Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Gratitude


Gratitude, I am your listening post,
perched on the shoulders of mountains,
in the grasses, in your granite face,



reclining in the long valleys of your body.
Send me your chariots, your champion angels,
warriors of the spirit, whose love rises in speech,



in gesture, in wordless looks, bathed in the most
sublime rose waters; even in anguish for the suffering
of others. Send me your thoroughbreds,


heavy with bridle; I will race alongside you,
breathing my thanksgiving for the idealism of youth,
for the wild and holy power of the earnest


novitiate; for conversations between fathers,
mothers, sons and daughters, blooming in the
rising cumulus of purity and courage, in the altitudes


of high regard, the vitality of innocence, the awakening
of inquiry. Let me travel beside you, raining down with
the pounding hooves of your galloping love.


- Gary Horvitz

Miracles


Here I sit at my computer on 11-11-11, reading hours of emails and petitions and forwards about Delaware River fracking, and Mississippi’s rejection of personhood for women’s eggs, and move-your-money-day, and tar sands pipelines, and constitutional amendments to limit campaign funds, and Occupy Oakland’s massive challenge to stay non-violent in this most violence-racked city, and polar bears without ice floes, and torture of lesbians in Ecuador, and, and,............ and I am overcome with gratitude:


.... to Hippocrates and Hahnemann and Curie and Pasteur and Salk and my Dr. Michael and Debbie and herb gardens and bees and sunshine and rain and the loyalty of seed, for helping me be here still, octogenarian on fire


.... to my parents and grandparents and their ancestors for their good genes and their good sense to cross the daunting Atlantic to labor in coal mines and cigar factories to make me, to make me better, to make me a better life


.... to Ben Franklin and Tom Edison and Singer and to my furnace for keeping me warm, and to all the other comforting and safety-making inventions in this shelter where I can close my eyes in sleep unafraid


.... to those who created language out of grunts, and Gutenberg, and my Dad who taught me to read while tending to my sixth-year chickenpox, and to Miss Hanson who liked my third-grade poems, and to those colonials who created Rutgers University without ever having me in mind


.... to a lifetime of listening wonderment for the Mozart melodies that reside in my head, my brain’s personal MP3 downloads


.... to Susan and the other suffragettes who marched and suffered nights in jail for my right to be a woman voting, though they never knew me personally


.... to Ghandi and MLK and Mother Theresa and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Friends and COs and Occupy-all, all those who hold the light


.... to the power of those who loved me and love me still, and by so doing keep me whole still, whether they walk the earth or no longer grace it


.... to whatever mysteries keep my mind alert and capable of outrage, keep my soul alive and capable of gratitude


.... to my diaphragm that keeps me breathing, I know not why


- Vilma Ginzberg

Another Shovel


On this Covid-of-Thanksgivings
As the year draws down
Bleakness penetrates our masked faces
A shroud of our former selves

Our village weave has unraveled and
Our darkness finds our discontentment
In limited breath
Trying to soothe
Holding brokenness

Here I found a small and jeweled freedom-fighter
A winged-one on the ground
Cold, expired
On some Pacific Flyway November patio, mine

As all the losses came home to roost
As ghosts still wrapped on their gurneys,
In every state, in every country
Lie hampered and uncertain
Of their transition onward
Yet here was one more -

A small bird, dead on the ground
Bearing all the cruelty of not being able
To draw near today to the
Heft of reparation so needed
To the salve that family and flock bring
To the depth of sadness
Of those who died in
Foreign arms on sterile wards

No union actualized
No familiar hands of belonging
We have to reimagine such warmth of life,
All for another time


- P Gregory Guss

Turkeys

Sometimes we saw shadows of gods in the trees; silenced, we went on. Sometimes the dog would bound off over the snow, into the forest. Sometimes a tree had twenty or more black turkeys in it, each seeming the size of a small black bear. We remember them for their care for their kind ever since we watched the big hen in the very top of the tree shaking load after load of apples down to the flock. Sometimes I felt I would never come out of the woods, I thought its deeper darkness might absorb me or feed me to the black turkeys and I would cry out for the dog and the dog would not answer.

