Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Let's Remake The World


Let's remake the world with words.
Not frivolously, nor
To hide from what we fear,
But with a purpose.
Let's,
As Wordsworth said, remove
"The dust of custom" so things
Shine again, each object arrayed
In its robe of original light.

And then we'll see the world
As if for the first time.
As once we gazed at the beloved
Who was gazing at us.

- Gregory Orr

Waste

Not even waste
is inviolate.
The day misspent,
the love misplaced,
has inside it
the seed of redemption.
Nothing is exempt
from resurrection.
It is tiresome
how the grass
re-ripens, greening
all along the punched
and mucked horizon
once the bison
have moved on,
leaning into hunger
and hard luck.

- Kay Ryan

If, On Account Of The Political Situation


If, on account of the political situation,

there are quite a number of homes without roofs, and
men

Lying about in the countryside neither drunk nor
asleep,

If all sailings have been cancelled till further
notice,

If it's unwise now to say much in letters, and if,

Under the subnormal temperatures prevailing,

The two sexes are at present the weak and the strong,

That is not at all unusual for this time of year.

If that were all, we should know how to manage.
Flood, fire,

The dessication of grasslands, restraint of princes,

Piracy on the high seas, physical pain and fiscal
grief,

These are after all our familiar tribulations,

And we have been through them all before, many, many
times.

As events which belong to the natural world where

The occupation of space is the real and final fact

And time turns round itself in an obedient circle,

They occur again and again but only to pass

Again and again into their formal opposites,

From sword to ploughshare, coffin to cradle, war to
work,

So that, taking the bad with the good, the pattern
composed

By the ten thousand odd things that can possibly
happen

Is permanent in a general average way.



Till lately we knew of no other, and between us we
seemed

To have what it took -- the adrenal courage of the
tiger,

The chameleon's discretion, the modesty of the doe,

Or the fern's devotion to spatial necessity:

To practice one's peculiar civic virtue was not

So impossible after all; to cut our losses

And bury our dead was really quite easy. That was why

We were always able to say: "We are children of God,

And our Father has never forsaken His people."

But then we were children: That was a moment ago,

Before an outrageous novelty had been introduced

Into our lives. Why were we never warned? Perhaps we
were.

Perhaps that mysterious noise at the back of the brain

We noticed on certain occasions -- sitting alone

In the waiting room of the country junction, looking

Up at the toilet window -- was not indigestion

But this Horror starting already to scratch Its way
in?

Just how, just when It succeeded we shall never know:

We can only say that now It is there and that nothing

We learnt before It was there is now of the slightest
use,

For nothing like It has happened before. It's as if

We had left our house for five minutes to mail a
letter,

And during that time the living room had changed
places

With the room behind the mirror over the fireplace;

It's as if, waking up with a start, we discovered

Ourselves stretched out flat on the floor, watching
our shadow

Sleepily stretching itself at the window. I mean

That the world of space where events reoccur is still
there,

Only now it's no longer real; the real one is nowhere

Where time never moves and nothing can ever happen:

I mean that although there's a person we know all
about

Still bearing our name and loving himself as before,

That person has become a fiction; our true existence

Is decided by no one and has no importance to love.



That is why we despair; that is why we would welcome

The nursery bogey or the winecellar ghost, why even

The violent howling of winter and war has become

Like a juke-box tune that we dare not stop. We are
afraid

Of pain but more afraid of silence; for no nightmare

Of hostile objects could be as terrible as this Void.

This is the Abomination. This is the wrath of God.

- W.H. Auden

We are pleased to announce the third place winner in our Poems For Haiti contest, George Taylor's "Remembering Haiti". Tomorrow we will share the second place winner and on Wednesday the first place. Stay tuned.

Many thanks to all of you who submitted such beautiful gifts!



Remembering Haiti

I see their dark Haitian faces
in the halls at my mother's retirement home.
The men carry tape measures on plaster-stained leather belts.

