Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

i am a little church

i am a little church (no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
- i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying) children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope, and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church (far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish) at peace with nature
- i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring, i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)


- e.e.cummings

Our Eyes Are Sweet Obedient Dogs

The mind must reach beyond time,
not revise or think at all;
thought is always late for truth.
Take the one bright element
from heaven on earth, the blazing
word inside the throat of rivers
and sky, desert and fields,
that will not burn, and speak
its flame without a sound.
Fire catches in sight and feeds
on gross imagination.
We do not see for fear
of burning here alive.

- Chard de Niord

October

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day.
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes' sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost -
For the grape' sake along the wall.

- Robert Frost

Poem In October

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in shower of all my days
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sunlight
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and the sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singing birds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.

- Dylan Thomas

God Does Not Answer Prayer

God does not answer prayer.
It is a sacrilege to think so.

An insult to the god-drenched hearts

of all who pray through the night

and in the morning are nonetheless

handed a dead child.


The churches in Salem used to burn heretics

to increase attendance. Now those who feel

their prayer didn't reach quite far enough,

that they were not pure enough,

are victims of a merciless atheism

that says all good fortune comes from God

though the brutal often prosper

and it is not uncommon to torture

the pure of heart.


We pray for the best, forgetting

the unpredictable unfolding

that must occur for us to learn

prayer for others works better

than for ourselves. Jesus prays

in the garden of Gethsemane

and is refused. Ten thousand,

ten million prayers rise in Latin,

Arabic, Hindi, and Hebrew


yet their husbands and wives,

children and sisters, fathers and brothers

do not survive well if at all

though in their chest beats the strong sacred heart.


No prayers are granted, none denied.

True prayer reaches well beyond the edge of the world.

It enters head bowed into the arms of the Beloved.


- Stephen Levine

To My Students

You who can read,
do not take it for granted;
you who cannot,
there are worlds, there are gods
yet to be quickened in your dreams.
The worlds await to form on your tongue,
the gods to tremble in your ears.

These little marks, black as fly-droppings
on the page, and as small,
speak to you - you do not hear.
I cannot tell you the beginning of naming,
only how it changes and magic
sparks and sputters at the base of the skull.
I do not know if there is answer;
perhaps our speaking is enough.
Men have died always alone;
these small blemishes on the page
their final legacy.
Do not lose them,
these the enchanted cinders
of our stars.

- Rafael Jesus Gonzalez

(Rafael Jesus Gonzales turns 75 this coming Sunday, October 10, 2010)

Moss

Maybe the idea of the world as flat isn't a tribal memory
or an archetypal memory, but something far older - a
fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory.

Memory of leaping or crawling or shrugging rootlet by
rootlet forward, across the flatness of everything.

To perceive of the earth as round needed something else
- standing up! - that hadn't yet happened.

What a wild family! Fox and giraffe and wart hog, of
course. But these also: bodies like tiny strings, bodies like
blades and blossoms! Cord grass, Christmas fern, soldier
moss! And here comes grasshopper, all toes and knees
and eyes, over the little mountains of dust.

When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn,
I don't frighten her. And when I see the moss grazing
upon the rock, I touch her tenderly,

sweet cousin.

- Mary Oliver

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter and inland among stones
The surface of the slate grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

- Seamus Heaney
(from Opened Ground)

The Distance

The distance between us
is holy ground
to be traversed
feet bare
hands raised
in joyous dance
so that once it is
crossed
the tracks of our pilgrimage
shine in the darkness
& light our coming together
in a bright & steady light.

- Rafael Jesús González

The Past

The past is an interest-bearing investment,
an estate enclosing more territory each day,

a delta always creating land.



Now, in my 60s,

I'm a great landowner,

a don unable to survey

all my holdings at once,

even from the highest hill.



To do so, I have to take

to the winding back roads.

Whole years I'd forgotten

come into view.

Everything is growing,

rooted in soil.

