Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

A Spring Day

On the eighth day of a spring month, in a time called the white year,
I tried to hold my mind and make it
still—
my mind that wanders aimlessly.
Repeatedly I tried, ever more dejectedly.
I wished to merge my mind
in the sky of unstained space;
I wished to float my body
lightly, in dancing clouds.
Like a breeze in the open air,
my mind yearns to drift, ill at ease
in rest.
Yet now, before the sun turns red
and sets,
may I leave this place, this gaping
state—
a field of lotus groves, spacious,
blissful,
a mind at ease and joyful.


- Kelsang Gyatso, seventh Dalai Lama
(Translated by Thupten Jinpa and Jas’ Elsner)

The Mushroom Hunters

Science, as you know, my little one, is the study
of the nature and behaviour of the universe.
It’s based on observation, on experiment, and measurement,
and the formulation of laws to describe the facts revealed.

In the old times, they say, the men came already fitted with brains
designed to follow flesh-beasts at a run,
to hurdle blindly into the unknown,
and then to find their way back home when lost
with a slain antelope to carry between them.
Or, on bad hunting days, nothing.

The women, who did not need to run down prey,
had brains that spotted landmarks and made paths between them
left at the thorn bush and across the scree
and look down in the bole of the half-fallen tree,
because sometimes there are mushrooms.

Before the flint club, or flint butcher’s tools,
The first tool of all was a sling for the baby
to keep our hands free
and something to put the berries and the mushrooms in,
the roots and the good leaves, the seeds and the crawlers.
Then a flint pestle to smash, to crush, to grind or break.

And sometimes men chased the beasts
into the deep woods,
and never came back.

Some mushrooms will kill you,
while some will show you gods
and some will feed the hunger in our bellies. Identify.
Others will kill us if we eat them raw,
and kill us again if we cook them once,
but if we boil them up in spring water, and pour the water away,
and then boil them once more, and pour the water away,
only then can we eat them safely. Observe.

Observe childbirth, measure the swell of bellies and the shape of breasts,
and through experience discover how to bring babies safely into the world.

Observe everything.

And the mushroom hunters walk the ways they walk
and watch the world, and see what they observe.
And some of them would thrive and lick their lips,
While others clutched their stomachs and expired.
So laws are made and handed down on what is safe. Formulate.

The tools we make to build our lives:
our clothes, our food, our path home…
all these things we base on observation,
on experiment, on measurement, on truth.

And science, you remember, is the study
of the nature and behaviour of the universe,
based on observation, experiment, and measurement,
and the formulation of laws to describe these facts.

The race continues. An early scientist
drew beasts upon the walls of caves
to show her children, now all fat on mushrooms
and on berries, what would be safe to hunt.

The men go running on after beasts.

The scientists walk more slowly, over to the brow of the hill
and down to the water’s edge and past the place where the red clay runs.
They are carrying their babies in the slings they made,
freeing their hands to pick the mushrooms.

- Neil Gaiman

Planetarium

Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750–1848)
astronomer, sister of William; and others.

A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them

a woman ‘in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles’

in her 98 years to discover
8 comets

she whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled
in those spaces of the mind

An eye,

‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’
from the mad webs of Uranusborg

encountering the NOVA

every impulse of light exploding

from the core
as life flies out of us

Tycho whispering at last
‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’

What we see, we see
and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus

I am bombarded yet I stand

I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.

- Adrienne Rich

Why Regret?

Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn't it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster's New International, perhaps having just
eaten of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
"The perfected lover does not eat."
Didn't you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren't you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring's offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn't it outdo the pleasure of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

- Galway Kinnell

I wanted to look up a few of the poets words in the now defunct dictionary but I appreciate the brilliant images this Irish poet portrays. Thanks again Larry for awakening my soul this morning.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Why Regret?

Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?...

---

Races

You are a Brother
And a Sister
In the colors of Life
Some people believe
They are races
Human races
Whatever that may be
Races are for running
The competitive edge
Distrust and confusion
Leaving alterations
In innocent faces
We are natural Life
A part of Mother Earth's design
A blending of colors
To make the difference
In the teaching
of meanings
We are colors in the family
of Life.

- John Trudell

Crazy Jane and God


That lover of a night
Came when he would,
Went in the dawning light
Whether I would or no;
Men come, men go;
All things remain in God.

