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To Those Who Have Lost Everything
crossed
in despair
many deserts
full of hope
carrying
their empty
fists of sorrow
everywhere
mouthing
a bitter night
of shovels
and nails
“you’re nothing
you’re shit
your home’s
nowhere”—
mountains
will speak
for you
rain
will flesh
your bones
green again
among ashes
after a long fire
started in
a fantasy island
some time ago
turning
Natives
into aliens
- Francisco X. Alarcón
December, 2018
How can it be? so late in the year.
I feel myself spinning
in ever increasing speed
toward the black hole of solstice
like a piece of discarded meat
gets spun
toward the drain and the grind
of the garbage disposal.
Bears retreat to caves.
Makes sense.
Although the waning light
brings every remaining yellow and red leaf
still clinging to the tree
sharply into focus
and heightens yearning
to a fever pitch
which we translate
into frenzied purchases.
All the resolutions of the past year
are now revealed
as fantasy
once again
I haven’t changed.
All the money spent on transforming me
into something else
is noted in the spreadsheet
- a fool’s golden attempts.
So drawn towards sleep
in this waning light
which panics me further
for what nightmares might
arise and become real enough
to reach through the screen
of projected dreams
and kill me.
- Barbara Hirschfeld
Awakened
In advanced age, my health worsening,
I woke up in the middle of the night
and experienced a feeling of happiness
so intense and perfect that in all my life
I had only felt its premonition.
And there was no reason for it.
It didn’t obliterate consciousness;
the past, which I carried, was there,
together with my grief.
And it was suddenly included,
was a necessary part of the whole.
As if a voice were repeating:
“You can stop worrying now;
everything happened just as it had to.
You did what was assigned to you,
and you are not required anymore
to think of what happened long ago.”
The peace I felt was a closing of accounts
and was connected with the thought of death.
The happiness on this side was
like an announcement of the other side.
I realized that this was an undeserved gift
and I could not grasp by what grace
it was bestowed on me.
- Czeslaw Milosz
Happiness
So early it’s still almost dark out.
I’m near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy
has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren’t saying anything,
these boys.
I think if they could,
they would take
each other’s arm.
It’s early in the morning,
and they are
doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale
over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn’t enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly.
And goes beyond, really,
any early morning
talk about it.
- Raymond Carver
Credo
I cannot find my way: there is no star
In all the shrouded heavens anywhere;
And there is not a whisper in the air
Of any living voice but one so far
That I can hear it only as a bar
Of lost, imperial music, played when fair
And angel fingers wove, and unaware,
Dead leaves to garlands where no roses are.
No, there is not a glimmer, nor a call,
For one that welcomes, welcomes when he fears,
The black and awful chaos of the night;
For through it all, -- above, beyond it all, --
I know the far-sent message of the years,
I feel the coming glory of the Light!
- Edwin Arlington Robinson
Solstice Color
The other day I looked into my airtight sealed jar of sugar in which
Little tiny, crystalline, black specks moved in the glacial field of white
The tiniest ants I’d ever seen.
If we saw a photo negative of our heart
Would we see tiny black specks moving about
In the vast divine field of white light?
Black holes where our grief and disappointments and yearnings are
Sucked into a black abyss of silence?
If we could look deep into those black silences would we see
Tiny crystalline specs of white light?
Like the solstice where in the deep, dark winter night
We light candles and wait for the return of light
My neighbors have two black sheep and
Two white sheep with black hoods of fur,
A black bull with white horns and a black cat with a white left leg and paws
And a black and white sheep dog
They roam and eat in a brilliant green field where
Red autumn leaves fall in the blue sky after gray mornings
Their black and white coats amid the grand scheme of color
Makes me wonder if the way through our darkest nights
Is not through the dark, or the light, but
Though the noisy, chaotic cacophony of color that is our life
The red sorrows, the yellow bliss, green yearning, turquoise love
In the duel nature of our lives, the myriad black and white choices
That we face daily are not separated by gray nuances
But filled and connected by brilliant luminescent color
Like baking white sugar and flour and black chocolate chips
Into a sweet delicacy that gives us colorful delight
- Sally Churgel
Noel
When snow is shaken
From the balsam trees
And they’re cut down
And brought into our houses
When clustered sparks
Of many-colored fire
Appear at night
In ordinary windows
We hear and sing
The customary carols
They bring us ragged miracles
And hay and candles
And flowering weeds of poetry
That are loved all the more
Because they are so common
But there are carols
That carry phrases
Of the haunting music
Of the other world
A music wild and dangerous
As a prophet’s message
Or the fresh truth of children
Who though they come to us
From our own bodies
Are altogether new
With their small limbs
And birdlike voices
They look at us
With their clear eyes
And ask the piercing questions
God alone can answer.
