Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Icarus


When Icarus falls

   a fragmented world’s wounds

receive the falling boy
   who has suffered an excess of light

his frantic wings
   collapsed in distracted flight.

He falls
   into every burning abandonment.

He falls into the last tiger’s dream.

   He falls into the lies

told by those who have
   to those who have not.

He falls into the lives
   of black men dying of brutality

the women and children

   caught in the fire storm, the agony gasp

of refugees.

   All suffocating beneath the ashes of

words injustice fear
   betrayal hate separation bigotry

He is falling into city streets
   bloodied in homelessness

scarred in desperation

   broken by illusion.

In the old story
   no one listens to the cries
   no one turns to look
   no one decides to do something to help.

But we are not in that story.
   We are listening
   We are looking

for the boy has fallen into our hearts
   Ignited us and we are awake.
   Our wings beat as One

The wounded words will rise from the ashes
   Justice love honor connection
   Can we pledge to care enough

to shout to roar
   what really matters?

to do what we can
   In the ways we can

While we can

- Gail Onion

The Moth

“New research suggests that butterflies and moths come with mental baggage…left over from their lives as larvae.”

- Science

He’d like to be at one with his new self
but memories sit in him like eyes.

Sometimes scent implies an unheard-of
idea and he’s off
but it’s just another of the given forms.

You’d think flight would be decent redress,
the power to sift himself through air
and leave each thought in its old place,
where hard feelings also could be left.

He shrugs and the wings
quiver with great precision,
nature will have to live with what it’s done,
he cannot manage even resignation
without a show of grace.

- Jana Prikryl

Paul Robeson

That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other's
harvest:
that we are each other's
business:
we are each other's
magnitude and bond.

- Gwendolyn Brooks

He was a Deep River.

To Those Born After Us


I. Truly, I live in a time of darkness!
The innocent word is foolish. A smooth brow
Suggests lack of sensitivity. Those who are laughing
Just haven’t heard the terrible news yet.

What kind of times are these,
When a conversation about trees is almost a crime,
Because so many misdeeds are left unspoken?
That person there – calmly crossing the street,
Is probably no longer available
To his friends who are in trouble.

It’s true: I’m still earning a living.
But that’s pure coincidence.
Nothing in what I do justifies my eating my fill.
By chance, I am spared. (When my luck runs out, I’m lost).

People say to me: Eat and drink! Be glad that you can.
But how can I eat and drink, when what I eat
Is taken from the mouths of the hungry, and the
Water I drink deprives one who is thirsty?
But still…I eat and I drink.

I would like to be wise.
In ancient books one can read what is wise:
To not participate in the conflicts of the world,
To be without fear, in the short time we have,
Also to get along without violence,
To requite evil with good,
To not satisfy one’s wishes, but to forget them –
These things are considered wise.
All of them are beyond me.
Truly I live in a time of darkness!

II. I came into the cities at a time of disorder,
A time of hunger.
I came among people at a time of uproar,
And I was outraged with them.
So passed the time
I was given on Earth.

I took food between battles,
And laid down to sleep among killers.
I was careless in love,
And regarded nature without patience.
So passed the time
I was given on Earth.


In my time, all roads led to a swamp.
My language gave me away to the executioner.
I could do very little. But the rulers
Sat more securely without me – that was my hope.
So passed the time
I was given on Earth.

III. You, who are the ones who will rise up
From the flood in which we went down,
Remember,
When you speak of our weaknesses,
The dark times from which you escaped.

We travelled, changing countries more often than shoes,
Through the wars between classes, in despair
Because we found injustice, but no outrage.

And yet we do know this:
Hatred, even of meanness,
Distorts the visage.
Anger, even at injustice,
Makes hoarse the voice. Alas,
Though we wanted to prepare the ground for kindness,
We didn’t know how to be kind ourselves.

But you, when the time comes,
When human beings can help one another,
Remember us
With forbearance.

- Bertolt Brecht

Ah, Brecht...worth your weight in gold as a poet, just for this poem, if one never sees another. The greatest "time capsule" ever penned, imo. If we think we have problems... and yet, fittingly chosen for the 15th anniversary of 9/11.
Also known in English under the title "To Posterity," and available online in a few different translations. This poem has brought me to tears many times over the years. Always grateful to see its nuggets of truth being shared publicly. :heart:

Onions


Of relationships,
and of our individual lives,
they say that once
you finally figure-out
what’s really going on,
what’s actually true,
you discover that it’s only
one layer
of an onion,

which then presents
a new layer
for us to solve.

