Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,

On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798



Five years have past; five summers, with the length

Of five long winters! and again I hear

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

With a soft inland murmur.—Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

That on a wild secluded scene impress

Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

The day is come when I again repose

Here, under this dark sycamore, and view

These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,

Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,

Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves

'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see

These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines

Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,

Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke

Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!

With some uncertain notice, as might seem

Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,

Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire

The Hermit sits alone.



These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind

With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man's life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,—

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things.



If this

Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft—

In darkness and amid the many shapes

Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir

Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,

Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—

How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,

O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,

How often has my spirit turned to thee!



And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,

With many recognitions dim and faint,

And somewhat of a sad perplexity,

The picture of the mind revives again:

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts

That in this moment there is life and food

For future years. And so I dare to hope,

Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first

I came among these hills; when like a roe

I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides

Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

Wherever nature led: more like a man

Flying from something that he dreads, than one

Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then

(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days

And their glad animal movements all gone by)

To me was all in all.—I cannot paint

What then I was. The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were then to me

An appetite; a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, nor any interest

Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,

And all its aching joys are now no more,

And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this

Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts

Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,

Abundant recompense. For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.



Nor perchance,

If I were not thus taught, should I the more

Suffer my genial spirits to decay:

For thou art with me here upon the banks

Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,

My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch

The language of my former heart, and read

My former pleasures in the shooting lights

Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while

May I behold in thee what I was once,

My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,

Knowing that Nature never did betray

The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,

Through all the years of this our life, to lead

From joy to joy: for she can so inform

The mind that is within us, so impress

With quietness and beauty, and so feed

With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,

Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,

Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all

The dreary intercourse of daily life,

Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb

Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold

Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon

Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;

And let the misty mountain-winds be free

To blow against thee: and, in after years,

When these wild ecstasies shall be matured

Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind

Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,

Thy memory be as a dwelling-place

For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,

If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,

Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts

Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,

And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance—

If I should be where I no more can hear

Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams

Of past existence—wilt thou then forget

That on the banks of this delightful stream

We stood together; and that I, so long

A worshipper of Nature, hither came

Unwearied in that service: rather say

With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal

Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,

That after many wanderings, many years

Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,

And this green pastoral landscape, were to me

More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!



- William Wordsworth

Called By The Fire



Called by fire blazing in leaves,
wandering like Aengus into the beauty,
ambling a dappled circle,
tracing the cycle of my life.


Monkey mind names them:
Maidenhair, turkey, spicebush.
Sink into the beauty:
Awesome, fantastic, magnificent.
Words not enough.
Deeper to sounds, a protolanguage
of feeling.
No mediation: ooh! gasp! Aaahhhh!
Finally pure awe, basking in stillness.


40 years in this place,
once, all enthusiasm and ideas,
so much to do,
time seemingly unlimited.


Now, in my own autumn,
slowly trodding a leafy Persian carpet of gold,
red grace notes ascatter,
I see my whole life around me.


Past and future - together.


Saplings abound -
Maple, hickory, beech.
Land becomes its true self,
hidden so long under ax and plow.


Nut to tree,
surging through leaf mold,
life rising from death.


Fallen white oak,
leaves curled brown,
on its path of return
to the nurturing earth.
Surrendering wholly to source,
as I will do in time.
Compost and foxfire,
a fading glow,
lighting a path for those to come.


- Alan Cohen

I keep thinking
of the madrone leaves
that crackle with a hush
when they are hit with first sunlight
on the hillside at the place
I call
Celebration Bend

and the way that our
community
center
called the Hub
looks so different
when the first damp
and overcast
autumn evening
appears--
like a nest
among the
calm and gathering
hills

but I don't walk much
towards Celebration Bend
these days

and we don't gather
at the Hub
because
you know

pandemic

and other things

I want things
back

even my
most intimate
observations
and memories

Instead
I keep thinking


- Amy Elizabeth Robinson


This poem was written shortly before Amy’s home and 12 of the 13 homes in her intentional community Monan’s Rill were lost to the Glass Fire. This community, founded in the 1970s, has been the hub of so much of Sonoma County’s peace, justice, watershed ecology, and forest stewardship work over many years. If any of you feel called to help these wonderful people out in this time please go to https://www.gofundme.com/f/SupportMonansRill.

