Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

For the Last Wolverine

They will soon be down

To one, but he still will be
For a little while still will be stopping

The flakes in the air with a look,
Surrounding himself with the silence
Of whitening snarls. Let him eat
The last red meal of the condemned

To extinction, tearing the guts

From an elk. Yet that is not enough
For me. I would have him eat

The heart, and from it, have an idea
Stream into his gnarling head
That he no longer has a thing
To lose, and so can walk

Out into the open, in the full

Pale of the sub-Arctic sun
Where a single spruce tree is dying

Higher and higher. Let him climb it
With all his meanness and strength.
Lord, we have come to the end
Of this kind of vision of heaven,

As the sky breaks open

Its fans around him and shimmers
And into its northern gates he rises

Snarling complete in the joy of a weasel
With an elk’s horned heart in his stomach
Looking straight into the eternal
Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all

My way: at the top of that tree I place

The New World’s last eagle
Hunched in mangy feathers giving

Up on the theory of flight.
Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate
To the death in the rotten branches,
Let the tree sway and burst into flame

And mingle them, crackling with feathers,

In crownfire. Let something come
Of it something gigantic legendary

Rise beyond reason over hills
Of ice screaming that it cannot die,
That it has come back, this time
On wings, and will spare no earthly thing:

That it will hover, made purely of northern

Lights, at dusk and fall
On men building roads: will perch

On the moose’s horn like a falcon
Riding into battle into holy war against
Screaming railroad crews: will pull
Whole traplines like fibres from the snow

In the long-jawed night of fur trappers.

But, small, filthy, unwinged,
You will soon be crouching

Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion
Of being the last, but none of how much
Your unnoticed going will mean:
How much the timid poem needs

The mindless explosion of your rage,

The glutton’s internal fire the elk’s
Heart in the belly, sprouting wings,

The pact of the “blind swallowing
Thing,” with himself, to eat
The world, and not to be driven off it
Until it is gone, even if it takes

Forever. I take you as you are

And make of you what I will,
Skunk-bear, carcajou, bloodthirsty

Non-survivor.

Lord, let me die but not die
Out.

- James L. Dickey

The Afterlife

A man fell out of the tree in our backyard. I ran over
to help him. “Would you like some tea?” I said. “I think
I broke my back,” he said. “Perhaps some ice cream would
be just the thing,” I said. “Lend me your hand,” he said.
I gave him my hand and tried to pull him up. When he was
upright, he said, “Where am I?” “You’re in my backyard,” I
said. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” he said.
“It’s just an ordinary yard, a small garden, a few flowers,”
I said. “Yes, it’s a sorry sight. How can you stand to live
here?” he said. “Oh, it’s my home,” I said. “Home? That’s
a curious word,” he said. “Where do you live?” I said. “Live?
Live? That’s a funny question,” he said. “I don’t live anywhere.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “I’m a dead man. I just float
around,” he said. “Well, I’ve never met a dead man. I’m
pleased to meet you,” I said. “I think you’re supposed to
scream or something,” he said. “Oh no, I’m really pleased,”
I said. “It’s really kind of you to drop by.” “I didn’t
drop by. It was the wind,” he said. “And then the wind stopped
and I fell into the tree.” “How lucky for me,” I said. “You’ll
be going with me, of course, when I leave. You’ll never be
coming back,” he said.

- James Tate

A Morning Offering

I bless the night that nourished my heart
To set the ghosts of longing free
Into the flow and figure of dream
That went to harvest from the dark
Bread for the hunger no one sees.

All that is eternal in me
Welcomes the wonder of this day,
The field of brightness it creates
Offering time for each thing
To arise and illuminate.

I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Wave of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.

- John O'Donohue

Their Ages

A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, so people imagine a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had.
But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know.
Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

You grew up with three
Angel brothers and sisters.
My only child, I sought
To reassure me, you that
You were not alone.

Nathan, Leah and Lily
I named them.
Today Nathan would be 44,
Leah, 35 and Lily soon-to-be 30.
All three were lost in an unwanted
Gush of blood and pain, that sadly,

Even your birth and good life
Cannot mute.
I kept them alive
In my heart and yours,
Though their visage remained
Invisible. You grew

Before my eyes, beautiful,
Carnal, and complete. You grew
Surrounded by angels,
All that they might have been.

Losing what might have been
Is loss, too. Invisible
Like a quiet disease.
A future frustrated or denied
Can fester in a heart,
Can rot a psyche
Unless mourned
For all its unmoored dreams.

So I named my babies,
Grieved my angels. I gave
Their memory to you
To walk with you in
The loneliness that is Life.
I kept them alive and
I always know their ages.

