Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Sacred Site



For Kathryn H.



I’m facing a wall

across the subway track:

old paint and rust

blotched

into billows

of white

smeared with rose, ochre,

even azure –

chemical

efflorescences

of decay.



Yet by another alchemy,

I find a baroque cloud,

a face, a torso.

Not seeking but only seeing

a transformation takes place.



We were talking of journeys, of pilgrimages

to sacred sites.

And you said

Any site can be sacred.



And I thought: so that’s how it works.

If any sight can be transformed

by an act of attention,

perhaps so too – with a deeper seeing –

any site.



So that one might glimpse

for an instant

(how could one hope for more?)

the world

that shimmers

on the other side

of sight.

- Nina Mermey Klippel

Gone Gone Gone

"The wan moon is sinking under the white wave and time is sinking with me. O!"
- Robert Burns

yes it's gone gone gone
gone gone away
yes it's gone gone gone
gone gone away
yes it's gone gone gone
gone gone away
yes it's gone gone gone
gone gone away
gone gone gone
won't be back today
gone gone gone
just like yesterday
gone gone gone
isn't any more
gone to the other shore
gone gone gone
it wasn't here to stay
yes it's gone gone gone
all gone out to play
yes it's gone gone gone
until another day
no one here to pray
gone gone gone
yak your life away
no promise to betray
gone gone gone
somebody else will pay
the national debt no way
gone gone gone
your furniture layaway
plans gone astray
gone gone gone
made hay
gone gone gone
Sunk in Baiae's Bay
yes it's gone gone gone
wallet and all you say
gone gone gone
as you can waive your pay
yes it's gone gone gone
gone last Saturday
yes it's gone gone gone
tomorrow's another day
gone gone gone
bald & old & gay
gone gone gone
turned old and gray
yes it's gone gone gone
whitebeard & cold
yes it's gone gone gone
cashmere scarf & gold
yes it's gone gone gone
warp & woof & wold
yes it's gone gone gone
gone far far away
to the home of the brave
down into the grave
yes it's gone gone gone
moon beneath the wave
yes it's gone gone gone
so I end this song
yes this song is gone
gone to kick the gong
yes it's gone gone gone
No more right & wrong
yes it's gone gone gone
gone gone away.

- Allen Ginsberg

Cyberspace Theology

Aphrodite lurks somewhere in the sites of the internet. If
we seek the root directory, all the goddesses can be found,

dancing around the labyrinthine algorithm that generates
perfect bodies and transparent minds. The gods are there,

too, riding search engines on heroic quests. We want our
will translated into binary values. All the ones, we will add

up, but delete the zeroes. Some build fortunes through post-
modern pixel castles in the air, money made truly from

nothing. We no longer believe in heaven above earthly space
or in infinite mercy, so we seek salvation in more megabytes,

from e-mails from the furthest reaches, and maybe beyond,
counting files instead of sins, and cleanse not our souls, but

our hard drives. Cyberspace exists nowhere within real time
or space--the same location where the old heaven was supposed

to be. Its revelation is no burning bush or walking on water,
since these feats are only beginner's level on our kids' video

games. We no longer want a higher reality. We'd rather gossip
in Plato's cave of moving shadows and winking virtuality.

- Glen A. Mazis

Half Life

our hands stretch out across the sea
between us
only reaching half-way into the fear and
the darkness
who could know when and how
the contours of the earth might shift
taking us down a few feet
throwing us down where
we are now in the muck of our souls
the one soul
taking us down
to examine half-heartedly the words the
last words
so many empty decaying words
that only survive half their meaning
now
we wish we could know or do
what is truly required
to see through the many arms of fate
waving invisibly as they
obscure half the sky on any given day
what shall we do
we are in this together
not just half of us
the half that drills down to the
tender heart at the center
of it all but also the other terrified
half that lives in every heart
dragged before the mirror of
this world
vigilantly protecting itself from
the claws of a jaguar night
the half-darkness of what cannot be shared
there is no other way but to wrap
ourselves around these holy messengers
not half way but fully touching
the countless fingers reaching this way
they are still soft they are
still warm
they are still our
children mothers blood kin of all time
sighing
I spoke to you unkindly
the other day I want to make it
right if you
will give me half a chance

- Gary Horvitz

O sweet spontaneous earth

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the doting

fingers of
prurient philosophies pinched
and poked

thee
has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy
knees squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring
- e. e. cummings

A Cold Spring

for Jane Dewey, Maryland

Nothing is so beautiful as spring. - Gerard Manley Hopkins

A cold spring:
the violet was flawed on the lawn.
For two weeks or more the trees hesitated;
the little leaves waited,
carefully indicating their characteristics.
Finally a grave green dust
settled over your big and aimless hills.
One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine,
on the side of one a calf was born.
The mother stopped lowing
and took a long time eating the after-birth,
a wretched flag,
but the calf got up promptly
and seemed inclined to feel gay.

The next day
was much warmer.
Greenish-white dogwood infiltrated the wood,
each petal burned, apparently, by a cigarette-butt;
and the blurred redbud stood
beside it, motionless, but almost more
like movement than any placeable color.
Four deer practiced leaping over your fences.
The infant oak-leaves swung through the sober oak.
Song-sparrows were wound up for the summer,
and in the maple the complementary cardinal
cracked a whip, and the sleeper awoke,
stretching miles of green limbs from the south.
In his cap the lilacs whitened,
then one day they fell like snow.
Now, in the evening,
a new moon comes.
The hills grow softer. Tufts of long grass show
where each cow-flop lies.
The bull-frogs are sounding,
slack strings plucked by heavy thumbs.
Beneath the light, against your white front door,
the smallest moths, like Chinese fans,
flatten themselves, silver and silver-gilt
over pale yellow, orange, or gray.
Now, from the thick grass, the fireflies
begin to rise:
up, then down, then up again:
lit on the ascending flight,
drifting simultaneously to the same height,
–exactly like the bubbles in champagne.
–Later on they rise much higher.
And your shadowy pastures will be able to offer
these particular glowing tributes
every evening now throughout the summer.

- Elizabeth Bishop

A Chat About Otis Before We Chat About You

Because Otis the dog lies

Collapsed at my feet

On the gold of the old oak floor,

And I wanted to ask you

How you would describe the complicated and simple



Act of a dog laying itself down.



First he is standing, then he

Makes the decision to recline, then he –– But

Let me shut up, for it’s your view



Of the matter I desire to know.

For when I consider Egypt,

The ponderous pondering Bassett,

Or Sandy the good or Miss Prism

The Pug or the huge farm Shepherd

Of course called Lady,



I see that all these dogs knew, right away,

Without schooling, how to

Lie down.



I want your view of

Of how something so natural and easy

Came to be installed in dogs everywhere

Like a universal language.



Let me hear your sorrows in a minute

Or two, sure, but just now let’s turn to Otis



Lying on his side here the whole length

Of this poem -- sandy flanks,

White collar and tummy, and sixty-five pounds

Of get-the-cat -- and turn over

Together how this great knowledge

Operates

And came to be.


- Bruce Moody

Tsunami Tango

I Tango with my Japanese partner.
I wondered what he is feeling.

He says it is all OK.
That the media is making this big.
We both dance on.

Then I ask, what about his family?
What about our connection to this?
Who is speaking that voice?
We Tango again around the floor.

I that earthquake,
I that tsunami,
I that melt down.

We Tango that.

- Mary Morgan

Seven Days in March

On one side of the Pacific, it’s as if the Japanese were overrun by a variation of the four horsemen of the apocalypse: earthquake, tsunami, volcano, near nuclear explosions. Then came the snowstorms that frustrate the efforts of finding vanished loved ones. It’s heartbreaking. But rising like the sun above clouds of chaos, the Japanese give the rest of the world an image of how to suffer with grace when blessings are hard to imagine.

On the other side, voices of divine nature, though more muted, express their power in short and long waves of water and weather: sunken harbors, landslides, flooding -- dreams sink with their boats. And yet, amidst the mayhem, the snowpack is replenished for another season.


massive earthquake

days now just a split-second
:
longer



power outage

nubs of ten candles

alight again



wind hail rain

the Laguna reclaims its

… name



radiation leaks

news of her family

leaves us teary-eyed



creek joins

river

green water

brown water



after the drenching

legs of grape vines

underwater



above

where the village used to be

budding lilacs



- andrew zarrillo
march 2011

Shirt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Robert Pinsky

Persephone’s Lament

Persephone rises from the earth a pale shadow.
Like mist from the water she rises,
Riding the air currents,
Invisible yet palpable, bird-like, with silent flapping wingspan
She turns and wheels,
Uneven, troubled,
Moving at random, integrating this burdensome freedom.

Wherever she drifts the earth quickens below.
A frenzy of surging new growth,
Tremendous bursts of color and beauty explode forth
With the charge of released life-force;
Life-force that hums in the ear and enlivens the heartbeat.
And yet Persephone sees none of it.
She is possessed by the months spent in the fiery molten core of existence.

Her being pumped full of the plans of Pluto her husband,

She consumed it all and swelled with his power.

But the mother fought back through her daughter’s essential goodness

And their conflicting thoughts ripped at her mind

Till she tore into warring fragments,

Each fighting each

And both being her.

Death, fertility,

Power, vengeance,

Passion uncontrollable and

Rage,

Pure rage,

Unleashed rage,

These she now knows and is.



Released, she floats in the heavy winds and gentler breezes,

Whispering unthinkable paradoxes into the ears

Of people who do not see her

And disbelieve their hearing.

Jogging their fingers in their ears

They shake their heads and go on.

And so Persephone’s shattered being

Calls forth rejuvenation while pleading death.



“Oh, beware,” she moans over the fertile valleys, the dusty valleys,

through mutilated aching forests

and petrified endarkened cities.

“Pluto knows the Mother!

He bends the elements,

Shaping them to heavy forms.

He rapes the Mother as he raped me

And his being, engorged with power,

Knows no limitation.

Can you not see his flexed muscles

Gleaming upon your foreheads?

The Mother will not long suffer his violation

And you will bear the loss!”