Banners choke the sky;
Men-at-arms tread;
Armoured horses neigh
Where the great battle was
In the narrow pass:
All things remain in God.

Before their eyes a house
That from childhood stood
Uninhabited, ruinous,
Suddenly lit up
From door to top:
All things remain in God.

I had wild Jack for a lover;
Though like a road
That men pass over
My body makes no moan
But sings on:
All things remain in God

- William Butler Yeats

Refuse to Shrink



Have you Cried enough in this lifetime

To reclaim the watersheds?

To heal the rainforest ?

Encourage all grief to pour forth

Spread yourself wide

Refuse to shrink

from your oceanic nature.

- Kristy Hellum

The Road

Here is the road: the light
comes and goes then returns again.
Be gentle with your fellow travelers
as they move through the world of stone and stars
whirling with you yet every one alone.
The road waits.
Do not ask questions but when it invites you
to dance at daybreak, say yes.
Each step is the journey; a single note the song.

- Arlene Gay Levine

The Dignity of the Races

the innocent faces
of the many races
cause explosive reactions
in the brains of many
leaving traces
of negative thoughts and feelings
that were taught
from the beginning

the work is
letting the fog
cover angry lessons
save smiles and tears
till the landscape clears
and walk the peaceful plank
that many think they can’t
because those faces
stand in the way
of happiness, their happiness

I know, for I have seen
how they go on without realizing
that happiness resides
in all the faces
for everyone
has their own happiness
and their own dignity
the dignity of the races

- Jayro Dyer

Eulogy



My mother was a dictionary.

She was one of the last fluent speakers of our tribal language.

She knew dozens of words that nobody else knew.

When she died, we buried all of those words with her.

My mother was a dictionary.

She knew words that had been spoken for thousands of years.

She knew words that will never be spoken again.

She knew songs that will never be sung again.

She knew stories that will never be told again.

My mother was a dictionary.

My mother was a thesaurus,

My mother was an encyclopedia.

My mother never taught her children the tribal language.

Oh, she taught us how to count to ten.

Oh, she taught us how to say “I love you.”

Oh, she taught us how to say “Listen to me.”

And, of course, she taught us how to curse.

My mother was a dictionary.

She was one of the last four speakers of the tribal language.

In a few years, the last surviving speakers, all elderly, will also be gone.

There are younger Indians who speak a new version of the tribal

language.

But the last old-time speakers will be gone.

My mother was a dictionary.

But she never taught me the tribal language.

And I never demanded to learn.

My mother always said to me, “English will be your best weapon.”

She was right, she was right, she was right.

My mother was a dictionary.

When she died, her children mourned her in English.

My mother knew words that had been spoken for thousands of years.

Sometimes, late at night, she would sing one of the old songs.

She would lullaby us with ancient songs.

We were lullabied by our ancestors.

My mother was a dictionary.

I own a cassette tape, recorded in 1974.

On that cassette, my mother speaks the tribal language.

She’s speaking the tribal language with her mother, Big Mom.

And then they sing an ancient song.

I haven’t listened to that cassette tape in two decades.

I don’t want to risk snapping the tape in some old cassette player.

And I don’t want to risk letting anybody else transfer that tape to

digital.

My mother and grandmother’s conversation doesn’t belong in the

cloud.

That old song is too sacred for the Internet.

So, as that cassette tape deteriorates, I know that it will soon be dead.

Maybe I will bury it near my mother’s grave.

Maybe I will bury it at the base of the tombstone she shares with my

father.

Of course, I’m lying.

I would never bury it where somebody might find it.

Stay away, archaeologists! Begone, begone!

My mother was a dictionary.

She knew words that have been spoken for thousands of years.

She knew words that will never be spoken again.

I wish I could build tombstones for each of those words.

Maybe this poem is a tombstone.

My mother was a dictionary.

She spoke the old language.

But she never taught me how to say those ancient words.

She always said to me, “English will be your best weapon.”

She was right, she was right, she was right.

- Sherman Alexie

Poetry Repair

The sign said, Poetry Body & Fender Repair
In smaller print Domestic Only
and even smaller print
Experienced English Major on Duty

My dented poem about lost youth and food coloring
had a few problems so I pushed it in the open door

“May we be of service, sir?”
My poem has a slow leak and now and then the steering is loose

“That’s dreadful. Have you discerned anything else, sir?”
Well, it start ok but it slows down when I change direction

“Has it been repaired before, sir?”
Too many times I’m afraid

“Sir, it appears your poem has met with a collision.”
How can you tell?