Jean Phillipe holds a screw driver
in my mother's kitchen.
He says in a Caribbean-French accent
"Your mother is my teacher."

The his smile reaches out to me
across three hundred years of history
which neither of us mentions,
across the rift in the earth
which brought down Haiti's buildings
and across the screams of parents.

This broad white-toothed smile hovers thankfully
above the men and women unloading truckloads of food.

"She helps my English, very bad" Jean Phillipe says.

He smiles again
across the landscape between Haiti and Mill Valley
full of people who help each other
any way they can.

- George Taylor

Today we offer you the second place winner in our Poems For Haiti Contest.

In Memoriam

for Haiti

One minute heating up the stove
to cook a little lunch
then sweep the floor
the next a rumble
as if trains stampeded through rooms
through walls toppling like lincoln logs
she had given birth
the papers said
on a bed with blue sheets
her baby's face
no longer hers
but the thousands pinned beneath stone
singing could not break through
where they stood swaying
the jut of a hip or dusty feet under skirts
the sky buried itself
no time for
a lullaby, not even a kiss
on the mother's half-opened lips.

- Claire Drucker

Today we are pleased to share the first place winner in our Poetry For Haiti contest, Laurie Kirkpatrick's "Retrospect".

Retrospect

These photos have been altered
since New Year's week
when my daughter brought them home from Port-au-Prince.

Grey bungalows with fuchsia porches float over the treetops,
opening into air.

Stacked high under plastic tarps and Digicel umbrellas,
ripe guavas. Roosters wave their handful of orange feathers
and insolent blue tails. A wedding flickers in a church
of paper lanterns, baby's breath.

Hibiscus winds through barbed wire.
Archways are latticed in iron filigree.
The least windows are barred as if
the enemy can be shut out.

Before a door the turquoise color of portable latrines
a man carries a bag of soil, or maybe it's cement, on his head;
a woman balances a whole week's groceries in her hamper,
their strong arms and backs about to
shoulder the dead.

- Laurie Kirkpatrick

The Forge

All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil's short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, one end square,
Set there immovable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music.
Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and a flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.

- Seamus Heaney

The Unknown Citizen

(To js/07/m/378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in a hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation,
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

- W.H. Auden

Invictus


Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

- William Ernest Henley

Paschal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Robert Pinsky

A Story

Everyone loves a story. Let's begin with a house.
We can fill it with careful rooms and fill the rooms
with things—tables, chairs, cupboards, drawers
closed to hide tiny beds where children once slept
or big drawers that yawn open to reveal
precisely folded garments washed half to death,
unsoiled, stale, and waiting to be worn out.
There must be a kitchen, and the kitchen
must have a stove, perhaps a big iron one
with a fat black pipe that vanishes into the ceiling
to reach the sky and exhale its smells and collusions.
This was the center of whatever family life
was here, this and the sink gone yellow
around the drain where the water, dirty or pure,
ran off with no explanation, somehow like the point
of this, the story we promised and may yet deliver.
Make no mistake, a family was here. You see
the path worn into the linoleum where the wood,
gray and certainly pine, shows through.
Father stood there in the middle of his life
to call to the heavens he imagined above the roof
must surely be listening. When no one answered
you can see where his heel came down again
and again, even though he'd been taught
never to demand. Not that life was especially cruel;
they had well water they pumped at first,
a stove that gave heat, a mother who stood
at the sink at all hours and gazed longingly
to where the woods once held the voices
of small bears—themselves a family—and the songs
of birds long fled once the deep woods surrendered
one tree at a time after the workmen arrived
with jugs of hot coffee. The worn spot on the sill
is where Mother rested her head when no one saw,
those two stained ridges were handholds
she relied on; they never let her down.
Where is she now? You think you have a right
to know everything? The children tiny enough
to inhabit cupboards, large enough to have rooms
of their own and to abandon them, the father
with his right hand raised against the sky?
If those questions are too personal, then tell us,
where are the woods? They had to have been
because the continent was clothed in trees.
We all read that in school and knew it to be true.
Yet all we see are houses, rows and rows
of houses as far as sight, and where sight vanishes
into nothing, into the new world no one has seen,
there has to be more than dust, wind-borne particles
of burning earth, the earth we lost, and nothing else.

