAs

[Larry Robinson]

We Need Each Other Now


We need each other now.
In truth, we always have.
But as things disintegrate,
as chaos and disorder reign,
we become like bones,
scattered and
stripped clean of all
that is inessential.
Let’s reassemble ourselves,
the way Isis did with Osiris,
or La Loba with her wolf bones.
Let’s find a new configuration,
this part mine, that part yours –
Perhaps something original
will emerge, or
something ancient.
Let’s light a candle now, friends,
so together we might see


how to begin.


- Maya Spector

[gardenmaniac]

thanks again, Larry - this is spot on!


We Need Each Other Now


We need each other now.
In truth, we always have.
But as things disintegrate,
as chaos and disorder reign,
we become like bones,
scattered and
stripped clean of all
that is inessential.
Let’s reassemble ourselves,
the way Isis did with Osiris,
or La Loba with her wolf bones.
Let’s find a new configuration,
this part mine, that part yours –
Perhaps something original
will emerge, or
something ancient.
Let’s light a candle now, friends,
so together we might see


how to begin.


- Maya Spector

[Larry Robinson]

Death Comes To Town


The church bell tolls 12 times.
A tumbleweed careens down
parched mainstreet.
Where is everyone who said they had my back?
At the intersection
Nemesis
dressed in black.
My feet shuffle forward.
Masked faces press against the saloon windows.
I wonder who betrayed Me?
The waitress who didn't wear her mask over her nose?
The drunk Sacramento couple who wouldn't wear masks?
The boardwalk creaks.
Grit in my mouth.
Unfinished list in my pocket:
regrets
loves
treasures.
A gopher breaks through the hardpan.
Where have all your brave words gone?

Nemesis' ivory face
glints.
A barn owl screams.
It's not over, until it's over.
Guffaw.
Unamused
Nemesis sets up the table
unfurls the chess board
bids me to move.
White pawn to e4.


- Bob Burnett

[Larry Robinson]

Like The Comet<o:p></o:p>

I´d like to sit where rhyme cannot reach me<o:p></o:p>https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2020-07-12_09-02-59.png
far from edges and limits, methods and axioms.<o:p></o:p>
Where two plus two is anything but four.<o:p></o:p>
Where fluid self mixes with everything<o:p></o:p>
and nothing remembers what it is.<o:p></o:p>
I´d like to lose myself only to find me again<o:p></o:p>
lying behind sunsets<o:p></o:p>
and let myself die one more time<o:p></o:p>
to follow the comet which, unannounced, <o:p></o:p>
lit up the stunned river of the night<o:p></o:p>
and showed us our original face.<o:p></o:p>





Como el cometa <o:p></o:p>
Quiero sentarme donde la rima no me alcance<o:p></o:p>
lejos de bordes y límites, métodos y axiomas.<o:p></o:p>
Donde dos más dos sea cualquier cosa menos cuatro.<o:p></o:p>
Donde el ser fluido se mezcle con todo<o:p></o:p>
y nada se acuerde de lo que es.<o:p></o:p>
Quiero perderme para volver a encontrarme<o:p></o:p>
tendida detrás de atardeceres<o:p></o:p>
y dejarme morir una vez más<o:p></o:p>
para seguir al cometa que sin aviso encendió<o:p></o:p>
el azorado río nocturno<o:p></o:p>
y nos volvió a mostrar nuestra cara original.<o:p></o:p>

- Virginia Francisco<o:p></o:p>
<o:p> </o:p>
<o:p> </o:p>

[Larry Robinson]

The Icelandic Language


In this language, no industrial revolution;
no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone;
only sheep, fish, horses, water falling.
The middle class can hardly speak it.


In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble
through dark and rain with a handful of rags.
The door groans; the old smell comes
up from under the earth to meet you.


But this language believes in ghosts;
chairs rock by themselves under the lamp; horses
neigh inside an empty gully, nothing
at the bottom but moonlight and black rocks.


The woman with marble hands whispers
this language to you in your sleep; faces
come to the window and sing rhymes; old ladies
wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam inside pancakes.


In this language, you can't chit-chat
holding a highball in your hand, can't
even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course,
all your grief and failure come clear at last.


Old inflections move from case to case,
gender to gender, softening consonants, darkening
vowels, till they sound like the sea moving
icebergs back and forth in its mouth.


- Bill Holm

[Larry Robinson]

Willing

Let me listen.
Let me not know what to say.
Let me receive the world
as it slurs and shrieks,
hums and whispers,
speaks and bleats.
Let me lean ever closer in.
There are walls I have built
in my ears. There is so much
I would rather not hear.
Let me listen.
Let me receive with wonder.
Let all be worthy of note.
Let me be witness, eavesdropper,
spy.
Let me never pretend
to be deaf.
Let the world slip into me
and change me
as light changes a room.
Let me be silent, let me listen,
and in listening,
let me be new.


- Rosemary Wahtola Trommer

[Larry Robinson]

Screen Time

Mirrors are one thing
I am there for hair
or to apply emollient
with purpose
then move on –
brief self-assessment
and that’s it

And before these times
of distance and screens,
when I was with you
I looked only at you
into your eyes
could see the subtle signs
of your life lived

Now I spend hours
looking at a gallery
of people almost there –
I am one of them

Grateful for the chance
to see you at all,
I can’t complain,
at least not about you.
I try not to look at myself
looking at you

but it’s hard not to observe
that I tend to tilt my head
so I experiment
left, right or straight
which is best?

Back to focusing on you
I am listening, really I am
but I can’t help but notice my wrinkly bits,
that my face is more serious than I feel
and do I look pale?
Do we all look pale?

- Margaret Barkley

[Larry Robinson]

The Silence of the Stars


When Laurens van der Post one night
In the Kalihari Desert told the Bushmen
He couldn't hear the stars
Singing, they didn't believe him. They looked at him,
Half-smiling. They examined his face
To see whether he was joking
Or deceiving them. Then two of those small men
Who plant nothing, who have almost
Nothing to hunt, who live
On almost nothing, and with no one
But themselves, led him away
From the crackling thorn-scrub fire
And stood with him under the night sky
And listened. One of them whispered,
Do you not hear them now?
And van der Post listened, not wanting
To disbelieve, but had to answer,
No. They walked him slowly
Like a sick man to the small dim
Circle of firelight and told him
They were terribly sorry,
And he felt even sorrier
For himself and blamed his ancestors
For their strange loss of hearing,
Which was his loss now. On some clear nights
When nearby houses have turned off their visions,
When the traffic dwindles, when through streets
Are between sirens and the jets overhead
Are between crossings, when the wind
Is hanging fire in the fir trees,
And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove
Between calls is regarding his own darkness,
I look at the stars again as I first did
To school myself in the names of constellations
And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,
I can still hear what I thought
At the edge of silence were the inside jokes
Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,
The C above high C of my inner ear, myself
Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:
My fair share of the music of the spheres
And clusters of ripening stars,
Of the songs from the throats of the old gods
Still tending even tone-deaf creatures
Through their exiles in the desert.


- David Wagoner

[Larry Robinson]

For Those Who Came Before

Silence that breaks the strongest of eardrums
The lynching rope's last whispers,
Cracking as it stretches before the awful truth
Of pure unrelenting ignorance.


Where innocence is crowned in thorns
Just as it was centuries before
To noble the cause of awakening.


The good buried deep
Remembered only vaguely by the grave digger,
Who unapologetically does his sole labor
To forget the past.


Erasing the deeds that mock harshly
Humanity's false imaginings
Of its evolved state.


Denial, whose Sunday preacher
Emancipates with sweat and spittle
Any doubts of conscience or equality
In the name of Jesus.


To whom any or all injustices can be righted
Tightly, like a taunt rope.


- Craig Bassett

[Larry Robinson]

Legacies


her grandmother called her from the playground
“yes, ma’am”
“i want chu to learn how to make rolls” said the old
woman proudly
but the little girl didn’t want
to learn how because she knew
even if she couldn’t say it that
that would mean when the old one died she would be less
dependent on her spirit so
she said
“i don’t want to know how to make no rolls”
with her lips poked out
and the old woman wiped her hands on
her apron saying “lord
these children”
and neither of them ever
said what they meant
and i guess nobody ever does


- Nikki Giovanni

[Larry Robinson]

You Reading This, Be Ready


Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along the shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?


Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?


When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life --


What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?


- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

Petrified Wood


In this moment,
the wind lofted branches
dance their familiar pine waltz.
And while the June snowfall clings,
the granite peaks remain
seemingly permanent, unchanging.
While elsewhere,
the virus dance destroys,
and cuts open inequities
to global view,

and rage
at the atrocities to which we are powerless,
channels
to meet the currents of rage
at the human atrocities we must control.