- Galway Kinnell

Still

I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I'll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is

magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I
found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:

I whirled though transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:

at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!

- A. R. Ammons

More Than Something Else


Something Else.
Some one else
Some where else


That place is here,
In my home,
We are here.


I am brown,
Brown hair,
Brown eyes,
Like cookies Feather tells me, and I like to think it’s perfectly
cooked Pueblo cookies.


My kids are something else,
9 different shades of brown,
All beautiful.


My grandkids are something else,
4 brown eyes, 2 blue eyes,
All Native,
Definitely something else, as I watch them be rowdy, be loving,
be here in this world.


We are here
On this earth
In this time and place


In our homes,
On our lands,
In the cities,
With our families, laughing loudly, cooking together, protecting
each other.


We are something else
With our songs
Our dances.


We pray with corn meal,
Eagle feathers,
Medicine bundles,
Burn some sage, make sure to acknowledge the four directions,
as the sun comes up.


We are the something else,
Who were here,
To greet Christopher Columbus


We were born from
This earth,
Crawled out of the center,
Of our mother’s womb, we are important, we are strong.


We are something else,
We are Pueblo people, Plains people, Forest People, Desert
people, Nomadic people, Cliff dwellers, Ocean fishers, Lake and
river fishers, hunters, medicine collectors, horse riders, artists,
speakers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, we are human beings.
We are something else,
We are Native People,
Indigenous to this land.
We are a proud,
Something else.


- Rainy Dawn Ortiz

Psalm


Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!
How many clouds float past them with impunity;
how much desert sand sifts from one land to another;
how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil
in provocative hops!


Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers
or alights on the roadblock at the border?
A humble robin - still, its tail resides abroad
while its beak stays home. If that weren’t enough, it won't stop bobbing!


Among innumerable insects, I'll single out only the ant
between the border guard's left and right boots
blithely ignoring the questions "Where from?" and “Where to?"


Oh, to register in detail, at a glance, the chaos
prevailing on every continent!
Isn't that a privet on the far bank
smuggling its hundred-thousandth leaf across the river?
And who but the octopus, with impudent long arms,
would disrupt the sacred bounds of territorial waters?


And how can we talk of order overall?
when the very placement of the stars
leaves out doubting just what shines for whom?


Not to speak of the fog's reprehensible drifting!
And dust blowing all over the steppes
as if they hadn't been partitioned!
And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves,
that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters!


Only what is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.


- Wislawa Szymborska
(translated from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh)

We Have Lost So Much


We have lost so much
says my friend, Patty
as she carefully holds
a little bird stunned, fallen to
the base of the sky scraper
it’s just collided.


We have lost so much
stunned, shaking our heads
our aching necks.


In the empty streets
even when we meet
Someone
our masks avoid speech
our eyes,
hard to say, collide
but that’s what it feels like
holding my head
Thinking of my friend
Carefully
letting the bird rest
under a nearby bit of bush.
A little quiet, maybe
it will find its way.
There’s a river nearby
all the empty buildings.


- Mary Swanson

This poem makes its point.
Here's the lyric to a song by a friend of mine, about how masks reveal the SOUL, the Universal, more than faces do without masks! I find it very interesting! There's a video that I can't post because of copyright issues, but I hope to add a link to an mp3 audio file. The lyrics and the music too are by Mischa Rutenberg.
“Eye to Eye to I”



Why do you worry about a little thing
Like a fabric mask that will save your skin
Look again you might find a hidden grace
What you lose when you choose to cover your face
Then you’ll see Eye to eye to I …….eye to eye to I


We wear our face to mask ourselves
This is the act at which we all excel
So many smiles that tell bold lies
Rarely deliver as advertised


Our mouths are sealed our eyes revealed
Maybe now we will share what is real
We no longer need this mask of lies
You lose your face when the ego dies
Take a moment and you’ll realize
All we need to see is eye to eye
Eye to eye to I


All my life I have hidden the truth
Behind the smiles and the games of youth
Now I find all the glamour gone
Let go the nonsense and move along


Our mouths are sealed our eyes revealed
Maybe now we will share what is real
We no longer need this mask of lies
You lose your face when the ego dies
Take a moment and you’ll realize
All we need to see is eye to eye
Eye to eye to I


Why do you worry about a little thing like
A small piece of fabric that will save your skin
Look again you will find a hidden grace
What you lose when you choose to cover your face
Then you’ll see Eye to eye to I

Four Quartets: The East Coker


III


O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away-
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing-
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.



