Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

The Cemetery Poem

Michelle finds me long past midnight, shoveling
the grassy turf in our backyard, digging
three feet by six, determined to dig further.
And if she could love me enough
to trust me, to not cover her mouth
in shocked recognition, her hair lit up
in moonlight; if she could simply shovel
into the earth and dig another hole
beside me, straining to bear the weight
each blade lifts in its gunmetal sheen,
then maybe, if she could trust like that
she’d begin to see them — the war dead,
how they stand under lime trees and ash,
here among us, papyrus and stone in their hands.
There will be no dreaming for me.
Not tonight. I dig without stopping and tell her—
We need to help them, if only with a coffin.
Michelle stares out at these blurry figures
in silhouette, the very young and the very old
among them, and with a gentle hand
she stays the shovel I hold, to say —
We should invite them into our home.
We should learn their names, their history.
We should know these people
we bury in the earth.

- Brian Turner

Cancer Prayer

Dear God
Please flood her nerves with sedatives
and keep her strong enough to crack a smile
so disbelieving friends and relatives
can temporarily sustain denial.
Please smite that intern in oncology
who craves approval from department heads.
Please ease her urge to vomit, let there be
kind but flirtatious men in nearby beds.
Given her hair, consider amnesty
for sins of vanity; make mirrors vanish.
Surround her with forgiving family
and nurses not too numb to cry. Please banish
trite consolations; take her in one swift
and gentle motion as your final gift.

- Michael Astriee

Was it Writ?

Was it writ that first
She set her winds to whistle
spiraling round, bringing all weathers;
second, through mist, fog and fern
sortied the soft whistling owl;
third, shepherd intoned to his sharp-eared friend
fetching the lost from bog and fen;
fourth, thundered our jets;
fifth, deafening silence?
Sixth, ructions and ripples convulse!

Or might we
funnel absolute energies,
swiveling like a deer's ears
towards the source of sounds?

Furies calm;
quakes subside;
walls of hate crack.
We laugh at our pettiness.
A never-before-dance
begins to spin.

- Raphael Block

More Blues and the Abstract Truth

I back the car over a soft, large object;
hair appears on my chest in dreams.
The paperboy comes to collect
with a pit bull. Call Grandmother
and she says, Well you know
death is death and none other.

In the mornings we’re in the dark;
even at the end of June
the zucchini keep on the sill.
Ring Grandmother for advice
and she says, O you know
I used to grow so many things.

Then there’s the frequent bleeding,
the tender nipples, and the rot
under the floormat. If I’m not seeing
a cold-eyed doctor it is
another gouging mechanic.
Grandmother says, Thanks to the blue rugs
and Eileen Briscoe’s elms
the house keeps cool.

Well. Then. You say Grandmother
let me just ask you this:
How does a body rise up again and rinse
her mouth from the tap. And how
does a body put in a plum tree
or lie again on top of another body
or string a trellis. Or go on drying
the flatware. Fix rainbow trout. Grout the tile.
Buy a bag of onions. Beat an egg stiff. Yes,
how does the cat continue
to lick itself from toenail to tailhole.
And how does a body break
bread with the word when the word
has broken. Again. And. Again.
With the wine. And the loaf.
And the excellent glass
of the body. And she says,
Even. If. The. Sky. Is. Falling.
My. Peace. Rose. Is. In. Bloom.

- C. D. Wright

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

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) spent much of his short, adult life as a volunteer soldier for the British military during World War I. He wrote vivid and terrifying poems about modern warfare. Owen was killed by machinegun fire just days before the end of the war.

THE PRISONER
(In Memory of My Father's Fallen B-29 Crew)

I am the age his mother was
when the telegram came.
I open the crumbling envelope
and find it there.
I am her again as I
read those bold
black words:
"So sorry,
the plane was lost,
shot down over Manchuria.
Your son is missing,
and presumed dead.
Many regrets."

