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Holy Pools
There is nothing but water in the holy pools,
I know, I have been swimming in them.
All the gods sculpted of wood and ivory
can't say a word.
I know, I have been crying out to them.
The Sacred Books of the East are nothing but words.
I looked through their covers one day sideways.
What Kabir talks about is only what he has lived through.
If you have not lived through something,
It is not true.
- Kabir
The Whittled Forest
My father taught himself
to play the violin in
the pantry
with jellies and jams,
the garbage can and a broom. He
scraped the strings with
a stringed bow, the cold
curved wood in the winter tucked
under his chin,
like the arc
of a whittled forest unknown.
It sounded awful.
He was a poor man
job-raising a family, struggling
with daybreak.
He worked at a night job
and practiced half the day on
scales. That is
why we mocked
his effort.
- Jane Mayhall
For Light
Light cannot see inside things.
That is what the dark is for:
Minding the interior,
Nurturing the draw of growth
Through places where death
In its own way turns into life.
In the glare of neon times,
Let our eyes not be worn
By surfaces that shine
With hunger made attractive.
That our thoughts may be true light,
Finding their way into words
Which have the weight of shadow
To hold the layers of truth.
That we never place our trust
In minds claimed by empty light,
Where one-sided certainties
Are driven by false desire.
When we look into the heart,
May our eyes have the kindness
And reverence of candlelight.
That the searching of our minds
Be equal to the oblique
Crevices and corners where
The mystery continues to dwell,
Glimmering in fugitive light.
When we are confined inside
The dark house of suffering
That moonlight might find a window.
When we become false and lost
That the severe noon-light
Would cast our shadow clear.
When we love, that dawn-light
Would lighten our feet
Upon the waters.
As we grow old, that twilight
Would illuminate treasure
In the fields of memory.
And when we come to search for God,
Let us first be robed in night,
Put on the mind of morning
To feel the rush of light
Spread slowly inside
The color and stillness
Of a found word.
- John O'Donohue
It's More Than The Morning
It’s more than the morning we must wake up to
The birds have been singing for hours in our dreams
Let us not be too sleepy to remember the countless blessings
Waiting to unfold in a day remembered with grace
Let us not forget to love
To smile, to breathe the simple truth
That life is precious in all its configurations
Designed to guide us to our awakening
What a paradox that we must sleep to dream
And awaken to fulfill our dreams
What a paradox that we must die to fully live
Give to receive, and empty to fill up again.
Even our longing is a blessing
For it carries the wind across the sea
And stirs the ocean of the soul
Into the creative matrix of wonder.
- Anodea Judith
Having A Poem Arrive
Having a poem arrive
is like coming downstairs
and finding coffee and pancakes made for you
by your daughter who left early.
Having a poem arrive
is like the first clearing breath
of the day on your zafu.
Having a poem arrive
is like seeing tiny green leaves
sprouted from the dry brown husk
of a tree you have been trying to rescue.
Having a poem arrive
is like noticing a sapling, once
tormented by gophers and deer,
finally take its place in the orchard.
True, having poem arrive can be like
a small rock in your hiking boot,
high-laced,
with your arms full.
And it can be like the car alarm
of the city visitor
outside your neighbor’s barn
beyond the forest.
The butterfly
which left
while you took a moment
to get your camera.
But mostly,
it can be like making dinner
with your true love
using nothing but local, fresh surprises.
- Scott O'Brien
For/From Lew
Lew Welch just turned up one day,
live as you and me. "Damn, Lew" I said,
"you didn't shoot yourself after all."
"Yes I did" he said,
and even then I felt the tingling down my back.
"Yes you did, too" I said—"I can feel it now."
"Yeah" he said,
"There's a basic fear between your world and
mine. I don't know why.
What I came to say was,
teach the children about the cycles.
The life cycles. All other cycles.
That's what it's all about, and it's all forgot."
- Gary Snyder
For A Row Of Laurel Shrubs
They don't want to be your hedge,
Your barrier, your living wall, the no-go
Go-between between your property
And the prying of dogs and strangers. They don't
Want to settle any of your old squabbles
Inside or out of bounds. Their new growth
In three-foot shoots goes thrusting straight
Up in the air each April or goes off
Half-cocked sideways to reconnoiter
Wilder dimensions: the very idea
Of squareness, of staying level seems
Alien to them, and they aren't in the least
Discouraged by being suddenly lopped off
Year after year by clippers or the stuttering
Electric teeth of trimmers hedging their bets
To keep them all in line, all roughly
In order. They don't even
Want to be good-neighborly bushes
(Though under the outer stems and leaves
The thick, thick-headed, soot-blackened
Elderly branches have been dodging
And weaving through so many disastrous springs,
So many whacked-out, contra-
Dictory changes of direction, they've locked
Themselves together for good). Yet each
Original planting, left to itself, would be
No fence, no partition, no crook-jointed
Entanglement, but a tree by now outspread
With all of itself turned upward at every
Inconvenient angle you can imagine,
And look, on the ground, the fallen leaves,
Brown, leathery, as thick as tongues, remain
Almost what they were, tougher than ever,
Slow to molder, to give in, dead slow to feed
The earth with themselves, there at the feet
Of their fathers in the evergreen shade
Of their replacements. Remember, admirers
Long ago would sometimes weave fresh clippings
Into crowns and place them squarely on the heads
Of their most peculiar poets.
- David Wagoner
Let History Be My Judge
We made all possible preparations,
Drew up a list of firms,
Constantly revised our calculations
And allotted the farms,
Issued all the orders expedient
In this kind of case:
Most, as was expected, were obedient,
Though there were murmurs, of course;
Chiefly against our exercising
Our old right to abuse:
Even some sort of attempt at rising,
But these were mere boys.
For never serious misgiving
Occurred to anyone,
Since there could be no question of living
If we did not win.
The generally accepted view teaches
That there was no excuse,
Though in the light of recent researches
Many would find the cause
In a not uncommon form of terror;
Others, still more astute,
Point to possibilities of error
At the very start.
As for ourselves there is left remaining
Our honour at least,
And a reasonable chance of retaining
Our faculties to the last.
- W. H. Auden
Mennonites
We keep our quilts in closets and do not dance.
We hoe thistles along fence rows for fear
we may not be perfect as our Heavenly Father.
We clean up his disasters. No one has to
call; we just show up in the wake of tornadoes
with hammers, after floods with buckets.
Like Jesus, the servant, we wash each other's feet
twice a year and eat the Lord's Supper,
afraid of sins hidden so deep in our organs
they could damn us unawares,
swallowing this bread, his body, this juice.
Growing up, we love the engravings in Martyrs Mirror:
men drowned like cats in burlap sacks,
the Catholic inquisitors,
the woman who handed a pear to her son,
her tongue screwed to the roof of her mouth
to keep her from singing hymns while she burned.
We love Catherine the Great and the rich tracts
she gave us in the Ukraine, bright green winter wheat,
the Cossacks who torched it, and Stalin,
who starved our cousins while wheat rotted
in granaries. We must love our enemies.
We must forgive as our sins are forgiven,
our great-uncle tells us, showing the chain
and ball in a cage whittled from one block of wood
while he was in prison for refusing to shoulder
a gun. He shows the clipping from 1916:
Mennonites are German milksops, too yellow to fight.
We love those Nazi soldiers who, like Moses,
led the last cattle cars rocking out of the Ukraine,
crammed with our parents - children then -
learning the names of Kansas, Saskatchewan, Paraguay.