On Taking the Measure of Your Book


for Michael Franco

there must be a way
to enter your poetry
the way your words turn
into meaning after meaning
into the depths of memory
into the silence of the beach
which of course is never silent
but it seems so when I am there alone
and then the birds come
over the dunes
the tiny sandpipers,
silent in sand
creating the rhythm
of your poem
and far out beyond my eyes
the great white pelicans
and as I watch them I see
how I must enter your poetry
wings folded against the wind
as I slice again and again
into the measure of your ocean
there where silence is translated
into language

- Fran Claggett-Holland

Fran’s poem was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye for the New York Times Magazine.

The Big Picture



I try to look at the big picture.
The sun, ardent tongue
licking us like a mother besotted


with her new cub, will wear itself out.
Everything is transitory.
Think of the meteor


that annihilated the dinosaurs.
And before that, the volcanoes
of the Permian period — all those burnt ferns


and reptiles, sharks and bony fish —
that was extinction on a scale
that makes our losses look like a bad day at the slots.


And perhaps we’re slated to ascend
to some kind of intelligence
that doesn’t need bodies, or clean water, or even air.


But I can’t shake my longing
for the last six hundred
Iberian lynx with their tufted ears,


Brazilian guitarfish, the 4
percent of them still cruising
the seafloor, eyes staring straight up.


And all the newborn marsupials —
red kangaroos, joeys the size of honeybees — steelhead trout, river dolphins,
all we can save


so many species of frogs
breathing through their
damp permeable membranes.


Today on the bus, a woman
in a sweater the exact shade of cardinals,
and her cardinal-colored bra strap, exposed


on her pale shoulder, makes me ache
for those bright flashes in the snow.
And polar bears, the cream and amber


of their fur, the long, hollow
hairs through which sun slips,
swallowed into their dark skin. When I get home,


my son has a headache and, though he’s
almost grown, asks me to sing him a song.
We lie together on the lumpy couch


and I warble out the old show tunes, “Night and Day”…
“They Can’t Take That Away from Me”… A cheap
silver chain shimmers across his throat


rising and falling with his pulse. There never was
anything else. Only these excruciatingly
insignificant creatures we love.



- Ellen Bass

Daily Acts For the Foreseeable Present

There still are some simple truths.
The sun does rise, so to speak,
Surrounded each day by a greater or lesser
Intensity of color! It does still set
Over all manner of geography,

Even the dimming stars are still here,
A witness of light across the heavens, the sun and moon
Moving with us, as we too change with the seasons.

The cosmos is vast and often incomprehensible.
There are still questions we are fortunate to ask,
With answers that are not large enough for us.
Our holy beginnings are shrouded in story. Yet

It is still a good rule of thumb to tell the truth
Rather than lie, to practice the golden rule,
To have a little humility, to use common sense,
To plant a garden, mindful of all that we love,
To exercise, to delight in daily acts,
To value the God-given differences which make us,
And life interesting. This is what we teach children.

Meanwhile, while so many species are vanishing,
And light pollution obscures the primordial,
the force that has long held existence in existence
Is still keeping the beavers busy weaving their dams
Keeping giraffes, with their many necklaces,
Elegant and awkward! Rhinos still lumber roly-poly
With pigs and countless kids, into the mud.
The foxes and anteaters are keeping their
Noses to the ground, for a while, they still
Can’t get enough off the smell of existence.

- Judith Stone

Election

I voted.

I voted for the rainbow.

I voted for the cry of a loon.

I voted for my grandfather’s bones
that feed beetles now.

I voted for a singing brook that sparkles
under a North Dakota bean field.

I voted for salty air through which the whimbrel flies
South along the shores of two continents.

I voted for melting snow that returns to the wellspring
of darkness, where the sky is born from the earth.

I voted for daemonic mushrooms in the loam,
and the old democracy of worms.

I voted for the wordless treaty that cannot be broken
by white men or brown, because it is made of star semen,
thistle sap, hieroglyphs of the weevil in prairie oak.

I voted for the local, the small, the brim
that does not spill over, the abolition of waste,
the luxury of enough.