I see him before me
as he left for the war,
handsome and young -
a farm boy
full of his bravery
yet hay-field green.
They all looked like that -
happy and cock-sure
in brown leather jackets
hats off to the side
fighting for the greatest country on earth
fighting for freedom.
But the ones who
will never come home
are already marked.

For fifty years my father
has tried to understand
why he was blown from the plane,
why his life was saved
and others perished.

It is 4 a.m. - I tell my father
to turn off his radio,
but the war wounds are
playing an all-night chess game
on his exiled body,
advancing across him
like the bombers that day
over Manchuria.

And he is listening
for news of his safety,
for Russians coming to
liberate Mukden prisoners of war,
for his release.

He is listening,
just as his mother did
every night for nine months
after the telegram came.


- Jackie Huss Hallerberg

Today I Was Happy, So I Made This Poem

As the plump squirrel scampers
Across the roof of the corncrib,
The moon suddenly stands up in the darkness,
And I see that it is impossible to die.
Each moment of time is a mountain.
An eagle rejoices in the oak trees of heaven,
Crying,
This is what I wanted.

- James Wright

It Was Like This: You Were Happy


It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness—
between you, there is nothing to forgive—
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

- Jane Hirshfield

The Future

For God's sake, be done
with this jabber of "a better world."
What blasphemy! No "futuristic"
twit or child thereof ever
in embodied light will see
a better world than this.
Do something! Go cut the weeds
beside the oblivious road. Pick up
the cans and bottles, old tires,
and dead predictions. No future
can be stuffed into this presence
except by being dead. The day is
clear and bright, and overhead
the sun not yet half finished
with his daily praise.

- Wendell Berry

Invitation to the Dance

In the story my father tells
he's running up the marble staircase
at the Boston Music Hall, a young man
late for the concert-
decked out in his coat
and best tie, though earlier today
he's been to the burlesque house,
then counted his change for a doughnut,

saving just enough for the symphony,
the train-fare home.
How tall he is, and slim, his face
the same thin face I wore at 17
and his hair is nearly black,
flying up from his forehead
as he takes the stairs, two, three at once;

and if I could hold him fast at any moment
this would be it-not the thrill of first sex
not the complex joy of marriage,
not the morning of my birth-but as he is
here, now-quick enough to catch the melody,
late enough to move with it, keep time with it,
running with all his life before him
and the world filled with music.

- Martha Carlson-Bradley

The Secret

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

- Denise Levertov

Labyrinth

I walk the beach
washed in churning sound,
sighting flight soarings,
cormorants, pelicans, gulls
on uplifting currents
shifting in the shore wind,
earful, eyeful coastal motion
and then I find along the sloping shore
a fully realized laid-out labyrinth
not a random residue of tidal flow
but measured paths formed of seaweed, sand, and stone
a shape satisfying the human eye, the foot,
for a circumnambulation of will
mind and questing spirit
of each traveler making the way alone.

Someone has left to a beach wanderer
this circular route map on the longer journey,
a place of time and space to ask directions
where each questing step leads to the center,
each inward step returns outward from the core,
a kind of breathing in and breathing out
endings requiring beginnings, living dying
and dying living on this ever changing shore.

I place my foot onto the winding path
asking what I need to ask myself,
what I hope for and what I fear,
what there is to gain and what to lose,
not that I will die but how
I'll take death's indignities,
accepting dying as but another stage,
how to give up the power to choose.

And at the labyrinthian core,
enlightened, relieved of choice
traveling where my footsteps take me
I turn to marvel where I've been,
how far I've come by walking,
and by the weavings of my mind and hand.
My questing over, I now may yield
to this winding destiny
footprinted on these pathways
soon to be erased in sand.

- Doug Stout

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

- Jane Kenyon

Sunday, Salaam

Gushing forth
from three miles deep
in the Gulf Coast,
clouds roil beneath
the sunrise sheen,
slick acres
of greed.

No one is in
the pews
this Sunday:
the morning is
deadly,
silent

sea birds squat
bewildered,
the shore marsh
dragged, clogged
with the offal
of sacrifice
to strange gods,

the temple bereft,
mud and sandy traces
lie on its ancient, sacred floors,
walls echoing cries
of betrayed souls,
their Mother’s

nascent
thunder.

