Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

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

On the Fifth Day




On the fifth day
the scientists who studied the rivers
were forbidden to speak
or to study the rivers.


The scientists who studied the air
were told not to speak of the air,
and the ones who worked for the farmers
were silenced,
and the ones who worked for the bees.


Someone, from deep in the Badlands,
began posting facts.


The facts were told not to speak
and were taken away.
The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent.


Now it was only the rivers
that spoke of the rivers,
and only the wind that spoke of its bees,


while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees
continued to move toward their fruit.


The silence spoke loudly of silence,
and the rivers kept speaking
of rivers, of boulders and air.


Bound to gravity, earless and tongueless,
the untested rivers kept speaking.


Bus drivers, shelf stockers,
code writers, machinists, accountants,
lab techs, cellists kept speaking.


They spoke, the fifth day,
of silence.


- Jane Hirshfield

The Season of Oxymorons


In the midst of the pandemic lockdown
the beautiful spring day sings through the leaves.


Grateful to taste the cream in the milk,
I muster the will to let go.


Socially distant. Together apart.
The Bunny who lays eggs and the Angel of death.


Mask of goodwill. Virgin forest tp.
Wasp nest in my head, picking up the phone.


I dig into the catacombs of my study,
read fictions about longevity.


Wet leaves and dark clouds whisper, summer.
The virus will rest this summer? Will I?


The bees keep going back to sleep.
I put on my armor to grocery shop.


I haven’t seen the sky this blue in years.
Is there a vaccine for lack of compassion?


Everyday uncertainty’s fresh. In a land
of too much, it’s hard to gauge what’s enough.


The poppies blink, the old aunties.
People discover birdsong and Crow.


Howling with neighbors I haven’t met yet, and dogs—
the only thing that keeps me sane.


- Gwynn O’Gara

Quarantine


In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking — they were both walking — north.


She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.


In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.


Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:


Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.


- Eavan Boland
( september 24, 1944 - April 29, 2020)

Quarantine, 1918


There were towns
that knew about the flu before
it arrived; they had time to imagine the germs
on a stranger’s skirts, to see how death
could be sealed in an envelope,
how a fever could bloom in the evening,
and take a life overnight.
A few villages, deep in the mountains,
posted guards on their roads,
and no one was allowed to come or go,
not even a grandmother carrying a cake;
no mail was accepted and all the words
and packages families sent
to one another went unopened,
unanswered. Trains were told
not to stop, so they glowed for a moment
before swaying
towards some other place. The food
at the corner store never came
from out of town and no one went
to see a distant auntie
or state fair. For awhile, the outside world
existed in imagination, in memory,
in books or suitcases, deep in closets.
There was nothing but the town itself,
hiding from what was possible,
and the children cutting dolls
from paper, their scissors sharp.


- Faith Shearin

Scripture With Your Tea

I tell you, if you read scripture with your tea, as do I every morning
then you are I
in that the rose inside us knows the rose we see and scent
is the selfsame rose all along.

Likewise, if your God is the God Of Vengeance what a fool I’d be to deny mine is not the same.

But, oh, I hope you don’t kill me because of your prayers.
Plagues make room for everyone so we don’t need to shoulder one another aside.

But, even in a crowd, we practiced natural decorum, as a baby’s wail is understood as natural in almost any circumstance.

We need patience now more than ever
and the volcano of this world practices it
like the good instruction, the rose of instruction, it is.

The gamble of the stock market can wait, for the fatal gamble to wander off.

Each of us has eyes we do not see now.
And in the meantime and for a while, our heads shrouded in quarantine, imagination is the book
we read about one another.

Our seclusion is not a bad thing, but a retreat in a cave from whose door imagination rolls the
boulder every living moment to a dawn that denies us the coming day of the-same-old-thing.

Bruce grows still now.
He knows as know you, and all of us,
that each of us can do the rest,
right the rest,
know the rest.

Life gave us that.



- Bruce Moody

Come as You Are

Come to the party;
wear your blanched jeans
sun-seared to silk
an arranged marriage of rock and knee.