There is a plethora of indications. We can hear
a whispering murmur, a susurrus actually
from under the hood. And it’s dripping verbs at an appalling rate.”

Plethora? Susurrus? Appalling? I don’t use words like that.

“There you have it. That’s your problem sir. Good day.”

- Doug von Koss

When you think about it, mostly, a cage is air -

When you think about it, mostly, a cage is air - 
so what is there
to be afraid of?
A cage of air. Baudelaire said
Poe thought America was one giant cage.
To the poet, a nation is one big cage?
And isn’t the nation mostly filled with air?
Try to put a cage around your dream.
The cage escapes the dream.
I see it streak and stream.

- Sandra Simonds

Tabernacle

Since they shared the same
monogram, Jim
Crow & Jesus
often found themselves

getting the other’s dress shirts
back from the wash.
This was after Jim
had made it big

& could afford such
small luxuries. He
& Jesus mostly met
Sundays in church

where Jesus came for the singing
but stayed for the sermon
& to see whether the preacher
ever got it right.

Jim, you guessed it,
came for the collection plate
& after stayed
for the hot

plates of the Ladies
Auxiliary (no apostrophe).
To one
folks prayed,

the other they obeyed.

- Kevin Young

The Dominguez Escalante Expedition


When the Dominguez Escalante Expedition
couldn’t find a way
to cross the river,
they left a vast expanse
of redrock

empty

at the center
of their map.

Our lives
are like that,
we know so much,
words can describe so much,

and yet,
at our infinite center,
there is
an emptiness
a space
where all
that truly matters
lives.

- Trout Black

The Sadness At The Heart Of The Nation

Waking up after bad dreams,
loss, grief, unable to reach you;
I think of the sadness at the heart
of the nation. Where song fades out.
How there is a train to prison
that young men ride each day.
We are torn from each other, lost,
some rageful, as we dive down
into our unconscious wounds, awake to
our present reality. There is
no one here in the darkness.
The great storms carry thunder snow.
New rains cause flooding in the west.
There is a sadness at the heart.
The painters will show us colors
and textures of our inner life.
We hope for vibrancy, movement,
our shadows illuminated.
In the distance, musicians
begin to write, sing, chant
of our dark mystery, our protest,
and we honor and embrace
a sadness that will not end soon enough.
There are drums, now, to be played.
We are the strong, grieving, drummers
of our American world. And so I go
downtown early, for a cup of coffee,
5:30 in the morning, and driving,
hear Dave Carlson's band,
Tazmanian Devils, on KRSH radio,
"Roots, Blues, Americana",
playing a live version of "Not Fade Away",
as good as it gets rock 'n roll,
magical in the early dark,
the crowd cheering at the end.
And I think I'm going to be all right again,
even with this sadness at the heart of the nation.

- Jack Crimsons

On Memorizing A Poem

In the beginning was the Word.
Creation is involved here.
This is not “print-on-a-page”.
These are the flowers
of the ages.

Nor can you clip them
and stuff them
in some mental vase.
You have to plant them inside!

First-reading scatters
the seeds of words,
atoms whirling with life,
even the ones that seem inert.

Then: repetition
becomes the steady hand
holding the watering can.

Imperceptibly, every word sprouts.
Secret tendrils grow day by day,
reach out, join hands,

become part of something larger,
a clause, a sentence. Finally,
each word so tropically
bonded with others,
it no longer exists
as a separate thing.

A stanza coheres. The force
continues to flow onward,
new critical mass accrues,
the spirit leaps

across the gap to the next,
back to the one before!
Every reading, connections
establish themselves more firmly.
New ones arise,
flourish like bougainvillea.
Roads appear: Turn Left Here.
Paths and gardens of knowing
form in the brain. Bouquets
climb up into the air,
perfume the air, above the brain!

Finally, a newly-created world
lives within you
to be invoked when needed,
called forth like a genie from a bottle.

Every poem or story
made one’s own
initiates its keeper
into the long line
stretching back
to ancient campfires.
Every teller chants with Homer,
Valmiki, bards whose names
we do not know,

carries this line,
the Light in eyes,
onward

- Max Reif

Simonides of Crete

I read Simonides of Crete.
His words twenty-five centuries ago
speak as living stone:

“Across the pale stillness
of water, keel-carven,
these lovely eyes of desire
drag the ship to her doom.”