Here, the ancient deaths become rocks of treasure,
spawning new appreciation.
Yet, let us not take aeons -of grains as small as sand -
of empathy , compassion, and justice,

to bring us to treasure the present,
human, xylem and phloem of our communities.
Let us not wait
for the living gifts of our people
to turn to stone, before they are preserved.


- Renee Dryfoos

[Barry]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d8qZwLANbI&feature=youtu.be

[Larry Robinson]

Help Me, Love Poem


Help me, love poem, rise up from the broken glass,
The time to sing has come.
Help me, love poem, to reestablish integrity,
And to sing again about pain.


The world isn’t free of war, it’s true,
It isn’t washed of its blood, hate still exists,
It’s true.


But it’s also certain that we’re closer to a truth.
Violence sees itself in the mirror of the world
And its face is not even attractive to itself.


And I continue believing in the possibility of love.
I’m certain of that understanding among
Human beings, achieved over pain,
Over the broken glass.


- Pablo Neruda

[Larry Robinson]

Weather


On a scrap of paper in the archive is written

I have forgotten my umbrella. Turns out

in a pandemic everyone, not just the philosopher,

is without. We scramble in the drought of information

held back by inside traders. Drop by drop. Face

covering? No, yes. Social distancing? Six feet

under for underlying conditions. Black.

Just us and the blues kneeling on a neck

with the full weight of a man in blue.

Eight minutes and forty-six seconds.

In extremis, I can’t breathe gives way

to asphyxiation, to giving up this world,

and then mama, called to, a call

to protest, fire, glass, say their names, say

their names, white silence equals violence,

the violence of again, a militarized police

force teargassing, bullets ricochet, and civil

unrest taking it, burning it down. Whatever

contracts keep us social compel us now

to disorder the disorder. Peace. We’re out

to repair the future. There’s an umbrella

by the door, not for yesterday but for the weather

that’s here. I say weather but I mean

a form of governing that deals out death

and names it living. I say weather but I mean

a November that won’t be held off. This time

nothing, no one forgotten. We are here for the storm

that’s storming because what’s taken matters.

- Claudia Rankine

[Larry Robinson]

Huck




Where did you go my little one?
Your puppy paws and milky breath,
brown, spotted fur
with the eyes of Mary Oliver


You had me before we even made it home


Together we imbued our dream
of open car windows,
golden parks with butterfly ferns,
English Plane trees
where we practiced voice commands
that you would stay,
and I would soar with adorations


How could they take you away, my darling
How could I have already failed
in my duty to protect our sovereignty
They lied to my protective instincts
when they took you and your pink tummy
to be neutered


and then gave you away to someone else


I stand now in the dark
your open crate and your unsoiled blanket
apologizing to you
and our dream
of endless mornings, walks and tug-o-war


How they will have to wait, and wait
now with my tears -
an open braided-leash




- P. Gregory Guss

[Larry Robinson]

On Breathing


I held mine, at a cash point
by the police station
when I saw her kneel to speak
on his level, a mother telling
her not yet three year old son you don’t
need to be scared, we’ve done nothing
wrong, him nodding like he could see
the shape of her lie, like life had taught
him already that fear is for surviving
and in his innocence the boy brought
me to the tight of my chest at the sight
of the men in bullet proof vests by their
hi vis van, I felt for the phone in my pocket
heavy as untaught history where there on a timeline
a man in Ohio can’t decide if a mask
is more dangerous than his own face—
I want to live
but I also want to live
—I’m trying to take one here to get a grip
on what I mean but it's everywhere and
messy, while my friend wastes his in polite
debate with a man who can’t fathom
a life without his invisible upper hand
and a few months before this, when I refused
to watch that video, I gasped for mine
between guttural sobs on the sofa and
a man in Hackney gasped for his on the hospital
bed when the doctor tried to switch him off,
saying he’d been on for too long, saying
the ventilator needed to go to someone
who had a chance at life, his wife fought
to her last for his, wouldn’t leave the bedside
until he could inhale without coughing
and lord knows it's hard to speak when
you’re trying to catch yours, and how is it that
we’ve been running out of ours and not stopped
running, we’ve been chasing ours and it seems
the world wants to knock the wind out of us and
as I write this now, with another tab open on
respiration and stress relief, two men hover
in the sycamore outside my window, paid to cut
down the thing that’s been quietly, unequivocally
helping me inhale/exhale, this ordinary act
made sacred under the impossible weight
of a world that won’t tend to its wounds and
what becomes of a poem that’s run out of air
but refuses to end?


- Remi Graves

[Larry Robinson]

If Only…..




If only we had all worn masks…
If only every human had good medical coverage….
If only our nursing homes were safe….
If only every person listened to scientists and medical professionals…..
If only every person had a made a living wage to be able to save for a difficult time
If only our caring for others became more important that our selfishness
If only……..




If only we had conserved our natural resources
If only we had preserved our many forests
If only we had known the price of convenience over saving our air and oceans
If only we had invested in public transportation
If only we had listened to scientists’ warnings
If only we relied less on fossil fuels
If only we had realized the cost of unchecked growth on animal habitats, breeds of wildlife
If only we had realized that everything we do and how we live has an effect on nature
If only we all wanted a safe climate for the next generation
If only we could see that the worst is yet to come…..


- Karen Barnes

[Larry Robinson]

For John Lewis


In an age of outrage there is love.
In an age of fear there is love.
In an age of unspeakable grief and loss there is love.


Gratitude remains intact.
But we must act.


In an age of outrage, fear and grief
there is always love.


And always gratitude, kindness and compassion,
in action,
in the service of love.
In the service to the generations that follow.


- Janis Dolnick

[Larry Robinson]

Berry

Figural lugers rove-ovalling over ever dagger-doomed time-bend.
Sectioned seconds severed slightly, silently.
Space-slivers tomb-riddled busily biding dial-driven dome-dance, endemerail.
The minotaur a monitor a moonitude, dune-dumb, dancing.

Quiet please, a berry is breaking.
The juice is trickling strictly sweetly,
a temple treble, an ice-lit sky court,
a deep-pillared pentagonal pale-paved haven.

Five garden marble-maids breathe entrance, bow arches.
Astrally assembled, a circle assuming,
still-stationed sacredly, aspiring to spiral.

Split-lifted at prayer-point, swirl-hurling through the midnight noon.
Petalpure power pipe-reeling through ringrich rim-locks,
unpeeling the first mystery fruits myth-rhythmically.

Quiet please, a berry is breaking.
The pain is trickling strictly sweetly.
The stem is still ecstatic.


- Cindy Bishop

[Larry Robinson]

When I Am Among The Trees

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”



- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Poetry At The End Of The World


Indigenous peoples do not believe the world is ending.


The world is changing, they say.


Even before the scientists named climate change


The shamans knew it


When they saw the snow caps melting


The earth quaking and tilting


Animals and birds leaving


The Ocean rising


They say: The Earth is Changing. For the sixth time.


***


The Inuit ask: When all the ice melts, who will we be?


In Vanuatu they say: We have nowhere to go in this island.


The Kogi says: The Younger Brother is hurting our Mother


The Syrian refugees say: The war is caused by drought.


The Indian farmer says: I cannot pay my debts; I’d rather die.


The white man in Texas says: I will build me a bunker.


The white man in the White House says: I will build me a wall.


The Silicon Valley techie says: I will build spaceships to Mars.


The media mogul says: Let’s make more reality tv spectacles.


The religious say: God will provide.


***


In the meantime —


Fire says: I’m hungry


Water says: I am thirsty.


Fish says: I am choking on plastic


Bees say: Your chemicals make me sick.


Monarch butterflies ask: Where’s our habitat now?


***


Chthulune, Anthropocene,


Biomimicry, New materialism


Agential Realism, Inter and Intrasubjectivity


Mental monocropping, Hybridity


Indigenous Cosmopolitanism


Concepts roll off the brain but doesn’t land on the skin


***


Poetry at the end of the world is:


Silence


Elegant Disintegration


Just. Be. Kind.


Tender and Generous


***


Go barefoot often


Salute the Sun each morning


Say Goodnight, Moon.


Eat local and in season


***


I keep going because I belong to a village


Pay my debt for the privilege of being here for a few moments


Live poetically even if I am not a word poet


English is not my first tongue


***


Grieve now while you can


Build beautiful altars to Death


Sing and dance your prayers


Resist the temptation of bright-sidedness


Do not meditate away your grief


Do not write another self help book


Poems, yes.






- Leny Strobel

[Larry Robinson]

Irony


France forbid burkhas in its elegant cities,
Americans persecuted those with covered faces


Our President forbid the entry of those people into our country
Schools/universities made rules forbidding the strange coverings.


Must I go on?