- Philip Levine

Ecclesiastes II:I

We must cast our bread
Upon the waters, as the
Ancient preacher said,

Trusting that it may
Amply be restored to us
After many a day.

That old metaphor,
Drawn from rice farming on the
River's flooded shore,

Helps us believe
That it's no great sin to give,
Hoping to receive.

Therefore I shall throw
Broken bread, this sullen day,
Out across the snow,

Betting crust and crumb
That birds will gather, and that
One more spring will come.

- Richard Wilbur

blessing the boats


(at St. Mary's)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back
may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

- Lucille Clifton

Planting a Sequoia

All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard,
Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.
Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific,
And the sky above us stayed the dull gray
Of an old year coming to an end.

In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son's birth-
An olive or a fig tree-a sign that the earth has one more life to bear.
I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father's
orchard,
A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs,
A promise of new fruit in other autumns.

But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,
Defying the practical custom of our fathers,
Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant's birth cord,
All that remains above earth of a first-born son,
A few stray atoms brought back to the elements.

We will give you what we can-our labor and our soil,
Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,
Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees.
We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light,
A slender shoot against the sunset.

And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead,
Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down,
His mother's beauty ashes in the air,
I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you,
Silently keeping the secret of your birth.

- Dana Gioia

In Passing

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious

- Lisel Mueller

The Self-Unseeing

Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollow and thin:
Here is the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.

She sat here in her chair,
Staring into the fire;
He who played stood there,
Bowing it higher and higher.

Childlike I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day;
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away.

- Thomas Hardy

Rock and Hawk

Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.

This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the seawind
Lets no tree grow,

Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.

I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;

Life with calm death; the falcon's
Realist eyes and act
Married to the massive

Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.

- Robinson Jeffers

Rock Bottom

So this is what it comes down to in the end: earth and sand
skimmed, trimmed, filleted from rocky bone, leaving only
solid unshakeable bottom, what doesn't in the end give in
to the relentless hammer, whoosh, and haul-away of tides
but stands there saying "Here I am here I stay," protestant
to the pin of its absolute collar, refusing to put off the sheen
on its clean-scoured surface, no mourning weeds in spite of loss
after loss – whole wedges of the continent, particles of the main
plummeting from one element to the other and no going back
to how things were once, but to go on ending and ending here.

- Eamon Grennan

Alba

Climbing in the mist I came to a terrace wall
and saw above it a small field of broad beans in flower
their white fragrance was flowing through the first light
of morning there a little way up the mountain
where I had made my way through the olive groves
and under the blossoming boughs of the almonds
above the old hut of the charcoal burner
where suddenly the sent of the bean flowers found me
and as I took the next step I heard
the creak of the harness and the mule’s shod hooves
striking stones in the furrow and then the low voice
of the man talking softly praising the mule
as he walked behind through the cloud in his white shirt
along the row and between his own words
he was singing under his breath a few phrases
at a time of the same song singing it
to his mule it seemed as I listened
watching their breaths and not understanding a word.

