Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

It Was A Pretty Big Year


It was a pretty big year for predators.
The marketplace was on a roll.
And the land of opportunity,
Spawned a whole new breed of men without souls.
This year, notoriety got all confused with fame.
And the devil is downhearted,
Because there’s nothing left for him to claim.
He said, “it’s just like home,
“It’s so low-down, I can’t stand it,
“I guess my work around here has all been done.”
And the fruit is rotten,
The serpent’s eyes shine,
As he wraps around the vine.
In the Garden of Allah.


- Don Henley
(“The Garden of Allah” - 1995)

Unwritten Note


The news is on everyone's lips
like flies gathering on excrement:
President Roosevelt has ordered


our removal. Will we be
taken from our homes like vermin?
I know it must be a misunderstanding,


gossip spread in these
harsh times. I choke
on acrid laughter.


It is not possible.
After all, I served
my chosen country in the Army,


in the Great War. So I go to see
my longtime friend and sheriff
of Monterey County.


It is no joke, Hideo. You'll have to go.
He can't look me in the eyes.
When he finds my body hung


in this rented room, with
my certificate of honorary citizenship
expressing honor and respect


for your loyal and splendid
service to the country,
he will understand why


I could not allow
this noble country to tarnish
its honor, or mine.


- Jodi Hottel

On Prayer You ask me how to pray to someone who is not. All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard, Above landscapes the color of ripe gold Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun. That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal Where everything is just the opposite and the word is Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned. Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately, Feels compassion for those tangled in the flesh And knows that if there is no other shore We will walk that aerial bridge all the same. - Czeslaw Milosz (translated by Robert Hass)

This Ecstasy It’s not paradise I’m looking for but the naming I hardly gave a thought to. Call it the gift I carried in my loneliness among the animals before I started listening to the news. Call it the hint I had about the knowledge that would explode. In the meantime, which is real time plus the past, you’re swishing your skirt and speaking French, which is more than I can take, which I marvel at like a boy from the most distant seat in the Kronos Dome, where I am one of so many now I see the point of falling off. There’s not enough seats for us all to attend the eschaton. This ecstasy that plants beauty on my tongue, so that if it were a wing, I’d be flying with the quickness of a hummingbird and grace of a heron, is so much mercy in light of the darkness that comes. Who would say consolation? Who would say dross? Not that anyone would blame them. All night I hear so many echoes in the forest I’m tempted to look back, to save myself in hindsight, where all I see is the absence of me. Where all I hear is your voice, which couldn’t be more strange. How to go on walking hand in hand without our bodies on the path we made for our feet, talking, talking? - Chard deNiord

Of The Empire


We will be known as the culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.


- Mary Oliver

Before The Men's Retreat




She asks: “What is it?”
And I say: “100 men naked in the woods.”
She wrinkles her nose and says: “No clothes?”
And I say: “Sometimes.”
And she says: “What do you do?”
I say: First we removed the coat of corporate soldier, of worker
bee, of boss, of coach, of business owner.
Then we pull off the jacket of marriage.
Toss aside the shoes of parenthood.
The umbrella of son.
The backpack of friend.
The helmet of hero, savior, tough guy.
We pull from our pockets the mantle of lady’s man, lover,
slayer of the weaker sex.
We check in our charm and toss away the pants of romance.
All the roles and expectations we carry about in our
lives, we leave behind like a pile of clothes on the floor.”
She says: “On the floor? That’s what I thought. Then you’re naked?”
Says I: “Not yet. We promise not to engage in physical violence,
then we strip off unnecessary civilization. Toss it in the
pile with all the rest.”
She: “Then you’re naked.”
I: “No. We still hold onto our tattered dysfunctions and
threadbare beliefs like a 10 year old pair of bikini briefs.
That’s the last thing, but we hold fast, because, you know,
those stinking little lies and truths, that stained and
shredded pair of underwear held our life together for 10,
20, 40 years. And only when we can toss that old thing away
are we truly naked”
She blinks and says: “So it’s 100 men in the woods in tattered
underwear.”
I say: “Yes. But over the course of the week, it washes away in
the realm of ritual. Blown away by the breath of spirit.
Cracked open under the scrutiny and support of men. Pried
off by the power of story.”
She stares at me, silent, and then: “Why? ... Why do you do it?”
I say: “So we can see what’s left. That’s us. Naked. We can
hardly recognize ourselves, but that’s who we are. It’s
blinding. Dazzling. Beautiful. Very painful, but very real.
We walk with it. Work with it. Sing songs to honor and
protect it. Wounds are revealed, healed, become our
strength and our shield. Internal lands are explored.
Monsters are banished. And in the end, we bring some
of all this back into life, even as we put our clothes back on.”
She shifts and settles, ponders and pads about the room, then
smiles and says: “Well have a good time then.”


- Greg Kimura

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young


So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb, for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not they hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.


But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.


- Wilfred Owen

The Parable of the Old Men and the Young is a poem by Wilfred Owen which compares the ascent of Abraham to Mount Moriah and his near-sacrifice of Isaac there with the start of World War I. It had first been published by Siegfried Sassoon in 1920 with the title The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, without the last line "And half the seed of Europe, one by one".^[1]

The poem is an allusion to a story in the Bible, Genesis 22:1-18.

In the poem, the biblical patriarch Abraham (significantly called by his former name, Abram, in the poem) takes Isaac—his only begotten son by his wife Sarah—with him to make a sacrificial offering to God. The offering, though Isaac does not know this, is to be Isaac himself. "Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps", which suggests imagery relating to a young soldier being sent, possibly against his will, in a uniform to fight. When he makes to sacrifice his son, an angel calls from heaven, and tells Abram not to harm Isaac. Instead, he must offer the "Ram of Pride". Then follow the last two lines of the poem diverges from the Biblical account, set apart for greater effect: "But the old man would not so, but slew his son, / and half the seed of Europe, one by one."

"The Parable of the Old Man and the Young" is written loosely in iambic pentameter. It does not use traditional rhyme; instead, the lines are bound together by assonance, consonance, and alliteration.

As the title mentions, the poem is a parable. It is generally accepted that the old man, Abram, represents the European nations or more probably their governments. Another less common opinion is that he represents Germany or Kaiser Wilhelm II, whom some would claim started the war. However, Owen does not blame any individual nation or person in any of his other poems, so there is no reason to believe that he does so in this one. Rather, he condemns all those in power who took their countries to war.

According to the poem, the rulers of Europe believed that sacrificing their nations' (Ram of) Pride was too high a price, yet the irony is that the real cost of this Pride was millions of dead—the seed of Europe.

The last two lines are the only ones that rhyme, and the image they paint is chilling: an old man methodically killing the seed of Europe. It is mainly the power of this image, set out in the poem and culminating in the last two lines, that makes it haunting.

The poem is among those set in the War Requiem of Benjamin Britten.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young


So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb, for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not they hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.


But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.


- Wilfred Owen

---

Larry,

I rarely, pretty much never, intrude on this thread of yours. And I prefer that others resist the urge as well (with the proximate exception of Attic who provided very informative information!).

But since I shared your referral of Wilfred Owen's poem on my FB today, and have taught, and hope to teach again, his nonpareil poem, "Dulce et decorum est".

Here it is:

Wilfred Owen


Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.


_____________________________________________________________________

How do we honor fallen Warriors? Stop fighting wars. Especially ones of choice based on lies and selfish interest. Truly defensive wars? That's a more difficult question. Most wars, are not defensive. Especially, but not exclusively, modern American (U.S.) ones. They're aggressive.

https://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html

Point Reyes—wild oats in the wind
for JQ

As if it were the holy spirit
engulfing me,
as if I even knew
the nature of such a thing,
as if I might even be able to tell you
the mystery of a moment that pushed me
to the very edge of . . . of . . . something,
calling loudly without words for me to simply open up—all the way . . .

We stood together in silence,
in the midst of things,
on the headlands, high above the surf,
a dusty trail beneath our feet
crisscrossed from time to time
by slow moving, shinny black beetles,
while stationery, high above our heads
a hawk lay just beneath the cold gray blanket
that covered everything on this tiny slip of land
sliding northward, sliding always northward.
And everywhere it was wind—
the air moved, ruffled clothes and tousled hair,
made soft staccato pops and flutters in our ears
that almost hid from them
an exquisite, near silent song.

Had we not seen the wild oats dancing,
delicately dangling their tiny, hull-covered seeds,
atop straight golden stalks,
that bent down in the wind,
as if to say, namaste, to everything,
lightly touching one another, then,
like bows and strings—
had we not seen them dancing so,
we would have missed their music,
their heavenly music,
the intricacy of which,
the joy of which
went well beyond
what human hand
could make
or these human words
describe.

Oh, the wind and the song of the wild oats!
- Bill Denham

WAVING GOOD-BYE

A new suitcase in one hand,
car keys in the other and finally
off to college for the first time.

Looking back past the walnut tree
a last glance at the old house
his family still waving good-bye
good-bye from behind
the screened-in porch.

Shifting gears on Main Street,
thinking of things left behind
his old room and a medal from track
closet full of memories and old clothes
all still too good
to give away.

Homecoming for the thanksgiving feast
stunned at the bareness of his room
just one change of socks and underwear remaining
in the top right drawer of the otherwise
empty chest.