This is why we cannot leave the beliefs
or what else would we be? why we eat
'til we're drunk on shoofly and moon pies and borscht.
We do not drink; we sing. Unaccompanied on Sundays,
those hymns in four parts, our voices lift with such force
that we lift, as chaff lifts toward God.
- Julia Kasdorf
Beginners
Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla
“From too much love of living,
Hope and desire set free,
Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere to the sea—“
But we have only begun
To love the earth.
We have only begun
To imagine the fullness of life.
How could we tire of hope?
—so much is in bud.
How can desire fail?
—we have only begun
to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision
how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.
Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?
Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?
Not yet, not yet—
there is too much broken
that must be mended,
too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.
We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.
So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,
so much is in bud.
- Denise Levertov
The Way It Is
There is a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what things you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
But you don't ever let go of the thread.
- William Stafford
On Another's Sorrow
Can I see another's woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief,
And not seek for kind relief?
Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow's share?
Can a father see his child
Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?
Can a mother sit and hear
An infant groan, an infant fear?
No, no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!
And can He who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small bird's grief and care,
Hear the woes that infants bear --
And not sit beside the next,
Pouring pity in their breast,
And not sit the cradle near,
Weeping tear on infant's tear?
And not sit both night and day,
Wiping all our tears away?
Oh no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!
He doth give his joy to all:
He becomes an infant small,
He becomes a man of woe,
He doth feel the sorrow too.
Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Maker is not by:
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Maker is not year.
Oh He gives to us his joy,
That our grief He may destroy:
Till our grief is fled an gone
He doth sit by us and moan.
- William Blake
Sekhmet, the Lion-headed Goddess of War
He was the sort of man
who wouldn't hurt a fly.
Many flies are now alive
while he is not.
He was not my patron.
He preferred full granaries, I battle.
My roar meant slaughter.
Yet here we are together
in the same museum.
That's not what I see, though, the fitful
crowds of staring children
learning the lesson of multi-
cultural obliteration, sic transit
and so on.
I see the temple where I was born
or built, where I held power.
I see the desert beyond,
where the hot conical tombs, that look
from a distance, frankly, like dunces' hats,
hide my jokes: the dried-out flesh
and bones, the wooden boats
in which the dead sail endlessly
in no direction.
What did you expect from gods
with animal heads?
Though come to think of it
the ones made later, who were fully human
were not such good news either.
Favour me and give me riches,
destroy my enemies.
That seems to be the gist.
Oh yes: And save me from death.
In return we're given blood
and bread, flowers and prayer,
and lip service.
Maybe there's something in all of this
I missed. But if it's selfless
love you're looking for,
you've got the wrong goddess.
I just sit where I'm put, composed
of stone and wishful thinking:
that the deity who kills for pleasure
will also heal,
that in the midst of your nightmare,
the final one, a kind lion
will come with bandages in her mouth
and the soft body of a woman,
and lick you clean of fever,
and pick your soul up gently by the nape of the neck
- Margaret Atwood
and caress you into darkness and paradise.
Fall Song
*
Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,
*
the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back
*
from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere
*
except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle
*
of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This
*
I try to remember when time's measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn
*
flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay - how everything lives, shifting
*
from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.
*
- Mary Oliver
Autumn Sky
In my great grandmother's time,
All one needed was a broom
To get to see places
And give the geese a chase in the sky.
•
The stars know everything,
So we try to read their minds.
As distant as they are,
We choose to whisper in their presence.
•
Oh Cynthia,
Take a clock that has lost its hands
For a ride.
Get me a room at Hotel Eternity
Where Time likes to stop now and then.
•
Come, lovers of dark corners,
The sky says,
And sit in one of my dark corners.
There are tasty little zeroes
In the peanut dish tonight.
- Charles Simic
I Saw Myself
I saw myself
a ring of bone
in the clear stream
of all of it
and vowed
always to be open to it
that all of it
might flow through
and then heard
"ring of bone" where
ring is what a
bell does
- Lew Welch
A Dream of Trees
There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,
A quiet house, some green and modest acres
A little way from every troubling town,
A little way from factories, schools, laments.
I would have time, I thought, and time to spare,
With only streams and birds for company,
To build out of my life a few wild stanzas.
And then it came to me, that so was death,
A little way away from everywhere.
There is a thing in me still dreams of trees.
But let it go. Homesick for moderation,
Half the world's artists shrink or fall away.
If any find solution, let him tell it.
Meanwhile I bend my heart toward lamentation
Where, as the times implore our true involvement,
The blades of every crisis point the way.
I would it were not so, but so it is.
Who ever made music of a mild day?
- Mary Oliver
The Beautiful Changes
One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.
The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.
Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
- Richard Wilbur
Boarder Crossing
As the day cools
he waits his turn,
checking the grip tape
on his deck.
Then suddenly he’s up:
with a kick, he’s in motion,
dropping down into
the smooth, open bowl.
His lithe young limbs
sway with the curve
of the concrete,
ollying on the return.
A one eighty, then
a quick kickflip.
For one eternal moment
he is gravity-free.
We hold our breaths:
maybe this time
Icarus will stay aloft
carrying our dreams.
Then, with a sigh,
we see him land.
He is human,
after all.
- Larry Robinson
Laguna Skategarden
Grand Opening
The Laguna Skategarden, Sebastopol’s newest park, will be
dedicated at 11 a.m. on Saturday, September 27, 2008. The
Laguna Skategarden includes a state-of-the art 15,000 sq ft
skate park featuring a beginner bowl, a street course, a
rocket bowl, and an advanced deep-pool bowl. The park also
includes community garden plots, a playground-type climb-
ing rock, a beautiful shade arbor, park benches, picnic ta-
bles, drinking fountain, and a public restroom.
The Laguna Skategarden is located at
6700 Laguna Park Way, between
Morris Street and Flynn Street in the
City of Sebastopol.
See you there!
City of Sebastopol
Sebastopol: Local flavor. Global vision.
City Hall
7120 Bodega Avenue
Sebastopol, California 95472
Phone: 707-823-1153
Fax: 707-823-1135
For more information: Planning Department 823-6167
City of Sebastopol
Date: 09/27/08
Time: 11:00 a.m.—5:00 p.m.
Everything
I want to make poems that say right out, plainly,
what I mean, that don't go looking for the
laces of elaboration, puffed sleeves. I want to
keep close and use often words like
heavy, heart, joy, soon, and to cherish
the question mark and her bold sister
the dash. I want to write with quiet hands. I
want to write while crossing the fields that are
fresh with daises and everlasting and the
ordinary grass. I want to make poems while thinking of
the bread of heaven and the
cup of astonishment; let them be
songs in which nothing is neglected,
not a hope, not a promise. I want to make poems
that look into the earth and the heavens
and see the unseeable. I want them to honor
both the heart of faith, and the light of the world;
the gladness that says, without any words, everything.
- Mary Oliver
The Answer
Then what is the answer? - Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history... for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.
- Robinson Jeffers
You don't just choose these poems at random, do you?
My goodness, how timely this is. Thank you!
- R
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
The Glass of Water
That the glass would melt in heat,
That the water would freeze in cold,
Shows that this object is merely a state,
One of many, between two poles. So,
In the metaphysical, there are these poles.
Here in the centre stands the glass. Light
Is the lion that comes down to drink. There
And in that state, the glass is a pool.
Ruddy are his eyes and ruddy are his claws
When light comes down to wet his frothy jaws
And in the water winding weeds move round.
