Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Deepening The Wonder

Death is a favor to us,
But our scales have lost their balance.

The impermanence of the body
Should give us great clarity,
Deepening the wonder in our senses and eyes

Of this mysterious existence we share
And are surely just traveling through.

If I were in the Tavern tonight,
Hafiz would call for drinks

And as the Master poured, I would be reminded
That all I know of life and myself is that

We are just a midair flight of golden wine
Between His Pitcher and His Cup.

If I were in the Tavern tonight,
I would buy freely for everyone in this world

Because our marriage with the Cruel Beauty
Of time and space cannot endure very long.

Death is a favor to us,
But our minds have lost their balance.

The miraculous existence and impermanence of
Form
Always makes the illumined ones
Laugh and sing.

- Hafiz
(translation by Daniel Ladinsky)

THE COSMOLOGY OF FINDING YOUR SPOT

The Resistantism of all other places
On the floor among filters and the spillings
The cosmology of the floor of the Nation
The cosmology of finding your place
The cosmology of smelling and feeling your Natural place
inside the place, feeling the filters
feeling the rock, feeling the roll
feeling the social spray at that level
low down, with the filters and the feet
feeling the place you can fold all four legs
and be man's best friend to the End, among the filters
and the feet, in the rock, and in the roll
in the clock and in the roll, in the hole
of the social bilge The Great White Dog
of the Rockchalk, seeks his place Seeks
The place for Him there, tries every scrap of Space
The Great White Dog of The Rockchalk
moves under the Social seeking his own Place
in the constant present snap of eternity
listening with the german dislocated castanet
His Nose Is under the great pin ball rolling in heaven above
thru the barren terrain of feet He moves
from place to place seeking his place
The resisters the dogs seek their place
WAYNE KIMBALL told me all this
WAYNE KIMBALL sits in the booths, WAYNE KIMBALL
knows about the The Great White Dog of The Rockchalk
The Great White Dog of The Rockchalk doesn't
The Great White Dog of The Rockchalk has been there
Western Civilization is Beer
The Great White Dog of The Rockchalk
went thru the door of Western Civilization
Which is north of the Barbershop
and north of the sailor pants incense shop
The Great White Dog went between all that
and the Gaslight, The Great White Rockchalk Dog
shakes hands with both paws indiscriminately
For he Seeks his own true place on the floor
He disregards the social He seeks the Place
he seeks The Space his soul can occupy
In His restless search he looks only for the Place
Where he can come to rest in his own true Place
and that might be on the floor of the rockchalk
The great White Dog is not Interdicted by opinion
He accepts the floor of the Rock Chalk as an Area,
like any other, he will test that space
He is preoccupied only with the Search
The Great White Dog of The Rockchalk is not social
WAYNE KIMBALL told me all this, WAYNE KIMBALL
is social, he knows only persons, he doesn't
give a shit for the floor of the Rockchalk
WAYNE KIMBALL is neurotic like us, he wants
to smoke Grass, WAYNE KIMBALL sits in the booths
WAYNE KIMBALL drinks beer, has a part time job
pretending to be literate, WAYNE KIMBALL uses
the telephone and all other public Utilities
including Cocaine, The Great White Dog
of The Rockchalk is full of shit and can't shit
until he finds his place, WAYNE KIMBALL has diarrhea
WAYNE KIMBALL hasn't got a driver's license
WAYNE KIMBALL is thin and knows everything that happens
He has ears, He is a corrupt little mongrel like us
turned on to everything hopeless and bullshit
The Great White Dog of The Rockchalk is dumb
and doesn't know anything but his instinct for the search
for his place somewhere in the litter
of the filters and the literally dropped dreams
of the Great Rock Chalk, he smells the dreams
on the floor dropped from between the legs
of young English majors, ejected from between the
Dual Spraycans of the fraternizers
He seeks his place on top of this matter
among the feet of the privileged nation on the floor
of the Great shit, Rock Chalk Rock Chalk White Rock
Calk Dog, And WAYNE KIMBALL Smokes cigarettes
and Thoreaus them ontoOntoOntoOnto the floor
already predicated by cancer, the slow movement of Cancer
And I love these dogs because they are us and more us
than we are and they seek their places as do the true
whether they are Resisters or just scared or both
They are the twin dogs of creation in our image
and I give them both the floor as I give the Resisters
This Poem from the throne of Belief as the Egyptians
Gave and took from the Dogs Their access to Heaven
That we may all be Gods and seek our Place.

