Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

I, Coyote, Stilled Wonder


When did I get that bejawed look,
that flashes up out of creeks and pools?
Was it when I fled across
pasture and through woods,
up to ledge, and came out
in the world to let myself think events
back into their right sequence again?
Man glaring into bloody mess on ground,
cow, who has birthed calf, I,
Coyote, actually tasted,
ate of it well past demarcating line
where calf becomes aftermatter.
I think it was then, when I fled
singing, happy, to wood's edge.
I could see Man raise arms,
steady his over-and-under, and squeeze.
I, Coyote, I was there, yes, I saw it all,
even the flock of tiny lead
that went scattering past.
I felt in me all those that hit,
nearly shattered wraith, clinging
to crushed jawbone, invisibly
slickering through trees, from here on
alone, I, Coyote, stilled wonder.


- Galway Kinnell

In My Spare Time


During my long, boring hours of spare time
I sit to play with the earth’s sphere.
I establish countries without police or parties
and I scrap others that no longer attract consumers.
I run roaring rivers through barren deserts
and I create continents and oceans
that I save for the future just in case.
I draw a new colored map of the nations:
I roll Germany to the Pacific Ocean teeming with whales
and I let the poor refugees
sail pirates’ ships to her coasts
in the fog
dreaming of the promised garden in Bavaria.
I switch England with Afghanistan
so that its youth can smoke hashish for free
provided courtesy of Her Majesty’s government.
I smuggle Kuwait from its fenced and mined borders
to Comoro, the islands
of the moon in its eclipse,
keeping the oil fields in tact, of course.
At the same time I transport Baghdad
in the midst of loud drumming
to the islands of Tahiti.
I let Saudi Arabic crouch in its eternal desert
to perserve the purity of her thoroughbred camels.
This is before I surrender America
back to the Indians
just to give history
the justice it has long lacked.


I know that changing the world is not easy
but it remains necessary nonetheless.


- Fadhil al-Azzawi
(translation: Khaled Mattawa)

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

In My Spare Time


During my long, boring hours of spare time
I sit to play with the earth’s sphere.
I establish countries without police or parties
and I scrap others that no longer attract consumers.
I run roaring rivers through barren deserts
and I create continents and oceans
that I save for the future just in case.
I draw a new colored map of the nations:
I roll Germany to the Pacific Ocean teeming with whales
and I let the poor refugees
sail pirates’ ships to her coasts
in the fog
dreaming of the promised garden in Bavaria.
I switch England with Afghanistan
so that its youth can smoke hashish for free
provided courtesy of Her Majesty’s government.
I smuggle Kuwait from its fenced and mined borders
to Comoro, the islands
of the moon in its eclipse,
keeping the oil fields in tact, of course.
At the same time I transport Baghdad
in the midst of loud drumming
to the islands of Tahiti.
I let Saudi Arabic crouch in its eternal desert
to perserve the purity of her thoroughbred camels.
This is before I surrender America
back to the Indians
just to give history
the justice it has long lacked.


I know that changing the world is not easy
but it remains necessary nonetheless.


****- Fadhil al-Azzawi
****(translation: Khaled Mattawa)

---

I would keep the continents and oceans where they are
but ship the $banks$ to Alcatraz and sink the Island after that.*
No credit cards or printed money,
barter only with solid goods, handy work and mind-creations.
I would strew the seeds of magic-*
to enhance our human minds and hearts
to keep all the goodness and more of it to add.
Just keep a tiny bit of mean to balance of it all...
and wars would fade away...

edith

Voices from the Trees


Deep roots
Wide reach


Listen to the whispering wind,
the raging gale.
Feel the quiet in your depths.


Release your seeds into the breeze
You probably won't see
where they land and grow.


Your reaction to inevitable wounds
engenders the face you show the world.


Offer your fruit
to all who need it.


When old, remember the suppleness of youth.
When young, imagine the strength of age.


Grow ever toward flaming passion
as we reach toward the sun.


- Alan Cohen

To A Friend whose Work Has Come To Nothing


Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honour bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbours' eyes?
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.


- William Butler Yeats

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

To A Friend whose Work Has Come To Nothing

---

True happiness is of a retired nature,
and an enemy to pomp and noise;
it arises, in the first place,
from enjoyment of one's self,
and in the next
from the friendship
and conversation
of a few selected companions.

Joseph Addison

In the Yuzgir Pass




For Karim Minu

As my eyes followed her,
The dragonfly
Rose and fled.
The preying mantis
Did not reach her.
If he had,
Nothing would remain of her
Save for a colorful pair of wings.

When the foolish hunter
Was sleeping in his hiding-place
In the Yuzgir Pass,
The pretty gazelle,
Under my gaze,
Drank deeply from the spring
And went away
And nothing remained of her
But her recent droppings.

On our return,
I found a goat-bell.
I hung it round my neck
And we ran down the goat trail:
I wanted to be the dragonfly's wings
I wanted to be the gazelle's legs.


- Majid Naficy

The Ordinary Path to the Limitless

The child learning the bird
is not just naming it,
She is for a fleeting moment
escaping the prison of the small,
the self suddenly become vast
in the bird’s wing and the flying
song in the secret branches of a tree.
That song is heard in the ear of a heart
learning a brown bird’s name, for the first time,
a brown bird that is neither outside
nor inside, nor imagined, as it flies off,
as it merges into the familiar
magnificence, that is everywhere
and they are both the size of the sky.


- Judith Stone

Alone among mountains and hills,
coiling like dragons and snakes,
I've come to live.
All day, I know nothing
but joy.
Sometimes, I climb
a solitary peak,
and let loose a howl
that chills
the Universe.

- Khong Lo (?-1119)
Vietnam

The Price of Right


So much grace available, but how we receive it depends on what we can let go of.
- Joi Sharp


Inside the place where we are right, the rain
can never fall. Inside the place where we
are right, the leaves fall yellowed off the trees.
No breeze. No bells. No peaches. We explain.
We judge, contend, defend and claim, maintain
our certainty. And meanwhile, we don't see
the lilacs wilting, grasses browning, bees
without their hives, lost crows, the sunset drained.
But sometimes in this shrinking cage of right
wings in a doubt. A question. Nothing's clear.
And see how soon the crows return, a slight
of breeze, a scent of rain. I'll meet you here,
this open place, exposed, unclosed. How light
comes spilling in as our defenses disappear.


- Rosemerry Trommer

You Are Not Christ
New Orleans, Louisiana
For the drowning, yes, there is always panic.
Or peace. Your body behaving finally by instinct
alone. Crossing out wonder. Crossing out
a need to know. You only feel you need to live.
That you deserve it. Even here. Even as your chest
fills with a strange new air, you will not ask
what this means. Like prey caught in the wolf’s teeth,
but you are not the lamb. You are what’s in the lamb
that keeps it kicking. Let it.


- Ricky Laurentiis

There is also this to see:
They will live on, they will increase,
No longer pawns of time.
They will grow like the sweet wild berries
The forest ripens as its treasure.

Then blessed are those who never turned away
And blessed are those who stood quietly in the rain.
Theirs shall be the harvest; for them the fruits.

They will outlast the pomp and power
Of lawmakers, whose meanings will crumble.
When all else is exhausted and bled of purpose,
They will lift their hands,
that have survived.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Pentimenti

"Pentimenti of an earlier position of the
arm may be seen."—Frick Museum


It's not simply
that the top image
wears off or
goes translucent;
things underneath
come back up
having enjoyed the
advantages of rest.
That's the hardest
part to bear, how
the decided–against
fattens one layer down,
free of the tests
applied to final choices.
In this painting,
for instance, see how
a third arm––
long ago repented
by the artist**––
is revealed,
working a flap
into the surface
through which
who knows what
exiled cat or
extra child
might steal.

- Kay Ryan

I never get enough of laughing with you,
that wild humor.


Thirsty and dry, I complain, but everything is made of
water!
Lonely, yet my head leans against your shirt!
My wounded hands, your hands.


Do something drastic.


You say, "Come and sit in the innermost room,
where you'll be safe from the love-thief."


I reply, "But I've tried to be the ringknocker
on your door, so you won't have to
always be letting me in and out."


