Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

In the Storm


Some black ducks
were shrugged up
on the shore.
It was snowing


hard, from the east,
and the sea
was in disorder.
Then some sanderlings,


five inches long
with beaks like wire,
flew in,
snowflakes on their backs,


and settled
in a row
behind the ducks --
whose backs were also


covered with snow --
so close
they were all but touching,
they were all but under


the roof of the duck's tails,
so the wind, pretty much,
blew over them.
They stayed that way, motionless,


for maybe an hour,
then the sanderlings,
each a handful of feathers,
shifted, and were blown away


out over the water
which was still raging.
But, somehow,
they came back


and again the ducks,
like a feathered hedge,
let them
crouch there, and live.


If someone you didn't know
told you this,
as I am telling you this,
would you believe it?


Belief isn't always easy.
But this much I have learned --
if not enough else --
to live with my eyes open.


I know what everyone wants
is a miracle.
This wasn't a miracle.
Unless, of course, kindness --


as now and again
some rare person has suggested --
is a miracle.
As surely it is.


- Mary Oliver

Break The Mirror
In the morning
After taking cold shower
—–what a mistake—–
I look at the mirror.
There, a funny guy,
Grey hair, white beard, wrinkled skin,
—–what a pity—–
Poor, dirty, old man!
He is not me, absolutely not.
Land and life
Fishing in the ocean
Sleeping in the desert with stars
Building a shelter in the mountains
Farming the ancient way
Singing with coyotes
Singing against nuclear war–
I’ll never be tired of life.
Now I’m seventeen years old,
Very charming young man.
I sit down quietly in lotus position,
Meditating, meditating for nothing.
Suddenly a voice comes to me:
“To stay young,
To save the world,
Break the mirror.”


- Nanao Sakaki

What They Did To Sitting Bull


Lured into the fort by promise
of meat for his people, they meant to
murder him for the Ghost Dance
and because he was a power they
could not understand or tame,
sho they did.
Murder him.
They shot and shot him until
he fell in the snow like a sack
of wet corn meal and the blood
ran out of him like the cry
of a lone Crow in an empty sky.


Then they quartered the body,
hacked it into 4 pieces
with an axe,
thinking this would keep him
from coming back and put an end
to his power.
Because they had not understanding,
they could not know
it increased his power 4 times,
sent him in the 4 directions and
opened 4 doors into the the starry worlds.
You can fool a straving dog with
the promise of meat, but
a man of real power will
eat your heart and relish
every lie and frail conceit;
he will feast on your weakness
and for every one you kill,
4 will come seeking your unborn children
and they will carve them from your loins and
they will carry them away
and feed them in the empty sky
for the meat which was promised him.


- Red Hawk

Thank you for posting this poem by Red Hawk. I'm especially happy to see it today. Just after midnight I finished editing the chapter on Sitting Bull in my book, Twenty-six Companions (available mid-June). I have met him in one of the four directions he was sent.

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

What They Did To Sitting Bull

Lured into the fort by promise
of meat for his people, they meant to
murder him for the Ghost Dance...

---

Frank Givens Encountering Crazy Horse

When Frank Givens first wondered
how many souls he himself possessed,
where each one resided and who else,
pondering the same things, was
ahead or behind him in this exploration,
Frank Givens accepted the notion that
he might, just perhaps, be just a little
crazy as in “crazed” as Crazy Horse
or any other commonly accepted
hot house shaman or witch doctor,
all of which goes to prove that
accepting anything stops creation cold,
leaving its tracks frozen as fossil
embedded in those proverbial sands of time
where footsteps either vanish or
immortalize like chevrons on sleeves
worn by Christian soldiers onward
in futile battles fought for no purpose
other than the preachments of late night
downtown British soap operas crying,
laughing, entertaining as if seriousness
of purpose solely seeks to sadden
such viewers who judge themselves above
Letterman, Leno, Night Live, or Kimmel.

However, let us go back with Frank Givens
to just what Crazy Horse is all about,
horse disturbed by the American armies,
first of hunterous madmen slaughtering
tatanka on the plains removing
life in the form of food, buffalo food.
“Before I go crazy,” horse musing,
“First I must try and try to understand,
just what I am missing about by what
authority, by what Jesus, these hunters
simply (Horse-Now-Crazy discovering irony)
presume all right to the food of my
people, these herds which diminish


before the onslaught of long guns
fired from their smoking iron beasts.
By what right? And so, I break
from any sense of reality, justice,
or Sioux civility and, instead,
become bitter weed, ferocious steed,
invisible soul of all my people,
raining carnage upon the barbaric
infidel, the crusading hateful killer
of all that we know to be sacred, I the
forever wronged and enraged, Crazy Horse.”


- Ed Coletti

The Dead Woman

If suddenly you do not exist,
if suddenly you no longer live,
I shall live on.


I do not dare,
I do not dare to write it,
if you die.


I shall live on.


For where a man has no voice,
there, my voice.


Where blacks are beaten,
I cannot be dead.
When my brothers go to prison
I shall go with them.


When victory,
not my victory,
but the great victory comes,
even though I am mute I must speak;
I shall see it come even
though I am blind.


No, forgive me.
If you no longer live,
if you, beloved, my love,
if you have died,
all the leaves will fall in my breast,
it will rain on my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,
my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but
I shall stay alive,
because above all things
you wanted me indomitable,
and, my love, because you know that I am not only a man
but all mankind.

- Pablo Neruda

First Night


The chapel holds
many truths
Christ on the wall
Surrounded by stations
Rose-red crackled glass
Setting the last
Hot May Day rays
To the west


Resting
Peaceful
Not crucified
Buddha
Praying-hand mudra


Medipraying
Medipraying


Common ground found
Amid cubicled kneelers,


Alters and offerings
Flowers and incense
Not so different
Buddha and Christ


Common mind Blind
Deaf and blind
No ears, no eyes
No knowing
No difference


Medipraying
Medipraying




Prayatating
Prayatating


Fitting so nicely
Together


Supporting
Supporting
This little piece of peace




Angela's white walls
Dorothy's brown
The new
The old
The dogs still click and
The clocks still bark


But the Silence


Remains


The same


- Connie Ayers

Monet's Garden


I long in Spring to go again

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...1_08-39-32.png

where the Epte weds the Seine,
to see the glories of Giverny
born on Monet's palette, willowy
brushed nymphea fronds, the
lilies open to the new day's dawn.


We saw it flamboyant May
as all about the gardens lay
the colors that seduced his brush
that muse and canvas matched and meshed
to create in this private heaven
the promise of his soaring passion.


Yes, we shall return tomorrow
seek him out in winter's shadow,
ask to borrow from his cache
of wildest color and request
he give the seeds we'll take with care,
to plant our own Giverny here.


Giverny, France


- Maxine Collin Williams

Listening to My Mother


My mother says the author
has a musky intelligence. Musky
because you can smell the forest
shoaled with the secrets of earth,
roots, hooved beasts nosing the ground
alert animal, breathing and listening.

I know what she means. Still
it startles me to hear her say it, as if
she were myself, the same
erotic attachment of body
to body. Rivers in us, storms
and spinning stars. All parts,
all scents and shiftings, shades
of salt and fragrant blossoming,
blood and the grit of the soil
of memory. She says

the sound of stones turning
underwater is a kind of music.
Resonant, I answer. We are quiet
then, remembering together
our separate lives.

Perhaps she heard the stones turn
like that before I was born,
standing at the water’s edge,
her ear tuned to the dense energies
of the wordless world. Perhaps
she turned her body underwater
like a slick fish, and heard the stones
as I have heard them roll
downstream in the current that
shoved against her, that musk
of presence the angels envy us
in their disembodied glory.

Once I turned like those stones
humming in her belly, in that original
watery world. I weighed her down
with the musk of my presence.
Heavily she turned in her sleep,
dreaming of water, dreaming
herself a turning stone, dreaming
the weightless resonance
of her own life. I listen,

the sound moves out from turning
stones through water, not fast as light,
but slow as a fetus turning. Not
like church bells, but like china
become bone, the resonance
of ancestors. Her voice and my voice
the same musky history
of generations, our lives together

turning like the radio rosary hour,
like small stones murmuring
in the same stream. Sometimes
I hear my own voice, see my own
face, a mirror dance, the long line
of women a ribbon running
in an Irish knot, origin and end
the same mystery. My mother says

and I listen. Stones underwater
and the rich world turning through
us, in us, a musky music, raw
with the wild we love.


- Elizabeth Herron

Walking Meditation

My elderly mother
takes my arm,
leaning on me
for support
as we head uphill
toward home.

She moves
very, very slowly,
and I find
I must focus
and breathe
for balance,
her every step
becoming mine.



- Iain Macdonald

Don’t Tell Anyone


We had been married for six or seven years
when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me
that she screams underwater when she swims—


that, in fact, she has been screaming for years
into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool
where she does laps every other day.


Buttering her toast, not as if she had been
concealing anything,
not as if I should consider myself


personally the cause of her screaming,
nor as if we should perform an act of therapy
right that minute on the kitchen table,


—casually, she told me,
and I could see her turn her square face up
to take a gulp of oxygen,


then down again into the cold wet mask of the unconscious.
For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming
as they go through life, silently,


politely keeping the big secret
that it is not all fun
to be ripped by the crooked beak


of something called psychology,
to be dipped down
again and again into time;


that the truest, most intimate
pleasure you can sometimes find
is the wet kiss


of your own pain.
There goes Kath, at one PM, to swim her twenty-two laps
back and forth in the community pool;


—what discipline she has!
Twenty-two laps like twenty-two pages,
that will never be read by anyone.