I voted for the commonwealth of the ancient forest,
a larva for every beak, a wing-tinted flower
for every moth’s disguise, a well-fed mammal’s corpse
for every colony of maggots.

I voted for open borders between death and birth.

I voted on the ballot of a fallen leaf of sycamore
that cannot be erased, for it becomes the dust and rain,
and then a tree again.
I voted for more fallow time to cultivate wild flowers,
more recess in schools to cultivate play,
more leisure, tax free, more space between days.

I voted to increase the profit of evening silence
and the price of a thrush song.

I voted for ten million stars in your next inhalation.

- Alfred K. LaMotte

Harvest


It’s autumn in the market—
not wise anymore to buy tomatoes.
They’re beautiful still on the outside,
some perfectly round and red, the rare varieties
misshapen, individual, like human brains covered in red oilcloth—
Inside, they’re gone. Black, moldy—
you can’t take a bite without anxiety.
Here and there, among the tainted ones, a fruit
still perfect, picked before decay set in.
Instead of tomatoes, crops nobody really wants.
Pumpkins, a lot of pumpkins.
Gourds, ropes of dried chilies, braids of garlic.
The artisans weave dead flowers into wreaths;
they tie bits of colored yarn around dried lavender.
And people go on for a while buying these things
as though they thought the farmers would see to it
that things went back to normal:
the vines would go back to bearing new peas;
the first small lettuces, so fragile, so delicate, would begin
to poke out of the dirt.
Instead, it gets dark early.
And the rains get heavier; they carry
the weight of dead leaves.
At dusk, now, an atmosphere of threat, of foreboding.
And people feel this themselves; they give a name to the season,
harvest, to put a better face on these things.
The gourds are rotting on the ground, the sweet blue grapes are finished.
A few roots, maybe, but the ground’s so hard the farmers think
it isn’t worth the effort to dig them out. For what?
To stand in the marketplace under a thin umbrella, in the rain, in the cold,
no customers anymore?
And then the frost comes; there’s no more question of harvest.
The snow begins; the pretense of life ends.
The earth is white now; the fields shine when the moon rises.
I sit at the bedroom window, watching the snow fall.
The earth is like a mirror:
calm meeting calm, detachment meeting detachment.
What lives, lives underground.
What dies, dies without struggle.


- Louise Gluck

October Salmon


He’s lying in poor water, a yard or so depth of poor safety,
Maybe only two feet under the no-protection of an outleaning
small oak,
Half-under a tangle of brambles.


After his two thousand miles, he rests,
Breathing in that lap of easy current
In his graveyard pool.


About six pounds weight,
Four years old at most, and hardly a winter at sea –
But already a veteran,
Already a death-patched hero. So quickly it’s over!


So briefly he roamed the gallery of marvels!
Such sweet months, so richly embroidered into earth’s
beauty-dress,
Her life-robe –
Now worn out with her tirelessness, her insatiable quest,
Hangs in the flow, a frayed scarf –


An autumnal pod of his flower,
The mere hull of his prime, shrunk at shoulder and flank,


With the sea-going Aurora Borealis of his April power –
The primrose and violet of that first upfling in the estuary –
Ripened to muddy dregs,
The river reclaiming his sea-metals.


In the October light
He hangs there, patched with the leper-cloths.


Death has already dressed him
In her clownish regimentals, her badges and decorations,
Mapping the completion of his service,
His face a ghoul-mask, a dinosaur of senility, and his whole body
A fungoid anemone of canker –


Can the caress of water ease him?
The flow will not let up for a minute.


What change! from that covenant of Polar Light
To this shroud in a gutter!
What a death-in-life – to be his own spectre!
His living body become death’s puppet,
Dolled by death in her crude paints and drapes
He haunts his own staring vigil
And suffers the subjection, and the dumbness,
And the humiliation of the role!


And that is how it is,
That is what is going on there, under the scrubby oak tree,
hour after hour,
That is what the splendour of the sea has come down to,
And the eye of ravenous joy – king of infinite liberty
In the flashing expanse, the bloom of sea-life,


On the surge-ride of energy, weightless,
Body simply the armature of energy
In that earliest sea-freedom, the savage amazement of life,
The salt mouthful of actual existence
With strength like light –


Yet this was always with him. This was inscribed in his egg.
This chamber of horrors is also home.
He was probably hatched in this very pool.


