Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

I Think Continually of Those


I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.


What is precious is never to forget
The delight of the blood drawn from ancient springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth;
Never to deny its pleasure in the simple morning light,
Nor its grave evening demand for love;
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.


Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass,
And by the streamers of white cloud,
And whispers of wind in the listening sky;
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
Born of the sun, they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.


- Stephen Spender

Fire's Pieta



Sitting legs open wide on the black ground
she cradles the burned llama
against the fullness of her body.


An officer with a shotgun
approaches in the lower left,
come to perform a final, brutal mercy.


She waits.
Her eyes are lowered.
I imagine she is rocking,
crooning.


- Ruah Bull

September Meditation


I do not know if the seasons remember their history or if the days and
nights by which we count time remember their own passing.
I do not know if the oak tree remembers its planting or if the pine
remembers its slow climb toward sun and stars.
I do not know if the squirrel remembers last fall's gathering or if the
bluejay remembers the meaning of snow.
I do not know if the air remembers September or if the night remembers
the moon.
I do not know if the earth remembers the flowers from last spring or if
the evergreen remembers that it shall stay so.
Perhaps that is the reason for our births - to be the memory for
creation.
Perhaps salvation is something very different than anyone ever expected.
Perhaps this will be the only question we will have to answer:
"What can you tell me about September?"

- Burton D. Carley

Waiting for the Fire



Not just the temples, lifting

lotuses out of the tangled trees,

not the moon on cool canals,

the profound smell of the paddies,

evening fires in open doorways,

fish and rice the perfect end of wisdom;

but the small bones, the grace, the voices like

clay bells in the wind, all wasted.


If we ever thought of the wreckage

of our unnatural acts,

we would never sleep again

without dreaming a rain of fire:

somewhere God is bargaining for Sodom,

a few good men could save the city; but

in that dirty corner of the mind

we call the soul

the only wash that purifies is tears,

and after all our body counts,

our rape, our mutilations,

nobody here is crying; people who would weep

at the death of a dog

stroll these unburned streets dry-eyed.


But forgetfulness will never walk

with innocence; we save our faces

at the risk of our lives, needing

the wisdom of losses, the gift of despair,

or we could kill again.


Somewhere God is haggling over Sodom:

for the sake of ten good people

I will spare the land.

Where are all those volunteers

to hold back the fire? Look:

when the moon rises over the sea,

no matter where you stand,

the path of the light comes to you.


- Philip Appleman

Leap

A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.

Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.

The mayor reported the mist.

A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes.

Tiffany Keeling saw fireballs falling that she later realized were people. Jennifer Griffin saw people falling and wept as she told the story. Niko Winstral saw people free-falling backwards with their hands out, like they were parachuting. Joe Duncan on his roof on Duane Street looked up and saw people jumping. Henry Weintraub saw people “leaping as they flew out.” John Carson saw six people fall, “falling over themselves, falling, they were somersaulting.” Steve Miller saw people jumping from a thousand feet in the air. Kirk Kjeldsen saw people flailing on the way down, people lining up and jumping, “too many people falling.” Jane Tedder saw people leaping and the sight haunts her at night. Steve Tamas counted fourteen people jumping and then he stopped counting. Stuart DeHann saw one woman’s dress billowing as she fell, and he saw a shirtless man falling end over end, and he too saw the couple leaping hand in hand.

Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.

But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the window holding hands.

I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell. Maybe they didn’t even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped, and fell endlessly into the smoking canyon, at two hundred miles an hour, falling so far and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the pavement near Liberty Street so hard that there was a pink mist in the air.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold onto that.

- Brian Doyle

Notice What This Poem Is Not Doing

The light along the hills in the morning
comes down slowly, naming the trees
white, then coasting the ground for stones to nominate.
Notice what this poem is not doing.
A house, a house, a barn, the old
quarry, where the river shrugs--
how much of this place is yours?
Notice what this poem is not doing.
Every person gone has taken a stone
to hold, and catch the sun. The carving
says, "Not here, but called away."
Notice what this poem is not doing.
The sun, the earth, the sky, all wait.
The crowns and redbirds talk. The light
along the hills has come, has found you.
Notice what this poem has not done.


- William Stafford

Photograph from September 11


They jumped from the burning floors—
one, two, a few more,
higher, lower.


The photograph halted them in life,
and now keeps them
above the earth toward the earth.