- Tony Hoagland

The Earth is a Being Who Deserves to be Loved


Wounded with bombs and highways, the Earth coughs, bleeds,
and warns, and is not heard nor heeded.


And still she loves, her tremendous heart
expanding, contracting in awesome measure.


After the magical thrust through root and bark
of blood-streams of seas and thunderous rivers,


magnificently various, she offers
the sacrifice of elegance, in flowers.


Multiple is she in anger and reverence,
passion and prayer. Even in catastrophe


and tempest, confounding harmonies enlighten.
She is haloed with many balancing haloes,


each day crowned with a corona of caroling
as bird-note meets bird-note at dawn moving westward.


Warmed, made fertile and lucent by her Sun,
laved by her rains, loved by her delicate snows,


I see her sleeping dreaming, waking,
streaming rays from glorious eyes, of blue light;


measuring the secret of us all in a mighty
splendid montage, she is hermaphrodite.


Let the palm of our love caress the line
of her multiform breasts; the hips of her hills;


embrace her tree barks, mightier than books;
lie in her arms. She will give us golden bread, and wine.


- Daisy Aldan

Moving Into Language

We walk
on the bones of our mother,
shape earth silence
into elegy,
mourn the lost words that
lie with her,
searching
for our own lost song.


- Fran Glaggett

The Island


Every visit, my mother-in-law Ruth
sang us under the table.
A few hours of old standards
and Barbara and I would duck out,
ready for bed, knowing
her mom could go on all night.


This time, she’d had a health crisis
and was recovering in assisted care.
Our visits consisted of watching her O-T and P-T,
arranging her transition back home
and talking with doctors, therapists, family.
No time for music. She hadn’t even
seemed strong enough, at first.


Coming back from a museum-visit break
my last afternoon, I impulsively
pulled the guitar from the trunk,
then found mom and daughter
in the lounge room, finishing
a discussion of foods
needed at home.


We started with the songs
I knew by heart, easier
for eye contact:
“Blue Moon”, “Begin the Beguine,
“Sentimental Journey.” I opened
the songbook for “Love Is Here To Stay.”


An hour in that vein, until we
remembered some errands we had to do
before dark, and promised to return
before visiting hours ended at 8.


She was asleep at 7:15. We didn’t know
what to do, surrounded as she was
by two roommates, each only
a hospital curtain away.


One on each side of the bed, we looked
at each other and took
a chance, singing softly:
“I’ll be seeing you…”


Ruth’s eyes opened.
She looked as if she might
think this a pleasant dream.
Dream or not, she joined in.


The songs became simpler,
more elemental. Too cramped to open
the book, I had to rely on suggestions:


“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
“Danny Boy.” “Old Man River”.
Finally “Auld Lang Syne,”


and why I’m writing this
is to try to tell you
what is impossible to verbalize--


how when we sang,
“We’ll drink a cup of Kindness yet”,
the cup was really there,
and it was full,


as if, song by song,
distraction and worry had been
rivers flowing away,
leaving us dry on an island
that had been submerged,
and the name of that island
was the Heart.


In this place,
words did not
merely suggest,
they embodied:
How long since I’d been here?


Ruth motioned for me to bend
a little closer. When I did,
she said, “Music is the greatest gift
you can give someone in life.”


The silence in the room
was breathing this truth, and I didn’t
want to just leave it all there.
Maybe this will help me,
and you, to remember.


- Max Reif

Stepping Westward

What is green in me
darkens, muscadine.
If woman is inconstant,
good, I am faithful to
ebb and flow, I fall
in season and now
is a time of ripening.
If her part
is to be true,
a north star,
good, I hold steady
in the black sky
and vanish by day,
yet burn there
in blue or above
quilts of cloud.
There is no savor
more sweet, more salt
than to be glad to be
what, woman,
and who, myself,
I am, a shadow
that grows longer as the sun
moves, drawn out
on a thread of wonder.
If I bear burdens
they begin to be remembered
as gifts, goods, a basket
of bread that hurts
my shoulders but closes me
in fragrance. I can
eat as I go.


- Denise Levertov

The Rider


A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn't catch up to him,
the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.
What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.
A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.


- Naomi Shihab Nye

The Mower


The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.


I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:


Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful


Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.


- Phillip Larkin

The Continent's End




At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain,
wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring,
The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the ground-swell shook the beds of granite.

I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established sea-marks,
felt behind me
Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before me the mass and double stretch of water.

I said: You yoke the Aleutian seal-rocks with the lava and coral sowings
that flower the south,
Over your flood the life that sought the sunrise faces ours
that has followed the evening star.

The long migrations meet across you and it is nothing to you,
you have forgotten us, mother.
You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb
and lay in the sun’s eye on the tideline.

It was long and long ago; we have grown proud since then and
you have grown bitter; life retains
Your mobile soft unquiet strength; and envies hardness,
the insolent quietness of stone.

The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child,
but there is in me
Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched
before there was an ocean.

That watched you fill your beds out of the condensation of thin vapor
and watched you change them,
That saw you soft and violent wear your boundaries down, eat rock,
shift places with the continents.

Mother, though my song’s measure is like your surf-beat’s ancient rhythm
I never learned it of you.
Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones
flow from the older fountain.


- Robinson Jeffers

Heart Labor


When I work too hard and then lie down,
even my sleep is sad and all worn out.
You want me to name the specific sorrows?
They do not matter. You have your own.
Most of the people in the world
go out to work, day after day,
with their voices chained in their throats.
I am swimming a narrow, swift river.
Upstream, the clouds have already darkened
and deep blue holes I cannot see
churn up under the smooth flat rocks.
The Greeks have a word, paropono,
for the complaint without answer,
for how the heart labors, while
all the time our faces appear calm
enough to float through in the moonlight.


- Maggie Anderson

With Elephants

With elephants everything
volumes
down.

A cascade of cliff
lumbering
on four limber pillars.

A fog of stone
always slowly
moving west.

A strolling Niagara, yes.

Wearing a wardrobe
of loose-fitting determination,
she looms
her great sweet
buxom
daunt.

You have felt their stone-tough,
bristly,
sensitive
proboscis.
It snouts around like the foot of a snail.
until it clamps the morsel of crackerjack,
which it,
like an undersea thing,
daintily,
and confidently
and insouciantly
and speedily
imparts
into its heart-shaped maw.

Bad for the tusks?

Well, elephant dentists and nutritionists say
Elephants must eat
for their health and satisfaction,
every day
of popcorn
a silo.

So who am I to lecture an elephant –
vegan as she is –
about weight-loss?

Elephants remember
to diet on whole savannahs
and toss their massy heads about,
making gales with their ears

and, with their Cyrano noses,
announce ––
stand back! ––

Triumphals!


- Bruce Moody

yes, I wonder who gets to keep the prize?

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

With Elephants

With elephants everything
volumes
down.

A cascade of cliff
lumbering
on four limber pillars.

A fog of stone

https://img856.imageshack.us/img856/...9392434c5e.jpg

always slowly
moving west.

A strolling Niagara, yes.

Wearing a wardrobe
of loose-fitting determination,
she looms
her great sweet
buxom
daunt.

You have felt their stone-tough,
bristly,
sensitive
proboscis.
It snouts around like the foot of a snail.
until it clamps the morsel of crackerjack,
which it,
like an undersea thing,
daintily,
and confidently
and insouciantly
and speedily
imparts
into its heart-shaped maw.

Bad for the tusks?

Well, elephant dentists and nutritionists say
Elephants must eat
for their health and satisfaction,
every day
of popcorn
a silo.

So who am I to lecture an elephant –
vegan as she is –
about weight-loss?

Elephants remember
to diet on whole savannahs
and toss their massy heads about,
making gales with their ears

and, with their Cyrano noses,
announce ––
stand back! ––

Triumphals!


- Bruce Moody

---

In Praise of Craziness, of a Certain Kind


On cold evening
my grandmother,
with ownership of half her mind -
the other half having flown back to Bohemia -


spread newspaper over the porch floor
so, she said, the garden ants could crawl beneath,
as under a blanket, and keep warm,


and what shall I wish for, for myself,
but, being so struck by the lightning of years,
to be like her with what is left, that loving.


- Mary Oliver

Takstang


Takstang monastery,

https://img819.imageshack.us/img819/...nastery400.jpg

the tiger's nest.

Two thousand feet
to the valley floor.

After many days
alone in the mountains,

the body hesitates
at the sight of a single roof.

Having listened to the wind,
sufficient to itself,

like a single clear breath
from the body of the mountain,

we hear the sutra's
diamond hard presence

at the center of experience

https://img195.imageshack.us/img195/9981/img8028s.jpg

so clearly now,

spoken from the felt rhythm
of a ten-day walk.

And having crossed the pass
in cold rain,

we wait, about to ripen
into our own going,

Like a drop of clear water
hanging from the cliff edge,

its own transparent world
growing from within,

until it fills with just enough
to flow on

out of the mountains
as we do.

So silent now, only the sound,
as we go

of that pure water
falling

toward home.