- T.S. Eliot

Vanishing
The grief and sense of loss we often interpret as a failure in our personality is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered. - Paul Shepard

Heart, lungs and gut gone to the gnaw
of insects, the intact hull of her
beached on duff, prickly
oak and pine needles, coyote scat
in the crook of her knee --

the dog sniffs a small sharp hoof
ignoring the heap of dung
red with madrone berries,
pale pits pearling through.
She noses the foreleg
where scraps of hide cling to bone.

Imagine the first flick of tail,
ripple of skin under summer flies,
and how this fawn died.
The woods are full of stories
in rotting trunks, cool shadows
and bones like these, whitened
by winters she hadn’t seen.

But what of her stays with me?
Days later in my lumpy green chair
by the window, cat curved
around my feet on the ottoman,
the dog denned under the table,
teacup on the sill, and I think

of the fox -- its narrow bloated body
on the road, a plastic bag
snagged on its foot, ballooning
beside blood slicked fur.

Will the silence of their absence rise
above the din of cities? Will their ghosts
stumble through strip malls and suburbs
looking for lost meadows, jostle
at the on-ramps distracting drivers
with a sudden vague unease?

Will our grief surprise us?
Will we wonder at our loneliness?


- Elizabeth Herron

The Place Where We Are Right


From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.


The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.


But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plow
and a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.


- Yehuda Amichai
(translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell)

In Fire Season, Rain


The soft smoke of hard rain
drilling down through tree bones.
The hiss and steam of quenched fire —
rain nipping flame’s root, gray mud of ash.
Rain tap slapping your hat. Rain gloves.
Rain making your coat heavy, your neck cold.
Rain washing what was seared, culled, fallen, lost.
Where fire fed, rain offering rest, restoration.
Rain turning eye-salt to rivulets, rivulets
to rivers wheresoever many weep as one.
Rain thrust deep in earth, seeking seeds.
Rain taking its own sweet time.
Earth’s thirst for first rain —
never to be cursed again.


- Kim Stafford

Twilight in Hendy Woods


This is the hour of magic
When this world and the other world
Touch in a lingering kiss
And a deep stillness settles over all things.


This is the hour of magic
When the Earth,
For one eternal moment, holds its breath
Before turning from the sun.


This is the hour of magic
When, if you listen
With an open heart and a quiet mind,
You can hear the Ancient Ones, the elders of the forest


Telling the old stories:
Of the chainsaw massacres and the fires;
Of the great ice ages and the birth of continents;
Of the times long past when they were many and covered the Earth.


They are leaving us now.
When they are gone,
Who will tell these stories?


- Larry Robinson



http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...logo152x23.gif
Climate Change and California’s Favorite Trees
(click for article)

The Vote



My eyes wing out over misted fields
Dappled with islands of snow geese and sandhill cranes
I’m in my car making calls
To Hispanics in Arizona: “Your vote counts!”
This is our chance to save our country! Think of your children,
All the dreamers, young and old!
Our land. The air! The water! Stand for women, welcome and equality
Imagine a future worth living


Ten white show geese leap up from the water
Pure soft wings like angels against the blue
Trumpeting, boisterous, shouting Freedom!
Announcing themselves here! - here, on this land
“See this place?” they trumpet. “See this water, these grasses and
reeds? They are ours and we are theirs!
They have been ours since the wind was here, that
Wind we sailed down on from the north you call
Canada, Artic, Alaska, Yukon
We are immigrants, perpetually. See our strong
Feather shafts? Our tough sinewed chests?”


So go vote! Drive or walk – crawl if you have to –
Get to the polling place and check
That box marked inclusion!
Let your ballot shout for all the people and the creatures
Sing embrace and welcome.
Seat leaders who celebrate our American brother/sisterhood
Elect an America that reveres the land and safeguards its future


Now there! Look! An approaching V of Canada geese
Whose visas are not required.
Are you voting for Biden and Harris?
Yes! Bless you! Dios te bendiga!
Tendremos un futuro! Going today, yes?
Get there early. Be sure your voice is heard!
Every one counts – especially in Arizona!