Each is still complete,
with a particular face
and blood well hidden.


There’s enough time
for hair to come loose,
for keys and coins
to fall from pockets.


They’re still within the air’s reach,
within the compass of places
that have just now opened.


I can do only two things for them—
describe this flight
and not add a last line.


- Wislawa Szymborska
(Translated by Clare Cavanagh)

A Walk


My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance--


and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave. . .
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.


- Rainer Maria Rilke
( translated by Robert Bly)

Ron Rozewski and Tom Bissinger hiking in Olympali State Park 2018. Tom is a fan of Robert Bly.

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A Time of Waking

It is a time of waking with morning tears
and a time of mourning.

It is a time of waking to the smell of death
in smoke filled air.

A smell so strong it penetrates the waters
and arises within the waters.

It is a death so vast it will not have a name on this earth but only beyond in the reaches of time and space.

It is a death that is now hollowing out what is in our vision, leaving a thinning veil of the beauty of life we have known.

It is a death that will now be known to the young.

It is a death with sorrows that no well can hold.

It is a death that visits the poverty of the mind and is known to the lingering spirits that live in the forever world.

It is a time of waking with morning tears and a time of mourning.



- Jeff Rooney

Control Burn

What the Indians
here
used to do, was,
to burn out the brush every year.
in the woods, up the gorges,
keeping the oak and pine stands
tall and clear
with grasses
and kitkitdizzie under them,
never enough fuel there
that a fire could crown.

Now, manzanita,
(a fine bush in its right)
crowds up under the new trees
mixed up with logging slash
and a fire can wipe out all.

Fire is the old story.
I would like,
with a sense of helpful order,
with respect for laws
of nature,
to help my land
with a burn, a hot clean
burn
…..(manzanita seeds will only open
…..after a fire passes over
…..or once passed through a bear)
And then
it would be more
like,
when it belonged to the Indians

Before.



- Gary Snyder

Poetry reading at Ft. Ross, 2019

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Correction, 2013

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Winter in Wisconsin


Let me tell you about winter in Wisconsin.
How the sun struggles to make an appearance at all
before it gives up and slinks from the sky,
leaving the school kids to tote their heavy backpacks
home in darkness.
How the nights stretch and stretch
like some cruel magician’s trick
where the rope of scarves never ends,
and month after frigid month
stumbles forward on frost-bitten feet.


Suddenly, one morning, the light feels less meek.
The mercury wills its way past 40
and the mounds of sooty snow begin to sweat.
Children and puppies explode out doors
like champagne corks,
while translucent men strip their shirts
and gleam in the startling sunlight.
Young girls – goose pimples be damned! –
pull their shorts from the bottom of the drawer.
The lawns fill with Frisbees and runners and the laughter
of a carnival, or collective madness.


In a way, we are all enduring winter in Wisconsin now:
Hunkered down in our homes,
we read or watch movies.
We bake and clean out the back closet,
paint the living room,
biding our time, biding our time,
while anticipation churns like a gathering storm
as we wait, impatiently, for spring.


- Melissa Kelley

How the Land Talks

I am the Keeper of the Mysteries.
What I know is only understood in the imaginal realms, hence I often keep still.
I know why the seasons turn and how truth is not fathomed in clean, neat prose.
I have held the mysteries in myself. I contain multitudes.
I embrace opposites.
I am formed from paradox.
I rein in the mysteries.
Life, death, and rebirth are the steps of my dance.
Metaphor is my landscape.
I am the vast canvas maintaining the space where beings offer themselves to each other.
I clasp all the dry trees of my chaparral savannah in its red, crusty soil.
Madrone and manzanita ruled among knob cone pine, luxurious in youth, scraggly with age.
The tan oaks scatter acorns all over the rolling hills.
Under me is where the deep water flows. It is hard water, packed with minerals.
I am the One whose forms receive the fire and rain, the earthquake and plague.
My depths take in ash pits, smoldering leaves, and embers falling from the forest’s canopy.
I am the One who charts the Great Migrations.
I open with the Sun, who radiates on the trees of life the beauty that captivates all beings.
I am the One whose meadows uphold slender legs adorned with golden brown skin.
My canyons carry paws that slink silently, echoing the limestone’s stark face.
I am the One whose duff is stampeded with others, close, connected in my sweet, dusty face.
My ridges hold a travel that goes farther than humans could ever understand.



