Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

A Map to the Next World
for Desiray Kierra Chee

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for
those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged
from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.
For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It
must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it
was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the
altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our
children while we sleep.

Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born
there of nuclear anger.

Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to
disappear.

We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to
them by their personal names.

Once we knew everything in this lush promise.

What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the
map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav-
ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.

An imperfect map will have to do, little one.

The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s
small death as he longs to know himself in another.

There is no exit.

The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a
spiral on the road of knowledge.

You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking
from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh
deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.

They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.

And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world
there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.

You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song
she is singing.

Fresh courage glimmers from planets.

And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you
will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.

When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they
entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.

You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.

A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the
destruction.

Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our
tribal grounds.

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was
once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

- Joy Harjo

Theme for English B


The instructor said,

Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you—
Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:

It's not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.) Me—who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?

Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me—
although you're older—and white—
and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.

- Langston Hughes

The Story

Once upon a time the farmer's wife
told it to her children while she scrubbed potatoes.
There were wise ravens in it, and a witch
who flew into such a rage she turned to brass.

The story wandered about the countryside until
adopted by the palace waiting maids
who endowed it with three magic golden rings
and a handsome prince named Felix.

Now it had both strength and style and visited
the household of the jolly merchant
where it was seated by the fire and given
a fat gray goose and a comic chambermaid.

One day alas the story got drunk and fell
in with a crowd of dissolute poets.
They drenched it with moonlight and fever and fed it
words from which it never quite recovered.

Then it was old and haggard and disreputable,
carousing late at night with defrocked scholars
and the swaggering sailors in Rattlebone Alley.
That's where the novelists found it.

- Fred Chappell

won’t you celebrate with me

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

- Lucille Clifton

Were I a Martyr

I want no flowers,
no epoch of union,
no dawn of disunion.
I want no flowers
for I am the loveliest flower.
I want no kisses
if for a true wrist
I must hold some knight –
no epoch of marriage,
no dawn of divorce,
no widow’s fever.
I want no kisses
if, along with love, I become a martyr.
I want no tears
over the coffin or me, a corpse.
I want no cherry tree of sympathy
dragged to the walls of my grave,
no flowers or kisses,
no tears or miseries.
Bring nothing.
Hold nothing.
I die as a homeland without a flag, without a voice.
I am grateful.
I want nothing.
I will accept nothing.

- Kajal Ahmad

(translated from the Kurdish by Darya Ali and Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse )

Autumn Sky

In my great grandmother's time,
All one needed was a broom
To get to see places
And give the geese a chase in the sky.

•

The stars know everything,
So we try to read their minds.
As distant as they are,
We choose to whisper in their presence.

•

Oh Cynthia,
Take a clock that has lost its hands
For a ride.
Get me a room at Hotel Eternity
Where Time likes to stop now and then.

•

Come, lovers of dark corners,
The sky says,
And sit in one of my dark corners.
There are tasty little zeroes
In the peanut dish tonight.

- Charles Simic

Oration: Half-Moon in Vermont

A horse is shivering flies off its ribs, grazing
Through the stench of a sodden leachfield.

On the broken stairs of a trailer
A laughing fat girl in a T-shirt is pumping
Milk from her swollen breasts, cats
Lapping at the trails. There's a sheen of rhubarb
On her dead fingernail. It's a humid morning.

Tonight, with the moon washing some stars away,
She'll go searching for an old bicycle in the shed;
She'll find his father's treasures:
Jars full of bent nails, a lacquered bass,
And the scythe with spiders
Nesting in the emptiness of the blade
And in the bow of its pine shaft.
Milling junk in the dark,

She'll forget the bicycle, her getaway,
And rescue
A color photograph of an old matinee idol.
Leaving the shed, she'll startle

An owl out on the marsh. By November
It will be nailed through the breast to the barn.

In a year the owl will go on a shelf in the shed
Where in thirty years there will be a music box
Containing a lock of hair, her rosaries,
Her birth certificate,

And an impossibly sheer, salmon-pink scarf. What
I want to know of my government is

Doesn't poverty just fucking break your heart?