- Ed Dorn
(1969, Lawrence, Kansas)


Ed Dorn (1929-1999)
Poet and author of numerous works, Dorn is perhaps best known for his five part poem Gunslinger and as an alumni of the experimental, interdisciplinary Black Mountain College. His fictional character Wayne Kimball from the poem The Cosmology of Finding your Spot, which takes place in Lawrence, Kansas is the compilation of two Lawrence residents and fellow writers Wayne Propst and George Kimball.

Thanks, Larry, for the paragraph about the author/poet Ed Dorn.

This one begs to be read aloud!

However I didn't wait for it to beg.

I quickly recognized this and read it aloud as an offering, to Ed, Georg Propst, and myself! Powerful!

Thanks again,
dusty

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

THE COSMOLOGY OF FINDING YOUR SPOT...

---

What then Hafez?

Hafez said:
“THE GREAT RELIGIONS ARE THE SHIPS AND POETRY THE LIFE BOATS
EVERY SANE MAN I’VE EVER KNOWN HAS JUMPED OVERBOARD.”

But you may ask: what then Hafez?

Then we’ll drift across uncharted seas in lifeboats without the antiquated provisions of clerics.

We’ll survive by drinking holy rain-water, catching luminescent spirit fish, and making midnight prayers of the heart.

Then after years or decades, we’ll return to a great ship that leads us onward, but not back to the familiar oceans of certainty.

We’ll sit and humbly join hands with those huddled in the dark recesses of the ship’s steerage, who have left home forever in search of undiscovered lands.

- Bruce Silverman

American Nightmare

I'm in bed with America.
America is writhing and moaning in her sleep,
twisting the bed sheets around her
as if coiled in the grip of a giant boa constrictor.
America whimpers in her sleep
and turns her head to the left and to the right.
America is having a nightmare.

America is dreaming that the Inquisition
is back with its old, unimproved tortures.
America is dreaming that the British won
the Revolutionary War and that Franklin,
Washington and Jefferson were hanged at Valley Forge.
America is dreaming that she must increase
her nuclear arsenal because being able
to destroy the world 5,000 times over isn¹t enough
if Russia can destroy the world 6,000 times over.
America is dreaming that the southern plantations
have risen from the dust, and the whips and manacles
the torch and the hood and the noose.
America is dreaming that water is rising
around her house and she can¹t get out
because the EPA has boarded up the doors and windows.
America is dreaming that drinking melted polar ice
has changed her children into Syrian refugees.
America is dreaming that her babysitter
is a registered sex offender.
America is dreaming that her real parents
are dead and impostor parents are forcing
her into the family business of carnival geeking.
America is dreaming that Lincoln has just
shot everyone in Ford¹s Theater.
America is dreaming that she¹s feeling faint
after drinking the cup handed to her by Putin.
America is dreaming that she has nothing left
to eat but the money dragged from the vaults
after the last billionaire committed suicide.
America is dreaming that Whitman and Emerson
have pulled up their grave plots and
relocated them to Ontario.
America is dreaming that all the blood shed by patriots
in her wars has congealed into a malignant tumor
kept in a secret room in the White House.
America is dreaming that Henry Ford has
returned from the dead to help the President
rewrite the Constitution in 144 characters.
America is dreaming that when the Pilgrims
go out to the woods for the first Thanksgiving
all they can find to shoot are skeletons.
America is dreaming that the Italians and Irish
and Poles have been sent back where they came from
across the Atlantic in individual wooden washtubs.
America is dreaming that beneath the site of the World Trade Center
are anti-towers deep underground where
the real masterminds of September 11th
are plotting a new attack.
America is dreaming that the President has hacked
Jesus¹s twitter account
and is repealing the Sermon on the Mount.
America is dreaming that a tiny severed hand
is creeping along the floor like a pale spider
toward the Button.
America is dreaming that a vast stone head
from an exploded planet¹s Mount Rushmore
is hurtling toward Indiana.
America is dreaming ‹ STOP!

America, can you hear me?
(I¹m shaking you by the shoulders.)
I wouldn¹t be in bed with you if I didn¹t love you.
Spare yourself this nightmare.
It doesn¹t have to be this way.
There is still time.

America, dear America, please wake up!

- Thomas Smith

A Mark of Resistance

https://www.WaccoBB.net/forums/wacco...5_13-11-58.png

Stone by stone I pile
this cairn of my intention
with the noon's weight on my back,
exposed and vulnerable
across the slanting fields
which I love but cannot save
from floods that are to come;

can only fasten down
with this work of my hands,
these painfully assembled
stones, in the shape of nothing
that has ever existed before.