Staring down the hallway at Christmas,
past the presents and the lighted tree
he saw his room was gone.
the doorway and the door...
across from his little brother's room.

At spring break under the walnut tree
staring again at the screened-in porch
he was certain
the house was gone.

Trying one last time in June
the porch was gone
the tree was gone
Main Street no where
to be found.

Driving away past his disappearing high school
he wondered was there a medal?
Had he ever had a brother?

Clutching the wheel in front
he knew he'd better hurry
his road disappearing,
his town disappearing, and
was that his life
slowly waving good-bye
good-bye
in his rear view mirror?

- Doug von Koss

Healing From Cancer She lay still in the broken water of her tenderness. In every way the Cloud of Unknowing swept about her. With all due haste, waves of wholeness broke over her, blue and softly, Organ notes of roses papering surfaces all around her. Leaves whispered her name. With no fear and all trembling, she fell deep into wellness Coming finally back into her own life polished and fine Much as a babe enters into the bright world blinking from her cave of sustenance. - Kalia Mussetter

Salt

I thought of kneeling. I thought of cold
monastery stone and the red velvet cushions
at the communion rail -- a reverence
history could not contain.

What is history? -- the bones of a dead mouse.
His scarred face was the first mystery. Six
veils to reach the dark pulse of his arm --
Salome dancing for John the Baptist’s head.

I have found God in the least likely places --
the dog sleeping beside my chair
is inhabited by God. I could go into the street
and tell everyone God sleeps in my house

in the body of a dog! Who would believe me?
You have your own moments.
I too have lain in the night
beside my lover and heard God breathing.

Intention was the second mystery.
When my father died
his skin was like Michelangelo’s marble,
his veins the hidden rivers that sustained him

through five children, two wives, deaths, wars
even prison. Under the skin
where the blue vein pulsed, I saw
my grandmother’s heart flutter.

I leaned toward the pale gate
of the scarred stranger’s elbow, my tongue
reverent to the taste of salt.
The impulse to worship is always there.

It is the diamond in the water, the deer
last night, dreamily over the fence in the fog
for the shimmering lick in the field.

- Elizabeth Herron

A Scientist's Acrostic

Scientists are like beetles
Crawling over the earth, antennae twitching,
In tune with the mysteries
Einstein whispered under a star-polished
Night sky. He chose the celestial playground by
Convention-even logic, as beetles know, can be
Enhanced by beauty.

Illumination dawns after years of
Scratching through dark leaves, dirt.

Lying on one's back, legs flailing,
Is temporary, and not, as some imagine
Fundamental failure or
Even such a bad thing.


- Jennifer Gresham

Nice one, Larry (and Ms. Gresham)! For those who don't know what an acrostic is, it means a message "hidden" in a poem (or other writing) such that you read it by reading DOWN the page rather than across. So in the poem above, reading down the first letter of each line says "SCIENCE IS LIFE". Acrostics are fun, and I recommend that those of you who enjoy such things try writing some, but it's difficult to write a good one, especially a poem containing two (or, heathen forbid, even more) acrostics, and more especially if you're making the lines rhyme too. I wrote a double-acrostic sonnet once for the Wergle Flomp poetry contest (a fun contest which gives cash prizes for the poems deemed most wonderfully bad!). My entry was about "vanity" poetry websites--sites that tell everyone their crappy poem is wonderful as a way to get them to buy collections of that crappy poetry and other stuff. My poem contains two acrostics ridiculing the vanity sites. These hidden messages are in the first letter and fourth letter of each line:

Sonnet with Two Acrostics

What drek is this? Who published it, and why?
Hath not the editor performed his task?
And is this not some kind of scam, I ask,
This poet’s purse to open with a lie?

Raise glasses for a toast, or to your eyes,
And imitate the doggerel you’ve heard.
Now there’s another literary turd.
Knee-deep in excrement, we seek a prize.

Diss not the hack the windmills of whose mind,
Rent thus asunder, quest yet for the Muse,
In simple rhymes like Eminem might use,
Vain verses which, like rotten grain, they grind.
Ere kaching! go registers of cash,
Let’s see this website print and sell this trash!

-- Dixon Wragg

That post was enjoyeD
How much...lots, say I
And throw into the miX
No shortage of wry.. humor, and O
Know you’re read daily, maN
So Dixon, dear poet, write on, wragg on!

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Dixon:

Nice one, Larry (and Ms. Gresham)! For those who don't know what an acrostic is, it means a message "hidden" in a poem (or other writing) such that you read it by reading DOWN the page rather than across. So in the poem above, reading down the first letter of each line says "SCIENCE IS LIFE". Acrostics are fun, and I recommend that those of you who enjoy such things try writing some, but it's difficult to write a good one, especially a poem containing two (or, heathen forbid, even more) acrostics, and more especially if you're making the lines rhyme too. I wrote a double-acrostic sonnet once for the Wergle Flomp poetry contest (a fun contest which gives cash prizes for the poems deemed most wonderfully bad!). My entry was about "vanity" poetry websites--sites that tell everyone their crappy poem is wonderful as a way to get them to buy collections of that crappy poetry and other stuff. My poem contains two acrostics ridiculing the vanity sites. These hidden messages are in the first letter and fourth letter of each line:

Sonnet with Two Acrostics

What drek is this? Who published it, and why?
Hath not the editor performed his task?
And is this not some kind of scam, I ask,
This poet’s purse to open with a lie?

Raise glasses for a toast, or to your eyes,
And imitate the doggerel you’ve heard.
Now there’s another literary turd.
Knee-deep in excrement, we seek a prize.

Diss not the hack the windmills of whose mind,
Rent thus asunder, quest yet for the Muse,
In simple rhymes like Eminem might use,
Vain verses which, like rotten grain, they grind.
Ere kaching! go registers of cash,
Let’s see this website print and sell this trash!

-- Dixon Wragg

---

Very nice indeed, Christine--but I might be biased ;^D

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by [email protected]:

That post was enjoyeD
How much...lots, say I
And throw into the miX
No shortage of wry.. humor, and O
Know you’re read daily, maN
So Dixon, dear poet, write on, wragg on!

---

Greed


Hope is the deaf man who has often heard of our dying,
but hasn't heard of his own death or contemplated his own end.

The blind man is Greed: he sees the faults of others,
hair by hair, and broadcasts them from street to street,


but of his own faults his blind eyes perceive nothing.
The naked man fears his cloak will be pulled off,


but how could anyone take the cloak of one who is naked?
The worldly man is destitute and terrified:


he possesses nothing, yet he dreads thieves.
When death comes, everyone around him is lamenting,


while his own spirit begins to laugh at his fear.
At that moment the rich man knows he has no gold,
and the keen-witted man sees that talent does not belong to him.


- Jellaludin Rumi


~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


Kar Amal-râ dân keh marg-e mâ shenid
marg-e khvod na-shenid va naql-e khvod na-did
Hers nâ-biyânast binad mu be-mu
`ayb-e khalqân va be-guyad ku be-ku
`Ayb-e khvod yek zarreh cheshm-e kur-e u
mi na-binad garcheh hast u `ayb ju
`Ur mi tarsad keh dâmânesh be-ranad
dâman-e mard-e barahneh kay darand
Mard-e donyâ mofles ast va tars-nâk
hich u-râ nist az dozdânesh bâk
Vaqt-e margesh keh bovad sad nawheh pish
khandeh âyad jânesh-râ zin tars-e khvish
n zamân dânad ghani kesh nist zar
ham zaki dânad keh bod u bi honar


-- Mathnawi III:2628-2635
Version by Camille and Kabir Helminski
"Rumi: Jewels of Remembrance"
Threshold Books, 1996
(Persian transliteration courtesy of Yahyá Monastra)

Falcon Moon



From the glow of dawn a moon appeared
It swept from the sky—speared me with its eyes

With me in its talons, to the sky it soared--
Like a hawk which snatches a songbird by force

I glanced at myself--no me to be seen
The moon of mercy pared my body to a soul

Formless I flew, just seeing the moon--
The moon, and the world lit in its gleam

In the soul I traveled, with the moon as my beacon
Lay bare the secret of the time before time

Sky, and then sky, all merged with the moon
The raft that is me was drowned in the sea

Without the force of that Sunburst of Shams
Neither the moon nor the sea can be seen.


- Jelalludin Rumi
Ghazal 19
(Translation by Shantanu Phukan)






Falcon Moon

Dar Charkh-e sahargah yaki mah ayan shud
Vaz charkh bazer amad o bar ma nigran shud

Chun baz ke birbayad murghi ba-gahe said
Birbud mara an mah o bar charkh ravan shud

Dar khud chun nazar kardam, khud ra banadidam
Zeera ke dar an mah tanamaz lutf chun jan shud

Dar jan chun safar kardam juz mah nadidam
Ta sirr-e tajalliye azal jumle bayan shud

Na charkh-e falakjumle dar an mah firo shud
Kashtiyye vujudam hame dar bahr-e nihan shud

An bahr bazad mauj o khirad baz bar amad
V-avaz dar afgand, chunin gasht o chunan shud

An bahr kafi kard ba har pareh az an kaf
Naqshi zi falan amad o jismi zi fulan shud

Be daulate makhdumiye shams al haqi tabrez
Nai mah tavan didan, o nai bahr tavan shud

Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and
barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green
and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to
awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high
hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would
take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.