You say, "No. You stand on the threshold waiting,
and you're here in the inner chamber too.
You're at home in both places."


I love the quietness of such an answer.
Come to this table of quietness.


- Jelelludin Rumi
Ode 2244
Version by Coleman Barks


Hitch up your camel. It is time again for Rumi's Caravan, a magical evening of poetry and music, returns. This event usually sells out. Tickets are $25 and are available at the Rug Gallery in Santa Rosa at 514 B Street, at Many Rivers Books and Tea in Sebastopol at 130 S. Main St. and at brown paper tickets. See the attached flyer for more details.


Where: Glaser Center, 547 Mendocino Ave, Santa Rosa
When: February 9. Doors open at 6 pm for pre-show wine and appetizers, and the performance begins at 7 pm.
Tea and cake will be served at intermission.

Lavish attire encouraged.

Performers:

Carol Fitzgerald
Claressa Darden Morrow
Doug von Koss
Gwynn O'Gara
Kay Crista
Larry Robinson
Maja Apolonia Rodé
Richard Naegle

Musicians:
Cynthia Albers
Kim Atkinson

Twilight Under Pine Ridge

Earth between two lights,
one just now draining away
from tiny trees on the western shoulder
and one to come,
as the stars begin to open in the field of night.
On every slope great trees are flowering
in beautiful relation and yet
all solitary. In the green darkness
clear voices leave off
and fold inward toward sleep.
The grass
parts.
Lord God slides forward on his belly.


- Robert Mezey

Descant

“We, the people…” he intoned, like a master chorister,
long, lean hands arcing slowly, gracefully,
pointing upward to that place where sparrows,
eyed from on high,
pursue their simple song of happiness and freedom.

“He wants to annihilate us,” whines the weepy Speaker to his obstinate troops,
as if turning from tedious, tiresome talk of guns, butter, and sour statistics
would so disentangle their gnarly grip on the ship of state
that they and it would sink together,
like water-logged wooden weights,
to the dark depths of memory’s vast ocean.

“We, the people…” over and over he calmly calls us back,
back from the brink of life-sapping fear,
back from shallow slogans’ thin air,
back to that place where confidence reins,
like boy sopranos singing above the gloom,
their harmonious descant lifting us skyward
with a vibrant ancient song.

- Bill Dickinson

The Boy Died In My Alley


to Running Boy


The Boy died in my alley
without my Having Known.
Policeman said, next morning,
"Apparently died Alone."


"You heard a shot?" Policeman said.
Shots I hear and Shots I hear.
I never see the Dead.


The Shot that killed him yes I heard
as I heard the Thousand shots before;
careening tinnily down the nights
across my years and arteries.


Policeman pounded on my door.
"Who is it?" "POLICE!" Policeman yelled.
"A Boy was dying in your alley.
A Boy is dead, and in your alley.
And have you known this Boy before?"


I have known this Boy before.
I have known this boy before, who ornaments my alley.
I never saw his face at all.
I never saw his futurefall.
But I have known this Boy.


I have always heard him deal with death.
I have always heard the shout, the volley.
I have closed my heart-ears late and early.
And I have killed him ever.


I joined the Wild and killed him
with knowledgeable unknowing.
I saw where he was going.
I saw him Crossed. And seeing,
I did not take him down.


He cried not only "Father!"
but "Mother!
Sister!
Brother."
The cry climbed up the alley.
It went up to the wind.
It hung upon the heaven
for a long
stretch-strain of Moment.


The red floor of my alley
is a special speech to me.


- Gwendolyn Brooks

To Be a Slave of Intensity


Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think. . .and think. . .while you are alive.
What you call “salvation’ belongs to the time before death.


If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?


The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten--
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of
Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you
will have the face of satisfied desire.


So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!


Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that
does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.


- Kabir
(version by Robert Bly)

Bent to the Earth
They had hit Ruben
with the high beams, had blinded
him so that the van
he was driving, full of Mexicans
going to pick tomatoes,
would have to stop. Ruben spun

the van into an irrigation ditch,
spun the five-year-old me awake
to immigration officers,
their batons already out,
already looking for the soft spots on the body,
to my mother being handcuffed
and dragged to a van, to my father
trying to show them our green cards.

They let us go. But Alvaro
was going back.
So was his brother Fernando.
So was their sister Sonia. Their mother
did not escape,
and so was going back. Their father
was somewhere in the field,
and was free. There were no great truths

revealed to me then. No wisdom
given to me by anyone. I was a child
who had seen what a piece of polished wood
could do to a face, who had seen his father
about to lose the one he loved, who had lost
some friends who would never return,
who, later that morning, bent
to the earth and went to work.


- Blas Manuel De Luna

State Of The Union (2005)


Today the President speaks
of his plan to liberate us all.
The bodhisattvas have a similar plan,
but theirs will take a little longer:
endless lifetimes, in fact.


His, of course, is more urgent
due to the coming Rapture,
when all true believers will be lifted
out of their cars and clothes
and credit card debt.


I, too, pray for the Rapture.
After they’re gone we’ll untangle
the wrecked cars and the broken bodies.
We’ll wash their clothes and give them to the poor.
We’ll write off their debts and open their homes to the
homeless.


Then we’ll get on with rebuilding
our bombed cities and shattered lives,
our schools, our libraries and our poisoned soil.
We’ll clean our rivers, plant rice and bake bread.
We’ll sing and make love and drink red wine.
We’ll raise our children and do the laundry
and argue about much smaller things.


As for me, I want to smell
the just open daphne and go for a walk with Cynthia.
I want to prune the apricot tree
and talk with my neighbor
about the unseasonably delicious foretaste of Spring
this second day of February, 2005.


- Larry Robinson 2/2/05

an orphan & the Dharma do well together
last week the odd couple gave birth to a divine child
old friends don’t recognize me
“how different you look”, they say
on Cold Mountain it is Spring
naked I chase butterflies & moonbeams
mountain outside, mountain inside
all is wholeness dreaming itself alive

- Robert Leverant

The Song of Wandering Aengus




I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.


When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name;
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.


Though I am old from wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.


- William Butler Yeats

Amo Ergo Sum

Because I love
The sun pours out its rays of living gold
Pours out its gold and silver on the sea.

Because I love
The earth upon her astral spindle winds
Her ecstasy-producing dance.

Because I love
Clouds travel on the winds through wide skies,
Skies wide and beautiful, blue and deep.

Because I love
Wind blows white sails,
The wind blows over flowers, the sweet wind blows.

Because I love
The ferns grow green, and green the grass, and green
The transparent sunlit trees.

Because I love
Larks rise up from the grass
And all the leaves are full of singing birds.

Because I love
The summer air quivers with a thousand wings,
Myriads of jewelled eyes burn in the light.

Because I love
The iridescnt shells upon the sand
Takes forms as fine and intricate as thought.

Because I love
There is an invisible way across the sky,
Birds travel by that way, the sun and moon
And all the stars travel that path by night.

Because I love
There is a river flowing all night long.

Because I love
All night the river flows into my sleep,
Ten thousand living things are sleeping in my arms,
And sleeping wake, and flowing are at rest.

- Kathleen Raine

Silence


There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.


The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.


The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.


The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.


And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night


like snow falling in the darkness of the house—
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.


- Billy Collins

Love
Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills.
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.
- Czeslaw Milosz
(translated by Robert Hass)

Famous
The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.


- Naomi Shihab Nye

For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15

There is no stray bullet, sirs.
No bullet like a worried cat
crouching under a bush,
no half-hairless puppy bullet
dodging midnight streets.
The bullet could not be a pecan
plunking the tin roof,
not hardly, no fluff of pollen
on October’s breath,
no humble pebble at our feet.

So don’t gentle it, please.

We live among stray thoughts,
tasks abandoned midstream.
Our fickle hearts are fat
with stray devotions, we feel at home
among bits and pieces,
all the wandering ways of words.

But this bullet had no innocence, did not
wish anyone well, you can’t tell us otherwise
by naming it mildly, this bullet was never the friend
of life, should not be granted immunity
by soft saying—friendly fire, straying death-eye,
why have we given the wrong weight to what we do?