God has played a wonderful trick on us all:
Wear the mask or die of a virus that is out of our control,
that is beyond our immigration rules
that does not see borders,
that is toys with the most intelligent minds on the planet,


mutating as I speak these very words, trying to survive in its primitive right.


Ah! irony. Now, even the male sex of the species,
required to cover their faces, except for those eyes,
the haunting eyes that look for recognition, connection.


May the Covid 19 teach us the Unity we actually are
and have its Darwinistic impact on those who remain arrogant.


- Jan Corbett

[Larry Robinson]

In the Eighties We Did the Wop




If you end your crusades for the great race,


then I will end my reenactments of flying,


and if you lean down to smell a painted trillium,


then I will cast a closer eye on those amber waves,


and if you stop killing black children,


then I will turn my drums to the sea and away from


your wounded mountains. Who mothered your love of death?


Here is a heart-shaped stone to rub when you feel fear rising;


give me anything, an empty can of Pabst, a plastic souvenir, a t-shirt from

Daytona.


Here is a first edition: The Complete Poems of Lucille Clifton.


Give me an ancient grove and a conversation by a creek, charms


to salve my griefs, something that says you are human,


and I will give you the laughter in my brain and the tranquil eyes of my uncles.


Show me your grin in the middle of winter.


In the eighties we did the wop; you, too, have your dances.


It is like stealing light from a flash in the sky. I promise:


no one is blaming you. No one is trying to replace you.


It’s just that you are carrying a tainted clock calling it European History,


standing in khakis, eyes frightened like a mess of beetles.


- Major Jackson

[Larry Robinson]

Drawings By Children




1


The sun may be visible or not
(it may be behind you,
the viewer of these pictures)
but the sky is always blue
if it is day.
If not,
the stars come almost within your grasp;
crooked, they reach out to you,
on the verge of falling.
It is never sunrise or sunset;
there is no bloody eye
spying on you across the horizon.
It is clearly day or night,
it is bright or totally dark,
it is here and never there.


2


In the beginning, you only needed
your head, a moon swimming in space,
and four bare branches;
and when your body was added,
it was light and thin at first,
not yet the dark chapel
from which, later, you tried to escape.
You lived in a non-Newtonian world,
your arms grew up from your shoulders,
your feet did not touch the ground,
your hair was streaming,
you were still flying.


3


The house is smaller than you remembered,
it has windows but no door.
A chimney sits on the gable roof,
a curl of smoke reassures you.
But the house has only two dimensions,
like a mash without its face;
the people who live there stand outside
as though time were always summer —
there is nothing behind the wall
except a space where the wind whistles,
but you cannot see that.


- Lisel Mueller

[Larry Robinson]

A Cry From Down The Rabbit Hole In The Time Of The Pandemic

I have gone
down the rabbit hole
chasing a bright
promise of information,
which I believed to be
the quick tail of elusive truth,
but so far, down here,
have scarcely gotten
even another glimpse!

You see, I thought I already
possessed that commodity:
that truth was safely inside me.
I pursued my daily
rounds of life with confidence,
eager to make my sojourn here
a vehicle for truth’s stamp
each time the sun came up.
Were those the days!
And in summer, I would travel
to faraway places and sometimes
my holiest spot on Earth,
to refresh those inner wellsprings.
Now my world has been fractured—
cloven asunder by Duality’s sword
in the form of bold voices
speaking into my world
what I considered nonsense,
with straight face
and many earnest points
and copious hyperlinks.
My confidence—
easily shaken when challenged,
a lifelong problem—
falters and I think:
“Could they be right?”

I languish in this rabbit hole
of dualistic parry-and-thrust,
for my Beloved of my heart says
all are One, and even more:
“Inscribe these words on your heart.
God alone is real.
Nothing matters but love for God.”*
Oh, Beloved!
How do I recover the vision
of Oneness You gave me,
which I enjoyed—
let’s not exaggerate, though,
it was never continuous—
before I dove
down this rabbit hole!
They call this cognitive dissonance,
a fancy name for confusion,
for a dragon whose smoke
obscures the clarity of Truth!
A virtual destruction
of the wholeness
I thought I knew.

Show me how to restore
the perception of Oneness
to my double-vision mental eye!

Those contrary voices:
How can I see they are You as well—
that there is no “right” or “wrong”,
but only You?

What am I not getting?
God was. God is. God will be.
How can I not see this?
Do what You must, Beloved!
Bang me on the head! Burn me alive!
Skin me and turn me inside out!
If this is all a pang of re-birth,
please, please, slap me on the ass
and get me the hell
out of here soon!

- Max Reif


“Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.”
Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

At the Bomb Testing Site


At noon in the desert a panting lizard
waited for history, its elbows tense,
watching the curve of a particular road
as if something might happen.


It was looking at something farther off
than people could see, an important scene
acted in stone for little selves
at the flute end of consequences.


There was just a continent without much on it
under a sky that never cared less.
Ready for a change, the elbows waited.
The hands gripped hard on the desert.


- William E. Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

How I Discovered Poetry


It was like soul-kissing, the way the words
filled my mouth as Mrs. Purdy read from her desk.
All the other kids zoned an hour ahead to 3:15,
but Mrs. Purdy and I wandered lonely as clouds borne by a breeze off Mount Parnassus.


She must have seen
the darkest eyes in the room brim:
The next day she gave me a poem she’d chosen especially for me
to read to the all except for me white class.
She smiled when she told me to read it, smiled harder, said oh yes I could.
She smiled harder and harder
until I stood and opened my mouth to banjo playing darkies, pickaninnies, disses and dats. When I finished my classmates stared at the floor. We walked silent
to the buses, awed by the power of words.


- Marilyn Nelson

[Larry Robinson]

Come to Hiroshima


to those who with no shame condone
annihilation of whole cities or nations
please come to Hiroshima
come in early August when the heat is worst
make sure you're there on the sixth
when the sweat running down your back
somehow feels appropriate
see the museum - learn what you can
imagine as deeply as possible what happened
and try to understand - why


to those who think we need atomic bombs
newer better more useable ones
as certain leaders now claim
please come to Hiroshima
walk through Peace Park
this epicenter - cemetery of ironic serenity
contemplate - meditate - try to understand
would we have done this to whites - dear Christians
here by the riverside thousands staggered to water
"mizu! mizu!" some couldn't even ask
for what could possibly relieve the burning


to those who think that war is still okay
sleepy as people used to be about slavery
come see the shattered wrecked dome
left in jagged shambles to remind us
see at sunset the paper lanterns
red blue and gold - inscribed with dreams
people lovingly made in the park all day
watch them float downstream candles aglow
like thousands of vanished souls
or beautiful hopes - for what might be possible
please come to Hiroshima
and bring pictures of your loved ones


- Ron Hertz

[Larry Robinson]

Here for Life

(Vandenberg Air Force Base, January 1983;
first blockade of the MX Missile test)


I am here —
I wear the old-ones’ jade —
it’s life, they said & precious,
turquoise I’ve sought to hone my vision,
& coral to cultivate the heart,
mother of pearl for purity.

I have put on what power I could
to tell you there are mountains
where the stones sleep —
hawks nest there
& lichens older than the ice is cold.

The sea is vast & deep
keeping secrets
darker than the rocks are hard.

I am here to tell you
the Earth is made of things
so much themselves
they make the angels kneel.
We walk among them
& they are certain as the rain is wet
& they are fragile as the pine is tall.

We, too, belong to them;
they count upon our singing,
the footfalls of our dance,
our children’s shouts, their laughter.

I am here for the unfinished song,
the uncompleted dance,
the healing,
the dreadful fakes of love.
I am here for life
& I will not go away.

- Rafael Jesús González


Aquí por vida

(Base de Fuerza Aérea de Vandenberg, enero 1983;
primer bloqueo de la prueba del proyectil nuclear MX)


Aquí estoy —
llevo el jade de los ancianos —
es la vida, decían, y preciosa,
turquesa que he buscado
para darle filo a mi visión,
y coral para cultivar el corazón,
madreperla para la pureza.

Me he puesto el poder que pude
para decirles que hay montañas
donde duermen las piedras —
los halcones anidan allí
y liquen más viejo
de lo que el hielo es frío.

El mar es vasto y profundo
guardando secretos
más oscuros
de lo que las rocas son duras.

Aquí estoy para decirles
que la Tierra es hecha de cosas
tan suyas mismas
que hacen a los ángeles arrodillarse.
Caminamos entre ellas
y son ciertas como la lluvia es húmeda
y son frágiles como el pino es alto.

Nosotros también les pertenecemos;
cuentan con nuestro cantar,
los pasos de nuestro bailar,
los gritos de nuestr@s hij@s, su risa.

Aquí estoy por la canción sin acabar,
el baile incompleto,
el sanar,
las terribles adujas del amor.
Aquí estoy por vida
y no me iré.