He speaks from a character of firm kindness
and, as you can see, also from a respect for the strong arm of nature.

He speaks of climbing the rock walls to Virtue,
and how only those with sweat, with clenched concentration and courage
reach the peak,
but also how blithe her attendant there are
as they celebrate their hymns.

And, likewise (for even the Gods had their defects),
how to never expect perfection from any mortal –
forgiving those especially whose luck was bad.

And how finally (how fate-grave all Greek poetry is!)
Prosperity may vanish
or overturn.
The light-lifting wing of a dragonfly
is not more swift.

I like hard Greek conclusions. Except that, of course,
Fate may, but spirit does not,
ever
really
conclude.

- Bruce Moody

Reversal of Fortune

Somewhere in the crevice between dusk and dawn
just before the grey glow of daylight creeps
through the blinds, awakening my ache
for just one more hour of sleep,
and you

Your hand reaches down from the heavens,
once again stroking my forehead
from the bridge of my nose to the hairline
smoothing out worry lines etched
since childhood, erasing mental litter,
like waves of the ocean washing the shore

The very shore where we strolled on
our first date, your large hand cradling mine,
my own hand saying “yes,” while we spoke
in low tones as I’m speaking to you now
across the divide:

You wouldn’t believe that the country you fled
to find refuge from uniformed men goose-stepping
through your dreams, insisting
in the native tongue you detested
that you are one of them and there is no escape

That very land that worshipped blond and blue-eyed boys
is now led by a woman, is embracing
a million desperate dark-skinned people,
and the grandchildren of your uncles and aunts
wash swastikas off buildings, place bronze plaques
on sidewalks announcing the truth of their clotted past
lest they forget

While the country where you sought and found asylum –
remember the woman lifting her torch to the huddled masses –
has closed its borders in a great forgetting of fake news
and alternative facts

Did you know what was coming? Is that why, twenty years
before the buried grenades of terror and hate
burst forth like fireworks in America’s spacious skies,
you returned to die in your homeland’s pastoral countryside?


The same countryside abutting the Black Forest
my family crossed on foot through perilous nights
to Amsterdam’s port, to the bowels of a ship,
to my country tis of thee, just before the glass shattered in yours?

By what miracle did we find each other’s hands in the dark,
did I allow the fingers of the enemy to caress away nightmares
of men in striped pajamas with yellow stars?

And by what quirk of fate are you gone, but the dreams are back
just before dawn, so I escape through the crack in search of
hallowed ground, where I can finally kneel at your grave,
sing you to sleep, and rest my head on the grassy mound.

- Linda Blachman

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

- Phillip Larkin

A World in Pain

later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere

- Warshan Shire

Lost in the Mail

Madeleine Bell, at 2240
in her wavy print dress
hobbled up to the mailbox and
inspected each piece:
another sympathy card
for her run over dog,
this from her bridge partner,
Mrs. Scanlon.
I could tell.
It was small and white and quickly read,
then quickly closed.
And it made her eyes water
and she squeezed them to dry in the fading sun.
Now her shoulders
slumped even more
as she made her way home,
those wavy blue stripes,
not unlike, I imagined,
tire treads running
the length of her back.

Raymond, next door, shuffled his stack
and covering the papers from his ex-wife’s attorney
(so I wouldn’t see the divorce became final)
with a large yellow envelope from which he withdrew
a Polaroid snapshot of:
Single white female
seeks romantic long evenings,
non-smokers only,
I wished him luck on this one,
as I had every week.

And my own empty box,
except for the Guardian
telling me to pay up,
it was, once again
another spent year
measured in stamps.

But the three of us stopped to look up from our leaving
and caught each others eyes just at the moment
that the sky turned suddenly a bright shade of Mercurochrome
swabbing our hurting world.

C.Dec, 1991

In My Wallet I Carry a Card

In my wallet I carry a card
which declares I have the power to marry.

In my wallet I carry a card
which declares I may drive.

In my wallet I carry a card
that says to a merchant I may be trusted to pay her.

In my wallet I carry a card
that states I can borrow a book in the town where I live.

In my hand I carry a card.
Its lines declare I am cardless, carless,
stateless, and have no money.

It is buoyant and edgeless.
It names me one of the Order of All Who Will Die.