Mohammed, Mohammed, deserves the truth.
This bullet had no secret happy hopes,
it was not singing to itself with eyes closed
under the bridge.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

Cave
(for Werner Herzog)

300 century-ago paintings
six times aged over any after.
Happy 32,000^th year since
artists first conceived art as I do
while the dormant years bore no
handmade eyes, soul or elevation
until other tastes beholding them
transformed at once to wings.

Handprints of red dot
crooked finger
white horse
bison with eight legs
signifying movement,
likewise a rhino’s
many tusks, and
a spinal column.

Glacial time
sunny cold
calcite skull bones of ibis
and bits of golden eagles
carried here by bears who
later scratched the walls white,
hyenas watching noisily.

Paleolithic odors
imagined and real
of cave dwellers
envisioned and everywhere,
small boy with wolf,
white calcite,
eyes upon us, while

The hotel next door
to the art gallery
where my own paintings hang
in Glen Ellen, California
congruently is named
“Chauvet.”


- Ed Coletti

Sweet Darkness


When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.


When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.


There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.


You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.


Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.


Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness


to learn


anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive


is too small for you.


- David Whyte

Abandoned Farmhouse
He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
on a pile of broken dishes by the house;
a tall man too, says the length of the bed
in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,
says the Bible with a broken back
on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;
but not a man for farming, say the fields
cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.

A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall
papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves
covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,
says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.
Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves
and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.
And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.
It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.

Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields
say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard
like branches after a storm--a rubber cow,
a rusty tractor with a broken plow,
a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.


- Ted Kooser

In the Absence of Kindness


In the absence of kindness
Take one deep breath
And then let it go
Into the heat of confusion
Or an echoless emptiness
Where it may be swallowed up
Like a dove in a black hole
Listen as it coos gently in the dark


The next breath may disorient you
That’s a good sign
Go ahead
Lose your way
Your point
Your imitation
Of someone you don’t even
Recognize now

You’ve made a U-turn
And like a boomerang
Being struck by lightning
Random acts of kindness
Now seem as natural
As being breathed into Self
That One who has forgiven
Any part of the whole that
Might have believed
You were not enough


- Fran Carbonaro

OCCUPY SUGARLOAF
- a California State Park


As I hike the path that crosses
a sun-blanched meadow, meander
under oak shadow on the hillside trail,

I spot them, beginning to take over:
whip of slim snake, fin-flick of steelhead
black-tailed deer, encroaching grass.

Silence occupies the air.

Then the ravens' croaks,
the turkeys' glee. There's only
one more day

till the state locks the gate
to cars, campers, horses—
and those who know

no boundaries take hold:
quail, hawk, lizard
rain, sun, wind, seed.
- Jodi Hottel

Leaning In


Sometimes, in the middle of a crowded store on a Saturday
afternoon, my husband will rest his hand
on my neck, or on the soft flesh belted at my waist,
and pull me to him. I understand


his question: Why are we so fortunate
when all around us, friends are falling prey
to divorce and illness? It seems intemperate
to celebrate in a more conspicuous way


so we just stand there, leaning in
to one another, until that moment
of sheer blessedness dissolves and our skin,
which has been touching, cools and relents,


settling back into our separate skeletons
as we head toward Housewares to resume our errands.


- Sue Ellen Thompson

Footnote from the Brink

2/14/2013, Valentines Day

Black sky,
lots of glittering white stars,
brings back a memory.
I'm not moving,
but staying still,
still want to participate,
get involved.

Color coming into it,
reds and greens,
blinking yellow background
warning me,
get on to something else,
stay active with the thoughts of dying.

Din in background,
going off and on,
very important.
Activity,
just being,
the act of dying.

State of being,
the act of dying not affecting it.
Wonder what part, what part of what?
It is a situation that is getting confusing.
Why am I doing it?
I'm not curious about dying.
I just want to do it.
I am not afraid.

The din is leaving me,
evaporating.
I sleep.
I wake up,
not unhappy to wake up.
I accept it all.

Another day is coming on,
travel and family are still basic passions,
and dying is well taken care of,
coming around the bend.

Where did the words come from?

My friends are mostly gone,
and I'm going off to love music, jazz, opera,
and to hear Gregory's voice,
to see him.

Leaving is enough.
I can't feel sad,
what's happening is inevitable.
My time is your time.

I'm feeling incompetent,
unlikely to hold it together.
I did the best I could under the circumstances.

The circumstances of what?
Everything is interesting,
every little piece of evidence,
and I am not afraid.

I want to head into the unknown,
with my forehead first,
no hair to cover my eyes.
I want to go open, unadorned, plain and bare.
I see part light, part dark,
the light is ahead of me,
and dark on either side of me.

I'm traveling through the light and the dark.
And I am not afraid.


- Maxine Collin Williams
(Maxine died last week after 95 years on the planet)

ascension


for Jonathan Glass

the geometry
of distance annoys
is unfilled

countless shapes fly about
collide
change form
careen in other directions

when motion stops
what does the space contain?

do we require an answer?

it feels dangerous
uncertain
without movement

images and memories
slowly approach
are here
then gone

hands held
candles lit
chaotic feelings
rise and fall
within love
and loss

life's
ragged outline
becomes more clear
we must go on

so must you.


- Richard Retecki

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum -
Kept beating - beating - till I thought
My mind was going numb -

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space - began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here -

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then -


- Emily Dickinson

Dear Human:


You've got it all wrong.
You didn't come here to master unconditional love.
This is where you came from and where you'll return.


You came here to learn personal love.
Universal love.
Messy love.
Sweaty love.
Crazy love.
Broken love.
Whole love.
Infused with divinity.
Lived through the grace of stumbling.
Demonstrated through the beauty of . . . messing up.
Often.


You didn't come here to be perfect; you already are.
You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous.
And rising again into remembering.
But unconditional love? Stop telling that story.
Love in truth doesn't need any adjectives.
It doesn't require modifiers.
It doesn't require the condition of perfection.


It only asks you to show up.


And do your best.


That you stay present and feel fully.


That you shine and fly and laugh and cry
and hurt and heal and fall and get back up
and play and work and live and die as YOU.


It's enough.


It's plenty.


- Courtney A. Walsh

It Is March


It is March and black dust falls out of the books
Soon I will be gone
The tall spirit who lodged here has
Left already
On the avenues the colorless thread lies under
Old prices


When you look back there is always the past
Even when it has vanished
But when you look forward
With your dirty knuckles and the wingless
Bird on your shoulder
What can you write


The bitterness is still rising in the old mines
The fist is coming out of the egg
The thermometers out of the mouths of the corpses


At a certain height
The tails of the kites for a moment are
Covered with footsteps


Whatever I have to do has not yet begun


- W. S. Merwin

The World Was Old When We Got Here


we could see that, easy. Paint and birch
bark curling, dried up wells and leaky
faucets, weeping willows and bent windmills
shrieking in the breeze. Driven outside, we swung
our legs from the seats of rusted tractors tangled
in dead branches, crept into abandoned
houses graffitied by trees. We wove sticks
with bale twine to make shelters, fished
the hood of a car from the river
for a roof, used bricks from the crumbled
cookhouse for a makeshift wall.


Inheriting ruins,
we made ruins.


Blue jeans in the wash still came out dirty. The breath
of grown-ups fermented with things unsaid. Someday
we'd understand "farm crisis," foreclosure, FDIC. We'd see
people driving Cadillacs, rest our faces on the plush
white carpet of our own remodeled homes, remember
clover by the chicken pen, how each spring we rolled
in it, each spring it was new.


- Kara McKeever

In Praise of Worry


Think of it and it won't happen,
I've often thought. Too unlikely
to imagine the accident-you
in the car in the rain-then receive
the call. Too uncanny,
too much like a book.


In life, almost no one
recognizes what's important
when it's beginning-the comical bully
on his way to power, the shy boy
next door loading his gun, or the baby
in the barn, only the animals watching.


Then a few travelers arrive in the night.


Later, we can see the shape of the story,
or make one up, if we have to.


So you're driving home in a terrible storm.
Rain lashes the windshield, great trees
are collapsing, but you're safe
because the scene I'm picturing


won't happen if I think of it first.
That's what I keep telling myself
until the storm is over-
challenging the order of things
to show its hand, betting it won't.