- W.S. Merwin

White Horse


Through the woods of Annadel,

past trees gently arched,

trunks and stones moss-matted —

comes the fair stallion steady on the trail



One angel on a treetop sings

one note, repeated,

repeated



Milky surface of stream,

little wall of water

falling into it,

and the white horse

coming nearer

with a steady sound

beating under the boughs

in the darkness of woods

as if by magic

moving towards

to where, upon the ribbed edge,

he passes

trails a veil of light

that shakes us

as though wind

as though ecstasy



— Katherine Hastings

Advice from a Tree


Dear Friend

Stand Tall and Proud
Sink your roots deeply into the Earth
Reflect the light of your true nature
Think long term
Go out on a limb
Remember your place among all living beings
Embrace with joy the changing seasons
For each yields its own abundance
The Energy and Birth of Spring
The Growth and Contentment of Summer
The Wisdom to let go like leaves in the Fall
The Rest and Quiet renewal of Winter
Feel the wind and the sun
And the delight in their presence
Look up at the moon that shines down upon you
And the mystery of the stars at night
Seek nourishment from the good things in life
Simple pleasures
Earth, fresh air, light
Be content with your natural beauty
Drink plenty of water
Let your limbs sway and dance in the breezes
Be flexible
Remember your roots
Enjoy the view!

- Ivan Shamir

Love This Miraculous World

Our understandable wish
to preserve the planet
must somehow be
reduced
to the scale of our
competence.
Love is never abstract.
It does not adhere
to the universe
or the planet
or the nation
or the institution
or the profession,
but to the singular
sparrows of the street,
the lilies of the field,
“the least of these
my brethren.”
Love this
miraculous world
that we did not make,
that is a gift to us.

- Wendell Berry

Hatred


See how efficient it still is,

how it keeps itself in shape -

our century's hatred.

How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles.

How rapidly it pounces, tracks us down.

It's not like other feelings.

At once both older and younger.

It gives birth itself to the reasons

that give it life.

When it sleeps, it's never eternal rest.

And sleeplessness won't sap its strength; it feeds it.


One religion or another -

whatever gets it ready, in position.

One fatherland or another -

whatever helps it get a running start.

Justice also works well at the outset

until hate gets its own momentum going.

Hatred. Hatred.

Its face twisted in a grimace

of erotic ecstasy.

Oh these other feelings,

listless weaklings.

Since when does brotherhood

draw crowds?

Has compassion

ever finished first?

Does doubt ever really rouse the rabble?

Only hatred has just what it takes.

Gifted, diligent, hard working.

Need we mention all the songs it has composed?

All the pages it has added to our history books?

All the human carpets it has spread

over countless city squares and football fields?

Let's face it:

it knows how to make beauty.

The splendid fire-glow in midnight skies.

Magnificent bursting bombs in rosy dawns.

You can't deny the inspiring pathos of ruins

and a certain bawdy humor to be found

in the sturdy column jutting from their midst.

Hatred is a master of contrast -

between explosion and dead quiet,

red blood and white snow.

Above all, it never tires

of its leitmotif - the impeccable executioner

towering over its soiled victim.

It's always ready for new challenges.

If it has to wait awhile, it will.

They say it's blind. Blind?

It has a sniper's keen sight

and gazes unflinchingly at the future

as only it can.

- Wislawa Szymborska

I strain my ears
I raise my head
and wait for the dawn breeze
How many times dreamily
herding an ox in the Spring rain?
Who realizes that this intention pierces heaven?
Just remain with rising eyebrows
And blinking eyes

- Dogen Zenji

Gratitude Goulash

Take down your biggest pot,
bigger than you think you need.
Slice, dice or cut into manageable pieces
the desiccated remains
of all your life's
calamitous events.

Look around for missed ingredients.
Add clean water, local honey and vinegar.
Bring this mess to a rolling boil then
simmer on a back burner for several days.

When your kitchen smells good,
Ask a close friend to come over.
Get out two old bowls,
they need not match.
Just before serving add a dollop of success
and a smidgen of failure.
Then be very liberal with paprika.

Solemnly bless the goulash,
and take a few bites…
Laugh together, forgive yourself,
then gratefully
go out to eat.