I didn't know the past blossomed

with such passionate, poignant flowers

or yielded such succulent fruit.



Blossoms have faces and speak.

Resurrected old homes straddle valleys.

Memories graze on hillsides.

I return from such excursions knowing

there are still more such loops. How

did the tiny sharecropper's yard

I knew as a young man

ever accrue to this? What Hand

has watered the once-arid precincts

and made them fertile?



I wonder, hearing people say,

“the past is dead”, when I find it so alive,

nearly as unknown, at times,

as what has not yet been dreamed,

and though I do not live in the past,

it is the foundation upon which I stand

- Max Reif

There Is No One Story and One Story Only

The engineer’s story of hauling coal
to Davenport for the cement factory, sitting on the bluffs
between runs looking for whales, hauling concrete
back to Gilroy, he and his wife renewing vows
in the glass chapel in Arkansas after 25 years
The flight attendant’s story murmured
to the flight steward in the dark galley
of her fifth-month loss of nerve
about carrying the baby she’d seen on the screen
The story of the forensic medical team’s
small plane landing on an Alaska icefield
of the body in the bag they had to drag
over the ice like the whole life of that body
The story of the man driving
600 miles to be with a friend in another country seeming
easy when leaving but afterward
writing in a letter difficult truths
Of the friend watching him leave remembering
the story of her body
with his once and the stories of their children
made with other people and how his mind went on
pressing hers like a body
There is the story of the mind’s
temperature neither cold nor celibate
Ardent
The story of
not one thing only.

- Adrienne Rich

Excerpt for Little Gidding

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

- T.S. Eliot
(The Four Quartets)

Let Me Be Beautiful Like Sea Glass

Let my edges that cut be stroked by sand and salt
let my slick surface coarsen till it’s crushed to bits
let my colors soften as they scrape the bottom
let the waves love me in their rough way
let me be changed by that love
let me not forget I held another
yet fully inhabit my particularity
let me be smooth enough to be rubbed by small fingers
and slipped inside a pocket or a bowl
let me prove that beauty is born when something breaks

- Gwynn O’Gara

Hope

Old spirit, in and beyond me,
keep and extend me. Amid strangers
friends, great trees and big seas breaking,
let love move me. Let me hear the whole music,
see clear, reach deep. Open me to find due words,
that I may shape them to ploughshares of my own making.
After such luck, however late, give me to give to
the oldest dance.... Then to good sleep,
and - if it happens - glad waking.

- Philip Booth

First Rain

The first day of rain
should be declared
a natural holiday.

All stops, somehow.
A new season so simply turns.

All is immediate.
The instant of first wet on skin.
Sounds dance and mingle.
Soils, leaves, muddy waters
blend into deeply breathed
fragrances, become a
raw tonic
gone far too long.

We go through the day
cocooned.
A fire perhaps,
and time to enjoy it,
if we are lucky.

There’s something Sunday
about the first day of rain,
suspended between
today and
forever.

Memories take us,
deeper than words.
Further back than
recall can bring us.
Leave us off to
wander further beyond thought
to pure feeling,
back to some safety
of somewhere we
seem to have
lost.

Close the shops,
silence the clocks.
It’s the first day of rain.

- Scott O'Brien

For The Time Of Necessary Decision

The mind of time is hard to read.
We can never predict what it will bring,
Nor even from all that is already gone
Can we say what form it finally takes;
For time gathers its moments secretly.
Often we only know it's time to change
When a force has built inside the heart
That leaves us uneasy as we are.

Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul
Or the love where we once belonged
Calls nothing alive in us anymore.
We drift through this gray, increasing
nowhere
Until we stand before a threshold we know
We have to cross to come alive once more.

May we have the courage to take the step
Into the unknown that beckons us;
Trust that a richer life awaits us there,
That we will lose nothing
But what has already died;
Feel the deeper knowing in us sure
Of all that is about to be born beyond
The pale frames where we stayed confined,
Not realizing how such vacant endurance
Was bleaching our soul's desire.