- Rafael Jesús González



To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only7 the worst, it destroys our capacity7 to do something. If we remember those times and places – and there are so many – where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
~ Howard Zinn

[Larry Robinson]

To World War Two


Early on you introduced me to young women in bars
You were large, and with a large hand
You presented them in different cities,
Made me in San Luis Obispo, drunk
On French seventy-fives, in Los Angeles, on pousse-cafe's.
It was a time of general confusion
Of being a body hurled at a wall.
I didn't do much fighting. I sat, rather I stood, in a foxhole.
I stood while the typhoon splashed us into morning.
It felt unusual
Even if for a good cause
To be part of a destructive force
With my rifle in my hands
And in my head
My serial number
The entire object of my existence
To eliminate Japanese soldiers
By killing them
With a rifle or with a grenade
And then, many years after that,
I could write poetry
Fall in love
And have a daughter
And think about these things
From a great distance
If I survived
I was "paying my debt
To society" a paid
Killer. It wasn't
like anything I'd done
Before, on the paved
Streets of Cincinatti
Or on the ballroom floor
At Mr. Vathe's dancing class
What would Anne Marie Goldsmith
Have thought of me
If instead of asking her to dance
I had put my BAR to my shoulder
And shot her in the face
I thought about her in my foxhole--
One, in a foxhole near me, has his throat cut during the night
We take precautions but it is night and it is you.
The typhoon continues and so do you.
"I can't be killed--because of my poetry. I have to live on in order to write
it."
I thought--even crazier thought, or just as crazy--
"If I'm killed while thinking of lines, it will be too corny
When it's reported" (I imagined it would be reported!)
So I kept thinking of lines of poetry. One that came to me on the beach on
Leyte
Was "The surf comes in like masochistic lions."
I loved this terrible line. It was keeping me alive. My Uncle Leo wrote to me,
"You won't believe this, but some day you may wish
You were footloose and twenty on Leyte again." I have never wanted
To be on Leyte again,
With you, whispering into my ear,
"Go on and win me! Tomorrow you might not be alive,
So do it today!" How could anyone win you?
You were too much for me, though I
Was older than you were and in camouflage. But for you
Who threw everything together, and had all the systems
Working for you all the time, this was trivial. If you could use me
You'd use me, and then forget. How else
Did I think you'd behave?
I'm glad you ended. I'm glad I didn't die. Or lose my mind.
As machines make ice
We made dead enemy soldiers, in
Dark jungle alleys, with weapons in our hands
That produced fire and kept going straight through
I was carrying one,
I who had gone about for years as a child
Praying God don't let there be another war
Or if there is, don't let me be in it. Well, I was in you.
All you cared about was existing and being won.
You died of a bomb blast in Nagasaki, and there were parades.
- Kenneth Koch

[Larry Robinson]

San Gregorio Sands


the last sweet drops of the tangerine sun
trickle down, and the surf is tangerine foam
San Gregorio sands are honey and gold
and the fog is waiting till we've gone on home

perfect day — there's a hawk there playing
where the warm air climbs up the rocky cliff
he can stay there floating forever
like a daydream balanced on the point of "if"

if I had my way, that tangerine sun
would stay floating right there like the lazy hawk
and San Gregorio sands would always be warm
for an hour of love and a barefoot walk

the road is twisty and the summer is hot
our bags are packed and we're ready to go
there's not much time but we'll take what we've got
when San Gregorio calls we don't say no

perfect day, and it's almost over
but there's two more sips of the cherry wine
we can stay for five more minutes
watching gulls play hopscotch at the water line

the sun is down, it's past time to go
I'll be back some day but I don't know when
San Gregorio sands will be honey and gold
I'll shed my shoes and be home again

- Elizabeth Fuller

[Larry Robinson]

Ode to the Joyful Ones




Shield your joyful ones.
—from an Anglican prayer


That they walk, even stumble, among us is reason
to praise them, or protect them—even the sound
of a lead slug dropped on a lead plate, even that, for them,
is music. Because they bring laughter’s
brief amnesia. Because they stand,
talking, taking pleasure in others,
with their hands on the shoulders of strangers
and the shoulders of each other.
Because you don’t have to tell them to walk toward the light.
Because if there are two pork chops
they will serve you the better one.
Because they will give you the crutch off their backs.
Because when there are two of them together
their shining fills the room.
Because you don’t have to tell them to walk toward the light.


- Thomas Lux

[Larry Robinson]

Sorrow Song

for the eyes of the children,
the last to melt,
the last to vaporize,
for the lingering
eyes of the children, staring,
the eyes of the children of
buchenwald,
of viet nam and johannesburg,
for the eyes of the children
of nagasaki,
for the eyes of the children
of middle passage,
for cherokee eyes, ethiopian eyes,
russian eyes, american eyes,
for all that remains of the children,
their eyes,
staring at us, amazed to see
the extraordinary evil in
ordinary men.

- Lucille Clifton

[Larry Robinson]

Two Suns In The Sunset


In my rear-view mirror the sun is going down
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyzfHmPJqM4
Sinking behind bridges in the road
I think of all the good things
That we have left undone
And I suffer premonitions
Confirm suspicions
Of the holocaust to come


The rusty wire
That holds the cork
That keeps the anger in
Gives way
And suddenly it's day again


The sun is in the east
Even though the day is done
Two suns in the sunset
Could be the human race is run


Like the moment when the brakes lock
And you slide towards the big truck (“Oh no!”)
You stretch the frozen moments with your fear


And you'll never hear their voices ("Daddy, Daddy!")
And you'll never see their faces
You have no recourse to the law anymore


And as the windshield melts
And my tears evaporate
Leaving only charcoal to defend
Finally I understand
The feelings of the few
Ashes and diamonds
Foe and friend
We were all equal in the end


- Roger Waters

[Larry Robinson]

We Have Come to Be Danced


We have come to be danced
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLzsaEwZ9tY&t=34s
not the pretty dance
not the pretty pretty, pick me, pick me dance
but the claw our way back into the belly
of the sacred, sensual animal dance
the unhinged, unplugged, cat is out of its box dance
the holding the precious moment in the palms
of our hands and feet dance

We have come to be danced
not the jiffy booby, shake your booty for him dance
but the wring the sadness from our skin dance
the blow the chip off our shoulder dance
the slap the apology from our posture dance

We have come to be danced
not the monkey see, monkey do dance
one, two dance like you
one two three, dance like me dance
but the grave robber, tomb stalker
tearing scabs & scars open dance
the rub the rhythm raw against our souls dance’’[‘]’]’’]];.;
;,

We have come to be danced
not the nice invisible, self conscious shuffle
but the matted hair flying, voodoo mama
shaman shakin’ ancient bones dance
the strip us from our casings, return our wings
sharpen our claws & tongues dance
the shed dead cells and slip into
the luminous skin of love dance

We have come to be danced
not the hold our breath and wallow in the shallow end of the floor dance
but the meeting of the trinity: the body, breath & beat dance
the shout hallelujah from the top of our thighs dance
the mother may I?
yes you may take 10 giant leaps dance
the Olly Olly Oxen Free Free Free dance
the everyone can come to our heaven dance

We have come to be danced
where the kingdom’s collide
in the cathedral of flesh
to burn back into the light
to unravel, to play, to fly, to pray
to root in skin sanctuary
We have come to be danced
WE HAVE COME

- Jewel Mathieson
(1958-2020)

[Larry Robinson]

Initiation Song from the Finders' Lodge


Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.


- Ursula LeGuin

[Larry Robinson]

The News

The big country beat the little country up
like a schoolyard bully,
so an even bigger country stepped in
and knocked it on its ass to make it nice,
which reminds me of my Uncle Bob’s
philosophy of parenting.
It’s August, I’m sitting on the porch swing,
touching the sores inside my mouth
with the tip of my tongue, watching the sun
go down in the west like a sinking ship,
from which a flood of stick orange bleeds out.
It’s the hour of meatloaf perfume emanating from the houses.
It’s the season of Little League practice
and atonal high school band rehearsals.
You can’t buy a beach umbrella in the stores till next year.
The summer beauty pageants are all over,
and no one I know won the swimsuit competition.
This year illness just flirted with me,
picking me up and putting me down
like a cat with a ball of yarn,
so I walked among the living like a tourist,
and I wore my health uneasily, like a borrowed shirt,
knowing I would probably have to give it back.
There are the terrible things that happen to you
and the terrible things that you yourself make happen,
like Frank, who gave his favorite niece
a little red sports car
for her to smash her life to pieces in.
And the girl on the radio sings,
You know what I’m talking about. Bawhoop, awhoop.
This year it seems like everyone is getting tattoos—
Great White sharks and Chinese characters,
hummingbirds and musical notes—
but the only tattoo I would want to get
is of a fist and a rose.
But I can’t tell how they will fit together on my shoulder.
If the rose is inside the fist, it will be crushed or hidden;
if the fist is closed, as a fist by definition is,
it cannot reach out to the rose.
Yet the only tattoo I want this year
is of a fist and rose, together.
Fist, that helps you survive.
Rose, without which
you have no reason to live.