- David Whyte

Touch The Air

Now touch the air softly,
Step gently, one, two…
I'll love you till roses
Are robin's-egg blue;
I'll love you till gravel
Is eaten for bread,
And lemons are orange,
And lavender's red.

Now touch the air softly,
Swing gently the broom.
I'll love you till windows
Are all of a room;
And the table is laid,
And the table is bare,
And the ceiling reposes
On bottomless air.

I'll love you till Heaven
Rips the stars from his coat,
And the moon rows away in
A glass-bottomed boat;
And Orion steps down
Like a diver below,
And Earth is ablaze,
And Ocean aglow.

So touch the air softly,
and swing the broom high.
We will dust the gray mountains,
And sweep the blue sky;
And I'll love you as long
As the furrow the plow,
As However is Ever,
And Ever is Now.

- William Jay Smith

Forever


In the universe of God
she is a wave on the ocean
of eternity.
And I, another wave on the same ocean,
travel with her
until the time
that one of us fades into the salty waters,
leaving the other behind,
who will also one day be no more.


But one bright morning
we will awaken in each other's arms
beyond oceans, beyond eternity,
beyond even she and me,
and at that time
we will be
forever.


- Greg Kimura

morning prayer 3


o!


redwoods along the bikepath
redwoods at big hendy
redwoods in armstrong woods
redwoods in downtown sebastopol


willows along the bikepath
willows shading atscadero creek
willows arching over the laguna
willows fragrant & pliable


live oaks beside the bike path
live oaks on the ragle hills
live oaks huge before the pasture
live oaks rising small amid blackberries


black oaks sheltering my home
black oaks on the laguna uplands
black oaks along the bikepath
black oaks on the ragle hillside


redwoods standing strong in the sky
oaks rooted powerfully in the earth


o!


- Sandy Eastoak

A Cafe and You


I am in my own state of being
As the door to my sanctuary closes behind me.
No tears flow here
Just the joy of being in the moment.
When in my lifetime have I been more free?


Perhaps as a small child in the sandbox
Where form was born from within.
Time had no constraints
Imagination took several forms at once
In the warmth of knowing myself.


- Mahmud Darivsk

Reckoning at Buck’s Lake


In the late evening
as the sun left a deepening maroon-blue light
between earth and sky,

my son and I sat at our campfire sharing stories of
what had been and what would be:

my son having his own child; me, a father soon to be a grandfather.


Gratitude unfolded in us like a flower, the wave- lapping lake
a symphony celebrating our thirty-year span together.


He said, “Dad--look how the star rising so close over the far trees
on the other side of the lake has made a beam of light on the water.”

Awe-struck, silent, the million small tasks of living fell away from us entirely,


and we wondered if there will ever anything lovelier to look at:


straight and luminous it lay, an arrow on the mirrored space of water
connected shore to shore, a shimmering swath of starlight.


Raptured, we saw it spread out into an ever-widening beam of gold and silver,

moving and alive.


In a quarter hour it faded and was gone.

Lifting our glasses to celebrate, I asked myself: was it Venus, the Goddess herself,
her limitless heart shining a path to a lonely little planet,

calling forth sacred tidings, the fruits of human love from her storied pantheon?


- Larry Kenneth Potts

To Save Yourself


When a crow nests in your hair
throw away your comb.

If a white dog comes to your door
drive it off. If a black dog
let it lie at your hearth.

Take gravel from the gullet of a cock
and cook it with suet. Shape a loaf
to rise in moonlight.
When a stranger comes,
slice the bread.

If you have regrets, sew salt
in the hem of your coat.
Throw away your heroic medals.
Wrap green ribbons around
your wrists and doorknobs.
Sing to stones. Pray to trees.

When anger fists your heart
pull it out by the root,
wrap it in red twine and bury it
under a rose bush. It will make
strong thorns.

Let your memories lie
by the fire beside the black dog.
When melancholy joins them
do not turn away.

Wrap your suffering in blue silk
and let the tide take your tears.
Take home a seashell
to remind you
all things come and go,
come and go.

If despair clings to you
get up before dawn
and think of those you love
still sleeping.

If worry burdens your shoulders
break the crust of your back
and flap your arms like a homeless
coat or the wings of a blackbird.

When doubt darkens your hope
flap them again. Remember
kicking your legs to swim underwater.

Remember kicking your legs to swing
as high as the swing would go.
Remember weightlessness.

Let sadness see the sunrise.

If longing aches, take aspirin.

When you can’t sleep, go talk
to the owls, and listen
for they will answer.

When you weep, remember rain.

We are such small lives,
so perishable. We are fruit
falling. We are the faintest stars
salting the dark.
We are ants
looking for honey.
We are flower and pollen.
We are the hive.

What we make and give away
gathers gold.

- Elizabeth Herron

that crazy fellow
he sleeps alone
is disconnected
from all & everything
wherever he turns
he sees himself
time is fleeting
time is now
someday soon
he will die
he’s preparing
by training his mind
so that he crosses
the street awake
into the unknown

- Robert Leverant

The Truro Bear


There’s a bear in the Truro woods.
People have seen it - three or four,
or two, or one. I think
of the thickness of the serious woods
around the dark bowls of the Truro ponds;
I think of the blueberry fields, the blackberry tangles,
the cranberry bogs. And the sky
with its new moon, its familiar star-trails,
burns down like a brand-new heaven,
while everywhere I look on the scratchy hillsides
shadows seem to grow shoulders. Surely
a beast might be clever, be lucky, move quietly
through the woods for years, learning to stay away
from roads and houses. Common sense mutters:
it can’t be true, it must be somebody’s
runaway dog. But the seed
has been planted, and when has happiness ever
required much evidence to begin
its leaf-green breathing?


- Mary Oliver

For the Orchard

I want to tell you about the apple orchard.
How in the spring, when I come up over the rise,
blossom clouds soften the sky with a whisper.
How on summer afternoons I swim carelessly
through green shade and shards of light.
How autumn fills me ripe with desire
and I devour stolen fruit as I walk.
How the winter horizon is sharpened at night
with unadorned branches pinned to stars.


This April day I’ll tell you
how I drew the trees as they lay felled.
Trunks, connected or not by shred of bark,
lay on stumps ridged by saw tooth.
Limbs capsized into impossible tangles
laced with the season’s new growth.
Here and there, among the terrible beauty,
I witnessed, first and last, the blossoming.

- Christine Walker

After The Fact

The people of my time are passing away: my Wife is baking for a funeral, a 60-year old who Died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it’s Ruth we care so much about in intensive care: ... It was once weddings that came so thick and Fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo: Now, it’s this and that and the other and somebody Else gone or on the brink: well, we never Thought we would live forever (although we did) And now it looks like we won’t: some of us Are losing a leg to diabetes, some don’t know What they went downstairs for, some know that A hired watchful person is around, some like To touch the cane tip into something steady, So nice: we have already lost so many, Brushed the loss of ourselves ourselves: our Address books for so long a slow scramble now Are palimpsests, scribbles and scratches: our Index cards for Christmases, birthdays, Halloweens drop clean away into sympathies: At the same time we are getting used to so Many leaving, we are hanging on with a grip To the ones left: we are not giving up on the Congestive heart failures or brain tumors, on The nice old men left in empty houses or on The widows who decided to travel a lot: we Think the sun may shine someday when we’ll Drink wine together and think of what used to Be: until we die we will remember every Single thing, recall every word, love every Loss: then we will, as we must, leave it to Others to love, love that can grow brighter And deeper till the very end, gaining strength And getting more precious all the way…. - A.R. Ammons

Serving


Remember that time your dog died and I didn't tell you for months
Because you had deployed and George Bush was shouting,
"Bring it on" and we were all thinking that Korea was fixing to blow.
But, when I emailed to say we were headed for West Virginia,
You fired back, "Mom, where is Annie" and I had to say she was hit by a car.
I sent brownies loaded with black walnuts from the old home place.


Or when you called me from Iraq asking me to
Talk to people about donating shoes and I told you it was hopeless
Because of the Tsunami, everyone was already donating.
You said "Hell with that" and your unit threw in their paychecks and bought
All those families just outside Falujha new shoes off the Internet.
I made two hundred popcorn balls wrapped in wax paper.


Or that February you came home for R&R, so sad and sick.
I baked your favorite, meatloaf and you said you couldn't possibly,
But I gave you doe-eyes so you ate and threw up all night,
Into the next day, saying over and over "Sweet Jesus,
Please, make it stop" and I knew you weren't talking about the meatloaf.


Or the day after Sergeant Crabtree went to Vegas and blew
His head off in the hotel bathroom, while here at home your
Best friend got arrested for selling narcotics and you said neither one of them
Needed to and maybe wouldn't have if you'd been there. So, I shipped
Molasses cookies thick with Crisco frosting, all the way to Kandahar.


Or the afternoon your farm boy fingers tried to clamp the artery
On that precious baby girl, near the valley of Arghandab,
While her father screamed for Allah and blood soaked your uniform
When you hugged her to you as she passed.
I drenched that fruitcake in brandy for three days.


But mostly it was the night your daughter was born and we
Locked eyes across the birthing room. I thought to myself,
Skillet-fried chicken with candied sweet potatoes, fried okra,
Lima beans with bacon, cornbread and aunt Lila's hot fudge cake.
We used the good dishes and grandpa Oris said the blessing.