- Scott O'Brien

In Passing

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

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

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

- Lisel Mueller

A Ripe Fig

Now that you live in my chest,
anywhere we sit is a mountaintop.

Those other things that entice people,
like porcelain dolls from China,
which have made people weep for centuries,
even those are changing now.

What used to be pain is now a lovely bench
where we sit under the roses.

A left hand has become a right.
a black wall, a window,
a cushion in a heel of a shoe,
a leader of an assembly.

Intelligence and silence.
What we say is poison to some,
nourishing to others.

What we say is a ripe fig,*
but not all birds that fly eat figs.

- Jellaludin Rumi

Casualties

Having flown their last miles,
tattered wings flutter, try to rise
from the red-brown skin of a Louisiana beach.
Off the endangered list for one short year,
now just flotsam and jetsam lapping this humid shore.
An open vein, oil and water mix,
unspooling a knotted thread along the coast
to weave this pelican’s shroud.

The hasp of Pandora’s box, so carelessly sprung,
sinks to the ocean floor, eludes us in the current.
For now, an eternity of stars returns each night,
bright reminder that we lost paradise somewhere along the way.

- Susan Collier Lamont

Sit Quietly

If you have time to chatter,
Read books
If you have time to read,
Walk into the mountain, desert, and ocean
If you have time to walk,
Sing songs and dance
If* you have time to dance,
Sit quiety, you Happy Lucky Idiot.
*
- Nanao Sakaki
*

Another Long Walk


Given enough time,
there is always another long walk,
another proof of civilization's lie,
and all must prepare to run,
for no matter where you are born,
the sky can crack and drown you in fire.

The prophet said it would be fire
licking at our heels next time
and it is anyone’s bad luck to be born
where death comes cloaked as a walk
that goes on and on, until lives run
out of breath, stumble, and lie

in barren fields with nothing to lie
between them and scorching fire.
There is nothing to do, but to run
as fast as you can, to outdistance time
and this nightmare of a walk
where death is borne

on wings of silver and hope dies, unborn,
among hobbled prints that lie
in mute witness to another long walk
that crushes hearts into red grit of fire
and strangles cries of rage that time
after time, someone must pack up a life and run

to nowhere. This walk, too, shall run
its course, new stars will be born
to light up the heavens and, in time,
history will write, not quite truth, not quite lies,
of who and why and how all became fire.
Some will say there never was a walk

of death, that all people are free to walk
a thousand miles of blackened earth, to run
a marathon of fear, while fire
power presides as midwife to newborn
cries of war. Dark clouds gather and lie
low over fallow fields, where time

has run out. On distant horizon, fire is born,
from smoldering ash left to lie untended.
The time has come for another long walk.

- Patrice Warrender

Homing Song: Two Stanzas

Because any place
you affix as home is an astonishment
Destiny or destination-- you are home
and you know instinctly how to doubt it
a talent for searching, you begin
with maps and roots and tributaries
in a backyard or in a city park
unearthing cedar systems or star charts
or at your father's cabin
mapping the riverlogic of the Nemakagan
while otters skim and pack the trail
for you, while sand coyotes pull in
midnight air, and sing a capella
all the lonely way back
to you
And you sing back, throwing out
round songs to anonymous canyons
and the fine criminal lives
you admire and while
Invoking nothing more than the
comfort of the faraway familiar,
echoes like whispers
the sound of a descending star
your own long distance
it's all the same
Once you were reminded
of the throatsingers in Canada
as a child cried behind you
Each enhanced private legends
you used to decipher alone,
tremeloes come back
signifying you, signifying them
at the same time, a song
means all of us.

- Denise Sweet

The Gardener of Eden

I am the old dreamer who never sleeps
I am timekeeper of the timeless dance
I preserve the long rhythms of the earth
and fertilize the rounds of desire

In my evergreen arboretum
I raise flowering hopes for the world
I plant seeds of perennial affection
and wait for their passionate bloom

Would you welcome that sight if you saw it?
Revalue the view you have lost?
Could you wake to the innocent morning
and follow the risks of your heart?

