Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Edges Of Roads

Of all country things, I suppose
I know best the edges of roads,
not berms where grass grows down to sides
of ditches, like on interstates,

or even where animals feed
at dusk, where cans congregate with
wrappers and the small dead are bounced
off below the cruising vultures.

I mean the trails behind the line
of woods and brush several yards off
where whatever watches can see
all that passes, not seen itself.

Hunters will know the place I mean
where on wet fall days they can move
silently, far enough from home,
but not in so deep they can get lost.

Lovers know it best, slipping off
on weekday afternoons or weekend
nights, pushing back convertible
tops, reaching for fragments of sky.

Seeing and not being seen are what
I want to say, not in hiding
but in league with fringes, knowing
what roads don't know of things that stay,

the way a child, who isn't lost, kneels
out of sight, urging with a straw
a beetle along, while through the town
anxious voices cry out his name.

- Trent Busch

For the Union Dead

“Delinquent Omnia Servare Rem Publicam.”

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city’s throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound’s gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man’s lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die—
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year—
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw’s father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son’s body was thrown
and lost with his “niggers.”

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the “Rock of Ages”
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

- Robert Lowell

Here is more on the 54th Regiment: African Americans led by Shaw fighting on the Union side. Also an image of the the plaque Lowell refers to. If you haven't seen this in person, be sure to visit it near the Statehouse next time you're in Boston: https://www.nps.gov/boaf/learn/historyculture/shaw.htm

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

For the Union Dead

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See:
Robert Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead" and St. Gaudens' Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

For the Union Dead

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The Eagle Creek Fire

The air is still,
the sky white with smoke
from the Eagle Creek fire,
ash drops in tiny flakes,
the giant white oak
stands motionless and black,
silhouetted against the sky,
like a giant tombstone,
each dark leaf an inscription,
a memory of one of its
charred cousins,
devoured by
the fire.

- Bill Denham

Credo

My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum
And gazing upon it, gathering and quieting
The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt, the actual
Appalling presence, the power of the waters.

He believes that nothing is real except as we make it. I humbler have found in my blood
Bred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism.

Multitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is only
The bone vault’s ocean: out there is the ocean’s;

The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality. The mind
Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;

The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

- Robinson Jeffers

raveling travel

he was talking about how it was
that a spider
found on different islands
separated by infinite water


could get around
(undaunted by doubt)


a silk thread
swept up by wind


maybe like a song
past understanding catches the ear
as if we could hear
filaments of ourselves on the air


a strand of dying sunlight
pulling thread out of a star


a more rational creature
would not dare
such a survival strategy --


silk -- unraveling
oneself -- a form
of travel


- Gene Berson

A Word On Statistics

Out of every hundred people

those who always know better:
fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:
nearly all the rest.

Ready to help,
as long as it doesn't take long:
forty-nine.

Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four--well, maybe five.

Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.

Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.

Those not to be messed with:
forty and four.

Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.

Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.

Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.

Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it's better not to know
not even approximately.

Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.

Getting nothing out of life but things:
thirty
(although I would like to be wrong).

Doubled over in pain,
without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three,
sooner or later.

Those who are just:
quite a few at thirty-five.

But if it takes effort to understand:
three.

Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.

Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred--
a figure that has never varied yet.


- Wislawa Szymborski
(translated by Joanna Trzeciak)

Dreamers

there's no emptiness
in the heart no sadness
at the start of youth
we are travelers in space
boundaries are made
jobs are scarce
the place we move to
with our parents early
is our place and we dream
of staying on here with you
winds of summer heat
winds of seasonal change
winds of American youth
here early here to stay
the stone of darkness
suddenly blazes
with magnificent light
stay on stay here

- Jack Crimmins

My Head is in My Heart


Not every day, but today,
When glancing in the mirror
By the front door,
I saw myself…
Differently…
I went back to take a look…again.
“Your head is in your heart,” I said.

I paused, I took it in, whatever that meant.
Maybe this will be my meditation for a day,
My Koan for a week?

This was a felt moment.
Sort of an Alice in Wonderland moment.
Maybe a Magritte question?

