Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Sing with Liberty: Psalm of Protest 15

Sing with Liberty,
For the Mother of Exiles weeps at our sunset gates,
Weeps for her battered proclamation
Twisted to shut our sea-washed shores
To the innocent
Fleeing violence and deprivation.

Sing with Liberty,
For we too were once among the tired and the poor,
Our parents and grandparents
Were the huddled masses
Journeying to a land where they could breathe free.

Sing with Liberty,
Sing with Emma,
Sing with the generations,
The wretched refuse
Washed upon our teeming shores,
Who built this nation,
Who hold us accountable to defend our legacy.

Sing with Liberty,
For from her beacon-hand
Still glows a world-wide welcome,
Flickering now,
But not yet extinguished.
And we will continue to sing with Liberty
The song of freedom,
Beckoning the homeless,
The tempest-tost,
To the lamp at our golden door.

- Alden Solovy

Woodstock

In the mud of a tire rut,
we were the filaments.

We said if Mrs. Agnew could make music
on Spiro’s flute

we said the clubs in the hands of the Chicago cops
would liquefy.

The trees shook with the throb of steel.

What did we do to be so red, white, and blue?

We were inexorable
like the dialectic unraveling from Hanoi
to the Jacksonian grass.

We were the inebriates of vitamin C and cocaine,
the daughters of the gray flannel suit.

And when the shaman spread his yellow robe like the sun
he was all teeth and amp

and what were we?

- Peter Balakian

Shine, Perishing Republic


While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass
hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make
earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and
home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly
long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing
republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening
center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left
the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught—they say—God, when he
walked on earth.


- Robinson Jeffers

Lightening the Load

The first thing we have to do
is to notice
that we've loaded down the camel
with so much baggage
we'll never get through the desert alive.
Something has to go.

Then we can begin to dump
the thousand things
we've brought along
until even the camel has to go
and we're walking barefoot
on the desert sand.

There's no telling what will happen then.
But I've heard that someone,
walking in this way,
has seen a burning bush.

- Francis Dorff

The Tamalpais Solution

When asked what he did to take care of himself,
her father John would reply, “That mountain,
three times a week, I walk up that mountain.”

That eminence where meandering plants thrive
in serpentine soils, where the redwood creek
drains into the John Muir-discovered woods,
and where Arroyo Corte Madera del Presidio
cascades to Richardson’s Bay opening radiantly
upon the Golden Gate—indeed that mountain
dominating the horizon beyond his front door
as it had long before doors and houses,
animals, neighbors, humanity, et al.

This mountain looming many ages before
oak and Douglas-fir began sprouting,
eons prior to any Scotsman David Douglas
at Scone Palace 1837 where the sweet quick bread
Scone (rhyming with “John”) also was born.

When the area began budding with people,
the coastal Miwok believed that a witch,
not a good witch so many now prefer, but
a malignant scheming witch cast poisonous
soap root like a fish net over this mountain
where she dwelt glutted with venom at its peak
where no Miwok brave dared tread lest
long-imagined horrors would engulf them.

After pausing for awhile at the top,
John looks over all that has been given,
sits to rest, unwraps his sandwich of
salami, swiss, mustard and lettuce
on rye bread and determines that for now,
“All is good,” and makes preparations
for his return home to the foothills.

With his back to the mountain’s peak,
John misses the Miwok witch, her arms
spread in malevolent welcome—
he, descending, unwittingly escapes
one more time until he will not again.

- Ed Coletti

God Breaks the Heart Again and Again Until It Stays Open
after a quote from Sufi Inayat Khan

But what if my heart is a 7-Eleven after its third daytime robbery in a week?

What if my heart is a piñata trashed to tissue and peppermint shrapnel?

What if my heart is a peeled mango bearing an emerald housefly?

What if my heart is an air conditioner weeping a rosary of rusty tears?

What if my heart is Sebastião Salgado’s sinkhole swallowing another child?

What if my heart is Death Valley in wide-view Cinemascope?

What if my heart is a chupacabrón chanting, Build the wall?

What if my heart is the creepy uncle’s yawning zipper?

What if my heart is a Pentecostal babbling a river of tongues?

What if my heart is the cross-eyed Jesus bought at the Poteet flea market?

What if my heart is El Paso, Texas, in bed with the corpse of Ciudad Juárez?

What if my heart is unhinged from the weight of its lice-ridden wings?

What then for an encore, oh my soul, when you have blessed me a
hundredfold?