And there and in another state--the refractions,
The metaphysica, the plastic parts of poems
Crash in the mind--But, fat Jocundus, worrying
About what stands here in the centre, not the glass,
But in the centre of our lives, this time, this day,
It is a state, this spring among the politicians
Playing cards. In a village of the indigenes,
One would have still to discover. Among the dogs
and dung,
One would continue to contend with one's ideas.
- Wallace Stevens
Paul Newman
If Paul Newman is dead,
then where now are the rest of us
whose mid-world lives were quickened by
that vital glance and pulse?
How can the sun
go on rising, when every morning it came
out of those blue eyes?
Eternal youth has succumbed:
All men are mortal, after all,
and the streams that refresh the living realms
must now go searching for a new darling.
- Max Reif
By the way, I found myself copying down certain phrases of an SF Chronicle article on Mr. Newman (by Mick LaSalle).
One tidbit: "(He) had not torment in the area of masculinity... lacking any conflict or confusion in that zone... could play men without defense or apology or bluff... building his own ethics system out of the few things he could trust."
Very Robert Bly-esque, I thought (much to my delight).
- R
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Remorseless Ripples
Everything will be snatched
out of our limbs,
as the fall winds
breeze and tease,
then tug and swell,
remorselessly tearing
our leaves
of money, shredding
our looks and bodily sheaths.
What's left in the land?
Only the roots and ripples
of our laughter,
troughs of tears,
the draughts of love
that we bring.
So now it is fall,
leaves fly, fly
to the earth,
and when our need
is to cling,
aren't we held in embrace
by pattering rain?
For in the fragile,
ribbed web of our being,
all is dissolving -
only the core remains.
- Raphael Block
We Have A Beautiful Mother
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her hills
Are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
Hills.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her oceans
Are wombs
Her wombs
Oceans.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her teeth
The white stones
At the edge
Of the water
The summer
Grasses
Her plentiful
Hair.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her green lap
Immense
Her brown embrace
Eternal
Her blue body
Everything we know.
- Alice Walker
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
- Leonard Cohen
Prepare
"Why don't you write me a poem that will prepare me for your
death?" you said.
It was a rare day here in our climate, bright and sunny. I didn't feel like
dying that day.
I didn't even want to think about it -- my lovely knees and bold
shoulders broken open,
Crawling with maggots. Good Christ! I stood at the window and I saw
a strange dog
Running in the field with its nose down, sniffing the snow, zigging and
zagging,
And whose dog is that? I asked myself. As if I didn't know. The limbs
of the apple trees
Were lined with snow, making a bright calligraphy against the world,
messages to me
From an enigmatic source in an obscure language. Tell me, how shall I
decipher them?
And a jay slanted down to the feeder and looked at me behind my glass
and squawked.
Prepare, prepare. Fuck you, I said, come back tomorrow. And here he
is in this new gray and gloomy morning.
We're back to our normal weather. Death in the air, the idea of death
settling around us like mist,
And I am thinking again in despair, in desperation, how will it happen?
Will you wake up
Some morning and find me lying stiff and cold beside you in our bed?
How atrocious!
Or will I fall asleep in the car, as I nearly did a couple of weeks ago,
and drive off the road
Into a tree? The possibilities are endless and not at all fascinating,
except that I can't stop
Thinking about them, can't stop envisioning that moment of hideous
violence.
Hideous and indescribable as well, because it won't happen until it's
over. But not for you
For you it will go on and on, thirty years or more, since that's the
distance between us
In our ages. The loss will be a great chasm with no bridge across it
(for we both know
Our life together, so unexpected, is entirely loving and rare). Living
on your own --
Where will you go? what will you do? And the continuing sense of
displacement
From what we've had in this little house, our refuge on our green or
snowbound
Hill. Life is not easy and you will be alive. Experience reduces itself to
platitudes always,
Including the one which says that I'll be with you forever in your
memories and dreams.
I will. And also in hundreds of keepsakes, such as this scrap of a poem
you are reading now.
- Hayden Carruth
Hayden Carruth died yesterday at age 87
Summer’s Gone
My very good friend is leaving,
won’t be back till next year.
In the place of her sunny, even-tempered disposition
and her hot breath on my neck
I will have a tempestuous and unpredictable
but colorful companion
who scatters leaves all over the yard
and wets the landscape.
Goodbye, my good friend!
I will miss you dearly
as I wind my fleecy scarf about my neck
against the chill of your alter ego.
- Jana deProsse
Extraordinary Times
Is it that we want: Armageddon?
Or are we merely tired of routine decades?
Adrenaline's fallout blasts the air:
warm currents from one side, Arctic winds from another,
a volatile mix that could upend
the patient efforts of a century or more.
Our homes, our jobs—safe? Milk
already $5.29 a half-gallon, and if prices spiral
until even the middle class can’t afford to live,
what then?
But there is something, something
we love: the danger itself, or the promise
of something beyond? Reality
seems closer now. But instead of arriving,
it teases like a tiger swiping a great paw,
then disappearing, then coming back to swipe again,
neither destroying us thus far, nor leaving us alone.
- Max Reif
Just Thinking
Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.
No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held
for awhile. Some dove somewhere.
Been on probation most of my life. And
the rest of my life been condemned. So these moments
count for a lot--peace, you know.
Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one
stirring, no plans. Just being there.
This is what the whole thing is about.
- William Stafford
Labor
I spent a couple of years during my undestined
Twenties on a north woods acreage
That grew, as the locals poetically phrased it,
"Stones and rocks." I loved it.
No real insulation in the old farmhouse,
Which meant ten cords of hardwood,
Which meant a muscled mantra of cutting,
Yarding, splitting, stacking and burning.
I was the maul coming down kerchunk
On the round of maple; I was the hellacious
Screeching saw; I was the fire.
I was fiber and grew imperceptibly.
I lost interest in everything except for trees.
Career, ambition and politics bored me.
I loved putting on my steel-toe, lace-up
Work boots in the morning. I loved the feel
Of my feet on grass slick with dew or frost
Or ice-skimmed mud or crisp snow crust.
I loved the moment after I felled a tree
When it was still again and I felt the awe
Of what I had done and awe for the tree that had
Stretched toward the sky for silent decades.
On Saturday night the regulars who had worked
In the woods forever mocked me as I limped into
The bar out on the state highway. "Workin' hard
There, sonny, or more like hardly workin'?"
I cradled my bottle between stiff raw hands,
Felt a pinching tension in the small of my back,
Inhaled ripe sweat, damp flannel,
Cheap whiskey then nodded—a happy fool.
They grinned back. Through their proper
Scorn I could feel it. They loved it too.
for Hayden Carruth
- Baron Wormser
Elegy for Matthew Shepard
In the end, let me believe this much: that only the first blow was
painful-what came after, no more than half-heard thunder, a
proselyte storm impending in Wyoming distances and speaking
in tones as low as a lover's voice in the floating time before sleep.
That the scarecrow night and a day on the buck fence were
nothing to him, who had carried himself to a place beyond
the hours, the thirty-degree freeze, the ropes that lashed
his arms apart in the unnatural opposite of embrace.
That God stood by to witness his ninth hour-a miracle this time
of presence-so that the broken-hearted question never came; and
sent the blank, dark face of midnight down to press its cheek
on his, still wet with tears, and come away all etched in stars.
Anyone who loved him would convince himself the same-
even those, not father or brother, lover or friend, whose
grief, its ragged fingers impotent as wind-ripped prayer flags,
loiters at the boundaries of our skin like shadows.