- Tony Hoagland

[Larry Robinson]

2020 Walk to Salt Water

When they go low, we go high. Michele Obama
How low can you go? Chubby Checker

I.
A spring-loaded clip
unchains the first gate.
Our path heads for
a grey volcanic outcrop,
reminder that this bay
marks the fault line
at our country’s edge.

What relief to leave behind
the morning paper stories
of this small “p” president.
Of how he’s sending troops.
More troops to guard against
assemblies of his citizens
petitioning their government.

No, this afternoon we navigate
the gopher-riddled pasture ground
among pot-bellied angus, huge
quadrupeds that prance away
from us on tiny hooves.
II.
We come to the second gate
encrusted on both sides
by poison oak a well-oiled
green the red is overtaking.
My hand threads around
the post, unhooks the snap
and the gate swings wide.
Buttercups are humming
gold, color of truth.

Unwittingly the mind snags
on the contrast with this
very small “p” president;
he who made the Limbo
the Official White House
Dance by simply standing
there in place and speaking;
he who fabricates alternate facts
repronounced by the invertebrate
and/or blind loyalists he dupes
with nanoscopic honesty;
he who does- or can-
not read and yet rewrote the book
on lies told while in office.
III.
The third gate clip missing
its spring wants fiddling with.
We take note of and sidestep
bobcat or mountain lion scat
and hew to the trail’s contour
along the landscape slope.
A light wind carries my attention
across the field to purple asters,
yes, color of kings and queens.

What grand irony how this
smallest of all possible “p’s”
president tells the world over
and over that he’s the greatest
creature in the sea of life
when he is but blubber.

Nevertheless, this year again
he’s poisoning the well,
ranting how his opposition
schemes to cheat him out
of his imagined reelection.
Thus he delegitimizes ballots
that could well be delivered
by the US Postal Service
which he works to unravel
and thereby steal the vote.
IV.
The early fog is lifting
off the ridge―sky blue
infinity comes into focus.
We look upon salt water
although I refuse to weep.
Today’s gift of clarity moves me
to ask, with all humility,
O Lord, if one there be:

Grant that this imposter fin-al-ly
be made to go stand someplace else,
anyplace besides the office he holds
down with bogus bone-spurred feet;
Grant that every single eligible
person registers to vote;
and when the time does come
Grant that they do.

- Bill Greenwood

[Larry Robinson]

Waking


Get up from your bed,
go out from your house,
follow the path you know so well,
so well that you now see nothing
and hear nothing
unless something can cry loudly to you ,
and for you it seems
even then
no cry is louder than yours
and in your own darkness
cries have gone unheard
as long as you can remember.


These are hard paths we tread
but they are green
and lined with leaf mould
and we must love their contours
as we love the body branching
with its veins and tunnels of dark earth.


I know that sometimes
your body is hard like a stone
on a path that storms break over,
embedded deeply
into that something that you think is you,
and you will not move
while the voice all around
tears the air
and fills the sky with jagged light.


But sometimes unawares
those sounds seem to descend
as if kneeling down into you and you listen strangely caught
as the terrible voice moving closer
halts,
and in the silence
now arriving
whispers


Get up, I depend
on you utterly.
Everything you need
you had
the moment before
you were born.


- David Whyte

[Larry Robinson]

To Susan B. Anthony on her eightieth birthday






To Susan B. Anthony
on her eightieth birthday
February 15, 1900


I


My honored friend, I’ll ne’er forget,
That day in June, when first we met:
Oh! would I had the skill to paint
My vision of that “Quaker Saint”:
Robed in pale blue and silver gray,
No silly fashions did she essay:
Her brow so smooth and fair,
‘Neath coils of soft brown hair:
Her voice was like the lark, so clear,
So rich, and pleasant to the ear:
The “‘Prentice hand,” on man oft tried,
Now made in her the Nation’s pride!


II


We met and loved, ne’er to part,
Hand clasped in hand, heart bound to heart.
We’ve traveled West, years together,
Day and night, in stormy weather:
Climbing the rugged Suffrage hill,
Bravely facing every ill:
Resting, speaking, everywhere;
Oft-times in the open air;
From sleighs, ox-carts, and coaches,
Besieged with bugs and roaches:
All for the emancipation
Of the women of our Nation.


III


Now, we’ve had enough of travel.
And, in turn, laid down the gavel,—
In triumph having reached four score,
We’ll give our thoughts to art, and lore.
In the time-honored retreat,
Side by side, we’ll take a seat,
To younger hands resign the reins,
With all the honors, and the gains.
United, down life’s hill we’ll glide,
What’er the coming years betide;
Parted only when first, in time,
Eternal joys are thine, or mine.


- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
(1815-1902)

[Larry Robinson]

A Woman Speaks


Moon marked and touched by sun
my magic is unwritten
but when the sea turns back
it will leave my shape behind.
I seek no favor
untouched by blood
unrelenting as the curse of love
permanent as my errors
or my pride
I do not mix
love with pity
nor hate with scorn
and if you would know me
look into the entrails of Uranus
where the restless oceans pound.


I do not dwell
within my birth nor my divinities
who am ageless and half-grown
and still seeking
my sisters
witches in Dahomey
wear me inside their coiled cloths
as our mother did
mourning.


I have been woman
for a long time
beware my smile
I am treacherous with old magic
and the noon's new fury
with all your wide futures
promised
I am
woman
and not white.


- Audre Lorde

[Larry Robinson]

If, On Account Of The Political Situation




If, on account of the political situation,


there are quite a number of homes without roofs, and men


Lying about in the countryside neither drunk nor asleep,


If all sailings have been cancelled till further notice,


If it's unwise now to say much in letters, and if,


Under the subnormal temperatures prevailing,


The two sexes are at present the weak and the strong,


That is not at all unusual for this time of year.


If that were all, we should know how to manage. Flood, fire,


The dessication of grasslands, restraint of princes,


Piracy on the high seas, physical pain and fiscal grief,


These are after all our familiar tribulations,


And we have been through them all before, many, many times.


As events which belong to the natural world where


The occupation of space is the real and final fact


And time turns round itself in an obedient circle,


They occur again and again but only to pass


Again and again into their formal opposites,


From sword to ploughshare, coffin to cradle, war to work,


So that, taking the bad with the good, the pattern composed


By the ten thousand odd things that can possibly happen


Is permanent in a general average way.


Till lately we knew of no other, and between us we seemed


To have what it took -- the adrenal courage of the tiger,


The chameleon's discretion, the modesty of the doe,


Or the fern's devotion to spatial necessity:


To practice one's peculiar civic virtue was not


So impossible after all; to cut our losses


And bury our dead was really quite easy. That was why


We were always able to say: "We are children of God,


And our Father has never forsaken His people."


But then we were children: That was a moment ago,


Before an outrageous novelty had been introduced


Into our lives. Why were we never warned? Perhaps we were.


Perhaps that mysterious noise at the back of the brain


We noticed on certain occasions -- sitting alone


In the waiting room of the country junction, looking


Up at the toilet window -- was not indigestion


But this Horror starting already to scratch Its way in?


Just how, just when It succeeded we shall never know:


We can only say that now It is there and that nothing


We learnt before It was there is now of the slightest use,


For nothing like It has happened before. It's as if


We had left our house for five minutes to mail a letter,


And during that time the living room had changed places


With the room behind the mirror over the fireplace;


It's as if, waking up with a start, we discovered


Ourselves stretched out flat on the floor, watching our shadow


Sleepily stretching itself at the window. I mean


That the world of space where events reoccur is still there,


Only now it's no longer real; the real one is nowhere


Where time never moves and nothing can ever happen:


I mean that although there's a person we know all about


Still bearing our name and loving himself as before,


That person has become a fiction; our true existence


Is decided by no one and has no importance to love.


That is why we despair; that is why we would welcome


The nursery bogey or the winecellar ghost, why even


The violent howling of winter and war has become


Like a juke-box tune that we dare not stop. We are afraid


Of pain but more afraid of silence; for no nightmare


Of hostile objects could be as terrible as this Void.


This is the Abomination. This is the wrath of God.