“Do you not see?” she hisses through fields and sooty streets,

crumbling junkyards and antiseptic shopping centers.

“You feed him with your indifference;

He steps upon your bowed heads.

If his deadly fireballs do not destroy you, your neglect of the Mother will!

And how you will shriek

As the life pours from your broken bodies.

Feigning surprise, you will drink from the cup of fear that he offers

As the Mother’s fury screams out to the heavens.

Her shifting body, her storming elements

Will toss your helpless forms about

Like miniature sailboats caught in a tempest.”



The angel of the earth spews her torments into the winds.

She does so every Spring.

Perhaps once she was recognized and greeted as she passed

But those days are gone.

Very few puzzle over the irony of her release from earth and fire.

The masses are content to live out her effect.

All too eager to accept the affirmations of her flight

They neglect the despair of her voice;

A despair that deepens each year

And awaits the retribution.



- Maya Spector

This Didn’t Happen Over There


This didn’t happen over there.

Each of us is lost
in the tsunami
of swirling gray water.

Each of us feels
how close the
the damaged reactors
are to our bodies.

Each of us knows
how it would be
for our entire village
to be swept away.

There ia a moss-covered stone
in the hills above Miyako
that marks where the tsunami
of 1896 crested.

Each of us has heard
the nuclear scientists
promise that we’re safe,

and we built walls
beyond our shoreline
to diffuse
another tsunami,
should it come.

“Should it come.”

Each of us knows
how this tiny blue planet
continues to re-assemble itself,
how mountains grow,
and how gravity
pulls everything.

Each of us holds
our loved-ones close.
Each of us knows
how fragile
it all is.

- Trout Black

The Spring

(After Rilke)

Spring has returned! Everything has returned!
The earth, just like a schoolgirl, memorizes
Poems, so many poems. ... Look, she has learned
So many famous poems, she has earned so many prizes!

Teacher was strict. We delighted in the white
Of the old man's beard, bright like the snow's:
Now we may ask which names are wrong, or right
For "blue," for "apple," for "ripe." She knows, she knows!

Lucky earth, let out of school, now you must play
Hide-and-seek with all the children every day:
You must hide that we may seek you: we will! We will!

The happiest child will hold you. She knows all the things
You taught her: the word for "hope," and for "believe,"
Are still upon her tongue. She sings and sings and sings.


- Delmore Schwartz

Creation Story


I am not afraid of love
or its consequence of light.
It is not easy to say this
or anything
when my entrails dangle
between paradigms and fear.

I am ashamed.

I never had the words
to carry a friend from her death
to the stars correctly,
or the words to keep my people safe
from drought or gunshot.

The stars who were created by words
are circling over this house
formed of calcium and of blood,
this house in danger of being torn apart
by stones of fear.

If these words can do anything,
if these songs can do anything,
I say, bless this house with stars,
transfix us with love.

- Joy Harjo

Tell the Bees

Tell the bees. They require news of the house;
they must know, lest they sicken
from the gap between their ignorance and our grief.
Speak in a whisper. Tie a black swatch
to a stick and attach the stick to their hive.
From the fortress of casseroles and desserts
built in the kitchen these past few weeks
as though hunger were the enemy, remove
a slice of cake and lay it where they can
slowly draw it in, making a mournful sound.

And tell the fly that has knocked on the window all day.
Tell the redbird that rammed the glass from outside
and stands too dazed to go. Tell the grass,
though it's already guessed, and the ground clenched in furrows;
tell the water you spill on the ground,
then all the water will know.
And the last shrunken pearl of snow in its hiding place.

Tell the blighted elms, and the young oaks we plant instead.
The water bug, while it scribbles
a hundred lines that dissolve behind it.
The lichen, while it etches deeper
its single rune. The boulders, letting their fissures widen,
the pebbles, which have no more to lose,
the hills—they will be slightly smaller, as always,

when the bees fly out tomorrow to look for sweetness
and find their way
because nothing else has changed.

- Sarah Lindsay

Repair Of The World

A Kabalistic* Creation Story



In the beginning

Before there were any beginnings or endings

There was no place that was not already God.

We call this unimaginable openness

Ein Sof,

Being without end, world without end,

Ein Sof.



Then came the urge to give life

To our world and us.

But there was no place that was not already God.

So Ein Sof breathed in to make room

Like a father steps back

So his child will walk to him.

And we call this withdrawing

Tzim Tzum.



Into the emptiness Ein Sof set vessels

And began to fill them with Divine Light

Like a mother places bowls

In which to pour her delicious soup.

We call these bowls,

Kaleem.



As the light poured forth

A perfect world was being created.

Think of it, a world without greed

And cruelty and violence.

But then something happened.

The Kaleem shattered.

No one knows why.

Perhaps the bowls were too frail,

Perhaps the light too intense

Perhaps Ein Sof was learning.

After all, no one makes perfect the first time.



With the shattering of the bowls

The Divine Sparks flew everywhere.

Some rushing back to Ein Sof,

Some falling, falling,

Trapped in the broken shards,

To become our world and us.

Though this is hard to believe,
The perfect world is all around us,

But broken into jagged pieces

Like a puzzle thrown to the floor,

The picture lost,

Each piece without meaning until

Someone puts them back together again.



We are that someone.

There is no one else.

We are the ones, who can find the broken pieces,

Remember how they fit together

And rejoin them.

And we call this repair of the world

Tikkun Olam.



In every moment with every act

We can heal our world and us.

We are all holy sparks, dulled by separation.

But when we meet and talk

And eat and make love,

When we work and play and disagree

With holiness in out eyes,

Seeing Ein Sof everywhere,

Then our brokenness will end.



Then our bowls will be strong enough

To hold the light.

And our light gentle enough

To fill the bowls.

As we repair the world together

We will learn that there is no place,

No person, no land, sea or air being,

No plant, tree, or rock

That is not

God.



- Naomi Newman



*Inspired by Rabbi Isaac Luria’s (1534-1572) theory of creation. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, Safed, Palestine became the center of a new form of Jewish mysticism. Lurianic Kabala focused on the questions of suffering and evil and how the world can be saved and redeemed. © Naomi Newman, April 1994

After chopping off all the arms

that reached out to me; after

boarding up all the windows

and doors; after filling all the

pits with poisoned water; after

building my house on a rock of

a no, inaccessible to flattery and

fear; after cutting out my tongue

and eating it; after hurling handfuls

of silence and monosyllables of

scorn at my loves; after forgetting my name

and the name of my birth place

and the name of my race; after

judging and sentencing myself to

perpetual waiting and perpetual

loneliness, I heard against the

stones of my dungeon of syllogisms

the humid, tender, insistent

onset of spring.

　- Octavio Paz
(Elliot Weinberger translation)

Diminution

I have read volumes,
Written volumes,
Taught from volumes.
Now my words are fewer,
More long breaths between them.
I look up after committing
A single phrase to paper,
Linger a while,
Note the long shadows
On blackjack oak
In the late afternoon sun.
At times, I give up
Words altogether, listen
To the wind, watch
The winter wheat grow, savor
The taste of silence,
And give myself over
To the speech of the stars.

- Howard Stein

Meeting At An Airport

You asked me once,
on our way back
from the midmorning
trip to the spring:
“What do you hate,
and who do you love?”

And I answered,
from behind the eyelashes
of my surprise,
my blood rushing
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure . . .
I love the spring
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”
And you laughed . . .
and the almond tree blossomed
and the thicket grew loud with nightingales.

. . . A question
now four decades old:
I salute that question’s answer;
and an answer
as old as your departure;
I salute that answer’s question . . .

And today,
it’s preposterous,
here we are at a friendly airport
by the slimmest of chances,
and we meet.
Ah, Lord!
we meet.
And here you are
asking—again,
it’s absolutely preposterous—
I recognized you
but you didn’t recognize me.
“Is it you?!”
But you wouldn’t believe it.
And suddenly
you burst out and asked:
“If you’re really you,
What do you hate
and who do you love?!”

And I answered—
my blood
fleeing the hall,
rushing in me
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure,
and I love the spring,
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”

And you wept,
and flowers bowed their heads,
and doves in the silk of their sorrow stumbled.

- Taha Muhammah Ali

For The Future

Planting trees early in spring,
we make a place for birds to sing
in time to come. How do we know?
They are singing here now.
There is no other guarantee
that singing will ever be.

- Wendell Berry

Sea Stacks

Thrust skyward, closely crowding the coast
Random relentless risings of Earth's crust
Storied sea stacks more ancient than
Any ancestors acknowledged by us

Rubbed glass-smooth from mastodons
Scratching their woolly hides akin to whales
Attempting to slip-off salty barnacles barely budging
When they too thrust skyward, then back into the sea.

- Tim Smith

Sebastopol

Its hard won fitness climbing
the ashen road that carries you up
the “Three Sisters” by bike.
Three ever steeper climbs, hot,
exposed, until the peak.
At the top, the air is cool dappled-shade.
Lying down beneath thick-knuckled trees.

Today, at the peak all is bare.
The trees split like boxed bodies in a magic trick.

Many fields have been cleared.
Apples for grapes. *The new farmers say: Apples
are yesterday—as they till the earth for a new crop.
The old, who for generations have trimmed
the delicate limbs of the Gravenstein
are now red-faced and gnarled as their heirloom trees.

At the top, the ridge is a permeable line
between green hills that roll to the sea,
and the patchwork of farmed valley that leads to town.
What is good/bad is brackish as history:
A two-day stand-off between two men,
one inside the general store, the other
pacing the street. *Nothing could come between.
Crowds gathered murmuring—it’s like the battle of Sebastopol—
and the name stuck. **But, after the naming, what happened?
Someone must have stepped outside,
or someone must have stepped inside—
that much isn’t remembered.

I crest at the top—this time without stopping
look out at the ridge dividing sea from town,
push the pedal down, into the descent
into the rush and risk of air.

***- Iris Dunkle

Words Can Describe

Did you ever think the astronauts should have done
a better job describing the Moon for the rest of us?