His silence now is pure rebuff. Wandering away on the indifferent
air, he slipped across the seam that sometimes opens where the earth
and sky brush edges, and, like strangers, step politely back, eager
now to kiss the boy whose reckless arms have stretched, since dawn,
from the far edge of the meadow. He won't turn back,
though we call, though we stand in groups as general as wildflowers
and bow and nod together in the wind:
He knows the calendar is all subjunctive now, that
death's no matter for the dead.
- Wendell Ricketts
This is the 10th anniversary of the attack on
Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay college student in Laramie, Wyoming. He
died on October 12, 1998 of his injuries.
In the Beginning
Sometimes simplicity rises
like a blossom of fire
from the white silk of your own skin.
You were there in the beginning
you heard the story, you heard the merciless
and tender words telling you where you had to go.
Exile is never easy and the journey
itself leaves a bitter taste. But then,
when you heard that voice, you had to go.
You couldn't sit by the fire, you couldn't live
so close to the live flame of that compassion
you had to go out in the world and make it your own
so you could come back with
that flame in your voice, saying listen...
this warmth, this unbearable light, this fearful love...
It is all here, it is all here.
- David Whyte
In The Absence Of Bliss
Museum of the Diaspora, Tel Aviv
The roasting alive of rabbis
in the ardor of the Crusades
went unremarked in Europe from
the Holy Roman Empire to 1918,
open without prerequisite
when I was an undergraduate.
While reciting the Sh’ma in full
expectation that their souls
would waft up to the bosom
of the Almighty the rabbis burned,
pious past the humming extremes
of pain. And their loved ones with them.
Whole communities tortured and set aflame
in Christ’s name
while chanting Hear, O Israel.
Why?
Why couldn’t the rabbis recant,
kiss the Cross, pretend?
Is God so simple that He can’t
sort out real from sham?
Did He want
these fanatic autos-da-fé, admire
the eyeballs popping,
the corpses shrinking in the fire?
We live in an orderly
universe of discoverable laws,
writes an intelligent alumna
in Harvard Magazine.
Bliss is belief,
agnostics always say
a little condescendingly
as befits mandarins who function
on a higher moral plane.
Consider our contemporary
Muslim kamikazes
hurling their explosives-
packed trucks through barriers.
Isn’t it all the same?
They too die cherishing the fond
certitude of a better life beyond.
We walk away from twenty-two
graphic centuries of kill-the-jew
and hail, of all things, a Mercedes
taxi. The driver is Yemeni,
loves rock music and hangs
each son’s picture—three so far—
on tassels from his rearview mirror.
I do not tell him that in Yemen
Jewish men, like women, were forbidden
to ride their donkeys astride,
having just seen this humiliation
illustrated on the Museum screen.
When his parents came
to the Promised Land, they entered
the belly of an enormous
silver bird, not knowing whether
they would live or die.
No matter. As it was written,
the Messiah had drawn nigh.
I do not ask, who tied
the leaping ram inside the thicket?
Who polished, then blighted the apple?
Who loosed pigs in the Temple,
set tribe against tribe
and nailed man in His pocket?
But ask myself, what would
I die for and reciting what?
Not for Yahweh, Allah, Christ,
those patriarchal fists
in the face. But would
I die to save a child?
Rescue my lover? Would
I run into the fiery barn
to release animals,
singed and panicked, from their stalls?
Bliss is belief, but where’s
the higher moral plane I roost on?
This narrow plank given to splinters.
No answers. Only questions.
- Maxine Kumin
Let America Be America Again
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where it is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That anyone be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free".)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek-
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the people! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean-
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today-O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home-
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free".
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay-
Except the dream that's almost dead today.
O, let America be America again-
The land that never has been yet-
And yet must be-the land where every one is free.
The land that's mine-the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME-
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose-
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath-
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain-
All, all the stretch of these great green states-
And make America again!
Langston Hughes
Lazy
Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days' worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.
- Ryokan
The Second Coming
Turning and turning on the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: Somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again, but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- William Butler Yeats
Worship
A white heron
Hiding itself
In the snowy field,
Where even the winter grass
Cannot be seen.
- Dogen
Toward Bethlehem
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W. B. Yeats
Yes, I know.
This is the time
of the second coming.
The great beast lurking,
the savage heart
beating once again.
Somewhere in the desert, yes,
that blank and pitiless stare.
The haunches moving.
The stealthy advamce.
Shall we watch in horror and dismay?
Do we turn away
or witness in silence and despair?
The vision falters,
the image fades again.
That distant struggle
in the clouds of dust--
is this the specter
we ourselves have made,
created from our inner dreamscape
of grasping and desire?
Are we ourselves
the approaching shape
of darkness drawing near?
- Dorothy Walters
In Washington
Suited banksters talk of debt default, crowd control, and martial law.
Grave politicians promise yet again to follow them through hell itself and a few local pet projects if necessary.
Concerned journalists soberly agree that something drastic must be done to restore confidence.
Meanwhile at my house,
Confident oak leaves deposit free sunshine into rash acorns.
Unruly kinglets comb the leaves for small spiders.
Friends gather in circles, newfound comfort in proximity.
Impenetrable blackberry tangles open onto riotous gopher burrows.
Outlaw scrub jays hide acorns under secret mattresses.
Undocumented stones crash unpredictably down the hillside.
I sit still on this buckwheat cushion, high grasses waving freedom all around me.
We are in this together
and we are ready
now.
- Barton Stone
In This World
In this world
we walk on the roof of hell,
gazing at flowers.
- Kobayashi Issa
In The End
It is not death we fear
but rather a life un-lived.
For in the end
it will be the stars
that went unseen
and
the love we did not tend,
That will cause our soul
to weep.
- Ron Harding
OUCH!
- R
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain
The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.
- Li Po
Firefall
Though it is cold,
the fires in the Lodge
remain unlit all day;
the world outside still starched
and sifted with the flour
of yesterday’s snow.
For hours,
in the great hall of the Awahnee
I’ve been looking up at
a life-size portrait of John Muir.
He’s posing against a granite boulder—
larger-than-life,
mirroring my grammar-school memory
of his history--
When Muir hiked he ate only
the stale bread he could lift
off his father’s bakery in Mariposa,
dipping their rough crusts
into mountain streams
to loosen them up.
He stitched trails,
wove his thin body down
the crevices of every rock
these naked windows face--
All day, I’ve been trying to think
of something to give you--
a souvenir, a risk--
but the portrait of Muir,
the taste of his two thin lips,
has me fixed in this chair.
They’re like a pair of blue butterflies
I could trap in my palms
and press to my lips.
* * *
My mother has told me for years
about the firefalls--
from Glacier Point--
the highest peak,
the Rangers would light
huge bonfires every week
just to see them spill over
down to the valley floor
as they yelled from above:
Let the fire fall.
I have never seen it.
The firefalls were banned
years before I was born,
But I have grown accustomed
to believing my Mother.
She says loving is what’s
most important in life
not butterflies, not
marking what is yours--
What I’m giving you
is the possibility
of what might ignite--
fire falling down
as the men yell from above,
their voices echoing
through the whole discovered park.
- Iris Dunkle
Shed The Fear
Who has a face sees
the world,
but the world
is not
to be borne -
or only
when seen as
another:
how did this
come together? How
did I find you?
So many turns
in the road
so few of them
possible!
How not to spin out
in hairpin turns
of disbelief.
The Sufi martyrs
insisted
"The world
is a wedding."
Why not
go with them.
in the face of
present carnage,
centuries
later.