A pile of stones: an assertion
that this piece of country matters
for large and simple reasons.

A mark of resistance, a sign.

- Adrienne Rich

Anyone Who Is Still Trying

Any person, any human, any someone who breaks
up the fight, who spackles holes or FedExes
ice shelves to the Arctic to keep the polar bears
afloat, who talks the wind-rippled woman
down from the bridge. Any individual, any citizen
who skims muck from the coughing ocean,
who pickets across the street from antigay picketers
with a sign that reads, GOD HATES MAGGOTS,
or, GOD HATES RESTAURANTS WITH ZAGAT RATINGS
LESS THAN 27. Any civilian who kisses
a forehead heated by fever or despair, who reads
the X ray, pins the severed bone. Any biped
who volunteers at soup kitchens, who chokes
a Washington lobbyist with his own silk necktie—
I take that back, who gives him mouth-to-mouth
until his startled heart resumes its kabooms.
Sorry, I get cynical sometimes, there is so much
broken in the system, the districts, the crooked
thinking, I’m working on whittling away at this
pessimism, harvesting light where I can find it.
Any countryman or countrywoman who is still
trying, who still pushes against entropy,
who stanches or donates blood, who douses fires
real or metaphorical, who rakes the earth
where tires once zeroed the ground, plants something
green, say spinach or kale, say a modest forest
for restless breezes to play with. Any anyone
from anywhere who considers and repairs,
who builds a prosthetic beak for an eagle—
I saw the video, the majestic bird disfigured
by a bullet, the visionary with a 3-D printer,
with polymer and fidelity, with hours
and hours and hours, I keep thinking about it,
thinking we need more of that commitment,
those thoughtful gestures, the flight afterward


- David Hernandez

Black Holes Exist

The astrophysicists proclaim
Black Holes Exist.
I believe them.
Yes, within my mind I see them
Black against the Black of space.
But now I ask
What are they?
Are they Everything that looks like
Nothing?
Are they Nothing that is also
Everything?
Are they the narcissistic ego
of a cosmic body
swallowing the praise of every star?
I think I’ve seen them walking on Fifth Avenue
and preening in their offices
swallowing the little lights around them
sucking in their hopes of everlasting fame
leaving nothing in their wake
readying their vacuumed contents for a vast explosion
littering the universe with burning gas
the trumpet of collapse.


- William Johnson Everett

Below the City

for the people of Barcelona


In the city of Barcelona, a city
Dripping with the honey of youth,
Draped with history contained within
Walls, witness to love and atrocities,
We pass below the streets in currents
Like schools of disparate fish. We pass
Trying not to notice, not to see
the other.
Youth beautiful, luscious in
Unearned pride, the elderly
Phantoms of time. In between
Swim children, ignorant of unspoken rules.
Sometimes we're not a school, but
A murmuration. We move as one, dancing
And wheeling, a singular mind.
It's then the massive love
we are when we are one,
pierces the pavement above and
the pedestrians smile, not knowing
Why.

- Rebecca del Rio

Young Maples

I remember maples
Smooth bark
Like gray glass
On a February pond
Leafless supple switches
Winter wands
Buds furled with tight-fisted notions
Brewing dreams of leaves and wind
A contained explosiveness in
Sleeping saplings
Alarms and excites me, ready
With the first hint of warmth
To burgeon, to double their size
Nearly splitting their skin with
Calm, wild hurry

I recall when I was eager
To grow into the dream
Of who I was sure I would be
Maples have no hesitancy –
How did mine overtake me? –
Don’t second guess
Or sink weary of being maples
Nor begin to doubt their place
In the woods. Do they?
Perhaps too many snow storms
Rock falls, lightening strikes
Can slow them
Even a tree is not so sure
And of course there are the lumbermen
Two by fours and cheap furniture
In their eyes
I shall return to the young maples
Perhaps if I listen to their leaves
In the April wind

- Garth Gilchrist

https://www.WaccoBB.net/forums/wacco...0_11-46-02.png

The Moon

Look out at the moon in the sky, as she is right at this moment.
Does she have to be in an eclipse to be so honored and praised?

What about seeing the Essence that is there right now?
Not one drop more or less than when she goes between earth and sun some weeks later.

Will we forget all about her after that news worthy event?
Is there more to see than just the darkness that will appear on that particular date?

What about the Light of Presence that never leaves?
What is there now that is is asking to be seen always?