We spent billions of dollars to send them there,
to walk around on that glassy sand in those

synthetic mukluk boots, driving their goofy, lunar
dune buggies, slapping a golf ball 5386 yards

to an endless sand trap. We heard that static through
corridors of space until they had the chance to describe

exactly, ROGER, what they saw, AFFIRMATIVE,
and instead we heard: "Words can’t describe,"

CHECK, "the stark beauty," A-OKAY,
"of the landscape . . . I mean the moonscape."

They were young. Inarticulate. Absolutely
without words to describe what they saw. But then,

when they watched the Earth Rise from the Moon’s
fluorescent horizon, I remember, their words were pure

excitement and Oh, my God and It’s so beautiful.
We knew what they meant from our Earth-bound

imaginations. We knew that the rising Earth was
the jewel of our breathing, the swirling of our weather,

a wondrous cat’s eye marble rolling across black velvet,
reminding us of our daughters’ faces, the freckled

continents, those oceans of blue eyes, the determined set
of our son’s jaw in the angle of a peninsula. And that stillness

around the globe like a lake viewed through the pine woods.
They were speechless because they were reminded of everything

they missed. From their tin-foil shed, on the Sea of Tranquility,
first witnessing, ROGER, the beloved’s face out there.

- Timothy J. Nolan

Her Voice Grabbed Me So Hard I Almost Remembered Who I Was
for Sarah Ballard Smith (Last Native Speaker of Bodega Miwok)

Her voice is reel-to-reel crackling, earthbound, but all air.
Her voice reflects back like the cool, pearled shells of abalone.
Her voice stitched stories out of lightning and rain clouds.
Her voice collected the rains for fear of the drought.
Her voice was combed free of the trouble it must have contained.
Her voice could gather salt from the sea, leech acorns and smooth clamshells
into tiny, white beads.
Her voice was annotated with this currency.
Her voice skimmed the cool, shallow depths of Bodega Bay.
Her voice was quick as a baby tiger shark dodging predators, darting from
the sway of kelp leaf to kelp leaf.
Her voice contains the tiny blue stars of forget-me-nots and the nervous
beauty of quails.
Her voice still lingers in the grey combed clouds that stretch across the
too, blue above the restless sea.

- Iris Dunkle

Dodo

Each twig a field of oxygen

Each pebble a frog’s hike

- Cozi

Instructed to draw a bird, any bird,

On a large sheet of cream-colored paper,

And out the windows, right when I needed them,

No birds to copy in their flight.

Out of the crayons came a wavering outline, colored in:

A short, portly gentleman

Led by a great yellow beak,

And empty circles for eyes, no wings, no feet,

And to take advantage of my ignorance

In large letters I printed DODO.

Extinct bird:

What might have been before it wasn’t anymore.


Over my shoulder this condensed block

Of an elderly presence loomed.

Miss Brown. In our grammar schools back then,

No teacher could be a Mrs.,

Lest pregnancy, with its yeasty mountain-moving,

Perturb our tiny brains.

Some teachers had brains

That could be measured in milligrams, like the dodo’s,

In inverse proportion to their spinsterly meanness

And it’s a good thing most are extinct by now,

Having borne no offspring into our little world.


DODO . Miss Brown took offense,

Wrote a note, folded it, sent me down

The ghost-inhabited hallway to the principal. In the hallway air,

The distinct but merging essences

Of generations of chalk dust and spattered urine,

Spirits of ancient white bread and bologna sandwiches.

This the same hallway my father trod. There he was

With his thoughts, what he knew and what he didn’t yet know

Clicking into their proper places,

So I wonder if they beat the imagination out of him

And that’s why there are so many salesmen in my family.


The cramped, scarred desks, children sounding out

The words in staggered unison,

The dull, planned minutes of Seth Thomas clocks,

And between each click

Eternity showed its face –

Sometimes it yawned, sometimes it grinned –

And me striding

Past classroom after classroom, angry, ashamed, prideful,

Carrying the injustice on my shoulders, on my big way

To the principal’s big office.

The ruler slapped

The back of my hand, once, twice.

Up went her hand for the third.

I took off, and instead of choosing home

I chose a hike to my Saturday place,

Down the hill through the woods

Into the doorless world of trees.

No Miss Brown to castigate me, no dodos to instruct me

In the ancient ways of impulse,

But plenty of birds and much bird song.


Between each rallying signaling of my presence,

I filled in – twitters and trills and tweets –

Until I was a bird among the birds.

Oh, I could fly

But had drawn no wings

So had no need to fly.


- Steve Orlen

Milk and Honey


O dear God: the land You have promised us
already has people living in it. Why
didn't we hear that before the exodus?
So this is the choice, to live as slaves or die
as slaves to war? Now think: some other place
You haven't got? We sent out men to spy
for us, a sorry lot who claim a race
of giants lives up there—no doubt a lie,
more likely long-lost relatives. Hebron's
a town as old as Esau, walled with stones
they'll gladly throw at us, blood brothers or not.
Couldn't we come in peace, share what we've got
including You, settle down and call
it off? But No, You answer: You must dispossess them all.

Shelach-lecha, Numbers 12:1-15:41

- Dan Bellm

The Wolf God

Like a painting we will be erased, no one can remain.
I saw my life as a wolf loping along the road
And I questioned the women of that place.

Some regard the wolf as immortal, they said.
Now you know this only happened in one case and that
Wolves die regularly of various causes—

Bears kill them, tigers hunt them,
They get epilepsy,
They get a salmon bone crosswise in their throat,

They run themselves to death no one knows why—
But perhaps you never heard
Of their ear trouble.

They have very good ears,
Can hear a cloud pass overhead.
And sometimes it happens

That a windblown seed will bury itself in the aural canal
Displacing equilibrium.
They go mad trying to stand upright,

Nothing to link with.
Die of anger.
Only one we know learned to go along with it.

He took small steps at first.
Using the updrafts.
They call him Huizkol,

That means
Looks Good in Spring.
Things are as hard as you make them.

- Anne Carso

Meditations At Lagunitas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed . It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry .

- Robert Hass

Being a Person

Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here to make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.

A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.

Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone's dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn't be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.

How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.

- William Stafford

The Smile


Why do you smile at a joke you have not heard

if something in the grey-morning-cheeping of the birds

accompanies the joke, like an audience laughing along with you,

and the traffic of the bridge with its nose down

or the other-grey water of the river that does not seem to move, but does,

this congregation, all these things forgetting themselves

dumb, like you, making up a religion second by second

whose collection plate is this smile of gratitude and certainty, full

in the presence of the invisible and ever-present

Lord.

- Bruce Moody

Daisies

It is possible, I suppose that sometime*
we will learn everything*
there is to learn: what the world is, for example,*
and what it means. I think this as I am crossing*
from one field to another, in summer, and the*
mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either*
knows enough already or knows enough to be*
perfectly content not knowing. Song being born*
of quest he knows this: he must turn silent*
were he suddenly assaulted with answers. Instead*
oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly*
unanswered. At my feet the white-petalled daisies display*
the small suns of their center piece, their - if you don't*
mind my saying so - their hearts. Of course*
I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and*
narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know?*
But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,*
to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;*
for example - I think this*
as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch -*
the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the*
daisies for the field.*

-*Mary Oliver*

Listen for the Beloved

Listen for the Beloved.

The walls fall down.


Listen for the Beloved.

The stories wither to dust.


Listen for the Beloved.

The crockery dances in the cupboards.


Listen for the Beloved.

The animals obey their masters.


Empty your pockets.

You do not live in a tiny tent,

solitary in your peapod warmth

by a dwindling fire.



No, your tent is the sky.

And that lump in your throat

is not coal.

Neither is it gold.

It is not even yours.


Set free the herd

chained to your doorstep.

Set free the millers

honed to your wheel.


There is water aplenty

overflowing the

cup of the Beloved.

Drink by her soul hand.



- Gary Horvitz

Passover

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

They thought they were safe

https://img860.imageshack.us/img860/6793/passover.jpg

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

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

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

- Lynn Ungar

An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
and on the opposite mountain I am searching
for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
both in their temporary failure.
Our voices meet above the Sultan’s Pool
in the valley between us. Neither of us wants
the child or the goat to get caught in the wheels
of the terrible Had Gadya machine.

Afterward we found them among the bushes
and our voices came back inside us, laughing and crying.

Searching for a goat or a son
has always been the beginning
of a new religion in these mountains.

- Yehuda Amichai

Between

But it’s the cave I want to know.
Not how He left, rose, became a something
again. But what happens in the cave.

Not blood, not body, not wine stamped with the memory
of blood, but the space between breath
and breath where we are nowhere

to be found.
Someone weeps outside.
Someone tugs at the boulder.
Someone clings to a torn lock of His hair.

And inside, in the still, lightless air
the turning back
into everything.

- Kim Rosen

Wellfleet Shabbat

The hawk eye of the sun slowly shuts.
The breast of the bay is softly feathered
dove grey. The sky is barred like the sand
when the tide trickles out.

The great doors of Shabbat are swinging
open over the ocean, loosing the moon
floating up slow distorted vast, a copper
balloon just sailing free.

The wind slides over the waves, patting
them with its giant hand, and the sea
stretches its muscles in the deep,
purrs and rolls over.

The sweet beeswax candles flicker
and sigh, standing between the phlox
and the roast chicken. The wine shines
its red lantern of joy.

Here on this piney sandspit, the Shekinah
comes on the short strong wings of the seaside
sparrow raising her song and bringing
down the fresh clean night.


- Marge Piercy

Seven Stanzas at Easter


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- John Updike

BirdBath

only this
matters: this ecstatic
baptism

this standing on stick-
thin legs where the singing
creek pools at the lip
of the waterfall

only this
ruby-feathered
chest diving to meet
its reflection

this beak piercing
again and again that quivering
surface, these wings half-
unfolding, a ruffle

of joy guiding rivers
of light a tumble
of droplets dressed
in rainbows along your hidden
spine

shattering all
decorum beneath
blue branches in quiet

assent. . .

- Elizabeth Reninger

Silently a flower blooms,
In silence it falls away;
Yet here now, at this moment, at this place,
The world of the flower, the whole of the world is blooming.
This is the talk of the flower, the truth of the blossom;
The glory of eternal life is fully shining here.