Bring your piano hands
burnished with soil,
your compost-painted fingernails
cupping a mug to keep you warm.

May truth roll from your tongue,
your breath bear pale green words
stained with sour grass
your chin a looking glass for buttercups.

Bring your perfumed breath
essence of onion and honest sweat
simmered in the field of communal toil
back bent like the winter birch.

Don't forget your coal-daubed feet
fresh from the ashes
stories secreted
in the knotholes of your toes.

Bring your hair, dandelion-twined
spider webs that ride your cuffs
sow bug and dung beetle
dreaming in the pocket of your grandma's apron.

Pack your wind-chiseled heart
with its needlepoint of scars.
Don't clean up
come as you are.

- Sande Anfang

Cinco de Mayo


Cinco de Mayo celebrates a burning people,

those whose land is starved of blood,

civilizations which are no longer

holders of the night. We reconquer with our feet,

with our tongues, that dangerous language,

saying more of this world than the volumes

of textured and controlled words on a page.

We are the gentle rage; our hands hold

the stream of the earth, the flowers

of dead cities, the green of butterfly wings.

Cinco de Mayo is about the barefoot, the untooled,

the warriors of want who took on the greatest army

Europe ever mustered—and won.

I once saw a Mexican man stretched across

an upturned sidewalk

near Chicago's 18th and Bishop one fifth of May day.

He brought up a near-empty bottle

to the withering sky and yelled out a grito

with the words: ¡Que viva Cinco de Mayo!

And I knew then what it meant—

what it meant for barefoot Zapoteca indigenas

in the Battle of Puebla and what it meant for me

there on 18th Street among los ancianos,

the moon-faced children and futureless youth

dodging the gunfire and careening battered cars,

and it brought me to that war

that never ends, the war Cinco de Mayo

was a battle of, that I keep fighting,

that we keep bleeding for, that war

against a servitude that a compa

on 18th Street knew all about

as he crawled inside a bottle of the meanest

Mexican spirits.


- Luis Rodriguez

Bound to Words


Even in isolation
I am bound to words
already written
already spoken
not negating but
subtly changing the
atmosphere we live
and breathe in

And do we live and breathe
the purity of air, the
breeze and blossoming trees
that signal spring came
a month ago and we didn’t
notice because we were practicing
social distancing, hoping one day
to get it right

They ask, are you lonely
and I say no, I am not lonely
but I miss the fulness of the life
we lived for so many years
I miss it as if you were still here
when I went on living
just as if you would be here
in this house when I got home

How could I be lonely when my
heart is filled with memory
and promise when those I love
who never met you but know
your voice when I read my poems
to them and I can’t explain
how it is to have you with me
here inside these words of isolation


- fran claggett-holland

For The Death Of 100 Whales


In April, 1954, TIME magazine described seventy-nine bored American G.I.s stationed at a NATO base in Iceland murdering a pod of one hundred killer whales. In a single morning the soldiers, armed with rifles, machine guns, and boats, rounded up and then shot the whales to death.



Hung midsea
Like a boat mid-air
The liners boiled their pastures:
The liners of flesh,
The Arctic steamers
Brains the size of a teacup
Mouths the size of a door


The sleek wolves
Mowers and reapers of sea kine.
THE GIANT TADPOLES
(Meat their algae)
Lept
Like sheep or children.
Shot from the sea's bore.


Turned and twisted
(Goya!!)
Flung blood and sperm.
Incense.
Gnashed at their tails and brothers
Cursed Christ of mammals,
Snapped at the sun,
Ran for the Sea's floor.


Goya! Goya!
Oh Lawrence
No angels dance those bridges.
OH GUN! OH BOW!
There are no churches in the waves,
No holiness,
No passages or crossings
From the beasts' wet shore.


Michael McClure
(Oct. 20, 1932 - May 4, 2020)

The Raincoat




When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled to take me
to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
and move more in a body unclouded
by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
songs to her the whole forty-five minute
drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
five minutes back from physical therapy.
She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. Today,
at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
another spine appointment, singing along
to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.