“My head is in my heart,” I said.
Thank God, it has a new place to call home!

- Eliza Weaver

Valley Fire

September 14, 2015


Sky’s so dry you could light a match
by winking at the clouds and
borer beetles burrow
insatiable selves
into the hearts
of firs. Meanwhile

the big leaf maples
burnish our autumn early this year.
They’re beautiful but
they’re more beautiful
when they’re wet,
says a friend, and
my mouth starts to water

yes,
this time of year,
everything’s better
when it’s wet.

And there’s a big hot hole in the land
up north and east that makes my
own life feel glorious full, and all
my dreams feel edgy. So

when those first real
raindrops fall (if they come
before the fire), and after
the kids are asleep,
I’m gonna
have sex
in the rain.

- Amy Robinson

As I crossed the bridge, a hairy hand came out.
"Stop, pay troll."
I gave him 5 euros. He put it not in his purse but in a jar.
"It's for the poor. They are very hungry," he said.
"This week Africa. Maybe next week your country."
He scratched. "When you get to the other side of the bridge, you get it back."
I looked, saw no one giving back. He saw me looking.

"Not THIS bridge," he said.

- Birrell Walsh

Pledge

Republic, your cool hands
On my schoolgirl shoulders.
Not sure what allegiances meant
Until the vows were held by heart,
By memory, by rote, by benign betrothal.
Republic, you were mine, I knew
Because of Mother’s religious pamphlets:
Lindsay for Mayor.
McGovern for President.
How to Register Voters.
I didn’t ever want to go to school
On Saturdays. The baby-sitter said
If Nixon won, I’d have to go. Me,
Your most cherished child bride.
I wanted a white communion dress
Like the ones the Catholic girls wore.
Republic, you know I wanted to play
Cards with Mother. Mother smoking
Marlboros, watching Watergate all week.
Citizen Mother all consumed at that confessional.
I liked the name Betsy Ross.

- Elizabeth Powell

wow.

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

As I crossed the bridge, a hairy hand came out.
"Stop, pay troll."
I gave him 5 euros. He put it not in his purse but in a jar.
"It's for the poor. They are very hungry," he said.
"This week Africa. Maybe next week your country."
He scratched. "When you get to the other side of the bridge, you get it back."
I looked, saw no one giving back. He saw me looking.

"Not THIS bridge," he said.

- Birrell Walsh

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Two Kinds

There are two kinds of people in the world;
the ones with washers and dryers and the ones
who unfurl their slips at the laundromat, spread
saris and bed sheets by the river, hang
their checkered boxers on the line.

There are two: those who love Einstein
for his relativity and those who love his hair.
Those who relish words like infrastructure
and problematic, and those who like to ponder
life in the belly of the whale. For some,
invitations come as night birds; others get
a summons in the mail. These wander wet and
lonely; those soft-shoe in rhythm with the rain.

Two kinds: the tragic heroes and the understudies;
the bootleggers and the cobblers. Wolf-whisperers
and dogcatchers; shovellers of snow and readers
of the flake. There are those who run into the room
with a lit match, stopping to wonder what they came for,
and the ones who run in without the match.

- Prater Sereno

praise song

to my aunt blanche
who rolled from grass to driveway
into the street one sunday morning.
i was ten.
i had never seen
a human woman hurl her basketball
of a body into the traffic of the world.
Praise to the drivers who stopped in time.
Praise to the faith with which she rose
after some moments then slowly walked
sighing back to her family.
Praise to the arms which understood
little or nothing of what it meant
but welcomed her in without judgment,
accepting it all like children might,
like God.