- Lawrence Raab

Silence


I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea,
And the silence of the city when it pauses,
And the silence of a man and a maid,
And the silence of the sick
When their eyes roam about the room.
And I ask: For the depths
Of what use is language?
A beast of the field moans a few times
When death takes its young.
And we are voiceless in the presence of realities -
We cannot speak.




A curious boy asks an old soldier
Sitting in front of the grocery store,
"How did you lose your leg?"
And the old soldier is struck with silence,
Or his mind flies away
Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg,
It comes back jocosely
And he says, "A bear bit it off."
And the boy wonders, while the old soldier
Dumbly, feebly lives over
The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,
The shrieks of the slain,
And himself lying on the ground,
And the hospital surgeons, the knives,
And the long days in bed.
But if he could describe it all
He would be an artist.
But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds
Which he could not describe.


There is the silence of a great hatred,
And the silence of a great love,
And the silence of an embittered friendship.
There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,
Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,
Comes with visions not to be uttered Into a realm of higher life.
There is the silence of defeat.
There is the silence of those unjustly punished
And the silence of the dying whose hand
Suddenly grips yours.
There is the silence between father and son,
When the father cannot explain his life,
Even though he be misunderstood for it.


There is the silence that comes between husband and wife.
There is the silence of those who have failed;
And the vast silence that covers
Broken nations and vanquished leaders.
There is the silence of Lincoln,
Thinking of the poverty of his youth.
And the silence of Napoleon
After Waterloo.
And the silence of Jeanne d'Arc
Saying amid the flames, "Blessed Jesus" -
Revealing in two words all sorrows, all hope.
And there is the silence of age,
Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
In words intelligible to those who have not lived
The great range of life.


And there is the silence of the dead.
If we who are in life cannot speak
Of profound experiences,
Why do you marvel that the dead
Do not tell you of death?
Their silence shall be interpreted
As we approach them.


- Edgar Lee Masters

To Daffodils


Fair Daffodils, we weep to see

https://www.flower-gardening-made-ea...sus-suzy-1.jpg

You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain'd his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the even-song;
And, having pray'd together, we
Will go with you along.


We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
Like to the summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew,
Ne'er to be found again.


- Robert Herrick

The Generations


We watch the young, rising early, determined,
going out to dig into the horizons their elders
heralded: the images and tokens of worship, the
paradises and unfenced boundaries prepared
before them that now must be seen through
their own eyes. There's no going back. There's
hope they will grow into the possibilities we were.
We want and often wait for and gravely expect
our children to fulfill our plotted desires. Often we
are blind or indifferent to their desires. More and
more we merge with the lives and deaths contained
in the time through which we passed.
Let us watch out for the winter's clouds we see as
loss, the withering of hope into judgement that can
come with age. Why trust in the whisperings of regret
when our precious days are ripening with the measure
of honest enthusiasms that, at last, we have earned?
The generation that follows, we pray, will not be burdened
with our history of distortions; they may be free of the
lament that recalls a world once better than it is. How
clear it is that those other worlds are here! We who were
children just a dream ago can offer the light that lets us
love in them their journey. Understanding this, we can
come to more respect our own.

- Rich Meyers

Two Giant Fat People


God
And I have become
Like two giant fat people
Living in a
Tiny boat.
We
Keep
Bumping into each other and
Laughing.


- Hafiz
(from The Gift - Translations by Daniel Ladinsky)

Difficulties


Friend, please tell me what I can do about this mud world
I keep spinning out of myself!


I gave up expensive clothes, and bought a robe
But I noticed one day the cloth was well-woven.


So I bought some burlap, but I still
Throw it elegantly over my left shoulder.


I stopped being a sexual elephant,
And now I discover that I"m angry a lot.


I finally gave up anger, and now I notice
That I am greedy all day.


I worked hard at dissolving the greed,
And now I am proud of myself.


When the mind wants to break its link with the world
It still holds on to one thing.


Kabir says: Listen, my friend,
There are very few that find the path!!


- Kabir
(translation by Robert Bly)

Passage Through The Center


It’s like swimming across a river
with our eyes closed, this passage
through the center of our life.
Sometimes we have to navigate
from the inside out -
when the stars hide their light
when we cannot see the bank
on the other side, when the hounds
of our past bark on the shoreline
braying their mournful song at our leaving.

It is a stillness like the heart of the fire
that guides—the voice of some angel of mercy
who has been sending us missives
since our birth. And when we look over
our shoulder - once, twice -
it is the fierce tiger of truth who howls,
You cannot go back, that place is gone now.

And for a moment, we freeze in the river
sure we will drown, forgetting which way
is up and down, forward and back,
as the roar of the tumbling current
pours through us with all the questions
that have refused to leave us alone,
with visions of the many roads
bursting into flames behind us.

And then something remembers itself,
lifts our shoulders above the swirling cauldron
of in between and we simply let go
of making our way, we let go of decisions,
and the tangled paradoxes flow on through
the river’s body, drawing us to the edge
of this new world that calls us to our knees
to give thanks for this fertile soil
seeded with dreams,
thirsty for our arrival.

- Laura Weaver

Point Reyes—wild oats in the wind
for JQ

As if it were the holy spirit
engulfing me,
as if I even knew
the nature of such a thing,
as if I might even be able to tell you
the mystery of a moment that pushed me
to the very edge of . . . of . . . something,
calling loudly without words for me to simply open up—all the way . . .

We stood together in silence,
in the midst of things,
on the headlands, high above the surf,
a dusty trail beneath our feet
crisscrossed from time to time
by slow moving, shinny black beetles,
while stationery, high above our heads
a hawk lay just beneath the cold gray blanket
that covered everything on this tiny slip of land
sliding northward, sliding always northward.
And everywhere it was wind—
the air moved, ruffled clothes and tousled hair,
made soft staccato pops and flutters in our ears
that almost hid from them
an exquisite, near silent song.

Had we not seen the wild oats dancing,
delicately dangling their tiny, hull-covered seeds,
atop straight golden stalks,
that bent down in the wind,
as if to say, namaste, to everything,
lightly touching one another, then,
like bows and strings—
had we not seen them dancing so,
we would have missed their music,
their heavenly music,
the intricacy of which,
the joy of which
went well beyond
what human hand
could make
or these human words
describe.

Oh, the wind and the song of the wild oats!


- Bill Denham

Ark

The mountain sleeps,
awaiting the arrival
of the next storm,
unmoved as only a mountain can be

Unlike the rest of us
anxiously eyeing
the hidden pearl of the sun
tucked away in the
dank oyster flesh
of the cloud

Or others of us,
heads down grazing into a wind
heavy with water and information
we do not want

Or still others
gathering kindling
that might float away from us
and save someone else

All of us occupied
with our useless preparations,
like Noah, who meant well
but should have left well enough alone
and slept and dreamed
he was a mountain.


- Greg Hayes

The Pope's Penis

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver sweaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat -- and at night
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.

- Sharon Olds

Jesus Christ! ;-)

Gold, Green

Let it be
On a day in March
California;
When the grass is green
On the rolling hills
And the snow
Is deep in the mountains –

Let it be
On a day like this
That we plant a tree
California
For the years to come
For the little ones
and the lakes
Will be pure in the mountains –

Let it be gold and green
California;
That we touch the ground
That we heal the land
From the mountains to the sea.

- Gary Snyder

Envoi


O, child, where we stand
Is quicksand


This venerable crust
Dust


Move bravely on,
As if there were watchers.


- Barry Spacks

alchemy


the miracle is in
the capacity
of your eyes
to distinguish
an ordinary tree
from a sun-crowned
gently nodding
green cathedral.
to realize
a faucet
is a dispensary
of wet
braided
light.
to regard
your own
left hand
as an astonishing feat
of animation.
to turn
a rabid
gnashing world
into unending
gentle music.


- Natascha Bruckner

Daffodils


I wander'd lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.


- William Wordsworth

Sailing to Byzantium

I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations--at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.


II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.


III

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.


IV

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form a Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords or ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.