Ahh,
those who compare this
to an onion
have never
savored stew's delicious
carrots, potatoes, mushrooms, celery, broth
until only a single translucent onion is left
in the bottom of the pot
awaiting our large spoon
to pick it up
the whole onion
and slip
its entire delicious slurp
all at once
into our mouth.

- Trout Black

Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal


After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any
Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.


Well -- one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own
gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor,
wailing loudly.

Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her.
What is her
Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four
hours late and she
Did this.

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway,
min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?

The minute she heard any words she knew -- however
poorly used -
She stopped crying.

She thought our flight had been cancelled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical
treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we're fine, you'll get
there, just late,

Who is picking you up? Let's call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on
the plane and
Would ride next to her -- southwest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just
for the fun of it.

Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while
in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.

Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call
some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took
up about 2 hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her
life. Answering
Questions.

She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies --
little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts --
out of her bag --
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It
was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler
from California,

The lovely woman from Laredo -- we were all covered
with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better
cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free beverages from
huge coolers --
Non-alcoholic -- and the two little girls for our
flight, one African
American, one Mexican American -- ran around serving
us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar
too.

And I noticed my new best friend -- by now we were
holding hands --
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some
medicinal thing,

With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling
tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones
and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

Not a single person in this gate -- once the crying of
confusion stopped
-- has seemed apprehensive about any other person.

They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other
women too.
This can still happen anywhere.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

A Speech To The Garden Club Of America

(With thanks to Wes Jackson and in memory of Sir Albert Howard and Stan Rowe.)

Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;
There are so many outcomes that are worse.
But I must add I’m sorry for getting here
By a sustained explosion through the air,
Burning the world in fact to rise much higher
Than we should go. The world may end in fire
As prophesied—our world! We speak of it
As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit
Of temporary progress, digging up
An antique dark-held luster to corrupt
The present light with smokes and smudges, poison
To outlast time and shatter comprehension.
Burning the world to live in it is wrong,
As wrong as to make war to get along
And be at peace, to falsify the land
By sciences of greed, or by demand
For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify
The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.
But why not play it cool? Why not survive
By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?
Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens
By going back to school, this time in gardens
That burn no hotter than the summer day.
By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,
By goods that bind us to all living things,
Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.
The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,
Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger
Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.
A creature of the surface, like ourselves,
The garden lives by the immortal Wheel
That turns in place, year after year, to heal
It whole. Unlike our economic pyre
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

- Wendell Berry

End Of Summer

An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.

I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.

Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.

Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.

- Stanley Kunitz

Master Dogen Walks on the South Fork


The eyes of the fox are shells,
Her home is sand, this luminous beach.

She is washed by saltwater, bleached by sun,
Wrapped in the calcium ribbon of shellfish.

Her body is a skeletal map, a lens, a geographic mark.

Did she leave the security of oaks,
Descend the dune of scrub and marl,
Or rise, carried by the waves of the Sound?

Myriad things come forth
To make the map of eyes and bone,
To mark the art of shell and stone.

Water, wind, stone, luminous sand, wind, water . . .


- Scott Chalky

Sky Slope

The strange September sun departs
A soft breeze cracks the wall of humidity
Those on the way to work glide above the pavement
Happy as if Second Avenue were transformed:
Ah, a brick lane in an ancient city on the day
Of the morning of a religious revival
When the prophets and clowns come to town

Yes, we all deserve the best
Isn’t that so?

Looking east: tiny clouds piled
One on top of another
Like stones on a trail elsewhere
Shift your head and the frail blue sky is empty
High and empty
This is the void
Nobody wants to die

We all deserve the best
Isn’t that so?

If I were to follow the path of clouds
Mind recollecting, backtracking then brazenly
Galloping ahead, never releasing the thread
Of what the sky has to offer
Might I not catch a glimpse of promise
Buried deep
In weather dying:

Look at it another way
Perhaps an image of a subsistence farmer
Blissfully encountering
A rare eatable fungus
Beneath a rock
In a patch of barren soil

Conversely
Would the void resurface

Dry fissure in the mud


We all deserve the best

Isn’t that so?



- Barry Denny

Kindness

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

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

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

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

- Naomi Shihab Nye


"The person who is in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community everywhere they go.”
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

We know what Master laid thy keel,
What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,
What anvils rang, what hammers beat,
In what a forge and what a heat
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!