The air explodes with the cackle cries of cranes
Sandhills sailing just overhead, shouting, swooping down from
The northern Rockies, mountains marching
Right across borders, free as crane flight. A ranger
Says smaller, stronger Sandhills come from Siberia.
Siberia! If I ask their nationality, what
Will they answer? Daughters and sons of the wind?
Of the river courses, of marshy fields north and south


You’re taking your mamá – y su cuñado?
Your mom and brother-in-law are going, too?
That’s great! And call some friends! Todos los amigos que pueden votar.
All that are able to vote must vote, must go to the polls – when they get done
With their work, their service, their gift to this country


The flooded fields are a cacophony of ducks – a dozen kinds, all
Colors and sizes – and voices! Like America
Cottonwoods ring the fields, cottonwoods burnished now, but
Greening in the spring to welcome throngs of songbirds just
Up from Central America – the long jungle isthmus, sending north its
Winged jewels of scarlet and vermillion, lapis and bright yellow.
Where is their home? Which is their patria?


And here we are – squawking together. Dancing in these fields
In this place. And Coyote! See him, loping past?
The shaman who miraculously survived the scourge, that centuries-long
Determined purge of the wild, exterminating native peoples
And wolves, and whatever wild things might threaten the
Fierce taming of the continent. A boundless continent of ancient forests
Felled for their wood.

The same Scourge some still desperately want to continue,
Which would – if given the chance – drain, plow and replant these wet misty
Wild waving fields into straight civilized rows of
Profitable, decent crops.
That Old Greedy Power, unseeing, unheeding of
The boundless riches of wildness. Of diversity, of many colors.

Their Scourge would hack down or spray down or curse down
The hundred kinds of forbs and flowers, sweet sedge, red reeds, tall grass
– and small I see all about me here in this Refuge set aside by the seeing Heartful
To give us a glimpse of how it was, this stretching, singing land
This billowing tapestry of textures and tones,
Wondrous seeds, whispering reeds


Refuge. Might America be a refuge again? For its dreaming, flowing immigrants?
Can it rejoice in a rainbow of faces? Can it be a refuge of sanity and new understanding?
A sacred place to its creatures , waters, health and life? Can it honor its native peoples at last?
Will it hold all its families and their futures in trust? Can it be a place to thrive and belong?
This might be much to ask, but we must ask and then we must try. Because we dream, we must act!


Fernando, Ofelia, Rodrigo, Jose!
I call you because I can’t call everyone.
Will you vote then for inclusion and goodness?
You will? For health and sanidad? For brotherly respect and kindness to the land?
For fresh water and for these geese and cranes and coyote?
For all our place and our many peoples?

- Garth Gilchrist

Declaration of Interdependence
Such has been the patient sufferance…
We’re a mother’s bread, instant potatoes, milk at a checkout line. We’re her three children pleading for bubble gum and their father. We’re the three minutes she steals to page through a tabloid, needing to believe even stars’ lives are as joyful and as bruised. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury…
We’re her second job serving an executive absorbed in his Wall Street Journal at a sidewalk café shadowed by skyscrapers. We’re the shadows of the fortune he won and the family he lost. We’re his loss and the lost. We’re a father in a coal town who can’t mine a life anymore because too much and too little has happened, for too long.
A history of repeated injuries and usurpations…
We’re the grit of his main street’s blacked-out windows and graffitied truths. We’re a street in another town lined with royal palms, at home with a Peace Corps couple who collect African art. We’re their dinner-party talk of wines, wielded picket signs, and burned draft cards. We’re what they know: it’s time to do more than read the New York Times, buy fair-trade coffee and organic corn.
In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress…
We’re the farmer who grew the corn, who plows into his couch as worn as his back by the end of the day. We’re his TV set blaring news having everything and nothing to do with the field dust in his eyes or his son nested in the ache of his arms. We’re his son. We’re a black teenager who drove too fast or too slow, talked too much or too little, moved too quickly, but not quick enough. We’re the blast of the bullet leaving the gun. We’re the guilt and the grief of the cop who wished he hadn’t shot.
We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor…
We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor…
We’re the dead, we’re the living amid the flicker of vigil candlelight. We’re in a dim cell with an inmate reading Dostoevsky. We’re his crime, his sentence, his amends, we’re the mending of ourselves and others. We’re a Buddhist serving soup at a shelter alongside a stockbroker. We’re each other’s shelter and hope: a widow’s fifty cents in a collection plate and a golfer’s ten-thousand-dollar pledge for the cure.
We hold these truths to be self-evident …
We’re the cure for hatred caused by despair. We’re the good morning of a bus driver who remembers our name, the tattooed man who gives up his seat on the subway. We’re every door held open with a smile when we look into each other’s eyes the way we behold the moon. We’re the moon. We’re the promise of one people, one breath declaring to one another: I see you. I need you. I am you.