- Ada Limón

Dear Mama




when did we become friends?
it happened so gradual i didn't notice
maybe i had to get my run out first
take a big bite of the honky world and choke on it
maybe that's what has to happen with some uppity youngsters
if it happens at all


and now
the thought stark and irrevocable
of being here without you
shakes me


beyond love, fear, regret or anger
into that realm children go
who want to care for/protect their parents
as if they could
and sometimes the lucky ones do


into the realm of making every moment
important
laughing as though laughter wards off death
each word given
received like spanish eight


treasure to bury within
against that shadow day
when it will be the only coin i possess
with which to buy peace of mind


- Wanda Coleman

Cave Painting At Font du Gaume


Of course, even his bones
are now dust,
his flowing mane
taken by the wind,
those sturdy hooves
and solid flesh consumed
and reborn in endless forms.


Even so, through two hundred centuries
of darkness and lamplight
he is still running free
across that vast savannah of time.


And the hand that captured,
in a few spare lines
on the limestone wall,
that wild grace,
sending it down through the years -
hand of my ancestor,
hand of our ancestor -
has long since returned
to the formless.


A day will come,
certainly,
when all this
will be gone:
you and I,
the painting,
even the wall,
carved by ages of
drip and flow,
through uplifted memories
of countless tiny beings
who spent their short lives
in that primordial sea.


And yet this beauty -
this grace -
offers itself to us
in this moment,
the only time we have.


- Larry Robinson

Beautiful, Larry! Made my day, as you often do. Roland

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Cave Painting At Font du Gaume...

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The Women at the Well

We are the women at the well;

We who draw up the sacred water
under a red sun
as a child pulls at our skirts.

We gather, share stories,
spill our laments onto the ground
where they seep to the underworld.

Weathered hands raise and
lower the bucket endlessly,
refreshing dry vessels,
and, at times, hope.

We are the courageous
who dare to work the bucket
into the earth’s dark places,

We labor to raise earth’s vein of tears,
Where we have hidden our sorrows.

And by doing so,

Both honor and purify the darkness;

This I know: we do the holy work.

- ann masai

The Stare’s Nest By My Window


The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening, honey bees
Come build in the empty house of the stare.


We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare


A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.


We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; oh, honey-bees
Come build in the empty house of the stare.


- W.B. Yeats

Black 101


“How are you afraid of a man
running away from you?”
-Toni Morrison


Fear is a magnetizer.
It changes the polarity of black bodies.
Makes them highly attractive to
bullets, police batons, tasers,
white rage, white guilt,
and blue-eyed blondes.


Fear is a multiplier.
It turns children into men,
men and women into monsters,
and non-compliant teens
into dangerous gangs
and threatening mobs.


Fear is a magician.
It turns Hip Hop into gangster rap,
plastic toys into guns,
cigarillos, cellphones,
wallets, brazenness,
and extended index fingers
into high caliber weapons.


Fear is a revisionist history class.
It turns people of color into the
enslavers, confederate soldiers,
lynch mobs, klansmen, night riders
and terrorists.


Fear is a sniper.
It takes dead aim, aims to kill,
kills for sport and pleasure,
is pleased to take souvenirs,
and stuffs and mounts its trophies.


- Frank X Walker

Because Of You




Because of you,
when I awoke I left my bed earlier than usual.
There is so much to say hello to and wish a good morning.
Because of you
I had cereal, blueberries ,walnuts and a little cream
that I ate slowly, thoughtfully mindfully.
Because of you
I turned off the classical music station
and listened to what was left of the dawn chorus.
Because of you
I have poems pressed between the pages of my heart.
Because of you
I signed petitions against climate change, and
pledges to protect children ,immigrants and the earth.
Because of you
I walked through the garden noticing that
many roses now have put on their dancing shoes,
those bright luminous petals..
Because of you
I felt the dearness of friendship in the beauty around us
the gratefulness for you and roses and blueberries and this world.
And I know that you are a part of all the things that I love,
And I write because of you-
Because of you.