- Kari Peterson

ouch ... too bad this beauty of a poem makes it so painfully clear what we are doing to another generation of service men and women. It took my breath away, as did the nightmares of my friends when they returned from Viet Nam.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Serving


Remember that time your dog died and I didn't tell you for months
Because you had deployed and George Bush was shouting,
"Bring it on" and we were all thinking that Korea was fixing to blow.
But, when I emailed to say we were headed for West Virginia,
You fired back, "Mom, where is Annie" and I had to say she was hit by a car.
I sent brownies loaded with black walnuts from the old home place.


Or when you called me from Iraq asking me to
Talk to people about donating shoes and I told you it was hopeless
Because of the Tsunami, everyone was already donating.
You said "Hell with that" and your unit threw in their paychecks and bought
All those families just outside Falujha new shoes off the Internet.
I made two hundred popcorn balls wrapped in wax paper.


Or that February you came home for R&R, so sad and sick.
I baked your favorite, meatloaf and you said you couldn't possibly,
But I gave you doe-eyes so you ate and threw up all night,
Into the next day, saying over and over "Sweet Jesus,
Please, make it stop" and I knew you weren't talking about the meatloaf.


Or the day after Sergeant Crabtree went to Vegas and blew
His head off in the hotel bathroom, while here at home your
Best friend got arrested for selling narcotics and you said neither one of them
Needed to and maybe wouldn't have if you'd been there. So, I shipped
Molasses cookies thick with Crisco frosting, all the way to Kandahar.


Or the afternoon your farm boy fingers tried to clamp the artery
On that precious baby girl, near the valley of Arghandab,
While her father screamed for Allah and blood soaked your uniform
When you hugged her to you as she passed.
I drenched that fruitcake in brandy for three days.


But mostly it was the night your daughter was born and we
Locked eyes across the birthing room. I thought to myself,
Skillet-fried chicken with candied sweet potatoes, fried okra,
Lima beans with bacon, cornbread and aunt Lila's hot fudge cake.
We used the good dishes and grandpa Oris said the blessing.


- Kari Peterson

---

What is Grace


Grace is shy,
she comes like a thief in the night
when you're not looking
she will rob you sure enough
who knows why


Uninvited, she is not expected,
that is her realm
look too hard, you'll miss her
be asleep, you'll miss her
who knows why


seen and unseen, she is not lost
grace is not found in seeing and doing
She lives in the receiving and
the reversal of what is dry and brittle,
bright and inspiring matter not
who knows why


Grace can't be earned
she cares not for good or bad
empty or full or any other thing
it's just for us no matter why
to hear ten thousand frogs singing in the rain
who knows why


please pass the salt.


- Linda Anderson

Waiting


Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
I rave no more 'gainst time or fate,
For lo! my own shall come to me.


I stay my haste, I make delays,
For what avails this eager pace?
I stand amid the eternal ways,
And what is mine shall know my face.


Asleep, awake, by night or day,
The friends I seek are seeking me;
No wind can drive my bark astray,
Nor change the tide of destiny.


What matter if I stand alone?
I wait with joy the coming years;
My heart shall reap where it hath sown,
And garner up its fruit of tears.


The waters know their own and draw
The brook that springs in yonder height;
So flows the good with equal law
Unto the soul of pure delight.


The stars come nightly to the sky;
The tidal wave unto the sea;
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,
Can keep my own away from me.


- John Burroughs

From last weekend in Monterey:



whales in guam and whales in baja
sing a different song every year
they are singing the same song
a twenty minute ditty with non-repeating lyrics
at the same time all together
a song that no single whale makes up or
decides for all the others is the one to be sung
this year
the one no single whale could propagate across
what we imagine to be great distances
through a medium we call water
which is actually a space that is unknown to us
buried deeper than any other secret

not the space of separation we think we know
between objects that we believe are real
but a different space
a field that knows no distance or time
the empty shimmering luminous field
that only makes itself known to us
in brief dreams
lying as it does within the heart of each singing
whale and in each of us
always listening for us
when all things we construct
all silences we lean into and drown out so loudly
like uninvited relatives
the thing that wants us to listen right now
more than anything
anything
is our own song
the changing inscrutably common melody
unknown to any single person
yet compelling each to sing
just now


- Gary Horvitz

We Are All Pilgrims
We are all pilgrims.
Some worship at the temple of materialism.
Some linger in the warm pools of Aphrodite.
Others trek to mountain peaks
or hidden springs,
seeking the source
of mystery itself.
But we all journey somewhere.
We are all pilgrims.

The roads we travel –
the dusty miles,
the rain-soaked muddy roads,
the twisting uphill trails -
drag on, so arduous and long,
with no endpoint in sight.

But then, one day,
you look into a mirror, or
catch your reflection
in still water,
and you see
that you have grown old.
Suddenly, a different destination nears.

You cry out –
I’m not ready!
Now you understand that
it was never arriving
that mattered.
You know –
deeply and without doubt –
that the pilgrimage itself
was the point.
All of those hours lost
in complaint, confusion and misery –
you realize that they were
opportunities ignored and departed.

Even now,
walking the great camino,
you rouse – repeatedly –
from unconscious moments.
You desperately want
to stay open-eyed
and grateful.
But even our failures are the journey.
And we are all pilgrims.


- Maya Spector

Brahma

https://img94.imageshack.us/img94/2143/brahmak.png

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.


- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everyone Sang

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was fill’d with such delight
As prison’d birds must find freedom
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on; on and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted,
And beauty came like the setting sun.
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away . . . O but every one
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

- Siegfried Sasson

The Light of Asia OM, AMITAYA! measure not with words
Th’ Immeasurable; nor sink the string of thought
Into the Fathomless. Who asks doth err,
Who answers, errs. Say nought!
The Books teach Darkness was, at first of all,
And Brahm, sole meditating in that Night:
Look not for Brahm and the Beginning there!
Nor him, nor any light
Shall any gazer see with mortal eyes,
Or any searcher know by mortal mind;
Veil after veil will lift—but there must be
Veil upon veil behind.
Stars sweep and question not. This is enough
That life and death and joy and woe abide;
And cause and sequence, and the course of time,
And Being’s ceaseless tide,
Which, ever changing, runs, linked like a river
By ripples following ripples, fast or slow—
The same yet not the same—from far-off fountain
To where its waters flow
Into the seas. These, steaming to the Sun,
Give the lost wavelets back in cloudy fleece
To trickle down the hills, and glide again;
Having no pause or peace.
This is enough to know, the phantasms are;
The Heavens, Earths, Worlds, and changes changing them,
A mighty whirling wheel of strife and stress
Which none can stay or stem.…
If ye lay bound upon the wheel of change,
And no way were of breaking from the chain,
The Heart of boundless Being is a curse,
The Soul of Things fell Pain.
Ye are not bound! the Soul of Things is sweet,
The Heart of Being is celestial rest;
Stronger than woe is will: that which was Good
Doth pass to Better—Best.
I, Buddh, who wept with all my brothers’ tears,
Whose heart was broken by a whole world’s woe,
Laugh and am glad, for there is Liberty!
Ho! ye who suffer! know
Ye suffer from yourselves. None else compels,
None other holds you that ye live and die,
And whirl upon the wheel, and hug and kiss
Its spokes of agony,
Its tire of tears, its nave of nothingness.
Behold, I show you Truth! Lower than hell,
Higher than Heaven, outside the utmost stars,
Farther than Brahm doth dwell,
Before beginning, and without an end,
As space eternal and as surety sure,
Is fixed a Power divine which moves to good,
Only its laws endure.…
That which ye sow ye reap. See yonder fields!
The sesamum was sesamum, the corn
Was corn. The Silence and the Darkness knew!
So is a man’s fate born.…
If he shall day by day dwell merciful,
Holy and just and kind and true; and rend
Desire from where it clings with bleeding roots,
Till love of life have end:
He—dying—leaveth as the sum of him
A life-count closed, whose ills are dead and quit
Whose good is quick and mighty, far and near,
So that fruits follow it.
No need hath such to live as ye name life;
That which began in him when he began
Is finished: he hath wrought the purpose through
Of what did make him Man.
Never shall yearnings torture him, nor sins
Stain him, nor ache of earthly joys and woes
Invade his safe eternal peace; nor deaths
And lives recur. He goes
Unto NIRVÂNA. He is one with Life,
Yet lives not. He is blest, ceasing to be.
OM, MANI PADME, OM! the Dewdrop slips
Into the shining sea!…
AH! BLESSED LORD! OH, HIGH DELIVERER!
FORGIVE THIS FEEBLE SCRIPT, WHICH DOTH THEE WRONG,
MEASURING WITH LITTLE WIT THY LOFTY LOVE.
AH! LOVER! BROTHER! GUIDE! LAMP OF THE LAW!
I TAKE MY REFUGE IN THY NAME AND THEE!
I TAKE MY REFUGE IN THY LAW OF GOOD!
I TAKE MY REFUGE IN THY ORDER! OM!
THE DEW IS ON THE LOTUS!—RISE, GREAT SUN!
AND LIFT MY LEAF AND MIX ME WITH THE WAVE.
OM MANI PADME HUM, THE SUNRISE COMES!
THE DEWDROP SLIPS INTO THE SHINING SEA!

- Edwin Arnold

The Last Salmon


When the last salmon come home
like Chief Joseph's beaten tribe
gulls will arrive from the dump
as honor must be accorded, and
the sunshine will be dignified
though we love no dead but our own.


