Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Beautiful Wreckage

What if I didn’t shoot the old lady
running away from our patrol,
or the old man in the back of the head,
or the boy in the marketplace?

Or what if the boy—but he didn’t
have a grenade, and the woman in Hue
didn’t lie in the rain in a mortar pit
with seven Marines just for food,

Gaffney didn’t get hit in the knee,
Ames didn’t die in the river, Ski
didn’t die in a medevac chopper
between Con Thien and Da Nang.

In Vietnamese, Con Thien means
place of angels. What if it really was
instead of the place of rotting sandbags,
incoming heavy artillery, rats and mud.

What if the angels were Ames and Ski,
or the lady, the man, and the boy,
and they lifted Gaffney out of the mud
and healed his shattered knee?

What if none of it happened the way I said?
Would it all be a lie?
Would the wreckage be suddenly beautiful?
Would the dead rise up and walk?

- W.D. Erhart

We’ve come a long way toward getting nowhere

My obsession with Jews is an obsession
with one Jew. I look at her walking
and wonder what anyone could have
against Jews, at her sleeping
or hunting for her keys in the morning,
which she does often, lose her keys
when she has to go to work, suggesting
she doesn’t want to, and maybe this
is the problem with Jews:
they don’t want to leave. Or they eat
lots of chicken. Or worry the black
of their skirts doesn’t match the black
of their tops. Or like children more
than babies. Or fret over their mothers.
My Jewish problem is figuring out
why America in 2016 has a dab
of 1930s German Fascism to it—
people at political rallies
yelling crap about the Jews.
If I thought it would do any good,
I’d go to Topeka or wherever
and bring Eve with her troubled wardrobe
and her love of chicken and fascination
with children between two and thirteen,
when they can talk but before
they’ve begun planning the murder
of their parents, bring her face-to-face
with the screamers and ask, So these
are the freckles you hate? I would—we have
a lot of Amex points and I’ve never been
to Topeka or wherever, and I’m sure wherever
is very nice. And whenever we travel
to wherever, whatever people say
and however they say it, Eve’s freckles
will be the same, kind of cute
and kind of Jewish,
just like all her other parts
that do and do not have freckles,
in an inventory I alone
get to take, though trust me—
after repeated inspection, I can attest
that underneath it all, she, like many
of the people you know or are,
is ticklish, wrinkly, sexy, scarred—
since Jews really are relentless
when it comes to being human.

- Bob Hicok

In This Broken Time


Tyrants will roar their victories,
painting their red dreams
on the lids of the nation—
And kindness will be kindness.
Greed will scoop out the soft places
with sharp spoons
leaving only hunger—
And mercy will be mercy.
Fear will cry its hot misguided wrath,
sending nightmares through the land,
shocking dreamers from their sleep in dread—
And courage will be courage.
Brutality will shake its tiny fist
gloved thick with power;
people will be killed in shameful ways,
the storms of grief and rage will howl—
And goodness will be goodness.
In the end, no matter the deceit,
no matter how compelling,
we can’t be broken from our truest selves—
we always circle back around
and find our honor where we left it.
Our people, our American people,
our many-colored threads
stretched tight in warp and weft
between that which knows
its own goodness
and that which does not—
Will claim the land again for our children
and the enemy’s children, too,
mending finally all the tears in the
cloth of who we once and still
so dream of being.

- Kalia Mussetter

Rain & Rachamim

I love the rain.
Makes me think of rachamim, of the Divine well spring of compassion.
Nothing better than falling asleep to the rain
the quiet rumble on the roof
like a cat purring on your lap
the gurgle of the gutters - the sound of all things wet and soggy outside
while we are warm under the covers
inside.

How lucky we are to have a roof over our heads
so that we can enjoy the rain and
so many other things –

Thank you God for the rain and our roofs
our shelter
from the storm.

Let your rachamim fall on all your creatures,
spread over us a shelter of rachamim
of compassion and
Shalom.

- George Gittleman

Passover Remembered


Pack nothing.
Bring only your determination to serve
and your willingness to be free.

Don't wait for the bread to rise.
Take nourishment for the journey,
but eat standing,
be ready to move at a moment's notice.

Do not hesitate to leave your old ways behind - fear, silence, submission.

Only surrender to the need of the time;
to love justice and walk humbly with your God.

Do not take time to explain to the neighbors.
Tell only a few trusted friends and family members.

Then begin quickly, before you have time to sink back into the old ways.

Set out in the dark.
I will send fire to warm and encourage you.
I will be with you in the fire
and I will be with you in the cloud.