Every day I grow a dream in my garden
where the beds are laid out for love
When will you come to embrace it
and join in the joy of the dance?

- James Broughton

Cutting Loose

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose
from all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.

Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell you where it is and you
can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path -- but that's when
you get going best, glad to be lost,
learning how real it is
here on earth, again and again.

- William Stafford

The Time

Summer is the time to write. I tell myself this
in winter especially. Summer comes,
I want to tumble with the river
over rocks and mossy dams.

A fish drifting upside down.
Slow accordions sweeten the breeze.

The Sanitary Mattress Factory says,
"Sleep is Life."
Why do I think of forty ways to spend an afternoon?

Yesterday someone said, "It gets late so early."
I wrote it down. I was going to do something with it.
Maybe it is a title and this life is the poem.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

The World is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. - Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

- William Wordsworth

Because

Lately she's been falling in love everywhere--
at the market, in the pharmacy, always in the cafeteria
sliding her tray over the metal rails,
last week with the hands of the attendant at the gas station.
Sometimes it happens all day long.

Yesterday at the campus it was everything again--
The way the postmaster was whistling,
or how the frisbee players sing the quad.
The way some students stay after class, that usually gets her.
Cashiers, people who sing at stop lights--all fair game.
Cab drivers--forget it.

With ice cream scoopers, with their little paper hats,
it is often love at first sight,
and she will never forget how at the sandwich shop--
the young man working said anything to drink, miss?
to the 80-year-old woman in front of her,
then when it was her turn, said ma'am instead.

Later today, blessed by all this loving
she will make some tea and play a violin concerto
for her dog who is deaf.
She will play the music as loud as it will go
because she can,
and because somehow he'll hear it,
and he will stand on the porch
of the fine yellow house, glowing.

She will be all choked up
because the lawn chairs
have never been this white before,
and because, tired ears flapping
in a soft Autumn breeze,
the old dog will bark back his joy.

- Lisa Starr

I Tell You

[excerpt]
I could not predict the fullness
of the day. How it was enough
to stand alone without help
in the green yard at dawn.

How two geese would spin out
of the ochre sun opening my spine,
curling my head up to the sky
in an arc I took for granted.

And the lilac bush by the red
brick wall flooding the air
with its purple weight of beauty?
How it made my body swoon,

brought my arms to reach for it
without even thinking.

***

In class today a Dutch woman split
in two by a stroke — one branch
of her body a petrified silence,
walked leaning on her husband

to the treatment table while we
the unimpaired looked on with envy.
How he dignified her wobble,
beheld her deformation, untied her

shoe, removed the brace that stakes
her weaknesses. How he cradled
her down in his arms to the table
smoothing her hair as if they were

alone in their bed. I tell you—
his smile would have made you weep.

***

At twilight I visit my garden
where the peonies are about to burst.

Some days there will be more
flowers than the vase can hold.

- Susan Glassmeyer

Cormorants

When the door to the chapel of dusk is ajar the cormorants flock and fly west,
necks outstretched towards salvation; nuns en route to vespers.
The silhouettes of their habits cut across the shadowed sky.
They form a cluster, as from the cloister hurrying to Evensong,
Then thread themselves along a line too fine to see.

I can tell them like beads, a sunset rosary: Ave Maria, Stella Maris, ora pro avis.
Pray for your dark daughters, now and at the closing of each day.
May the oceans continue to feed them;
May the winds bear up the black flames of their wings,
And may the rocky islands lend them sanctuary, at their journey's end.


- Jane L. Mickelson

Atlas

Extreme exertion
isolates a person
from help,
discovered Atlas.
Once a certain
shoulder-to-burden
ratio collapses,
there is so little
others can do:
they can't
lend a hand
with Brazil
and not stand
on Peru.

- Kay Ryan

In The Coffin

“I am not saying, I am not saying”.