From reserved seats on the dike
we will watch them leaping, see
their darkening flanks like old tires
in the water. The river will be at low flow
as decreed by the army engineers. Here
at the rapids the high school band
will cheer, playing the passage
of great fish through the air.


- William A. Roecker

Summer Solstice


In memory of Elena
We came home
from decorating
our friend’s cardboard casket
physically exhausted, emotionally spent
from comforting her daughter, her son
your best friend
who was her best friend.
As we sat out under your plum tree
ripe, sweet red plums fell
at our feet
in the late afternoon heat.
How do they decide when
it’s time to let go?
We ate your homemade basil pesto
fresh-picked lettuce from your garden
plums and strawberry rice dream
for dessert.
We were refreshed.
We kissed.
And kissed again.
We went to bed
before the first day of summer’s
sun had set
and loved one another.
And loved one another.


- Lilith Rogers

Summer Solstice


I wanted to see where beauty comes from
without you in the world, hauling my heart
across sixty acres of northeast meadow,
my pockets filling with flowers.
Then I remembered,
it’s you I miss in the brightness
and body of every living name:
rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.
You are the green wonder of June,
root and quasar, the thirst for salt.
When I finally understand that people fail
at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,
the paper wings of the dragonfly
aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?
If I get the story right, desire is continuous,
equatorial. There is still so much
I want to know: what you believe
can never be removed from us,
what you dreamed on Walnut Street
in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,
learning pleasure on your own.
Tell me our story: are we impetuous,
are we kind to each other, do we surrender
to what the mind cannot think past?
Where is the evidence I will learn
to be good at loving?
The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond
for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.
There are violet hills,
there is the covenant of duskbirds.
The moon comes over the mountain
like a big peach, and I want to tell you
what I couldn’t say the night we rushed
North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers
and the way you go into yourself,
calling my half-name like a secret.
I stand between taproot and treespire.
Here is the compass rose
to help me live through this.
Here are twelve ways of knowing
what blooms even in the blindness
of such longing. Yellow oxeye,
viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms
pleading do not forget me.
We hunger for eloquence.
We measure the isopleths.
I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.
The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.
Fireflies turn on their electric wills:
an effulgence. Let me come back
whole, let me remember how to touch you
before it is too late.


- Stacie Cassarino

Landscape of Night


Each night
Is a lake
That rises at sundown
Spreads itself thin
Laps at
The house lights
Fills up low shoes
Would make fish of us all.


- Tom Hennen

The Hollow Ground


The jug of feeling fills and empties a thousand times
a day. Dust whirls about in the vast hall
inside us. When we walk down the street
none of this is visible.


Some war so many coats that it's clear they
are freezing to death, but most of us are unaware
the the jug is filling even as we pull on our pants
or stand in line with the groceries.


Yesterday the news cam that someone we know
has died, and now her husband and sons grieve.
In the evening we make food, drink wine, talk
about summer nights on her porch.


In the morning the rain comes. It keeps us close
like our old mother saying There, there, it's
going to be all right, and then, slowly, Death
steps back. There, there.


- Abbot Cutler

I Wait for Grace


each morning in the garden, and know she’s near
when juncos***** breeze through the cherry blooms
and not one white petal falls

How white they are, these petals, new and strong
like the white teeth of Africa’s orphans smiling
at a camera, no word for the hunger in their eyes

I take anemones from plastic pots and plant them
in amended soil for the children to grow strong roots
unfold their brilliant colors


- Cynthia Poten

Anniversary
That you and I, I and you,
this twenty-fifth year after
you stamped your foot, shattered
the glass, and friends, so many dead
or forgotten, applauded in a ballroom
long abandoned, twenty-five years
of Monday good-byes, monthly wars
with stacks of bills, bags of garbage,
frozen gutters, nights filled
with pink medicines, fevered cheeks
on shoulders, the other hand reaching
for the pediatrician's call, termites
chewing, and hours waiting
for the door to open, holding
our own daughter's head vomiting
beer into our own leaking toilet,
that now, as mirrors mark the descent
of breasts, the tub catches silvered
pubic hair and our eyes wear pouches
and hoods, as though expecting rain,
that you and I could smell the salt
of each other, coming together after
long absence, silent, still, staring up
at the darkening ceiling, naked in a house
with empty, orderly bedrooms, the last
of dead roses and discarded boyfriends
tossed out, your hand touching mine,
our breathing slowing,
the wonder of it all.
- Davi Walters

The Country of Marriage


Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.


- Wendell Berry

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Country of Marriage


Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.


- Wendell Berry

---

And so bright it was on this Wednesday...

Peonies

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open -
pools of lace,
white and pink -
and all day the black ants climb over them,

boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls,
craving the sweet sap,
taking it away

to their dark, underground cities -
and all day
under the shifty wind,
as in a dance to the great wedding,

the flowers bend their bright bodies,
and tip their fragrance to the air,
and rise,
their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness
gladly and lightly,
and there it is again -
beauty the brave, the exemplary,

blazing open.
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?

- Mary Oliver

Everybody Knows


Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you've been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you've been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
And everybody knows that it's now or never
Everybody knows that it's me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when you've done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old Black Joe's still pickin' cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows
And everybody knows that the Plague is coming
Everybody knows that it's moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there's gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows
And everybody knows that you're in trouble
Everybody knows what you've been through
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows it's coming apart
Take one last look at this Sacred Heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Oh everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows


- Leonard Cohen

it is an assumption that everybody knows all of this, i don't. i know what i assume, do you? do you want to know my assumptions? i am willing to share them with you...

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Everybody Knows

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Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by rossmen:

it is an assumption that everybody knows all of this, i don't. i know what i assume, do you? do you want to know my assumptions? i am willing to share them with you...

---

OK, I'll bite. Please post your assumptions to new thread.

Praise Song For The Day

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.


- Elizabeth Alexander

How sweet it was yesterday imagining I was a tree!
I had almost rooted in one place
and grew in sovereign slowness there.
I took the breeze and the north wind,
caresses, blows--what difference did it make?
I was neither joy nor torment to myself,
I couldn't detach myself from my own center,
no decisions, no movement:
if I moved it was because of the wind.


- Jonathan Galassi

Old Man Leaves Party


It was clear when I left the party
That though I was over eighty I still had
A beautiful body. The moon shone down as it will
On moments of deep introspection. The wind held its breath.
And look, somebody left a mirror leaning against a tree.
Making sure that I was alone, I took off my shirt.
The flowers of bear grass nodded their moonwashed heads.
I took off my pants and the magpies circled the redwoods.
Down in the valley the creaking river was flowing once more.
How strange that I should stand in the wilds alone with my body.
I know what you are thinking. I was like you once. But now
With so much before me, so many emerald trees, and
Weed-whitened fields, mountains and lakes, how could I not
Be only myself, this dream of flesh, from moment to moment?


- Mark Strand

Objector


In line at lunch I cross my fork and spoon
to ward off complicity—the ordered life
our leaders have offered us. Thin as a knife,
our chance to live depends on such a sign
while others talk and The Pentagon from the moon
is bouncing exact commands: "Forget your faith;
be ready for whatever it takes to win: we face
annihilation unless all citizens get in line."


I bow and cross my fork and spoon: somewhere
other citizens more fearfully bow
in a place terrorized by their kind of oppressive state.
Our signs both mean, "You hostages over there
will never be slaughtered by my act." Our vows
cross: never to kill and call it fate.


- William Stafford

Larry,
Thank you so very much for bringing all these amazing poems into my days!
Michelle
:waccosun:

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Old Man Leaves Party
It was clear when I left the party
That though I was over eighty I still had
A beautiful body........

---

Wonderful. I am going to do this with my utensils today, whevever I go, and pass the lovely prayer along to the diners next to me, and maybe they will pass it along, until we are all doing it...

As Arlo said, back in 1966:

"And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white of my fingerprints. And the only reason I'm singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if you're in a situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into the shrink wherever you are, just walk in say 'Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant.' And walk out. You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin' a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day, walking in singin' a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may think it's a movement. And that's what it is, the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it comes around on the guitar."

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Objector

In line at lunch I cross my fork and spoon
to ward off complicity—......

---

Thank you, Larry, for your contribution to maintaining our independence and reclaiming our democracy.

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Objector
In line at lunch I cross my fork and spoon
to ward off complicity—...........

---

ON THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS
Poor Richard's Almanack, 1757


While free from Force the Press remains,
Virtue and Freedom chear our Plains,
And Learning Largesses bestows,
And keeps unlicens'd open House.
We to the Nation's publick Mart
Our Works of Wit, and Schemes of Art,
And philosophic Goods, this Way,
Like Water carriage, cheap convey.
This Tree which Knowledge so affords,
Inquisitors with flaming swords
From Lay-Approach with Zeal defend,
Lest their own Paradise should end.


The Press from her fecundous Womb
Brought forth the Arts of Greece and Rome;
Her offspring, skill'd in Logic War,
Truth's Banner wav'd in open Air;
The Monster Superstition fled,
And hid in Shades in Gorgon Head;
And awless Pow'r, the long kept Field,
By Reason quell'd, was forc'd to yield.


This Nurse of Arts, and Freedom's Fence,
To chain, is Treason against Sense:
And Liberty, thy thousand Tongues
None silence who design no Wrongs;
For those who use the Gag's Restraint,
First Rob, before they stop Complaint.