- Zenkei Shibayama

Turtle

Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
she can ill afford the chances she must take
in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
a packing case places, and almost any slope
defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
she's often stuck up to the axle on her way
to something edible. With everything optimal,
she skirts the ditch which would convert
her shell into a serving dish. She lives
below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
the sport of truly chastened things.

- Kay Ryan

God's Mistakes

In the great city of Paris live all sorts of people,
Very tall Africans and very short,
Really tiny Europeans, grown-ups less than five feet tall.

And every morning on the Metro I see the man with the tumor
Ballooning from his neck, and the blind Tunisian flute-player.

And one Sunday, in the bone museum, at the Jardin des Plantes,
Among the dinosaurs and whales picked clean by time,
I saw the delicate, intertwined skeletons
Of fetal Siamese twins afloat in a bottle:

Marie et Christian, it says--
In Paris, they even baptize God's mistakes.

And outside the Pompidou,
There is the brash and balding mountain man
With the belly that could stop a train.
He earns his daily bread by playing the nasty fool
Before the crowds. How many people? 100? 200?

He yells, cajoles, and chases them;
Insults, humiliates, and captures them,
Then beats them on the head with an air-filled
Plastic bat or knees them in the crotch.

When he snatches an Asian tourist girl
And holds her like a trophy with one arm,
And with the other strips off his overalls

And stands before us in his billowing
Striped white and yellow boxer shorts, guffawing
At our discomfort and at hers, and points down,
Down there, beneath that huge belly,

We all gasp and we all clap,
Though we're pleased it isn't us.
He grabs her Nikon and stuffs it down
His shorts and snaps a snap. Un souvenir, he says.

But the belly itself, that's the freakish thing.
It sticks out from his body like an organ of its own,
Neither sagging like a beer belly nor round like a pregnancy,

Buy boxy, somehow, like a coffin for a baby,
Except there are these odd, protruding knots of muscle
Here and there, as if he built it up like that,

The way a man might idly sqeeze a rubber ball
While watching television. As he jerks it up and down,
Like a puppet, like a Pierrot wooing his Pierrette,
It's like a brain case

Surrounding its own intelligence,
Its blind and foraging hunger and its wiles.

Hey, Africain, he yells, and mimes a few steps
Of a mincing queen. He points to a woman's breasts:
Pas beaucoup, he sneers. Et vous! he yells,

Pointing at me, and by now I am embarrassed
For the human race
That we all put up with this burlesque:

The leather-coated dwarf; the acned, tattooed German
Teenage punk with a symphony of earrings; the bald Italian
Who gets his head shined with a dirty cloth.

Still, I stand in my spot on the vast
And sloping apron of the Pompidou,
Grinning and embarrassed but pleased with the attention,

So when he summons me, I go to him,
Like a penitent to the altar,
Like a reluctant child to his father.

He lies down, very gingerly, on his back,
On a bed of nails, and commands,
Asseyez-vous sur moi!

So I sit, right on that thing, that belly.
He begins to move it, slowly, up and down,

I am a child again in the park on a seesaw
The first time I could do it without help.
My mother is beaming and applauding, as is this crowd,
At my bad luck and my good nature, as I bounce

Up and down for all the world a fool to see,
Having a good old time, until the thing is done,
And I slide off, to go about my business

Of being a tourist in the great city of Paris
Among the albinos and the amputees, the retarded
And the refugees, the omnipresent unemployable

Winos and beggars, Maries et Christians, knowing for once
Exactly which one of God's mistakes I am.

- Steve Orlen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Wendell Berry

Toward The Space Age
*
We must begin to catch hold of everything
around us, for nobody knows what we
may need. We have to carry along
the air, even; and the weight we once
thought a burden turns out to form
the pulse of our life and the compass for our brain.
Colors balance our fears, and existence
begins to clog unless our thoughts
can occur unwatched and let a fountain of essential silliness
out through our dreams.
And oh I hope we can still arrange
for the wind to blow, and occasionally
some kind of shock to occur, like rain,
and stray adventures no one cares about --
harmless love, immoderate guffaws on corners,
families crawling around the front room growling,
being bears in the piano cave.

- William Stafford

The Turtle

breaks from the blue-black
skin of the water, dragging her shell
with its mossy scutes
across the shallows and through the rushes
and over the mudflats, to the uprise,
to the yellow sand,
to dig with her ungainly feet
a nest, and hunker there spewing
her white eggs down
into the darkness, and you think


of her patience, her fortitude,
her determination to complete
what she was born to do----
and then you realize a greater thing----
she doesn’t consider
what she was born to do.
She’s only filled
with an old blind wish.
It isn’t even hers but came to her
in the rain or the soft wind
which is a gate through which her life keeps walking.


She can’t see
herself apart from the rest of the world
or the world from what she must do
every spring.
Crawling up the high hill,
luminous under the sand that has packed against her skin,
she doesn’t dream
she knows
she is a part of the pond she lives in,
the tall trees are her children,
the birds that swim above her
are tied to her by an unbreakable string.

- Mary Oliver

For reasons with which I won't bore you, I erroneously attributed yesterday's poem, "Toward The Space Age", to Mary Oliver. It was actually written by William Stafford. This is not to first time - and will probably not be the last time - that I have goofed in this way. My apologies to you, to Mary and to Bill.
Larry

White Heron


What lifts the heron on its two soft kissing kites
I praise without a name.
A crouch, a flare,
A shape thought at the sky, a long stroke through the cumulus of trees
Then . . . gone.
Oh, rare!

Saint Francis, happiest on his knees,
Would have cried, "Father!"
Cry anything you please,
But praise,
Praise the white original that lights the blue expanse of sky.

While saints report their doves and rays
I sit by pond scums 'till the air recites its heron back
And doubt all else but praise.


- John Ciardi

Blue Heron

Blue Heron
symbol of the river city:
Portland on the Willamette
and Mighty Columbia.

August in her stillness
A heron on the far shore,
Awesome up close
a B-52 dices between
city houses, wings aslant
to miss the buildings

Eight foot wingspan
Acing down gulp koi
from the backyard pond.

Mighty hungry kisses
says the empty pool.
Mighty hungry kisses.

- David Bean

Hope and Love

All winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
do not know
if the solitary habit
is their way,
or if he listened for
some missing one--
not knowing even
that was what he did--
in the blowing
sounds in the dark.
I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry.
He slept
with his long neck
folded, like a letter
put away.

- Jane Hirshfield

The Blue Egg

This morning, a great blue heron rose from the swamp like the second coming.
I'd never seen the high nests in the far off trees until it rose. Green
buds are pulsing out of the fingers of trees and the long sleep is shaken
from our bodies as we stumble back into the spotty light. All winter in our
borrowed home my son has been collecting egg cartons. Every week he stores
another cardboard carton beneath the sink. "For the chickens, Momma." He
says. "When we raise chickens, we can sell the eggs." The sky sits above
the trees-blue as the heron. Blue as a dyed eggs. Blue as a promise. When
the bird rose this morning he brought what was land bound (our hearts, our
eyes) up to the possibility of sky.

- Iris Dunkle

Last-Minute Message for a Time Capsule

I have to tell you this, whoever you are:
that on one summer morning here, the ocean
pounded in on tumbledown breakers,
a south wind, bustling along the shore,
whipped the froth into little rainbows,
and a reckless gull swept down the beach
as if to fly were everything it needed.

I thought of your hovering saucers,
looking for clues, and I wanted to write this down
so it wouldn't be lost forever --
that once upon a time we had
meadows here, and astonishing things,
swans and frogs and luna moths
and blue skies that could stagger your heart.
We could have had them still,
and welcomed you to earth, but
we also had the righteous ones
who worshipped the True Faith, and Holy War.

When you go home to your shining galaxy,
say that what you learned
from this dead and barren place is
to beware the righteous ones.

- Phillip Appleman

Often I Imagine The Earth


Often I imagine the earth
through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of—
atoms, peculiar
atoms everywhere—
no me, no you, no opinions,
no beginning, no middle, no end,
soaring together like those
ancient Chinese birds
hatched miraculously with only one wing,
helping each other fly home.

- Dan Gerber

We Have A Beautiful Mother

We have a beautiful
Mother
Her hills
Are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
Hills.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her oceans
Are wombs
Her wombs
Oceans.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her teeth
The white stones
At the edge
Of the water
The summer
Grasses
Her plentiful
Hair.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her green lap
Immense
Her brown embrace
Eternal
Her blue body
Everything we know.

- Alice Walker

Miracle Fair


Commonplace miracle:
that so many commonplace miracles happen.

An ordinary miracle:
in the dead of night
the barking of invisible dogs.

One miracle out of many:
a small, airy cloud
yet it can block a large and heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:
an alder tree reflected in the water,
and that it’s backwards left to right
and that it grows there, crown down
and never reaches the bottom,
even though the water is shallow.

An everyday miracle:
winds weak to moderate
turning gusty in storms.

First among equal miracles:
cows are cows.

Second to none:
just this orchard
from just that seed.

A miracle without a cape and top hat:
scattering white doves.

A miracle, for what else could you call it:
today the sun rose at three-fourteen
and will set at eight-o-one.

A miracle, less surprising than it should be:
even though the hand has fewer than six fingers,
it still has more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:
the world is everywhere.

An additional miracle, as everything is additional:
the unthinkable
is thinkable.