The Roshi had thought deeply between the first and second saying?

The question, “Alive or dead?”

Mother Nature, alive or dead?

My closed eyes, alive or dead.

The spirit of growing things, alive or dead?

It is ours to say.

Sit and cry and wait.

It is ours to say.

- Bruce Gibbs

Imagine

Imagine the time the particle you are
Returns where it came from.
The family darling comes home!
Wine without being contained in cups
Is handed around.
A red glint appears in a granite outcrop
And suddenly the whole cliff turns to
Ruby!

- Jelalludin Rumi

Call It Accident


Call it midnight thump and boom.
Gumbo lockdown.

Call up gush;
swirl and spread.

Forward moving call it stalled.
Call a party, crown petroleum queen.

On call the creeping,
race for land.

Call it caught

drifting

in a starless sea.

Long-billed or swell-bellied, sway in the bilge.
Call it quits—trolled, talked-down.

Roll call: Plover, Egret, Tern.
Shrimp estuaries and pelican rookeries. Songbirds

who “I used to come here from America.”
Call it marshes packed in sludge.


- Monique Wentzel

At Thomas Merton’s Grave

We can never be with loss too long.
Behind the warped door that sticks,
the wood thrush calls to the monks,
pausing upon the stone crucifix,
singing: “I am marvelous alone!”
Thrash, thrash goes the hayfield:
rows of marrow and bone undone.
The horizon’s flashing fastens tight,
sealing the blue hills with vermilion.
Moss dyes a squirrel’s skull green.
The cemetery expands its borders—
little milky crosses grow like teeth.
How kind time is, altering space
so nothing stays wrong; and light,
more new light, always arrives.

- Spencer Reece

The Wings of Love

I will row my boat on Muckross Lake when the grey of the dove
Comes down at the end of the day; and a quiet like prayer
Grows soft in your eyes, and among your fluttering hair
The red of the sun is mixed with the red of your cheek.
I will row you, O boat of my heart! Till our mouths have forgotten to speak
In the silence of love, broken only by trout that spring
And are gone, like a fairy’s finger that casts a ring
With the luck of the world for the hand that can hold it fast.
I will rest my on my oars, my eyes on your eyes, till our thoughts have passed
From the lake and the sky and the rings of the jumping fish;
Till our ears are filled from the reeds with a sudden swish
And a sound like the beating of flails in the time of corn.
We shall hold our breath while a wonderful thing is born
From the songs that were chanted by bards in the days gone by;
For a wild white swan shall be leaving the lake for the sky,
With the curve of her neck stretched out in a silver spear.
Oh! When the creak of her wings shall have brought her near,
We shall hear again a swish, and a beating of flails,
And a creaking of oars, and a sound like wind in sails,
As the mate of her heart shall follow her into the air.
O wings of my soul! We shall think of Angus and Caer
And Etain and Midir, that were changed into wild white swans
To fly round the ring of the heavens, through the dusks and the dawns,
Unseen by all but true lovers, till judgment day
Because they had loved for love only. O love! I will say,
For a woman and man with eternity ringing them round
And the heavens above and below them, a poor thing it is to be bound
To four low walls that will spill like a pedlar’s pack,
And a quilt that will run into holes, and a churn that will dry and crack
Oh! better than these, a dream in the night, or our heart’s mute prayer
That O’Donaghue, the enchanted man, should pass between water and air
And say, I will change them each into a wild white swan,
Like the lovers Angus and Midir, and their beloved ones, Caer and Etain
Because they have loved for love only, and have searched through the shadows of things
For the Heart of all hearts, though the fire of love, and the wine of love, and the wings.