- Anselm Hollo
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
Another Woman
Another woman
would keep her mouth shut,
not spout fervent beliefs
like a speaker on a soapbox.
Another woman
would have chosen
equity over experience,
settling down or
just plain settling.
Another woman
would have stayed the course,
refusing distraction and
the pangs of the heart
that lead to upheaval.
Another woman
would not vacillate hearing
the voices that preach security and
the voices that harp on ideals.
Another woman
would not succumb to worry,
knowing that it never helps
and only constricts.
Another woman
would revel in her children’s independence
instead of mourning
their day-to-day absence in her life.
Another woman
would live in gratitude every moment
for her sojourn on this gorgeous planet
and not slip into the mundane
routine of forgetting.
But I am not
another woman.
I am this woman,
led by my heart and
pulled by conflicting voices,
a woman who
worries,
mourns,
forgets.
I am this woman,
this aging, outspoken, heart-stirred,
frightened and sometimes grateful woman,
This woman,
with this particular life
and not another.
- Maya Spector
May the Elements Endure. Amen.
We walk toward the sound of the ocean,
between these quiet hills, the lupine float in fog:
lavender clouds.
Here each bent stalk of native grass, each calla lily
flowing bridal white down the green aisle of the valley,
each wild silk bloom, and each bird singing against the sea
has taken millions of years to bring to this marriage.
This habitat so sensitive that our salt smell turns the heads of deer,
startles rabbits and holds back a bobcat in soundless watch;
our feet thundering down the packed dirt path, our voices roar over the ocean.
In Marin the wetlands are disappearing as the sun
disappears in this fog that swallows up the hills.
A Great Horned Owl carries night in her dark wings.
The sky is red when we reach the water’s edge,
a man doing Tai Chi is moving in waves,
the silent branches of his body.
We think of the old shipwreck
of the Tennessee
here on Tennessee Beach.
Then head home.
With earth still rising
under a long tide of clumsy feet,
each of our steps now
a prayer:
- Judith Stone
The Morning’s News
The morning’s news drives sleep out of the head
at night. Uselessness and horror hold the eyes
open to the dark. Weary, we lie awake
in the agony of the old giving birth to the new
without assurance that the new will be better.
I look at my son, whose eyes are like a young god’s,
they are so open to the world.
I look at my sloping fields now turning
green with the young grass of April. What must I do
to go free? I think I must put on
a deathlier knowledge, and prepare to die
rather than enter into the design of man’s hate.
I will purge my mind of the airy claims
of church and state. I will serve the earth
and not pretend my life could better serve.
Another morning comes with its strange cure.
The earth is news. Though the river floods
and the spring is cold, my heart goes on,
faithful to a mystery in a cloud,
and the summer’s garden continues its descent
through me, toward the ground.
- Wendell Berry
Prayer for a Tenspeed Heart
Let the fire of my body
propel and warm me
and let each darkness
reveal its plenitude.
Let the hills
flatten under my wheels
and let the eloquent curves
yield up their good surprise.
Let my heart be obstinate
when I need to climb
and let my lowliest gears
restrain my spinning down.
Let there be flatland, too,
and into that glittering place
let me stretch with the heart of a lover,
at full speed, blind and intent.
- Barbara Hendryson
Exercise
First forget what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly every day
then forget what day of the week it is
do this regularly for a week
then forget what country you are in
and practice doing it in company
for a week
then do them together
for a week
with as few breaks as possible
follow these by forgetting how to add
or to subtract
it makes no difference
you can change them around
after a week
both will help you later
to forget how to count
forget how to count
starting with your own age
starting with how to count backward
starting with even numbers
starting with Roman numerals
starting with fractions of Roman numerals
starting with the old calendar
going on to the old alphabet
going on to the alphabet
until everything is continuous again
go on to forgetting elements
starting with water
proceeding to earth
rising in fire
forget fire
- W.S. Merwin
When I Say Farewell
I have no faith in my works.
I know time's ocean,
its lashing of waves day by day
will erase them.
My faith is in my self.
The whole day I fill my cup and drink
the perpetual nectar of the world.
Every moment's love
has been saved in it.
The weight of pain has not torn
and the dust has not blackened
its art.
I know,
when I go from
the play of this life,
the forests of flower, every season, will witness
I have loved the world.
Only this love is real, gift of my birth.
When I say farewell
this undecaying truth will cancel death.
- Rabindranath Tagore
This Is A Perfect Moment
This is a perfect moment.
It's a perfect moment for many reasons,
but especially because you and I are waking up
from our sleepwalking, thumb-sucking, dumb-clucking collusion
with the masters of illusion and destruction.
Thanks to them,
from whom the painful blessings flow,
we are waking up.
Their wars and tortures,
their crimes against nature,
extinctions of species
and brand new diseases.
Their spying and lying
in the name of the father,
sterilizing seeds and
trademarking water.
Molestations of God,
celebrations of shame,
stealing our dreams and
changing our names.
Their cunning commercials
and blood-sucking hustles,
their endless rehearsals
for the end of the world.
Thanks to them,
from whom the awful teachings flow,
we are waking up.
- Rob Brezsny
Describe Your Grief
I am driving a back road
where there are still farms,
fenced cattle, tobacco barns.
I can’t describe my grief,
unless it’s like marching
into a lost war, folding clothes by numbers,
waiting in rank for breakfast
beneath the steamy electric lights
before dawn, crawling in a cave
that hasn’t been mapped.
I round a curve and see two birds
flapping in the road.
One has been hit
by a car, and its mate
flutters just above,
wild to inspire
its fallen partner’s flight.
When Anna was ill,
I would have seen her as the fallen bird,
injured in the road, as I hovered,
watching her struggles,
urging her to fly on broken wings.
But now she is gone,
with our marathon conversations,
her startling questions.
And I don’t know
which of those two birds
I am.
- Tom Hawkins
All Hallow’s Eve, 2001
Above the deep-piled carpet of maple leaves
the madrones are slipping free
of summer’s brown paper wrapping,
eager to show off their new winter coats.
The afternoon rain still drips
from the canopy of oak, fir and pine.
Across the creek a turkey chuckles
as a woodpecker beats a drum.
The light is passing swiftly now,
passing from the face of this land.
Shadows are lengthening everywhere,
reaching out across our lives.
Should we not, then, dare to love boldly,
more boldly than ever before -
as if the fate of the Earth itself
depended upon our loving?
And still the stars will surely rise,
revealing the Soul’s deep secret:
that the eye can see farther in the dark of night
than ever it could by day.
- Larry Robinson
October Corn
The stalks of corn in my vegetable garden a deep green not long ago have given way to a yellowing of old age. Once straight, tall and virile they now bend over like an old man, and my tomato plants are stressed from the cold night air of late October. The green ones will not grow or ripen. It pains me a little seeing the sweetness of summer fade day by day but it’s all a part of the plan you know; the strength of summer giving way to the aching bones of autumn.
In Petaluma parents find themselves meandering through The Corn Maze as their children run through the stalks or climb onto straw bales then choose a pumpkin to take home.
I remember trick or treating one year when my twin, Fernando and I were little boys; Tony, our big brother, dressed us as pirates I got an eye-patch, Fernando a handkerchief tied around his head. Tony made us wooden swords and had me go shirtless into the night. He said that a real pirate would brave the cold and so I refused to shiver and not allow the chill to penetrate beneath my skin. Our older sisters took us house to house and neighborhood to neighborhood in our frenzied drive for as much candy as we could gather; pirates pilfering booty. Only Christmas surpassed Halloween in fun and getting something good for simply being young. So many years later now, I am occupied by the business of grown-ups.