- Rebecca del Rio

this amazing day

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

- e.e. cummings

There Is No One Story and One Story Only

The engineer’s story of hauling coal
to Davenport for the cement factory, sitting on the bluffs
between runs looking for whales, hauling concrete
back to Gilroy, he and his wife renewing vows
in the glass chapel in Arkansas after 25 years
The flight attendant’s story murmured
to the flight steward in the dark galley
of her fifth-month loss of nerve
about carrying the baby she’d seen on the screen
The story of the forensic medical team’s
small plane landing on an Alaska icefield
of the body in the bag they had to drag
over the ice like the whole life of that body
The story of the man driving
600 miles to be with a friend in another country seeming
easy when leaving but afterward
writing in a letter difficult truths
Of the friend watching him leave remembering
the story of her body
with his once and the stories of their children
made with other people and how his mind went on
pressing hers like a body
There is the story of the mind’s
temperature neither cold nor celibate
Ardent
The story of
not one thing only.

- Adrienne Rich

They carved “Nigger Lover”
On the hood of our car
After Dad came back from Selma
He went because he said he had to
Just like he’d done in ’44
To him it was the same war
Fought in a different uniform
But you there
Breaking windows
Just remember:
You have no right to right
If you do wrong yourself
And revenge is not justice
Just wrong turned inside out

- Mark Steensland

How could I forget?


Headed to Vermont
With a head full of Frost
How did he last
through all his tragedies
to have tea with Nikita
in his late eighties
sent by Kennedy
not that long ago
a President looked to a poet
and the Russians loved him
because he was a farmer

Yeats loved the soil too
and of course O'Donohue
and Seamus Heaney too
the stock of fathers
who could wield a spade
so sons could wield a pen.

- Brian McSweeney

True Fasting

Shout it aloud, do not hold back.
Raise your voice like a trumpet.
Declare to my people their rebellion
and to the descendants of Jacob their sins.
For day after day they seek me out;
they seem eager to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that does what is right
and has not forsaken the commands of its God.
They ask me for just decisions
and seem eager for God to come near them.
‘Why have we fasted,’ they say,
‘and you have not seen it?
Why have we humbled ourselves,
and you have not noticed?’
Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please
and exploit all your workers.
Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
and in striking each other with wicked fists.
You cannot fast as you do today
and expect your voice to be heard on high.
Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
only a day for people to humble themselves?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the Lord?

Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness will go before you,
and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.
Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;
you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.

If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.
The Lord will guide you always;
he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
like a spring whose waters never fail.
Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.

If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
and from doing as you please on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the Lord’s holy day honorable,
and if you honor it by not going your own way
and not doing as you please or speaking idle words,
then you will find your joy in the Lord,
and I will cause you to ride in triumph on the heights of the land
and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.

For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

Isaiah 58

Anchorage

Seagulls cackle and cry

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into the light of day and night

It's 2:30 am, we hear long sad
piercing screams that cry us to sleep

Like a hundred lost kittens meowing

We are new to Alaska, first timers here
just one day in

On the 8am news we hear that the
largest iceberg to date has broken off
the Antarctic shelf

Out the window we see people walking to work, a stray dog, a UPS truck drives by

Oh, when did we stop listening to the birds

We read that Moose have been seen walking on the streets of downtown Anchorage

- Patricia LeBon Herb

After the War

For Joseph Flum

When he got to the farmhouse, he rifled through
the cabinets, drawers, and cupboards,
and his buddies did too. The place was abandoned,
or so he thought, and his buddies did too.

He tried to talk to people in town, and his buddies did too,
but he was the only one whose Yiddish made it
across into German. They took his meaning.
He, in the farmhouse, took a camera and a gun,

but his buddies, who knows. About the gun,
it’s also hard to say, but after the war he took up
photography, why not, and shot beautiful women
for years. Got pretty good at it, and how.

Won prizes and engraved plates, put them in a drawer, forgot
the war, forgot his buddies, forgot the women, forgot the drawer.

- Rachel Galvin

Ego


Ego is the measure of all things.
Just beyond it, the immeasurable.

Ego glimpses that eternal tract
and everything it says about it boasts.

It hasn’t been there. It claims a romp in the hay
with a babe it saw up on the silver screen.

The ego colonizes from afar the afar.
Its real job lies the other way. Back

in the direction of the earth we are to feed
with the manure we are to be.

Ego is the measure of all things, but one. From it it
turns. Watch it bow magnanimously.