- William Butler Yeats

A Song Of Peace


I closed my eyes in darkness

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...e_dove.svg.png

and opened them in light,
and over the world,
like a flag unfurled,
was a sweet sound and a holy sight.

A dove spread wings of magic;
its shadow was golden and broad,
and the people of earth,
in a passion of birth,
had shattered an ancient sword.

Oh, why is my country hated
and made such a thing of scorn,
this fruitful place
with its varied race,
this land where I was born?

And why is my country darkened,
when the rest of the world is light,
and cloaked in fear
of things once dear,
and weak in its frightful might?

And why are the people silent,
and where is the ancient song
that mankind found
was freedom's sound,
to shatter injustice and wrong?

We'll not have our country hated!
Our country is strong and grand.
Oh, be not dismayed
by those who betrayed
the heritage of our land.

If a song can be made so simple,
if a word can become a creed,
then the sound of peace
will gently increase,
like the harvest from the seed.

Ask not why the land is silent;
let the people measure their toil,
and the human race
will share its grace
with the lonely folk of our soil.

Its grace is new and holy,
and peace is the dream of the world,
and the people of earth
in a passion of birth
will see their banner unfurled.

The banner is pure and sacred,
enough of the swine who destroy!
Enough of the night,
the world is bright-
and the future is filled with-joy.

Our cup is running over
with the graft and the lies and the hate,
and the renegade
is too well paid
with our broken dreams and our children's fate.


We'll open our eyes in the darkness,
and boldly look to the light,
and call to our side
with earnest pride
our people who dwell in the night.

And they'll see the dove so holy,
so pure and wide of wing,
wide as the earth
in its passion of birth-
with a joyful song to sing.

And the lilt will be made so simple,
and the word will become a creed,
and the song of peace
will gently increase,
like the harvest from the seed.

- Howard Fast (1914-2003)

Another Spring


The seasons revolve and the years change
With no assistance or supervision.
The moon, without taking thought,
Moves in its cycle, full, crescent, and full.


The white moon enters the heart of the river;
The air is drugged with azalea blossoms;
Deep in the night a pine cone falls;
Our campfire dies out in the empty mountains.


The sharp stars flicker in the tremulous branches;
The lake is black, bottomless in the crystalline night;
High in the sky the Northern Crown
Is cut in half by the dim summit of a snow peak.


O heart, heart, so singularly
Intransigent and corruptible,
Here we lie entranced by the starlit water,
And moments that should each last forever


Slide unconsciously by us like water.


- Kenneth Rexroth

Ten Years Later


When the mind is clear
and the surface of the now still,
now swaying water
slaps against
the rolling kayak,
I find myself near darkness,
paddling again to Yellow Island.
Every spring wildflowers
cover the grey rocks.
Every year the sea breeze
ruffles the cold and lovely pearls
hidden in the center of the flowers
as if remembering them
by touch alone.
A calm and lonely, trembling beauty
that frightened me in youth.
Now their loneliness
feels familiar, one small thing
I've learned these years,
how to be alone,
and at the edge of aloneness
how to be found by the world.
Innocence is what we allow
to be gifted back to us
once we've given ourselves away.
There is one world only,
the one to which we gave ourselves
utterly, and to which one day
we are blessed to return.


- David Whyte

Frivolous Spring

If one must have a mind for winter,
spring requires no mind at all.

Only a blue-eyed sky, long of day,
sweet of night,

or sprinkle of rain with muddysplash
walk in the park,

and gather of lupine, poppies,
a singing lark.

Spring is a garland dance in the woods,
a humming breeze with peppery zing
of pollensting,

a giddy of daisies flinging petals
to the wind, counting the ways
helovesmehelovesmenothelovesme!


- Patrice Warrender

Bush's War


I typed the brief phrase, "Bush's War,"
At the top of a sheet of white paper,
Having some dim intuition of a poem
Made luminous by reason that would,
Though I did not have them at hand,
Set the facts out in an orderly way.
Berlin is a northerly city. In May
At the end of the twentieth century
In the leafy precincts of Dahlem Dorf,
South of the Grunewald, near Krumme Lanke,
Spring is northerly; it begins before dawn
In a racket of bird song. The amsels
Shiver the sun up as if they were shaking
A liquid tangle of golden wire. There are two kinds
Of flowering chestnuts, red and white,
And the wet pavements are speckled
With petals from the incandescent spikes
Of their flowers and shoes at U-bahn stops
Are flecked with them. Green of holm oaks,
Birch tassels, the soft green of maples,
And the odor of lilacs is everywhere.
At Oscar Helene Heim station a farmer
Sells white asparagus from a heaped table.
In a month he'll be selling chanterelles;
In the month after that, strawberries
And small, rosy crawfish from the Spree.
The piles of stalks of the asparagus
Are startlingly phallic, phallic and tender
And deathly pale. Their seasonal appearance
Must be the remnant of some fertility ritual
Of the German tribes. Steamed, they are the color
Of old ivory. In May, in restaurants
They are served on heaped white platters
With boiled potatoes and parsley butter,
Or shavings of Parma ham and lemon juice
Or sorrel and smoked salmon. And,
Walking home in the slant, widening,
Brilliant northern light that falls
On the new-leaved birches and the elms,
Nightingales singing at the first, subtlest,
Darkening of dusk, it is a trick of the mind
That the past seems just ahead of us,
As if we were being shunted there
In the surge of a rattling funicular.
Flash forward: the firebombing of Hamburg,
Fifty thousand dead in a single night,
"The children's bodies the next day
Set in the street in rows like a market
In charred chicken." Flash forward:
Firebombing of Tokyo, a hundred thousand
In a night. Flash forward: forty-five
Thousand Polish officers slaughtered
By the Russian Army in the Katyn Woods,
The work of half a day. Flash forward:
Two million Russian prisoners of war
Murdered by the German army all across
The eastern front, supplies low,
Winter of 1943. Flash: Hiroshima.
And then Nagasaki, as if the sentence
Life is fire and flesh is ash needed
To be spoken twice. Flash: Auschwitz,
Dachau, Therienstadt, the train lurching,
The stomach woozy, past displays of falls
Of hair, piles of valises, spectacles
With frames designed to curl delicately
Around a human ear. Flash:
The gulags, seven million in Byelorussia
And Ukraine. In innocent Europe on a night
In spring, among the light-struck birches,
Students holding hands. One of them
Is carrying a novel, the German translation
Of a slim book by Marguerite Duras
About a love affair in old Saigon. (Flash:
Two million Vietnamese, fifty five thousand
Of the American young, whole races
Of tropical birds extinct from saturation bombing)
The kind of book the young love
To love, about love in time of war.
Forty five million, all told, in World War II.
In Berlin, pretty Berlin, in the spring time,
You are never not wondering how
It happened, and the people around you
In the station with chestnut petals on their shoes,
Children then, or unborn, never not
Wondering. Is it that we like the kissing
And bombing together, in prospect
At least, girls in their flowery dresses?
Someone will always want to mobilize
Death on a massive scale for economic
Domination or revenge. And the task, taken
As a task, appeals to the imagination.
The military is an engineering profession.
Look at boys playing: they love
To figure out the ways to blow things up.
But the rest of us have to go along.
Why do we do it? Certainly there's a rage
To injure what's injured us. Wars
Are always pitched to us that way.
The well-paid news readers read the reasons
On the air. And we who are injured,
Or have been convinced that we are injured,
Are always identified with virtue. It's that--
The rage to hurt mixed with self-righteousness
And fear--that's murderous.
The young Arab depilated himself
As an act of purification before he drove
The plane into the office building. It's not
Just violence, it's a taste for power
That amounts to loathing for the body.
Perhaps it's this that permits people to believe
That the dead women in the rubble of Baghdad
Who did not cast a vote for their deaths
Or the glimpse afforded them before they died
Of the raw white of the splintered bones
In the bodies of their men or their children
Are being given the gift of freedom
Which is the virtue of their injured killers.
It's hard to say which is worse about this,
The moral sloth of it or the intellectual disgrace.
And what good are our judgments to the dead?
And death the cleanser, Walt Whitman's
Sweet death, the scourer, the tender
Lover, shutter of eyelids, turns
The heaped bodies into summer fruit,
Magpies eating dark berries in the dusk
And birch pollen staining sidewalks
To the faintest gold. Bald nur--Goethe--no,
Warte nur, bald ruhest du auch. Just wait.
You will be quiet soon enough. In Dahlem,
Under the chestnuts, in the leafy spring.