- Norman Dubie

Findings

dear god,
I keep finding you in my poems,
don’t I?
I didn’t know I was a believer,
but I keep calling you out
and you keep showing up
like you belong here,
right in the middle of my thoughts,
don’t you?
like you’re at home in my house
even if I’m not in yours;
that makes you a generous god,
if not persistent to the point of obsessive
for not giving up on me
knowing I keep giving up on you
yet calling your names out
as if I had the copyright to them. Oh lord,
and you never once threatened me with an infringement suit
or even complained.
you just sat here,
in the middle of my words,
like you were some regal force of nature
resplendent
glorious
the perfect reference
inexplicable
yet understood on every level
and could rise above even my half-truth invocation of your good name
as if we were partners in this crime,
when it is I who am the criminal
and you, the divine, forgiving law
that is partner in all things
believed or not

- Gary Turchin

The Well of Grief

Those who will not
slip beneath the still surface
on the well of grief,
turning down through its black water
to the place where we cannot breathe
will never know the source
from which we drink the secret water,
cold and pure,
nor find in the darkness, glimmering,
the small round coins thrown by those
who wished for something else.

- David Whyte

Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913


Vivas to those who have fail'd!
And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!
- Walt Whitman


I. The Red Flag


The newspapers said the strikers would hoist
the red flag of anarchy over the silk mills
of Paterson. At the strike meeting, a dyers' helper
from Naples rose as if from the steam of his labor,
lifted up his hand and said here is the red flag:
brightly stained with dye for the silk of bow ties
and scarves, the skin and fingernails boiled away
for six dollars a week in the dye house.


He sat down without another word, sank back
into the fumes, name and face rubbed off
by oblivion's thumb like a Roman coin
from the earth of his birthplace dug up
after a thousand years, as the strikers
shouted the only praise he would ever hear.


II. The River Floods the Avenue


He was the other Valentino, not the romantic sheik
and bullfighter of silent movie palaces who died too young,
but the Valentino standing on his stoop to watch detectives
hired by the company bully strikebreakers onto a trolley
and a chorus of strikers bellowing the banned word scab.
He was not a striker or a scab, but the bullet fired to scatter
the crowd pulled the cork in the wine barrel of Valentino's back.
His body, pale as the wings of a moth, lay beside his big-bellied wife.


Two white-veiled horses pulled the carriage to the cemetery.
Twenty thousand strikers walked behind the hearse, flooding
the avenue like the river that lit up the mills, surging around
the tombstones. Blood for blood, cried Tresca: at this signal,
thousands of hands dropped red carnations and ribbons
into the grave, till the coffin evaporated in a red sea.


III. The Insects in the Soup


Reed was a Harvard man. He wrote for the New York magazines.
Big Bill, the organizer, fixed his good eye on Reed and told him
of the strike. He stood on a tenement porch across from the mill
to escape the rain and listen to the weavers. The bluecoats
told him to move on. The Harvard man asked for a name to go
with the number on the badge, and the cops tried to unscrew
his arms from their sockets. When the judge asked his business,
Reed said: Poet. The judge said: Twenty days in the county jail.


Reed was a Harvard man. He taught the strikers Harvard songs,
the tunes to sing with rebel words at the gates of the mill. The strikers
taught him how to spot the insects in the soup, speaking in tongues
the gospel of One Big Union and the eight-hour day, cramming the jail
till the weary jailers had to unlock the doors. Reed would write:
There's war in Paterson. After it was over, he rode with Pancho Villa.


IV. The Little Agitator


The cops on horseback charged into the picket line.
The weavers raised their hands across their faces,
hands that knew the loom as their fathers' hands
knew the loom, and the billy clubs broke their fingers.
Hannah was seventeen, the captain of the picket line,
the Joan of Arc of the Silk Strike. The prosecutor called her
a little agitator. Shame, said the judge; if she picketed again,
he would ship her to the State Home for Girls in Trenton.


Hannah left the courthouse to picket the mill. She chased
a strikebreaker down the street, yelling in Yidish the word
for shame. Back in court, she hissed at the judge's sentence
of another striker. Hannah got twenty days in jail for hissing.
She sang all the way to jail. After the strike came the blacklist,
the counter at her husband's candy store, the words for shame.