- Bruce Moody

Being a Lake

He has never dreamed of being a lake
in the high mountains, and now he wonders why.
Surely there could be no better, in the way
of dreamy aspirations: to be clear and cold
and swim through by trout. To allow the sunlight
far into your depths, to have depths no one
Will ever visit. To be ceilinged by ice
and many feet of snow in winter, to shine pure blue
into the pure blue of the sky, to show the stars
the stars, to be drunk by wild animals.
And to admit an occasional human,
who, because of the memory of having been there,
might dream of being there. Being there.
Not a visitor but a dreamer, dreaming
this very lake is what he's always wanted to be.

- Robert Wrigley

Thank you, Larry. This shifts the paradigm in the regenerative direction....

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Being a Lake...

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Traveling At Home

Even in a country you know by heart
it’s hard to go the same way twice.
The life of the going changes.
The chances change and make a new way.
Any tree or stone or bird
can be the bud of a new direction. The
natural correction is to make intent
of accident. To get back before dark
is the art of going.

- Wendell Berry

Brought to Tears

I weep in the middle of a story more often
than in the midst of real life events.
In story the meaning is so compressed.
Whole lives crowd into a few pages.
The bible is an entire library, and
you can carry it in a backpack.

Every story has direction
every detail has intention
if only in rhythm or ornamentation.
And by the end, a story makes
some kind of sense;
even if it is unbearable.
Both the beauty and the suffering!

In my life so much is arrived at by
meandering paths, all the branching
directions., Sometimes the meaning
Is missed or unclear. Other times I go by a way
that is not chosen, but imposed
the way snowflakes express themselves:
we can see, but only under a magnifying glass
that hidden forces inform their crystalline beauty.

In our common lives front-page news is random:
The Pope, or the symphony will be in town.
Or the County Fair, an advance in neuroscience or
Another ecological disaster strikes, usually
in a region already decimated by poverty,
A new planet has been discovered with moons,
a five-year-old wins a spelling bee.
A gourmet recipe delights foodies. Or wine.
And all this happens simultaneously. Random
violence repeating itself the world over,
not resolving. And there is so much suffering
like starvation, it overwhelms . It overwhelms.

In story, an author’s intention is more clear:
an ecology of lives and their patterns, the
designs leave a glittering trail like a snail
a narrative of the way we found. Of suffering
redeemed. Of lessons learned. Or a poem,
Its word music bringing us to tears.

- Judith Stone

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Brought to Tears
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- Judith Stone

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Hope Is Not For The Wise

Hope is not for the wise, fear is for fools;
Change and the world, we think, are racing to a fall,
Open-eyed and helpless, in every newscast that is the news:
The time’s events would seem mere chaos but all
Drift the one deadly direction. But this is only
The August thunder of the age, not the November.
Wise men hope nothing, the wise are naturally lonely
And think November as good as April, the wise remember
That Caesar and even Augustus had heirs,
And men lived on; rich unplanned life on earth
After the foreign wars and the civil wars, the border wars
And the barbarians; music and religion, honor and mirth
Renewed life’s lost enchantments. But if life even
Had perished utterly, Oh perfect loveliness of earth and heaven.

- Robinson Jeffers

Vinny’s Garden



It was one of many on the street lined with sycamores;

fifteen square feet of patchy grass sprinkled with seeds,

an invitation to starlings, sparrows and pigeons, all

oblivious to each other’s feasting, yet not interfering. A cat

crouched quietly beside a yellow rose bush; two squirrels

cavorted about in great haste chiding one another; people

strolled by with indifference to the living harmony.


- Marvin Blaustein

Living

in the earth-deposits

of our history

Today a backhoe divulged

out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle

amber

perfect

a hundred-year-old
cure for fever

or melancholy

a tonic
for living on this earth

in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered

from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years

by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin

of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold

a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman

denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds

came

from the same source as her power

- Adrienne Rich

The Way Back

Why is it I can only trust people
Who have had their heart broken
100 times who have been
tortured in foreign jails who have
repeated their time in rehab over
and over their
families going broke
whose life companions have
died in their arms or
whose newborn arrived still or with
unexpected chromosomes or
those living in countries ruled by hateful
tyrants and with forced circumstance
could not leave?
Perhaps it is because they have not stopped singing
Perhaps because they have come back
They have come back singing
It is they who left that blood
red twine along the
labyrinth
for me
to find
my way
back.

- Kristy Hellum

(Illustrated by Ronaldo)

The Good Life

When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.

- Tracy K. Smith

Blazing Trees



You have only to see

the blazing sunset through

the trees to be

in that dazzling presence

and catch a voice saying

“Take off your masks!”



With a clatter they land

all around, but you barely

notice because the fire

in your heart is bursting

toward that bright glow

on the horizon.