- Gail Onion

How Much


Low stream flows, deceptively gentle
incubate fish eggs, keep them safe,
while storms would sweep them away
toward predators downstream.


Birthing salmon and steelhead, fins flinch,
shudder in waters too calm for swimming
to tributaries, their birth canals.


In the main stem, they dig up
each other's eggs, lay their own. Animals
fond of ikura, meaning salmon eggs
and also how much, quickly feast.


Sword of storm, sword of calm hangs above.
How often we celebrate, scoop caviar,
lives swallowed like casual swords
cutting through first life.


Custom of delicate spoons, as if fearing
fragility of wealth, prone to slip away
overnight, glistening pearly ounces, as if
taking less dignifies the taking, as if


life's thrashings disappear beneath
glistening dishes of roe, as if
too much would reveal our gaze
deciding who survives cycles,
dying, regenerating.


Fish ache to fly upstream like birds
swim through clouds like blooms
welcome the sun, as fawns bond
in faint cries to their does.
Doe and fawn graze, lie on grass,
each blade holding its own weight.


- Lynn Axelrod

I Ask My Mother to Sing




She begins, and my grandmother joins her.
Mother and daughter sing like young girls.
If my father were alive, he would play
his accordion and sway like a boat.


I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,
nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch
the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers
running away in the grass.


But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into water,
then rock back, and fill with more.


Both women have begun to cry.
But neither stops her song.


- Li-Young Lee

To Be Of Use


The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.


I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.


I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.


The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.


- Marge Piercy

We Wear the Mask


We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.


Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.


We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!


- Paul Laurence Dunbar

This Moment


At this moment of cruel uncertainty
Planet Earth seems pretty steady
In its turning and circling
Gifting our eyes
With the illusion of the sun rising
And later on descending
During the moment we label
As 7pm
When we lift our hands in unison
And applaud
The unflinching
Front line workers.
In the growing dimness
Of 8pm
We even howl in gratitude
We stretch out our arms
As if to hold them
And those they serve
The ill
Dying
Grieving.
We could also
If so inclined
Both embrace and dissolve
Our collective pain
By trusting the illusive paradox
That all exists only
In the boundless
Present moment.
Embodying this riddle
We can still praise
Our planet’s comforting
Consistent motion
The conjurer
Of our more familiar notion of time
Including the returning
Deceptive rise
Of lovely healing dawn.


- A.W. Gerber

Kentucky River Junction

to Ken Kesey & Ken Babbs


Clumsy at first, fitting together
the years we have been apart,
and the ways.

But as the night
passed and the day came, the first
fine morning of April,

it came clear:
the world that has tried us
and showed us its joy

was our bond
when we said nothing.
And we allowed it to be

with us, the new green
shining.

*

Our lives, half gone,
stay full of laughter.

Free-hearted men
have the world for words.

Though we have been
apart, we have been together.

*

Trying to sleep, I cannot
take my mind away.
The bright day

shines in my head
like a coin
on the bed of a stream.

*

You left
you're welcome.

- Wendell Berry

In the Time of Pandemic

It is the time of virus and testing,
of outbreaks and epicenters,
time of rates of infection
and death tolls of loved ones.

It is the time of face masks
and closures, of quarantines
and distance to flatten
alarming bell curves.

And it is the time of desperate
shopping and panicky selling,
of markets collapsing,
of gun sales booming.

Faced with such facts,
what does our populist leader do
but stand up to the cameras
and bully the Press.
He huffs and he puffs
and his great balloon brain
unleashes its forked tongue…
and still his apologists cheer.

Oh woe is my country.
Here sheltered in place,
armed with no medical knowledge,
no wealth or position,
no radio program or newspaper column,
no podcast or facebook,
locked down and stymied,
I mine what little I know:

That lies come home to roost
at the door of their maker.
That the goldfinch of truth
can be trusted to sing.