V. Vivas to Those Who Have Failed


Strikers without shoes lose strikes. Twenty years after the weavers
and dyers' helpers returned hollow-eyed to the loom and the steam,
Mazziotti led the other silk mill workers marching down the avenue
in Paterson, singing the old union songs for five cents more an hour.
Once again the nightsticks cracked cheekbones like teacups.
Mazziotti pressed both hands to his head, squeezing red ribbons
from his scalp. There would be no buffalo nickel for an hour's work
at the mill, for the silk of bow ties and scarves. Skull remembered wood.


The brain thrown against the wall of the skull remembered too:
the Sons of Italy, the Workmen's Circle, Local 152, Industrial
Workers of the World, one-eyed Big Bill and Flynn the Rebel Girl
speaking in tongues to thousands the prophecy of an eight-hour day.
Mazziotti's son would become a doctor, his daughter a poet.
Vivas to those who have failed: for they become the river.


- Martín Espada

After the Fire

What was it like to run
forced from my home forever?
A new life to live in a nightmare
every day tears
hard acceptance and fear
then to find daylight
in all the living so bright
it burns
a rose’s heady sweetness of home
is the same as
the haunting of wildfire smoke

The support from so many
who kept us from falling
we couldn’t have survived without
receiving receiving receiving
help felt like a heart attack
stretching my big pride pushing it aside
breaking open
an already broken heart
grief breathed into my bones of lead
a violence
stuck there in the deep

Was it all a dream?
After
we were refugees
I remember swimming at a hotel in Healdsburg
floating in abundant blue
a cool balm a boon in a strange town
not home
nothing of ours known
but this little box of a room
held us from sinking

drinking helped us drift to lift
the weight of loss to forgetfulness
dizzy we’d fall into bed
welcoming the surrender
we became water

surreal days followed more surreal days
and a searing pain without end.

- Danielle Bryant

donald’s trumpet


donald’s trumpet
blares itself into
the peaceful dawn
shattering the coming light
into shards of shadow

bends the truth of trees
until they
abandon their nature
and wish they were
bushes

birds
leave behind
their co-opted tweets and twitters
and sway dumb
above the dark swamps

children and dogs
turn the other way

the deaf tell us
donald’s trumpet
is making
patriotic
music

- Vilma Olsvary Ginzberg

Falling
In these awe-filled days of fire and flood
We watch and wait and wonder
When that fierce hand
Might reach at last for us.

Those of us not yet touched by calamity
Quake, knowing in our bones
That though we may be spared
This time, time will level us all.

No magic amulets, no prayers,
Good deeds or good looks
Can promise protection
From our terminal condition.

And those who have watched a child
Swept forever from our arms
Or fled the flames that swallowed
Our hopes and our memories
Or hid from the bombs
Or the predator’s gaze
Know that nothing now will ever be the same -

As if anything ever were.
For all of us are falling
Like ashes, like rain,
Like petals or leaves;
But we all are falling together.

And if we knew, in truth,
There was nowhere to land,
Tell me: could we know the difference
Between falling and flying?

- Larry Robinson

Paradise Lost/Regained
(occasioned by Donald Trump’s brief visit to
the ruins of Paradise, CA —November 17, 2018)


Swing thuribles lit with sweet flickering
frankincense and cedar shavings over Paradise
this place where everything aspired to be pleasant
when no thing or place ever truly is all good
Purge us with hyssop and we shall be clean
Bathe us in the rose water used in Arabia to clean the Kaaba
and in Persia to prepare graves for the dead
For evil must be washed away that death have not dominion
where the land will be reclaimed from possession by monsters

Bring forth the tincture of a billion blossoms
The evil creature hath been amongst us
befouling our wounded land
with the stench of offal from its breath
condemning each of us to its lingering presence
our fate far worse if we do nothing to dissipate
the foul choking blackening smoke that
the monster has belched forth and left us
wearily sickening all the more so that he’d been
here amongst us during another time of great sorrow


Gather sage and cedar to smudge the sacred places twice destroyed
first by fire then by sacrilege to the ancients the Mechoopda
of the Maidu people whose spirits reside in the central Sierras
in the watershed area of the Feather and American rivers
as well as in Humbug Valley Maidu meaning Man
will persist watching over this land so rudely visited by fire and evil
Today we chant with them to Creator to restore the trees and native
plants, grasses, animals ... Everything out here is connected to the lives of
our Maidu ancestors whom we protect and by whom we are protected
that such affronts to each and every Mechoopda too shall pass beyond

- Ed Coletti

Open

It is a small step to remember
how life led to this
moment's hesitation.