- Anne Porter
Where refugees seek deliverance that never comes,
And the heart consumes itself, if it would live,
Where little children age before their time,
And life wears down the edges of the mind,
Where the old man sits with mind grown cold,
While bones and sinew, blood and cell, go slowly down to death,
Where fear companions each day's life,
And Perfect Love seems long delayed,
Christmas is waiting to be born:
In you, in me, in all mankind.
- Howard Thurman
Of Virgin Births
Smile upon your child Mary, Jewish woman of Nazareth. You gave birth to Jesus, remained a
virgin, and rose to be worshiped by his followers. Your son was born at the death of the year. His
coming brought light to the world.
Smile upon your child Coatlicue, earth mother of Mesoamerica, worshiped by the Aztecs. You
gave birth to Huitzilopochtli god of the sun, who brought light to the world, and you remained a
virgin.
Ride Balthasar, ride Melchior, and Gaspar. Follow the star to the manger baring your gifts for
the god-child.
O priest of Huitzilopochtli raise your obsidian knife and bring it down onto the chest of the
sacrificed. Extract his heart with swift skill, that this gift will please and continue to bring the
sun.
And Jesus died a bloody and torturous death that his followers may know life.
Rise over the horizon Huitzilopochtli and bring sun that your followers may grow maize to
sustain themselves. And rise Jesus, rise from the dead, and give of your body and blood that your
followers may sustain themselves.
- Armando García-Dávila.
Another Christmas Story
What if Mary was María
dark skinned and tired
trudging through the desert
pregnant and far from home?
What if Joseph was José
and there was no donkey
but the burden of fear weighed the same?
What if there was no money
for Joseph or José,
and what if the birth pangs grew sharper
for Mary or María?
What if there were no beds
for any of them,
no shelter, no warmth,
only dust and cold stars glittering above?
What if Bethlehem was Texas?
What if the baby was born
in a manger
or a detention center
this Jesus, this Jesús
this child of God?
Would he be revered
or ripped from his mother’s arms,
this Jesus, this Jesús
this child of God?
Wouldn’t the angels rejoice
at this divine spark
born into the world?
Would we?
- Lisa Shulman
The Way It Is
There is a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what things you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
But you don't ever let go of the thread.
- William Stafford
Wow, this one is SO simple, SO succinct.Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
It covers God, Intuition, Buddha-Nature, or whatever one might call it or not call it!
Just don't let go the thread!
:heart:
Stafford is one of my favorites, especially his "Travelling thru the dark".
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by REALnothings:
Blue Heron Walking
Not one of Mr. Balachine’s soloists had feet this articulate,
the long bones explicitly spread, then retracted, even more
finely detailed than Leonardo’s plans for his flying machines.
And all this for a stroll, a secondary function, not the great
dramatic spread and shadow of those pterodactyl wings.
This walking seems determined less by bird volition or
calculations of the small yellow eye than by an accident
of breeze, pushing the bird on a diagonal, the great feet executing
their tendus and lifts in the slowest of increments, hesitation
made exquisitely dimensional, as if the feet thought themselves
through each minute contribution to propulsion, these outsized
apprehenders of grasses and stone, snatchers of mouse and vole,
these mindless magnificents that any time now will trail
their risen bird like useless bits of leather. Don’t show me
your soul, Balanchine used to say, I want to see your foot.
- Julie Bruck
Asking yourself, even the most mundane question, is like throwing the I Ching
The retreat is noisy
I walk downhill
towards the labyrinth and beseech the path
five times:
Tell me how an old man reaches
his authentic self?
Silently the path replies:
Your terrain is rocky.
One plods and plods,
sleeps and then plods some more.
Avoid fallen branches, but be sure
to gaze skyward through the leafless trees
way beyond the moon--
where trickster and saint
embrace in contentious paradox.
- Barry Denny
All the True Vows
All the true vows
are secret vows
the ones we speak out loud
are the ones we break.
There is only one life
you can call your own
and a thousand others
you can call by any name you want.
Hold to the truth you make
every day with your own body,
don't turn your face away.
Hold to your own truth
at the center of the image
you were born with.
Those who do not understand
their destiny will never understand
the friends they have made
nor the work they have chosen
nor the one life that waits
beyond all the others.
By the lake in the wood
in the shadows
you can
whisper that truth
to the quiet reflection
you see in the water.
Whatever you hear from
the water, remember,
it wants you to carry
the sound of its truth on your lips.
Remember,
in this place
no one can hear you
and out of the silence
you can make a promise
it will kill you to break,
that way you'll find
what is real and what is not.
I know what I am saying.
Time almost forsook me
and I looked again.
Seeing my reflection
I broke a promise
and spoke
for the first time
after all these years
in my own voice,
before it was too late
to turn my face again.
- David Whyte
To the New Year
With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning
so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible
- W.S. Merlin
Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen
I.