- Sandra Cisneros

Oath of Disloyalty

I am a disloyal Jew.
I am not loyal to a political party.
Nor will I be loyal to dictators and mad kings.
I am not loyal to walls or cages.
I am not loyal to taunts or tweets.
I am not loyal to hatred, to Jew-baiting, to the gloating connivings of white supremacy.

I am a disloyal Jew.
I am not loyal to any foreign power.
Nor to abuse of power at home.
I am not loyal to a legacy of conquest, erasure and exploitation.
I am not loyal to stories that tell me who I should hate.

I am a loyal Jew.
I am loyal to the inconveniences of kindness.
I am loyal to the dream of justice.
I am loyal to this suffering Earth
And to all life.
I am not loyal to any founding fathers.
But I am loyal to the children who will come
And to the quality of world we leave them.
I am not loyal to what America has become.
But I am loyal to what America could be.
I am loyal to Emma Lazarus. To huddled masses.
To freedom and welcome,
Holiness, hope and love.



- Irwin Keller


Listen to Irwin chanting this: https://www.irwinkeller.com/itzikswe...-of-disloyalty

I wear my disloyalty like a badge of honor

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

- Li-Young Lee

For Nellie Jo

I remember the landscape in your eyes
alone and petrified, we took you in
coaxing with a Christmas ham from a neighbor was good
and to seal the bet, our diplomatic Rottweiler befriended
it took the edge off being lost on a holiday
your thin matte black coat and nails worn rough
was telling enough
we never got the full story where you’d been and
weeks in, when no one claimed you
we gave you a name
soon we found how others were unkind to you
it arrived in your bad manners and temperament
biting white jagged teeth
insecure with bitches less than you
we pulled you off fights by the hind legs
we didn’t know you
but your softness belied the toughness
when we taught you to swim, you were all legs
pounding in the green water
over and over your target
during the summer in Grass Valley
it seemed you found your calling then
when the idea of a home became easier,
we were troubled in our marriage and
you showed us how persistence and goofiness
were the best tricks to a happiness
and when you stopped chasing the ball
we forgot how to play too
but you stayed with us
much later, one Thanksgiving
when whole bowls of water
emptied onto the wood floors telling us how you’d fallen
and the imminent months ahead
increased with medications
we doubted if we could care for you
in the same carefree way you did us
but we tried
the days ensued, opened slowly
and slower beside you
we didn’t know when the end
so we asked you
for some sign on the road to Stop
and when you did, it was clear (enough)
on a searing summer blue day
trembling like in the beginning
we touched your thick down for comfort
and held onto you, but first
we brought you to the lush, open field where you once played
when it was time to go
your deep brown eyes blinked a few more times into mine
and closed in again
towards home.

- Danielle Bryant

Time’s Up

Lately I’ve been crawling out
Of your machine.
I’ve been removing your phallus
From my temple and releasing
My sisters from your chains.

Lately I’ve been wearing black
Through the hot summer days
Because my grief is stronger than the sun.

There is no recompense for all I have lost,
Even were you to bow your head
And beg forgiveness.

I used to believe I would
Recover my joy.
Now, as I wrest my sovereignty
From your calloused hands,
I will settle for freedom.

- Jean Redus

How Much

When the time comes
and you are still not ready
and everything you did has added up to
just this, because who wants
to go into the cold dark
and after all this maybe
is your only one -- this life
and did you love it
what you were given? How much
did you waste wishing and weeping
and gnashing your teeth
when you could have danced --
when you could have
what you are leaving now


- Elizabeth C. Herron

Why California Will Never Be Like Tuscany

There must have been huge oaks and pines, cedars,
maybe madrone,
in Tuscany and Umbria long ago.
A few centuries after wood was gone, they began to build with
brick and stone.

Brick and stone farmhouses, solid, fireproof,
steel shutters and doors.

But farming changed.
60,000 vacant solid fireproof Italian farmhouses
on the market in 1970,
scattered across the land.

Sixty thousand affluent foreigners,
to fix them, learn to cook, and write a book.

But in California, houses all are wood —
roads pushed through, sewers dug, lines laid underground —
hundreds of thousands, made of strandboard, sheetrock,
plaster —.

They won’t be here 200 years from now — they’ll burn or rot.
No handsome solid second homes for

Thousand-year later wealthy
Melanesian or Eskimo artists and writers here,

— oak and pine will soon return.