That which could never be shown on the news.
That which can never be taken away.

But calls to be recognized and seen for what it truly is.
Seen for the Silence that she holds and honors.

For all her trips around the earth she has taken.
For all the times she has shown up both night and day.

There is the true seeing.
Not just for one eclipse or for a one time viewing.

But for each and every moment, a chance to be acknowledged.
For being that Essence and beauty in our heavens, singing her Silence.

- Mary Morgan

Poem

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane.
The news would pour out of various devices
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

- Muriel Rukeyser

Looking For A River

We pass the long blue and white
tent, chairs set in sedate rows,
men and women silent shadows

in the heat; preparing for a revival,
they pay us no mind as our car
tires whine past on soft asphalt.

A bay horse grazes in a field; black
Angus stand belly-deep in a farm pond,
tails switching flies, heads down like

somnolent statues cut out of starless
skies. On and on we drive, a little lost,
following the thread of a shaky map.

We’re looking for a river. We’re looking
for a fresh green current, swirls of mica,
trout circling the kettle like holy ghosts.

We’re looking for the long white banner
of a waterfall, the hidden path behind
a plume of mist and ragged lace.

When we get there, we’ll slide across
slick dark gray rocks, push aside moss
cascading out of deep cracks like prophets.

We’ll crawl into that cool dark space
behind the veil, listen to the river preach:
granite gospel from the mouth of a mountain.

- Deborah A. Miranda

Better Thank Expected

Things were not as bad as I had thought.
The scrape in the fender of the rented car
could be hidden with a little white paint
before I returned it to the agency.

This CD of New Age music, which I disliked at first,
with its synthetic wind of pulsing jellyfish,
does a remarkable job of slowing down my heart.

Merely to have survived to this point
is already the most unlikely triumph;
to still be breathing and trying to improve.

Things are definitely better than expected.
I'm not on trial for anything.
I have given up on the idea of great sucess.
The oncologist says the x-ray shows no " abnormalities."


We are always trying to come to a decision,
always in a place where we are making up our minds
whether the soup is good, the flowers pretty,
whether we are fortunate, or poor.

All my life I have been
loved by women,
held up by water,
ignored by war.
I have outlasted the voluntary numbness
I required to remain alive.

Why shouldn't I be able,
why shouldn't I be able now
to walk down the street,

under the overhanging trees,
and raise my arms and say
that the rain shaking down from the leaves

is not an inconvenience but a joy?


- Tony Hoagland

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

...
Merely to have survived to this point
is already the most unlikely triumph;
to still be breathing and trying to improve....

---

:birthday:

Happy Birthday, Larry!

On behalf of all of Waccodom, thank you so much for sharing poetry with us!
It brightens my day and many others! :waccosun:

:thankyou1::birthday::thankyou1::birthday::thankyou1:

Of History and Hope

We have memorized America,
how it was born and who we have been and where.
In ceremonies and silence we say the words,
telling the stories, singing the old songs.
We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.
The great and all the anonymous dead are there.
We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.
The rich taste of it is on our tongues.
But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know.
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
to keep on going where we meant to go.

But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how
except in the minds of those who will call it Now?
The children. The children. And how does our garden grow?
With waving hands—oh, rarely in a row—
and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow.

Who were many people coming together
cannot become one people falling apart.
Who dreamed for every child an even chance
cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.
Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head
cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.
Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child
cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.
We know what we have done and what we have said,
and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,
believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become—
just and compassionate, equal, able, and free.

All this in the hands of children, eyes already set
on a land we never can visit—it isn't there yet—
but looking through their eyes, we can see
what our long gift to them may come to be.
If we can truly remember, they will not forget.

- Miller Williams

The Cure At Troy

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

- Seamus Heaney’s translation of
"The Philoctetes," by Sophocles

The Chambermaids in the Marriott in Midmorning

are having a sort of coffee klatch as they clean
calling across the corridors in their rich contraltos
while luffing fresh sheets in the flickering gloom
of the turgid passionate soaps they follow from room to room.
In Atlanta they are black, young, with eloquent eyes.
In Toledo white, middle-aged, wearing nurses’ shoes.
In El Paso always in motion diminutive Chicanas
gesture and lift and trill in liquid Spanish.
Behind my “Do Not Disturb” sign I go wherever they go
sorely tried by their menfolk, their husbands, lovers or sons
who have jobs or have lost them, who drink and run around,
who total their cars and are maimed, or lie idle in traction.
The funerals, weddings and births, the quarrels, the fatal gunshots
happen again and again, inventively reenacted
except that the story is framed by ads and coming attractions,
except that what takes a week in real life took only minutes.
I think how static my life is with its careful speeches and classes
and how I admire the women who daily clean up my messes,
who are never done scrubbing with Rabelaisian vigor
through the Marriott’s morning soaps up and down every corridor.