- Dylan Thomas

Ice Cream Truck Mystery


Every summer night, although the fog turns
evenings cool in Northern California,
one dilapidated ice cream truck,
pink as the strawberry
in a block of Neapolitan,
putts down my street.

Its driver is an old man in a turban,
quite serene,
whom I make out to be a Sikh.
Its tune the traditional:
“Turkey in the Straw,”
always of mysterious relevance to ice cream,
which repeats on a calliope
with a monotony like migraine.

I have never known a soul to buy his goods:
not parent, child, the adolescent boys
out shooting baskets in the neighbor’s driveway
nor the girls next door
pretending not to watch the boys.

And so I’d like to think
this is the ice cream truck of evening prayer:
his one last daily meditation on
the Omnipresent in all neighborhoods.
He practices compassion and good will
in the face of apathy and bad music,
careful of the children,
circumventing potholes,
ego, anger, lust, attachment, greed.

As stars come out
in the branches of the bo trees,
alone as Jesus,
riding in his pink mystery,
this one man’s caravan drives by,
recalling the Unknowable
for all of us.

- Laurie Kirkpatrick

Feathered Alignment


When gun point ideologies
breathe their final blood stained sigh
and the glare of mourning the broken world
fades to a darkling pink
the way white petals sometimes do

When greed has crushed the last bed of ferns
held in feathered alignment
by only a faintly wind in the once was forest
will you remember then to love the child
whose no machine and inborn tongue
could lead us home?


- Cynthia Poten

I Have News for You




There are people who do not see a broken playground swing
as a symbol of ruined childhood


and there are people who don't interpret the behavior
of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process.


There are people who don't walk past an empty swimming pool
and think about past pleasures unrecoverable


and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians.
I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings


do not send their sinuous feeder roots
deep into the potting soil of others' emotional lives


as if they were greedy six-year-olds
sucking the last half-inch of milkshake up through a noisy straw;


and other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without
debating the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality.


Do you see that creamy, lemon-yellow moon?
There are some people, unlike me and you,


who do not yearn after fame or love or quantities of money as
unattainable as that moon;
thus, they do not later
have to waste more time
defaming the object of their former ardor.


Or consequently run and crucify themselves
in some solitary midnight Starbucks Golgotha.


I have news for you-
there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room


and open a window to let the sweet breeze in
and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.


- Tony Hoagland

Ode to the Oat


Ah, most noble oat,
How grand a grain you are!
The stuff of brawn and bone,
of Scottish Highlander.


Your golden seeds
are pummeled flat,
and soaked and cooked as meal.
Stick to the ribs
(and pots and bowls) . . .
Endurance is so real!


The rosy glow
of children's cheeks
Betrays the breakfast grain.
A good day's start
will last two weeks
before they eat again.


- Karl Frederick

Constant


We live for constants,
Rain in winter, the cat
Curled like a furry comma
On the edge of the bed.


Sometimes, many times
These don’t come, instead
There is drought, the father dies,
The mother grows old.


The constant is this:
The mind insists, persists in the insane
Circle of creation from chaos.
Make order of mystery.


“Listen to me,” it shouts.
So we listen.
Constant chatter, constant need
Growing like a curse.


The constant is this:
Life is chaos, disintegration, blooming
Anew into order and collapsing
Again to blossom into something more perfect,
Then chaos, disintegration and on.


We watch helplessly, entranced
Like the magician’s audience,
The hypnotist’s mark.


Nothing to do but join hands,
Bow heads, say blessings
To the capricious, wild
original god.


- Rebecca del Rio

A Blessing for a Wedding
Today when persimmons ripen
Today when fox-kits come out of their den into snow
Today when the spotted egg releases its wren song
Today when the maple sets down its red leaves
Today when windows keep their promise to open
Today when fire keeps its promise to warm
Today when someone you love has died
or someone you never met has died
Today when someone you love has been born
or someone you will not meet has been born
Today when rain leaps to the waiting of roots in their dryness
Today when starlight bends to the roofs of the hungry and tired
Today when someone sits long inside his last sorrow
Today when someone steps into the heat of her first embrace
Today, let this light bless you
With these friends let it bless you
With snow-scent and lavender bless you
Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly
Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears
Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes
Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you
Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days
- Jane Hirshfield

Honey At The Table

It fills you with the soft
essence of vanished flowers, it becomes
a trickle soft as a hair that you follow
from the honey pot over the table


and out the door and over the ground,
and all the while it thickens,


grows deeper and wilder, edged
with pine boughs and wet boulders,
pawprints of bobcat and bear, until


deep in the forest you
shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark,


you float into and swallow the dripping combs,
bits of the tree, crushed bees — a taste
composed of everything lost, in which everything
lost is found.


- Mary Oliver

I will be traveling until mid-July so this will be the last poem I post until I return. May you all stay safe and at ease.
Larry


Start Close In

Start close in,
don't take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step you don't want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people's questions,
don't let them
smother something
simple.

To find
another's voice
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes a
private ear
listening
to another.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don't follow
someone else's
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don't mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don't take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step you don't want to take.



- David Whyte

On behalf of myself and the many Waccos who are nourished and inspired by the poems you share with us daily, thank you, Larry, thank you! :waccosun:

May your travels be full of wonder!

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

I will be traveling until mid-July so this will be the last poem I post until I return. May you all stay safe and at ease.
Larry

---

The Return


Some day, if you are lucky,
you'll return from a thunderous journey
trailing snake scales, wing fragments
and the musk of Earth and moon.


Eyes will examine you for signs
of damage, or change
and you, too, will wonder
if your skin shows traces


of fur, or leaves,
if thrushes have built a nest
of your hair, if Andromeda
burns from your eyes.


Do not be surprised by prickly questions
from those who barely inhabit
their own fleeting lives, who barely taste
their own possibility, who barely dream.


If your hands are empty, treasureless,
if your toes have not grown claws,
if your obedient voice has not
become a wild cry, a howl,


you will reassure them. We warned you,
they might declare, there is nothing else,
no point, no meaning, no mystery at all,
just this frantic waiting to die.


And yet, they tremble, mute,
afraid you've returned without sweet
elixir for unspeakable thirst, without
a fluent dance or holy language
to teach them, without a compass
bearing to a forgotten border where
no one crosses without weeping
for the terrible beauty of galaxies


and granite and bone. They tremble,
hoping your lips hold a secret,
that the song your body now sings
will redeem them, yet they fear


your secret is dangerous, shattering,
and once it flies from your astonished
mouth, they-like you-must disintegrate
before unfolding tremulous wings.


- Geneen Marie Haugen

Welcome back, Larry! No prickly questions here! Just gratitude! :waccosun:

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Return

Some day, if you are lucky,
you'll return from a thunderous journey..

---

Soul And The Old Woman

What is the soul? Consciousness. The more awareness,
the deeper the soul, and when

such essence overflows, you feel a sacredness around. It’s
so simple to tell one who

puts on a robe and pretends to be a dervish from
the real thing. We know the taste

of pure water. Words can sound like a poem but not have
any juice, no flavor to

relish. How long do you look at pictures on a latrine
wall? Soul is what draws

you away from those pictures to talk with the old woman
who sits outside by the door

in the sun. She’s half blind, but she has what soul loves
to flow into. She’s kind, she weeps.

She makes quick personal decisions and laughs so easily.


- Jellaludin Rumi
( translated by Coleman Barks)

Bouganvillea


I like the inner lives of the silverware; the fork,
the spoon, the knife. I appreciate
how they each have a different reference toward
god, how the fork is Muslim,
the spoon, like a stone, is Buddhist, how the knife
is Roman Catholic—
always worried, always having
a hard time forgiving people, the knife kneeling
down in Ireland and Africa. In San Francisco
my lamp has become a temple.
Every time I turn it on the light moves out across
the room like a meditation,
like a bell or a robe
the way it covers everything and doesn’t want to
kill. Light is the husband
and everything it touches is its bride, the floor,
the wall, my body,
the bronze installation in Hayes Valley
its bride. The lamp chants
and my clothes, my hat thrown in the corner of the room
chants back: nothing, nothing. In my next life
I’ll have no fingers, no toes. In my next life I’ll be
a bougainvillea. A Buddhist monk
will wake up early on Sunday morning and not be a fork
and not be a knife, he will look down at the girl
sleeping in his bed like a body of water,
he will think about how
he lifted her up like a spoon to his mouth all night, and walk
into the courtyard and pick up the shears
and cut a little part of me, and lie me down next to her mouth
which is breathing heavily and changing all the dark in the room to light.


- Matthew Dickman

Sligo Glen: Walking Out Of Silence


And then, after,
when you'd turned back
by the way you came,
back toward
the mouth of the Glen
you'd entered
noisiliy just an hour before,
calling to the others
and you reached again,
but this time alone
the invisible line
where
you could mark exactly
when you began to hear
the sounds of the road
and the machines and the blank
cries of everyday commerce,
so that for a moment you could
retrace that one single step
back into the Glen
and immerse yourself
instantly
in the quiet
source of revelation
you had felt
only a moment before,


as if under water,
as if slipping back
into the river
of silence running between
the tree lined walls
and then you could practice
leaving and
returning in your own body,
through your own breath,
inward and outward,
descending and
entering and reentering the silence
and shelter of your own
narrow valley of aloneness,
from interiority
to conversation
and back.