You will learn to eat new food and find refuge in new places.
I will give you dreams in the desert
to guide you safely home to that place
you have not yet seen.

The stories you will tell one another around the fires in the dark
will make you strong and wise.

Outsiders will attack you and some who follow you,
and at times you will get weary
and turn on each other
from fear and fatigue and blind forgetfulness.

You have been preparing for this for hundreds of years.
I am sending you into the wilderness to make a new way
And to learn my ways more deeply.

Some of you will be so changed
by weathers and wanderings
that even your closest friends
will have to learn your features
as though for the first time.
Some of you will not change at all.

Some will be abandoned by your dearest loves
and misunderstood by those
who have known you since birth
and feel abandoned by you.

Some will find new friendship
in unlikely faces, and old friends
as faithful, and true
as the pillar of God's flame.

Sing songs as you go,
and hold close together.
You may at times grow confused
and lose your way.

Continue to call each other
By the names I’ve given you,
To help you remember who you are.
Touch each other and keep telling the stories.

Make maps as you go,
remembering the way back
from before you were born.

So you will be only the first
of many waves of deliverance on these desert seas.
It is the first of many beginnings
your Paschaltide.
Remain true to this mystery.

Pass on the whole story.

Do not go back.

I am with you now
and I am waiting for you.

- Alla Renee Bozarth

Paschal

Easter was the old North
Goddess of the dawn.
She rises daily in the East
And yearly in spring for the great

Paschal candle of the sun.
Her name lingers like a spot
Of gravy in the figured vestment
Of the language of the Britons.

Her totem the randy bunny.
Our very Thursdays and Wednesdays
Are stained by syllables of thunder
And Woden's frenzy.

O my fellow-patriots loyal to this
Our modern world of high heels,
Vaccination, brain surgery—
May they pass over us, the old

Jovial raptors, Apollonian flayers,
Embodiments. Egg-hunt,
Crucifixion. Supper of encrypted
Dishes: bitter, unrisen, a platter

Compass of martyrdom,
Ground-up apples and walnuts
In sweet wine to embody mortar
Of affliction, babies for bricks.

Legible traces of the species
That devises the angel of death
Sailing over our doorpost
Smeared with sacrifice.

- Robert Pinsky

Easter Exultet

Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision
shipwrecks you.
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
Be prepared
to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane.
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!
Honeymoon with Big Joy!

- James Broughton

I especially like "upholstering a rut"!

On the fifth day
the scientists who studied the rivers
were forbidden to speak
or to study the rivers.

The scientists who studied the air
were told not to speak of the air,
and the ones who worked for the farmers
were silenced,
and the ones who worked for the bees.

Someone, from deep in the Badlands,
began posting facts.

The facts were told not to speak
and were taken away.
The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent.

Now it was only the rivers
that spoke of the rivers,
and only the wind that spoke of its bees,

while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees
continued to move toward their fruit.

The silence spoke loudly of silence,
and the rivers kept speaking,
of rivers, of boulders and air.

Bound to gravity, earless and tongueless,
the untested rivers kept speaking.

Bus drivers, shelf stockers,
code writers, machinists, accountants,
lab techs, cellists kept speaking.

They spoke, the fifth day,
of silence.

- Jane Hirshfield

The Fall of Rome
(for Cyril Connolly)


The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

- W. H. Auden

some of us have specialized in rut upholstery--and o lord the range of styles and comfort levels!

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Sara S:

I especially like "upholstering a rut"!

---

What Song Should We Sing

The massive overhead crane comes
when we wave to it, lets down
its heavy claws and waits tamely
within its power while we hook up
the slabs of three-quarter-inch
steel. Takes away the ponderous
reality when we wave again.
What name do we have for that?
What song is there for its voice?
What is the other face of Yahweh?
The god who made the slug and ferret,
the maggot and shark in his image.
What is the carol for that?
Is it the song of nevertheless,
or of the empire of our heart? We carry
language as our mind, but are we
the dead whale that sinks grandly
for years to reach the bottom of us?

- Jack Gilbert

A Ritual to Read to Each OtherRelated Poem Content Details

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

- William Stafford

There She Is

When I go into the garden, there she is.
The specter holds up her arms to show
that her hands are eaten off.
She is silent because of the agony.
There is blood on her face.
I can see she has done this to herself.
So she would not feel the other pain.
And it is true, she does not feel it.
She does not even see me.
It is not she anymore, but the pain itself
that moves her. I look and think
how to forget. How can I live while she
stands there? And if I take her life
what will that make of me? I cannot
touch her, make her conscious.
It would hurt her too much.
I hear the sound all through the air
that was her eating, but it is on its own now,
completely separate from her. I think
I am supposed to look. I am not supposed
to turn away. I am supposed to see each detail
and all expression gone. My God, I think,
if paradise is to be here
it will have to include her.