- Doug von Koss

Farewell Song

There is a new bird in this forest - song so sweet it breaks my heart to be
leaving. Twenty-seven years of the Stellar Jay's harsh voice drowning out
the songbirds. And now, melodious song rings all around, a solitary
woodpecker accompanying on percussion. Yesterday I recorded them with a plan
to reveal their identities. But for now, the trees sing with this mystery of
sweetness - my farewell song.

What then, if I let the world break my heart with it's terrible beauty and
unceasing change?

- Kay Crista

Signals and Leaves

The signals we give—yes, or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford

If we listen to the lesson of the falling leaves
we will send the right signals to each other,
the yes, the no, the maybe. We will send
love
and faith
and the knowledge that letting go
is the only way of knowing whether our signals
(of grace, of god)
are coming through
true.
- Fran Claggett

After reading “Ritual to Read to Each Other” by William Stafford
and “The Lesson of the Falling Leaves” by Lucille Clifton

Parade

Across the valley
carried by the fullness of the spring sun
echo something distant and
familiar: drums. The high
school band prepares again
in the heat of early morning
for the annual parade in our town,
small enough that anyone who
wants can join in,
whose neighbors, children, friends,
animals, enemies, rivals, and anonymous
relatives will march, all steady, then
pause to wait for those ahead
to perform before the judging stand and
then march on, and on, and on

out to the edge of town, out off the far end, marching still
to where they
will echo
and someday start, I know,
for I can feel it already,
a single tear
to salt my closed
and grateful eye.

- Scott O'Brien

To A Young Poet

Don’t believe our outlines, forget them
and begin from your own words.
As if you are the first to write poetry
or the last poet.

If you read our work, let it not be an extension of our airs,
but to correct our errs
in the book of agony.

Don’t ask anyone: Who am I?
You know who your mother is.
As for your father, be your own.

Truth is white, write over it
with a crow’s ink.
Truth is black, write over it
with a mirage’s light.

If you want to deal with a falcon
soar with the falcon.

If you fall in love with a woman,
be the one, not she,
Who desires his end.

Life is less alive than we think but we don’t think
of the matter too much lest we hurt emotion’s health.

If you ponder a rose for too long
you won’t budge in a storm.

You are like me, but my abyss is clear.
And you have roads whose secrets never end.
They descend and ascend, descend and ascend.

You might call the end of youth
the maturity of talent
or wisdom. No doubt, it is wisdom,
the wisdom of a cool non-lyric.

One thousand birds in the hand
don’t equal one bird that wears a tree.

A poem in a difficult time
is beautiful flowers in a cemetery.

Example is not easy to attain
so be yourself and other than yourself
behind the borders of echo.

Ardor has an expiration date with extended range.
So fill up with fervor for your heart’s sake,
follow it before you reach your path.

Don’t tell the beloved, you are I
and I am thou, say
the opposite of that: we are two guests
of an excess, fugitive cloud.

Deviate, with all your might, deviate from the rule.

Don’t place two stars in one utterance
and place the marginal next to the essential
to complete the rising rapture.

Don’t believe the accuracy of our instructions.
Believe only the caravan’s trace.

A moral is as a bullet in its poet’s heart
a deadly wisdom.

Be strong as a bull when you’re angry
weak as an almond blossom
when you love, and nothing, nothing
when you serenade yourself in a closed room.

The road is long like an ancient poet’s night:
plains and hills, rivers and valleys.
Walk according to your dream’s measure: either a lily
follows you or the gallows.

Your tasks are not what worry me about you.
I worry about you from those who dance
over their children’s graves,
and from the hidden cameras
in the singers’ navels.

You won’t disappoint me,
if you distance yourself from others, and from me.
What doesn’t resemble me is more beautiful.

From now on, your only guardian is a neglected future.

Don’t think when you melt in sorrow
like candle tears, of who will see you
or follow your intuition’s light.
Think of yourself: is this all of myself?

The poem is always incomplete, the butterflies make it whole.

No advice in love. It’s experience.
No advice in poetry. It’s talent.

And last but not least, Salaam.