So that you suddenly realized
you were given
the complete and utter gift
of your own transparency,


the revelation of your
own ex act boundary with
the world.


The frontier
between silence and speech
exactly
the line you must cross
to give yourself
while saving yourself,


the gleam in your heart
and your eye,
another sun rising,
the old memories alive
after a long night of absence
and the world again
suddenly worth
risking,
worth seeing,
worth innocence,
worth everything.


- David Whyte

God, I love poetry.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Sligo Glen: Walking Out Of Silence


And then, after,
when you'd turned back
by the way you came,
back toward
the mouth of the Glen
you'd entered
noisiliy just an hour before,
calling to the others
and you reached again,
but this time alone
the invisible line
where
you could mark exactly
when you began to hear
the sounds of the road
and the machines and the blank
cries of everyday commerce,
so that for a moment you could
retrace that one single step
back into the Glen
and immerse yourself
instantly
in the quiet
source of revelation
you had felt
only a moment before,


as if under water,
as if slipping back
into the river
of silence running between
the tree lined walls
and then you could practice
leaving and
returning in your own body,
through your own breath,
inward and outward,
descending and
entering and reentering the silence
and shelter of your own
narrow valley of aloneness,
from interiority
to conversation
and back.


So that you suddenly realized
you were given
the complete and utter gift
of your own transparency,


the revelation of your
own ex act boundary with
the world.


The frontier
between silence and speech
exactly
the line you must cross
to give yourself
while saving yourself,


the gleam in your heart
and your eye,
another sun rising,
the old memories alive
after a long night of absence
and the world again
suddenly worth
risking,
worth seeing,
worth innocence,
worth everything.


- David Whyte

---

Losing Steps


1
It's probably a Sunday morning
in a pickup game, and it's clear
you've begun to leave
fewer people behind.


Your fakes are as good as ever,
but when you move
you're like the Southern Pacific
the first time a car kept up with it,


your opponent at your hip,
with you all the way
to the rim. Five years earlier
he'd have been part of the air


that stayed behind you
in your ascendance.
On the sidelines they're saying,
He's lost a step.


2
In a few more years
it's adult night in a gymnasium
streaked with the abrupt scuff marks
of high schoolers, and another step


leaves you like a wire
burned out in a radio.
You're playing defense,
someone jukes right, goes left,


and you're not fooled
but he's past you anyway,
dust in your eyes,
a few more points against you.


3
Suddenly you're fifty;
if you know anything about steps
you're playing chess
with an old, complicated friend.


But you're walking to a schoolyard
where kids are playing full-court,
telling yourself
the value of experience, a worn down


basketball under your arm,
your legs hanging from your waist
like misplaced sloths in a county
known for its cheetahs and its sunsets.


- Stephen Dunn

I have a feeling that wisdom only comes with a decline in power.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Losing Steps


1
It's probably a Sunday morning...

---

Become Part Of The Truth

When school and mosque and minaret
get torn down, then dervishes
can begin their community.


Not until faithfulness turns into betrayal
and betrayal into trust
can any human being
become part of the truth.


Not until a person dissolves,
can he or she know
what union is.


There is a descent into emptiness.
A lie will not change
the truth with just
talking about it.


While you are still yourself,
you're blind to both worlds.


That ego-drunkenness
will not let you see.
Only when you are cleansed of both,
will you cut the deep roots
of fear and anger.


- Jellaluddin Rumi (Translated by Coleman Barks from The Soul of Rumi)

Stand firmly, sit serenely, mutter profoundly, sing outrageously and dance all the way to your death.


- James Broughton

STUBBORN DONKEY


Silence is a stubborn donkey
whose master turns toward
home again and again
and the ass has his own
destination that even his
god doesn't know.


Do not try to tame the donkey
or the silence
or the master...
turn towards home
and bow to what god
arrives at the well.


- Lizbeth Hamlin

Hands


I should hate to lose them in a freakish accident.
They have brought me much covert pleasure.
Like shell-less crabs;
they have leased their homes, rested as itinerant workers,
travelling between finger grasps.
They have been my living.


Leonardo da Vinci was fascinated by hands.
He understood that if you could draw them,
you could shape cathedrals from water.
You could see the inner workings
of a hidden language.


I turn them over, as I would
a page of scripture, eager for more light.
Every pound of flesh takes the strain,
works cantilevers, pulls ropes
just to open them above gravity.


I half expect to see,
engraved on the skin of my palms, little faces,
old lovers, a long dead dog, Da Vinci
smiling between a wrinkled Mona Lisa.
Goya working alone in the uncertain darkness
of a broken life.


Yesterday I spiced ground pork.
As the meat caressed my fingers,
my hands felt like two nursing sows.
Fingers know their mother.
They know that to pray with greasy hands
and an appetite, is a perfect redemption


At times, I want to clean them
like seabirds caught in an oil slick.
Then I remember,
they still miss all my fumbled catches.
They wash me every day, as I wash them.


- Eric Ashford

The English Are So Nice!
The English are so nice
so awfully nice
they are the nicest people in the world.
And what’s more, they’re very nice about being nice
about your being nice as well!
If you’re not nice they soon make you feel it.
Americans and French and Germans and so on
they’re all very well
but they’re not really nice, you know.
They’re not nice in our sense of the word, are they now?
That’s why one doesn’t have to take them seriously.
We must be nice to them, of course,
of course, naturally—
But it doesn’t really matter what you say to them,
they don’t really understand—
you can just say anything to them:
be nice, you know, just be nice
but you must never take them seriously, they wouldn’t understand.
Just be nice, you know! oh, fairly nice,
not too nice of course, they take advantage—
but nice enough, just nice enough
to let them feel they’re not quite as nice as they might be.


- D.H. Lawrence

Luminism



And though it was brief, and slight, and nothing
To have been held on to so long, I remember it,
As if it had come firm within, one of the scenes
The mind sees for itself, night after night, only
To part from quickly and without warning. Sunlight
Flooded the valley floor and blazed on the town’s
Westward facing windows. The streets shimmered like rivers,
And trees, bushes, and clouds were caught in the spill,
And nothing was spared, not the couch we sat on
Not the rugs, nor our friends, staring off into space.
Everything drowned in the golden fire. Then Philip
Put down his glass and said: “This hand is just one
In an infinite series of hands. Imagine.”
And that was it. The evening dimmed and darkened
Until the western rim of the sky took on
The purple look of a bruise, and everyone stood
And said what a great sunset it had been.This was a while ago,
And it was remarkable, but something else happened then--
A cry, almost beyond our hearing, rose and rose,
As if across time, to touch us as nothing else would,
And so lightly, we might live out our lives and not know.
I had no idea what it meant until now.


- Mark Strand

Because Even The Word Obstacle Is An Obstacle


Try to love everything that gets in your way;
The Chinese women in flowered bathing caps
murmuring together in Mandarin and doing leg exercises in your lane
while you execute thirty-six furious laps,
one for every item on your to-do list.
The heavy-bellied man who goes thrashing through the water
like a horse with a harpoon stuck in its side and
whose breathless tsunamis rock you from your course.
Teachers all. Learn to be small
and swim past obstacles like a minnow,
without grudges or memory. Dart
toward your goal, sperm to egg. Thinking, Obstacle,
is another obstacle. Try to love the teenage girl
lounging against the ladder, showing off her new tattoo:
Cette vie est la mienne, This life is mine,
in thick blue-black letters on her ivory instep.
Be glad she'll have that to look at the rest of her life, and
keep going. Swim by an uncle
in the lane next to yours who is teaching his nephew
how to hold his breath underwater,
even though kids aren't supposed
to be in the pool at this hour. Someday,
years from now, this boy
who is kicking and flailing in the exact place
you want to touch and turn
may be a young man at a wedding on a boat,
raising his champagne glass in a toast
when a huge wave hits, washing everyone overboard.
He'll come up coughing and spitting like he is now,
but he'll come up like a cork,
alive. So your moment
of impatience must bow in service to the larger story,
because if something is in your way, it is
going your way, the way
of all beings: toward darkness, toward light.


- Allison Luterman

Water Shed


The green expanse of duck weed
Parts and there he sits,
Proud - or so I imagine -
In all his feathered irridescence,
Shedding water with neither thought nor effort.


The late Spring rains
Fall on Sonoma Mountain and English Hill,
Dancing down the Laguna and Atascadero Creek.
So Wintergreen becomes Summergold.


But where are salmon, the steelhead,
The pronghorn and the grizzly?


There is so much for us to grieve now,
So much lost that we will never see again.
And yet so much still arising
That we have only begun to dream.


Can we shed despair
As we shed our tears
And see with clearer eyes
The shining form now emerging?


- Larry Robinson

Lead

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
- Mary Oliver

Hi Larry,
a poem from my book is similar to yours:

Home

Grief casts a shadow
on the worn linoleum floor,
but there’s sunshine all around
and yellow daffodils in my yard.
A vision emerges from fecund compost
of decaying dreams,
amidst a graveyard with memory tombstones
that mark the dead.
New growth rises from the ashes
of failed pursuits.
This dream is finer and truer than the rest,
and brings a fullness of content
that radiates comfort head to sole.
A lifetime of seeking for my place
has revealed
that home is living in my truth.
May you always feel the bliss
of knowing you are home.