- John O'Donohue

Fresh

To move
Cleanly.
Needing to be
Nowhere else.
Wanting nothing
From any store.
To lift something
You already had
And set it down in
A new place.
Awakened eye
Seeing freshly.
What does that do to
The old blood moving through
Its channels?

- Naomi Shihab Nye

At Lake Scugog
1.

Where what I see comes to rest,

at the edge of the lake,

against what I think I see

and, up on the bank, who I am

maintains an uneasy truce

with who I fear I am,

while in the cabin’s shade the gap between

the words I said

and those I remember saying

is just wide enough to contain

the remains that remain

of what I assumed I knew.


2.

Out in the canoe, the person I thought you were

gingerly trades spots

with the person you are

and what I believe I believe

sits uncomfortably next to

what I believe.

When I promised I will always give you

what I want you to want,

you heard, or desired to hear,

something else. As, over and in the lake,

the cormorant and its image

traced paths through the sky.


- Troy Jollimore

The Chinese Peaks
For Donald Hall

I love the mountain peak
but I know also its rolling
foothills
half-invisible
in mist and fog.

The Seafarer gets up
long before dawn to read.
His soul
is a whale feeding
on the Holy Word.

The soul who loves the peak
also inhales the deep
breath rising
from the mountain
buried in mist.

- Robert Bly

The Man Watching


I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers' sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translation by Robert Bly

I Found Myself in Walmart


Spiritually speaking
I was on a candy high.
Perhaps that is why
I found myself foraging
basket in hand
(while most others pushed
oversized carts
toward a supersized Nirvana)
among the cocoa harvests
of foreign lands.

You followed me reluctantly.
You love Wal-Mart
but you were puzzled.

"Eric" you said patiently
"what do you need?"

As you spoke
a shaft of light crashed
like a Chinese paratrooper
through the store's skylight.
It bounced off high stacked shelves.
It barged its way between
overweight shoppers
illuminating spandex mysteries.
It flashed upon my eyes
and I knew.

I knew that while our bodies
did not so often
pound love into speaking flames-
that I still wanted you,
only you,
just you,
not even candy.
Not cut-price plastic hole fillers,
not anything blue, green or yellow
seen on a T.V. in aisle 3
nor did I need more coffee
or anything.

How even here
in this warehouse of hope and light
we could find each other
like Adam discovering Eve
and Eve peeking at Adam
in their Garden of Eden
for the first time.
And how like Adam
I had found God.

- Eric Ashford

Why Bodhidharma Went to Howard Johnson's


"Where is your home," the interviewer asked him.

Here.

"No, no," the interviewer said, thinking it a problem of translation,
"when you are where you actually live."

Now it was his turn to think, perhaps the translation?

- Jane Hirshfield

Oil and Ash

What’s organic emits carbon when burned so animal
dung or dried seaweed picked from rocks or a child left
too long in the sun will all eventually rise toward the place
we used to think god lived: among the clouds on a big chair.

So apparently it’s come to this: the way to save the sky is sell
the sky to those who would release ash into it, through pipes.

I understand this economically, and I’d rather not
mention the resemblance to prostitution, but when I open my
mouth it also fills with something called sky, each inhalation
drags sky across the fine hairs of my nostrils stirring them

in patterns resembling the locomotion of centipedes.
The inverted trees of my lungs filter sky into blood a shade

darker than a cardinal, blood so red it seems it should sing.
The seashell whorls of my ears hold barely two-thimbles-
worth of sky but without those twin pockets of stratosphere
thrumming my drums the world would fall as silent as a world

where they had inexplicably fed their own kind into steel machines.
Later, visiting archaeologists might ponder what had driven them

to do such a thing? There might be conjecture about belief systems
or native religions but for the first thousands of years there would be
nothing but the sound of ash sifting through dried leaves, a sound that is
in some ways similar—but also different—from the sound of falling snow.

