Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

little tree
little tree
little silent Christmas tree
you are so little
you are more like a flower

who found you in the green forest
and were you very sorry to come away?
see i will comfort you
because you smell so sweetly

i will kiss your cool bark
and hug you safe and tight
just as your mother would,
only don't be afraid

look the spangles
that sleep all the year in a dark box
dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine,
the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads,

put up your little arms
and i'll give them all to you to hold
every finger shall have its ring
and there won't be a single place dark or unhappy

then when you're quite dressed
you'll stand in the window for everyone to see
and how they'll stare!
oh but you'll be very proud

and my little sister and i will take hands
and looking up at our beautiful tree
we'll dance and sing
"Noel Noel"

- e.e.cummings

Awaken


we are in the wake
of a great shifting

awaken

you better free your mind
before they illegalize thought

there’s a war going on

the first casualty was truth
and it’s inside you

the universe is counting on our belief
that faith is more powerful than fear
and in that the shifting moment
we’ll all remember why we’re here

in a world where you’re assassinated for having a dream
and the rich spend 9 billion a year to control our ideas
and visions are televised so things aren’t what they seem

we gotta believe
in a world where
there’s room enough for everyone
to breathe

cause reality is made up of
7 billion thoughts
who made up their minds
of what’s real and what’s not

so I stopped believing
in false idols of war
greed and hate
is not worth my faith

my mind’s dedicated
to justice
my soul is devoted
to love

and love is God
and God is truth
and truth is you
and you are me
and I am everything
and everything is nothing
and nothing is the birthplace of creation
and transformation is possible
and you are proof

we were born right now
for a reason
we can be whatever
we give ourselves the power to be

and right now we need
day dreamers
gate keepers
bridge builders
soul speakers
web weavers
light bearers
food growers
wound healers
trail blazers
truth sayers
life lovers
peace makers

give what you most deeply desire
to give
every moment you are choosing to live
or you are waiting

why would a flower hesitate to open?
now is the only moment
rain drop let go
become the ocean

possibility is as wide
as the space
we create
to hold it

- Naima Penniman

"Right now we need . . . truth sayers"!
Thank you for introducing me to this performance poet new to me.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Awaken...
- Naima Penniman

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Invocation For The Dark Times: Solstice 2002



Stop what you are doing and listen.
Listen to the darkness gathering around you

Stop what you are doing and breathe.
Breathe into the life that you are given.

Stop what you are doing and breathe into this moment
This moment of gathering darkness hovering at the edge
Of colored lights and plastic trees and busy streets and unmet needs

Breathe into the darkness
Growling with the waxing web of war
Wrapping the somnolent fear fed world
in the power hungry vice grips of adolescent tyrants
Formed from the dust of overextended empires
Caught by the ruthless clutch of encroaching stupidity
Escaping the boundaries of all reason at the cost of
Everything You Hold Dear.

Breathe into the wraithlike reporters of doom and gloom
Breathe into the anguished futile cries
Of unheard children wanting the world to last
The trees to stand, the rivers to flow
The sun to shine tomorrow and the next day and the next
Without Nuclear Winter.

Breathe through the putrid stench of all that is dying
And Scream your Agonized Release.

Scream and open to the darkness that is the Great Unmaking.
Open to the darkness that is the letting go,
The crashing down, the stricken stalk,
The dwindling stream, the moonless night,
The used up yesterdays
Whose rightful place is
Peacefully Pushed into the Past.

Breathe and die to the ego-driven empires within you
Spun from the longing of misled separation
Breathe into the endless, endless nothing that is the
blackest velvet source of all.
Breathe into the quiet, the still, the empty and the full
The cradling cloak of rest that
Remembers and Renews.

Breathe into the darkness that is the moist wet womb
Breathe into the slumbering seed,
Cradled in the eternity of crumbled mountains.
Breathe into the the gaping black lace of infinite galaxies,
Birthed from the hiccups of sleeping Gods
Just to tell us there's something
More than Meets the Eye.

Reach into the teeming void to a distant star
And pull it down through endless steps and rainbow veils
And yearning kisses and improbable wishes
Breathe the dreams of dark night’s slumber
onto the tongues of the inner flame,
the luminous light,
The awakening dance
Breaking the trance
Taking the chance on
Changing the Stance.

Breathe into your undulating visions
Birthed from sorrow into hope
Birthed from darkness into faith
Birthed from nothing into something
Something better, something new, something yet we do not know
But only feel, deep within, deep and down,
Where Darkness Reigns Forever
like the
Ancient Queen She Is.

And then, and then, only then,
The Light Will Come.


- Anodea Judith

By The Way
For Adrienne Rich

I’ve given it time, as if time were mine to give.
There was a dam, larger than Hoover or the President or the patent
For the metal creature that sucks up all the dust.
Words had to stop and ask permission before crossing over.
Oh, sometimes they were wild with the urgency of sweet
And leaped—
Mostly the rest were kept in the net
Of swallowed or forbidden language.