- Linda Gregg

What We Need Is Here

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

- Wendell Berry

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

Auschwitz-Birkenau

To awaken here
Is to hear silence
Shrieking in cold,
Empty corridors, to awaken

In a heart hewn
By fear, a darkness
Closed to compassion.
Any kindness

Is all kindness--a treachery
We must enter, allow to enter us--
Ask us, "who are you here
In this hallowed hell?"

No where to step
Where ash hasn't fallen,
Where cruelty hasn't walked,
Fed on our tender fear.

Who am I in this
Enormous evil?
A dog waiting at a platform?
Or the child terrified of dogs,

Clutching a brother's hand?
A boy alive forever,
Forever frightened so we
Will know what we can do.

I move through ghosts, numb.
Like others, I am dumb,
In respectful, awful silence,
Save for voices screaming,

Who I am? Am I
The selfless priest crammed
In a standing cell, dying
For a stranger who survived?

Who am I here in history's
Hall of horrors? Walls lined
With visages, victims
Who haven't yet imagined

What we can do--will do.

Not Nazis, not
Germans, but humans
Did this. We
Do this now.

To awaken here is
To see that casual blue
Chip in the sky's
Somber gray soul,

Innocent opening
letting light flow down,
Bless this damned,
Degraded place.

To awaken here,
Is to know one's
Darkness, and not
Turning from it, see that light.

- Rebecca del Rio

Education?

To define a child by A to Z
Refines the art of mockery;
Such pretense of intellect
Harbors collective disrespect;
Uniform charts on every wall
Imitate Apollo perfectly apall.
Yes this urgency to order
Pretends the goddess of disorder
Is not a worthy Nemesis,
And that her cousin Dionysius
Has forsworn wine: his bride Psyche
Become a bridesmaid of Nike.

- Brian McSweeney

The Destruction of Sennacherib

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

- Lord Byron

• Poetry Contest for Adults and Youth
  
  
  
• CALL FOR ENTRIES: The History of Sonoma County
  A Poetry Contest for Adults and Youth
  Deadline for entry: May 1, 2017
  SCA announces a poetry contest, entitled "The History of Sonoma County" which invites local writers to submit poems about the history of Sonoma County. Poems selected from this contest will be displayed at Sebastopol Center for the Arts and winners will be invited to attend and read their winning poem at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts on June 10. The contest juror is Sonoma County Poet Laureate, Iris Jamahl Dunkle. Dunkle is the author of two poetry collections, Gold Passage (2013) and There's a Ghost in this Machine of Air (2015).
  The entry deadline is Monday, May 1, 2017. Youth, teens and adults are invited to submit their work and may submit up to three entries per contestant. The fee for adults is $8 for members of the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, $10 for non-members, and $5 for youth entries age 18 and under.
  Awards:
  
  
  • One juror will select the winning entries.
  • Three Winners will be selected in each of the following categories: Youth (K-5), Junior High (6-8), High School (9-12), Adult
  • Winners will read their poems at a reception June 10, 7:30pm,
  • Winning entries will be displayed at SCA
  • First place winners in all categories will each be awarded a $50 prize, Second place winners will receive a $25 prize and Third place winner will receive a $15 prize.
  • Winning entries may be published in SCA's "QuARTerly" and on the website.
  Entry Guidelines:
  
  
  • Entries are online only to be uploaded at: www.jotform.com
  • All entries must be original, unpublished, and not previously exhibited or read at SCA.
  • All entries must be submitted in a font no smaller than 12 pt. Times New Roman (or equivalent).
  • Each entry must be submitted in a Word Doc or PDF file, on a single 8½ x 11" page, with margins no less than 1 inch around.
  • Writers may submit a maximum of 3 entries.
  • Writers must submit two copies of each entry, one blind copy (without any author identification for judging), and a second copy identifying the author and city of residency for display. Each entry must be named as follows: lastname.firstname.1name and lastname.firstname.noname (for the copy without a name.) For example:
    