And when its last

glimmering rays are gone—

from human sight—

you're left with a gateway

that will open

even in your dark hour.

- Raphael Block

Be Music, Night

Be music, night,

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That her sleep may go
Where angels have their pale tall choirs

Be a hand, sea,
That her dreams may watch
Thy guidesman touching the green flesh of the world

Be a voice, sky,
That her beauties may be counted
And the stars will tilt their quiet faces
Into the mirror of her loveliness

Be a road, earth,
That her walking may take thee
Where the towns of heaven lift their breathing spires

O be a world and a throne, God,
That her living may find its weather
And the souls of ancient bells in a child's book
Shall lead her into Thy wondrous house

- Kenneth Patchen

How Could I Ever Forget That Flash

How could I ever forget that flash of light!

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In a moment, thirty thousand people ceased to be,
The cries of fifty thousand killed
At the bottom of crushing darkness;

Through yellow smoke whirling into light,
Buildings split, bridges collapsed,
Crowded trams burnt as they rolled about
Hiroshima, all full of boundless heaps of embers.
Soon after, skin dangling like rags;
With hands on breasts;
Treading upon the broken brains;
Wearing shreds of burn cloth round their loins;
There came numberless lines of the naked,
all crying.
Bodies on the parade ground, scattered like
jumbled stone images of Jizo;
Crowds in piles by the river banks,
loaded upon rafts fastened to the shore,
Turned by and by into corpses
under the scorching sun;
in the midst of flame
tossing against the evening sky,
Round about the street where mother and
brother were trapped alive under the fallen house
The fire-flood shifted on.
On beds of filth along the Armory floor,
Heaps, and God knew who they were?
Heaps of schoolgirls lying in refuse
Pot-bellied, one-eyed, with half their skin peeled
off bald.
The sun shone, and nothing moved
But the buzzing flies in the metal basins
Reeking with stagnant ordure.
How can I forget that stillness
Prevailing over the city of three hundred thousands?
Amidst that calm,
How can I forget the entreaties
Of departed wife and child
Through their orbs of eyes,
Cutting through our minds and souls?

- Mitsuyoshi Toge


Mitsuyoshi Toge, born in Hiroshima in 1917, was a Catholic and a poet. He was in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city on August 6, 1945, when he was 24 years old. Toge died at age 36. His firsthand experience of the bomb, his passion for peace, and his realistic insight into the event made him a leading poet in Hiroshima. This poem is from Hiroshima-Nagasaki: A Pictorial Record of the Atomic Destruction (1978).

The Answer

Then what is the answer? - Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know the great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their
tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least
ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for
evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal peace or happiness. These dreams will not be
fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear the whole
remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his
history … for contemplation or in fact…
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the divine beauty of
the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in
despair when his days darken.

- Robinson Jeffers

Listening


Lately
I have been listening to trees.

I asked them
if they have been talking to me
all along.

“We’ve been murmuring,”
I heard.
“Contentedly,
as you’ve been listening
to others,
to Emil’s spirit voice,
to Grandfather Fire,
to your hilltop Roble.

“Who you listen to,
who you hear,
depends upon you,
where you are in your listening.

“Everything,
of course,
has a voice.”

- Trout Black

Choosing Who To Be

You, who wake up each morning remembering who you are,
must think it strange that I, upon awakening
have no idea who I am, or what I’m doing in this room,
in this bed, beneath these covers.

It takes hours to put together a functioning identity,
like a woman trying on dozens of outfits to find just the right combination
for a night on the town.

With no basis to work from,
no map or structure to follow,
I try on dozens of masks,
deciding who to be today.

The mayor of a small town?
A policeman in riot gear?
An oncologist in a white coat giving her patient bad news?
A reporter following a story about a missing child?
A corporate executive deciding to clear a rainforest for a palm oil plantation?

When any identity will do, how will I choose?
And who is doing the choosing?

I could be a star, shining in the blackness of space,
a diatom at the bottom of the ocean,
a comet on its path around the sun,
or the color of sunlight.

One day I became a granite boulder in the middle of a playground,
enjoying playful children scrambling over me, laughing
and jumping off my peak into the ocean of sand surrounding me.

On another, I became the scent of night-blooming jasmine,
wafting on soft air, entering nostrils of animals,
and thrilling delicate moths attuned to my molecular structure.

You, who have only one fixed center, may feel envious of my freedom.
And I envy you for your stability and fortitude.
To be the same, day after day, takes courage and stamina.

In my incarnations, newly chosen with each sunrise,
I have lived a million lives, each one unique, precious as a gemstone.
And yet, I have no companions on this journey.

Be grateful for who you are, and what you have chosen.

- Lion Goodman