- Wislawa Szymborska
(translation by Joanna Trzeciak)

Freedom's Plow
*
When a man starts out with nothing,
When a man starts out with his hands
Empty, but clean,
When a man starts to build a world,
He starts first with himself
And the faith that is in his heart-
The strength there,
The will there to build.
First in the heart is the dream-
Then the mind starts seeking a way.
His eyes look out on the world,
On the great wooded world,
On the rich soil of the world,
On the rivers of the world.
The eyes see there materials for building,
See the difficulties, too, and the obstacles.
The mind seeks a way to overcome these obstacles.
The hand seeks tools to cut the wood,
To till the soil, and harness the power of the waters.
Then the hand seeks other hands to help,
A community of hands to help-
Thus the dream becomes not one man’s dream alone,
But a community dream.
Not my dream alone, but our dream.
Not my world alone,
But your world and my world,
Belonging to all the hands who build.
A long time ago, but not too long ago,
Ships came from across the sea
Bringing the Pilgrims and prayer-makers,
Adventurers and booty seekers,
Free men and indentured servants,
Slave men and slave masters, all new-
To a new world, America!
With billowing sails the galleons came
Bringing men and dreams, women and dreams.
In little bands together,
Heart reaching out to heart,
Hand reaching out to hand,
They began to build our land.
Some were free hands
Seeking a greater freedom,
Some were indentured hands
Hoping to find their freedom,
Some were slave hands
Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom,
But the word was there always:
Freedom.
Down into the earth went the plow
In the free hands and the slave hands,
In indentured hands and adventurous hands,
Turning the rich soil went the plow in many hands
That planted and harvested the food that fed
And the cotton that clothed America.
Clang against the trees went the ax into many hands
That hewed and shaped the rooftops of America.
Splash into the rivers and the seas went the boat-hulls
That moved and transported America.
Crack went the whips that drove the horses
Across the plains of America.
Free hands and slave hands,
Indentured hands, adventurous hands,
White hands and black hands
Held the plow handles,
Ax handles, hammer handles,
Launched the boats and whipped the horses
That fed and housed and moved America.
Thus together through labor,
All these hands made America.
Labor! Out of labor came villages
And the towns that grew cities.
Labor! Out of labor came the rowboats
And the sailboats and the steamboats,
Came the wagons, and the coaches,
Covered wagons, stage coaches,
Out of labor came the factories,
Came the foundries, came the railroads.
Came the marts and markets, shops and stores,
Came the mighty products moulded, manufactured,
Sold in shops, piled in warehouses,
Shipped the wide world over:
Out of labor-white hands and black hands-
Came the dream, the strength, the will,
And the way to build America.
Now it is Me here, and You there.
Now it’s Manhattan, Chicago,
Seattle, New Orleans,
Boston and El Paso-
Now it’s the U.S.A.
A long time ago, but not too long ago, a man said:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL--
ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR
WITH CERTAIN UNALIENABLE RIGHTS--
AMONG THESE LIFE, LIBERTY
AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.
His name was Jefferson. There were slaves then,
But in their hearts the slaves believed him, too,
And silently too for granted
That what he said was also meant for them.
It was a long time ago,
But not so long ago at that, Lincoln said:
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT THAT OTHER’S CONSENT.
There were slaves then, too,
But in their hearts the slaves knew
What he said must be meant for every human being-
Else it had no meaning for anyone.
Then a man said:
BETTER TO DIE FREE
THAN TO LIVE SLAVES
He was a colored man who had been a slave
But had run away to freedom.
And the slaves knew
What Frederick Douglass said was true.
With John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, Negroes died.
John Brown was hung.
Before the Civil War, days were dark,
And nobody knew for sure
When freedom would triumph
"Or if it would," thought some.
But others new it had to triumph.
In those dark days of slavery,
Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom,
The slaves made up a song:
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
That song meant just what it said: Hold On!
Freedom will come!
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
Out of war it came, bloody and terrible!
But it came!
Some there were, as always,
Who doubted that the war would end right,
That the slaves would be free,
Or that the union would stand,
But now we know how it all came out.
Out of the darkest days for people and a nation,
We know now how it came out.
There was light when the battle clouds rolled away.
There was a great wooded land,
And men united as a nation.
America is a dream.
The poet says it was promises.
The people say it is promises-that will come true.
The people do not always say things out loud,
Nor write them down on paper.
The people often hold
Great thoughts in their deepest hearts
And sometimes only blunderingly express them,
Haltingly and stumblingly say them,
And faultily put them into practice.
The people do not always understand each other.
But there is, somewhere there,
Always the trying to understand,
And the trying to say,
"You are a man. Together we are building our land."
America!
Land created in common,
Dream nourished in common,
Keep your hand on the plow! Hold on!
If the house is not yet finished,
Don’t be discouraged, builder!
If the fight is not yet won,
Don’t be weary, soldier!
The plan and the pattern is here,
Woven from the beginning
Into the warp and woof of America:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT HIS CONSENT.
BETTER DIE FREE,
THAN TO LIVE SLAVES.
Who said those things? Americans!
Who owns those words? America!
Who is America? You, me!
We are America!
To the enemy who would conquer us from without,
We say, NO!
To the enemy who would divide
And conquer us from within,
We say, NO!
FREEDOM!
BROTHERHOOD!
DEMOCRACY!
To all the enemies of these great words:
We say, NO!
A long time ago,
An enslaved people heading toward freedom
Made up a song:
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
The plow plowed a new furrow
Across the field of history.
Into that furrow the freedom seed was dropped.
From that seed a tree grew, is growing, will ever grow.
That tree is for everybody,
For all America, for all the world.
May its branches spread and shelter grow
Until all races and all peoples know its shade.
KEEP YOUR HAND ON THE PLOW! HOLD ON!

- Langston Hughes

Earth
*
Let the day grow on you upward
through your feet,
the vegetal knuckles,
*
to your knees of stone,
until by evening you are a black tree;
feel, with evening,
*
the swifts thicken your hair,
the new moon rising out of your forehead,
and the moonlit veins of silver
*
running from your armpits
like rivulets under white leaves.
Sleep, as ants
*
cross over your eyelids.
You have never possessed anything
as deeply as this.
*
This is all you have owned
from the first outcry
through forever;
*
you can never be dispossessed.
*
- Derek Walcott

For My Daughter

When I die choose a star
and name it after me
that you may know
I have not abandoned
or forgotten you.
You were such a star to me,
following you through birth
and childhood, my hand
in your hand.

When I die
choose a star and name it
after me so that I may shine
down on you, until you join
me in darkness and silence
together.

- David Ignatow

More Than We Know



Windows of the building across the way

facing away from the sun,

are filled with golden light.

How can it be?



They are reflecting

light reflected from mine.



Could there be

accidental gifts

we give

without knowing it?


- Nina Mermey Klippel

Ozymandias of Egypt
*
I met a traveller from an antique land *
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone *
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, *
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown *
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command ******
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read *
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, *
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. *
And on the pedestal these words appear: *
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: *
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" *
Nothing beside remains: round the decay *
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, *
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

- P. B. Shelley

Enlightenment

Forget about enlightenment.

Sit down wherever you are
and listen to the wind singing
in your veins.

Feel the love, the longing and
the fear in your bones.

Open your heart to who you
are right now, not who you’d
like to be. Not the saint you’re
striving to become, but the
being right there before you,
inside you, around you.

All of you is holy.

You’re already more and less
than whatever you can know.

Breathe out, look in, let go.

- John Welwood

Variation On The Word Sleep


I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and as you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

- Margaret Atwood

praise song

to my aunt blanche
who rolled from grass to driveway
into the street one sunday morning.
i was ten. **** i had never seen
a human woman hurl her basketball
of a body into the traffic of the world.
Praise to the drivers who stopped in time.
Praise to the faith with which she rose
after some moments then slowly walked
sighing back to her family.
Praise to the arms which understood
little or nothing of what it meant
but welcomed her in without judgment,
accepting it all like children might,
like God.

- Lucille Clifton

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 televisions,
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 where 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

An Old Astronomer and His Pupil

Reach me down my Tycho Brahe, I would know him when we meet,
When I share my later science, sitting humbly at his feet;
He may know the law of all things, yet be ignorant of how
We are working to completion, working on from then to now.

Pray remember that I leave you all my theory complete,
Lacking only certain data for your adding, as is meet,
And remember men will scorn it, 'tis original and true,
And the obloquy of newness may fall bitterly on you.

But, my pupil, as my pupil you have learned the worth of scorn,
You have laughed with me at pity, we have joyed to be forlorn,
What for us are all distractions of men's fellowship and wiles;
What for us the Goddess Pleasure with her meretricious smiles.

You may tell that German College that their honor comes too late,
But they must not waste repentance on the grizzly savant's fate.
Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

What, my boy, you are not weeping? You should save your eyes for sight;
You will need them, mine observer, yet for many another night.
I leave none but you, my pupil, unto whom my plans are known.
You "have none but me," you murmur, and I "leave you quite alone"?

Well then, kiss me, -- since my mother left her blessing on my brow,
There has been a something wanting in my nature until now;
I can dimly comprehend it, -- that I might have been more kind,
Might have cherished you more wisely, as the one I leave behind.

I "have never failed in kindness"? No, we lived too high for strife,
Calmest coldness was the error which has crept into our life;
But your spirit is untainted, I can dedicate you still
To the service of our science: you will further it? you will!

There are certain calculations I should like to make with you,
To be sure that your deductions will be logical and true;
And remember, "Patience, Patience," is the watchword of a sage,
Not to-day nor yet to-morrow can complete a perfect age.

I have sown, like Tycho Brahe, that a greater man may reap;
But if none should do my reaping, 'twill disturb me in my sleep
So be careful and be faithful, though, like me, you leave no name;
See, my boy, that nothing turn you to the mere pursuit of fame.

I must say Good-bye, my pupil, for I cannot longer speak;
Draw the curtain back for Venus, ere my vision grows too weak:
It is strange the pearly planet should look red as fiery Mars,
God will mercifully guide me on my way amongst the stars.

- Sarah Williams (1837–1868)

There Is No One But Us

There is no one but us.
There is no one to send,
nor a clean hand nor a pure heart
on the face of the earth,
but only us,
a generation comforting ourselves
with the notion that we have come at an awkward time,
that our innocent fathers are all dead
- as if innocence had ever been -
and our children busy and troubled,
and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready,
having each of us chosen wrongly,
made a false start, failed,
yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures,
and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved.
But there is no one but us.
There never has been.

- Annie Dillard

Song for The Parks

I

Where I rode my bike on hot days on the rough red road
Where my mother saw a rattlesnake as thick as her wrist
Where I jumped in the slimy duck-shit filled lake during the summer of confusion
Where we ran naked in the rain on a winter day, leaping over pokey branches
Where you hiked and became silent after I abandoned you
Where the father of our friend died suddenly of a heart attack

Where my grandfather put his boat into the Bay –
A white boat, with blue trim, he carved the oars himself.
In his white hat he would drift among the whitecaps,
Singing silent songs, pretending to be Irish.
We all thought he would die like this, drift out with the tide, like Saint Brendan.
Instead he died indoors by a window,
on top of a flower-print blanket, in November, laughing.