- Michael Bazze

Rippling and Astir


There's a rippling
in the air

stealing



across the hillside

misty sheets

slant and race



towards

this terrible

thirst.



All green things

are dressed in

see-through pearls.



Droplets pounce

dance polkas on

wooden fenceposts.



Brushing, rushing

shimmering

bush and tree



limbs flap, sway

opening to

volleys' intensity.



A hushed soaring

roars.


- Raphael Block

Ripening

The longer we are together
the larger death grows around us.
How many we know by now
who are dead! We, who were young,
now count the cost of having been.
And yet as we know the dead
we grow familiar with the world.
We, who were young and loved each other
ignorantly, now come to know
each other in love, married
by what we have done,
as much as by what we intend.
Our hair turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know. It was bitter to learn
that we come to death as we come
to love, bitter to face
the just and solving welcome
that death prepares. But that is bitter
only to the ignorant, who pray
it will not happen. Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of this world!

- Wendell Berry

Sick and Old, Same As Ever:
a Poem to Figure It All Out

Splendor and ruin,
sorrow and joy,
long life or early death:
when this human realm's
a figment of prank
and whimsy,

is it really so strange
if I'm soon a bug's arm
or rat's liver?
And chicken skin
or crane plumage-
what would it hurt?

In yesterday's winds,
I was happy to begin
my long journey,
but today, in all this sunlit
warmth of spring,
I feel better.

And now that I'm packed
and ready for that
distant voyage,
what does it matter
if I linger on a little while
longer here?

- Po Chu-I

This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth the beloved left
And, leaving,
Left to us.

No other world
But this one:
Willows and the river
And the factory
With its black smokestacks.

No other shore, only this bank
On which the living gather.

No meaning but what we find here.
No purpose but what we make.

That, and the beloved’s clear instructions:
Turn me into song; sing me awake.

- Gregory Orr

Tor House

If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:

Perhaps of my planted forest a few

May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard

With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.

Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art

To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.

But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years:

It is the granite knoll on the granite

And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel

River-valley, these four will remain

In the change of names. You will know it by the wild sea-fragrance of wind

Though the ocean may have climbed or retired a little;

You will know it by the valley inland that our sun and our moon were born from

Before the poles changed; and Orion in December

Evenings was strung in the throat of the valley like a lamp-lighted bridge.

Come in the morning you will see white gulls

Weaving a dance over blue water, the wane of the moon

Their dance-companion, a ghost walking

By daylight, but wider and whiter than any bird in the world.

My ghost you needn’t look for; it is probably

Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite, not dancing on wind

With the mad wings and the day moon.

- Robinson Jeffers

Old Man, Old Man

Young men, not knowing what to remember,
Come to this hiding place of the moons and years,
To this Old Man. Old Man, they say, where should we go?
Where did you find what you remember? Was it perched in a tree?
Did it hover deep in the white water? Was it covered over
With dead stalks in the grass? Will we taste it
If our mouths have long lain empty?
Will we feel it between our eyes if we face the wind
All night, and turn the color of earth?
If we lie down in the rain, can we remember sunlight?

He answers, I have become the best and worst I dreamed.
When I move my feet, the ground moves under them.
When I lie down, I fit the earth too well.
Stones long underwater will burst in the fire, but stones
Long in the sun and under the dry night
Will ring when you strike them. Or break in two.
There were always many places to beg for answers:
Now the places themselves have come in close to be told.
I have called even my voice in close to whisper with it:
Every secret is as near as your fingers.
If your heart stutters with pain and hope,
Bend forward over it like a man at a small campfire.

- David Wagoner

Where The Mind Is Without Fear

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free,
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls,
Where words come out from the depth of truth,
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection,
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit,
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action,
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!