And this was the only mother he ever had, this uneasy
channel of minnows
Under the mill-wall, with bicycle wheels, car-tyres, bottles
And sunk sheets of corrugated iron.
People walking their dogs trail their evening shadows across him.
If boys see him they will try to kill him.


All this, too, is stitched into the torn richness,
The epic poise
That holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom,
so patient
In the machinery of heaven.


- Ted Hughes

And Will They Ever Com


And will they ever come, days of forgiveness and grace,
when you’ll walk in the fields, simple wanderer,
and your bare soles will be caressed by the clover,
or the wheat-stubble will sting your feet, and its sting will be sweet?

Or the rainfall will catch you, its downpour pounding
on your shoulders, your breast, your neck, your head.
And you’ll walk in the wet fields, quiet widening within
like light on the cloud’s rim.

And you’ll breathe in the scent of the furrow, full and calm,
and you’ll see the sun in the rain-pool’s golden mirror,
and all things are simple and alive, you may touch them,
and you are allowed, you are allowed to love.

You’ll walk in the field. Alone, unscorched by the blaze
of the fires, along roads stiffened with blood and terror.
And true to your heart you’ll be again humble and softened,
as one of the grass, as one of humankind.


- Lea Goldberg

(translated from the Hebrew
by Rachel Tzvia Back)

Autumnal


after a line from William Stafford


When the leaves are about to yellow and fall
ask me then how I tried to hold on to what was green,
how I thought perhaps I was different,
how everything I thought I knew about gold
turned brittle and brown. Ask me what it was like
to fall then. Sometimes the world’s workings feel transparent
and we know ourselves as the world. Sometimes
the only words that can find our lips are thank you,
though the gifts look nothing like anything
we ever thought we wanted. Sometimes, gratitude
arrives in us, not because we are willing,
but because it insists on itself, like a weed,
like a wind, like change.


- Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Late Night Prayer


Within this silence may a true voice dawn
as smoothly as the heron flies,
the wings unfold from that slender silhouette
and a great power is unfurled.
This still form can transform itself into flight -
So can we all.
May out of this quiet time come wisdom.
May in this silence emerge sound.
May this sound hold the secret of many things,
the balm to soothe our torment,
the elixir to lift us out of the slime.


We are stuck in the muck,
our shoes too heavy to lift us out
we need a miracle.
We need a spirit like a
Great Blue Heron
picking us out of this quagmire
like the stork delivers the baby
to its eagerly awaiting parents--
parents ready to spill out love to their
long awaited child, as if that child
were all the children of this earth.


Deliver us oh great spirit,
heal this wound that bleeds into the sky
turning it yellow, turning it red,.
We are inside the earth’s blister –
a yellow orange oozing from our pain,
slipping out of our hands
out of our control.
We have nothing left.


Please heal us, make us whole
allow our sincere wish
to push away the clouds and smoke
allow our words to spread wings
to billow out like giant cumulus white
clouds with edges definition clarity
against a blue sky
Allow our words our wishes our hopes
to stretch out their arms
like the wings of the heron as she lifts her great long body off the earth
as if it were nothing.
nothing but a thought
a wish
a hope
for blue skies.


- Basha

The Lesson Of The Falling Leaves


the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god
i agree with the leaves


- Lucille Clifton

Sad

Trust.
Winter will be lovely this year,
Glorious, even.
Rain will soothe,
Winds excite,
And the dark ends of days will lead to unexplored,
Interior caverns, still and vast.


Some of the birds will stay
And I will befriend them,
Appreciate our mutual magic.


Other people and I will know
When we see each other on the street
That our bodies beneath the coats and scarves all have a bit of longing,

Only partially satisfied with the hot soup
And dense, warm bread.



This longing leads us to find joy everywhere:
On the pavement,
Within the storm,
New green showing off these smooth hills,
Each other.


One glowing candle will be enough
To light the way

To dancing,
Songs of worlds,
Real love,
Unity,
A kind of Justice we knew all along.