- Lucille Clifton

Proud

Like those crazy Babylonians, who raised a tower
higher than their own I.Q.; so gigantic,
it could only have been built by God —
a fact that they forgot, until they fell,
in argument, apart, like so many unmortared
parts of speech. Babylon, remember?
They fell, and we grew up
to learn two languages — one for money,
and one for love; one for saying what we mean,
and one for hiding it. I'm thinking of my brother,
who lost his voice, and then his wife
because he was too proud to say, "Please, Don't Go."
That architect, my brother,
who sleeps now on his office couch,
twitching like a racedog in a business suit,
a dog who dreams he is so far ahead of all
the competition, he'll be impossible to catch.
I'm speaking of my brother, but I might as well
be talking of my enormously rich and arrogant
other relative, the United States — a country so goliath,
it casts a shadow over half the world;
so ambidextrous, it can lie and listen to itself
at once. And isn't that the story of the mind?
Which started as a little church,
with open doors,
but wound up as a fortress, with foot-thick walls
and a bristling defense. Somewhere inside,
we are lost, muttering about our enemies
and making up the truth. Truth is,
the self is a disease, a wound
which grows infected with the fear
that it will never have enough.
And egomania
is standing on a mountaintop
and sucking down great lungfuls
of a better quality of air
than what the common people get; it feels
like freedom and it tastes like truth;
you laugh, and every forty seconds, pledge
a new allegiance to yourself. And maybe
we will have to go on climbing to some
hopeless height, to some fantastic speed,
like Icarus the biggest day of his career.
Maybe there are pinnacles of ignorance,
altitudes of stupid, from which
recovery is impossible. I think
of my brother, who might have saved himself
with just a single word, however late and lame.
I think of my country,
which goes on talking.

- Tony Hoagland

Olam

Olam is another word
for the elusive Godot.
What will never come
is also the one place

that never goes,
where Lurianic sparks
are everywhere scattered
and waiting is wonderful

when always there is task,
the tikkun of taking tea
or telling tales. Being together
is the ordinary telos

worth our transience -
for the Lord is not our friend
as the Talmud warns,
but you have been to me,

and I sometimes
imperfectly to you,
in this realm of
sometimes passing.

- Zach Horvitz

Prayer and Cosmos


Three great rebbes wrestle with the hermeneutics of prayer:
does god pray, to whom, and what are those prayers?

The inquisitive Earthling asks the reflective moon about the prayers of the Sun.

From Rabbi Yochanan we learn that God prays; then
Rabbi Zutra ben Tobi reflects and relates god’s prayer only to discover that the Holy one received the same prayer from Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha.

Amazingly, the prayers of sun and moon overlap, so a major eclipse of sorts is unfolding from where we stand, here upon the earth.

Each planet plays it’s part, each Rebbe speaks his truth, and the Holy One keeps shining the one great light.

The three align perfectly as they hurtle through space and time.

From the earth we watch the moon block the sun and we cheer as it reaches totality.

“Look how the sun and moon are joined, offering the same prayer” we say in that magnificent moment.

What we and the Rabbis forget is that the whirling planets and their heartfelt prayers are always reaching for totality.