- Rabindranath Tagore

The Second Coming

Turning and turning on the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of*Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: Somewhere in the sands of the*desert
A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again, but now I know*
That twenty centuries of stony sleep*
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

- William Butler Yeats

Becoming A Redwood

Stand in a field long enough, and the sounds
start up again. The crickets, the invisible
toad who claims that change is possible,

And all the other life too small to name.
First one, then another, until innumerable
they merge into the single voice of a summer hill.

Yes, it’s hard to stand still, hour after hour,
fixed as a fencepost, hearing the steers
snort in the dark pasture, smelling the manure.

And paralyzed by the mystery of how a stone
can bear to be a stone, the pain
the grass endures breaking through the earth’s crust.

Unimaginable the redwoods on the far hill,
rooted for centuries, the living wood grown tall
and thickened with a hundred thousand days of light.

The old windmill creaks in perfect time
to the wind shaking the miles of pasture grass,
and the last farmhouse light goes off.

Something moves nearby. Coyotes hunt
these hills and packs of feral dogs.
But standing here at night accepts all that.

You are your own pale shadow in the quarter moon,
moving more slowly than the crippled stars,
part of the moonlight as the moonlight falls,

Part of the grass that answers the wind,
part of the midnight’s watchfulness that knows
there is no silence but when danger comes.

- Dana Gioia

The Old Devotée



I know what it is to live

a simple life of nothing.

Like the monk who bows

and prays and sits

every day in death-like routine.

The ages do not trumpet his renown

for wisdom and peace.

He writes nothing and cannot write.

He does his devotions which no one marks,

and he makes no boast, no sound.

He is surrounded by a million like himself

for miles of generations

backward and forward. If they earn

God’s smile it is everything to them

and enough. To make a sect of a smile

they know is not within their hand. O my closed eyes!

O my beautiful life

- Bruce Moody

SONNET LXXIII: THAT TIME OF YEAR THOU MAYST IN ME BEHOLD


That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

- William Shakespeare

Parable

First divesting ourselves of worldly goods, as St. Francis teaches,
in order that our souls not be distracted
by gain and loss, and in order also
that our bodies be free to move
easily at the mountain passes, we had then to discuss
whither or where we might travel, with the second question being
should we have a purpose, against which
many of us argued fiercely that such purpose
corresponded to worldly goods, meaning a limitation or constriction,
whereas others said it was by this word we were consecrated
pilgrims rather than wanderers: in our minds, the word translated as
a dream, a something-sought, so that by concentrating we might see it
glimmering among the stones, and not
pass blindly by; each
further issue we debated equally fully, the arguments going back and forth,
so that we grew, some said, less flexible and more resigned,
like soldiers in a useless war. And snow fell upon us, and wind blew,
which in time abated — where the snow had been, many flowers appeared,
and where the stars had shone, the sun rose over the tree line
so that we had shadows again; many times this happened.
Also rain, also flooding sometimes, also avalanches, in which
some of us were lost, and periodically we would seem
to have achieved an agreement; our canteens
hoisted upon our shoulders, but always that moment passed, so
(after many years) we were still at that first stage, still
preparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless;
we could see this in one another; we had changed although
we never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, traveling
from day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemed
in a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purpose
believed this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain free
in order to encounter truth, felt it had been revealed.

- Louise Gluck

Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness

Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends
into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out

to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing, as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on

though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.

- Mary Oliver

The Man In The Dead Machine
High on a slope in New Guinea
The Grumman Hellcat
lodges among bright vines
as thick as arms. In 1943,
the clenched hand of a pilot
glided it here
where no one has ever been.

In the cockpit, the helmeted
skeleton sits
upright, held
by dry sinews at neck
and shoulder, and webbing
that straps the pelvic cross
to the cracked
leather of the seat, and the breastbone
to the canvas cover
of the parachute.

Or say the shrapnel
missed him, he flew
back to the carrier, and every
morning takes the train, his pale
hands on the black case, and sits
upright, held
by the firm webbing.