- Gary Snyder

Things to Love


The determination of hate

how damp wood likes to hiss

the way water speaks with stone

the impermanence of fire

the permanence of photographs

the victory of two over one

weeds’ sovereignty over lawns

the conviction of nettles to belong

the slurpy sound of bracken being ripped from the earth

how air lives its freedom and freedom loves the air

being swallowed whole by the ocean

blue flame skies at Fanore

the suddenness of freckles after sun

whiskey’s lucidity

the stern humour in coffee

the victory of one over two

blood, wine, the razzamatazz of dandelions

butterflies with ragged wings.


This planet and its song

offerings everywhere

should we choose to look and see

- Aoife Reilly

Proclamation

Whereas the world is a house on fire;
Whereas the nations are filled with shouting;
Whereas hope seems small, sometimes
a single bird on a wire
left by migration behind.
Whereas kindness is seldom in the news
and peace an abstraction
while war is real;
Whereas words are all I have;
Whereas my life is short;
Whereas I am afraid;
Whereas I am free –despite all
fire and anger and fear;
Be it therefore resolved a song
shall be my calling – a song
not yet made shall be vocation
and peaceful words the work
of my remaining days.

- Kim Stafford

Mr. Duffy

“Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”
~ James Joyce from The Dubliners.

He didn’t talk about it much
Who would believe him
He knew the truth of it
He lived a short distance from his body

None of his clothes liked his body
He looked like he dressed
in a moment of forgetfulness
He knew this

Mr. Duffy thought about yoga a lot
It could really be good for him
Stretching and all that
There was just that one problem

Maybe a lot of problems
But the big one
He lived a short distance from his body

He noticed it first on the playground
You know when the ball comes straight at you
And it goes right through you
He knew it should have hurt

He felt nothing then
He feels nothing now
He still lives a short distance from his body

- Doug von Koss

The Storm

1

Against the stone breakwater,
Only an ominous lapping,
While the wind whines overhead,
Coming down from the mountain,
Whistling between the arbors, the winding terraces;
A thin whine of wires, a rattling and flapping of leaves,
And the small street-lamp swinging and slamming against
the lamp pole.

Where have the people gone?
There is one light on the mountain.

2

Along the sea-wall, a steady sloshing of the swell,
The waves not yet high, but even,
Coming closer and closer upon each other;
A fine fume of rain driving in from the sea,
Riddling the sand, like a wide spray of buckshot,
The wind from the sea and the wind from the mountain contending,
Flicking the foam from the whitecaps straight upward into the darkness.

A time to go home!--
And a child's dirty shift billows upward out of an alley,
A cat runs from the wind as we do,
Between the whitening trees, up Santa Lucia,
Where the heavy door unlocks,
And our breath comes more easy--
Then a crack of thunder, and the black rain runs over us, over
The flat-roofed houses, coming down in gusts, beating
The walls, the slatted windows, driving
The last watcher indoors, moving the cardplayers closer
To their cards, their anisette.

3

We creep to our bed, and its straw mattress.
We wait; we listen.
The storm lulls off, then redoubles,
Bending the trees half-way down to the ground,
Shaking loose the last wizened oranges in the orchard,
Flattening the limber carnations.

A spider eases himself down from a swaying light-bulb,
Running over the coverlet, down under the iron bedstead.
Water roars into the cistern.

We lie closer on the gritty pillow,
Breathing heavily, hoping--
For the great last leap of the wave over the breakwater,
The flat boom on the beach of the towering sea-swell,
The sudden shudder as the jutting sea-cliff collapses,
And the hurricane drives the dead straw into the living pine-tree.

- Theodore Roethke

The Cure

We think we get over things.
We don’t get over things.
Or say, we get over the measles
but not a broken heart.
We need to make that distinction.
The things that become part of our experience
never become less a part of our experience.
How can I say it?
The way to “get over” a life is to die.
Short of that, you move with it,
let the pain be pain,
not in the hope that it will vanish
but in the faith that it will fit in,
find its place in the shape of things
and be then not any less pain but true to form.
Because anything natural has an inherent shape
and will flow towards it.
And a life is as natural as a leaf.
That’s what we’re looking for:
not the end of a thing but the shape of it.
Wisdom is seeing the shape of your life
without obliterating (getting over) a single
instant of it.

- Albert Huffstickler

Theories of Time and Space


You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one—
by—one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion—dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on a mangrove swamp—buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry—tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph—who you were—
will be waiting when you return

- Natasha Trethewey

Singularity


(after Stephen Hawking)

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money —

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you. Remember?