©2004, Star Kissed Shadows, Sher Lianne Christian

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Water Shed


The green expanse of duck weed
Parts and there he sits,
Proud - or so I imagine -
In all his feathered irridescence,
Shedding water with neither thought nor effort.


The late Spring rains
Fall on Sonoma Mountain and English Hill,
Dancing down the Laguna and Atascadero Creek.
So Wintergreen becomes Summergold.


But where are salmon, the steelhead,
The pronghorn and the grizzly?


There is so much for us to grieve now,
So much lost that we will never see again.
And yet so much still arising
That we have only begun to dream.


Can we shed despair
As we shed our tears
And see with clearer eyes
The shining form now emerging?


- Larry Robinson

---

Forget
Forget the suffering
You caused others.
Forget the suffering
Others caused you.
The waters run and run,
Springs sparkle and are done,
You walk the earth you are forgetting.

Sometimes you hear a distant refrain.
What does it mean, you ask, who is singing?
A childlike sun grows warm.
A grandson and a great-grandson are born.
You are led by the hand once again.

The names of the rivers remain with you.
How endless those rivers seem!
Your fields lie fallow,
The city towers are not as they were.
You stand at the threshold mute.
- Czeslaw Milosz
(translation by Robert Hass)

Invisible Work


Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don't mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, "It's hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,
and there's no one
to say what a good job you're doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache."
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.


There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world's heart.
There is no other art.


- Alison Luterman

The Argonaut

I am old and have not prospered.
I possess only my thoughts. I have accumulated only
memories.
And I am mad. Insane.
It is my solace.
One cannot fail at madness.
It is my truth.
It is my freedom.
To whom does a mad man make account?
I am not judged for the quality of my madness.
Like the retarded. I am left alone. To explore.
To discover.
This is the new frontier.
I am the argonaut.


- Richard Manley

In the Beginning

Sometimes simplicity rises
like a blossom of fire
from the white silk of your own skin.
You were there in the beginning
you heard the story, you heard the merciless
and tender words telling you where you had to go.
Exile is never easy and the journey
itself leaves a bitter taste. But then,
when you heard that voice, you had to go.
You couldn't sit by the fire, you couldn't live
so close to the live flame of that compassion
you had to go out in the world and make it your own
so you could come back with
that flame in your voice, saying listen...
this warmth, this unbearable light, this fearful love...
It is all here, it is all here.


- David Whyte

Fear No More
Fear no more the heat o' the sun;
Nor the furious winter's rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney sweepers come to dust.


Fear no more the frown of the great,
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke:
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.


Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dread thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan;
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.


No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renowned be thy grave!


- William Shakespeare

Winged Energy of Delight


As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.

To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions ... For the god
wants to know himself in you.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
(translated by Steven Mitchell)

Courage

It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

- Anne Sexton

What If This Road

What if this road, that has held no surprises
these many years, decided not to go
home after all; what if it could turn
left or right with no more ado
than a kite-tail? What if its tarry skin
were like a long, supple bolt of cloth,
that is shaken and rolled out, and takes
a new shape from the contours beneath?
And if it chose to lay itself down
in a new way; around a blind corner,
across hills you must climb without knowing
what's on the other side; who would not hanker
to be going, at all risks? Who wants to know
a story's end, or where a road will go?

- Sheenagh Pugh

Sirens?


What exactly did the Sirens sing?
"Hello boys! Come on back!"?
We're told it would have meant
Crashing the ship offshore?


But, is this true?
What would the Sirens say?
"They made so many promises,
So tied to the mast."?


Were they expressing
Their hearts' desires?
Unimaginable sound?
A chorus of ocean?


Probably....
But, the ship sailed past....


And everyone loved the sun.
So warm. So dry....
Almost time
To go back underwater?


- Jon Jackson

The Light Beneath Sleep
Sometimes, underneath deep sleep
is a certain diffused glow,
as, in the rainforest, luminous toadstools
glow green among the leaf litter
and beetles crawl about with winking abdomens.
One night when I followed this glow
I came to an upturned tree
that was a kind of cathedral for glowworms
and the light beat against my face, my chest and my hands.
At the end of the corridor of sleep, a dream stands.
It may be that at the end of the corridor of death
there is the walking slightly uphill
through the green fields;
and then the light underneath sleep
is both in front and behind.
- John Tarrant

I will be traveling until August 20 and unable to post the daily poems. I hope that you are all happy, safe and well in the meantime. Many blessings,
Larry




What's In The Temple?


In the quiet spaces of my mind a thought lies still, but ready to spring.
It begs me to open the door so it can walk about.
The poets speak in obscure terms pointing madly at the unsayable.
The sages say nothing, but walk ahead patting their thigh calling for us to follow.
The monk sits pen in hand poised to explain the cloud of unknowing.
The seeker seeks, just around the corner from the truth.
If she stands still it will catch up with her.
Pause with us here a while.
Put your ear to the wall of your heart.
Listen for the whisper of knowing there.
Love will touch you if you are very still.


If I say the word God, people run away.
They've been frightened--sat on 'till the spirit cried "uncle."
Now they play hide and seek with somebody they can't name.
They know he's out there looking for them, and they want to be found,
But there is all this stuff in the way.


I can't talk about God and make any sense,
And I can't not talk about God and make any sense.
So we talk about the weather, and we are talking about God.


I miss the old temples where you could hang out with God.
Still, we have pet pounds where you can feel love draped in warm fur,
And sense the whole tragedy of life and death.
You see there the consequences of carelessness,
And you feel there the yapping urgency of life that wants to be lived.
The only things lacking are the frankincense and myrrh.


We don't build many temples anymore.
Maybe we learned that the sacred can't be contained.
Or maybe it can't be sustained inside a building.
Buildings crumble.
It's the spirit that lives on.


If you had a temple in the secret spaces of your heart,
What would you worship there?
What would you bring to sacrifice?
What would be behind the curtain in the holy of holies?


Go there now.


- Tom Barrett

The Day is Done

The day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of Night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in his flight.

I see the lights of the village
Gleam through the rain and the mist,
And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me
That my soul cannot resist:

A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain.

Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and heartfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
And banish the thoughts of day.

Not from the grand old masters,
Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time.

For, like strains of martial music,
Their mighty thoughts suggest
Life's endless toil and endeavor;
And to-night I long for rest.

Read from some humbler poet,
Whose songs gushed from his heart,
As showers from the clouds of summer,
Or tears from the eyelids start;

Who, through long days of labor,
And nights devoid of ease,
Still heard in his soul the music
Of wonderful melodies.

Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,
And come like the benediction
That follows after prayer.

Then read from the treasured volume
The poem of thy choice,
And lend to the rhyme of the poet
The beauty of thy voice.

And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares, that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.


- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Astonishment


Oarlocks knock in the dusk, a rowboat rises
and settles, surges and slides.
Under a great eucalyptus,
a boy and a girl feel around with their feet
for those small flattish stones so perfect
for scudding across the water.


A dog barks from deep in the silence.
A woodpecker, double-knocking,
keeps time. I have slept in so many arms.
Consolation? Probably. But too much
consolation may leave one inconsolable.


The water before us has hardly moved
except in the shallowest breathing places.
For us back then, to live seemed almost to die.
One day a darkness fell between her and me.
When we woke, a hawthorn sprig
stood in the water glass at our bedside.


There is a silence in the beginning.
The life within us grows quiet.
There is little fear. No matter
how all this comes out, from now on
it cannot not exist ever again.
We liked talking our nights away
in words close to the natural language,
which most other animals can still speak.


The present pushes back the life of regret.
It draws forward the life of desire. Soon memory
will have started sticking itself all over us.
We were fashioned from clay in a hurry,
poor throwing may mean it didn't matter
to the makers if their pots cracked.


On the mountain tonight the full moon
faces the full sun. Now could be the moment
when we fall apart or we become whole.
Our time seems to be up - I think I even hear it stopping.
Then why have we kept up the singing for so long?
Because that the sort of determined creature we are.
Before us, our first task is to astonish,
and then, harder by far, to be astonished.


- Galway Kinnell

A Quiet Joy


I'm standing in a place where I once loved.
The rain is falling. The rain is my home.


I think words of longing: a landscape
out to the very edge of what's possible.


I remember you waving your hand
as if wiping mist from the window pane,


and your face, as if enlarged
from an old blurred photo.


Once I committed a terrible wrong
to myself and others.


But the world is beautifully made for doing good
and for resting, like a park bench.


And late in life I discovered
a quiet joy
like a serious disease that's discovered too late:


just a little time left now for quiet joy.


- Yehuda Amichai
(tr. by Chana Bloch)

The Depths

When the white fog burns off,
the abyss of everlasting light
is revealed. The last cobwebs
of fog in the
black firtrees are flakes
of white ash in the world's hearth.

Cold of the sea is counterpart
to this great fire. Plunging
out of the burning cold of ocean
we enter an ocean of intense
noon. Sacred salt
sparkles on our bodies.

After mist has wrapped us again
in fine wool, may the taste of salt
recall to us the great depths about us.