- James H. Cousins

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"


- Emma Lazarus
New York City, 1883
(Inscribed on the Statue of Liberty)

A Letter to Ruth Stone

Now that you have caught sight
of the other side of darkness
the invisible side
so that you can tell
it is rising
first thing in the morning
and know it is there
all through the day

another sky
clear and unseen
has begun to loom
in your words
and another light is growing
out of their shadows
you can hear it

now you will be able
to envisage beyond
any words of mine
the color of these leaves
that you never saw
awake above the still valley
in the small hours
under the moon
three nights past the full

you know there was never
a name for that color

- W.S. Merwin

A Section of the Oconee Near Watkinsville

Before I get in,
the aluminum canoe floats flat on the shine
of water. Then I ruin its poise.
Middle of the first shoal through, I’m out,
stumbling through the ankle-breaking rocks.
Canoe free-floating downstream, without decision
or paddle. I lunge and bruise across the shallows
To get a forefinger in the rope eye on the stern.

June afternoon light. June afternoon water.

I know there’s a life being led in lightness,
out of my reach and discipline.
I keep trying to climb in its words,
and so unbalance us both.
The teacher’s example is everywhere open,
like a boat never tied up, no one in it,
that drifts day and night, metallic dragonfly
above the sunken log.

- Coleman Barks

Lanling Hermitage

Up high to a cloister of rock walls
I pushed aside clouds and climbed
a fine hike was what I hoped for
ignoring the dangers I reached my prize
but as light on the escarpment faded
and streams branched out like the lines in my hand
and the forests held nothing but loneliness
and the pinnacles disappeared into space
a man of the Way after reaching such heights
descended alone in the stillness of night
the mountain turned dark after sunset
a hundred springs echoed across the fall sky
my lamentable burdens reappeared intact
why can't I stay free of cares


- Wei Ying-wu
(translated from the Chinese by Red Pine)

The Word

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

between "green thread"
and "broccoli" you find
that you have penciled "sunlight."

Resting on the page, the word
is as beautiful, it touches you
as if you had a friend

and sunlight were a present
he had sent you from some place distant
as this morning -- to cheer you up,

and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing,

that also needs accomplishing
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue

but today you get a telegram,
from the heart in exile
proclaiming that the kingdom

still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,

- to any one among them
who can find the time,
to sit out in the sun and listen.

- Tony Hoagland

Recycling Day


In my neighborhood we put out three rolling cans
brown for trash, green for compost ( raw veggies and yard clippings only)
and blue for paper, plastics number 1 & 2 and aluminum.

At San Francisco General Hospital the green bin takes all food
dead or alive, animal, vegetable or mineral.
the blue accepts every hard plastic except number 7 (which can go in green if its made of compostable corn).

But I want to live in that other county--
you know, the one that takes it all.

On Monday they’ve got a green bin for envy, jealousy and greed,
Tuesday’s grey for despair, desperation and the desire to die.
Wednesday is puce and smells nasty –
bitterness, resentment and grudges you’ve held onto forever go in that one,
even the worms don’t like it,
so its sent off to the microbrial sludge plant for rehabilitation.

Thursday they do lavender for lost loves, unfulfilled dreams and broken hearts.
These get recycled into sperm and ovum
for people who can’t make their own children.

Friday is pink with orange polka dots for all thoughts obssessive,
addictive and self deprecating
And Saturday’s a rainbow can that the homeless folk like to rifle through
for sorrow and grief they wrap around their shoulders for warmth.

On Sunday the collectors go out for beer and hot dogs and watch football games,
while all the people in town wake at dawn to dance in the streets.
Faces like the next blank page in your favorite journal,
they dance to the silent songs in their minds
to the soft, strong beats of their coherent, empty hearts.

- Monnie Reba Efross

To Those Born After Us


I. Truly, I live in a time of darkness!
The innocent word is foolish. A smooth brow
Suggests lack of sensitivity. Those who are laughing
Just haven’t heard the terrible news yet.

What kind of times are these,
When a conversation about trees is almost a crime,
Because so many misdeeds are left unspoken?
That person there – calmly crossing the street,
Is probably no longer available
To his friends who are in trouble.

It’s true: I’m still earning a living.
But that’s pure coincidence.
Nothing in what I do justifies my eating my fill.
By chance, I am spared. (When my luck runs out, I’m lost).