There was no Nature. No
them. No tests

to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf or if

the coral reef feels pain. Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up to what we were
— when we were ocean and before that

to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all — nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was? before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All everything home

- Marie Howe

Practice

I touch my toes.

When I was a child,
this was difficult.
Now I touch my toes daily.

In 2012, in Sanford, Florida,
someone nearby was touching her toes before bed.

Three weeks ago,
in the Philippines or Myanmar, someone was stretching.

Tomorrow, someone elsewhere will bend
first to one side, then the other.

I also do ten push-ups, morning and evening.

Women’s push-ups,
from the knees.
They resemble certain forms of religious bowing.

In place of one, two, four, seven,
I count the names of incomprehension: Sanford, Ferguson, Charleston.
Aleppo, Sarajevo, Nagasaki.

I never reach: Troy, Ur.

I have done this for years now.
Bystander, listener. One of the lucky.
I do not seem to grow stronger.

- Jane Hirshfield

For All

Ah to be alive
on a mid-September morn
fording a stream
barefoot, pants rolled up,
holding boots, pack on,
sunshine, ice in the shallows,
northern rockies.

Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters
stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes
cold nose dripping
singing inside
creek music, heart music,
smell of sun on gravel.

I pledge allegiance

I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.

- Gary Snyder

My Old Friend
for all of my old friends

My old friend lives far away
from me and
I live far away
from my old friend.
We send email back and forth
from time to time,
a photo, a song, or
something in the news.
I am a part of my
old friend’s life,
only a part,
and my old friend is a
part of my life, too,
but just
a part.
We share good memories.
One day my email will not be answered.
Or perhaps
one day I will not
be here to open
my old friend’s message.
One of us will become
pure memory.
Sooner or later
both of us will
disappear into the
land of eternal forgetting.

- Eric T. MacKnight

Rise and Fall

Let go of fear
and rest in that which is.
For peace, like love,
comes to those who allow it.

Let go of fear
and rest in stillness.
Watch the breath rise...
and fall.

Watch the tide rise...
and fall.
Watch towers rise...
and fall.

Watch walls rise...
and fall.
Watch statues rise...
and fall.

Watch empires rise...
and fall.
Watch the breath rise...
and fall.

Let go of fear
and rest in the arms
of the One
who has always held you,
the One who holds
atoms and empires
and oceans and stars.

Let go of fear
and watch what happens next.

- Larry Robinson

The Turning

There were so many times it seemed impossible;
Everything getting worse and worse
Suffering, hopelessness, corruption;
Dire news every day.
Just too much wrong,
And always
On the dark horizon
The looming sentence of our demise.

It was in everything
Metastasized like a cancer;
A life threatening hatred,
Let loose to poison our hearts.

But then, slowly,
imperceptibly at first,
when all hope seemed lost,
Things started to turn.

A girl from Sweden,
A demonstration of youth,
A regulation that held;
A town that stood its ground,
A truth that was louder than lies.
A fire that was extinguished,
A kindness that was extended,
A moral fiber that poked through the tattered web
and began the mending.

It gathered strength in
The steady march of the silent, electric cars,
the gleaming solar panels,
and the Greening, Oh the Greening,
everywhere we could
The rooftops and sidewalks, and windowsills, spilling into sunlight.
We’d hardly noticed the birds were missing
until they began to sing again.

Eventually the corruption gave way
Like corroded metal,
Collapsing under the weight of people’s hearts.
Politicians falling through their selfish webs,
First one, then another,
Until like dominoes, they were scattered on the dust heap of history.

The stench was gone.
The hatred just no fun anymore;
Even the worst had no taste for it.

We picked up the pieces, scattered over the land.
We were quiet.
We were humbled.
We were careful.
We listened.
We sang.
We told new stories.

We barely even noticed when it began.
But looking back,
It was happening all along.

And then, at last, we laughed.


- Anodea Judith

Border Line

Acorn woodpeckers gather in
early morning on the bare-limbed oak
calling Jacob, Jacob, Jacob…
But first comes the sparrow hopping
through the grass, Queen Anne’s lace hangs
in the air as I step toward the sloping bushes
to pluck blackberries—
a bowl of stillness and stealth—
while below, a doe with her young
dips and crosses over our neighbor’s line—
no questions asked.


- Raphael Block

Soham Soham Soham


I am, I am, I am

Havayah, Havayah, Havyah

Sanskrit, English, Hebrew

It all says the same thing

Being, Universe, Ultimate Realty

God

Soham, Soham, Soham

Sooooo... the sound of inhalation.