Fear not each sudden sound and shock,
‘Tis of the wave and not the rock;
‘Tis but the flapping of the sail,
And not a rent made by the gale!

In spite of rock and tempest's roar,
In spite of false lights on the shore,
Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!

Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee.
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears,

Are all with thee, -are all with thee!

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I didn't know the Trumpster was THAT old!

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! ...

---

The Campesinos’ Maestra


And it was in that season when the countryside is a painter’s pallet of yellows, and reds, and crimsons that I met her.

She walks in a deliberate step even as campesinos in stained and soiled pants run row to row, slicing stems, stretched from the weight of bunches, sagging with the liquid sugar of the vines. Instinctively they find only the ripe.

Cut go. Cut go. Cut go.

But it was her wont to smile and speak with the certitude of a warm breeze, soft, gentile, quiet, but unquestioned resolve.

She has countless children under her charge loving each as her own, encouraging all to reach for the brass ring of life’s carousel.

And the campesinos, who never knew such a teacher, continue their jog up and down row after row, parcel after parcel, acre after endless acre, making their wage kicking dust into the air, carried by the wind forming tunnels in the sky.

"Save them from this," beckon the men in sweat, and dirt, and juice-soaked shirts.

She smiles and embraces their offspring. "I shall," she guarantees speaking with the measured conviction of the self-assured.

And the campesinos, they smile the smile of hope and wave to La Maestra displaying like trophies their fingers, scarred, and sliced, and bandaged from the errant swing of the hook that divides stem from branch.

"I shall," she vows walking off in a deliberate pace, with her youthful charges in tow.

- Armando Garcia-Davila

Rubai Ninety Two


Take a pear and pare it of its bruises.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com...b25587d084.jpg

Old bruised pears are best to eat.
Lean over, let it drip
onto your favorite plate.

The knife is sharp, serrated, and it shines
with tiny pools of juice.
Inside, your teeth ache a trice
of refrigerator cold.

Slice another slice and thank your pal the pear
for living – not to make you live
but just to grow, be swallowed,
disappear,
like you.

Grow, be swallowed,
disappear.

- Bruce Moody

A Buddhist Grace
or What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Somehow I never make it through this prayer:

Potatoes, celery, carrots, onions,
each tenderly coaxed
from soft soil aerated by your hand.
Thank you farmer for your work,
I am connected to you
through this fine stew
unified by its good red burgundy stock.
Thank you vintners and wine makers
for your part in this symphony
conducted with the tang of a bay leaf.

Let’s see—allow me to consider what else
for which to be thankful in my
deep dish of pungent stew—
—ah the succulence of fall-apart beef
nurtured to morseled chunks by your hand,
my cook, my uniter of all components.

Thank you cattle for offering yourselves as sacrifice.
Thank you slaughterhouse workers
wading ankle-deep in blood.
Thank you, those of you with the courage
to impersonally slay.
Thank you to the packers hanging carcasses on hooks.
Thank you for the cutters
who hew beef bodies
as if they were so many grades
and cuts of lumber.
Thank you, all of you, for the intimate part
you play in my meal and my life this day.

- Ed Coletti

Autumn Leaves

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...3_14-38-31.png

Celebrations of gratitude for
past seasons' fullness;
Last bright colors anticipate
winter's muted solitude.
Brilliant hurrahs on painted sunsets
announce inward turnings,
silent renewals.

Leaves that affirm, remind, invoke --
then let go

and

fall

so new births can begin.


- LynneAnne Forest

You Want it Darker

If you are the dealer
I’m out of the game
If you are the healer
Means I’m broken and lame
If thine is the glory
Then mine must be the shame
You want it darker
We kill the flame

Magnified, sanctified
Be Thy Holy Name
Vilified, crucified
In the human frame
A million candles burning
For the help that never came
You want it darker
Hineni Hineni
I’m ready, my Lord

There’s a lover in the story
But the story’s still the same
There’s a lullaby for suffering
And a paradox to blame
But it’s written in the scriptures
And it’s not some idle claim
You want it darker
We kill the flame

They’re lining up the prisoners and
The guards are taking aim
I struggled with some demons
They were middle-class and tame
I didn’t know I had permission
To murder and to maim
You want it darker
Hineni Hineni
I’m ready, my Lord

Magnified, sanctified
Be Thy Holy Name
Vilified, crucified
In the human frame
A million candles burning
For the love that never came
You want it darker
We kill the flame