- Jane Hirshfield

Where I'm From
(after George Ella Lyon)

I am from smooth clay,
from the rope swing over the riverbank.
I am from the acacia tree outside the sunstruck window.
(Blur of yellow,
the air particulated
like La Grande Jatte.)
I am from the old hammock,
brittle in the walnut shade
where I lay unseen all summer.

I'm from Gravenstein apple orchard,
from delicate dust and blackberry thicket.
I'm from warm trumpet brass
and the green Victorian,
from slim brown wrists and peeling white paint.
I'm from question authority
and you can't hug a child
with nuclear arms.

I am from the comfrey and the ivy,
from Occidental and the car won't start.
From the rosehip garland my mother strung
in the stillness of the graveyard noon,
the maps of the moon and the ocean floor.
Under the house were boxes of books
limned by mildew,
the old photographs of faces
strangely young, before the eclipse
of the present overtook them.
They were smiling.
They didn't know
what in the world to expect.

- Yosha Bourgea

At 3 AM

The world is so quiet
The sun is still asleep
Stars are yawning
Stillness…..silence?

No –

Rivers rush
Earth quakes
Volcanoes spew
Tornadoes roar
Hurricanes flood
Drought cracks
The earth is not silent
The earth is not asleep
We are silent
We are not awake

- Rebecca Evert

Watching

for my father

You and I used to talk about
Lear and his girls
(I read it in school,

you saw it on the Yiddish stage
where the audience yelled:
Don't believe them,

they're rotten) —
that Jewish father and his
suburban daughters.

Now I'm here with the rest,
smelling the silences,
watching you

disappear.
What will it look like?
Lost on the bed

without shoes, without lungs,
you won't talk
except to the wall: I'm dying,

and to the nurse: Be
careful, I
may live.

What does a daughter say
to the bones
that won't answer —

Thank you to the nice man?
Daddy?
The last time

we went to the Bronx Zoo,
the elephants were smelly as ever,
all those warm Sundays,

the monkeys as lewd.
But they put the penguins
behind curved glass

with a radiant sky
painted on the far wall.
And all those birds

lined up with their backs to us
watching the wrong
horizon.

- Chana Bloch
(3/15/1940 - 5/19/2017)

Secondary Boycott Ode

I had never seen anything like it. I was walking
out of the office of the braces doctor,
in the same building as the acne doctor,
I was on my way to the lunch counter
that had sandwiches on soft bread
with the crusts cut off—& people were blocking
the doors, following each other around
in a circle, like our junior high marching band,
& they were in the way, between me
& my sandwich. I went up to a lady who was watching,
& asked her what was happening,
& she told me about the segregated
lunch counters in the South—this was
a secondary boycott, of Woolworth’s. & I asked,
how do they choose who walks, & she said,
Anyone can. I had never seen anyone
saying no with their body, with their feet.
When I stepped toward the circle, a man walked a little
faster, & a woman walked a little slower,
& there was a space for me, to sing
without making a sound, at last to be
unfaithful to my family,
stepping out on silence.

- Sharon Olds

I am touched by this memory poem.Today, Memorial Day, I think of my father who wasn't just called to service, to kill Germans and Japanese humans, and without question... it was more of a huge planetary movement and every young man at the time was swept into it. He fathered five of us, all marching against war, dodging drafts, spitting on his blind allegiance to his unquestioned values. Today, I set to permanent rest his old values, and I honor all peace warriors: those who have lost faith and hope and even lives, fighting the GOOD fight. We are the real brave soldiers now, and always faithful to human life, justice, peace and equality.

Psalm

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

Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers
or alights on the roadblock at the border?
A humble robin - still, its tail resides abroad
while its beak stays home. If that weren’t enough, it won't stop bobbing!

Among innumerable insects, I'll single out only the ant
between the border guard's left and right boots
blithely ignoring the questions "Where from?" and “Where to?"

Oh, to register in detail, at a glance, the chaos
prevailing on every continent!
Isn't that a privet on the far bank
smuggling its hundred-thousandth leaf across the river?
And who but the octopus, with impudent long arms,
would disrupt the sacred bounds of territorial waters?

And how can we talk of order overall?
when the very placement of the stars
leaves out doubting just what shines for whom?

Not to speak of the fog's reprehensible drifting!
And dust blowing all over the steppes
as if they hadn't been partitioned!
And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves,
that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters!

Only what is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.

- Wislawa Szymborska
(translated by Anya Kucharev)