- Richard Blanco

Excerpt from 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)

Rosa, Born During a Pandemic


On Zoom an infant smiles:
It was months before we visited you live and three weeks
more before we could hold you. My granddaughter limitless,
without aspiration, until (wearing your owl face pajamas) you set
your mind to crawl, wandering off to explore
the contours of an abstract dome shaped toy, popup board book
and rubber giraffe that squeaks. Often you taste
your toys before your fingers groom their surface.
Traveling from room to room dangers abound and attract—
as if you were a 5-foot, 10-inch point guard challenging
a big man or a second lieutenant contemplating an action
rather than a cause—wires adhered to walls, water boiling
on the stove, pointy knobs on draws. Is anything ever known
before encountered?


In a photo album an infant smiles:
My parents proclaimed they’d wake me any time,
day or night and I’d smile. This was World War Two
when American Jews sought relief any way they could.
Dad, are sociological explanations any use coming to terms
with how fearful and constrained a kid I was? Of course, it’s imagination reconstructing what I know in my guts. Memory unreliable
before language. If I were permitted to crawl about, allowed
to explore and run my fingers around the contours of objects
that might break, we may never have been mutually humiliated
when I was unable to bait a hook on a fishing line or was late learning
to tie my shoes. What is the ratio between fear and contentment, numerator inborn— denominator inculcated by those who love you? Yes, it was when I first discovered (in the third grade) that I was
the fastest runner for my age that I smiled—knowingly.
How fortunate to grow up human!


Iphone in hand, I snap a photo of a cormorant,
wings spread wide, aloft a pole
left from an abandoned pier:
Rosa, this is dawn during the pandemic.
I’d have thought a cormorant
would dry its wings exclusively
when a day’s heat approached.
5:30 AM and already
I am granted a vision.
A creature, heart shining in the dark,
presenting its essence, before diving
beneath the surface
of the water in search of fish.
This morning before the sun has risen,
the park along the East River is empty,
the sky orange, cradling a cloud above red as a lobster.
I (who hardly ever took a photo pre-Covid) capture
water taxies and barges on the river.
This is what I do during the pandemic:
Walk the city, snapping images of everything
that drifts my way carrying thoughts that ripple
from scenes into poems.


- Barry Denny

Orion says rest
oh mystery of the larynx
align forces that
speech ring true from heart to heart
transforming relationships


gather birch bark ash
mix with dried red rose petals
sprinkle over earth
making a dedication
to wisdom among peoples


surprise yourself with
boundless humor a base for
sweet humility
weaving fragments of battle
into Good initiatives


- Lorene Allen

Eleven Unthinking Seconds


(Inspired by the Social Dilemma documentary)


Casually scrolling through my social media feed,
an ad catches my interest; Magnetic eyelashes.


For the eleven unthinking seconds that I’m captivated,
I watch someone use a pencil-like applicator to apply a gray
smudge of tiny metallic bits to the outer edge of an eyelid.


A thin arch of long lustrous lashes is carefully positioned,
and then, like magic, seemingly snaps perfectly into place.
Truly fascinating. Who knew?


I stopped watching as soon as I realized what I was doing,
and I didn’t click on the ad for more information, but no
matter, I was caught unawares and my fate was sealed.