- Mahmoud Darwish
Translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

The Morning After

I’m contemplating how the snake knows
it’s time to shed her skin. Imagining the internal
clock of now that wakes her, or, simply,
winter over, spine expanding
exponentially when she stretches,
straightens from the eternal coil
of sleeping and waking. Maybe
it’s the startle of a boy stepping near
above the rock she’s chosen
to wait for summer heat.
One day, like a tossed glove, like
a dress which no longer contains the shape
of her seduction, skin breaks.
The slow pull of self comes
like Nature always taught. The robes
of distinction, of wife, mother, lover,
sinner, are all behind her.
The boy whose eye is keen
will find the remnant, take it home,
tack it above his bed.
He’ll admire the length and depth,
will dream the dream of her
the knowledge of her existence
full in his head, the way to sun baked
rock, winding, but clear.

- Cindy Dubielak Yeager

Harvest of Thorns



Whom are they arresting?

Today, for the bomb in Times Square,

the one that did not go off,

except in people’s hearts

and exploded faith - after calling us back

from the borders of daily care

to stand and watch in horror.

Whom did they arrest?

Not the insatiable hatred, not

this misplaced

passion, obsessed with righting

wrongs at the expense of all

that is

right.

Not the shadow of revenge,

which knows no solace,

runs from loving

caresses, spits out the cloying taste

of reconciliation.

No, they never arrest the right one:

that shadow fleeing

over there, just now

disappearing down the subway,

rounding that corner, the one who

has never yet been caught

in all these millennia

of wars, murderous martyrs,

and lunacy.

Each springs boxes him in,

every butterfly is a bomber,

fixing him in her sights,

every child’s smile a vicious

attack; only a cemetery feels

like home to him.



Such a strange universe, calling for help,

holding so close to its heart

this harvest of thorns.

- Scott O'Brien

To A Terrorist

For the historical ache, the ache passed down
which finds its circumstance and becomes
the present ache, I offer this poem

without hope, knowing there's nothing,
not even revenge, which alleviates
a life like yours. I offer it as one

might offer his father's ashes
to the wind, a gesture
when there's nothing else to do.

Still, I must say to you:
I hate your good reasons.
I hate the hatefullness that makes you fall

in love with death, your own included.
Perhaps you're hating me now,
I who own my own house

and live in a country so muscular,
so smug, it thinks its terror is meant
only to mean well, and to protect.

Christ turned his singular cheek,
one man's holiness another's absurdity.
Like you, the rest of us obey the sting,

the surge. I'm just speaking out loud
to cancel my silence. Consider it an old impulse,
doomed to become mere words.

The first poet probably spoke to thunder
and, for a while, believed
thunder had an ear and a choice.

- Stephen Dunn

Family Garden

Tell me again about your garden
Tell me how you planted, in the small
flat of mountain land, corn seed

and bean seed, how your finger poked the soil
then you dropped in three dark bean seeds
for every yellow seed of corn.

Trees and mountains collared your land,
but the fenced garden opened freely
to sun and warm summer rains.

Your potato rows bulged in July. You ached
from digging them up, your hands down in dirt,
the cool lump of a tuber, brown-spotted,

just recovered, a greeting, like shaking hands.
Baskets full of bumpy brown potatoes filled
your basement until fall, until you gave

away what you could, throwing out the rest.
You gave away honey from the white hive too,
that box of bees beside the garden,

honey stored in Mason jars, a clearest honey
nectar from lin tree blossoms and wild flowers.
The bright taste of honey on the tongue

spoke of the place, if a place can be known
by the activity of bees and a flavor in the mouth,
if a person can be known by small acts

such as these, such as the way you rocked
summer evenings from a chair on the porch
tending your inner garden, eyes closed.

- Hank Hudepohl

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.