Many ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
protected from the circle of the moon
That pitches common things about. There stood
Amid the ornamental bronze and stone
An ancient image made of olive wood --
And gone are Phidias' famous ivories
And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.
We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun's rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king
Thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
The guardsmen's drowsy chargers would not prance.
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
He who can read the signs nor sink unmanned
Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant
From shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,
Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent
On master-work of intellect or hand,
No honour leave its mighty monument,
Has but one comfort left: all triumph would
But break upon his ghostly solitude.
But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say? That country round
None dared admit, if Such a thought were his,
Incendiary or bigot could be found
To burn that stump on the Acropolis,
Or break in bits the famous ivories
Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees.
II.
When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers enwound
A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
Or hurried them off on its own furious path;
So the platonic Year
Whirls out new right and wrong,
Whirls in the old instead;
All men are dancers and their tread
Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.
III
Some moralist or mythological poet
Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
I am satisfied with that,
Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
Before that brief gleam of its life be gone,
An image of its state;
The wings half spread for flight,
The breast thrust out in pride
Whether to play, or to ride
Those winds that clamour of approaching night.
A man in his own secret meditation
Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made
In art or politics;
Some Platonist affirms that in the station
Where we should cast off body and trade
The ancient habit sticks,
And that if our works could
But vanish with our breath
That were a lucky death,
For triumph can but mar our solitude.
The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:
That image can bring wildness, bring a rage
To end all things, to end
What my laborious life imagined, even
The half-imagined, the half-written page;
O but we dreamed to mend
Whatever mischief seemed
To afflict mankind, but now
That winds of winter blow
Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.
IV.
We, who seven years ago
Talked of honour and of truth,
Shriek with pleasure if we show
The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth.
V.
Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.
Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.
Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked -- and where are they?
Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.
VI.
Violence upon the roads: violence of horses;
Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded
On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,
But wearied running round and round in their courses
All break and vanish, and evil gathers head:
Herodias' daughters have returned again,
A sudden blast of dusty wind and after
Thunder of feet, tumult of images,
Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;
And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter
All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,
According to the wind, for all are blind.
But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon
There lurches past, his great eyes without thought
Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,
That insolent fiend Robert Artisson
To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought
Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.
- William Butler Yeats
Twenty Hundred and Nineteen
Ah, Yeats, whom we had put away
with the old poems,
your lines carefully marked from
our study long ago
with the indomitable Ms. Elizabeth Drew
at the summer college
on the green Vermont hilltop,
so many lines part of our native tongue.
we scarcely remember it was you
who first told us “the center cannot hold.”
But now, “Nineteen Hundred Nineteen”
is put down before us
and we recognize once again
your prescient genius.
A century ago. To the year.
And now we read with new/old eyes
- Fran Claggett
Chicken Cosmology
Neither the chicken, nor the egg,
(since you asked). What came first was
the essential emptiness, the chickenless void.
Then a beak for pecking, followed by a tongue
for tasting, a gullet for swallowing, eyes for seeing,
legs and wings for fleeing all that is not-chicken,
and an anus to excrete it. Then came the chicken brain
for dividing the world into chicken-friend and chicken-foe.
Then the humans (at once both friend and foe)
came to feed the chickens and tend the coops and collect
the eggs, and wring an occasional chicken neck.
The humans thought that they came first, but the chickens
knew that the humans were after the eggs, which were
before the chickens (which hatched from them). But also
after the chickens (that laid them). Which for humans
is a conundrum. But not for chickens, who never ponder
which came first, because every chicken knows
that she came first, since everything in a chicken’s
universe is herself, not excluding the road, (which,
since you asked) the chicken crosses
to get to her better side.
- Richard Schiffman
Happy New Year
The party's done, the plastic cups used up -
the ones we never know whether to wash or throw away -
thus
ambivalence follows us
into the new year
starting with the cups.
But the feeling of being
together the best nourishment.
Although the food was also good.
My mother's traditional crab mousse
so fifties in flavor
Even the punch
a throwback to simpler days
when 3 kinds of sweet liquids mixed together
did not make us quake
with fear of the consequences.
There are of course big resolutions,
mostly the same
again and again
but the real joy comes
because I am just a bit calmer
a bit better at riding the waves
of my own tumultuous inner oceans
the steady inner core
like a steel rod liquid channel of awareness
quicksilver river of my dreams
is easier to hold onto
an alabaster bannister
in the storm of life.
My teacher brings out the poetry in me
like a doctor
extracts the built up fluids under the skin.
All these words accumulated from years
of picking at the scabs and neglecting
to clean old wounds.
Now they arise as the elixir of life,
the cream that rises to the top,
the honey sequestered in the flower
the scent of sprouted white narcissus on the driveway.
And I respond to welcome the new year with this poem.
- Basha/Barbara Hirschfeld
Basha/Barbara Hirschfeld
Fantasia: Firezone
In the bedroom
we awake
to smokedark
ceiling cracks
and walk
upside down
to the curtains.