- Benjamin Franklin

The Birthing

Call out the names in the procession of the loved.
Call from the blood the ancestors here to bear witness
to the day he stopped the car,
we on our way to a great banquet in his honor.
In a field a cow groaned lowing, trying to give birth,
what he called front leg presentation,
the calf comes out nose first, one front leg dangling from his mother.
A fatal sign he said while rolling up the sleeves
of his dress shirt, and climbed the fence.
I watched him thrust his arms entire
into the yet to be, where I imagined holy sparrows scattering
in the hall of souls for his big mortal hands just to make way.
With his whole weight he pushed the calf back in the mother
and grasped the other leg tucked up like a closed wing
against the new one’s shoulder.
And found a way in the warm dark to bring both legs out
into the world together.
Then heaved and pulled, the cow arching her back,
until a bull calf, in a whoosh of blood and water,
came falling whole and still onto the meadow.
We rubbed his blackness, bloodying our hands.
The mother licked her newborn, of us oblivious,
until he moved a little, struggled.
I ran to get our coats, mine a green velvet cloak,
and his a tuxedo jacket, and worked to rub the new one dry
while he set out to find the farmer.
When it was over, the new calf suckling his mother,
the farmer soon to lead them to the barn,
leaving our coats just where they lay
we huddled in the car.
And then made love toward eternity,
Without a word drove slowly home. And loved some more.

- Deborah Digges

On Television


It is best to turn on the set only after all the stations have gone off the air and just watch the snowfall. This is the other life you have been promising yourself; somewhere back in the woods, ten miles from the nearest town, and that just a wide place in the road with a tavern and a gas station. When you drive home, after midnight, half drunk, the roads are treacherous. And your wife is home alone, worried, looking anxiously out at the snow. This snow has been falling steadily for days, so steadily the snow plows can't keep up. So you drive slowly, peering down the road. And there? Did you see it? Just at the edge of your headlight beams, something, a large animal, or a man, crossed the road. Stop. There he is among the birches, a tall man wearing a white suit. No, it isn't a man. Whatever it is it motions to you, an almost human gesture, then retreats farther into the woods. He stops and motions again. The snow is piling up all around the car. Are you coming?


- Louis Jenkins

This hits the eternal chord. Been there. Done that. Too often. So crazy. So "wrong." Living for the moment it happens again. :-)

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

On Television


It is best to turn on the set only after all the stations have gone off the air and just watch the snowfall. This is the other life you have been promising yourself; somewhere back in the woods, ten miles from the nearest town, and that just a wide place in the road with a tavern and a gas station. When you drive home, after midnight, half drunk, the roads are treacherous. And your wife is home alone, worried, looking anxiously out at the snow. This snow has been falling steadily for days, so steadily the snow plows can't keep up. So you drive slowly, peering down the road. And there? Did you see it? Just at the edge of your headlight beams, something, a large animal, or a man, crossed the road. Stop. There he is among the birches, a tall man wearing a white suit. No, it isn't a man. Whatever it is it motions to you, an almost human gesture, then retreats farther into the woods. He stops and motions again. The snow is piling up all around the car. Are you coming?


- Louis Jenkins

---

Perfect

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Objector

never to kill and call it fate.


- William Stafford

---

You/He nailed it (so to speak). Here's hoping Bradley Manning can hear the words to Alice's Restaurant within the depths of the US Inquisition System.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Chris Dec:

As Arlo said, back in 1966:

"And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white of my fingerprints. And the only reason I'm singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation..."

---

Dear Bradley. If we sing it very loudly each and every time it comes around on the guitar, maybe he will hear. Can we sign him up to get the WaccoBB Digest? Is he even allowed a computer?

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by ronliskey:

You/He nailed it (so to speak). Here's hoping Bradley Manning can hear the words to Alice's Restaurant within the depths of the US Inquisition System.

---

Which Are You?
There are two kinds of people on earth to-day;
Just two kinds of people, no more, I say.
Not the sinner and saint, for it’s well understood,
The good are half bad, and the bad are half good.
Not the rich and the poor, for to rate a man’s wealth,
You must first know the state of his conscience and health.
Not the humble and proud, for in life’s little span,
Who puts on vain airs, is not counted a man.
Not the happy and sad, for the swift flying years
Bring each man his laughter and each man his tears.
No; the two kinds of people on earth I mean,
Are the people who lift, and the people who lean.
Wherever you go, you will find the earth’s masses,
Are always divided in just these two classes.
And oddly enough, you will find too, I ween,
There’s only one lifter to twenty who lean.
In which class are you? Are you easing the load,
Of overtaxed lifters, who toil down the road?
Or are you a leaner, who lets others share
Your portion of labor, and worry and care?


- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
(1850-1919)

For My Father Who Never Made It To Paris


For my father who never made it to Paris
I meet friends late at night in smokey cafes
To drink frothy cappuccino and listen
To Coltrane sax solos on old jukeboxes
And talk of the wounds
Of fathers and sons


For fathers and sons
Who never returned home,
I reach down for words to express my grief,
Like an emergency ward surgeon groping
For stray sharpnel in the flesh
Of bleeding loved ones.


For all the words never found between men,
The buried burning words slowly infecting us,
I drop quarters in no-name bar telephones.
To call suicidal friends, distraught fathers,
Lone wolf sons who howl at the indifference of the moon,
And offer the round table of brotherhood.


For all the tumors caused by sorrow,
And all the ulcers formed by anger,
For all the nightmares wrought by rage,
And all the emptiness carved by despair,
I probe friends and family
For healing stories.


For my father and all fathers
Who never saw Paris,
One friend listens, reveals,
Reaches in an open wound,
Finds a piece of gold shrapnel,
Cashes it in for airfare,
Takes his father to the Left Bank.


So the healing
Can begin.

- Phil Cousineau

Landscape in Pictures
There is the empty place
Between two evergreens
Where I meant to hang the hammock.
It frames the landscape.
Through it you can see
The hills and the valley
And the creek with no name.
One night I saw
A cottonwood throwing itself
At a sky full of lightning.
In the morning
Leaves were everywhere.
- Tom Hennen

To Light the Way

I imagine a time
when the spark
you truly are
finally catches fire
through all the damp and mildew
and sets your dead-wood self
ablaze.

I am supposing you will say
something like "yeeouch!"
and possibly you may
be desperate enough
to stop, drop, and roll,
or run for the nearest
body of water.

But then
after several minutes
of mortified lunacy
you will find yourself
unscathed,
covered in dirt
and/or
dripping wet
laughing hysterically,
not caring how insane
the crowds gathering around
might think you are,
not worrying
whether or not
someone has called the police.

I imagine you will stop laughing then
and begin to weep
for all the illusions
of skin
and bone
and sinew
and thought
that now blow somewhere
across the midwest as fertile ash.
All of that illusion
that you once identified with,
and claimed as yourself

gone, gone, gone.

And once the madness
and mourning pass
I suppose you will float away
or choose to stay here as a naked,
penniless, homeless wanderer
with no aim, no fear, and no motive
but to love and to burn like a candle
to light the way.


- Levi Noe

The Poet's Hierarchy


for Galway Kinnell and
for the Poet Populist Movement


It's as if, here too, there's a hierarchy:
a Poet's Heaven, where the favored few
live, feeding on fame, Pulitzers and paychecks
on parties, applause and booksignings
in the midst of endless wine and crackers and cheese.
O the celebrity! O the throngs!
And then there are the rest of us
also in love with the word, the mystery:
we dance, unnoticed, in the alleys of the world
we dance, barefoot, on the pavement, in mud --
we are the peasants, the gypsies, the beggars
dancing outside the Poet's Heaven,
dancing, nonetheless, under stars.

- Pesha Joyce Gertler

Ode to Fallen Apple Trees


Driving up Sexton Road-
there at the top of the hill
where the road deadends
into Burnside Road- on this hot summer day
I am surprised at how high the grapevines are-
leaves bright and shiny green in the midday sunshine-
as if they’ve grown overnight-
I just haven’t really noticed-
Maybe I try to not look at this field too closely-


I can still see the apple trees, sturdy and full
each year with trunks, branches, leaves and apples
as the year cycled round-
and then
So brutally chopped down
like corpses lying strewn in the field-
Making way for more grapes and wine
to be made and profits to be earned


Now again the same ugly scene a little farther
down the road closer to town
on Watertrough Road next to a school-
So all the children there became unwilling
witnesses as the murdered trees silently
lie there so still in this soon-to-be vineyard


Once many years ago there were cherry trees
all around here in Sebastopol, west Sonoma county, CA
and then a blight came in and they were all cut down-
Only the name of Cherry Ridge Road remains as a
remembrance of what once was-
And now the apple trees are going-
No blight other than economic-
Greed taking over with the glut of wineries
Not to mention problems with ground water
and pesticide use and the blight of phylloxera-
Someday maybe with the lack of diversity
and planning, all the grapes will be pulled out-
For housing? Maybe marijuana farms? Hemp?