How the door to the deeper world
opens, letting the body fall at last,
toward the few griefs it can call its own.

Oh yes, I know. Our wings catch fire
in that downward flight
and we come to earth afraid
we can never fly again.

But then we always knew
heaven would be a desperate place.
Everything you desired coming
in one fearful moment
to greet you.

Your full presence only in rest
and the love that asks nothing.
The rest where you lie down
and are no longer found at all.

- David Whyte




"Be joyful though you have considered all the facts."
- Wendell Berry

Little Thing

You know
I have big dreams
but right now it's the
little things
that shockingly matter
"it's the little things"
my mom and dad always say
just on any old
ordinary day
not even in the face of fire
imagine how much
they would love
the nuthatches today
the tender connections
the glass of water
clean pillow
silent fox

- Amy Elizabeth Robinson

Sequel to the Woman with the Suitcase


October 2017: after the Tubbs fire:
​I had become the woman with the suitcase, not grasping my grandmother’s adventure
​to get out but learning to navigate my own where I could not go back in

the same purple suitcase sits
opened on a wooded floor
twenty-four months later

I found a way back in
carved out a tenuous sense of place
and though flames threaten to annihilate once again
there’s a new sensation inside
not intimidated by Nixle warnings, smoky air
the sounds of air tankers flying overhead

this time I will not be broken by conflagration
I have traveled the familiar road before
I know how to prance like a bedraggled marionette
through the insurance hoops and debris chaos
I know about wattles and how to be patient
I know how to say no, to say not yet, to friends meaning well
I know how to lie low
comfort a pounding heart
be with a screaming amygdala
I know how to be scared

this new house may become cinders
but today I’ve got a compost pile and a piano again
a perky begonia start unfurls mightily
next to the N-95 mask
grass roots communities are
mushrooming through the
backdrop of global fragmentation
soothing embers still sparking within

in the midst of danger I am surprisingly calm
my head is clear
if need be I will start over
and over again
like breath

- sharon bard

Trick or Treat


ring the bell
and don't get caught
there are monsters
in the basement
quiet as a thought

bracketed by the dark
is life's drift and mystery
nothing but noise
a disposable history

as involuntary as a hiccup
the clock endlessly circles
claims further territory
brooks no reversal

amid sunshine and smiles
a need to masquerade
only so many heartbeats
permit this charade

so trick or treat
and here is the clue
tick tock
tock tick

boo

- Les Bernstein

All Hallows

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

- Louise Glück

Crone at the Crossroads


Torchlight flickers
at the cave entrance,
an uneasy dance
between shadow and light
in deep cavernous passageways
usually hidden
behind the veil.

Like an owl perched atop a willow
in the dark of a new moon,
the crone awaits.

Eyes adjusting to interminable darkness,
to ever-changing landscape
all the while peering at the horizon.

Mother and daughter approach.
Woven sprigs of sun-warmed dandelion and lavender
Crown the maiden.
A garland of perpetual youth
encircles one too young
to be Queen of the Underworld.

Hecate guards a threshold that Demeter must not cross,
not now,
not ever.

Hecate turns toward the void.
Familiar with the terrain
Of descent,
she no longer desires light.

She knows to pause.
Her pupils dilate, yielding to Mystery.

Into the folds of her capacious heart
she tucks away memories
Of blossom, of flower, of honey
To offer her young apprentice

when a pomegranate seed
leaves
a bitter taste
in her mouth.

- Brighid FitzGibbon

Dear Mother,

It began with the article about the birds, the 2.9 billion missing North America birds, the 2.9 billion birds that disappeared and no one noticed. The sparrows, black birds, and swallows who didn’t make it, who weren’t ever born, who stopped flying or singing or making their most ingenious nests, who didn’t perch or peck their gentle beaks into moist black earth. It began with the birds. Hadn’t we even commented in June, James and I that they were hardly here? A kind of eerie quiet had descended. But later they came back. The swarms of barn swallows and the huge ravens landing on the gravel one by one. I know it was after hearing about the birds, that afternoon I crashed my bike. Suddenly falling, falling, unable to prevent the catastrophe ahead, unable to find the brakes or make them work, unable to stop the falling. I fell and spun and realized I had already been falling, that we have been falling, all of us, and crows and conifers and ice caps and expectations — falling and falling and I wanted to keep falling. I didn’t want to be here to witness everything falling, missing, bleaching, burning, drying, disappearing, choking, never blooming. I didn’t want to live without the birds or bees and sparkling flies that light the summer nights. I didn’t want to live with hunger that turned us feral or desperation that gave us claws. I wanted to fall and fall into the deepest, darkest ground and be finally still and buried there.