- W.H. Auden

[Roland Jacopetti]

·

Hi, Larry. Thanks for the Auden.
Roland

[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

[Larry Robinson]

The Inheritance


around the table
each taking a turn
they described how everything was lost
when the fire roared through


speaking last, the 74 year old grandmother ...
well, that fire did me a favor
those lousy kids of mine
didn't want that house or my stuff
four generations of it
so
the fire saved me
a lot of trouble trying to figure out
what to do with it


hate to say it
but those three of mine
turned out to be
mean insensitive people
and they can go to hell


i've already moved into a furnished apartment
and am doing quite well
but when i think back to watching it burn
my god, it still hurts yes. it does.


- Richard Retecki

[Larry Robinson]

What We Packed at 3 A.M.



The dog

the drugs


The cash

the cards


The elder neighbors who couldn’t drive


We packed our fear

though it couldn’t be contained


We crawled in our cars

as the fire raced


through its feast

of everything


of everyone

or everyone’s dreams


Everywhere we looked

RED RED


We called friends in the hills

No answer


We cried Jesus Christ!

No answer


The fire jumped and morphed

and ate some more


Garage doors wouldn’t open

Trees blocked the roads


The red sky

grew wider and taller


and shot its off-springs

into the air


to ignite their own

smorgasbords


We unpacked our prayers

to all the gods


we don’t believe in

And when we reached safety


we watched our phones

(we packed those, too)


for news and it

wasn’t good.


Yes, we had each other.

Yes, we were alive.


But our world,

our beautiful Sonoma County world


What we packed

wasn’t the mountains


wasn’t the deer

the coyotes, the quail


wasn’t the mountain lions

or mountain lakes


wasn’t Willi’s

or Fountaingrove


wasn’t Coffey Park

or the field of larks


or the knowledge

it would take two weeks


to get back home

or that home would still


be there

or that the gorgeous golden grass


just outside our windows

would change overnight


into candles waving

their virgin wicks


- Katherine Hastings

[Larry Robinson]

Ashes Among the Remains


My father responded
Just throw them away
I did not nor did I cast them into
ocean or bay where we’d fished
flounder and fluke nor strew them
over the golf courses where he’d hit
multistage rockets rising from half an inch
then to a foot above fairways
to summarily explode
hundreds of yards into the future
other worldly fireworks released
by his elegantly compact fury.
Instead I left them in their box
a golden shiny tin ossuary
next to my mother’s on the top shelf
of my bedroom closet
where I did not have to make decisions
and I incidentally could visit them daily
until our house burned down
in the California wildfires
October Ninth 2017
I don’t intend here to dwell upon
the nightmare that fire is
I will not detail the feelings we had
as we evacuated in one of our cars
along with the family terrier and nothing else
though later we did contemplate
Dad’s and Mom’s remains further
consumed by 1500 degree flames
extending their years-earlier incineration
in an oven at the crematorium near Petaluma.
Were it not that my parents lived well into
their nineties I so sick depressed and barely 74
might feel prepared to let go of the tangible rim
to the bottomless jar of all that remains
to the what or the where or the not.


- Ed Coletti

[Larry Robinson]

Letter to My Great-Grandchildren


Dear Chance and Aurora,


Maybe your grandparents
told you about this, maybe not.
When they were a young couple
raising your mom & dad
the world changed overnight.


One day we hiked the yellow hills
danced to jam bands
marched by the thousands in protest.
We lounged in cafes & hugged our friends
just the way you do now.


But the world changed overnight.
It was like a war
everyone fighting the enemy of illness.
We had to stay at home &
walk six feet apart.


The stores were shuttered
& the theaters boarded up.
Restaurants closed because
they couldn’t pay the rent.
The enemy was a virus that knew how to kill.


At first we cried, shocked
with grief & fear.
Then the clocks melted.
We bit our nails & held our children close.
Some folks died, others used words to comfort us.


Gradually, we came to our senses
& did what we could.
We found new ways to visit
read poems to our neighbors
over fences, played music in empty lots.


Though parks were closed, we still went on walks.
Everywhere, there were masked faces.
The dogs thought it funny that humans were muzzled.
The trees sighed deep sighs & the wildflowers
bloomed in shades we’d never seen.


- Sande Anfang

[Larry Robinson]

Kindness


Before you know what kindness really is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCkjSUb7K5o
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Shepherd]

This is a most important poem for our time--extending kindness, even to those whom we disagree with. Larry Robinson is indeed our poet laureate, who must spend much time most days reading poems and then sharing them with us.


·

[REALnothings]

Always happy to see this poem, and always try to pass it on as much as I can.
I agree it's one of the most important, most universal poems of our time...
the most "Medicine" in a short poem, that I can think of...a gift for literally EVERYONE who sees or hears it.
:heart:

[Larry Robinson]

Returning to Kindness


I am returning to kindness
a place where I am strong in my softness
I will start by kissing all of my scars
and washing them in rain
collecting dust from long journeys off my feet.

The way they carry weariness

from crossing rivers that should
have had bridges.
I will return to build crossing

paths over waters
that reminded me to

be kind


- Tapiwa Mugabe

[Larry Robinson]

Some Girls


Some girls can’t help it; they are lit sparklers,
hot-blooded, half naked in the depths of winter,
tagging moving trains with the bright insignia of their
fury.
I’ve seen their inked torsos: falcons, swans, meteor
showers.
And shadowed their secret rendezvous,
walking and flying all night over paths traced like veins
through the deep body of the forest
where they are trying on their new wings,
rising to power with a ferocious mercy
not seen before in the cities of men.
Having survived slander, abuse, and every kind of exile,
they’re swooping down even now
from treetops where they were roosting,
wearing robes woven of spider webs and pigeon
feathers.
They have pulled the living child out of the flames
and are prepared to take charge through the coming
apocalypse.
I have learned that some girls are boys; some are birds,
some are oases ringed with stalking lions. See,
I cannot even name them,
although one of them is looking out through my eyes
right now,
one of them
is writing all this down with light-struck fingers.


- Alison Luterman

[REALnothings]

This is WONDERFUL! It says all I feel and have always felt about "some girls"!
:waccosun::heart:

[Larry Robinson]

A Prayer for the Post Office


This is a non-partisan prayer
about something as mundane as mail,
as gentle as the swish of a letter
falling to the floor by the door.
This is a prayer
for stamps and stamp collectors,
the quietest of hobbies;
for pen-pals and thank you card writers,
for grandparents who always remember your birthday,
and love letters from the war,
kept at the bottom of a drawer.
This is a prayer
for the quiet dignity of the blue mailbox
standing like a sentinel on the corner,
portal to anywhere, for just the cost of a stamp.
Walking to the mailbox
down the block and around the corner
was my daughter’s first independent adventure,
the responsibility of an envelope,
addressed and ready in her small, serious hand.
Her nervous departure from the front door, alone,
and her triumphant return minutes later.
“I did it mama, I mailed the letter all by myself!”
Do you remember, the wonder of it?
Dropping a letter in one place,
mouth of the box swinging open and shut,
eating the envelope like cookie monster,
only to have that same letter reappear, days later,
in another place?
It is a mundane miracle.
When I was a teenager, learning how to drive
my mother set up garbage cans in front of our house
so I could practice parallel parking.
Our mailman, swinging by from house to house
stopped with a big smile to shout,
“turn the wheel! Cut it hard, that’s right, now straighten it out!”
His brown arm waving in circles
as we both grinned with the joy of it.
A simple thing, feeling like part of something -
a community, maybe - where mail carriers
and teenage drivers were all part of the same world.
I remember how quickly he would run up and down the front steps, even in the hot and humid summer.
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
This is a prayer for the carriers on their routes
The clerk at the window
The backroom sorters and the delivery truck drivers
Moving mountains one piece at a time.
Passing along that which was entrusted to them:
Electric bills,
bank statements,
birthday cards
…ballots.
Hear us, God of the taken-for-granted things,
Divine mystery of overnight delivery,
Spirit of Civic Life,
may we preserve this minor magic
of letter and stamp, scale and package,
sorting machine and postbox,
so that our children do not shake their heads
and wonder at all the things we allowed to slip away.



- Rev. Julia Hamilton

[Larry Robinson]

Green Apples

In August we carried the old horsehair mattress
To the back porch
And slept with our children in a row.
The wind came up the mountain into the orchard
Telling me something:
Saying something urgent.
I was happy.
The green apples fell on the sloping roof
And rattled down.
The wind was shaking me all night long;
Shaking me in my sleep
Like a definition of love,
Saying, this is the moment,
Here, now.

- Ruth Stone

[Larry Robinson]

Bullet Points

I will not shoot myself
In the head, and I will not shoot myself
In the back, and I will not hang myself
With a trash bag, and if I do,
I promise you, I will not do it
In a police car while handcuffed
Or in the jail cell of a town
I only know the name of
Because I have to drive through it
To get home. Yes, I may be at risk,
But I promise you, I trust the maggots
Who live beneath the floorboards
Of my house to do what they must
To any carcass more than I trust
An officer of the law of the land
To shut my eyes like a man
Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet
So clean my mother could have used it
To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will
Do it the same way most Americans do,
I promise you: cigarette smoke
Or a piece of meat on which I choke
Or so broke I freeze
In one of these winters we keep
Calling worst. I promise if you hear
Of me dead anywhere near
A cop, then that cop killed me. He took
Me from us and left my body, which is,
No matter what we’ve been taught,
Greater than the settlement
A city can pay a mother to stop crying,
And more beautiful than the new bullet
Fished from the folds of my brain.