Where the land is ripped open by the water blasts of gold-miners.
Scars exposed to the sky. And tell me again, what were they rushing for?
Here, in fourth grade, I felt the first pangs of love.

No, I will not listen, I will go in anyways, I'll climb the fence,
flip off the Ranger, and I'll take the rich black mud
and make sculptures of shrunken heads with sharp shells for teeth
and stones for rolling eyes, with wild seaweed hair and tongues lolling out,
and leave them in a row of defiance for everyone to see.


II

Every Wednesday after school in 11th grade, we climbed the four and a half miles to Gunsight Rock. From there, we could see out across the Sonoma valley, past our small provincial city, to the distant, sparkling, Pacific. The fog came in, we got drunk on wildflowers, covered ourselves in mud, and we shouted, amazed at the richness of the land. We loved each other as men do.

Once, halfway up the ridge, I swam in an icy pool filled with Poison Oak branches. I became completely covered in a red rash, my fingers involuntarily scratched my face and crotch for weeks. Every scratch was a blessing, each finger shouting, "Yes, you were there! Yes, you are here!"

III

But I want to know, how do you close a redwood tree? By what door?
The invisible one the size of a man, that is wherever you stand in front of it?
And how do you close a meadow? Will you close the North gate or the South gate or the gate by the winding stream?
And how will you close a hillside? Will you close the wide gate at the base or the small wooden gate at the nape of the neck?
And what door will you close in a desert boulder?

We will not be barred from our Synagogues.
And the Zen Buddhists will not climb the wall
but become the whole park from the other side by a switch of perception
And this will fling open the doors of every redwood tree
And all will be singing in strange tones.

- Asa Horvitz

Song for The Parks

I

Where I rode my bike on hot days on the rough red road
Where my mother saw a rattlesnake as thick as her wrist
Where I jumped in the slimy duck-shit filled lake during the summer of confusion
Where we ran naked in the rain on a winter day, leaping over pokey branches
Where you hiked and became silent after I abandoned you
Where the father of our friend died suddenly of a heart attack

Where my grandfather put his boat into the Bay –
A white boat, with blue trim, he carved the oars himself.
In his white hat he would drift among the whitecaps,
Singing silent songs, pretending to be Irish.
We all thought he would die like this, drift out with the tide, like Saint Brendan.
Instead he died indoors by a window,
on top of a flower-print blanket, in November, laughing.

Where the land is ripped open by the water blasts of gold-miners.
Scars exposed to the sky. And tell me again, what were they rushing for?
Here, in fourth grade, I felt the first pangs of love.

No, I will not listen, I will go in anyways, I'll climb the fence,
flip off the Ranger, and I'll take the rich black mud
and make sculptures of shrunken heads with sharp shells for teeth
and stones for rolling eyes, with wild seaweed hair and tongues lolling out,
and leave them in a row of defiance for everyone to see.


II

Every Wednesday after school in 11th grade, we climbed the four and a half miles to Gunsight Rock. From there, we could see out across the Sonoma valley, past our small provincial city, to the distant, sparkling, Pacific. The fog came in, we got drunk on wildflowers, covered ourselves in mud, and we shouted, amazed at the richness of the land. We loved each other as men do.

Once, halfway up the ridge, I swam in an icy pool filled with Poison Oak branches. I became completely covered in a red rash, my fingers involuntarily scratched my face and crotch for weeks. Every scratch was a blessing, each finger shouting, "Yes, you were there! Yes, you are here!"

III

But I want to know, how do you close a redwood tree? By what door?
The invisible one the size of a man, that is wherever you stand in front of it?
And how do you close a meadow? Will you close the North gate or the South gate or the gate by the winding stream?
And how will you close a hillside? Will you close the wide gate at the base or the small wooden gate at the nape of the neck?
And what door will you close in a desert boulder?

We will not be barred from our Synagogues.
And the Zen Buddhists will not climb the wall
but become the whole park from the other side by a switch of perception
And this will fling open the doors of every redwood tree
And all will be singing in strange tones.

- Asa Horvitz

We Have Come to Be Danced

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_A-FVit69-...Lighten+up.jpg

We have come to be danced
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 and scars open dance
The rub the rhythm raw against our soul dance.

We have come to be danced
Not the nice, invisible, self-conscious shuffle
But the matted hair flying, voodoo mama
Shaman shaking ancient bones dance
The strip us from our casings, return our wings
Sharpen our claws and tongues dance
The shed dead cells and slip into
The luminous skin of love dance.

We have come to be danced

https://rhythmsanctuary.com/wp-conte...er-150x150.jpg

Not the hold our breath and wallow in the shallow end of the floor dance
But the meeting of the trinity: the body, breath and beat dance
The shout hallelujah from the top of our thighs dance
The mother may I?
Yes you may take ten 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 kingdoms 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

[To listen to Jewel recite this, go here and click on the Play button]

If You Knew

What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.

A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

- Ellen Bass

Looking for Work

I’d been out of work for a month
and knew it was time to get going
on my job search. So I got out
of bed, gazed out the window, looked
for a job, saw nothing that interested
me, crawled under the covers again
and fell back to sleep.

An hour later, I got up, brewed
coffee, made it strong, the color
of wet road, then traveled a mile
with my throat until the pot was empty.

I didn’t go out at all the day
before but knew everything worth
missing was just outside my door
in the paper. Even with Monday
folded over with a crease through
noon, fifty cents seemed too
expensive for a day I basically
slept through.

The lead story reported a man
was shot just a few blocks
away, and though I hate guns,
I rifled through the rest of the paper,
tossed it on the floor then went
over to the refrigerator, even though
I don’t believe in miracles and opened
it. None was going to take place on
that day either: no food appeared
just an old piece of steak I cooked once,
that looked raw as last December.

With the temperature reaching
for 90º again and knowing
it shouldn’t reach for anything
beyond its grasp, I decided to get
dressed and walk over to St. James.
It’s a Catholic church but since
the saints inside are still concrete,
I like to go in on weekdays where
it’s cool, dark and empty. The strange
part is it feels like home. I’ve decided
it’s the candles who look like my
relatives. Irish. Each flame a jig,
lit up on Guinness instead of matches.

- Kevin Pilkington

The True Love

There is a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours,
especially if you have waited years and especially if part of you
never believed you could deserve this loved and beckoning
hand held out to you this way.

I am thinking of faith now and the testaments of loneliness and
what we feel we are worthy of in this world.

Years ago in the Hebrides I remember an old man who walked
every morning on the grey stones to the shore of baying seals,

who would press his hat to his chest in the blustering salt wind
and say his prayer to the turbulent Jesus hidden in the water,

and I think of the story of the storm and everyone waking
and seeing the distant yet familiar figure far across the water calling to them,

and how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking, and that
calling, and that moment we have to say yes, except it will not
come so grandly, so Biblically, but more subtly and intimately in
the face of the one you know you have to love,

so that when we finally step out of the boat toward them, we find
everything holds us, and everything confirms our courage, and if
you wanted to drown you could, but you don’t

because finally after all this struggle and all these years, you
don’t want to anymore, you’ve simply had enough of drowning,
and you want to live and you want to love and you will walk
across any territory and any darkness, however fluid and
however dangerous, to the take the one hand you know belongs
in yours.

- David Whyte

Piers Invents a Nigerian News-Bulletin
*
"Breakfast-time: the start;
Lunch-time: the middle;
Supper-time: the end."
*** Piers, aged four.
*
No time to go to bed, or to get up:
At supper-time the world falls over the cliff
And never knows it, presumably; at lunch
All the wide world stands level; and at breakfast:
Oh, the creation of all the days at once
In golden morning! Breakfast-time: the start!
*
Morning news: God created Today
Today, at seven twenty-three, with eggs,
Fanfares of bread, and jam, jubilee birds,
A conspicuous expanse of fancy sky,
And the sun, two brothers, parents, and a house,
Suddenly! from forever. Breakfast-time: the start.
*
Lunch-time: the middle. Bulletin: the sun
Seems to keep going up; one of the brothers
Walks and walks, and one gets angry. Sandwiches
Are an illimitable plateau. A fan
(Expected from the beginning of the world)
Evolves the wind of Paradise. Lunch, heat: the middle.
*
In the race of night and supper, God's night wins:
The sun goes out; the wind goes cool; dinner
Heats a few spots of table. Birds have been
Uncreated already. Invented insects
Disintegrate in shrieks. Brothers sag, worn,
And fade. Trees melt in sky. Supper: the end.
*
Breakfast-time; the start:
Lunch-time; the middle:
Supper-time: the end.
*** Do it again, God!
*
- David Knight

Our Time Is Now

Thank God our time is now,

when wrong comes up to face us everywhere,

never to leave us until we’ve taken the longest stride of soul humans ever took.

Events are now Soul-size.

The enterprise is exploration into God.

**********- Christopher Fry
**********(last lines of his play, A Sleep of Prisoners, written at the end of World War II)

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised


You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message
bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.

- Gil Scott-Heron


The Great Gil Scott-Heron, Poet And Musician, Has Died
by Daoud Tyler-Ameen

Gil Scott-Heron died Friday afternoon in New York, his book publisher reported. He was 62. The influential poet and musician is often credited with being one of the progenitors of hip-hop, and is best known for the spoken-word piece "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."

Gil Scott-Heron Makes A Striking Return

Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949. He spent his early years in Jackson, Tenn., attended high school in The Bronx, and spent time at Pennsylvania's Lincoln University before settling in Manhattan. His recording career began in 1970 with the album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, which featured the first version of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." The track has since been referenced and parodied extensively in pop culture.