- Sue Stephenson

Blessing the Bones

Mist curls through bushes and trees,
veils a woman on her knees to a river
that carries her words to the sea.
Eyes flashing like a wild dark night,
she speaks with the majesty of a Goddess,
the ardor of a Priestess, the urgency of a Mother.

The words float downstream and enter the Pacific
where they seep into white caps and shimmering cobalt.
Sunlight quickens every syllable sent to bless
the bones of Earth made bare by human malice,
the bones of Being born to skin and fur
to leaf and feather, root and scale, hoof and claw.

As the blessing weaves through equatorial islands,
bones beckon like shadows in bright cascades of foliage.
Driftwood beckons from gleaming shores -- tree bones
soothed by rhythms of the tides
From Hiroshima and Nagasaki come whispers like flames,
as if vaporized bones are a ghost fire,
a haunting that will ever abide as the ultimate abuse
of humanity’s power to create.

Across the Eurasian landmass they beckon --
the bones of homicide, genocide, ecocide
the bones of scattered mountain tops
of butterflies ground into grasslands
of wetlands dried and commodified.

From the Atlantic, bones beckon in beats of relief
at being tossed from slave ships.
In the Americas, they beckon from vanished villages,
from dusty drawers sequestered in museums,
from plantations, prairies, mines, and oil fields,
from once primal forests and ancient ceremonial grounds.

On days of the full moon, the woman returns
to the river that carried her blessing.
Black hair drapes her shoulders like a mantle of Creation
Her eyes shine with the tears of a planet
and the light of a star.
Some days she hears bells and a soft drum
It’s then the birds come.

- Cynthia Poten

At the Window

I was at the window
when a fly near the latch
was on its back spinning—
legs furious, going nowhere.

I thought to swat it
but something in its struggle
was too much my own.

It kept spinning and began to tire.
Without moving closer, I exhaled
steadily, my breath a sudden wind,
and the fly found its legs,
rubbed its face
and flew away.

I continued to stare at the latch
hoping that someday, the breath
of something incomprehensible
would right me and
enable me to fly.

- Mark Nepo

Autumn Passage




On suffering, which is real.
On the mouth that never closes,
the air that dries the mouth.


On the miraculous dying body,
its greens and purples.
On the beauty of hair itself.


On the dazzling toddler:
“Like eggplant,” he says,
when you say “Vegetable,”


“Chrysanthemum” to “Flower.”
On his grandmother’s suffering, larger
than vanished skyscrapers,


September zucchini,
other things too big. For her glory
that goes along with it,


glory of grown children’s vigil,
communal fealty, glory
of the body that operates


even as it falls apart, the body
that can no longer even make fever
but nonetheless burns


florid and bright and magnificent
as it dims, as it shrinks,
as it turns to something else.


- Elizabeth Alexander

October 2020

I don’t wish to dwell
on the oppressive heat, incessant smoke, and
uncertainty about whether to hang clothes in the closet, or
stuff them into a suitcase

Words can’t begin
to salve the pain of isolation
from family
dear companions
communities

I can’t complain for myself
when others lose their jobs and homes
endure the collapse of social services
suffer the pain and humiliation of poverty

I do however notice who benefits
when the infernal machine
of insatiable economics
buoys the stock market
ignores unemployment, foreclosures, hunger, and health

Priorities become obvious when
the disarrayed government
no longer a lifeline against disaster
fails to halt the agonizing slide
into debt and despair


Political charade carries the farce forward

Beyond the coffins of our hopes and dreams
we see dimly, by the flickering bonfire of old promises
our tattered reputation and flag
lying at the feet of the powerful


- Karl Frederick

The swan does not care
if I think
it is beautiful.
The platypus is indifferent
to my laugh or scorn.


My great granddaughter--
"great" "grand" "daughter"--
what an odd and awe
inspiring succession
of words--
makes her 10 month old
will be known
over the tiniest
of indignations:
that piece of cheese
this book
pick me up
put me down.
I do not want
to break her spirit.
I can only show her
the swan and
the platypus,
the blue dragonflies mating over the pond,
the soft forest floor beneath the redwoods,
the crash of the ocean's waves,
the pelicans that glide above them.
I can only hope
that she will use
that fierce will
to protect
the natural world
and her place
in it.