    • Smith.Amy.1name and Smith.Amy.1noname
    • Smith.Amy.2name and Smith.Amy.2noname
    • Smith.Amy.3name and Smith.Amy.3noname
  Due to volume considerations, a literary panel may prescreen entries.
  Deadlines & Fees:
  Entries must be submitted online by May 1, 2017.
  Sebastopol Center for the Arts members: $8 per entry (membership is $40 annually).
  Non-members: $10 per entry.
  Youth age 18 and under $5 per entry.
  Winners will be notified by May 25.
  For more information, email [email protected] or 707-829-4797 or visit www.sebarts.org
  
  

The Charge of the Goddess

Now listen to the words of the Great Mother,
who was of old also called among men Artemis,
Astarte, Athene, Dione, Melusine, Aphrodite,
Cerridwen, Dana, Arianrhod, Isis, Bride,
and by many other names.
At her altars, the youth of Lacedaemon in Sparta made due sacrifice.


Whenever ye have need of any thing,
once in the month,
and better it be when the moon is full,
then shall ye assemble in some secret place, and adore the spirit of me,
who am Queen of all witches.


There shall ye assemble, ye who are fain to learn all sorcery,
yet have not won its deepest secrets;
to these will I teach things that are as yet unknown.


And ye shall be free from slavery;
and as a sign that ye be really free,
ye shall be naked in your rites;
and ye shall dance, sing, feast, make music and love, all in my praise.
For mine is the ecstasy of the spirit,
and mine also is joy on earth;
for my law is love unto all beings.


Keep pure your highest ideal;
strive ever towards it, let naught stop you or turn you aside;
for mine is the secret door which opens upon the land of youth,
and mine is the cup of wine of life,
and the cauldron of Cerridwen,
which is the Holy Grail of immortality.


I am the gracious Goddess,
who gives the gift of joy unto the heart of man.
Upon earth, I give the knowledge of the spirit eternal;
and beyond death, I give peace, and freedom,
and reunion with those who have gone before.


Nor do I demand sacrifice;
for behold, I am the Mother of all living,
and my love is poured out upon the earth.


Hear ye the words of the Star Goddess;
she in the dust of whose feet are the hosts of heaven,
whose body encircles the universe.


I who am the beauty
of the green earth and the white moon upon
the mysteries of the waters,
I call upon your soul to arise and come unto me.


For I am the soul of nature
that gives life to the universe.
From me all things proceed and unto me
they must return.
Let My worship be in the
heart that rejoices, for behold,
all acts of love and pleasure
are My rituals.


Let there be beauty and strength,
power and compassion,
honor and humility,
mirth and reverence within you.
And you who seek to know me,
know that the seeking and yearning
will avail you not,
unless you know the Mystery:
for if that which you seek,
you find not within yourself,
you will never find it without.


For behold,
I have been with you from the beginning,
and I am that which is attained
at the end of desire

- Traditional by Doreen Valiente, as adapted by Starhawk

Mother Church No. 3

Kin Kletso/Yellow House
Chaco Canyon, San Juan County, New Mexico
Anasazi Ruins, AD 1125-1130
for Henri, at 2

You step down into the Flat World
Then ask me to say it, to explain

How our name can mean both ancestor
And enemy. Your body begins in four directions.

Here, one calendar takes eighteen years.
I am three. One day is an eyelash.

Your body is a segment of prehistoric road,
A buried stairwell with only the top stair obvious.

We are alluvial, obsidian.
Sometimes the ground swells

With disappointment; sometimes we know our mountains
Will be renamed after foreign saints.

We sing nine-hundred-year-old hymns
That instruct us in how to sit still

For forty-nine years
Through a fifty-year drought.

We climb down through the hole anyway,
And agree to the arrangement.

- Robin Coste Lewis

Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him

1. Do gorillas have birthdays?
Yes. Like the rainbow, they happen.
Like the air, they are not observed.

2. Do butterflies make a noise?
The wire in the butterfly’s tongue
hums gold.
Some men hear butterflies
even in winter.

3. Are they part of our family?
They forgot us, who forgot how to fly.

4. Who tied my navel? Did God tie it?
God made the thread: O man, live forever!
Man made the knot: enough is enough.

5. If I drop my tooth in the telephone
will it go through the wires and bite someone’s ear?
I have seen earlobes pierced by a tooth of steel.
It loves what lasts.
It does not love flesh.
It leaves a ring of gold in the wound.

6. If I stand on my head
will the sleep in my eye roll up into my head?
Does the dream know its own father?
Can bread go back to the field of its birth?

7. Can I eat a star?
Yes, with the mouth of time
that enjoys everything.

8. Could we Xerox the moon?
This is the first commandment:

I am the moon, thy moon.
Thou shalt have no other moons before thee.