- Denise Levertov

Hope

It hovers in dark corners
before the lights are turned on,
it shakes sleep from its eyes
and drops from mushroom gills,
it explodes in the starry heads
of dandelions turned sages,
it sticks to the wings of green angels
that sail from the tops of maples.

It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
it lives in each earthworm segment
surviving cruelty,
it is the motion that runs the tail of a dog,
it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
of the child that has just been born.

It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.

It is the serum which makes us swear
not to betray one another;
it is in this poem, trying to speak.


- Lisel Mueller

There Is No Word

There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store
with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack
that should have been bagged in double layers

—so that before you are even out the door
you feel the weight of the jug dragging
the bag down, stretching the thin

plastic handles longer and longer
and you know it’s only a matter of time until
bottom suddenly splits.

There is no single, unimpeachable word
for that vague sensation of something
moving away from you

as it exceeds its elastic capacity
—which is too bad, because that is the word
I would like to use to describe standing on the street

chatting with an old friend
as the awareness grows in me that he is
no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance,

a person with whom I never made the effort—
until this moment, when as we say goodbye
I think we share a feeling of relief,

a recognition that we have reached
the end of a pretense,
though to tell the truth

what I already am thinking about
is my gratitude for language—
how it will stretch just so much and no farther;

how there are some holes it will not cover up;
how it will move, if not inside, then
around the circumference of almost anything—

how, over the years, it has given me
back all the hours and days, all the
plodding love and faith, all the

misunderstandings and secrets
I have willingly poured into it.
- Tony Hoagland

Forever


In the Universe of God
she is a wave on the ocean
of eternity.
And I, another wave in the same ocean,
travel with her
until the time
that one of us fades into the salty waters,
leaving the other behind,
who will also one day be no more.


But one bright morning
we will awaken in each other's arms
beyond oceans, beyond eternity,
beyond even she and me,
and at that time
we will be
forever.


- Greg Kimura

The Vulnerability of Children


Lives inside all of us
Like a small animal heart beat
The quiver of quickening,
The womb-bound baby's sensing
Her possibilities and vulnerabilities.


On edge, unsure, but sure
Someone is certain, we guard
Our ignorance, hide it
Like buried scat instead of the jewel
Not knowing is, not knowing or forgetting,
The blessing of curiosity without contempt.


The boy bends over the microscope,
Studies the blossoms in stone,
The steady beat of a heart aware
Of the miraculous. In that moment
Fear of mistakes, knowledge of right
Or wrong recede and the boy's vulnerability,
The vulnerability of children blesses him,


Gifts him with precious perspective,
The vision of quotidian miracles
Hidden in the mundane. Blessed
Wonder, blessed curiosity,
Blessed vulnerability that opens
The heart and blesses the mind.


- Rebecca del Rio

Those Buckeyes

Oh, lord, lord, lord, it's terrible!
As Neruda had his precious socks,
I have had my exquisite buckeyes.
And the bowl is nearly empty!

I'm down to two precious morsels
that celebrate the perfect mating
of chocolate and peanut butter.

They are so beautiful
in their crystal container,
inside the refrigerator,
lording it over the
pickles and chutney.

Over time, each bite
has been a ritual, a sacrament,
a celebration of gratitude!
Yes, the miraculous
caught for a moment
in my mouth.

I've never felt worthy
of their delicious bodies.
I confess that's painfully true.
I'm merely mortal after all.

On that fearsome and dreaded day
when I gaze upon the empty bowl
may my sobs and tears be a testament
that for a few blissful moments
in this pedestrian world
I have been blessed
by the divine.

I have had buckeyes.
I have had buckeyes.

- Doug von Koss

Place


On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree


what for
not for the fruit


the tree that bears the fruit
is not the one that was planted


I want the tree that stands
in the earth for the first time


with the sun already
going down


and the water touching its roots


in the earth full of the dead
and the clouds passing


one by one
over its leaves


- W.S. Merwin

Divine Proportion

A biologist from Stockholm
brought me one year
a porcelain teacup
a small perfect thing
which nests in the hand
just so, with a belly
that curves as gracefully
as a humpback’s fluke
or a whippoorwill’s breast


It cracked one day
don't ask me how
I don’t recall doing it
wouldn't admit to it anyway
I traced with my fingertip
this new fault line
on my once perfect cup
with a chip in the rim
right where you would sip


Now it just waits
in the dark at the back
of the antique cupboard
no more to be warmed
by the boiling kettle
no longer the one
I reach for each morning
to steep my tea
but my favorite still.

- Seth H. Truby

Fuchsia That summer in the west I walked sunrise to dusk, narrow twisted highways without shoulders, low stone walls on both sides. Hedgerows of fuchsia hemmed me in, the tropical plant now wild, centuries after nobles imported it for their gardens. I was unafraid, did not cross to the outsides of curves, did not look behind me for what might be coming. For weeks in counties Kerry and Cork, I walked through the red blooms the Irish call the Tears of God, blazing from the brush like lanterns. Who would have thought a warm current touching the shore of that stone-cold country could make lemon trees, bananas, and palms not just take, but thrive? Wild as the jungles they came from, where boas flexed around their trunks — like my other brushes with miracles, the men who love you back, how they come to you, gorgeous and invasive, improbable, hemming you in. And you walk that road blazing, some days not even afraid to die. - Katrina Vandenberg

The Poet with His Face in His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn't need anymore of that sound.

So if you're going to do it and can't
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can't
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

- Mary Oliver

The Snakes of September


All summer I heard them
rustling in the shrubbery,
outracing me from tier
to tier in my garden,
a whisper among the viburnums,
a signal flashed from the hedgerow,
a shadow pulsing
in the barberry thicket.
Now that the nights are chill
and the annuals spent,
I should have thought them gone,
in a torpor of blood
slipped to the nether world
before the sickle frost.
Not so. In the deceptive balm
of noon, as if defiant of the curse
that spoiled another garden,
these two appear on show
through a narrow slit
in the dense green brocade
of a north-country spruce,
dangling head-down, entwined
in a brazen love-knot.
I put out my hand and stroke
the fine, dry grit of their skins.
After all,
we are partners in this land,
co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles.


- Stanley Kunitz

Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved


Resurrection of the body of the beloved,
Which is the worldWhich is the poem
Of the world, the poem of the body.

Mortal ourselves and filled with awe,
we gather the scattered limbs
Of Osiris.
That he should live again.
That death not be oblivion.



When I open the book
I hear the poets whisper and weep,
Laugh and lament.

In a thousand languages
They say the same thing:
“We lived. The secret of life
is love, that casts its wing
over all suffering, that takes
in its arms the hurt child,
that rises green from the fallen seed.”


Sadness is there, too.
All the sadness in the world.
Because the tide ebbs,
Because wild waves
Punish the shore
And the small lives lived there.
Because the body is scattered.
Because death is real
And sometimes death is not
Even the worst of it.

If sadness did not run
Like a river through the Book,
Why would we go there?
What would we drink?


Oh, there’s blood enough, and sap
From the stalks. Tears, too.
A raindrop and the dark water
Of bogs. It’s a rich ink.
Indelible, invisible
(hold up the page to the light,
hold the page near a flame).


The world comes into the poem.
The poem comes into the world.
Reciprocity – it all comes down
To that.
As with lovers:
When it’s right you can’t say
Who is kissing whom.


Lighten up, lighten up.
Let go of the heaviness.
Was it a poem from the Book
That so weighed you down?

Impossible. Less than a feather.
Less than the seed a milkweed
Pod releases in the breeze.

Lifted, it drifts out to settle
In a field, with all that’s inside it
Waiting to become
Root and tendril, to come alive.


Now the snow is falling
Even more than an hour ago.
The pine in the backyard
Bows with the weight of it.

Two years ago, my father
Died. What love we had
Hidden under misery,
Weighed down with years
Of silence.

And now,
Maybe the poem can free
Us, maybe the poem can express
The love and let the rest
Slide to the earth as the snow
Does now, freeing the tree
Of its burden.


To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That’s crudely put, but . . .

If we’re not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?


Time to shut up.
Voltaire said the secret
Of being boring
Is to say everything.

And yet I held
Back about love
All those years:
Talking about death
Insistently, even
As I was alive;
Talking about loss
As if all was loss,
As if the world
Did not return
Each morning.
As if the beloved
Didn’t long for us.

No wonder I go on
So. I go on so
Because of the wonder.



- Gregory Orr

And the Stars
Perhaps you did not know how bright last night,
Especially above your seaside door,
Was all the marvelous starlit sky, and wore
White harmonies of very shining light.
Perhaps you did not want to seek the sight
Of that remembered rapture any more.—
But then at least you must have heard the shore
Roar with reverberant voices thro’ the night.
Those stars were lit with longing of my own,
And the ocean’s moan was full of my own pain.
Yet doubtless it was well for both of us
You did not come, but left me there alone.
I hardly ought to see you much again;
And stars, we know, are often dangerous.


- Robinson Jeffers

The Gate

I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world

would be the space my brother’s body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man

but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,

rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This -- holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.

- Marie Howe

Phantom Limbs

I've met with the witchdocter,
read the runic bones
thrown from an ochre ram's horn,
the strong smoky dark inviting me to see my future,
the rattle of snake skin waking me from my trance.