I read in the newspapers that the last of the apples and grapes are being harvested here at home as the wars continue to take their human toll; money squandered that could be used to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and cure the sick. It saddened me to read that Paul Newman had died. They say he was old and sick though I only knew him to be young, handsome and generous. Someone wrote a poem about his life the next day; glad that poets write about things that matter sometimes.
My grandaunt, Tia Sara, who lived in Mexico, died when I was ten. She was very old and very wrinkled. She always wore dark ankle-length dresses and flesh colored stockings that covered what little you could see of her ankles. Her long silver hair was always braided and pinned tightly against her scalp. She went to bed one night never to rise again. Ma’s cousin, my tia Concha washed Sara’s lifeless body, combed and braided her hair, powdered her face, applied rouge, and stuffed wads of newspaper in her mouth to plump up her cheeks, sunken in by death. The family had a traditional “velorio” for Sara. Laid her out in her living room surrounded by candles as everyone knelt and prayed for her soul. My uncles dug her grave and buried her the next day. She received a proper memorial service even if she was a gossip who constantly doled out advice that was not asked for. My ma and pa, tios, tias and some amigos have passed on; irreplaceable losses. Sad that they are not with me at least they visit once in a while in dreams; I take some comfort knowing that one day I will be with them.
And I love the Day of the Dead, a custom rooted in the ancient Mexico. A way to honor those who have passed to the other world; a way to accept and even poke fun at, instead of fearing death. I suppose that by doing this we prepare ourselves for our own inevitable engagement with him.
We can fear or laugh and even accept him, for in the end we have no choice in the matter; it is all a part of the plan; are we not like stalks of corn in a garden? small tender sprouts in spring, strong and sturdy in summer, frail in autumn, dried and lifeless in winter.
Let us be like the sketches of skeletons who play music, dance and sing; hence replacing fear with a fiesta. Let us celebrate then, for today we are on this side of the great divide honoring those who have passed to the other hoping that one day we will be remembered and respected in the same manner even if we are imperfect. Raise your cups of atole of chocolate caliente raise your pan dulce: here’s to life mis hermanos y hermanas, here’s to death.
- Armando Garcia-Dávila
Night Wind
Outside my windows
the tall trees
darker than the black sky
carry the wind
unbridled by darkness
directly to my closed-eye mind
from a slow roar
like an ocean over treetops
gathering
always potential
moistened by water sounds
drips, gurgling gutters,
restless raw breaking waves
crash down into the towering firs,
bowed and twisting,
again and again releasing the hold
of the rain-washed gale.
the pine smells must yield:
lumber aikido.
- Scott O'Brien
Mirror
A deep sadness stirs in me; a stabbing pain almost.
Fall; ghosts of the dead of war, of age, of disease
Are calling. I can hear my Mother’s voice
Telling me some odd phrasing of hers
While I wash dishes - how to be
Present to whatever comes
Without losing one’s sense of humor,
Humor the greater part of valor.
Plainly, my Mother speaks; she comes always
At this fall time, some other times of distress or just
On occasion for companionship.
I hope to know what the Dalai Lama feels
When he claims to practice the state of dying
Each day. I imagine he is now used to that
And passing over will not come as a shock.
An El Dia de los Muertos film exists,
A banquet table, a large Spanish family
Seated round it, feasting,
A mirror at the end of the table.
Ancestors share the feast through the mirror,
The other-worldly family smiling and warm,
Passes food back and forth through the mirror
And so the Fall is welcomed in.
- Connie Madden
The Coming of Light
Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow's dust flares into breath.
- Mark Strand
Hope
“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—
And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird—
That kept so many warm—
I’ve heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.
- Emily Dickinson
Your posting of "Hope", one of Emily Dickinson's most popular poems, has inspired me to share the double dactyl I wrote about her some time ago. For those who don't know about them, double dactyls, sometimes called "higgledy-piggledies", are a fun, eight-line form of light verse which can only be written about people with double-dactylic names (i.e., six-syllable names accented on the first and fourth syllables, such as "Emily Dickinson").
EPILOGUE
Higgledy-piggledy
Emily Dickinson,
honored today as a
poet of note,
dared to express herself
uncustomarily,
‘til her conclusion, and
that’s all she wrote.
Boddhisattva Vow
"I want to come back
as the disabled child
of someone like Vladimir Putin
to awaken his hear of compassion.
"Then I'll be reborn
as a maybe extinct species -
like an ivory billed woodpecker;
I'll fly to Washington
or wherever I want
to bring the good news of our return.
"Or maybe I'll just be
a breath of wind touching
the world with hope and healing,
leaving no trace."
This is what Sue said.
I say
she hears the cries of the world.
Om Tara tutare ture swaha!
- Larry Robinson
Paul Robeson
That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other's
harvest:
that we are each other's
business:
we are each other's
magnitude and bond.
- Gwendolyn Brooks
EGRET
My center
Is a big and white
Snowy egret
Standing still in clear slow water.
Its nothingness is not empty
And because of it
Everything else is manifest
And insignificant.
- Sue Stephenson
Photography Lesson, Pt. Reyes
My father teaches me landscape
here, where the land itself can not decide
to which age it raises its stiff thumb.
I have a decision to make--
a few names to throw in the ocean.
We walk up the bare beach--
We look through a machine--
He says don’t forget
you are looking through a machine.
Your emotions will ruin it.
The hills beyond are almost bald--
a lone raven marks in an arc their curve
then lands still in a nest of waves.
Ravens, he says, will never appear in pairs.
I push the shutter down
let the machine realize
what I have learned,
as something scares the bird to flight.
Why must stories overlap? I ask
but my father is already walking,
the machine ticking faster
than waves can count.
- Iris Dunkle
Logos
Why wonder about the loaves and the fishes?
If you say the right words, the wine expands.
If you say them with love
and the felt ferocity of that love
and the felt necessity of that love,
the fish explode into the many.
Imagine him, speaking,
and don't worry about what is reality,
or what is plain, or what is mysterious.
If you were there, it was all those things.
If you can imagine it, it was all those things.
Eat, drink, be happy.
Accept the miracle.
Accept, too, each spoken word
spoken with love.
- Mary Oliver
The Reckoning
All profits disappear: the gain
Of ease, the hoarded, secret sum;
And now grim digits of old pain
Return to litter up our home.
We hunt the cause of ruin, add,
Subtract, and put ourselves in pawn;
For all our scratching on the pad,
We cannot trace the error down.
What we are seeking is a fare
One way, a chance to be secure:
The lack that keeps us what we are,
The penny that usurps the poor.
- Theodore Roethke
All Souls
Did someone say that there would be an end,
An end, Oh, an end, to love and mourning?
Such voices speak when sleep and waking blend.
The cold bleak voices of the early morning
When all the birds are dumb in dark November-
Rember and forget, forget, remember.
After the false night, warm true voices, wake!
Voice of the dead that touches the cold living.
Throughthe pale sunlight once more gravely speak.
Tell me again, while the last leaves are falling:
"Dear child, what has been once so interwoven
Cannot be raveled, nor the gift ungiven."
Now the dead move through all of us still glowing,
Mother and child, lover and lover mated,
Are wound and bound together and enflowing
What has been plaited cannot be unplaited-
Only the strands grow richer with each loss
And memory makes kings and queens of us.
Dark into light, light into darkness, spin.
When all the birds have flown into some real haven,
We who find shelter in the warmth within,
Listen, and fell new-cherisned, new-forgiven,
As the lost human voices speak through us and blend
Our complex love, our mourning without end.