- Donald Hall

Eagle Affirmation

You’ve got to understand that sighting the pair
of eagles over the block, right over our house,
not more than twenty feet above the roof,
so massive their wings pull at the corrugated
tin sheeting even with gentlest tilt, counteracts
bitterness against all the damage I see and hear
around me on an exclusively crisp blue morning,
when clarity is pain and even one small missing
wattle tree, entirely vanquished since I was last here
at home—I still find this hard to say—is agony;
a region is not a pinpoint and a different compass
works in my head, having magnetics for all
directions and all pointing to one spot
I know and observe as closely as possible;
and even one small vanished or vanquished
wattle tree is agony close to death for me,
where I find it hard to breathe to feed myself
to get past the loss; but the pair of eagles
still appearing and keeping their sharp
and scrupulous eyes honed, overrides
this ordeal, though I wish their victims
life too and their damage is traumatic
as anything else; that’s as much sense
or nonsense as I can make in such blue light.

- John Kinsella

Often I Imagine The Earth

Often I imagine the earth
through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of—
atoms, peculiar
atoms everywhere—
no me, no you, no opinions,
no beginning, no middle, no end,
soaring together like those
ancient Chinese birds
hatched miraculously with only one wing,
helping each other fly home.

- Dan Gerber

Pray for Peace

Pray to whomever you kneel down to:
Jesus nailed to his wooden or marble or plastic cross,
his suffering face bent to kiss you,
Buddha still under the Bo tree in scorching heat,
Adonai, Allah, raise your arms to Mary
that she may lay her palm on our brows,
to Shekhina, Queen of Heaven and Earth,
to Inanna in her stripped descent.

Hawk or Wolf, or the Great Whale, Record Keeper
of time before, time now, time ahead, pray. Bow down
to terriers and shepherds and siamese cats.
Fields of artichokes and elegant strawberries.

Pray to the bus driver who takes you to work,
pray on the bus, pray for everyone riding that bus
and for everyone riding buses all over the world.
If you haven't been on a bus in a long time,
climb the few steps, drop some silver, and pray.

Waiting in line for the movies, for the ATM,
for your latte and croissant, offer your plea.
Make your eating and drinking a supplication.
Make your slicing of carrots a holy act,
each translucent layer of the onion, a deeper prayer.

Make the brushing of your hair
a prayer, every strand its own voice,
singing in the choir on your head.
As you wash your face, the water slipping
through your fingers, a prayer: Water,
softest thing on earth, gentleness
that wears away rock.

Making love, of course, is already a prayer.
Skin and open mouths worshipping that skin,
the fragile case we are poured into,
each caress a season of peace.

If you're hungry, pray. If you're tired.
Pray to Gandhi and Dorothy Day.
Shakespeare. Sappho. Sojourner Truth.
Pray to the angels and the ghost of your grandfather.

When you walk to your car, to the mailbox,
to the video store, let each step
be a prayer that we all keep our legs,
that we do not blow off anyone else's legs.
Or crush their skulls.
And if you are riding on a bicycle
or a skateboard, in a wheel chair, each revolution
of the wheels a prayer that as the earth revolves
we will do less harm, less harm, less harm.

And as you work, typing with a new manicure,
a tiny palm tree painted on one pearlescent nail
or delivering soda or drawing good blood
into rubber-capped vials, writing on a blackboard
with yellow chalk, twirling pizzas, pray for peace.

With each breath in, take in the faith of those
who have believed when belief seemed foolish,
who persevered. With each breath out, cherish.

Pull weeds for peace, turn over in your sleep for peace,
feed the birds for peace, each shiny seed
that spills onto the earth, another second of peace.
Wash your dishes, call your mother, drink wine.

Shovel leaves or snow or trash from your sidewalk.
Make a path. Fold a photo of a dead child
around your VISA card. Gnaw your crust
of prayer, scoop your prayer water from the gutter.
Mumble along like a crazy person, stumbling
your prayer through the streets.