Scott-Heron continued to record through the 1970s and early '80s, before taking a lengthy hiatus. He briefly returned to the studio for 1994's Spirits. That album featured the track "Message to the Messengers," in which Scott-Heron cautions the hip-hop generation that arose in his absence to use its newfound power responsibly. He has been cited as a key influence by many in the hip-hop community — such as rapper-producer Kanye West, who closed his platinum-selling 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy with a track built around a sample of Scott-Heron's voice.

Scott-Heron struggled publicly with substance abuse in the 2000s, and spent the early part of the decade in and out of jail on drug possession charges. He began performing again after his release in 2007, and in 2010 released a new album, I'm New Here, to widespread critical acclaim.

© 2011 National Public Radio

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

I Knew a Woman

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in a chorus, cheek to cheek).

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing we did make).

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant notes to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways).

- Theodore Roethke

Come, said my Soul,
Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one,)
That should I after death invisibly return,
Or, long, long hence, in other spheres,
There to some group of mates the chants resuming,
(Tallying Earth's soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,)
Ever with pleas'd smile I may keep on,
Ever and ever yet the verses owning---as, first, I hear and now,
Signing for Soul and Body, set to them my name,

- Walt Whitman

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,-
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.


What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

- Wilfred Owen

A Tendency to Shine

If you prefer smoke over fire
then get up now and leave.
For I do not intend to perfume
your mind's clothing with
more sooty knowledge.
No, I have something else in mind.
Today I hold a flame in my left hand
and a sword in my right.
There will be no damage control today.
God is in a mood to plunder your riches and
fling you nakedly
into such breathtaking poverty

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AwZQHy5fQ...Adyashanti.jpg

that all that will be left of you will be
a tendency to shine.
So don't just sit around this flame
choking on your mind.
This is no campfire song
to mindlessly
mantra yourself to sleep with.
Jump now into the space
between thoughts and
exit this dream
before I burn the damn place down.
- Adyashanti

Blessing the Boats


(at St. Mary's)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it
will love your back

may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

- Lucille Clifton




bendición de los barcos
por Clifton Lucille

(En el puerto de Santa María)

puede la marea
que está entrando ahora mismo
el borde de nuestra comprensión
llevar a cabo lo
más allá de la cara del miedo
puedes besar
al viento y después aparte de él
seguro, confidiado de que te
vas a querer igual.

que puedes
abrir tus ojos al agua
ondeando el agua para siempre
y que en tu inocencia vas a
navegar a esto a aquello.

(Spanish translation by Ken Ireland)

Reading Chinese Poetry Before Dawn

Sleepless again,
I get up.
A cold rain
beasts at the windows.
Holding my coffee,
I ponder Tu Fu's
overturned wine glass.
At his window, snow,
twelve hundred years fallen;
under his hand,
black ink not yet dry.
"Letters are useless."
The poet is old, alone,
his woodstove is empty.
The fame of centuries
casts off no heat.
In his verse, I know,
is a discipline
lost to translation;
here, only the blizzard remains.

- Jane Hirshfield

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Reading Chinese Poetry Before Dawn

Sleepless again,
I get up.
A cold rain
beasts at the windows.
Holding my coffee,
I ponder Tu Fu's
overturned wine glass.
At his window, snow,
twelve hundred years fallen;
under his hand,
black ink not yet dry.
"Letters are useless."
The poet is old, alone,
his woodstove is empty.
The fame of centuries
casts off no heat.
In his verse, I know,
is a discipline
lost to translation;
here, only the blizzard remains.

- Jane Hirshfield

---

___

Thanks for you daily poems, Larry. Your post today and the clouds above inspired these few words:


Assurance

When clouds are
dark in the sky,
trees bending with
the howling wind,

is it delusional to
believe the sun
shines brilliantly
beyond the clouds?

This storm will pass
like others before.

___

In the Attic

There’s a half hour toward dusk when flies,
Trapped by the summer screens, expire
Musically in the dust of sills;
And ceilings slope toward remembrance.

The same crimson afternoons expire
Over the same few rooftops repeatedly;
Only being stored up for remembrance,
They somehow escape the ordinary.

Childhood is like that, repeatedly
Lost in the very longueurs it redeems.
One forgets how small and ordinary
The world looked once by dusklight from above…

But not the moment which redeems
The drowsy arias of flies—
And the chin settles onto palms above
Numbed elbows propped up on rotting sills.

- Donald Justice

Home to Roost

The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small -
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost - all
the same kind
at the same speed.

- Kay Ryan

The Night House

Every day the body works in the fields of the world
mending a stone wall
or swinging a sickle through the tall grass-
the grass of civics, the grass of money-
and every night the body curls around itself
and listens for the soft bells of sleep

But the heart is restless and rises
from the body in the middle of the night,
leaves the trapezoidal bedroom
with its thick, pictureless walls
to sit by herself at the kitchen table
and heat some milk in a pan.

And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe
and goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,
and opens a book on engineering.
Even the conscience awakens
and roams from room to room in the dark,
darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.

And the soul is up on the roof
in her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
singing a song about the wildness of the sea
until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
Then, they all will return to the sleeping body
the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,

resuming their daily colloquy,
talking to each other or themselves
even through the heat of the long afternoons.

Which is why the body- that house of voices
sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle or its pen
to stare at the distance,

to listen to all its names being called
before bending again to its labor.

- Billy Collins

Well, the best literature can do is alter consciousness.
That worked for me, a lot. Thanks

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives. -William C. Dement, professor of psychiatry (b. 1928)

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Night House

Every day the body works in the fields of the world
mending a stone wall
or swinging a sickle through the tall grass-
the grass of civics, the grass of money-
and every night the body curls around itself
and listens for the soft bells of sleep

But the heart is restless and rises
from the body in the middle of the night,
leaves the trapezoidal bedroom
with its thick, pictureless walls
to sit by herself at the kitchen table
and heat some milk in a pan.

And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe
and goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,
and opens a book on engineering.
Even the conscience awakens
and roams from room to room in the dark,
darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.

And the soul is up on the roof
in her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
singing a song about the wildness of the sea
until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
Then, they all will return to the sleeping body
the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,

resuming their daily colloquy,
talking to each other or themselves
even through the heat of the long afternoons.

Which is why the body- that house of voices
sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle or its pen
to stare at the distance,

to listen to all its names being called
before bending again to its labor.

- Billy Collins

---

Anyone Can Sing

Anyone can sing. You just open your mouth,
and give shape to a sound. Anyone can sing.
What is harder, is to proclaim the soul,
to initiate a wild and necessary deepening:
to give the voice broad, sonorous wings
of solitude, grief, and celebration,
to fill the body with the echoes of voices
lost long ago to bravery, and silence,
to prise the reluctant heart wide open,
to witness defeat, to suffer contempt,
to shrink, lose face, go down in ignominy,
to retreat to the last dark hiding-place
where the tattered remnants of your pride
still gather themselves around your nakedness,
to know these rags as your only protection
and yet still open - to face the possibility
that your innermost core may hold nothing at all,
and to sing from that - to fill the void
with every hurt, every harm, every hard-won joy
that staves off death yet honours its coming,
to sing both full and utterly empty,
alone and conjoined, exiled and at home,
to sing what people feel most keenly
yet never acknowledge until you sing it.
Anyone can sing. Yes. Anyone can sing.

- William Ayot

Blessing

Just off the Highway to Rochester, Minnesota
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their
happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the
darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

- James Wright

The Return

Some day, if you are lucky,
you’ll return from a thunderous journey
trailing snake scales, wing fragments
and the musk of Earth and moon.

Eyes will examine you for signs
of damage, or change
and you, too, will wonder
if your skin shows traces

of fur, or leaves,
if thrushes have built a nest
of your hair, if Andromeda
burns from your eyes.

Do not be surprised by prickly questions
from those who barely inhabit
their own fleeting lives, who barely taste
their own possibility, who barely dream.

If your hands are empty, treasureless,
if your toes have not grown claws,
if your obedient voice has not
become a wild cry, a howl,

you will reassure them. We warned you,
they might declare, there is nothing else,
no point, no meaning, no mystery at all,
just this frantic waiting to die.

And yet, they tremble, mute,
afraid you’ve returned without sweet
elixir for unspeakable thirst, without
a fluent dance or holy language
to teach them, without a compass
bearing to a forgotten border where
no one crosses without weeping
for the terrible beauty of galaxies

and granite and bone. They tremble,
hoping your lips hold a secret,
that the song your body now sings
will redeem them, yet they fear

your secret is dangerous, shattering,
and once it flies from your astonished
mouth, they–like you–must disintegrate
before unfolding tremulous wings.


- Geneen Marie Haugen

Great poem selection, Larry... Really wonderful. :-)

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Return

Some day, if you are lucky,
you’ll return from a thunderous journey
trailing snake scales, wing fragments
and the musk of Earth and moon.

Eyes will examine you for signs
of damage, or change
and you, too, will wonder
if your skin shows traces

of fur, or leaves,
if thrushes have built a nest
of your hair, if Andromeda
burns from your eyes.

Do not be surprised by prickly questions
from those who barely inhabit
their own fleeting lives, who barely taste
their own possibility, who barely dream.

If your hands are empty, treasureless,
if your toes have not grown claws,
if your obedient voice has not
become a wild cry, a howl,

you will reassure them. We warned you,
they might declare, there is nothing else,
no point, no meaning, no mystery at all,
just this frantic waiting to die.

And yet, they tremble, mute,
afraid you’ve returned without sweet
elixir for unspeakable thirst, without
a fluent dance or holy language
to teach them, without a compass
bearing to a forgotten border where
no one crosses without weeping
for the terrible beauty of galaxies

and granite and bone. They tremble,
hoping your lips hold a secret,
that the song your body now sings
will redeem them, yet they fear

your secret is dangerous, shattering,
and once it flies from your astonished
mouth, they–like you–must disintegrate
before unfolding tremulous wings.


- Geneen Marie Haugen

---

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Return

Some day, if you are lucky,
you’ll return from a thunderous journey
trailing snake scales, wing fragments
and the musk of Earth and moon.

Eyes will examine you for signs
of damage, or change
and you, too, will wonder
if your skin shows traces

of fur, or leaves,
if thrushes have built a nest
of your hair, if Andromeda
burns from your eyes.