- Patria Brown

When Great Trees Fall


When great trees fall,

rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.
When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.
Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of
dark, cold
caves.
And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

- Maya Angelou

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Smoke


Moon sinks orange.
Sky dims.
A shade drawn.
A curtain.
A blind.


Smoke is gone.
Maybe.


Occluded sky cries Pomo words:
dacha:la (sun,)-da- (moon,)- thothol (star.)


And, the broken sun rises phosphorescent,
blood spilled, red as abuse.


And, stars suck breath from earth.
Fall into another eternity.


And, waves roll backwards sweeping the sea.
Fish, mammals, birds swallowed.


What if we never escape?


If waves keep rolling backwards?


Horizon dissolves like a wound
inside a body
dead on a steel table.




- Pamela Stone Singer

The Book Of Life

The local gossip is of the last hummingbird.
For a moment
at sunset
the tulip poplar
stood wistfully holding its ragged leaves.
The last
or almost the last
sailboat against the eastern shore.
It was cold this morning.
In mid-August
there were seven hummingbirds
sparring at the feeder.
Now, alone on his bench
above the brittle cliff,
nursing an old-fashioned,
this picaro
remembers barefoot frolicking
on childhood’s bright sand.
He loves the gossip.

The gossip of hummingbirds in a season of
political
mendacity, the book of life barely
open, is at least
the acknowledgement that a good
woman lived her eighty-seven
years
with grace & determination, wit, a sharp-
edged
steady
commitment to what, as the sun wraps up its
picnic
blanket, appears so damned
obvious: we are called, as the book of life opens,
to love one another & hummingbirds
& the bay’s slow threnody.

The book of life opens and written is her name,
Ruth
& the truth of her life is

that wisdom can be witty & elegant & tough.
Enough politics! Supreme

over all powers is love after all. Ruth dreamed of
love, our Ruth & her namesake,

they would not take less from the world, & founded,
grounded
themselves on what is sound, good,

the durable strong wood of trees with deep roots,
Ruth.


- John Copley Alter

Once Only


almost at the equator
almost at the equinox
exactly at midnight
from a ship
the full


moon


in the center of the sky.




- Gary Snyder
(Sappa Creek near Singapore)

Snyder at Ft Ross in 2013, Nasa moon photo at Arlington VA, 2015— Photoshop merges time and space.

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Eavesdropping on angels


Yesterday, just as Rosh Hashanah was ending,
I managed to slip through the dream time and
heard R.B.G.’s two guardian angels chatting. Said
one: “Oy gevalt, those humans are slow to get it;
a Tzadik’s life, like all lives is scripted for greatness,
but some beings grasp the plan with a fervor that
only gods and angels manifest.” “Oy gatinu” said
the other. “We infuse humans with sacred teachings
and stories that not only the life, but also the death
of such beings becomes a rarified shofar blast that
jolts humankind.” Now we all really get it. We feel it
humming in the rarified air of change within moments
of her passing, we sense it now as the donations swell,
and lesser beings run for cover and choke on their
hypocrisy. Most of all we saw it, and remember with
broken hearts, the subtle impish smile on the face
of this tiny giant as she broke barriers that persisted
for centuries. We sense this rare presence and decorate
it with initials like F.D.R., M.L.K., and of now, R.B.G.
We ask: what doth the lord require of thee but to do
justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy god.
And pump iron at age 85.


- Bruce Silverman

I Go Down To The Shore


I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall —
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.


- Mary Oliver

Equinox


Now is the time of year when bees are wild
and eccentric. They fly fast and in cramped
loop-de-loops, dive-bomb clusters of conversants
in the bright, late-September out-of-doors.
I have found their dried husks in my clothes.


They are dervishes because they are dying,
one last sting, a warm place to squeeze
a drop of venom or of honey.
After the stroke we thought would be her last
my grandmother came back, reared back and slapped


a nurse across the face. Then she stood up,
walked outside, and lay down in the snow.
Two years later there is no other way
to say, we are waiting. She is silent, light
as an empty hive, and she is breathing.


- Elizabeth Alexander

Yom Kippur, 5781
(Day of Atonement, 2020)

The fires raged
and the smoke encircled
the globe.

Eveywhere
people breathed
bitter remnants
of ancient trees,
fleeing, frightened animals,
burning toxins,
particles of human flesh.