I've listened to the lions roar their gory debate
beyond my tent, as they muzzle in the blood of a zebra,
I've seen the African sun empty her orb
a river of liquid gold across the bushveld.

I've watched people running from bullets,
crisscross, a crazed spider's web spun to nowhere,
terror chizzled in their faces,
a barefoot wardance on shattered glass.

I've lived
where there stood a white bungalow
with wrap-around verandah,
chorus of cicadas laced the night air with etude scaling,
stereo and mono output,
calls, the sound of symphony
while a one-eyed grey monkey picked at ticks
and a bare-foot girl child was swinging
in the twisted Chinese guava tree,
planning her life.


- Margaret Caminsky-Shapiro

For Desire


Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;
and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal
surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,
or cherries, the rich spurt in the back
of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.
Give me the lover who yanks open the door
of his house and presses me to the wall
in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I'm drenched
and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload
and begin their delicious diaspora
through the cities and small towns of my body.
To hell with the saints, with martyrs
of my childhood meant to instruct me
in the power of endurance and faith,
to hell with the next world and its pallid angels
swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.
I want this world. I want to walk into
the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along
like I'm nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,
and I want to resist it. I want to go
staggering and flailing my way
through the bars and back rooms,
through the gleaming hotels and weedy
lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks
where dogs are let off their leashes
in spite of the signs, where they sniff each
other and roll together in the grass, I want to
lie down somewhere and suffer for love until
it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again
and put on that little black dress and wait
for you, yes you, to come over here
and get down on your knees and tell me
just how fucking good I look


- Kim Addonizio

The Weave Has No Limits


Foolish to fear and obsess
in this over-night roadhouse
I call my life. In the wide world
of the spirit I would forget the self.
It would be swallowed up into a vast
abundance. Thought would no longer
matter. Always threads of possibility
reach out from us. Where they get lost
and then knotted is the the place where
distortion perceives a conditioned world.
To grasp the essence of a leaf, a cloud,
a stone, cast an inner light around it. Let
that fine stitch of the intuitive guide you.
A clarity then can unfold that pure and
perfect tapestry inside. Do not try to fasten
the strands with clumsy hands hot for
lavish confusion. The weave does not
need your speculations; it is limitless.
You must let go of the thread that holds
onto your desperate story. Only when that
is abandoned with all its ornaments will the
untainted design appear, deeper and abiding.


- Rich Meyers

In Praise of Self-Deprecation

The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.
Scruples are alien to the black panther.
Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions
The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.

The self-critical jackal does not exist.
The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly
live as they live and are glad of it.

The killer-whale’s heart weighs one hundred kilos
but in other respects it is light.

There is nothing more animal-like
than a clear conscience
on the third planet of the Sun.

- Wislawa Szymborska

Little Gidding


I
Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?
If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.


II
Ash on and old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house—
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.
There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth.
Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.
In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
Both one and many; in the brown baked features
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another's voice cry: 'What! are you here?'
Although we were not. I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other—
And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
And so, compliant to the common wind,
Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time
Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
I said: 'The wonder that I feel is easy,
Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:
I may not comprehend, may not remember.'
And he: 'I am not eager to rehearse
My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both bad and good. Last season's fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
He left me, with a kind of valediction,
And faded on the blowing of the horn.


III
There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of no immediate kin or kindness,
But of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of one who died blind and quiet
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.


IV
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.


V
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.


- T.S. Eliot

Vegetables Are So Sneaky


They grow huge before our eyes
but we can't see the growing.
We keep inventing them daily,
don’t we, these elaborate edible sculptures?


Presenting themselves to us new,
each morning our imaginings
are more potent than we realize.
How little we comprehend!


Ah, vitamins
(and by extension calories)
aren't real!
They are constructs.
(Even if you can dine on them.)

There is just so much invention.
It is all around.
The mystery is everywhere.


- Judith Stone

A Time to (B)e Very Purpose(ful)
or Why I Will Actively Support President Obama’s Re-election
This has been a season
for the well-dressed to sit in plush red seats, and cheer
the deaths of the sentenced and uninsured […]

For the rich to proclaim themselves virtuous by virtue of their riches.
For the powerful to speak the brave new truth that money is speech […]

There was a time to be born – poor, in the 20s, in the South –
without a birth certificate. This year this may mean you may not vote […]

There is a time for laying words out carefully like a Scrabble player
And a time for releasing one’s voice as from a shook bottle […]

I do not think there is time to dilute our meaning with blood […]

Freedom has still allowed a band on 7^th Street
to play “the Saints Go Marching In.”
(A fellow in a fedora borrowed my umbrella to dance along.)
There’s time, it seems, to dance on the courthouse steps
in front of the keystone arch, and three stonewall cops […]

But do you sense a Gulf spill of money erupting?
Do you not feel a shiver in your soft true belly
that a swift fleet of boats is coming to attack [..?]


– Phyllis Meshulam

The Way of Attention


Buddha says that 3 actions determine life
First - Breath
The wise woman conserves her breath
Follows it as the shadow follows the body
She is reserved
Speaks when necessary
Her speaking follows four imperatives
kind - truthful - helpful - necessary
Otherwise, she keeps her own counsel
This is mastery of thought

Two - Impressions
The wise woman observes impressions without judgment or clinging impersonally
The way the sun shines on all living things without favor
She guards the impressions she leaves with others
Showing only those feathers suitable to the occasion
She shows all her feathers to birds of her own kind
Everything in its season
This is mastery of mood

Three- Sensations
The wise woman observes her body
Studies its functions
And tames them as a hunter tames a good dog to follow her lead
Taming the senses she is freed of excess
Practices moderation in all things
No need to indulge in drifting thoughts, mood or the shifting desires of the body
This is mastery of the form

Buddha says that the total sensation of the 3 actions defines death
The wise woman who has mastered tongue, mood and form
Is said to have mastered attention
Over which death has no dominion
She alone is free


- Red Hawk

What Work Is


We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.


- Phillip Levine

Fawns of Spring

Spotted fawns
of spring
have lost
their charm.

Turned away
by testy does,
they are left
to wander about
nuzzling
the dry stubble
of harvest
for a taste
of scarcity.

- Patrice Warrender

Halleluiah


Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I'm not where I started!


And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.


Halleluiah, I'm sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.


- Mary Oliver

Dear poetry lovers,
I will be traveling in Bhutan for the next few weeks and unable to send out the daily poems again until October 9. I do apologize for any disappointment this may cause. Many blessings to you all.
Larry




Say I Am You


I am dust particles in sunlight,
I am the round sun.


To the bits of dust I say, Stay.
To the sun, Keep moving.


I am morning mist,
and the breathing of evening.


I am wind in the top of the grove,
and surf on the cliff.


Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.


I am a tree with a trained parrot in it's branches.
Silence, thought, and voice.


The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark of a stone, a flickering


in metal. Both candle,
and the moth crazy around it.


Rose, and the nightingale
lost in the fragrance.


I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,


and the falling away. What is,
and what isn't. You who know


Jelaluddin, You the one
in all, say who


I am. Say I
am YOU.


- Jelalludin Rumi
(Translated by Coleman Barks)

Stone


Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.
From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
the stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.
I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill–
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.


- Charles Simic

Something Taken Away
(for George)

Age diminishes us piece by piece
even as it builds something within, gives
with one hand, shortens our lease
on the body with the other as long as it lives.

To get at George's lung, the oncologist took a rib today.
What the hell, we've got 24, 12 pairs
so i guess it's no big deal you could say.
24-23 more or less, who cares,

but each mortal piece, no matter how small
reminds us that the body is on short-term loan.
We can remember then that this body is not all
there is of us; something much finer can be known

not directly, but as wind is known by the flutter in the trees,
or as unseen love brings a strong man to his knees.

- Red Hawk

I Know Three Things
I know three things:
That which is will be.
That which will be was.
That which was is.

I dreamed I was awake.
The hair on my head grew grey
And the flesh sagged on my bones.
I turned on my side
Tucking into myself like a mother
Curls around her baby
And found another dream.

Yesterday my beehive erupted.
The old queen left with the restless ones,
Those who yearned for
A land just beyond the imagination.
Those who stayed will make a new queen
From the sweet nectar of their bodies.

Sometimes the Ancestors visit me.
They’re always happy to come.
We talk about old things
To see if they matter anymore.

- Nancy Binzen

Wondrous

I’m driving home from school when the radio talk
turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit
the here and now of the freeway at rush hour,
travel back into the past, where my mother is reading
to my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggs
and dying, and though this is the fifth time Charlotte
has died, my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing
at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math,
how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief
multiplies the one preceding it, how the author tried
seventeen times to record the words She died alone
without crying, seventeen takes and a short walk during
which he called himself ridiculous, a grown man crying
for a spider he’d spun out of the silk thread of invention —
wondrous how those words would come back and make
him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice
ten years after the day she died — the catch, the rasp,
the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m ok.


- Sarah Freligh

Weaving Fire
(For Max and Michaela, September 22, 2012)


How do you weave together
two strands of fire?
One, a blazing flame ofartistry and emotion,
the other a bright flash of beauty and determination.
Equal forces, met.
Equal passion evoked.