Do not be surprised by prickly questions
from those who barely inhabit
their own fleeting lives, who barely taste
their own possibility, who barely dream.

If your hands are empty, treasureless,
if your toes have not grown claws,
if your obedient voice has not
become a wild cry, a howl,

you will reassure them. We warned you,
they might declare, there is nothing else,
no point, no meaning, no mystery at all,
just this frantic waiting to die.

And yet, they tremble, mute,
afraid you’ve returned without sweet
elixir for unspeakable thirst, without
a fluent dance or holy language
to teach them, without a compass
bearing to a forgotten border where
no one crosses without weeping
for the terrible beauty of galaxies

and granite and bone. They tremble,
hoping your lips hold a secret,
that the song your body now sings
will redeem them, yet they fear

your secret is dangerous, shattering,
and once it flies from your astonished
mouth, they–like you–must disintegrate
before unfolding tremulous wings.


- Geneen Marie Haugen

---

Thanks for posting this extremely beautiful and relevant piece. I have had the good luck of meeting Geneen Marie through work that she does with her friend ,ecopsychologist and vision quest leader Bill Plotkin. She is an amazing writer and this piece gives us an excellent insight into her thought process. Where did you come across this at?

At Lake Scugog

1.
Where what I see comes to rest,
at the edge of the lake,
against what I think I see
and, up on the bank, who I am
maintains an uneasy truce
with who I fear I am,
while in the cabin’s shade the gap between
the words I said
and those I remember saying
is just wide enough to contain
the remains that remain
of what I assumed I knew.

2.
Out in the canoe, the person I thought you were
gingerly trades spots
with the person you are
and what I believe I believe
sits uncomfortably next to
what I believe.
When I promised I will always give you
what I want you to want,
you heard, or desired to hear,
something else. As, over and in the lake,
the cormorant and its image
traced paths through the sky.

- Troy Jollimore

The Wish to Be Generous

All that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man's evil, or dwindle
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know
my little light taken from me into the seed
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass.

- Wendell Berry

Ode To That Green Harmonica

Oh, how you made my heart weep
that full moon night in the mountain pines.
Your sound crying the tears
of hundreds of blues players
who wailed their losses to the night
and the distant stars

Your sound carried enough loneliness
to make the heavens moan
and rain for months.

Oh, you beautiful green harmonica.
Your shine worn down by sliding hands -
the hands easing out low breathy shimmers
caressing the empty places, the broken hearts
of lonely sweethearts
weeping In the night.

I pick you up like the marvelous treasure
you are - and gently kiss
your lips.

You ask only my breath,
my simple breath,
that makes you nearly shiver
out of my hand.

You are full to bursting
with sorrowful blues
falling in the darkness.

Your sound calls in the love sick cowboy,
the tired cook,
the railroad man too tired to go to bed,
the little child too alive
to go to sleep while your sounds
curl in his ears.

With all your sad moans
your green is still the greenest green
that ever a harmonica was - let someone else
try to find a greener green
than you.

That's it! You beautiful green harmonica.
That's it!

Maybe you once were black
with all the sorrows of the world.
Perhaps those darkening tones
easing from such tiny holes,
like sand through a sieve,
filtered out the hurtful parts.

You took only the honeyed leavings
of bleeding passion
and allowed them into the air.

And the trees heard!
Yes, the trees heard and gave you back
their beauty, their greenest green
of praising spring.
Oh, you beautiful green harmonica
Oh! Oh! Oh-hh!

- Doug von Koss

Buckeye

Heading up the Tuolomne
one early July evening
the steep slopes slant back and away
from the movement of water

a pale tawny boneyard of trees
stretches river bank to ridgeline.
The skeletal clatter of limbs
sours the day, this encounter
with so much death. In the narrows,
those dry sculpted shapes become clear.
Like a dream the trouble melting
in a comedy of error.
It is the buckeye, thousands strong
summer deciduous, proud, bare.
Other trees beginning to bloom and fruit,
watch the buckeye leaves curl in the heat,
wonder what’s wrong, as the miscreant tree
papers the ground with fandangos of
spiraled, sunburned currency.

The buckeye, clearly out of step,
its towering white panicles
coming too late in the season
and rivaling each bride’s bouquet.
November buckeye is still bare
and bent with fruit, leathery pears
that drape then crack then let go
the smooth amber seed the Pomo
made a mash of these and poured it
into the river to stun the fish
and carried the nub of the nut
around like a lucky rabbit’s foot.
January finds other trees napping,
while buckeye opens her monkey’s fist
of leaves, each little open hand gestures

hang on, I am here to tell you
the others are coming, in time,
all will be coming in good time.

- Penelope La Montagne

On the Nature of Things

The squawking crow
flies down from the redwood tree
to tell me
he is not a crow.

Not bird, not passerine bird
of the family Corvidae,
nor mind nor body
nor thing.

And not a crow.

In fact, he says,
he hasn't even been
discovered yet.

When I was young I dreamt
I climber marble stairs
toward a room that held
The Book of What Each Thing Is.
Golden light poured down those stairs
from a room so high
I could never see it.

From that book
I would learn
what is crow,
what is redwood,
what am I.

Crow tells me
the black of his wings
is deeper than any book.

Friends, there are hours
I have no greater grief,
no greater joy.

I will never know
what I am.

Crow
flies down often
to tell me so.

- Len Anderson

Dead Pets



They come between dreams

soft focus tails wagging,

whiskers electric.


The ones we have named.

Wide-eyed refugees

we carried home in cars

or in arms curled around

trembling ribs.


They return like blood

to fill again a thick vein

on the surface of sensation.

The tactile plasma

of Patch, Lucky, and Tigger

still checking our pulse.


Those we once called mine,

understand

it is we who were once theirs.

They see us now

as children see ghosts

and other lost souls.

　
- Eric Ashford

Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith




Every summer
I listen and look
under the sun’s brass and even
in the moonlight, but I can’t hear

anything, I can’t see anything -----
not the pale roots digging down, nor the green stalks muscling up,
nor the leaves
deepening their damp pleats,

nor the tassels making,
nor the shucks, nor the cobs.
And still,
every day,

the leafy fields
grow taller and thicker -----
green gowns lofting up in the night,
showered with silk.

Ans so, every summer,
I fail as a witness, seeing nothing -----
I am deaf too
to the tick of the leaves,

the tapping of downwardness from the banyan feet ----
all of it
happening
beyond all seeable proof, or hearable hum.

And, therefore, let the immeasurable come.
Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.
Let the wind turn in the trees,
and the mystery hidden in dirt

swing through the air.
How could I look at anything in this world
and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart?
What should I fear?

One morning,
in the leafy green ocean
the honeycomb of the corn’s beautiful body
is sure to be there.

- Mary Oliver

Snake
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
- D.H. Lawrence

Taormina, 1923

The Barefoot Boy

Through thy torn brim’s jaunty grace;
Blessings on thee, little man,Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan!
With thy turned-up pantaloons,
And thy merry whistled tunes;
With thy red lip, redder still
Kissed by strawberries on the hill;
With the sunshine on thy face,
From my heart I give thee joy,—
I was once a barefoot boy!
Prince thou art,—the grown-up man
Only is republican.
Let the million-dollared ride!
Barefoot, trudging at his side,
Thou hast more than he can buy
In the reach of ear and eye,—
Outward sunshine, inward joy:
Blessings on thee, barefoot boy!

Oh for boyhood’s painless play,
Sleep that wakes in laughing day,
Health that mocks the doctor’s rules,
Knowledge never learned of schools,
Of the wild bee’s morning chase,
Of the wild-flower’s time and place,
Flight of fowl and habitude
Of the tenants of the wood;
How the tortoise bears his shell,
How the woodchuck digs his cell,
And the ground-mole sinks his well;
How the robin feeds her young,
How the oriole’s nest is hung;
Where the whitest lilies blow,
Where the freshest berries grow,
Where the ground-nut trails its vine,
Where the wood-grape’s clusters shine;
Of the black wasp’s cunning way,
Mason of his walls of clay,
And the architectural plans
Of gray hornet artisans!
For, eschewing books and tasks,
Nature answers all he asks;
Hand in hand with her he walks,
Face to face with her he talks,
Part and parcel of her joy,—
Blessings on the barefoot boy!

Oh for boyhood’s time of June,
Crowding years in one brief moon,
When all things I heard or saw,
Me, their master, waited for.
I was rich in flowers and trees,
Humming-birds and honey-bees;
For my sport the squirrel played,
Plied the snouted mole his spade;
For my taste the blackberry cone
Purpled over hedge and stone;
Laughed the brook for my delight
Through the day and through the night,
Whispering at the garden wall,
Talked with me from fall to fall;
Mine the sand-rimmed pickerel pond,
Mine the walnut slopes beyond,
Mine, on bending orchard trees,
Apples of Hesperides!
Still as my horizon grew,
Larger grew my riches too;
All the world I saw or knew
Seemed a complex Chinese toy,
Fashioned for a barefoot boy!

Oh for festal dainties spread,
Like my bowl of milk and bread;
Pewter spoon and bowl of wood,
On the door-stone, gray and rude!
O’er me, like a regal tent,
Cloudy-ribbed, the sunset bent,
Purple-curtained, fringed with gold,
Looped in many a wind-swung fold;
While for music came the play
Of the pied frogs’ orchestra;
And, to light the noisy choir,
Lit the fly his lamp of fire.
I was monarch: pomp and joy
Waited on the barefoot boy!

Cheerily, then, my little man,
Live and laugh, as boyhood can!
Though the flinty slopes be hard,
Stubble-speared the new-mown sward,
Every morn shall lead thee through
Fresh baptisms of the dew;
Every evening from thy feet
Shall the cool wind kiss the heat:
All too soon these feet must hide
In the prison cells of pride,
Lose the freedom of the sod,
Like a colt’s for work be shod,
Made to tread the mills of toil,
Up and down in ceaseless moil:
Happy if their track be found
Never on forbidden ground;
Happy if they sink not in
Quick and treacherous sands of sin.
Ah! that thou couldst know thy joy,
Ere it passes, barefoot boy!

- John Greenleaf Whittier