I want to go back and rewrite all the letters.
I lied frequently.
No. I was not O.K.
And neither was James Baldwin, though his essays
Were perfect spinning platters of comprehension of the fight
To assert humanness in a black-and-white world.

That’s how blues emerged, by the way—
Our spirits needed a way to dance through the heavy mess.
The music, a sack that carries the bones of those left alongside
The trail of tears when we were forced
To leave everything we knew by the way—

I constructed an individual life in the so-called civilized world.
We all did—far from the trees and plants
Who had born us and fed us.
All I wanted was the music, I would tell you now—
Within it, what we cannot carry.
I talk about then from a hotel room just miles
From your home in the East
Before you fled on your personal path of tears
To the West, that worn-out American Dream
Dogging your steps.

You lived on a pedestal for me then, the driven diver who climbed
Back up from the abyss, Venus on a seashell with a dagger
In her hands.
I had to look, and followed your tracks in the poems
Cut by suffering.
Aren’t they all?
We’re in the apocalyptic age of addiction and forgetting.
It’s worse now.

But that dam, I had to tell you. I broke it open stone by stone.
It took a saxophone, flowers, and your words
Had something to do with it
I can’t say exactly how.
The trajectory wasn’t clean, even though it was sure.
Does that make sense?
Maybe it does only in the precincts of dreams and poetry,
Not in a country lit twenty-four hours a day to keep dreams stuck
Turning in a wheel
In the houses of money.

I read about transcendence, how the light
Came in through the window of a nearby traveller
And every cell of creation opened its mouth
To drink grace.

That’s what I never told you.

- Joy Harjo

The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

Human movements,
but for a few,
are Westerly.
Man follows the Sun.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

Or follows what he thinks to be the
movement of the Sun.
It is hard to feel it, as a rider,
on a spinning ball.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

Centuries and hordes of us,
from every quarter of the earth,
now piling up,
and each wave going back
to get some more.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

My face is the map of the Steppes,"
she said, on this mountain, looking West.

My blood set singing by it,
to the old tunes,
Irish, still,
among these Oaks.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

This is why
once again we celebrate
the great Spring Tides.

Beaches are strewn again with Jasper,
Agate, and Jade.
The Mussel-rock stands clear.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

This is why
once again we celebrate the
Headland's huge, cairn-studded, fall
into the Sea.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

For we have walked the jeweled beaches
at the feet of the final cliffs
of all Man's wanderings.

This is the last place.
There is nowhere else we need to go.

- Lew Welch

I think I remember (that's the way the elderly talk) that Lew Welch told people that, when he died, he'd be buried in a place on Mt. Tamalpais that no one would ever be able to find. He left a suicide note at Gary Snyder's house and vanished. This was in 1971, and his body was never found. He was thought to be carrying a handgun at the time of his disappearance.

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

...

- Lew Welch

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For/From Lew Welch

Lew Welch just turned up one day,
live as you and me. "Damn, Lew" I said,
"you didn't shoot yourself after all."
"Yes I did" he said,
and even then I felt the tingling down my back.
"Yes you did, too" I said—"I can feel it now."
"Yeah" he said,
"There's a basic fear between your world and
mine. I don't know why.
What I came to say was,
teach the children about the cycles.
The life cycles. All other cycles.
That’s what it's all about, and it's all forgot."

- Gary Snyder

Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

To the New Year

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

- W.S. Merwin

December 31st

All my undone actions wander
naked across the calendar,

a band of skinny hunter-gatherers,
blown snow scattered here and there,

stumbling toward a future
folded in the New Year I secure

with a pushpin: January’s picture
a painting from the 17th century,

a still life: Skull and mirror,
spilled coin purse and a flower.

- Richard Hoffman

Each year Sheila Murphy mails her friends a poem for the New Year. This years:

Starting With Black

In a dark place
in a dark time

start with black.
Stop. Soak up its energy.

Remember the circle
however bent and broken.

Prize balance. Seek Pleasure.
Allow surprise. Let music

guide your every impulse.
Support those who falter.

Steer by our fixed star:
No Justice, No Peace.

- Jim Haba

The Risk of Birth

This is no time for a child to be born,
With the earth betrayed by war & hate
And a comet slashing the sky to warn
That time runs out & the sun burns late.

That was no time for a child to be born,
In a land in the crushing grip of Rome;
Honour & truth were trampled by scorn-
Yet here did the Saviour make his home.

When is the time for love to be born?
The inn is full on the planet earth,
And by a comet the sky is torn-
Yet Love still takes the risk of birth.