This is how you go –

Very slowly and carefully,
one interlacing at a time.
A small compromise,
A gesture of love,
A cultivation of patience,
A deft and tender touch.

Two fires joined must be contained
or damage can occur.
But tended diligently,
each flame distinct,
yet burning entwined,
a brilliant radiance results.

So, let us all hold out our hands
to bless these two,
to offer a bit of water when needed,
a safe patch of earth on which to take refuge,
a gentle fan to foster a flickering flame.

The Navajos say -
“In beauty it’s begun.”
Rumi says -
“Let the beauty you love be what you do.”
The elders say –
“When fire burns down to glowing embers,
its beauty changes and deepens.”
Do not be afraid to go there.
Beauty is at the heart
of this union.
This weaving of light,
crafted carefully over time,
will dazzle the world.

- Maya Spector

BLESSING BHUTAN: a mandala in seven movements



SPINNING


Pelela pass
wooden spindle whirling
sheep wool yak wool
bus wheels rolling rolling
round the chorten
wrap around bowstring
plaid gho
feet stomping dancers
black hats Tshechu twirling
prayer wheels turning round and round
humble hands round and round spinning wheels
water falling

FALLING
water pouring down cliffs canyons
powerful hydro
pungent splats of betel juice
feudal reign falls
reborn baby strapped on mother’s back
sliding sidewise his eyes crusty cracks

CRACKING
sidewalks roads
sides of the roads
overhangs cracking
stacks of straw burning running
skull cracking brains open raptor food
psyche cracking
deities demons delusions spill inside outside
Bhutan cracking open rocks crashing stories erupting
ancient lore stretching over reality canvas
spinning and falling portals flapping

FLAPPING
prayer flags astrological hues 108 blending
bright then fading
fluttering from hills bridges gossamer
spirits wafting among
daphne pulp porous through screens
fingers stack paper on
shutters snapping capture
orange chartreuse rice fields waving
buckwheat amaranth chilis
eagles magpie wings flapping high
blue dot butterfly fluttering low low

BLOWING
bronze horns rumble deep
out of earth little children sing anthems
tourists blow a mound of marijuana buds
suck hard small flame
black plastic smoking sky over
fractal forests
help and thank you
monks chant on and on
hungry ghosts opening throats
each breath a prayer

TAPPING
woodpecker staccato against blue pine
baby monk blesses with wooden phallus
light raps on head
Silther taps on window
hiking poles pony hooves clop to Tiger’s Nest
thanka painter dips brush into orange
onto the god of epilepsy
huge canvas explodes in color
finger holds steads
precision
steady

STILLNESS
target embraces its arrow
dragon tongue
bus stops
white bellied heron lands
dogs silent
just this moment
vast meditation
dead center of the wheel
spokes whirling out in five dimensions
most mysterious

- Sharon Bard

SEVEN BRIEF NOTES ON HARMONY


1.
A bit out of sorts
while driving yesterday,

I began to harmonize aloud
with the solo voice on the CD.
Happy surprise: I suddenly
felt whole!


Can it be so simple to find
one's true place in the Great Chord?


2.
The laughter of children,
the song of a lark,
the roar of a freight train
bringing us what we need,
all part of the Great Symphony,


but so too are newspaper notices of suicides,
the whiz of bullets, the thunder and bite of bombs
and the cry of a rape victim.


We are counterpoint
to people across the globe
who are going to sleep as we wake.


We play a staccato chord
with every being
we pass on the street.


3.
Once in awhile, the Invisible
puts a hand on my shoulder
and reminds me—“You are Music!”


Then she shows me
how to become
a run of notes
as happy as a trout
swimming downstream.


4.
When I pull my harmonica
out of my pocket
and play an old standard,
“I Only Have Eyes for You” or
“I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Face”,


I feel the notes going out and up,
joining an immortal
melody in the sky.


Having been
a vehicle for this,
I feel more real.


5.
I know I’m surrounded by Mysteries:
the music of the spheres is
Cosmic Law set dancing,
You, Universal Mother,
and Your circles within circles of Light,
interpenetrating down here on Earth.
It is You who compassionately
taps my shoulder
as a reminder.


6.
Once, arriving early at a gathering,
I felt anxious waiting
for the event to start.


Hearing someone ask for a volunteer
to operate an ancient lift
that ferried people up from the lobby,
I jumped at the mindless job.


and the rest of the evening
enjoyed a role as Greeter,
solid part in the Song.


7.
All that any of us seek:
to find our true
and solid part in the Song.


- Max Reif

Seven Parts of Love

1.

A man leaves for work,
gets stuck in traffic and ruminates
on a grudge closing his heart like a trap.

Love is how he laughs it off.

2.

A dog loses his family
and walks 30 miles to find it.

Love is his thirst at mile 20,
a hidden stream near the woods
and the water as he drinks;

stamina and the thing opposing it.

3.

A bird sits on a wire,
its impulse to migrate
wooing its impulse not to.

Love is when the bird decides;

journey, destination
and the strength to make the trip.

4.

A child breaks a leg,
fear turning her mouth dry,
pain invading her like poison.


Love is a nurse’s hand on her
shoulder;

an x-ray and the lightbox behind it.



5.

At three a.m. a man wrestles with
his conscience.

Love is the contest, and the clamminess
of his sheets.

At four he dreams himself down a
bending street to a yellow house,
through a half-open door and into a room.

His father sits upright in a chair and
his mother bends near.

Love is his willingness to be a boy again,
crying, angry at the world

hot food on the table after
and a fire in the fireplace.

6.

A prison rises from a valley floor,
lights making razor wire shine like fake silver.

In a cell a young man burns with remorse
while a thousand miles away a
victim flails in the net of anger.

Love is the prisoner awake at night
craving to fray that net.

7.

Love is lilac and the one who
smells it;

hunger and the ability to wait;

desire and the will to chose it.

- David Beckman
(from “Language Factory of the Mind,” Finishing Line Press, 2011)

Hanging Bhutanese Prayer Flags at Yotongla Pass 3300 meters


The clouds are dropping
down below the mountains.
We are still above, but descending
with them from the higher pass.
The wind has carried these clouds
to make a way for us with prayers
blown from its lapping mouth.
Clouds spilling like a waterfall
moving from the higher places
back to this place, where a Bengal tiger
has killed a cow herder in search
of his bull. We live at the pleasure
of such wild forces, even as we clothe
these mountains and the mountains beyond
and even down to the seas with prayer.


- Judith Stone

Forty Egrets


This morning
cloudy and gray
as I drove the highway
in white shirt and business tie
from my left at ten o'clock high


arose a flock
of forty egrets
from the area I knew
as a rookery in summer


forty egrets
arising as one
heading south, knowing
somehow, today was the day,
and now was the time


lifting as they had
for millennia
some for their first time
and some for their last time


all feeling the same impulse
gathering within them
some irresistible instinct
propelling them up
into something unknown
but so right


and I knew
somehow that instinct is within me
that universal force is me
as it is all of us
and that someday


I will know
today is the day
and now is the time
and I will rise from wherever I am
toward where I know I must go


lifted
and guided
by forty egrets.


- Scott O'Brien

Birds


And when, dear one, you are so weary
you are ready to give up,
think then of the Canada Geese-
the way all day
they shout back at the beating, broken
heart of the world
"I am lonely too.
Keep flying. Keep flying.
I am lonely too."


- Lisa Starr

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

If You Knew


What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.

A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

- Ellen Bass

---

God In The Room Next Door


The deep thunder of your shuffling feet
has kept me awake now for hours!
You and your party angels,
eating apples from Eden,
and drunk on gallons of ambrosia.


The constant singing is driving me mad!
You and your heavenly chorus, and those
long songs all about what a great guy you are!
Songs that crash through every boundary made in a lifetime,
and every wall so carefully built, brick by brick.


Every wall, that is, except the one that separates us now.
You in your room, and I in mine.
The wall I pound on to get you to stop!
Shut the fuck up! And turn the volume down!
I'm trying to sleep, damn it!


I can see now why you don't return my calls.
Never send a text. Reply to my long, lonely letters.
I laugh with bitter tears at tales that god is dead!
Dead drunk is what I would say!
You and your friends...who don't include me.


My fists beat against the rhythm, my voice hoarse.
Are you deaf? That alone must certainly draw your attention!
That muffled arrhythmia. My constant cries.


But, no....
The angels come and go,
the chorus like an ocean's surge.
The walls fall, one by one.
Except for this one.
The one that separates us now.


Turn the damn music down!
It's opening my heart....


- Jon Jackson

Say Yes Quickly


Forget your life. Say "God is Great." Get up.
You think you know what time it is. It's time to pray.
You've carved so many little figurines, too many.
Don't knock on any random door like a beggar.
Reach your long hands out to another door, beyond where
you go on the street, the street
where everyone says, "How are you?"
and no one says "How aren't you?"
Tomorrow you'll see what you've broken and torn tonight,
thrashing in the dark. Inside you
there's an artist you don't know about.
He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.
If you are here unfaithfully with us,
you're causing terrible damage.
If you've opened your loving to God's love,
you're helping people you don't know
and have never seen.
Is what I say true? Say yes quickly,
if you know, if you've known it
from before the beginning of the universe.


- Jellaludin Rumi
(Version by Coleman Barks)