- Billy Collins

Another Mother's Day poem:


We Have A Beautiful Mother

We have a beautiful
Mother
Her hills
Are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
Hills.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her oceans
Are wombs
Her wombs
Oceans.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her teeth
The white stones
At the edge
Of the water
The summer
Grasses
Her plentiful
Hair.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her green lap
Immense
Her brown embrace
Eternal
Her blue body
Everything we know.

- Alice Walker

Whales Weep Not!*

They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.

All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of
the sea!

And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep bed of the sea,
as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale-blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and
comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale's
fathomless body.

And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking the
wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and
forth,
keep passing, archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the
sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.

And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-
tender young
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of
the beginning and the end.

And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves in a ring
when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood
and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat
encircling their huddled monsters of love.
And all this happens in the sea, in the salt
where God is also love, but without words:
and Aphrodite is the wife of whales
most happy, happy she!

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.
- D.H. Lawrence

Wired


First She had to heave up mountains,
then cool her blood with ice and wait
a little while for rock to tumble
shatter, allow her glacier plow
to rake the valleys out, until
the last few seconds, so they say,
we came and settled, built dry walls
up to the crags, scattered sheep to eat
forest shoots, and so came pasture.

And still her brooks course through
her veins, lilting and sighing and
spinning their ways into lake and sea
as she tilts quietly
ominous, egg-timer wired
to our words, feelings, thoughts—
weighing whether to flip it over
or, like the show with too small
an audience, simply close the stage.

- Raphael Block

It’s The Dream

It’s the dream we carry
that someting wondrous will happen,
that it must happen -
time will open
mountains will open
spring will gush forth from the ground -
that the dream itself will open
that one morning we’ll quietly drift
into a harbor we didn’t know was there.

- Olav H. Hauge
(translated from the Norwegian by Robert Hadin)

Jump Rope Rhyme

Tat tvam asi:
thou art that -
that leaf, that tree,
that cow, that cat,
that cloud, that sky,
that moon, that sun,
that you, that I -
for all are one.
So here you are
and there you go
and who you were
you hardly know.

I think this I
is only me:
a drip, a drop,
but not the sea.
Yet when I wake
from all these dreams,

then, like the snake,
I'll shed what seems:
this mask, this skin,
this ball and chain.
I will begin
to fall like rain.

Our heart's last home:
the wind-whipped foam,
the sweet, deep sea.
Tat tvam asi.

- Tom Hansen

Bird of Paradise

I know time flies
because the days have wings
They wake up and fly
with or without me

I know the days have wings
because my heart beats
It beats the way wings beat
between two shores

I know time has shores
because my heart has wings
And wings are made
to reach the other shore

- Clark Heinrich

Elephant Girl



Elephant Girl just wanted to play; no;

She wanted good work without undue stress;

Feed the elephants without accidents;

If there's an accident, call the Veterinarian;

If not, then practice principles of elephant health.

Stay in the game no matter what.

Which game?

She had a desire to go deeper,

Merge with whatever it is

That makes monks so cheerful

With so very little stuff.

- Connie Madden

The Absence That Was The Tree

Two men are cutting the dead maple down:
limbs and branches first, then the trunk
in sections, all the pieces scattered in piles
on the ground out of which it grew.

It's been released from its enormous weight.
It's given us this gift of a new view--
now the church and the woods
across the road can stare back at us

through where it stood and labored
to guard our privacy. The regions
of the sky the branches divided have merged
back again into their undefined whole.

All the nests have come crashing down.
No longer will we hear bird song
from the particular quarter: it will not
serve as orientation or point of discussion.

We remark about the extra light,
the new distance its absence
will afford, the extra breezes
traveling through the opened gate.

Death has a way of allowing us to see
beyond where the body formerly stood.
But we have come to love that body
more than the space revealed behind it.

All winter long we'll hack the remnants
even smaller so they will fit our stove,
where the tree will warm us in its next life. When
it says farewell, it will be as smoke on the air.