9. Who invented water?
The hands of the air, that wanted to wash each other.

10. What happens at the end of numbers?
I see three men running toward a field.
At the edge of the tall grass, they turn into light.

11. Do the years ever run out?
God said, I will break time’s heart.
Time ran down like an old phonograph.
It lay flat as a carpet.
At rest on its threads, I am learning to fly.

- Nancy Willard

Horses at Midnight without a Moon


Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

- Jack Gilbert

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

This note and photo above were sent to me yesterday by Margaret Gore from Mohton, PA

Hi Ron, Thought I'd write a little story for you in the spirit of my dad's pen to paper.

Well, today after being prodded each Spring "To go out and get em", I took my foraging basket and set out into our ten acre wood in search of the elusive morel mushroom. My friend, Ron Rozewski, said he found them here many moons ago. After 30 + years of living here I have never seen a one. His advice was not to look for them but only "To look for what is there".

So now I can tell you what really is there... Using my fancy Komperdell hiking pole, I began across the lane up a steep slope to the upper edge of the property. There must be some up here I thought. The stand of trees include oak, popular, and other hardwoods here on Hardwood Lane. But rather than morels, I saw squirrel nests, holes from the many varieties of woodpeckers and tons of poison ivy. I was just happy not to run into any of the wild turkeys that gobble or the skunk I smelled the night before.

I came down the slope and entered the big woods through the thicket, past the pond. I noticed the spillway overflowed with the Spring rain and created another stream to cross. There were a few more large trees toppled by their roots during the Winter's storms too.

On a smaller scale, the ground was covered in ferns unfurling their fronds and I couldn't help thinking how I saw them being sold in the garden center just yesterday for $4.95 a pop. I could be rich I thought! Looking even closer, I found wildflowers in all their glory...trout lilies, May apples, solomon seal, jack-in-the pulpit, and on and on. I am rich to have this beauty on my land... I realized in an Ah Ha moment!

I kept walking toward the stream near the bottom of the property. I didn't remember the stand of beech trees that line her banks and the twinkle of the water made me stop for a pause. By now I forgot all about my mission of foraging mushrooms.

My little hike was complete and I decided to save the creek crossing and steep incline to the summit and Southern edge of the property for my next restless urge and adventure in my big backyard. I headed back home to my little house in the wood quite satisfied.

Thanks Ron for urging me to get up and see what's out there. Not the morels I searched for but a whole lot more!

Love to you my wise friend, Marjorie

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Earth
...

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Imagining

What if God isnʼt a noun
to be empowered and worshiped
but a verb of creation
powered by love?

What if every single tree
drawn in primary school
is a sacred work of art
worthy of joyful notice?

What if our lives are built
on a web of kindness,
a net,
which holds everything living.

What if the rocks are alive
singing strength and courage;
vibrating
from our feet right up to our heart?

What if we loved ourselves
as deeply as the mountain
who,
caressed by water,
surrenders herself
into sand?

What if our most loved,
intra-national pastime
is a game of entertainment
where we all win?

What if no one aspired
to be a millionaire
and money no longer had power
but was simply a means of tender-ness.

What if transforming our world
by imagining it
can
actually make it happen?

- Deborah Rodney

A Child is Something Else Again


A child is something else again. Wakes up
in the afternoon and in an instant he's full of words,
in an instant he's humming, in an instant warm,
instant light, instant darkness.

A child is Job. They've already placed their bets on him
but he doesn't know it. He scratches his body
for pleasure. Nothing hurts yet.
They're training him to be a polite Job,
to say "Thank you" when the Lord has given,
to say "You're welcome" when the Lord has taken away.

A child is vengeance.
A child is a missile into the coming generations.
I launched him: I'm still trembling.

A child is something else again: on a rainy spring day
glimpsing the Garden of Eden through the fence,
kissing him in his sleep,
hearing footsteps in the wet pine needles.
A child delivers you from death.
Child, Garden, Rain, Fate.

- Yehuda Amichai
(translated from the original Hebrew by Chana Block)

Mirror. Memory
The man and woman in a formal portrait
before me in the gallery,
born to the high summer of Flemish pride —

pride in their eyes, rendered with animal glues,
in the elaborate loops of their collars,
even pride in the painter

who only yesterday applied gesso
and tacked the canvas to make them ready for
a future of perpetual intrusion —

are not the ones I want to remember:
winter provincials listening for infant cries,
boiling a kettle in the predawn,

their faces misted and revealed
in the steel of it, their moment passing,
passing; nothing but sleep in their eyes.

- Eavan Boland