There are still six apple trees
on the property where I live-
I celebrate the seasons round
from the spring blossoms
to late summer Gravensteins-
and delicious pies, crisps and sauce-
to fall pippins, granny smiths and
something like jonathans-
So great for eating, baking, canning
and some years for sharing
the bountiful harvest with friends,
the senior center and Burbank Gardens


O may children continue to know
how an apple orchard looks and smells
and what it is to pick and eat an apple
fresh off the tree
O sing the tart sweetness
Of an apple-
Be it red, green or yellow-
Its crisp fruit
delighting the tongue-
Its harvest a happy endeavor-
O may they continue to blossom
and thrive


- Carla Musik

“There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly..." a Zen story as told by Pema Chödrön


Between Tigers


When one is in the habit of Demands,
there are always Tigers, everywhere
hungry for attention. Strawberries


eaten in haste have little flavor, like
hurried love, pressured between
appointments and sleep.


The trick:


to know the Tiger, too, love it,
savor it so voraciously, the ferocity
softens and you see it was


no Demand after all, but rather
an entreaty, a roaring request,
please, please taste me, too.


- Rebecca del Rio

Moral? While humans are fleeing their tigers, do not blossom your strawberries.

Brockport Sunflowers

If they could walk, they would walk slowly.
They would shuffle onto the roads from their fields,
lally-gag into our village, sway on sidewalks,
dangle their silly beautiful heads.
Sexless, they would not bow to women,
or shake men’s hands with their leaves.
Desiring nothing but sunshine and water,
they’d peer into our shops with amazement.
Seeing themselves in windows, they’d know themselves holy.
They would love the children, and listen to them,
all day long, until the children were ready for bed.
As the evening star rose in the heavens,
They would nod goodbye to us, not having said a word,
And return, like walking haloes, to their fields.

- William Heyen

What We Carry


When I was an intern, we carried everything.
We carried manuals and little personal notebooks, frayed and torn,
crammed with tiny bits of wisdom passed on by a senior or attending.
Yet when a midnight patient rolled in with a myocardial infarction
we didn't look anything up because there were only four drugs we could use:
morphine for the crushing pain,
nitroglycerin to flush open the vessels,
lidocaine for rebellious rhythms,
and furosemide for sluggish fluids.
I'm old.
We had nothing to block the betas or the calcium channels,
nothing to inhibit the ACEs,
no fancy clot-dissolvers,
just the patient and the strip.
Some made it, some didn't.
Our white coats carried splatters from blood and iodine and no one even
noticed.


When people quit smoking, they just had to quit.
There were no nicotine substitutes,
no patch to stick on or gum to chew or spray to spritz or inhalers to sniff.
No varenicline or bupropion, just quit.
So many smoked, and so many died.
For a while I kept a list in my head of everyone I knew who had died from
tobacco, but it got too long.
The corpses between piled up into the millions,
and I felt I carried that load on my back every time I talked with a smoker.
I still do, every time, trying to put the right words together that will
turn the switch.
It's a heavy task that often fails.


Now there are so many drugs and treatments and diagnostic tests
that no one can know it all, yet on rounds I carry almost nothing.
No books, no scribbled notes.
I don't even carry the apps for my phone because when a question comes up
I just challenge my residents to see who can find the answer first.
They dive into their phones, like gleeful pirates plunging into a slender
treasure chest of knowledge,
and someone surfaces in seconds with the shiny golden answer.
And they're almost always right.


So I also try to carry the feelings for them.
Point out the sadness when we asked about that woman's family,
notice the exhaustion when a resident seems disorganized or short-tempered,
mention we haven't asked that man why he's drinking so much booze.
I've got three years with my learners, and then they are on their own.
I try to visibly carry my thirst for knowledge and my curiosity and my drive
to do things right,
to show that this burden is not as heavy as the burden of giving up on them,
and that this passion in fact lightens the load.


- Sandra Miller

Tomorrow


I

Tomorrow I will start to be happy.
The morning will light up like a celebratory cigar.
Sunbeams sprawling on the lawn will set
dew sparkling like a cut-glass tumbler of champagne.
Today will end the worst phase of my life.

I will put my shapeless days behind me,
fencing off the past, as a golden rind
of sand parts slipshod sea from solid land.
It is tomorrow I want to look back on, not today.
Tomorrow I start to be happy; today is almost yesterday.


II

Australia, how wise you are to get the day
over and done with first, out of the way.
You have eaten the fruit of knowledge, while
we are dithering about which main course to choose.
How liberated you must feel, how free from doubt:

the rise and fall of stocks, today’s closing prices
are revealed to you before our bidding has begun.
Australia, you can gather in your accident statistics
like a harvest while our roads still have hours to kill.
When we are in the dark, you have sagely seen the light.


III

Cagily, presumptuously, I dare to write 2018.
A date without character or tone. 2018.
A year without interest rates or mean daily temperature.
Its hit songs have yet to be written, its new-year
babies yet to be induced, its truces to be signed.

Much too far off for prophecy, though one hazards
a tentative guess—a so-so year most likely,
vague in retrospect, fizzling out with the usual
end-of-season sales; everything slashed:
your last chance to salvage something of its style.

- Dennis O’Driscoll

oi ... please pass the Prozac ...

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Tomorrow

I

Tomorrow I will start to be happy....

---

A Valley Like This


Sometimes you look at an empty valley like this,
and suddenly the air is filled with snow.
That is the way the whole world happened -
there was nothing, and then...


But maybe sometimes you will look out and even
the mountains are gone, the world become nothing
again. What can a person do to help
bring back the world?


We have to watch and then look at each other.
Together we hold it close and carefully
save it, like a bubble that can disappear
if we don't watch out.


Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world.
Hold out your hands to it. When mornings and evenings
roll along watch how they open and close, how they
invite you to the long party your life is.


- William Stafford

Psalm for a Lost Summer


By the rivers of Estes Park, there we sat down, yes, we sighed, when we
remembered Italy.
We pressed our pens against paper, and we sat under the pine trees,
listening to the crows.
For there in Colorado we were captive at a high altitude, required
to write without breath; and if we could not write, our consciences
required us to read, and improve our minds.
How shall we write our poems in this strange land?
If I forget you, Venice, let my right hand forget to wind the fettuccini
around the fork.
If I do not remember balmy Sorrento, let me never taste lemons again;
if I prefer not Capri above my chief joy.
Remember, O Muse, the couple who strolled about Assisi; who said,
How lovely this is, but next year let's vacation at home.
O Citizens of Assisi, do not blame us for the earthquake that destroyed
your basilica; how happy we were, looking at your frescos during a
thunderstorm.
Happy we shall be again, when we dash from this rented cabin, and
drive down from these great stone mountains forever, Amen.


- Maura Stanton

Apples


I used to pick apples as a boy
From the branches of a buddy's tree.
Off the branch and into the mouth,
The flesh was streaked through rosy pink
And sweet and crisp as nothing I knew
Save friendship.
Three or four at once I'd eat,
Run off, play, and come back for more.


In college I'd bike to abandoned orchards
On crisp September mornings.
I'd climb up, my mount leaned against a trunk,
And shake the branches till the leaves rattled
And they'd fall red by dozens
Thumping the wet-golden grass.
Jump down! Pick them up!
Wormy ones and all!
And bike home with a backpack full
-- a big pack, like you'd take hiking for a week.


Those after picking nights I stood over big steamy applesauce pots,
While a pie baked in the oven.
The rare virgins (no worms or bruises) I'd relish
One by one
Over cool days that followed.


These were old apples, musk-flavored like wine,
Coarse fleshed like kale
From trees that outlived their planters by
Fourscore years.
Outlasted their houses, too,


Some trees were rotted, like the houses,
Save for one strip of trunk spiraling up,
And one branch
That would blossom white year after year,
And bear red.
I took these fruits as precious
Joyfully disdaining the wax-shiney imposters
Stacked in neat rows at Safeway


Oh, I celebrated the worms!
They protected my crop!
For them orchard and apples were mine
Tax free, work free -
All I did was climb the tree, and shake
And wake to the smell of applesauce
Lingering in the air
I'll have some for breakfast, with cream.


- Garth Gilchrist

July, July, July

July, eternal summer,
every child's wish -
no school on either side.
Those belled hours curled up and died
in June.

July, July,
pregnant orchards dripping with fruit,
pools of children splashing in light,
porch swings creaking in weight of hear,
barbecue sauce, grilled burgers, hushed evening voices.

Gracias a dios for all the Julys
and that we were young,
sizzling through life,
golden fields humming
under our feet.

July, timeless july.

- Jan Corbett

The First Artichoke


Though everyone said no one could grow

https://img2u.info/ckgni/i/g9daa714a.jpg

artichokes in New Jersey, my father
planted the seeds and they grew one magnificent
artichoke, late-season, long after the squash,
tomatoes, and zucchini.


It was the derelict in my father's garden,
little Buddha of a vegetable, pinecone gone awry.
It was as strange as a bony-plated armadillo.


My mother prepared the artichoke as if preparing
a miracle. She snipped the bronzy winter-kissed tips
mashed breadcrumbs, oregano, parmesan, garlic,
and lemon, stuffed the mush between the leaves,
baked, then placed the artichoke on the table.
This, she said, was food we could eat with our fingers.
The First Artichoke


When I hesitated, my father spoke of beautiful Cynara,
who'd loved her mother more than she'd loved Zeus.
In anger, the god transformed her
into an artichoke. And in 1949 Marilyn Monroe
had been crowned California's first Artichoke Queen.


I peeled off a leaf like my father did,
dipped it in melted butter, and with my teeth
scraped and sucked the nut-flavored slimy stuff.
We piled up the inedible parts, skeletons
of leaves and purple prickles.