- Maxine Kumin

A wonderful testimonial to these hard-working women - Thank you!!

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Chambermaids in the Marriott in Midmorning

...

---

PLEASE DISTURB

I hung out my “please disturb sign”
but nobody did

It would have been fine with me

Nobody reads anymore
it’s all this television

So I stayed on my side of the door
nobody even knocked

It was a nice looking door

Then one morning the maid knocked
She didn’t bother to read my special sign

I yelled, “Come in, oh God, please come in!”
She said, “I’ll come back.”

Nobody reads anymore

- Doug von Koss
After five days at the Royal York Hotel
Toronto, Ontario, Canada. May 25, 1994

At The Flea Market


Last week at the flea market I spied Mahatma Ghandi, Rabbi Abraham Heschel and the Reverend Martin Luther King perusing a small two-pan balancing scale.

One pan was marked good, the other evil.

A discussion then ensued. Said Heschel: this scale is flawed: “the opposite of good is not evil, it’s indifference.”

Ghandi replied: yes, I agree, for “good and evil often are found together.” Then Dr. King spoke and said:

I find this scale to be befuddling because “there’s some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us.”

With that they simply walked off.

I timidly stepped forward and bought the scale.

I took it home and measured the weights sitting in the two pans marked good and evil. And here is what I found:

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco..._08-54-32a.png

When compared, good and evil seem to be about equal in

measure, but clearly, at times like this,

it’s necessary to put a finger on the scale.


- Bruce Silverman

If You Want To Pray For Houston


if you want
to pray for Houston
you have to pray
in her way
pray like Beyoncé
when she was
at HSPVA
or Billy and Dusty
shooting pool
at Rudyard's
pray like you're
sitting over soup
at Spanish Flowers
or pho at Mai's
steaming your glasses
pray like the kids
playing soccer
on the east side
or mutton busting
at the livestock show
pray like the runners
in Memorial Park
lacing them up
or the researchers
in the medical center
looking into microscopes
if you want
to pray for Houston
you have to pray
as quietly as
the Rothko Chapel
or Houston Zen Center
and you have to pray
as loudly as
the old scoreboard
at the Astrodome
after a José Cruz
home run
you have to pray
sitting under
a live oak tree
or standing next to
an azalea bloom
while your skin
clams in the heat
if you want to pray
for Houston
you have to pray
without pretense
this ain't Dallas
and in a neighborly way
as friends come out
to check on each other
in the rain
and those
who are far away
watch screens
and wipe our eyes
if you want to pray
for Houston
raise a bottle of Shiner
to the gray sky
and say that 130 mile an hour winds
and 9 trillion gallons of rain
are no match
for a city of such life
and diversity
you can fill up our bayou
but you will never rain
on our parade

- Jeremy Rutledge

Before The Flood


Why did he promise me
that we would build ourselves
an ark all by ourselves
out in back of the house
on New York Avenue
in Union City New Jersey
to the singing of the streetcars
after the story
of Noah whom nobody
believed about the waters
that would rise over everything
when I told my father
I wanted us to build
an ark of our own there
in the back yard under
the kitchen could we do that
he told me that we could
I want to I said and will we
he promised me that we would
why did he promise that
I wanted us to start then
nobody will believe us
I said that we are building
an ark because the rains
are coming and that was true
nobody ever believed
we would build an ark there
nobody would believe
that the waters were coming

- W.S. Merwin

Slipping Away


Nim the tide. Thole time.
Strangers knock on my door.
They say the ice-caps are melting.

Winter frozen waxen, white foam on high.
Crazed ice opens to dust-stone and mud.
Great halls splinter and fall into the sea,
dark sea rising.

All are slipping away.

Where goes the ice-walker white bear?
Where seal pups that blossom in spring?
Where are whales and the songs they sing?

They are slipping away.

Where feathered fliers that once filled the sky
the sky with sound of many wings thrumming?
Where is silver wolf’s night howl hunting?

Slipping away.

Alas for great halls toppled and gone.
Alas the tall, empty sky.
Nim the tide. Thole time.
Fold up the Earth.
Fugitive earth-stepper is slipping away.


- Patrice Warrender

Why Then Do We Not Despair?