People say to me: Eat and drink! Be glad that you can.
But how can I eat and drink, when what I eat
Is taken from the mouths of the hungry, and the
Water I drink deprives one who is thirsty?
But still…I eat and I drink.

I would like to be wise.
In ancient books one can read what is wise:
To not participate in the conflicts of the world,
To be without fear, in the short time we have,
Also to get along without violence,
To requite evil with good,
To not satisfy one’s wishes, but to forget them –
These things are considered wise.
All of them are beyond me.
Truly I live in a time of darkness!

II. I came into the cities at a time of disorder,
A time of hunger.
I came among people at a time of uproar,
And I was outraged with them.
So passed the time
I was given on Earth.

I took food between battles,
And laid down to sleep among killers.
I was careless in love,
And regarded nature without patience.
So passed the time
I was given on Earth.


In my time, all roads led to a swamp.
My language gave me away to the executioner.
I could do very little. But the rulers
Sat more securely without me – that was my hope.
So passed the time
I was given on Earth.

III. You, who are the ones who will rise up
From the flood in which we went down,
Remember,
When you speak of our weaknesses,
The dark times from which you escaped.

We travelled, changing countries more often than shoes,
Through the wars between classes, in despair
Because we found injustice, but no outrage.

And yet we do know this:
Hatred, even of meanness,
Distorts the visage.
Anger, even at injustice,
Makes hoarse the voice. Alas,
Though we wanted to prepare the ground for kindness,
We didn’t know how to be kind ourselves.

But you, when the time comes,
When human beings can help one another,
Remember us
With forbearance.

- Bertolt Brecht

A Day Comes

A day comes
when the mouth grows tired
of saying "I."

Yet it is occupied
still by a self which must speak.
Which still desires,
is curious.
Which believes it also has a right.

What to do?
The tongue consults with the teeth
it knows will survive
both mouth and self.

Which grin—it is their natural pose—
and say nothing.


- Jane Hirshfield

Heat

When I was little, young men like my uncles would croon.
Walking on the street or doing chores, a baritone groan:

Blue Skies. The blue of the night meets the gold of the day.
Body and Soul, Ramona, Ballerina, Too-ra-loo-ra-lay.

I asked my mother, why did the uncles sing like that?
Her three-syllable answer puzzled me: They’re in heat.

I remember it today as the young guy driving his van
With sound system blasting stops at a light, windows down.

We want to sound hot and magnetic. Or warm and charming -
Even the folk singer singing a song about global warming.

Folk music? All music is folk music, said a great musician:
I never heard a horse sing. (But they do play percussion.)

The souls deepest in hell don’t burn, they’re frozen in ice.
You’re full of hot air is an insult. But hot breath can be nice.

Your mother, color, class, region all co-author your drama:
Culture. A jerk politician can make hay in Oklahoma

By saying he doesn’t believe in Darwin, or climate change.
Let’s take a kayak to Nyack. Or be more at home on the range.

Vote for you, sigh for you, die for you. Is this the counterfoil
To sweetest music? Entropy, energy. Dead life come back as oil

To enable movement, music, power and light, heat, racket.
Cigarette lipstick traces, you know how we do, an airplane ticket.

Cool or hot music, cold calculation or comfort. Ancestral voice
Of pride or need: keening meaning — will we die of all this?