Hummmm... the sound of exhalation.

Am, Am, Am

repeated, it quickly becomes

Ma, ma, ma

The first word spoken by a child

In any language

From any land

Mama, Eema, Mam, 妈妈, أمي

It’s all the same

Does the child really say “mother”?

Perhaps she says, “ I am.”

I am here, I am here, I am here.

Here I am, here I am, here I am.

Hineini

Connected to the universe.

A part of being

Ultimate reality in me and me in it.

Havayah, Havayah, Havayah

The ineffable name

Present tense of “to be.”

In a language that lacks that verb in that form.

Not Adonai, or Lord or even Eternal One

Just being

Not Yahweh, or Jehovah or even Yahoo.

Just ultimate presence. Here. Now.

Better pronounced as breath in, breath out, breath in, breath out.

Yud - inhale

Heh - exhale

Vav - inhale

Heh - exhale

Breathing in light

Breathing out, as through a window.

Soham, Soham, Soham

So

Ham

In

Out

Yud

Heh

Here

Now

Am

I

- Daniel Gropper

(Soham or Sohum (सो ऽहम् so 'ham or so 'Hum[1]) is a Hindu mantra, meaning "I am He/That" in Sanskrit.[2][3]

In Vedic philosophy it means identifying oneself with the universe or ultimate reality.[2]

The mantra is also inverted from so 'ham (the sandhi of saḥ + aham) to ham + sa.)

In The End
For Eliot, September 7, 2004

And after everything, what is there to say, really,
to an animal whose death
one has long been expecting?
Perhaps it’s best not to say anything.
Better just to sit with him—
to stroke the fur that no one’s washed in months,
to scratch the ears which no longer hear,
to slowly shift that golden flop of a friend
to the spot he’d loved the best:
a little hilltop overlooking a harbor
where the boats are forever turning
toward the morning light,
where the heron is always just now landing, its ripple a whisper.

And careful with the legs, which stopped working, forever,
sometime last night, you turn him around gently
so that even though he can’t see so well his body can remember.
And that’s when he raises his fine head just one more time
to honor this slender, splendid patch of life—
the geese flying high and North forever,
the boats with their delicate dance.
He holds his head that way for several minutes though it hurts—
one more time smelling what’s West,
and the breeze dallies one final time
in the soft fur of his chest.

And that’s when you whisper, though you’re weeping
“It will be okay, it will be okay.”
And he shifts a thick, gentle paw, and somehow it finds your hand.
And may you have the sense, then, to sit with him in silence,
and to understand what he’s been saying all along—
to know, at last, what it means to love the earth this way—
to endure this kind of pain
just for one more morning’s breeze,
and the boats, and the blue,
so much blue.

- Lisa Starr

Praise What Comes

surprising as unplanned kisses, all you haven't deserved
of days and solitude, your body's immoderate good health
that lets you work in many kinds of weather. Praise

talk with just about anyone. And quiet intervals, books
that are your food and your hunger; nightfall and walks
before sleep. Praising these for practice, perhaps

you will come at last to praise grief and the wrongs
you never intended. At the end there may be no answers
and only a few very simple questions: did I love,

finish my task in the world? Learn at least one
of the many names of God? At the intersections,
the boundaries where one life began and another

ended, the jumping-off places between fear and
possibility, at the ragged edges of pain,
did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy?

- Jeanne Lohmann

She Dreamed of Cows


I knew a woman who washed her hair and bathed
her body and put on the nightgown she’d worn
as a bride and lay down with a .38 in her right hand.
Before she did the thing, she went over her life.
She started at the beginning and recalled everything‹
all the shame, sorrow, regret and loss.
This took her a long time into the night
and a long time crying out in rage and grief and disbelief‹
until sleep captured her and bore her down.

She dreamed of a green pasture and a green oak tree.
She dreamed of cows. She dreamed she stood
under the tree and the brown and white cows
came slowly up from the pond and stood near her.
Some butted her gently and they licked her bare arms
with their great coarse drooling tongues. Their eyes, wet as
shining water, regarded her. They came closer and began to
press their warm flanks against her, and as they pressed
an almost unendurable joy came over her and
lifted her like a warm wind and she could fly.
She flew over the tree and she flew over the field and
she flew with the cows.

When the woman woke, she rose and went to the mirror.
She looked a long time at her living self.
Then she went down to the kitchen which the sun had made all
yellow, and she made tea. She drank it at the table, slowly,
all the while touching her arms where the cows had licked.

- Norah Pollard