Piece by piece, the artichoke came apart,
the way we would in 1959, the year the flowerbuds
of the artichokes in my father's garden bloomed
without him, their blossoms seven inches wide
and violet-blue as bruises.


But first we had that miracle on our table.
We peeled and peeled, a vegetable striptease,
and worked our way deeper and deeper,
down to the small filet of delectable heart.


- Diane Lockward

Delicious!

thank you for this tasty bit, Larry

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The First Artichoke

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The Lightning Tree


In my niece's yard, close to the creek,
a huge sycamore, split wide open,
lives scarred and green, lines of gray
black descend from the sky marking
a history of violence. To live
split open,


To live torn apart by sudden light
you have to be able to allow
all to enter, even confusion, imperfection,
and fear, to walk with weightless joy
without owning it or wishing to.


You have to be willing to slip
sightless, silent into the unknown,
Unknowable fullness–and lack,
willing to clutch and hold
only the knowledge that
all is unknowable.


You must be
willing to stop
naming even yourself.


- Rebecca del Rio

Things


What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.


We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,


and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.


Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth


so we could pass into safety.


- Lisel Mueller

and a ship became 'she'

Language in the Mouth of the Enemy


I am afraid that this poem
will contribute to the destruction of Israel.
I am afraid that if I visit Adel Handal and his family
in Bethlehem one more time
I am betraying the Jewish state.
If I go to Daher's Vineyard and plant an olive tree,
if I teach the women of Nahalin poetry,
if I give voice to their rage,
what great-aunt of mine shot in the back
before an unmarked grave will have died then,
again for nothing?
If I love the suffering of the Palestinians - it is so bright -
more than the suffering of my own,
if I work for a better life for that dark-eyed boy
in Aida refugee camp who chased after our bus with arms
spread like a hawk's wing-span - who lifted a finger
to save the child in Warsaw, Lodz, Berlin? -
If that boy grows strong and straps a bomb
or worse, writes an article, a play, the perfect
argument against the Jewish state
then what have I done? What have I
done? What have
I done?


- Elana Bell

Our Aether

Beneficent formless force,
how great the joy in finding you—
if “you” be fitting address.—

Purposeless thought
pervading possible space,
leave us to be what we can be.

Know if you will, what we are,
just as we accept, even embrace,
all of our neighbors seen and unseen.

Show us the light to keep communion
with how this touch like a fragrance enables
invisibly conscious enveloping forces.


- Ed Coletti

In the Cave of Sister Mary Kevin, Ursaline


She might have even been as Spartan as Father Ignatius
if her taste had not run to plastered walls, a few modest chintz prints
and poignant photos of helpless children.
You could have fed a child in Haiti for that price, Sister.


Alok asked me about priest-craft—
appeasing hungry ghosts with big bellies,
tight mouths, and one might presume assholes,
not to mention pussies. Forgive me, Sister.


The anti-dote contains no eyes, no ears, no tongue,
no body, no mind, no assholes
no thought, no perception, no old age, no ending of old age and death
—and no sex. Have to give you that practice, Sister.


I knew more, or at least said, more than I ought.
Phil told me that the rite was no more than slight of hand:
chocolate, cardamom tea, ripe kiwis,
none of it really satisfying or nourishing.


Hungry ghosts think it’s dinner.
Anything looks like dinner when you’re starving.
Big bellies and big ears arise simultaneously –
evidence, your pictures of starving children in the Sudan.
Trick them. Stuff them with dharma.
No ears? I know about greed first hand.


If you’d had just a little more imagination, Sister,
I might have discovered a unicorn in your garden,
a mythical beast. But no. It had to be nasty tigress.
Her bad breath nearly killed me.


But right then and there
I stuck my head into her mouth,
to fulfill the requirement for courage,
no fear, no lipstick, no kisses.
Then I heard a small voice demanding attention –
Don’t be an asshole. Don’t arm your daemons.
No Crusades, no swords,
No preaching, no stones, no death.


And we were saved.
Thank you Sister.


- Ken Ireland

The History of Red


First
there was some other order of things
never spoken
but in dreams of darkest creation.

Then there was black earth,
lake, the face of light on water.
Then the thick forest all around
that light,
and then the human clay
whose blood we still carry
rose up in us
who remember caves with red bison
painted in their own blood,
after their kind.

A wildness
swam inside our mothers,
desire through closed eyes,
a new child
wearing the red, wet mask of birth,
delivered into this land
already wounded,
stolen and burned
beyond reckoning.

Red is this yielding land
turned inside out
by a country of hunters
with iron, flint and fire.
Red is the fear
that turns a knife back
against men, holds it at their throats,
and they cannot see the claw on the handle,
the animal hand
that haunts them
from some place inside their blood.

So that is hunting, birth,
and one kind of death.
Then there was medicine, the healing of wounds.
Red was the infinite fruit
of stolen bodies.
The doctors wanted to know
what invented disease
how wounds healed
from inside themselves
how life stands up in skin,
if not by magic.

They divined the red shadows of leeches
that swam in white bowls of water:
they believed stars
in the cup of sky.
They cut the wall of skin
to let
what was bad escape
but they were reading the story of fire
gone out
and that was a science.

As for the animal hand on death’s knife,
knives have as many sides
as the red father of war
who signs his name
in the blood of other men.

And red was the soldier
who crawled
through a ditch
of human blood in order to live.
It was the canal of his deliverance.
It is his son who lives near me.
Red is the thunder in our ears
when we meet.
Love, like creation,
is some other order of things.

Red is the share of fire
I have stolen
from root, hoof, fallen fruit.
And this was hunger.

Red is the human house
I come back to at night
swimming inside the cave of skin
that remembers bison.
In that round nation
of blood
we are all burning,
red, inseparable fires
the living have crawled
and climbed through
in order to live
so nothing will be left
for death at the end.

This life in the fire, I love it.
I want it,
this life.


- Linda Hogan

Foolish to lament




Foolish to lament the end of summer,
enough of that confused sound of grief
that only pleases the darkness. Listen,
a season's passing is not your oracle or
creation, not your personal farewell. Stop
playing the lover left tearful at the station
choking on inflated, maudlin words.
From the oaks on my street in late
August the leaves are already falling and
a night breeze bends even the thick sunflower
stalks. The garden lilies and roses turn their
wrinkled faces up into a starry sky. Why does
this withdrawal of summer convey sadness?
Isn't this occurrence a chance each year
to empty your heart into full attention to
change.? Get out of that stiffness, that
mental chewing on the sad,old bone that
has no taste for impermanence..
After all, it is not about you; it is the gift of
observing renewal in a way we have no words for.
Be content to enter a doorway into gratitude.
Listen to the murmuring of the rising wind,
the conversations between the trees. Remain
quiet as though you were walking the hushed
halls of a cathedral Leave your endless talk outside.
The world may have grown weary of your noisy
distractions and wants other voices to be heard.
Let go of that unnameable longing for what is always passing.


- Rich Meyers

Primitive


I have heard about the civilized,
the marriages run on talk, elegant and
honest, rational. But you and I are
savages. You come in with a bag,
hold it out to me in silence.
I know Moo Shu Pork when I smell it
and understand the message: I have
pleased you greatly last night. We sit
quietly, side by side, to eat,
the long pancakes dangling and spilling,
fragrant sauce dripping out,
and glance at each other askance, wordless,
the corners of our eyes clear as spear points
laid along the sill to show
a friend sits with a friend here.


- Sharon Olds

Two Kinds of Intelligence


There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.


With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.


There is another kind of tablet,
one already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid,
and it doesn't move from outside to inside
through the conduits of plumbing-learning.


This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.


- Jellaludin Rumi
(Version by Coleman Barks)

Reverse Living


Life is tough.
It takes up a lot of your time. All your weekends.
And what do you get at the end of it -
Death - A great reward.
I think that the life cycle is all backwards.
You should die first. Get it out of the way.
Then you live 20 years in an old folks home.
You get kicked out when you're too young.
You get a good watch. You go to work.
You work for 40 years until you are young enough to enter college.
You learn to party until you are ready for High School.
You go to High School, Grade School,
You become a little kid.
You play, you have no responsibilities.
You become a little baby.
You go back into the womb.
You spend the last nine months floating
Only to finish off as a gleam in somebodies eye.


- Lynne Vance

Sacred Wine


Sit with the pain in your heart, he said.
Hold it like a sacred wine in a golden cup.
The wine may break you and if it does, let it.
To be human is to be broken,
and only from brokenness can
one be healed.
The ancestors say:
the world is full of pain,
and each is allotted a portion.
If you do not carry your share,
then others are forced to carry it for you,
And the suffering you bring to the world is your sin,
But the suffering you bring to yourself will be your hell.
Sit with the pain in your heart, he said.
Hold it there like a sacred wine in a golden cup.


- Greg Kimura

Ready


How is it that the community waits
allowing the pomegranates to fully ripen?
Each day they hang lower in their tree
another shade added to their
Biblical skin


Eyed - in their fullness
yet left alone as their seductive
callings of crimson, blush and touch
go unplucked, undisturbed


Yet wait we do -
our collective waiting - our Blessings
An act of harmony
Our restraint bows in homage
as we commemorate our unity
for the fruit to reach us


and it does


and it is then,
as ready
as we are

- P. Gregory Guss