- Robert Hass

Leah's Daughter

The workshop was just about to get started when somebody noticed
that Leah looked glum & distracted & asked what was wrong,
& Leah told us her daughter had called from Iraq that morning,
hysterical, screaming & weeping. Trained as an army clerk,
she'd been reassigned & was driving sniper patrols around
in a Humvee. The day before, they'd spied two guys
at the side of the road wiring an IED, & behind them, sitting
& playing, were two little kids. Leah said her daughter
kept screaming into the phone that her guys fired round after round
after round till the four were nothing but torn-open bodies
& skulls without faces in puddles of blood & her guys just kept
laughing & shooting & laughing & shooting & "Mom, they
were just little kids! Oh my God," she kept crying. "It's not right!
It just isn't right!" We sat there, all of us, horrified, silent.
Till finally Karen said, "That's awful, Leah!" & after a minute or two,
when no one said anything more, I started taking attendance.
Then we critiqued the first poem: an honest if somewhat
disorganized story of failed love. But of course it was still
on everyone's mind, & someone, I think it was Teri, asked Leah
how old her daughter was & how long before she'd
get to come home. "It's her second deploy," Leah said quietly.
"She'll be twenty in August. She's got four months & six days
to go if her tour isn't extended like last time & if . . . " She stopped
midsentence. No one said anything further. Like everyone
else, I kept my mouth shut, & we moved on to the next poem.


- Steve Kowit

Is this a poem, a prayer, or a list.
Are these arbitrary things. Mercury,


Venus, Earth. Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus, Neptune. Eight. Like spokes


on the wheel of dharma. Nights
of hanukkah, lenses in a fission


weapon. Eight the atomic
number of oxygen. China


knew eight immortals, the Buddha
once preached an eightfold path.


Count the stars, you ask.
No. No, I can't. The gyroscope


of planets, what comes first. Count
the atomic number of hydrogen. How


many oceans are there really.
How many voids comprise the hub


of the dharmachakra, how many plutonium
cores inside the bomb. The one


whose initial impact my grandfather
miscalculated. What is not a planet. Why


do stars contain lithium, die
white dwarfs, in need of lithium.


- Zach Horvitz

Honda Pavarotti




I'm driving on the dark highway
when the opera singer on the radio
opens his great mouth
and the whole car plunges down the canyon of his throat.


So the night becomes an aria of stars and exit signs
as I steer through the galleries
of one dilated Italian syllable
after another. I love the passages in which


the rich flood of the baritone
strains out against the walls of the esophagus,
and I love the pauses
in which I hear the tenor's flesh labor to inhale


enough oxygen to take the next plummet
up into the chasm of the violins.
In part of the song, it sounds as if the singer
is being squeezed by an enormous pair of tongs


while his head and legs keep kicking.
In part of the song, it sounds as if he is
standing in the middle of a coliseum,
swinging a 300-pound lion by the tail,


the empire of gravity
conquered by the empire of aerodynamics,
the citadel of pride in flames
and the citizens of weakness
celebrating their defeat in chorus,


joy and suffering made one at last,
joined in everything a marriage is alleged to be,
though I know the woman he is singing for
is dead in a foreign language on the stage beside him,
though I know his chain mail is made of silver-painted plastic
and his mismanagement of money is legendary,
as I know I have squandered
most of my own life


in a haze of trivial distractions,
and that I will continue to waste it.
But wherever I was going, I don't care anymore,
because no place I could arrive at


is good enough for this, this thing made out of experience
but to which experience will never measure up.
And that dark and soaring fact
is enough to make me renounce the whole world
or fall in love with it forever.


- Tony Hoagland

Spring

Again, the violet bows to the lily

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...8_12-02-07.png

Again the rose is tearing off her gown!

Again, near the top of the mountain
The anemone’s sweet features appear.

The hyacinth speaks formally to the jasmine,
“Peace be with you.” “And peace to you lad!
Come walk with me in this meadow.”

The narcissus winks at the wisteria,
“Whenever you say.”

And the clove to the willow, “You are the one
I hope for.” The willow replies, “Consider
these chambers of mine yours. Welcome!”

The ringdove comes asking, “Where,
where is the Friend?”

With one note the nightingale
Indicates the rose.

Again, the season of Spring has come
And a spring-source rises under everything,
a moon sliding from the shadows.

- Jelaluddin Rumi
( translated by Coleman Barks)

To These Eyes


You only ones
I ever knew
you that have shown me
what I came to see
from the beginning
just as it was leaving
you that showed me the faces
in the realms of summer
the rivers the moments of gardens
all the roads that led here
the smiles of recognition
the silent rooms at nightfall
and have looked through the glasses
my mother was wearing when she died
you that I have never seen
except nowhere in a mirror
please go on showing me
faces you led me to
daylight the bird moment
the leaves of morning
as long as I look
hoping to catch sight
of what has not yet been seen


- W. S. Merwin

A Poem About a Farm


Fruit trees
A hill
White golden grasses
Dogs children roaming
A tractor filled with people
Circling around in circles
Under blue heaven skies
Friends gathered sipping wine
A brick oven baking
Round circles of dough
Butterflies, flowers, music
A sense of peace
Community, spoken words
My friends have a farm
Where souls meet
In nature and love.


- Nancy Long

Easter Morning In Wales


A garden inside me, unknown, secret,
Neglected for years,
The layers of its soil deep and thick.
Trees in the corners with branching arms
And the tangled briars like broken nets.


Sunrise through the misted orchard,
Morning sun turns silver on the pointed twigs.
I have woken from the sleep of ages and I am not sure
If I am really seeing, or dreaming,
Or simply astonished
Walking toward sunrise
To have stumbled into the garden
Where the stone was rolled from the tomb of longing.


- David Whyte

Conflict
I’d like to propose a toast…

to dreams
and to the bold
Men and Women
that dare to dream them
to the wild-eyed visionaries
that plant seeds in their
hearts with hopes
to one day see them
come to pass

for prayers
sweeter than papayas
that rise from the
deepest darkest
depths of our cellars
where my heart
is pumping out
prayers like mass

to the foresight
that illuminates our
foreshadows that
whirl in the glass
of our souls
to those robust
farm workers clad
in jeans, flannels
handkerchiefs and hats

for all the Mamas and Papas that
wear their skin like worn leather
who are wrinkled and red like raisins
and whose wrinkles hold stories like wine jugs
and whose woes are ten miles deeper than
any winemaker’s pocket book

this ones for them

for all of the grandmas
and grandpas that look like stucco
whose eyes look like ice wines
with frost outlining their irises
for the crows-feet perched
perfectly on their eye-lids
and their white hair flowing
like broken clouds passing
through windmill slices
for century old spines like gnarly
vines in vineyards for lilac diamonds
to the god-like elders
for our aging wines and
their timeless guidance

this ones for floral notes
sung by the brown folks
for the flower vendor
the one that puts
the rose in rosary
for a gorgeous culture
that rose from dirt so openly
for arms that open like blossoms
for womb-like palms that deliver
the grape from bondage
and carry it from
conception to fruition
and beyond the goblet
for the seed that dreams itself
larger than grapes and transcends
wine, song, couplet and sonnet

to cherry pickers like
rebels with barreled chests
waging war with their wages
who hurl their dreams
like Molotov cocktails
into our amber waves of grain
whose knuckles are
gnarled and strained
for the work of a dreamer
is stainless and honest

for the protagonist, the antithesis, the subplot
and most importantly the conflict

you see
I know copper-skinned
women and men
that work for pennies

I know Mothers that
never feel beaten
machine-like Mothers
that clean hotels by day
sell Avon at night
and work the fields
on the weekends
so this ones for freedom

for children with eyes like plums
whose hair looks like dark chocolate
waterfalls pouring out and catching the sun

for precious sun-flowers
with green thumbs that
have never been embarrassed
of their hardworking parents
that pick pears and pluck asparagus
this ones for the families that get scattered
for work all across the Americas

its ugly
I know a girl that was
held for ransom at birth
just beneath the border
by bad men known
as Coyotes who you
gotta pay to smuggle dreams
into this country

its beyond ugly
its heart crushing

so this ones for the underbelly
for the juggling of children over rivers
for dodging dogs & militias
for sliding dreams passed
the law writers passing
laws higher than the
barb wire their casting
the people they’re pruning
and the hopes they’re smashing

to the Mighty Migrant Worker
may your hands and spine
always nurture the vine
may the cups of all your tomorrows
be filled with the fruits of your labor
and may the dreams you dream of find freedom
in the land of your neighbor

To you
- Jordan Chaney

Tweet Prayer for Poets


Choose rock or sand;
prepare a face to suit
the places where you stand.