- Ellen Bass

Rest

I ask
these hands
to touch
the body
on the
burning pavement.
It lies.
Bereft.

There are no flowers
no wreaths...
no one weeps.
The spinning wheels
that tore its heart
have gone.
Gone...
Rushing to
that eight am appointment.
To pick up a child from school?
Or perhaps,
perhaps to meet a lover?
To hold someone in arms that
are lonely. To smile.
To kiss.

Into this moment
It stepped.

This furry creature
from the woods....
Its heart pounding
with
this
thing.

This thing that
runs in
the bosom of
the wild,
its shadow caught
in the laden
sweep
of the wing of an owl.
That sudden woosh...
thrashing air
through the fleeting glance
of ghost eyes.
This thing.
This thing
that comes
to me at twilight
in the perfumed mystery
of jasmine.
That sudden
startling
scent...
stunning my feet.

This thing.

It ran fierce in the
creature who
stepped
from the woods
to the road,
into this
other world.
Its feet
stumbled.
Unsure, it turned its head.
Then.
Rushing wheels and
the theft
of dignity.

I ask
these hands
to touch
the body
on the
burning pavement.
To return grace.
To bring the pieces
back
to the woods...
To make a home
in the wild
for
Rest.

- Araliya Navaratne

Epiphany on Highway One

Maybe I’d been working too hard
or maybe I was just looking forward to meeting a friend for a hike
or maybe it was just time

but my brain stuttered
when I saw the group of small brown cattle
grazing intently
bunched together
headed toward the old
tilted roadside barbed
wire fence
for the small green shoots among the dun parched fall
grasses

up alongside the high road
on the coastal highway
where the sky feels
somehow closer,
and all at once I
could see that everything that had ever
happened had led up to this moment
as if only for the sake of this very one
soon to be gone forever
and that my existence made no sense at all
of course!
because it was begotten in a miracle
and everything had since unfolded

and that these all were
God’s minutes,
and therefore
God’s breath, in a sense,
was blowing through my lungs
and God’s blood was
flowing through my veins,
and it was all I could do
to keep the car from literally lifting
off the road,
because it is really true,
isn’t it, that we are all alive
in miracle, nothing less?

- Scott O'Brien

I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least,

Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?

I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,

In the faces of men and women I see God,

and in my own face in the glass;

I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name.

And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever.

And as to you death, and you bitter hug of mortality.....it is idle to try to alarm me.

- Walt Whitman

KITES

Every thing, every sensation, every
Occurrence, common or not,
Is miracle.
Who said anything had to exist, anyway?

It is all joy,
And we are kites
Held aloft in the joy
By all that we cannot see,
Though we sense the movement that carries us,
The breath that ripples the thin paper
Of our longing.

- bSue

Here

Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face

how did this happen
well that's who I wanted to be

at last a woman
in the old style sitting
stout thighs apart under
a big skirt grandchild sliding
on off my lap a pleasant
summer perspiration

that's my old man across the yard
he's talking to the meter reader
he's telling him the world's sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium
and so forth I tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa ask him
to sit beside me for a minute I
am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips.

- Grace Paley

Keeper of Last Glances

Every night under the vault of stars
Birds are lost in flight or a snake sloughs his skin,
But what if a man feels the forlorn longing
For the invisible and inconceivable realm?

Sometimes I see them, the departed
with their bearded congregation bending
In reverence or swaying like a creaky, rusty swing
filling the neighborhood with phantoms, filling up time

Like nets on empty piers like moons
in the hug of the sky appealing for permanence

A presence comes upon the blur of ground
It might be the dust of the moon in which I see
a hand in a disappearing farewell wave, eyes
of friends hovering far up in the kite-like flutter
In the twilight of last appearance when the keeper
of mortal things lets go the string.