- May Sarton
Codicil
That man,
who accepted the stolen TV with a wink,
will run into a burning mobile home
next spring
to rescue an old woman.
The woman in the Volvo,
weaving in traffic
while furtively talking on her cell phone,
peels 20 pounds of potatoes each Friday evening
to take home fries to the shelter
every Saturday morning.
And even I,
who was so rude to the clerk this morning,
have been known
to bring flowers
to the bereaved.
-Ellen Skagerberg
Now and then
That's not me now
riding no hands
on a tree-lined road
nor sauntering Market Street
in my dress blues
nor climbing on top of you
on a rented bed
nor turning in my essay
at the end of the term
nor taking the baby's picture
on a Christmas morning
nor skinny dipping with you
on a Sierra lake
nor running out of money
and eating macaroni and cheese
nor telling the truth
that night of betrayal
nor reading a poem
at my mother's funeral
nor standing before the judge
to clean the slate,
nor being awarded some few honors,
rather I was all of those boys and men
in the journey of years
losing and finding my way,
but I am now none of them
at the same time all of them,
this man I have become,
this man I am now.
- Doug Stout
On the Han Shan Path
****
The trail to Cold Mountain is faint
the banks of Cold Stream are a jungle
birds constantly chatter away
I hear no sound of people
gusts of wind lash my face
flurries of snow bury my body
day after day no sun
year after year no spring
- Han Shan
What Kind of Times Are These
There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.
- Adrienne Rich
The November Angels
Late dazzle
of yellow
flooding
the simplified woods,
spare chipping away
of the afternoon-stone
by a small brown finch—
there is little
for them to do,
and so their gossip is
idle, modest:
low-growing,
tiny-white-flowered.
Below,
the Earth-pelt
dapples and flows
with slow bees
that spin
the thick, deep jute
of the gold time’s going,
the pollen’s
traceless retreat;
kingfishers
enter their kingdom,
their blue crowns on fire,
and feast on
the still-wealthy world.
A single, cold blossom
tumbles, fledged
from the sky’s white branch.
And the angels
look on,
observing what falls:
all of it falls.
Their hands hold
no blessings,
no word
for those who walk
in the tall black pines,
who do not
feel themselves falling—
the ones who believe
the loved companion
will hold them forever,
the ones who cross through
alone and ask for no sign.
The afternoon
lengthens, steepens,
flares out—
no matter for them.
It is assenting
that makes them angels,
neither increased
nor decreased
by the clamorous heart:
their only work
to shine back,
however the passing brightness
hurts their eyes.
- Jane Hirshfield
Shoveling Snow With Buddha
In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.
Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
for what he does, or does not do.
Even the season is wrong for him.
In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid?
Is this not implied by his serene expression,
that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?
But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.
This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.
He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.
All morning long we work side by side,
me with my commentary
and he inside his generous pocket of silence,
until the hour is nearly noon
and the snow is piled high all around us;
then, I hear him speak.
After this, he asks,
can we go inside and play cards?
Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk
and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table
while you shuffle the deck.
and our boots stand dripping by the door.
Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes
and leaning for a moment on his shovel
before he drives the thin blade again
deep into the glittering white snow.
- Billy Collins
You Can’t Have Everything
but you can have a tongued velvet kiss beneath tall cedars and oaks flushed with new leaves. You can have a graze of caress up your thigh, the soft brush of summer on honeyed skin. You can have muscles sleek with love and bliss in the buttery sun of morning. You can have birds singing in tree canopies, squirrels that leap, vibrant lobelia and petunias. You can have the smell of lavender and lemon thyme crushed between your fingers. You can have a window seat with pillows and books of poetry.
There are always your dreams of the writer’s studio that overlooks the ocean and delicious words to fill cracks chiseled by disappointment. You can’t clean the house with a twitch of your nose and will it to stay pristine, but you can have pineapple chunks of sunshine through your windows, bowls of rosy peaches, nectarines, ripe tomatoes. You can have a doe and two spotted fawns, a fox and her mate, blue jays, hummingbirds and coveys of quail.
You can’t make parents live forever, though for now, you can have the touch of love in your mother’s voice, the stories of your father’s triumphs that improve each year. You can’t force your sister to stop using meth, but you can send her love through sieved holes of darkness. You can’t rescue loved ones from their unhappiness, but you can wipe away their tears and remind them to drink in the fragrant beauty of earth and sky.
You can’t stop the effects of aging, but you can view heart-soaring mauves and blues of Eastern Sierras that sweep from desert expanse, camp beneath Mammoth pines. You can thrill with an intake of breath at the sight of a massive bear. The mind’s song may wind notes of want, yet you can sing gratitude for moments full of grace.
- Sher Christian
©2004 Star Kissed Shadows, Divining Poetry, (book) and Sweet Tongue (CD) (www.lusciouspoetry.typepad.com)
Thanksgiving
I have been trying to read
the script cut in these hills—
a language carved in the shimmer of stubble
and the solid lines of soil, spoken
in the thud of apples falling
and the rasp of corn stalks finally bare.
The pheasants shout it with a rusty creak
as they gather in the fallen grain,
the blackbirds sing it
over their shoulders in parting,
and gold leaf illuminates the manuscript
where it is written in the trees.
Transcribed onto my human tongue
I believe it might sound like a lullaby,
or the simplest grace at table.
Across the gathering stillness
simply this: "For all that we have received,
dear God, make us truly grateful."
- Lynn Ungar
Outside
The least little sound sets the coyotes walking,
walking the edge of our comfortable earth.
We look inward, but all of them
are looking toward us as they walk the earth.
We need to let animals loose in our houses,
the wolf to escape with a pan in his teeth,
and streams of animals toward the horizon
racing with something silent in each mouth.
For all we have taken into our keeping
and polished with our hands belongs to a truth
greater than ours, in the animals' keeping.
Coyotes are circling around our truth.
- William Stafford
Conscientious Objector
I shall die, but that is all I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
I hear the clatter on the barn door.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans,
many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle while he cinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself: I will not give hime a leg up.
Though he flick my shoulders with his whip, I will not
Tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
The black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all I shall do for Death; I am not
on his payroll.
I will not tell him the whereabouts of my friends, nor of
my enemies either.
Though he promise me much,
I will not map him the route to any man’s door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living that I should deliver
men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city are safe
with me; never through me
Shall you be overcome.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
Fuchsia
Even in late November, if you watch closely,
You can see a fuchsia begin to unfold in the morning sun.
Creamy outer lips open to reveal, at first shyly,
Then with great dignity, the stamen and pistil.
Inner lips of deeper reds are licked by a golden tongue.
Are they tasting the air? Are they beckoning the beloved?
Are they praying?
Surely it is too late in the year for bees .
Then, miracle of miracles! An Anna's hummingbird
Thrumming from behind the redwood
With its ruby throat and day-glo green cloak
Casually and delicately - but oh so precisely-
Dips in that remarkable tongue to the very core of that sweet, small fire, blessing and being blessed.
Jesus spoke of the lilies of the field.
But until this morning, I didn't really understand.
When you fully open your heart to the World,
No matter how late it is,
The World, like a lover, unlocks for you
All the doors of its treasure house.
- Larry Robinson
I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.
Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that's wide and timeless.
So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:
a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.
- Ranier Maria Rilke
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 heaver,
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
Drinking Love
Do you see what happens to you when you haven’t had a drink of love?
Nasty weather spreads across your face
until your eyes cloud with such sadness
that children become frightened
and even you own mirror won’t look back at you.