While I had only watched for eleven seconds, the algorithm
probably only needed seven, or maybe even just five.


Now, the all too familiar and vexing gotcha-targeting
has begun and the same ad follows me wherever I scroll.


I’m certain that ads for bio-luminescent lipstick
and nano particle hairspray are already queued up
and headed my way.


As a rule, I try my best not to allow my gaze to linger
on attractive nuisances such as this one, but I’m afraid
it happens more often than I’d like.


Once again, I’ve been cleverly manipulated by those
potent and unrelenting forces that can expertly hold
my attention for those few dreaded seconds.


It seems that my poor defenseless brain stem is just no
match for the greedy purveyors of these insidious morsels
of commercial enticement.


As a consequence, a newly taped note on the edge of my
computer screen reads; “Magnetic eyelashes? Really?”


It joins an existing note of admonishment that says;
“Electronic dog leash? Seriously?”




- Mark Telles

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.


Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that's wide and timeless.


So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:


a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.




- Ranier Maria Rilke

Solstice 2020


Two days before Solstice 2020
But the light is already lengthening.


We humans cannot measure the complexity of the
trigonometry, mystery, poetry of
axis angles, rotation sequence and power of Sun’s rays
as we hurtle through space over centuries.


Our miniscule errors in time have exponentially
turned into days,
to say the least.


Solstice is already here,
warming quarantined souls
and outside escapees,
reassuring us of the coming spring .
pulling dark bulbed life up through
live, moist earth.


It is already here.


Did you not feel the lingering light last night
under rising Jupiter and her sisters?


How could we dark little beings pinpoint such galactic chemistry?


- Jan Corbett

A special birthday blessing for Barry Chertov:


A Beauty Blessing


As stillness in stone to silence is wed
May your heart be somewhere a God might dwell.


As a river flows in ideal sequence
May your soul discover time in presence.


As the moon absolves the dark of resistance
May thought-light console your mind with brightness.


As the breath of light awakens colour
May the dawn anoint your eyes with wonder.


As spring rain softens the earth with surprise
May your winter places be kissed by light.


As the ocean dreams to the joy of dance
May the grace of change bring you elegance.


As clay anchors a tree in light and wind
May your outer life grow from peace within.


As twilight fills night with bright horizons
May beauty await you at home beyond.


- John O'Donohue

Oceans


I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.


And nothing
happens!
Nothing . . . Silence . . . Waves . . .


- Nothing happens?
Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?


- Juan Ramon Jimenez

The Winter Of Listenings

No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries
everything away outside.

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense
round every living thing.

All this trying
to know
who we are
and all this
wanting to know
exactly
what we must do.

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
to the lit angel
we desire.

What disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true
to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born…



- David Whyte

Elegy In Joy




We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer,
or the look, the lake in the eye that knows,
for the despair that flows down in widest rivers,
cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace,
all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.


The word of nourishment passes through the women,
soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations,
white towers, eyes of children:
saying in time of war What shall we feed?
I cannot say the end.


Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.
Not all things are blest, but the
seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.


This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.
Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation journey
toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,
fierce pure life, the many-living home.
Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all
new techniques for the healing of the wound,
and the unknown world. One life, or the faring stars.


- Muriel Rukeyser

1914 Truce


Christmas Eve in the trenches of France, the guns were quiet.
The dead lay still in No Man’s Land –
Freddie, Franz, Friedrich, Frank . . .
The moon, like a medal, hung in the clear, cold sky.


Silver frost on barbed wire, strange tinsel, sparkled and winked.
A boy from Stroud stared at a star
to meet his mother’s eyesight there.
An owl swooped on a rat on the glove of a corpse.


In a copse of trees behind the lines, a lone bird sang.
A soldier-poet noted it down – a robin holding his winter ground –
then silence spread and touched each man like a hand.


Somebody kissed the gold of his ring;
a few lit pipes;
most, in their greatcoats, huddled,
waiting for sleep.
The liquid mud had hardened at last in the freeze.


But it was Christmas Eve; believe; belief thrilled the night air,
where glittering rime on unburied sons
treasured their stiff hair.
The sharp, clean, midwinter smell held memory.


