this powerful poem led me to find another lovely one by this great modern Christian mystic;
AND a cool photo of him twirling an umbrella.
...

The Facts of Life 


That you were born
and you will die.


That you will sometimes love enough
and sometimes not.

Blessed Are You Who Bear the Light


Blessed are you
who bear the light
in unbearable times,
who testify
to its endurance
amid the unendurable,
who bear witness

You've outdone yourself today, Larry old boy!
THANK you!
THANK you, Maya Angelou!
(THIS is what the Silence is saying!
THIS IS our salvation!
This is the cure for all our ills,
I do believe!)...

On the Pulse of Morning




A Rock, A River, A Tree
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9nTt2F0Kdc
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens

Thank you, everybody, for your kind words! They have really warmed my heart and given me a sweet afterglow for this endeavor. Big Smile:waccosun:




I am very happy to hear this! I've been in...

In This Place
(An American Lyric)


There’s a poem in this place—

in the footfalls in the halls

in the quiet beat of the seats.

It is here, at the curtain of day,

where America writes a...

The Ear That Speaks

I have been a standing self in this world.
I have braved both pleasure and disgust.
I have lived my words.
The stranger appeared and I did not look away.
The crazy youth...

Too Many Names




Mondays are meshed with Tuesdays
and the week with the whole year.
Time cannot be cut
with your weary scissors,
and all the names of the day

Thank you Varda for setting up NBayOnline! It is fairly easy to download a mailing list from one group and add it to another. The existing WACCOBB mailing list could be transferred to NBayOnline....

Deep bows to you, Barry, for your dedication and constancy in providing this gift to our world - weaving the fabric of community. I wish you all the best in whatever venture comes next. You are a...

Trying to Be Thoughtful in the First Brights of Dawn

I am thinking, or trying to think, about all the
imponderables for which we have
no answers, yet endless interest all the
range of our...

In God’s Time

A platitude meant to calm
But what can it mean?


God’s time is geologic,
Susan says. Frustrated wishes and demands tell her this.
She is right.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

by W.H. Auden


Auden: A poet for our times
by Christopher Hitchens

​I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and...

Hozho


And you will see hozho all around you, inside of you.”
This morning she is teaching me the meaning of HOZHO.
It is dawn.
The sun is conquering the sky and my grandmother and I
are...

I Think That When I Die


I think that when I die,
I can breathe back the breath that made me live.
I can give back to the world all that I didn't do.
All that I might have been and couldn't...

A year of loss and chaos draws to a close.

Stories from a thousand cultures remind us that the cosmos is born - and reborn again and again - from chaos.

We have passed the darkest night of...

Try to Praise the Mutilated World


Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You...

The Grounding of Stone



Precious earth

I feel your pulse, solid under my feet

In a Dark Time


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

A Winter’s Alcove

There are sorrowful, chilled fogs these days that remind one of his mortality. We are in that season when the sun loses the eternal tug-of-war with the icy moon, as exhausted...

Oceans


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


And nothing
happens!

Yuval Noah Harari writes in the New York Times :


Here we have the old canard of the "Jewish Bankers Conspiracy" turned on its head and posed as a sly insinuation that "at its core" if...

Twilight in Hendy Woods


This is the hour of magic
When this world and the other world
Touch in a lingering kiss
And a deep stillness settles over all things.


This is the hour of magic

The Place Where We Are Right


From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.


The place where we are right
is hard and trampled

Psalm


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

More Than Something Else


Something Else.
Some one else
Some where else


That place is here,
In my home,

Still

I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I'll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my...

Another Shovel


On this Covid-of-Thanksgivings
As the year draws down
Bleakness penetrates our masked faces
A shroud of our former selves

Our village weave has unraveled and
Our...

Fire Recovery Heart Sutra

My house is nothing more than emptiness,
emptiness is nothing more than my house.
Home is exactly empty,
and emptiness is exactly home.

My house is empty: ...

To a Passer-By on Thanksgiving Day


Gentle Reader,
it is good that you have paused
along your way, accepting
the silent invitation of these lines


For it was you I had in mind

Journey Poem III
Our whole life is a search party for home,
even if someone still greets us with open arms,
even if someone broke our spirit there,
even if it was gutted and now it’s a parking...

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo152x23.gif
Opinion
When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy
Understanding the structure of global cabal theories can shed light on their allure...

The Cave


Someone standing at the mouth had
the idea to enter. To go further


than light or language could
go. As they followed
the idea, light and language followed

The Sun

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,

For Nothing Is Fixed




For nothing is fixed,

forever, forever, forever,

it is not fixed;

When Fannie Lou Hamer Said


I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired


She meant
No more turned cheek
No more patience for the...

Don’t Speak in the Abstract

Say rather:
It’s a nice day.
Pass the mashed potatoes, please.
Look, there’s a chickadee.
Your voice made me swoon.
Let’s plant the beans.
I miss my dead mother...

Read Three Times & Call Me in the Morning

Command yourself
to read a poem
three times
at each single session
to understand how much
it can offer you and
other readers over time
Notice...

singularity


(after Marie Howe)


in the wordless beginning
iguana & myrrh
magma & reef ghost moth
& the cordyceps tickling its nerves

Oil
soft rainsqualls on the swells
south of the Bonins, late at night. Light
from the empty mess-hall
throws back bulky shadows
of winch and fairlead
over the slanting fantail where I stand....

A Portable Paradise


And if I speak of Paradise,
then I’m speaking of my grandmother
who told me to carry it always
on my person, concealed, so
no one else would know but me.
That way they...

The swan does not care
if I think
it is beautiful.
The platypus is indifferent
to my laugh or scorn.


My great granddaughter--
"great" "grand" "daughter"--
what an odd and awe

October 2020

I don’t wish to dwell
on the oppressive heat, incessant smoke, and
uncertainty about whether to hang clothes in the closet, or
stuff them into a suitcase

Words can’t begin ...

Autumn Passage




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

Autumnal


after a line from William Stafford


When the leaves are about to yellow and fall
ask me then how I tried to hold on to what was green,
how I thought perhaps I was different,
how...

And Will They Ever Com


And will they ever come, days of forgiveness and grace,
when you’ll walk in the fields, simple wanderer,
and your bare soles will be caressed by the clover,
or the...

The Big Picture



I try to look at the big picture.
The sun, ardent tongue
licking us like a mother besotted


with her new cub, will wear itself out.

Called By The Fire



Called by fire blazing in leaves,
wandering like Aengus into the beauty,
ambling a dappled circle,
tracing the cycle of my life.