That dear ones we’ve lost
bequeath us the memory
of what made them beloved,
and aspiring to give new life
to these very qualities is all we have
now to requite our better angels.


- Bill Greenwood

Ashes, Ashes
All Fall Down


from 1347-1353
The Black Plague,
(Yersinia pestis), claimed one third of the population of Europe.


Born in a time of darkness,
she’s laid low in her cedar cradle.
Buboes flare at pit and groin as
on her cheeks, false roses bloom.
A parching fever carries her
beyond her mother’s grace
even before the dance
of rattling bones begins.


And who’s to blame?
an aggravated God,
the sinner, self-proclaimed,
flaying his flesh with
with cat-o’-nine tails,
the sailors dragging pestilence
ashore in duffel bags,
the ghetto of immigrants
rounded up like banished
books and burned to ashes?
When no one’s left
to oversee the barricades,
nor any left to dig the graves,
who will be left to blame?

Blame the Basilisk,
denizen of the dark ages,
dealer of death and ruination
He wears the thorn-face of a rooster,
strapping thighs of dragon,
the whip tail of a tortured serpent.
A foul miasma is his breath;
a single drop of blood is dose
enough to poison every well.
Every field he passes is a
withering reminder of his
dreadful domination.

You dare not
Dare Not
look into the
mirrors of his eyes.
The sight of your reflection
will strike you to the ground.


- b.armstrong

the sonnet-ballad


Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
They took my lover's tallness off to war,
Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess
What I can use an empty heart-cup for.
He won't be coming back here any more.
Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew
When he went walking grandly out that door
That my sweet love would have to be untrue.
Would have to be untrue. Would have to court
Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange
Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort)
Can make a hard man hesitate—and change.
And he will be the one to stammer, "Yes."
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?


- Gwendolyn Brooks

Memorial Day for the War Dead




Memorial day for the war dead. Add now
the grief of all your losses to their grief,
even of a woman that has left you. Mix
sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,
which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning
on one day for easy, convenient memory.


Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread,
in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.
"Behind all this some great happiness is hiding."
No use to weep inside and to scream outside.
Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding.


Memorial day. Bitter salt is dressed up
as a little girl with flowers.
The streets are cordoned off with ropes,
for the marching together of the living and the dead.
Children with a grief not their own march slowly,
like stepping over broken glass.


The flautist's mouth will stay like that for many days.
A dead soldier swims above little heads
with the swimming movements of the dead,
with the ancient error the dead have
about the place of the living water.


A flag loses contact with reality and flies off.
A shopwindow is decorated with
dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.
And everything in three languages:
Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.


A great and royal animal is dying
all through the night under the jasmine
tree with a constant stare at the world.


A man whose son died in the war walks in the street
like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.
"Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”


- Yehuda Amichai

Concurrence



Each day's terror, almost
a form of boredom - madmen
at the wheel and
stepping on the gas and
the brakes no good -
and each day one,
sometimes two,morning-glories,
faultless,blue, blue sometimes
flecked with magenta, each
lit from within with
the first sunlight.


- Denise Levertov

One


The mosquito is so small
it takes almost nothing to ruin it.
Each leaf, the same.
And the black ant, hurrying.
So many lives, so many fortunes!
Every morning, I walk softly and with forward glances
down to the ponds and through the pinewoods.
Mushrooms, even, have but a brief hour
before the slug creeps to the feast,
before the pine needles hustle down
under the bundles of harsh, beneficent rain.


How many, how many, how many
make up a world!
And then I think of that old idea: the singular
and the eternal.
One cup, in which everything is swirled
back to the color of the sea and sky.
Imagine it!


A shining cup, surely!
In the moment in which there is no wind
over your shoulder,
you stare down into it,
and there you are,
your own darling face, your own eyes.
And then the wind, not thinking of you, just passes by,
touching the ant, the mosquito, the leaf,
and you know what else!
How blue is the sea, how blue is the sky,
how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is, even you,
even your eyes, even your imagination.


- Mary Oliver