But Mother, you had other plans. The bike landed in grass and dirt and bang, I was ten-years-old, fallen in the road, my knees scraped and bloody. And I realized that even then nature was something foreign and cruel, something that could and would hurt me because everything I had ever known or loved that was grand and powerful and beautiful became foreign and cruel and eventually hurt me. Even then I had already been exiled, or so I felt, forever cast out of the forest. I belonged with the broken, the contaminated, the dead.

Maybe it was the sharp pain in my knee and elbow, or the dirt embedded in my new jacket, maybe it was the shock or the realization that death was preferable to the thick tar of grief coagulated in my chest, or maybe it was just the lonely rattling of the spokes of the bicycle wheel still spinning without me. Whatever it was. It broke. It broke. I heard the howling.

Mother, I am the reason the birds are missing. I am the cause of salmon who cannot spawn and the butterflies unable to take their journey home. I am the coral reef bleached death white and the sea boiling with methane. I am the millions running from lands that have dried, forests that are burning or islands drowned in water.

I didn’t see you, Mother. You were nothing to me. My trauma-made arrogance and ambition drove me to the that cracking pulsing city. Chasing a dream, chasing the prize, the achievement that would finally prove I wasn’t bad or stupid or nothing or wrong. Oh my Mother, what contempt I had for you. What did you have to offer that would give me status in the market place of ideas and achieving? What could your bare trees offer but the staggering aloneness of winter or greenness I could not receive or bear. I reduced you to weather, an inconvenience, something that got in my way, dirty slush that ruined my overpriced city boots with salt. I refused your invitation, scorned your generosity, held suspicion for your love. I ignored all the ways we used and abused you. I pretended to believe the stories of the fathers who said you had to be tamed and controlled — that you were out to get us.

I press my bruised body down on your grassy belly, breathing me in and out. I have missed you, Mother. I have been away so long. I am sorry. I am so sorry.

I am made of dirt and grit and stars and river, skin, bone, leaf, whiskers and claws. I am a part of you, of this, nothing more or less. I am mycelium, petal pistil and stamen. I am branch and hive and trunk and stone. I am what has been here and what is coming. I am energy and I am dust. I am wave and I am wonder. I am an impulse and an order. I am perfumed peonies and the single parasol tree in the African savannah. I am lavender, dandelion, daisy, dahlia, cosmos, chrysanthemum, pansy, bleeding heart and rose. I am all that has been named and unnamed, all that has been gathered and all that has been left alone. I am all your missing creatures, all the sweet birds never born. I am daughter. I am caretaker. I am fierce defender. I am griever. I am bandit. I am baby. I am supplicant. I am here now, Mother. I am yours. I am yours. I am yours.

- Eve Ensler

The Last Hotel Room in Sacramento

This time when the fires came, we drove east
past still-charred hills
and vineyards that escaped the flames,
over the Napa wetlands and through bucolic pastures.
Disaster clung to us despite the miles:
Smoke in our clothes, worry in our words.
Our phones trembled uncontrollably.

In Sacramento we wandered the motel strip like Mary and Joseph,
No Vacancy signs bright as Christmas.
Despondent and worn, we arrive at last at the Motel 6 by the railroad tracks.
Gerald has one room left,
“But I can’t let you have it because the sink is broken.”

We stood tall and pleaded our case
to a man younger than our youngest daughter.
A man whose eyes have not stung from acrid smoke
or seen fear on a neighbor’s face.
A lucky man who will go home tonight and lay his head on his own pillow,
still unaware that sometimes even the shabbiest room
can shine with its own desperate beauty.