If you are the dealer
Let me out of the game
If you are the healer
I’m broken and lame
If thine is the glory
Mine must be the shame
You want it darker
Hineni Hineni…..this line repeated
I’m ready, my Lord

- Leonard Cohen

Comice pears

https://www.superfreshgrowers.com/si...ero-comice.jpg

ripe to the very edge of ripeness,
are perhaps god’s greatest gift
or so it seems when I slice one
down the middle, quarter it, seed it
and bite into its soft fullness
and savor the sweet juices
some of which always, without fail,
drip past my lips or down my fingers
waiting, then, to be licked
that none of this gift
might go unused.

If this, then, is god made flesh,
who is satan
if not my fear?

- Bill Denham

How does one thank Bill Denham for the 'truth' about Comice pears? Always grateful for these postings Larry. Cecilia

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Comice pears
...

- Bill Denham

---

I, Too


I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.


- Langston Hughes

Study of Two Pears

I
Opusculum paedagogum.
The pears are not viols,
nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.

II
They are yellow forms
Composed of curves
Bulging toward the base.
They are touched red.

III
They are not flat surfaces
Having curved outlines.
They are round
tapering toward the top.

IV
In the way they are modelled
There are bits of blue.
A hard dry leaf hangs
From the stem.

V
The yellow glistens.
It glistens with various yellows,
Citrons, oranges andn greens
Flowering over the skin.

VI
The shadows of the pears
Are blobs on the green cloth.
The pears are not seen
As the observer wills.

- Wallace Stevens

How to Stop Rushing

Sit in an alpine meadow or
by the side of a dying friend

Taste the wind
her letting go breaths

Imagine a glacier scouring the valley
her first inhale

A butterfly alights on your hand:
become a flower, nourishment for it’s life
Her gaze turning toward eternity, finds you:
become a bridge for her passage

You will not rush the butterfly or
your friend’s last glimpses of this life

So: why rush this?

- Jennifer Louden

The Snakes of September


All summer I heard them
rustling in the shrubbery,
outracing me from tier
to tier in my garden,
a whisper among the viburnums,
a signal flashed from the hedgerow,
a shadow pulsing
in the barberry thicket.
Now that the nights are chill
and the annuals spent,
I should have thought them gone,
in a torpor of blood
slipped to the nether world
before the sickle frost.
Not so. In the deceptive balm
of noon, as if defiant of the curse
that spoiled another garden,
these two appear on show
through a narrow slit
in the dense green brocade
of a north-country spruce,
dangling head-down, entwined
in a brazen love-knot.
I put out my hand and stroke
the fine, dry grit of their skins.
After all,
we are partners in this land,
co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles.

- Stanley Kunitz

Refugee

They have no need of our help
So do not tell me
These haggard faces could belong to you or me
Should life have dealt a different hand
We need to see them for who they really are
Chancers and scroungers
Layabouts and loungers
With bombs up their sleeves
Cut-throats and thieves
They are not
Welcome here
We should make them
Go back to where they came from
They cannot
Share our food
Share our homes
Share our countries
Instead let us
Build a wall to keep them out
It is not okay to say
These are people just like us
A place should only belong to those who are born there
Do not be so stupid to think that
The world can be looked at another way

(now read from bottom to top)

- Brian Bliston

WOW! That's amazing!
:heart:

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Refugee

....

---

Refugees


Someone else’s little boy
walking immediately behind

I arrive at the final check point
am insistently waved through

I want nothing more in the world
only to simply cross over

Certainly not change to salt
looking back at the child

All I have left to me is
my ability to rationalize

At best for me on the other side
stretch twenty declining years

seventy or eighty for him
But I am not this child’s keeper am I

He has my sympathy: From him I have
the burn of his eyes on my reddening neck

all the more so as I admit to myself
I am not helpless before this determined little kid

Here in the presence of real human suffering
All I have left: clear choice and ability to justify

- Ed Coletti

October Arriving

I only have a measly ant
To think with today.
Others have pictures of saints,
Others have clouds in the sky.

The winter might be at the door,
For he’s all alone
And in a hurry to hide.
Nevertheless, unable to decide

He retraces his steps
Several times and finds himself
On a huge blank wall
That has no window.

Dark masses of trees
Cast their mazes before him,
Only to erase them next
With a sly, sea-surging sound.

- Charles Simic