- Richard Bloom

Savages

They buy poetry like gang members
buy guns — for aperture, caliber,
heft and defense. They sit on the floor
in the stacks, thumbing through Keats
and Plath, Levine and Olds, four boys
in a bookstore, black glasses, brackish hair,
rumpled shirts from the bin at St. Vincent de Paul.
One slides a warped hardback
from the bottom shelf, the others
scoot over to check the dates,
the yellowed sheaves ride smooth
under their fingers.
One reads a stanza in a whisper,
another turns the page, and their heads
almost touch, temple to temple — toughs
in a huddle, barbarians before a hunt, kids
hiding in an alley while sirens spiral by.
When they finish reading one closes
the musty cover like the door
on Tutankhamen’s tomb. They are savage
for knowledge, for beauty and truth.
They crawl on their knees to find it.


- Dorianne Laux

A Portable Paradise


And if I speak of Paradise,
then I’m speaking of my grandmother
who told me to carry it always
on my person, concealed, so
no one else would know but me.
That way they can’t steal it, she’d say.
And if life puts you under pressure,
trace its ridges in your pocket,
smell its piney scent on your handkerchief,
hum its anthem under your breath.
And if your stresses are sustained and daily,
get yourself to an empty room – be it hotel,
hostel or hovel – find a lamp
and empty your paradise onto a desk:
your white sands, green hills and fresh fish.
Shine the lamp on it like the fresh hope
of morning, and keep staring at it till you sleep.


- Roger Robinson

Good News


Would you rather have the good news
at a bad time, or bad news at a good?

Give me the good news, please.

Okay: Bad times don’t last forever.

Man, I needed that. And the bad news?

Good times don’t last forever, either.

So news is, basically, Things change?

When it’s bad, we need the good.
That’s new, old, and always.


- Kim Stafford

Oil
soft rainsqualls on the swells
south of the Bonins, late at night. Light
from the empty mess-hall
throws back bulky shadows
of winch and fairlead
over the slanting fantail where I stand.
but for men on watch in the engine room,
the man at the wheel, the lookout in the bow,
the crew sleeps. in cots on deck
or narrow iron bunks down drumming
passageways below.
the ship burns with a furnace heart
steam veins and copper nerves
quivers and slightly twists and always goes—
easy roll of the hull and deep
vibration of the turbine underfoot.
bearing what all these
crazed, hooked nations need:
steel plates and
long injections of pure oil.


- Gary Snyder

Buddhist New Year Song

I saw you in green velvet, wide full sleeves
seated in front of a fireplace, our house
made somehow more gracious, and you said
“There are stars in your hair”— it was truth I
brought down with me

to this sullen and dingy place that we must make golden
make precious and mythical somehow, it is our nature,
and it is truth, that we came here, I told you,
from other planets
where we were lords, we were sent here,
for some purpose

the golden mask I had seen before, that fitted
so beautifully over your face, did not return
nor did that face of a bull you had acquired
amid northern peoples, nomads, the Gobi desert

I did not see those tents again, nor the wagons
infinitely slow on the infinitely windy plains,
so cold, every star in the sky was a different color
the sky itself a tangled tapestry, glowing
but almost, I could see the planet from which we had come

I could not remember (then) what our purpose was
but remembered the name Mahakala, in the dawn

in the dawn confronted Shiva, the cold light
revealed the “mindborn” worlds, as simply that,
I watched them propagated, flowing out,
or, more simply, one mirror reflecting another.
then broke the mirrors, you were no longer in sight
nor any purpose, stared at this new blackness
the mindborn worlds fled, and the mind turned off:

a madness, or a beginning?