- Melissa Kelley

For my Mother


“we die for each other” she said

yes, I answered, it’s so true

over and over and over

my thoughts on this

swirled to a silent music
from some real place inside

a comfort place

where reminders live

that it really is all about love
and forgiveness

and lord knows she and I have had plenty

of ways to practice this

plenty of ways to fail at this


I have been too mixed up

to hear that music much
My regret moves as heart pains

Her regret stirs as growing cancer

There is little to calm the grief

only surrender, only service

But the music is getting louder
And I do think we are both finally succeeding

At life

By dying for each other


- jul bystrova

:heart: "Being is dying by loving." - Meher Baba :heart:

There’s A Package Downstairs

What are you doing up there? There’s a package downstairs, From the White House, it’s true, And it’s for you.
It’s filled with everything you’ve ever wanted, All the love you ever needed,
Every dream of yours come true,
And it’s for you.
There’s a package downstairs,
Where there is no law,
And everyone’s fed by the president’s paw, And it’s for you.
There’s a package downstairs,
Where there are no rules,
And all the kids have burnt down the schools, And it’s for you.
There’s a package downstairs, Where everyone lies,
And the fruit of the truth,
Is covered with flies.
There’s a package downstairs,
Where no one is clean,
And everyone watches a forty-inch screen,
But the drugs that they take makes everyone mean.
There’s a package downstairs, And it’s chock full of money, Where nothing is paid for,
And everything’s funny,
And it’s for you.
There’s a package downstairs,
That’s filled with delights,
But all that’s required is to give up your rights, And it’s for you.
There’s a package downstairs, And all will be well,
If you give up your soul,
And join them in hell.
There’s a package downstairs, That was sent by a fool,
Who lives in a white house... And it’s for you.

- Salvatore Murdocca

Say Yes

The moment I slipped my arms
into the poem of falling leaves
shrugged my shoulders just so
the threads of mystery in the fabric
pulled my body straight

This poem, an old jacket passed down
to my waiting hands
its elbows and cuffs shedding
old language of wonder and hope
was a perfect fit

This poem of crying violins
rusting sunsets, broken hearts
and lavender mornings
wrapped around my aching heart
and said yes, no matter what, yes

The music will sound, your friend will come
the bread will rise and the birds will sing
You are not the first and not the last
Say yes, no matter what, say yes.

- Doug von Koss

A Brave And Startling Truth

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

- Maya Angelou

Beneath the Surface

Beneath the surface
a firefighter reflects,
even cries.
They did it — they didn’t let the fire
spread beyond 101.
They were not going to repeat
what happened two years ago.
They were not going to
let this one kill more people and
burn thousands of homes.
Beneath the surface
even though 77,000 acres burned,
they succeeded.

Beneath the surface
the new CEO of PG&E gets a
2.5 million dollar salary.
What if that money went to
update equipment, poles,
put wires underground?

Beneath the surface we pay our
electric bill by flashlight.

Beneath the surface
no matter how many households
had their electricity shut off
a single jumper on a tower broke
and set off a spark
that seems to have started it all.*

Beneath the surface
I’m exhausted from carrying around
all my valuables in and out of my car
for four days.
Bad air still hurts my lungs,
I had to cancel my class and now
I’m in bed with a cold.
I blew a fuse last night.
Did they turn our power off again?
No, I still see light in the next room,
but how that thought sent panic
through my body.

Above the surface
we’ll get past this one.
Friends will help friends
and life will go on.

But beneath the surface
we are living powerless to the wind,
in fear of flames
and always knowing what we will pack
the next time around.

- Sherrie Lovler

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

- Wilfred Owen

Autumn Comes To Healdsburg

Fall arrives, time’s most favored season
at last the heart, the mind loosens its fist so that I no longer need to know who I am
i return to the hills and the great presences
light, heat, clouds, the bull pines
to recover for myself the purity of the falling world to enfold it like a pearl in the mind’s silence
i read the calligraphy of the oaks under
the fading skies, the tall grass bending in the meadow, the last robins— i am a circle reaching
the first place for the first time
in youth among fall leaves i refused
to acknowledge the ancient writing—
that the basket of summer empties, that the hours of men are as wind-driven clouds
and yet among fall leaves
i was overjoyed with the beauty of loss
now i stand on autumn’s wooded knoll that my life too may vanish
that night may fall into the earth’s arms
time is calling her trout from
their playgrounds in the sea
to river mouth, and redemption, and fury
for it is by means of the long delay
that we come to the righteousness of passion.

- Lee Perron