- Jericho Brown

[Larry Robinson]

Earthseed


There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.



When apparent stability disintegrates,
As it must —
God is Change —
People tend to give in
To fear and depression,
To need and greed.
When no influence is strong enough
To unify people
They divide.
They struggle,
One against one,
Group against group,
For survival, position, power.
They remember old hates and generate new ones,
They create chaos and nurture it.
They kill and kill and kill,
Until they are exhausted and destroyed,
Until they are conquered by outside forces,
Or until one of them becomes
A leader
Most will follow,
Or a tyrant
Most fear.



When vision fails
Direction is lost.


When direction is lost
Purpose may be forgotten.


When purpose is forgotten
Emotion rules alone.


When emotion rules alone,
Destruction… destruction.



Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.


Are you Earthseed?
Do you believe?
Belief will not save you.
Only actions
Guided and shaped
By belief and knowledge
Will save you.
Belief
Initiates and guides action —
Or it does nothing.



Kindness eases Change.


- Octavia Butler

[Larry Robinson]

Anthropocene

Even the word feels claustrophobic
Like endless lines and crowds
Of one color only. A species

Alone without context.
How lonely we have made
Ourselves, how poor.

It is not survival,
But greed that guides, drives
Us, leaves us lonely

On a denuded plain,
Without the container, the completion
Of other life to embrace us.

What will we do when only people
Populate our planet, our poems?
Who will we be

When we’ve forgotten our companions,
The oak, the fox, the prairie grass and
The hen hidden within.

Who will we be when
All around us
Are mirrors and madness?


- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

Bearing Witness

Sometimes we are asked to stop and bear witness:
this, the elephants say to me in dreams
as they thunder through the passageways
of my heart, disappearing
into a blaze of stars. On the edge
of the 6th mass extinction, with species
vanishing before our eyes, we’d be a people
gone mad, if we did not grieve.

This unmet grief,
an elder tells me, is the root
of the root of the collective illness
that got us here. His people
stay current with their grief—
they see their tears as medicine—
and grief a kind of generous willingness
to simply see, to look loss in the eye,
to hold tenderly what is precious,
to let the rains of the heart fall.

In this way, they do not pass this weight on
in invisible mailbags for the next generation
to carry. In this way, the grief doesn’t build
and build like sets of waves, until,
at some point down the line—
it simply becomes an unbearable ocean.

We are so hungry when we are fleeing
our grief, when we are doing all
we can to distract ourselves
from the crushing heft of the unread
letters of our ancestors.
Hear us, they call. Hear us.

In my dreams, the elephants stampede
in herds, trumpeting, shaking the earth.
It is a kind of grand finale, a last parade
of their exquisite beauty. See us, they say.
We may not pass this way again.

What if our grief, given as a sacred offering,
is a blessing not a curse?
What if our grief, not hidden away in corners,
becomes a kind of communion where we shine?
What if our grief becomes a liberation song
that returns us to our innocence?
What if our fierce hearts
could simply bear witness?

- Laura Weaver

50140

[Larry Robinson]

Ovid in Tears


Love is like a garden in the heart, he said.
They asked him what he meant by garden.
He explained about gardens. “In the cities,” he said,
“there are places walled off where color
and decorum are magnified into a civilization.
Like a beautiful woman,” he said.
How like a woman they asked. He remembered their wives
and said garden was just a figure of speech,
then called for drinks all around. Two rounds later
he was crying. Talking about how Charlemagne
couldn’t read, but still had made a world. About Hagia
Sofia and putting a round dome on a square
base after nine hundred years of failure.
The hand holding him slipped, and he fell.
“White stone in the while sunlight,” he said
as they picked him up. “Not the
great fires burning at the edge of the world.” His voice grew
fainter as they carried him away. “Both the melody
and the symphony. The imperfect dancing
in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.”




- Jack Gilbert

[Larry Robinson]

A Day is Coming


A day is coming
in which misery will end.
A day is coming
in which poverty
will open bank accounts
in every nation.
A day is coming.
I hear it coming.
A day is coming
in which the
campesino
will gather his children a green spring
and go on vacations.
I believe it.
I see it.
A day is coming
in which a soldier will be
decorated
for helping
instead of killing
his poor brother.
A day is coming
in which lovers
will serve themselves from large bowls
warm love and faithfulness.
A day is coming
in which the Christ who returns
is the Christ who never left.
A day is coming
in which the father will ask the son
for friendship
instead of respect.
A day is coming
in which the student
and a poor laborer
will be half and half.
A day is coming
in which the prisoners
come out
running in the fields and shouting
about their freedom.
A day is coming,
I see it coming.


- Lalo Delgado

[Larry Robinson]

The Field That Prays



Prayer weaves its colorful strands
As we wander around the field
Inside the circle we cast in awe
Of the center where nothing resides.

We imagine our souls go there
After we die alone or perhaps
We land in this empty field
To dream of wild black horses

While we are asleep.
The young ones wonder
If we elders will survive.
Why not? The goddess has plans

For us, even as we stand here
And wait to see what will happen.
This field unites us as we watch
Dry lightning and thunder meet.

The trees dance and the winds
Insist we change. Will the fires
Teach us to walk outside the path
Of amazement? While inside

This field, ancient stones cascade,
Inscribing the events of our tumbling
Lives. All that matters now is

The field’s magnetic force. “This is
My body and my blood,” they say.
“We receive and give to you our all.”
What if this wait is of our own making?

Surely the facts will not lead us out
Of this morass. We are part of something
Far greater than ourselves. Winding around
The field’s edge, we stumble into the realm

Of prayer. Outside the field is the fire,
Inside prayer, the flowing vessel of love.
We wait, engulfed by feelings, the emotions
Not of our own making.

The prayers are making us.



- Patria Brown

[Larry Robinson]

What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.

- Phillip Levine

[Larry Robinson]

I Think Continually of Those


I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.


What is precious is never to forget
The delight of the blood drawn from ancient springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth;
Never to deny its pleasure in the simple morning light,
Nor its grave evening demand for love;
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.


Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass,
And by the streamers of white cloud,
And whispers of wind in the listening sky;
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
Born of the sun, they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.


- Stephen Spender
50152

[Larry Robinson]

Fire's Pieta



Sitting legs open wide on the black ground
she cradles the burned llama
against the fullness of her body.


An officer with a shotgun
approaches in the lower left,
come to perform a final, brutal mercy.


She waits.
Her eyes are lowered.
I imagine she is rocking,
crooning.


- Ruah Bull

[Larry Robinson]

September Meditation


I do not know if the seasons remember their history or if the days and
nights by which we count time remember their own passing.
I do not know if the oak tree remembers its planting or if the pine
remembers its slow climb toward sun and stars.
I do not know if the squirrel remembers last fall's gathering or if the
bluejay remembers the meaning of snow.
I do not know if the air remembers September or if the night remembers
the moon.
I do not know if the earth remembers the flowers from last spring or if
the evergreen remembers that it shall stay so.
Perhaps that is the reason for our births - to be the memory for
creation.
Perhaps salvation is something very different than anyone ever expected.
Perhaps this will be the only question we will have to answer:
"What can you tell me about September?"

- Burton D. Carley

[Larry Robinson]

Waiting for the Fire



Not just the temples, lifting

lotuses out of the tangled trees,

not the moon on cool canals,

the profound smell of the paddies,

evening fires in open doorways,

fish and rice the perfect end of wisdom;

but the small bones, the grace, the voices like

clay bells in the wind, all wasted.


If we ever thought of the wreckage

of our unnatural acts,

we would never sleep again

without dreaming a rain of fire:

somewhere God is bargaining for Sodom,

a few good men could save the city; but

in that dirty corner of the mind

we call the soul

the only wash that purifies is tears,

and after all our body counts,

our rape, our mutilations,

nobody here is crying; people who would weep

at the death of a dog

stroll these unburned streets dry-eyed.


But forgetfulness will never walk

with innocence; we save our faces

at the risk of our lives, needing

the wisdom of losses, the gift of despair,

or we could kill again.


Somewhere God is haggling over Sodom:

for the sake of ten good people

I will spare the land.

Where are all those volunteers

to hold back the fire? Look:

when the moon rises over the sea,

no matter where you stand,

the path of the light comes to you.