On watch, a rifleman scoured the terrain –
no sign of life,
no shadows, shots from snipers, nowt to note or report.
The frozen, foreign fields were acres of pain.


Then flickering flames from the other side danced in his eyes,
as Christmas Trees in their dozens shone, candlelit on the parapets,
and they started to sing, all down the German lines.


Men who would drown in mud, be gassed, or shot, or vaporised
by falling shells, or live to tell, heard for the first time then –
Stille Nacht. Heilige Nacht. Alles schläft, einsam wacht …


Cariad, the song was a sudden bridge from man to man;
a gift to the heart from home,
or childhood, some place shared …
When it was done, the British soldiers cheered.


A Scotsman started to bawl The First Noel
and all joined in,
till the Germans stood, seeing
across the divide,
the sprawled, mute shapes of those who had died.


All night, along the Western Front, they sang, the enemies –
carols, hymns, folk songs, anthems, in German, English, French;
each battalion choired in its grim trench.


So Christmas dawned, wrapped in mist, to open itself
and offer the day like a gift
for Harry, Hugo, Hermann, Henry, Heinz …
with whistles, waves, cheers, shouts, laughs.


Frohe Weinachten, Tommy! Merry Christmas, Fritz!
A young Berliner, brandishing schnapps,
was the first from his ditch to climb.
A Shropshire lad ran at him like a rhyme.


Then it was up and over, every man, to shake the hand
of a foe as a friend,
or slap his back like a brother would;
exchanging gifts of biscuits, tea, Maconochie’s stew,


Tickler’s jam … for cognac, sausages, cigars,
beer, sauerkraut;
or chase six hares, who jumped
from a cabbage-patch, or find a ball
and make of a battleground a football pitch.


I showed him a picture of my wife. Ich zeigte ihm
ein Foto meiner Frau.
Sie sei schön, sagte er.
He thought her beautiful, he said.


They buried the dead then, hacked spades into hard earth
again and again, till a score of men
were at rest, identified, blessed.
Der Herr ist mein Hirt … my shepherd, I shall not want.


And all that marvellous, festive day and night, they came and went,
the officers, the rank and file, their fallen comrades side by side
beneath the makeshift crosses of midwinter graves …


… beneath the shivering, shy stars
and the pinned moon
and the yawn of History;
the high, bright bullets
which each man later only aimed at the sky.


- Carol Ann Duffy






UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy wrote this poem in remembrance of the soldiers in the German and British trenches in World War 1, who declared a momentary unilateral truce in the slaughter at Christmas 1914, in recognition of what united them as human beings, rather than the war that divided them as killing machines.




A short film about the event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSa2...ature=youtu.be

Others who noted that very special day and other times preceding it as well: World War I: The 1914 Christmas Truce

https://www.globalresearch.ca/world-...-truce/5421076

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In some sectors such fraternizations developed into an almost daily routine. In the area of the town of Pont-à-Mousson French as well as German soldiers started in November 1914 to fetch water daily at the Fountain of Father Hilarion (Fontaine du Père Hilarion), a spring situated in a ravine in the middle of no man’s land. Normally, they took turns to go there, and no shots were fired while water was being collected. But it frequently came to meetings and conversations. That sociability abruptly ended ... on December 7...

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John McCutcheon wrote a song about it:

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q...DE&FORM=VDQVAP

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A Winter’s Alcove

There are sorrowful, chilled fogs these days that remind one of his mortality. We are in that season when the sun loses the eternal tug-of-war with the icy moon, as exhausted leaves fall like wounded soldiers from desperate trees.

It is the time when the earth falls into her hibernation to conceive the unhappy dreams of lost loves, a time when we are reminded of whom we have offended and forgotten and left behind. It is the time of cold rains and hungry animals.

Let me kiss you, turn your collar up to the gray cold, take your hand, and strut the joyous walk of love defying the face of the storm. I will make fire and create a dry alcove for you in this river of iced waters, put my arms around your sadness and for one brief and exotic moment take you to where we will lay naked on warm blessed sands, bask in the sun, and laugh at our melancholy.

Let us heap our fears in the cold night where they will feel at home, polish our joys, and wear them around our necks.

- Armando Garcia-Dávila