- Diane di Prima

(August 6, 1934 - October 25, 2020)

singularity


(after Marie Howe)


in the wordless beginning
iguana & myrrh
magma & reef ghost moth
& the cordyceps tickling its nerves
& cedar & archipelago & anemone
dodo bird & cardinal waiting for its red
ocean salt & crude oil now black
muck now most naïve fumbling plankton
every egg clutched in the copycat soft
of me unwomaned unraced
unsexed as the ecstatic prokaryote
that would rage my uncle’s blood
or the bacterium that will widow
your eldest daughter’s eldest son
my uncle, her son our mammoth sun
& her uncountable siblings & dust mite & peat
apatosaurus & nile river
& maple green & nude & chill-blushed &
yeasty keratined bug-gutted i & you
spleen & femur seven-year refreshed
seven-year shedding & taking & being this dust
& my children & your children
& their children & the children
of the black bears & gladiolus & pink florida grapefruit
here not allied but the same perpetual breath
held fast to each other as each other’s own skin
cold-dormant & rotting & birthing & being born
in the olympus of the smallest
possible once before once


- Marissa Davis

Read Three Times & Call Me in the Morning

Command yourself
to read a poem
three times
at each single session
to understand how much
it can offer you and
other readers over time
Notice that this is how
one rare poem
will call to attention
the restless soul from
marking time at ease

- Ed Coletti

God Letter


Do I have to dress up or can I wear jeans? Dear Joaquin,

casual Sunday is a plus! Can a woman be fully present in heels?

Remember the other day at the shops, we saw the T-shirt that

read “Blessed” across the front? I know



you picked it up for me as a joke, but it made me pause. I think

I am blessed in the way I understand people to mean it: having

good fortune. But this is where faith messes with my clean concept,

because practicing Christians don’t believe blessings come



out the clear blue sky. So here’s God again, all up in the Kool-Aid.

I’m dating myself, but I mean that He gets in the way of

spiritual minimalism. He is at once contained and uncontainable,

which, intellectually, is hard to understand. So being blessed



must require that one acts in such a way that presses God to bestow

blessings, which isn’t the same thing as good fortune, but I want

to believe that people are saying, “You have such good fortune,

I hope for good fortune, too,” because it means that no one is



preaching at me like, “You have good God-God,” “Father

God I hope He Gods for us, too,” “You got God?” Et cetera.


- CM Burroughs

Don’t Speak in the Abstract

Say rather:
It’s a nice day.
Pass the mashed potatoes, please.
Look, there’s a chickadee.
Your voice made me swoon.
Let’s plant the beans.
I miss my dead mother so much today.
I want to touch your face.
Clean up this mess!
What’s better than a cool glass of water?
I feel so sad; all I want to do is cry.
What time is it?
I want to touch you everywhere.
Let’s go for a walk.
Will you have tea with me?
Let’s play some music.
I don’t want to die.
Come visit again soon.

- David Budbill

Letter to My Great, Great Grandchild
after Matthew Olzmann


Oh button, don’t go thinking we loved pianos
more than elephants, air conditioning more than air.
We loved honey, just loved it, and went into stores
to smell the sweet perfume of unworn leather shoes.


Did you know, on the coast of Africa, the Sea Rose
and Carpenter Bee used to depend on each other?


The petals only opened for the Middle C their wings
beat, so in the end, we protested with tuning forks.


You must think we hated the stars, the empty ladles,
because they conjured thirst. We didn’t. We thanked


them and called them lucky, we even bought the rights
to name them for our sweethearts. Believe it or not,


most people kept plants like pets and hired kids
like you to water them, whenever they went away.


And ice! Can you imagine? We put it in our coffee
and dumped it out at traffic lights, when it plugged up


our drinking straws. I had a dog once, a real dog,
who ate venison and golden yams from a plastic dish.


He was stubborn, but I taught him to dance and play
dead with a bucket full of chicken livers. And we danced


too, you know, at weddings and wakes, in basements
and churches, even when the war was on. Our cars


we mostly named for animals, and sometimes we drove
just to drive, to clear our heads of everything but wind.


- J.P. Grasser

Dead Letter Office


They say a scrivener
went mad from years of working
in the dead letter office,
that undelivered love letter,
broken hearts; the bank note,
a starving child; those words
of hope, of condolence, of solace
forever sealed, unread, cut short
weighed on his heart, his mind
What lives did they cost,
those letters dead, undelivered?
May not a destination be a destiny?
When ballots are not delivered
could not a democracy be destroyed,
a tyranny assured?
In a dead letter office
a scrivener lost his mind;
in a dead letter office
a country can lose its liberty.


- Rafael Jesus Gonzalez