Crisis, stasis, oasis or dust?
Calliope, Erato, look over us.


- David Beckman

Passover


Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses . . .
and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.
- Exodus 12: 7 & 13


They thought they were safe
that spring night; when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?
Forty years in the desert
without a home, without a bed,
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.


But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.


Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the desert sky.


- Lynn Ungar

The Garden of Love


I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.


And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.


And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys & desires.


- William Blake

Letter to Jerusalem

To hold the bird and not to crush her, that is the secret.
Sand turned too quickly to cement and who cares if the builders lose their arms?
The musk of smoldered rats on sticks that trailed their tails through tunnels underground.
Trickster of light, I walk your cobbled alleys all night long and drink your salt.
City of bones, I return to you with dust on my tongue.
Return to your ruined temple, your spirit of revolt.
Return to you, the ache at the center of the world.


- Elana Bell

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,


what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.


In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.


And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XXIX)

Ascension in Silk Pajamas
for Irene Perez



While most decline in their final days
Slack jawed and pallid, holding on,
You will ascend.....
Perhaps in the quiet of the early hours, as dawn teases
the horizon and when least expected.


Not with a struggle, but with the flutter of butterfly wings
Perceptible only to those with the finest-tuned senses.
You will slip out on that last elegant breath, your serenity swelling
Beyond the beautiful body you have inhabited
And the tender hearts encircling you
Past one last glimpse of your purposeful existence
Kissing it tenderly as you fly


Willingly, into the unknown.






- Fran Carbonaro

A Thousand Years of Healing


From whence my hope, I cannot say,
except it grows in the cells of my skin,
in my envelope of mysteries
it hums.
In this sheath so akin to the surface of the earth,
it whispers.
Beneath the wail and dissonance in the world,
hope’s song grows.
Until I know that with this turning
we put a broken age to rest.
We who are alive at such a cusp
now usher in
one thousand years of healing!

Winged ones and four-leggeds,
grasses and mountains and each tree,
all the swimming creatures,
even we, wary two-leggeds
hum, and call, and create the Changing Song.
We remake all our relations.
We convert our minds to the Earth.
In this turning time
we finally learn to chime and blend,
attune our voices; sing the vision
of the Great Magic we move within.
We begin the new habit,
getting up glad
for a thousand years of healing.


- Susa Silvermarie

April Chores


When I take the chilly tools
from the shed's darkness, I come
out to a world made new
by heat and light.


The snake basks and dozes
on a large flat stone.
It reared and scolded me
for raking too close to its hole.


Like a mad red brain
the involute rhubarb leaf
thinks its way up
through loam.


- Jane Kenyon

YES! Thank you, Larry ... this expresses so well the vision that has indeed been growing in the cells of me as well. I have been encouraging people to focus on this new reality growing around us instead of bemoaning the mess we are leaving. This says it perfectly. Blessings ....

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

A Thousand Years of Healing


From whence my hope, I cannot say,
except it grows in the cells of my skin,
in my envelope of mysteries
it hums.
In this sheath so akin to the surface of the earth,
it whispers.
Beneath the wail and dissonance in the world,
hope’s song grows.
Until I know that with this turning
we put a broken age to rest.
We who are alive at such a cusp
now usher in
one thousand years of healing!

Winged ones and four-leggeds,
grasses and mountains and each tree,
all the swimming creatures,
even we, wary two-leggeds
hum, and call, and create the Changing Song.
We remake all our relations.
We convert our minds to the Earth.
In this turning time
we finally learn to chime and blend,
attune our voices; sing the vision
of the Great Magic we move within.
We begin the new habit,
getting up glad
for a thousand years of healing.


- Susa Silvermarie

---

Exercise


First forget what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly every day

then forget what day of the week it is
do this regularly for a week
then forget what country you are in
and practice doing it in company
for a week
then do them together
for a week
with as few breaks as possible

follow these by forgetting how to add
or to subtract
it makes no difference
you can change them around
after a week
both will help you later
to forget how to count

forget how to count
starting with your own age
starting with how to count backward
starting with even numbers
starting with Roman numerals
starting with fractions of Roman numerals
starting with the old calendar
going on to the old alphabet
going on to the alphabet
until everything is continuous again

go on to forgetting elements
starting with water
proceeding to earth
rising in fire

forget fire

- W.S. Merwin

Spirit


spirit calls out your name
when lightning flashes
spirit makes a trail


and okay sometimes we catch a glimpse
Yeats' wife begins dictation
on the train outside San Bernardino


years later we listen and
fall inward to
silence


your life is gold within
sun behind clouds
still gives off light


is it too easy to say
life is blessed
and has freedom gone hidden


what is death
except
dark stone in the center of the path


- Jack Crimmins

The Dark Stone


for Jack Crimmins


There in the path, it waits
The dark stone, in the center–
The place we hoped never to arrive.


Life is littered with so many losses,
Dark stones, scattered in the fields and paths,
Betrayals by death, dishonesty, disappointment.


What happens if we meet that stone with wonder,
Walk to its cruel center, sit in its
Sorrowful presence?


Here, yes here, in the heart of
Fear, disillusion, chaos and
Confusion, peace arrives, a soft surprise.


- Rebecca del Rio

The Scream


It exploded out of
the short, squat woman,
curdling every molecule
in the library parking lot until
the whole little bay became
an emblem of her terror.


She stood silent, and the air
began to clear. Then she
erupted again, shrill syllables
--Aleut? Inuit? Tibetan?—
rolling off her tongue.


She stood on the curb beside
three travel-cases
the taxi driver had set there
before driving away.


Now her curse opened
to pure ululation:
visions of Algerian women,
revolution, apocalypse;
witchcraft.


Though I could not visit
the places where
her sounds had originated,
I knew the translations:
rage, horror. And this


much more: in
those bags
lay all she owned.
And no one
was coming
to take her
home.


- Max Reif

God Says Yes To Me


I asked God if it was OK to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was OK to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don¹t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I¹m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes


- Kaylin Haught

Lutheran Sea

One wave follows another
beneath the heel of the wind;
the spray blows landward,
but lacking salt or iodine
it smells oddly Protestant,
carrying the faintest tang
of wet iron,
well water
sluiced in a bucket
from a cabin you visited once
when you were a boy,
water that numbed the tongue
as if it had dripped
from a seam of ice,
blue and glistening,
in a cave
where nymphs of winter
with red fingers
preened before mirrors of frost,
dead cold sober.

- James Armstrong

Han-shan Is The Cure For Warts


My job was eating me night and day,
my wife threatening to leave, taking
even the stroller and the quilt.
A family of warts blossomed on my thumb
so big I introduced them to tellers and clerks.
Then I bumped into Han-shan in the bookstore,
one hundred poems so small I read them all.
We moved to a new place. My wife
smiles out on sidewalks where children ride.
I work in a room so quiet I can hear my heartbeat.
My warts are gone, no marks, no scars.


- James P. Lenfestey

The Diameter of the Bomb
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.


- Yehuda Amichai

Han Shan


Down in the city
they speed in the streets
Up on the mountain
we walk on the path


Down in the city
they see how fast
something can be done


Up on the mountain
we watch the dogwood blossom


First the christmas balls
then the little birds' mouths
followed by eggs in the nest
how I love that stage,
and that is followed
by campion holding hands
over head
when two petals still hold
and the other two have let go


Just yesterday...
Was it a new speed record?
for the street runners
…. or was it a bomb
that made news.