- Bruce Silverman

What the Storms Say

We have arrived. Yet
We are many and gather.
Still yelling at you
To turn, requiring you
To move, demanding
That you help each other.
We are screaming for you
To follow the spiral path
Of transformation. Our
Clouds swirl nine miles
High, we batter you so
You will learn your limits.
We barrel through your
Cities so you find out
You have gone too far.
You have forgotten too
Often how we are all
interconnected. Now
We remember. We
Are calling all of life
To acknowledge our
Indivisibility. Your
Souls are bound up
With us, the hurricanes,
The firestorms, and
The earthquakes.
We vibrate, we dance
In the wild rotations
Of celestial mirth.
Our souls follow
The beat, We are
Intrepid. We are
The spirits of change.
We call on you to
Reconsider your lives,
We are the hurricanes,
Insisting that you hurry,
Since there is little
Time before you and
Your circle of interrelated
Species will no longer
Be threatened, You will
Fall. To survive, you must
Keep watch and listen.
You run away to escape
The very thing you have
Created. Understand
This is not possible.
Safety is no where.
Extinction is upon us.
And when you return
From being with us,
What will you have?
Possessions are nothing.
We do not own one square
Inch of Mother Earth. She
Owns us, and she is out
Of patience. Trust not in
Material goods. Instead,
Rely on the wisdom of
The storms, the tsunami,
The floods, the tornados,
The lightning, the thunder.
See how we turn, We
Destroy, and we create.
We challenge you with
Your future, The time
Of the Great Migrations,
Of the Great Turnings,
Of the magical moments
Of mountains, The time
Of epiphany is upon you.
You have not lost everything.
What you have bought, what
You have so carefully counted
Has passed away. What you
Can hold is each other. What
You can cherish is diversity,
Multiplicity, all the forms
Of life. We order you to stand
Up and take notice. Our
Firestorms tell you to answer
Your grief with service. What
Service? To love one another,
To care, to give, to help. We
Are one. Something far greater
Than your selves are moving.
Something is being co-created.
You are like toddlers testing
Boundaries. You experience
Limits. All is not about comfort
Nor about your convenience.
Nor is it about what we own
Or what we can buy. All is
About our relationship to
Mother Earth and to and
Amongst her myriad of
Creatures. There is enough.
There is a way. The way is
Acknowledging suffering
As part of our path to
Redemption. The way
Of holding each other
And of committing
To the protection of
Sentient being to live
Together in peace and
In love. So we, the storm
Sprits are showing your
The price of all your lives
Is to recreate your lives.
You will run for your lives.
You will remember what
You thought your life was.
Then you will know exactly what
Life is worth. You are hunkered
Down under the storms. Your lives
belong to spirit and praise change.

- Patria Brown

Soon

autumn is about to make its leap
leaves are thrashing in the roadways

a thunderstorm fell yesterday
sweet gum blushes sunset in

old summer green a sign
to go a rush to see time gone

these brutal months cleaned in rain

- Kevin Pryne

Autumn

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all the other stars in the loneliness.

We're all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one….it's in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
Infinitely calm, hold up all this falling.


- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translated from the German by Robert Bly)

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Autumn

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all the other stars in the loneliness.

We're all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one….it's in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
Infinitely calm, hold up all this falling.


- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translated from the German by Robert Bly)

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Weather Report

for the autumn equinox


Balance:
The still point on the seesaw
between summer and winter
longer and shorter
neither one nor the other

Yet this day
is not only a moment poised
between dualities,
but a Singularity.
a One.
a Clarity.

Sun in full radiance
sky so blue
earth so green
and a wind
just enough to breathe
movement
into September trees --
beauty
that strikes like a thunderclap.

And so, in this moment between,
this perfect day,
I force myself to remember:
We are poised in a precarious balance
that will soon slide away,
down with a rush
to another weather, dark and chill.

And I pray,
May the clarity of this day
stay
in our hearts
when the weather changes.

May we still hold light
In the darkness to come

May we find the still point
On which to balance.


- Nina Mermey Klippel

Earth Prayer

O Endless Creator, Force of Life, Seat of the Unconscious, Dharma,
Atman, Ra, Qalb, Dear Center of our Love, Christlight, Yahweh, Allah,
Mawu, Mother of the Universe…

Let us, when swimming with the stream, become the stream…
Let us, when moving with the music, become the music…
Let us, when rocking the wounded, become the suffering..

Let us live deep enough till there is only one direction…
and slow enough till there is only the beginning of time…
and loud enough in our hearts till there is no need to speak…

Let us live for the grace beneath all we want,
let us see it in everything and everyone,
till we admit to the mystery that when I look deep enough into you,
I find me,
and when you dare to hear my fear in the recess of your heart,
you recognize it as your secret, which you thought no one else knew…

O let us embrace that unexpected moment of unity as the atom of God…
Let us have the courage to hold each other when we break and worship what unfolds…

O nameless spirit that is not done with us,
let us love without a net beyond the fear of death
until the speck of peace we guard so well becomes the world…

- Mark Nepo

Late Summer Roses


In the calm

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...8_11-00-51.png

of a late summer afternoon
my father sent me roses.


I was watching two
white butterflies
dance around each other
through the light and easy air
when I saw them—
pink roses
so small
one fit in the palm of my hand.


The scent
Ah, well, the scent
of a rose
can open you.