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses --
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.


- Anna Akhmatova
(translated by Stanley Kunitz)

Sometimes I really wonder when these poems were written. Many seem to come from today's headlines and yet I know they might be much older. would you consider adding the date ?

thanks
Joy aka Joybird

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Why Then Do We Not Despair?

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses --
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.


- Anna Akhmatova
(translated by Stanley Kunitz)

---

Cupped Hands

Find a teacher. Preferably one that lives close by. Very close. Like inside. Build a container. You don't have to cut down a tree and then let the wood season nor purchase a lathe and then sign up for a wood turning class at the local community center. All you have to do is cup your hands. They become their own container.
Now whisper
a prayer.
Those cupped hands hold all the prayers you have yet to pray. If you do not know how to pray
Simply say to yourself:
thank you
A thousand or eight thousand times. If you wonder who you're praying to,
don't worry

https://www.WaccoBB.net/forums/wacco...2_08-29-02.png

everyone wonders this most of the time,
the rabbis,
the monks in the caves,
the devout catholic.
Please please please
Thank you thank you thank you
Or the other way around it doesn't matter which comes first.
Teacher
Container
Prayer or
Gratitude.

- Kristy Hellum

As Houston Drowns


As Houston drowns
in storm of such force
as never before recorded
there is thunderous silence
in the press as to its cause
& silence, too, about
the same happening
in Bangladesh, India, Nepal,
Pakistan, Kashmir
due to the same cause.
Science is not silent though;
calling bread bread & wine wine,
it names the cause of climate change:
the economics of empire
with its scorn for the Earth,
with its technology for profit
fueled by the remains
of ancient forests & the life they bore
distilled in the dark entrails
of the Great Mother that birthed us
& now punishes our arrogance
to possibly heal herself
with our demise.
& the scoundrel fools that govern us
tweet on.

- Rafael Jesús González 2017


A la vez que se ahoga Houston


A la vez que se ahoga Houston
en tormenta de tal fuerza
que nunca antes se registra
hay silencio aturdidor
en la prensa hacia su causa
y silencio también acerca de
lo mismo que pasa
en Bangladés, India, Nepal,
Pakistán, Cachemira
debido a la misma causa.
Pero la ciencia no se calla;
llamándole pan al pan y vino al vino
nombra la causa por el cambio climático:
La economía de imperio
con su desdén por la Tierra,
con su tecnología por lucro
alimentada por los restos
de bosques ancianos y la vida que daban
destilados en las entrañas oscuras
de la Gran Madre que nos dio nacer
y ahora castiga nuestra arrogancia
para posiblemente sanarse
con nuestra extinción.
Y los canallas imbéciles que nos gobiernan
siguen tuiteando.


© Rafael Jesús González 2017

At the Public Market Museum: Charleston, South Carolina

A volunteer, a Daughter of the Confederacy
receives my admission and points the way.
Here are gray jackets with holes in them,
red sashes with individual flourishes,
things soft as flesh. Someone sewed
the gold silk cord onto that gray sleeve
as if embellishments
could keep a man alive.

I have been reading War and Peace,
and so the particulars of combat
are on my mind--the shouts and groans
of men and boys, and the horses' cries
as they fall, astonished at what
has happened to them.
Blood on leaves,
blood on grass, on snow; extravagant
beauty of red. Smoke, dust of disturbed
earth; parch and burn.

Who would choose this for himself?
And yet the terrible machinery
waited in place. With psalters
in their breast pockets, and gloves
knitted by their sisters and sweethearts,
the men in gray hurled themselves
out of the trenches, and rushed against
blue. It was what both sides
agreed to do.

- Jane Kenyon

Street Musicians


One died, and the soul was wrenched out
Of the other in life, who, walking the streets
Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on
The same corners, volumetrics, shadows
Under trees. Farther than anyone was ever
Called, through increasingly suburban airs
And ways, with autumn falling over everything:
The plush leaves the chattels in barrels
Of an obscure family being evicted
Into the way it was, and is. The other beached
Glimpses of what the other was up to:
Revelations at last. So they grew to hate and forget each other.

So I cradle this average violin that knows
Only forgotten showtunes, but argues
The possibility of free declamation anchored
To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself
In November, with the spaces among the days
More literal, the meat more visible on the bone.
Our question of a place of origin hangs
Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests,
In coves with the water always seeping up, and left
Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared
On the landscape, to make of us what we could.

- John Ashbury
(July 28, 1927 - September 3, 2017)