Selling fear in the city
is so easy.


Up on the mountain
with the dogwood blooming.
we just say:


Is that so?


Why were they running on paved streets?
Where were they going?


Didn't they hear?
It is spring.


- David Bean

For What Binds Us


There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down --
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.


And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,


as all flesh
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest --


And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.


- Jane Hirshfield

The Kama Sutra of Kindness: Position Number 3


It's easy to love
through a cold spring
when the poles
of the willows
turn green
pollen falls like
a yellow curtain
and the scent of
Paper Whites
clots
the air
but to love for a lifetime
takes talent
you have to mix yourself
with the strange
beauty of someone
else
wake each morning
for 72,000
mornings in
a row so
breathed and
bound and
tangled
that you can hardly
sort out
your arms
and
legs
you have to
find forgiveness
in everything
even ink stains
and broken
cups
you have to be willing to move through
life
together
the way the long
grasses move
in a field
when you careen
blindly toward
the other
side
there's never going to be anything
straight or predictable
about your path
except the
flattening
and the springing
back
you just go on walking for years
hand in hand
waist deep in the weeds
bent slightly forward
like two question
marks
and all the while it
burns
my dear
it burns beautifully above
you
and goes on
burning
like a relentless
sun


- Mary Mackey

We Have A Beautiful Mother


We have a beautiful
Mother
Her hills
Are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
Hills.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her oceans
Are wombs
Her wombs
Oceans.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her teeth
The white stones
At the edge
Of the water
The summer
Grasses
Her plentiful
Hair.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her green lap
Immense
Her brown embrace
Eternal
Her blue body
Everything we know.


- Alice Walker

Love This Miraculous World


Our understandable wish
to preserve the planet
must somehow be
reduced
to the scale of our
competence.
Love is never abstract.
It does not adhere
to the universe
or the planet
or the nation
or the institution
or the profession,
but to the singular
sparrows of the street,
the lilies of the field,
“the least of these
my brethren.”
Love this
miraculous world
that we did not make,
that is a gift to us.


- Wendell Berry

Taking the Dogs to the Beach

Took my dogs to the beach today -the old lady Sara and
the young upstart Emmy.

Sara, a lab mix, used to live to go places but is now mostly confined to the yard; she was very excited!

Nevertheless, I had to lift all 95lbs of her
into the back of my Prius.

Emmy, my sharp and alert 68 pound Sheppard
practically jumped over us to fit in as well.

They smelled the beach miles before we arrived.
The car fogged up with dog breath.

Out like we came in, old lady Sara huffing and puffing
before we got 10 feet from the car, Emmy already annoyed at the slow pace.

30 yards from where we started, Sara lies down near the lapping shore of the sea. Her eyes and her memory were much bigger than her arthritic body could manage. No frolicking in the surf, no chasing of balls sticks, birds or sea foam.

This was it.

She could go no further. She lay panting in the sand, staring out to sea.

Emmy wined and pulled on the leash saying without any words: “come on let’s go!”

I wonder what she sees, my old friend, in the rhythmic pounding of the surf, the eternal grinding down of things.

Does she know?

Perhaps…

All that lives must die,

all things flow back to the sea from which they came.

The best we can do is remember the good things
and not be afraid.

For God will not leave us comfortless.


- George Gittleman

O Sweet Spontaneous


O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting


fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked


thee,
has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy


beauty .how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and


buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true


to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover


thou answerest




them only with


spring)


- e.e. cummings

Until We Rise


They stood, teetering, on the window sills,
97 stories or 100 stories high,
and then, looking back
into the smoke and flames,
they held hands and jumped
hurling
spinning
careening
tumbling
through miles of open air
until they landed here,
in our hearts, where we
dig through the rubble
of our lives
to find them
and reach in, taking their hands in ours,
until we rise with them
from the Land of the Dead
into the new life we promise to become.


- Pesha Joyce Gertler

Shirt


The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians


Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band


Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze


At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—


The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out


Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.


A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once


He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—


Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked


Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans


Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,


Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
To wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,


The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:


George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit


And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,


The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.


- Robert Pinsky

Sonnets To Orpheus
Part Two, XII


Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
Where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much.
as the curve of the body as it turns away.


What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.


Pour yourself like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.


Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne,
becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.


- Rainer Marie Rilke
(translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

Milk Bone
only crumbs in my pocket
we walk slowly


smells no longer interest you
your world reduced to me


I am your religion
I will betray you
we walk the edge together
we will both fall far


- Les Bernstein

Debtors


They used to say we're living on borrowed
time but even when young I wondered
who loaned it to us? In 1948 one grandpa
died stretched tight in a misty oxygen tent,
his four sons gathered, his papery hand
grasping mine. Only a week before, we were fishing.
Now the four sons have all run out of borrowed time
while I'm alive wondering whom I owe
for this indisputable gift of existence.
Of course time is running out. It always
has been a creek heading east, the freight
of water with its surprising heaviness
following the slant of the land, its destiny.
What is lovelier than a creek or riverine thicket?
Say it is an unknown benefactor who gave us
birds and Mozart, the mystery of trees and water
and all living things borrowing time.
Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?

- Jim Harrison

Blessings for the Tomb, the Cocoon, the Liminal Space



May you surrender to the tender gravity of your grief and loss

May you give honor and homage to that which has fallen away

May you integrate the wisdoms of your passage

May you feel the sacred burden of your own life in your arms

May you treat yourself with exquisite kindness and patience

May you find peace in your cocoon . . . acceptance and surrender

May you be transformed by your own darkness and rise renewed

• Kay Crista

Gravity of Stars


Discovered while staring at the bottom of a coffee-cup
that I’ve spent too much time looking-up.
That if your head is arched too high in the clouds
you can’t appreciate how much you have grown
once you have forgotten the ground.
I want to forget about stars.
About things that fly.
Skyscrapers.
Superheroes.
And God.
I want to find magnitude in a molehill,
hard work on an ant’s back,
bad choice in an empty bottle,
forgiveness in a person’s car wreck.
I want to see color the same way a blind man must feel it.
Tell me when it was when I forgot about simplicity.
When I started to believe that someone who could do trigonometry in their
head mattered more than a 33-year-old man who finally woke up this
morning
and decided he was done wasting his life.
Today, he was gonna figure out to be better at living again.
We need to remember to go up to every person we see with scars
shake their hand and say,
Congratulations for surviving whatever it was
that caused you to hurt yourself.
Stop wishing on stars and start believing in ourselves again
for this world is a ticking time bomb;
everyday that passes is just another moment less.
I want to see my reflection in an eye of a fly.
No more stargazing.
Waterfall wishing.
Prayer giving.
I’m starting to get a crook in my neck by starring in the clouds for too long.
I want to be inspired by heartbeats again.
Hold people like my favorite book,
kiss the fat pimple on a teenager’s forehead and say,
I hope you don’t think that is a factor in how beautiful you are,
‘Cuz it is not.
Tell Michael Ray Stevens
It doesn’t make you bad to be in love with a boy—
love is what makes us human.
Be happy that you feel something for someone—
you’d be surprised how difficult that is for some.
I want to tell pilots to try swimming.
That the sky is way too beautiful for us to be in it.
We need to come down from our high-horse.
Tomorrow I’m going to travel Austin, TX by crawling on my knees
in hopes that when I stand back up I’ll see things differently.
I’m done dreaming of astronauts.
The moon is a made-up romantic.
Put me in the pavement.
Lie my carcass in the cracks.
Let me be humbled by the power of speaking by the silent dance
of a deaf man’s hands.
I want to watch closely the lips of a mute
who wishes for nothing other than to hear the sound of his voice.
Visit a hospital and hold the hand of a woman in a comma dreaming
about moving again.
For the sky has nothing in it as interesting as the diversity on this earth.
That is why I don’t care anymore about flying.
There is a reason the stars keep falling.
They are jealous of the things we get to see
by just being here—
On
the
ground. . .. .


- Lacey Roop

Another beautiful start to another beautiful day. Thanks, Larry

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Gravity of Stars

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