- Philip Appleman

[Larry Robinson]

Leap

A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.

Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.

The mayor reported the mist.

A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes.

Tiffany Keeling saw fireballs falling that she later realized were people. Jennifer Griffin saw people falling and wept as she told the story. Niko Winstral saw people free-falling backwards with their hands out, like they were parachuting. Joe Duncan on his roof on Duane Street looked up and saw people jumping. Henry Weintraub saw people “leaping as they flew out.” John Carson saw six people fall, “falling over themselves, falling, they were somersaulting.” Steve Miller saw people jumping from a thousand feet in the air. Kirk Kjeldsen saw people flailing on the way down, people lining up and jumping, “too many people falling.” Jane Tedder saw people leaping and the sight haunts her at night. Steve Tamas counted fourteen people jumping and then he stopped counting. Stuart DeHann saw one woman’s dress billowing as she fell, and he saw a shirtless man falling end over end, and he too saw the couple leaping hand in hand.

Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.

But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the window holding hands.

I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell. Maybe they didn’t even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped, and fell endlessly into the smoking canyon, at two hundred miles an hour, falling so far and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the pavement near Liberty Street so hard that there was a pink mist in the air.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold onto that.

- Brian Doyle

[Larry Robinson]

Notice What This Poem Is Not Doing

The light along the hills in the morning
comes down slowly, naming the trees
white, then coasting the ground for stones to nominate.
Notice what this poem is not doing.
A house, a house, a barn, the old
quarry, where the river shrugs--
how much of this place is yours?
Notice what this poem is not doing.
Every person gone has taken a stone
to hold, and catch the sun. The carving
says, "Not here, but called away."
Notice what this poem is not doing.
The sun, the earth, the sky, all wait.
The crowns and redbirds talk. The light
along the hills has come, has found you.
Notice what this poem has not done.


- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

Photograph from September 11


They jumped from the burning floors—
one, two, a few more,
higher, lower.


The photograph halted them in life,
and now keeps them
above the earth toward the earth.


Each is still complete,
with a particular face
and blood well hidden.


There’s enough time
for hair to come loose,
for keys and coins
to fall from pockets.


They’re still within the air’s reach,
within the compass of places
that have just now opened.


I can do only two things for them—
describe this flight
and not add a last line.


- Wislawa Szymborska
(Translated by Clare Cavanagh)

[Larry Robinson]

A Walk


My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance--


and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave. . .
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.


- Rainer Maria Rilke
( translated by Robert Bly)

[Ronaldo]

Ron Rozewski and Tom Bissinger hiking in Olympali State Park 2018. Tom is a fan of Robert Bly.

50195


·

[Larry Robinson]

A Time of Waking

It is a time of waking with morning tears
and a time of mourning.

It is a time of waking to the smell of death
in smoke filled air.

A smell so strong it penetrates the waters
and arises within the waters.

It is a death so vast it will not have a name on this earth but only beyond in the reaches of time and space.

It is a death that is now hollowing out what is in our vision, leaving a thinning veil of the beauty of life we have known.

It is a death that will now be known to the young.

It is a death with sorrows that no well can hold.

It is a death that visits the poverty of the mind and is known to the lingering spirits that live in the forever world.

It is a time of waking with morning tears and a time of mourning.



- Jeff Rooney

[Larry Robinson]

Control Burn

What the Indians
here
used to do, was,
to burn out the brush every year.
in the woods, up the gorges,
keeping the oak and pine stands
tall and clear
with grasses
and kitkitdizzie under them,
never enough fuel there
that a fire could crown.

Now, manzanita,
(a fine bush in its right)
crowds up under the new trees
mixed up with logging slash
and a fire can wipe out all.

Fire is the old story.
I would like,
with a sense of helpful order,
with respect for laws
of nature,
to help my land
with a burn, a hot clean
burn
…..(manzanita seeds will only open
…..after a fire passes over
…..or once passed through a bear)
And then
it would be more
like,
when it belonged to the Indians

Before.



- Gary Snyder

[Ronaldo]

Poetry reading at Ft. Ross, 2019

50216


·

[Ronaldo]

Correction, 2013

50217

·

[Larry Robinson]

Winter in Wisconsin


Let me tell you about winter in Wisconsin.
How the sun struggles to make an appearance at all
before it gives up and slinks from the sky,
leaving the school kids to tote their heavy backpacks
home in darkness.
How the nights stretch and stretch
like some cruel magician’s trick
where the rope of scarves never ends,
and month after frigid month
stumbles forward on frost-bitten feet.


Suddenly, one morning, the light feels less meek.
The mercury wills its way past 40
and the mounds of sooty snow begin to sweat.
Children and puppies explode out doors
like champagne corks,
while translucent men strip their shirts
and gleam in the startling sunlight.
Young girls – goose pimples be damned! –
pull their shorts from the bottom of the drawer.
The lawns fill with Frisbees and runners and the laughter
of a carnival, or collective madness.


In a way, we are all enduring winter in Wisconsin now:
Hunkered down in our homes,
we read or watch movies.
We bake and clean out the back closet,
paint the living room,
biding our time, biding our time,
while anticipation churns like a gathering storm
as we wait, impatiently, for spring.


- Melissa Kelley

[Larry Robinson]

How the Land Talks

I am the Keeper of the Mysteries.
What I know is only understood in the imaginal realms, hence I often keep still.
I know why the seasons turn and how truth is not fathomed in clean, neat prose.
I have held the mysteries in myself. I contain multitudes.
I embrace opposites.
I am formed from paradox.
I rein in the mysteries.
Life, death, and rebirth are the steps of my dance.
Metaphor is my landscape.
I am the vast canvas maintaining the space where beings offer themselves to each other.
I clasp all the dry trees of my chaparral savannah in its red, crusty soil.
Madrone and manzanita ruled among knob cone pine, luxurious in youth, scraggly with age.
The tan oaks scatter acorns all over the rolling hills.
Under me is where the deep water flows. It is hard water, packed with minerals.
I am the One whose forms receive the fire and rain, the earthquake and plague.
My depths take in ash pits, smoldering leaves, and embers falling from the forest’s canopy.
I am the One who charts the Great Migrations.
I open with the Sun, who radiates on the trees of life the beauty that captivates all beings.
I am the One whose meadows uphold slender legs adorned with golden brown skin.
My canyons carry paws that slink silently, echoing the limestone’s stark face.
I am the One whose duff is stampeded with others, close, connected in my sweet, dusty face.
My ridges hold a travel that goes farther than humans could ever understand.



- Patria Brown

[Larry Robinson]

When Great Trees Fall


When great trees fall,50290
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.
When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.
Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of
dark, cold
caves.
And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

- Maya Angelou

[Ronaldo]

502910


·

[Larry Robinson]

Smoke


Moon sinks orange.
Sky dims.
A shade drawn.
A curtain.
A blind.


Smoke is gone.
Maybe.


Occluded sky cries Pomo words:
dacha:la (sun,)-da- (moon,)- thothol (star.)


And, the broken sun rises phosphorescent,
blood spilled, red as abuse.


And, stars suck breath from earth.
Fall into another eternity.


And, waves roll backwards sweeping the sea.
Fish, mammals, birds swallowed.


What if we never escape?


If waves keep rolling backwards?


Horizon dissolves like a wound
inside a body
dead on a steel table.




- Pamela Stone Singer

[Larry Robinson]

The Book Of Life

The local gossip is of the last hummingbird.
For a moment
at sunset
the tulip poplar
stood wistfully holding its ragged leaves.
The last
or almost the last
sailboat against the eastern shore.
It was cold this morning.
In mid-August
there were seven hummingbirds
sparring at the feeder.
Now, alone on his bench
above the brittle cliff,
nursing an old-fashioned,
this picaro
remembers barefoot frolicking
on childhood’s bright sand.
He loves the gossip.

The gossip of hummingbirds in a season of
political
mendacity, the book of life barely
open, is at least
the acknowledgement that a good
woman lived her eighty-seven
years
with grace & determination, wit, a sharp-
edged
steady
commitment to what, as the sun wraps up its
picnic
blanket, appears so damned
obvious: we are called, as the book of life opens,
to love one another & hummingbirds
& the bay’s slow threnody.

The book of life opens and written is her name,
Ruth
& the truth of her life is

that wisdom can be witty & elegant & tough.
Enough politics! Supreme

over all powers is love after all. Ruth dreamed of
love, our Ruth & her namesake,

they would not take less from the world, & founded,
grounded
themselves on what is sound, good,

the durable strong wood of trees with deep roots,
Ruth.


- John Copley Alter

[Larry Robinson]

Once Only


almost at the equator
almost at the equinox
exactly at midnight
from a ship
the full


moon


in the center of the sky.




- Gary Snyder
(Sappa Creek near Singapore)