Breath deeply now
this bitter communion
of atonement.


- Dianne Monroe

Learning

A piccolo played, then a drum.
Feet began to come - a part of the music. Here comes a horse,
clippety clop, away.

My mother said, "Don't run -
the army is after someone
other than us. If you stay
you'll learn our enemy."

Then he came, the speaker. He stood
in the square. He told us who
to hate. I watched my mother's face,
it's quiet. "That's him," she said.

- William Stafford

They Say Fire Is A Metaphor


I
We weren't ready for everything to go.
We told some gods
we were grateful for what we had
—a paltry thing against infernos.


Broken voices reached us on ether,
discovered their own breath
still ninety-eight point six but choked
like a ghost with fever.


We search for lost ones through what remains
––cement angels, crazed rock, melted
metal cast as pyres—incinerated
by refusal electeds dare not explain.


II
Ash lungs––celestial tea of spider webs,
throats clogged––no relief. Yellow sky.
Clouds swirled like ply unraveling,
smoldering threads.


Brigades of birds shot out, circling alone,
nestlings agape, flame-fed
calls crossed woven twigs, grass,
ephemera destined for indeterminate bone.


Blanketed babes wound in arms for cradles,
ash where they stopped, unsifted mix
of wool, milk, grain, bleached of sound.
Only wind trembles.


Twisted trees, charred limbs affright;
rivers of dust will follow,
swallow trunks, leave glistening stone
arbors twice petrified.


- Lynn Axelrod

Avot V'Imahot
Initially I resisted, then ultimately embraced their wisdom, their strength. Every day their truth pulsates through me, for they gave me breath.
L’dor V’dor.

For unimageable numbers, a virus has stricken, and no longer, do they breathe.
For others, it has been a slug of lead or the crush of a knee.
No longer do they breathe.
The battles fought & the skills developed by our ancestors compel me to fight against the destruction of our planet and to resist the scuttling of our democracy - - to pursue justice on behalf of those who no longer breathe, and by standing on the shoulders of our most notorious ancestor, we say: Amen.

- David Salm

She Holds These Truths

Throngs of mourners gather below the
forty-four steps that ascend to a portico encircled by
Corinthian columns, each of the sixteen a reminder
of the beauty and dignity of this place
where Justice lies in repose before the Great Hall.

Gazing upward they see “Equal Justice Under Law”
etched over the doors that open to the high court
and what once was her seat, now shrouded in black
her opinions in majority and dissent echoing
through the lives and livelihoods of we the people.

She battled the patriarchs of bias and bigotry
with the sword of reason and the power of words to
wage a quiet revolution and reform a nation
called to uphold freedom’s guarantee of
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

They come to be near so bright a star
her light cast across the lives of
women, young and old, who know what
she has given to fight for the rights and
responsibilities that liberty, not time, guarantees.

Gratitude and grief resound throughout
a country dying for a more perfect union
the sanctity of the Constitution in peril,
perhaps lost without the notorious one
a servant of the law and her oath.

When the crowds return home and the
last candle is extinguished, the verses
of Amazing Grace withered by the wind
generations to come will hear the whisper
of a Justice’s voice that once set them free.


L.L. Stamps


Ruth Bader Ginsburg
(1933-2020)

Fall




Fall, falling, fallen. That's the way the season
Changes its tense in the long-haired maples
That dot the road; the veiny hand-shaped leaves
Redden on their branches (in a fiery competition
With the final remaining cardinals) and then
Begin to sidle and float through the air, at last
Settling into colorful layers carpeting the ground.
At twilight the light, too, is layered in the trees
In a season of odd, dusky congruences—a scarlet tanager
And the odor of burning leaves, a golden retriever
Loping down the center of a wide street and the sun
Setting behind smoke-filled trees in the distance,
A gap opening up in the treetops and a bruised cloud
Blamelessly filling the space with purples. Everything
Changes and moves in the split second between summer's
Sprawling past and winter's hard revision, one moment
Pulling out of the station according to schedule,
Another moment arriving on the next platform. It
Happens almost like clockwork: the leaves drift away
From their branches and gather slowly at our feet,
Sliding over our ankles, and the season begins moving
Around us even as its colorful weather moves us,
Even as it pulls us into its dusty, twilit pockets.
And every year there is a brief, startling moment
When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and
Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies;
It is the changing light of fall falling on us.


- Edward Hirsch