- Robert Pinsky

Let's Not Waste Time

If the sea is infinite and has nets,
if its music comes from the wave,
if the dawn is red and the sunset green,
if the forest is lust and the moon a caress,
if the rose opens and perfumes the house,
if the girl laughs and perfumes life,
if love comes and kisses me and leaves me trembling,
What does it matter,
while in my neighborhood there's a table without legs,
a child with no shoes or a bookkeeper coughing,
a banquet of potato peels,
a concert of dogs,
an opera of scabs.....
We need to become worried enough to cure the seeds,
bandage the hearts and write the poem
that will infect everyone.
And create the sentence which will embrace the whole world,
poets must smash swords,
must invent more colors and write Paternosters.
Letting laughter stay in the mouths of the tunnel,
not tell what's intimate, but sing in a choir,
not sing to the moon, not sing to the bride,
not write poems with ten-line stanzas, not fabricate sonnets,
Because we know how, we must yell at the mighty,
shout what I'm saying, that there are enough who live
howling under tin roofs with only what they have on their backs,
and mothers who don't comb their children's hair every day,
and fathers who wake up early and don't go to the theatre.
To clothe the humble placing our poems on their shoulders,
it's right to sing to the one who has no song and help him.
To kill usurers and with a rare patience convince them without
disgust,
To thresh in the fields, go down into a mine,
to be a diver for a week, visiting nursing homes,
jails, ruins, play with tiny children,
dance in the leprosaria.

Poets, let's not waste time, let's work,
because very little blood is reaching the heart.

- Gloria Fuertes
(from Anthology and Poems of the Slum, 1954)

Cutting Loose

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose
from all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.

Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell you where it is and you
can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path -- but that's when
you get going best, glad to be lost,
learning how real it is
here on earth, again and again.

- William Stafford

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

When the Horses Gallop Away from Us, It's a Good Thing

I always find it strange though I shouldn't how creatures don't
care for us the way we care for them.
Horses, for instance, and chipmunks, and any bird you'd name.
Empathy's only a one-way street.

And that's all right, I've come to believe.
It sets us up for ultimate things,
and penultimate ones as well.
It's a good lesson to have in your pocket when the Call comes to
call.

- Charles Wright

Something About Habit

Habit goes a long way
to explain us, but not
far enough. Take Mother.
Dying of leukemia, she wanted
to leave early for the doctor’s one morning
so that I could see a new restaurant.
“It’s a greenhouse and a restaurant!”
She didn’t know that at that point
she had five more days to live.

Restaurants, we know, are places
of pilgrimage for the middle class.
Mother wanted nothing more
than to keep living as she had.
Even when she could no longer eat
she kept going out with friends,
ordering, then staring at her food.
It wasn’t only habit, of course,
but the love of life itself.

Sometimes love can also bring us
to question a habit. Each morning
I receive an e-mail forecast
for the weather in two places: my home
and St. Louis, where Mother lived.

Home again after her funeral,
that e-mail looked strange one morning.
I kept thinking, “Why does it matter
what the weather is in St. Louis?”

- Max Reif

The Hunters

(after the /xam Bushman)

To see where the animals hide
is what we wish.
For the stars to take our hearts,
our hungry hearts,
and give us star-plenty, star-fullness,
is what we wish.

Always the stars are calling out:
"Tsau! Tsau!"
They are cursing the springbok's eyes
for men to kill.
Sitting outside in the cool of night
my grandfather spoke,
he said the springbok's eyes are cursed
by the sound of stars.

I listen for it now on summer nights
the "tsau! tsau!" of stars.

My grandfather said to the Ant Egg Star
when she rose,
"Take away my heart and change it
for a star-heart,
so my hunger, my burning hunger
will be satisfied.
I want a star's belly which is always full
and star arms.
My arrows stray and the game gets away
but stars aim well."

He sat down, he was silent,
he sharpened his arrows.

- Harold Farmer

Housecleaning

I packed up my ambition and sent it to the Salvation Army,
hoping for a tax deduction

hoping its remnants might better serve some other lost soul.



I washed my ego carefully
and put it at the curb with the other recyclables,

hoping it would come back in a milder form

seven generations from now.

I dismantled my arrogance
and bubble wrapped it for shipping to far-off places
more in need of my aggressive idealism,

hoping its use would better balance justice in the world.


I turned my jacket of pride inside out
and found humility hiding in the lining.

My karma exhausted by this cleaning, I took a nap.

And awoke in the autumn afternoon light
to find the last of the golden summer lilies in bloom.

- Laura Freebairn-Smith

Sympathy

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft though the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opens,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals--
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-wing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting--
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,--
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings--
I know why the caged bird sings!

- Paul Laurence Dunbar (1899)