Long dead, my father
sends me roses.
My heart
like a child,
amazed.


- Mary Swanson

Hope





I do not stand in judgment.
I simply weep
for the blindness I see
around me,
for the hurt inflicted,
knowingly or unknowingly,
upon the marginalized.
I know nothing else to do
but weep for this reality,
for this inability to love
each other.

May my tears fall upon this arid soil,
may their moisture
find the heart’s seed,
dry and shriveled,
for lack of loving,
for the lack of tears,
for the lack of life giving moisture.
May my tears envelop
each shriveled heart seed,
allow each seed to swell,
to begin to feel once more
what has been lost—
the ability to grieve,
to weep and to water
with their own tears
other dry and shriveled
heart seeds.


In this way, my grief is a fount of hope,
for only in my tears,
only through my tears,
shared in community,
am I able to live fully,
to weep and then to dance,
to dance and then to weep,
in this never ending cycle
of being human—
we are born and we die.

If we are to live fully
in that interim, in that short time
we are given, we must weep
for we all know we are destined to loose
everything and everyone
we have ever loved.
So, only through our grief,
only through our weeping,
openly, publicly, communally,
are we able to embrace our full humanness,
our own divinity, the wholeness of our lives,
to experience genuine hope and joy,
knowing our tears are watering
the shriveled heart seeds of the world.

Jesus wept.

- Bill Denham

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Hope
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Woman Poem


We shed blood
without violence
blend matter and spirit
fuse water and womb

We are Isis
rebirthing the sun
We are Maeve
reclaiming the shadow

We are a mother's peace
we hold the mother wound

Our blankets are sewn of prayer
red cotton, sweetgrass, yarrow
plaited into song
reclaiming the first medicine

We are daughters of swords
fight to the death
for the no that means no,
hold unfettered roots
through green labyrinths
to the Supreme

We breathe stars into you
til the end of breathing
We hum you to us
form tides steering mystery

Old ways are ours
oak murmuring the first leaves,
carrying the confluence of all circles
endings, beginnings
everywhere under your feet

We shape shift across this land
fire the hearth
travel the wheel
through rusty creaks
in awe of small things
light workers, all beings
the juice that is life

We are
and we are not.

- Aoife Reilly

What Is Broken Is What God Blesses



The lover’s footprint in the sand
the ten-year-old kid’s bare feet
in the mud picking chili for rich growers,
not those seeking cultural or ethnic roots,
but those whose roots
have been exposed, hacked, dug up and burned
and in those roots
do animals burrow for warmth;
what is broken is blessed,
not the knowledge and empty-shelled wisdom
paraphrased from textbooks,
not the mimicking nor plaques of distinction
nor the ribbons and medals
but after the privileged carriage has passed
the breeze blows traces of wheel ruts away
and on the dust will again be the people’s broken
footprints.
What is broken God blesses,
not the perfectly brick-on-brick prison
but the shattered wall
that announces freedom to the world,
proclaims the irascible spirit of the human
rebelling against lies, against betrayal,
against taking what is not deserved;
the human complaint is what God blesses,
our impoverished dirt roads filled with cripples,
what is broken is baptized,
the irreverent disbeliever,
the addict’s arm seamed with needle marks
is a thread line of a blanket
frayed and bare from keeping the man warm.
We are all broken ornaments,
glinting in our worn-out work gloves,
foreclosed homes, ruined marriages,
from which shimmer our lives in their deepest truths,
blood from the wound,
broken ornaments—
when we lost our perfection and honored our imperfect sentiments, we were
blessed.
Broken are the ghettos, barrios, trailer parks where gangs duel to death,
yet through the wretchedness a woman of sixty comes riding her rusty bicycle,
we embrace
we bury in our hearts,
broken ornaments, accused, hunted, finding solace and refuge
we work, we worry, we love
but always with compassion
reflecting our blessings—
in our brokenness
thrives life, thrives light, thrives
the essence of our strength,
each of us a warm fragment,
broken off from the greater
ornament of the unseen,
then rejoined as dust,
to all this is.


- Jimmy Santiago Baca, 1952