- Philip Terman

Before Summer Rain


Suddenly, from all the green around you,
something-you don't know what-has disappeared;
you feel it creeping closer to the window,
in total silence. From the nearby wood

you hear the urgent whistling of a plover,
reminding you of someone's Saint Jerome:
so much solitude and passion come
from that one voice, whose fierce request the downpour

will grant. The walls, with their ancient portraits, glide
away from us, cautiously, as though
they weren't supposed to hear what we are saying.

And reflected on the faded tapestries now;
the chill, uncertain sunlight of those long
childhood hours when you were so afraid.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Sparrow

With its swift
flick and plummet
through the chrism
of these first hours
after the rain
spraying droplets
off its wingtips then
scissoring past
the phone lines
into the blue
distance of roofs
and freeways
how not see it as
diving past
all we slather
onto the world
diving past it
the same way
we survive
our happiness
and also: sorrow.

- Peter Campion

To My Mother

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.

- Wendell Berry

A Hardware Store As Proof of the Existence of God

I praise the brightness of hammers pointing east
like the steel woodpeckers of the future,
and dozens of hinges opening brass wings,
and six new rakes shyly fanning their toes,
and bins of hooks glittering into bees,

and a rack of wrenches like the long bones of horses,
and mailboxes sowing rows of silver chapels,
and a company of plungers waiting for God
to claim their thin legs in their big shoes
and put them on and walk away laughing.

In a world not perfect but not bad either
let there be glue, glaze, gum, and grabs,
caulk also, and hooks, shackles, cables, and slips,
and signs so spare a child may read them,
Men, Women, In, Out, No Parking, Beware the Dog.

In the right hands, they can work wonders.

- Nancy Willard

The Loneliest Job in the World
As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me?,
you are completely screwed, because
the next question is How Much?,

and then it is hundreds of hours later,
and you are still hunched over
your flowcharts and abacus,

trying to decide if you have gotten enough.
This is the loneliest job in the world:
to be an accountant of the heart.

It is late at night. You are by yourself,
and all around you, you can hear
the sounds of people moving

in and out of love,
pushing the turnstiles, putting
their coins in the slots,

paying the price which is asked,
which constantly changes.
No one knows why.

-Tony Hoagland

Ancestors



It was only possible to dismiss them —

Yorkshire yeomen and women

Of London who managed

To meet and marry

And not be thrown into prison

Nor deported -- Cockneys

Of a semi-certain legitimacy

In the hurly of survival there.



The docks of time

Spread an ocean between them

And where I sit, never to be old,

Though I live to a hundred and four

As some of them did.



“Do you understand the strategy of the next pitch?

What the batter’s talent is,

Which out’s left,

Who’s next up?”



The focus of all of that, here, now,

Eliminates the past with

Tension on the future,

And Pee Wee Reese and Oscar Wilde

Are one in oblivion with who’s to come.



I have no ancestors.

And as for descendants,

I have nothing to offer the future

Which they cannot supply themselves.

This writing flows black ink only

Onto the lined paper of my heart.



- Bruce Moody

I know the truth - give up all other truths!

I know the truth - give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look - it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?

The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.

- Marina Tsvetayeva

Inscription for the Door



I have no enemies left,

only some friends who are late.

Come in, hang your coat

beside the fire and pull a chair to its edge.

We shall drink tea and clear the path

leading back to the heart’s first address.

You may have news of these nations beginning

at last to revolve beside each other like seasons

or word of the fires out of control south of us,

where the poor are burning the lies keeping

them poor.

Why are those three ragged strangers still kneeling

Over their ashes, invite them, bring them in,

they can rest here beside this oven of bread.

Children sleep in the corners, taking notes.

A woman is dressing in the room overhead,

her footsteps are tablets I open to sleep.

The new wind is full of branches tonight,

Leaving no holes in the darkness.

Enter. I have no enemies left any more,

0nly some friends who are late.

- Eugene Ruggles