- Richard Meyers

Beautiful poems. Rilke is a master. D.H.Lawrence exquisite.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
The cut worm forgives the plow.
Dip him in the river who loves water.
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
The busy bee has no time for sorrow.
The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock; but of wisdom,
no clock can measure.
All wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap.
Bring out number, weight and measure in a year of dearth.
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
A dead body revenges not injuries.
The most sublime act is to set another before you.
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
Folly is the cloak of knavery.
Shame is Pride's cloke.
Prisons are built with stones of law,
brothels with bricks of religion.
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.
The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves,
the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword,
are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man.
The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.
Let man wear the fell of the lion,
woman the fleece of the sheep.
The bird a nest, the spider a web,
man friendship.
The selfish, smiling fool, and the sullen,
frowning fool shall be both thought wise,
that they may be a rod.
What is now proved was once only imagin'd.
The rat, the mouse, the fox, the rabbit watch the roots;
the lion, the tyger, the horse, the elephant watch the fruits.
The cistern contains: the fountain overflows.
One thought fills immensity.
Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth.
The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.
The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.
Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.
He who has suffer'd you to impose on him, knows you.
As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers.
The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
Expect poison from the standing water.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
Listen to the fool's reproach! it is a kingly title!
The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air,
the mouth of water, the beard of earth.
The weak in courage is strong in cunning.
The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow;
nor the lion, the horse, how he shall take his prey.
The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest.
If others had not been foolish, we should be so.
The soul of sweet delight can never be defil'd.
When thou seest an eagle, thou seest a portion of genius;
lift up thy head!
As the caterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on,
so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.
To create a little flower is the labour of ages.
Damn braces. Bless relaxes.
The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest.
Prayers plow not! Praises reap not!
Joys laugh not! Sorrows weep not!
The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty,
the hands and feet Proportion.
As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish,
so is contempt to the contemptible.
The crow wish'd every thing was black,
the owl that every thing was white.
Exuberance is Beauty.
If the lion was advised by the fox, he would be cunning.
Improvement makes strait roads;
but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
Where man is not, nature is barren.
Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd.
Enough! or too much.

- William Blake

Thank you Larry Robinson for the wonderful poems you post. If I read nothing else on Waccobb, I always read your poems. As to Highway One by O'brien, he'd better take a good look now because soon that natural setting will be overtaken by vineyards as the rest of Sonoma Coounty has been over the past 30 years.

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Epiphany on Highway One

Maybe I’d been working too hard
or maybe I was just looking forward to meeting a friend for a hike
or maybe it was just time

but my brain stuttered
when I saw the group of small brown cattle
grazing intently
bunched together
headed toward the old
tilted roadside barbed
wire fence
for the small green shoots among the dun parched fall
grasses

up alongside the high road
on the coastal highway
where the sky feels
somehow closer,
and all at once I
could see that everything that had ever
happened had led up to this moment
as if only for the sake of this very one
soon to be gone forever
and that my existence made no sense at all
of course!
because it was begotten in a miracle
and everything had since unfolded

and that these all were
God’s minutes,
and therefore
God’s breath, in a sense,
was blowing through my lungs
and God’s blood was
flowing through my veins,
and it was all I could do
to keep the car from literally lifting
off the road,
because it is really true,
isn’t it, that we are all alive
in miracle, nothing less?

- Scott O'Brien

---

The Rhythm of Each

I think each comfort we manage-
each holding in the night, each opening
of a wound, each closing of a wound, each
pulling of a splinter or razored word, each
fever sponged, each dear thing given
to someone in greater need-each
passes on the kindness we've known.

For the human sea is made of waves
that mount and merge till the way a
nurse rocks a child is the way that child
all grown rocks the wounded, and how
the wounded, allowed to go on, rock
strangers who in their pain
don't seem so strange.

Eventually, the rhythm of kindness
is how we pray and suffer by turns,
and if someone were to watch us
from inside the lake of time, they
wouldn't be able to tell if we are
dying or being born.

- Mark Nepo