In the kitchen
we eat
burned fennel,
smoked ham
and toast.
In the sink
we spy two singed
swans on a raft
of orange sponges
then watch them
fly through open
patio doors
toward a horizon
dulled by ash.
On the deck
we take a toy train
on miniature
bonerail tracks
past trolls incinerated
beneath Lego bridges.
In the driveway
we enter
a blistered bandshell
where a chorus
chants that to
the northeast
an inferno
is 10% contained.
In the garage
we test the
air purifier,
re-inflate
the zeppelin
and stock
firewalking
boots rated
at 500 degrees
Fahrenheit.
In the airship
we head west
to the Pacific
to join
a school of
of fire eels
and swim
toward Japan.
- David Beckman
Affirmation
To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.
- Donald Hall
Wall, that vile wall
"The wall, my wall, he says,
"We are invaded by the poor,
the forsaken, the persecuted,
the children. No matter the cost
we have to protect our border."
Set on his wall nothing is more important to him;
it rises & stretches in his imagination —
crosses deserts, divides plains & mountains,
separates parents from children, cuts
the primordial routes of the deer & the cougar,
ocelot & coyote, jaguar & wolf — his beautiful wall
that not even Joshua's trumpets could bring down.
"My wall, my wall!" he throws a tantrum
& to get it paralyses the government,
sinks the economy, sulks like the foolish brat
he is, obstinate on his wall cost what it may
in money, in blood, in death, in suffering.
The wall, that vile wall.
El muro, mi muro — dice
— nos invaden los pobres.
los desamparados, los perseguidos,
los niños. No importa el costo;
tenemos que proteger nuestra frontera.
Terco en su muro nada le es más importante;
se alza y se alarga en su imaginación —
cruza desiertos, divide llanos y cerros,
separa padres de hijos. Corta
las rutas primordiales del venado y la puma,
ocelote y coyote, lobo y jaguar — su bello muro
que ni las trompetas de Josué puedan derribar.
¡Mi muro, mi muro! hace berrinche
y para conseguirlo paraliza al gobierno,
hunde la economía, se atufa como el mocoso necio
que es, aferrado a su muro cueste lo que cueste
en dinero, en sangre, en muerte, en sufrir.
El muro, ese asqueroso muro.
- Rafael Jesús González
Bravo! Well doneQuote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Bravo!!
Well done.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
On The Cost of Written Language
Once upon a time
we knew the dancers inside water,
could name each one
by her seven names.
We knew the alphabet
of red sea stars, deer tracks
in the mud and the curl of Scorpio
in the August night.
By what magic
did such spirit turn to silence?
what convinced us
to trade ears for eyes,
fluid thoughts
for scratches of ink,
summer voices
for black forests bounded
by rectangular horizons?
What insect has eaten the green leaves,
while the newspaper
spreads its daily silence,
pages falling softy like snow,
with a muffled hiss?
Fascinated we gaze
endlessly into this mirror we’ve made,
reflections struggling for breath
beneath the surface, hiding like coral
inside the calcified skeletons
of our ancestors?
- Arthur Dawson
Those who Call themselves Elder
I dreamt of the gray-haired amongst us
who carry aloft on long dominant arms
huge beams of salient energy – cambers of their lives
congruent and cherished curves
resting on old-world joists
Their arms shone as light refracted
against a hovel of clouds
like aroused hues captured
after a long flight
as the craft descends
piercing amber and unstable air
dancing with lift while holding dew and place
Such light shivers alive
unaccustomed to being disturbed
let alone witnessed in beauty
or in reverence
I dreamt these gray-haired ones
spoke far less often
preoccupied perhaps with
readying themselves
for unfamiliar rituals
Their soft eyes gaze pass the horizon
landing on new light
blurred to the vision
of dragons
or dragonflies
Awake now to their prestige of instinct
awake now to the great unknown
- P. Gregory Guss
Ripening
The longer we are together
the larger death grows around us.
How many we know by now
who are dead! We, who were young,
now count the cost of having been.
And yet as we know the dead
we grow familiar with the world.
We, who were young and loved each other
ignorantly, now come to know
each other in love, married
by what we have done,
as much as by what we intend.
Our hair turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know. It was bitter to learn
that we come to death as we come
to love, bitter to face
the just and solving welcome
that death prepares. But that is bitter
only to the ignorant, who pray
it will not happen. Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of this world!
- Wendell Berry
Sonoma County Winter
Onward through this wonderfully dreary day
Gray clouds, low and wind-driven
speak of things I cannot name.
Rain drips through bare limbs
into the greening earth, and
I am amazed to be cold, wet, and
so vibrantly alive.
Let December know
its cold reach has fallen short.
Inside, inside . . . spring!
- Karl Frederick