- Madeleine L’Engle

Encounter

We were riding through the frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive.
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going?
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

- Czeslaw Milosz

A New Land


“What is to give light must endure burning.” Victor Frankl


fires of grief
burn thru every pore
every crevice of self
every belief held tightly
even of inherent goodness

beliefs fail us now
watch as they dissolve
fly away on the breeze
ashes in free flight
no time to bid farewell

fully awake, eyes wide
turning toward the east
the return of light, a new day,
surrender to who knows what
gently hold the darkness

as revealed in outer form
step forward in terror
and in trust, asking:
how can i be of use
this burning one?

carry the torch
of initiated innocence
stumbling at times
falling, yet knowing
the fire will light a way

beyond a shallow safety
to a new land where
the heart of the world
pulses and sings
in billions of ears

somewhere between
terror and trust runs
the deeper river
of resolve, and there
we will reside, there

the sun outshines
the fires of grief
a prayer rises up
in a yet unspoken
language of light

- Fran Carbonaro

Ravens Hiding in a Shoe


There is something men and women living in houses
Don’t understand. The old alchemists standing
Near their stoves hinted at it a thousand times.

Ravens at night hide in an old woman’s shoe.
A four-year-old speaks some ancient language.
We have lived our own death a thousand times.

Each sentence we speak to friends means the opposite
As well. Each time we say, “I trust in God,” it means
God has already abandoned us a thousand times.

Mothers again and again have knelt in church
In wartime asking God to protect their sons,
And their prayers were refused a thousand times.

The baby loon follows the mother’s sleek
Body for months. By the end of summer, she
Has dipped her head into Rainy Lake a thousand times.

Robert, you’ve wasted so much of your life
Sitting indoors to write poems. Would you
Do that again? I would, a thousand times.

- Robert Bly

Hooray for Robert Bly!

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Ravens Hiding in a Shoe...

- Robert Bly

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Shoe drawn by Sherry Yuki, ravens from Oana Enache's pinterest page.

Invisible Work

Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don't mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, "It's hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,
and there's no one
to say what a good job you're doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache."
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.

There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world's heart.
There is no other art.

- Alison Luterman

A Song on the End of the World


On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.


On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.


And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

Warsaw, 1944

- Czeslaw Milosz
(translated by Anthony Milosz)

Shoulders

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world's most sensitive cargo
but he's not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy's dream
deep inside him.

We're not going to be able
to live in this world
if we're not willing to do what he's doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

Democracy

It's coming through a hole in the air,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHI9BTpGkp8

from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It's coming from the feels
that it ain't exactly real,
or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
It's coming through a crack in the wall,
on a visionary flood of alcohol;
from the staggering account
of the Sermon on the Mount
which I don't pretend to understand at all.
It's coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay,
from the brave, the bold, the battered
heart of Chevrolet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
It's coming from the sorrow on the street
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of G-d in the desert here
and the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
Sail on, sail on
o mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
past the Reefs of Greed
through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on
It's coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and the worst.
It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
It's coming from the women and the men.
O baby, we'll be making love again.
We'll be going down so deep
that the river's going to weep,
and the mountain's going to shout Amen!
It's coming to the tidal flood
beneath the lunar sway,
imperial, mysterious
in amorous array:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
Sail on, sail on
o mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
past the Reefs of Greed
through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on
I'm sentimental if you know what I mean:
I love the country but I can't stand the scene.
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

- Leonard Cohen

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot—air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That's the world, and we all live there.

- William Stafford

Drought Break -1979


Ducks skid on October flat water
Small buck, leaps up the blond grass
Never enough water here.
The land splits open like two chapped lips.


Your grandpa died.
He gave you fly fishing
and arrogance
his gin, straight
in the bottom of the jelly jar,
my throat closing around it
for lack of water

Your grandmother’s gone dotty.
She was halfway there,
made for easy conversation
her rapture complete repeating
Enchilada recipes

Forgotten in minutes.
Bake at three fifty.
Now damns burst
Reservoirs spillover
The contents of houses sweep out
to the sea.

Your grandmother’s synapses flood.
The river crests at high tide.

- Zeena Janowsky

The Spirit Work

https://maggieameanderings.com/image..._whirlwind.png

Let us ourselves be still
While the maelstrom builds

Be

At the center of
The powerful storm
A neutral place

Touch Earth and Sky
These are all of you
You are part of them

When the funnel cloud builds
You may look away
Soothe yourself
Fine enough

When the Sudden comes

If you are lifted away
Look down and smile
Imagine each second separately
Each second a life in itself
Full of wonder
Sparkling and clear

Let go

Control

Is Illusion
You have the gift of senses
Celebrate all that you see and hear and taste

In Jubilee
You give up all
To allow life to coalesce
In a new way

Fly away

And wherever the grains and seconds
Reassemble

That is as it will be

Let each particle carry the memory of love

- Anonymous

America: A Prophecy (excerpt)

The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations;
The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up;
The bones of death, the cov'ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry'd.
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst;

Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field:
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;
Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open.
And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge;
They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream.
Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night;
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.

For Everything that lives is holy. For Everything that lives is holy.

- William Blake

Remember

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star's stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is. I met her
in a bar once in Iowa City.
Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother's, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe. I heard her singing Kiowa war
dance songs at the corner of Fourth and Central once.
Remember that you are all people and that all people are you.
Remember that you are this universe and that this universe is you.
Remember that all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember that language comes from this.
Remember the dance that language is, that life is.
Remember.

- Joy Harjo

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

- W.H. Auden