The creatures around you, begin to worry about your loneliness
And soon birds assemble in the tops of the trees
Wondering what songs they might sing to bring solace to your soul.
Even the angels become alarmed
by your heedless rush to war with anyone
and your gathering of stones to hurl
at the innocent... and at yourself
I see what happens to you when you haven’t been out drinking love
carousing among the friends of forgiveness, in the taverns of love
You step farther and farther back
analyzing, calculating, ferreting out
the hidden clauses you’re convinced are there
in the simplest conversations.
You weigh each word like a dead fish.
You grab that cockeyed ruler of yours
and from your darkness begin to measure the angles
in a radiant heart you once trusted.
This is how you get, my dear, when you
foolishly refuse to drink from love's hand.
This is why the teachers of simplicity
urge us – keep remembering god,
keep remembering god, keep remembering
so that you will come to know that he is here,
gently watching, sweetly waiting for you to accept his help.
And this is why Hafiz calls to you
“Come, come, bring your cup.
I have an endlessly leaking barrel of light and laughter
which the beloved has strapped to my back.
and I want, more than all the world,
to quench your thirst.”
Drink this freedom and you will know
that the sanest, happiest, richest among us
are those who want nothing more than to give love.
- Hafiz
At first I laughed out loud. Now I sit, only shaking my head from side to side...
Thank you, Larry.
- R
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Dead List
Black and cold outside, sunrise veiled by storm clouds.
A robin perches high in the oak outside the kitchen window to begin his daily chatter. I say my customary “good morning” to him.
Steam rises from my coffee cup; first sip tastes best.
Always intrigued reading obituaries in the morning paper;
people’s lives reduced to a handful of words.
“I check the dead list,” Tony, my neighbor used to say; he was a World War I veteran, fought for Italy. “My name not on list. Good day today!” Sad when his name finally appeared; I miss him; made me laugh, his irreverence toward the pope; telling me my back spasms were because I wasn’t getting enough; the man in me laughing, the altar boy embarrassed.
Sad when the old die; tragic when they’re young. Saw an infant’s coffin at a funeral once, it was carried by a single pallbearer. Philip, my best friend in the sixth grade died one rainy afternoon. The cave he had been digging collapsed in on him. Next day his desk was empty. Ma showed me his obituary. Young woman widowed last year; her husband killed in the war; she pregnant with their first; named the boy after his father.
Timeless this checking of dead lists, lists from Thermopylae, from Waterloo, Bull Run, Normandy, Da Nang, Baghdad. A mother’s dread realized.
We will not see the coffins bearing America’s colors return home. No day of mourning for them. Each blood sacrifice reduced to an item in the obits.
I consider making another cup of coffee but the kitchen lights flicker as flashes of lightning crack, explode, rumble through the valley shattering the predawn peace. My house trembles, window panes shake. Without mercy rain and hail pound apple trees in the orchard their blossoms fall to the ground, fruit that will never be realized. A vicious wind fells the oak, its roots point toward heaven. I hear nothing more from the robin.
- Armando Garcia-Dávila
Finding Intelligent Design
"You don't have to look
anything farther than the sinuses
to refute Intelligent Design," my doctor says.
Yet it's plain as my nose that
Divinity has seated itself, like a satisfied old woman
on the park bench of her psyche.
So what of it?
The design we seek in the material
hides like a defiant child.
Trapped as we are
in three dimensions,
with our intelligence,
looking for Intelligence
is like seeking a galaxy
with a microscope.
- Rebecca del Rio
If Poetry Were Not Morality
It is likely I would not have devoted myself to poetry in this world which remains insensitive to it, if poetry were not morality.
Jean Cocteau, Past Tense
I'm the kind of woman who
when she hears Bobby McPherin sing without words
for the first time on the car radio has to
pull over and park with the motor
running. And Cecil Taylor, I pulled over
for him too, even though later the guy
at the record store said he was just
'a side man.' Something he did with silence and
mixing classical with I'm-worried-about-this-but-I
have-to-go-this-way-anyhow. This not letting me
go. What did you do, the guy asked me, when you
pulled over? Smiled, I said, sat
and smiled. If the heart could be that simple. The photo
of Gandhi's last effects taped near
my typewriter: eyeglasses, sandals, writing paper
and pen, low lap sized writing desk and something
white in the foreground like a bedroll.
Every so often, I glance at this, just paper torn
from a book, and wish I could get down to
that, a few essentials, no
more. So when I left this place it would be
humbly, as in those welfare funerals my mother
used to scorn because the county always bought
the cheapest coffins, no satin lining, and if you
wanted the dead to look comfortable
you had to supply your own
pillow. I still admire her hating to see the living
come off cheap in their homage to any life. She
was Indian enough so the kids used to
taunt me home with "Your mother's a squaw!"
Cherokee she said. And though nobody
told me, I knew her grandfather had to be
one of those chiefs who could never
get enough horses. Who, if he had two hundred,
wanted a hundred more and a hundred more
after that. Maybe he'd get up in the night and go
out among them, or watch their grazing
from a distance under moonlight. He'd pass his mind
over them where they pushed their muzzles into
each other's flanks and necks and their horseness
gleamed back at him like soundless music until
he knew something he couldn't know
as only himself, something not to be told again
even by writing down the doing
of it. I meet him like that sometimes,
wordless and perfect, with more horses than he
can ride or trade or even know why
he has. His completeness needs to be stern, measuring
what he stands to lose. His eyes
are bronze, his heart is bronze with the mystery
of it. Yet it will change his sleep
to have gazed beyond memory, I think, without sadness or
fear onto the flowing backs of horses. I look down
and see that his feet are bare, and I
have never seen such beautiful prideless feet set
on the earth. He must know what he's doing, I think, he
must not need to forgive himself the way I do
because this bounty pours onto me
so I'm crushed by surrender, heaped and
scattered and pounded into the dust with wanting more,
wanting feet like that to drive back
the shame that wants to know why
I have to go through the world like an overwrought
magnet, like the greedy Braille of so many
about-to-be-lost memories. Why can't I just
settle down by the side of the road and turn the music
up on one of those raw, uncoffined voices of
the dead --Bob Marley, Billie Holiday or the way Piaf
sang 'Je Ne Regrette Rien" so that when
the purled horse in the music asks what I want with it
we are swept aside by there being no answer except
not to be dead to each other, except for
those few moments to belong beyond deserving to
that sumptuousness of presence, so the heart
stays simple like the morality of
a robin, the weight of living so clear a mandate
it includes everything about this junkshop
of a life. And even some of our soon-to-be-deadness
catches up to us
as joy, as more horses than we need.
- Tess Gallagher
THE USES OF BEAUTY
1
Sundays, Father would take us
to a slough behind the Mississippi.
There, among the cypress stumps,
we'd fish the afternoon away.
Sitting with pole in hand one day,
I heard a splash and turned my head
to see a nearby pool alive!.
Its liquid silver boiled up
gleaming, rainbow forms
that broke the surface,
then dove down again
in streamlined arcs.
Had the sun itself
divided into shards
and come down here?
Were these Apollo's fish,
swimming in their sacred pool?
Picking up my net, I trapped
those flashing wonders, one by one,
exulting in each success. Soon
no more living miracles
disturbed the water.
We took them home.
I don't remember
if we even
fried them up.
2
The first time I saw mountains,
we were driving through the Ozarks,
from St. Louis to Hot Springs.
The highway wound. Suddenly,
an overlook: valley, hills and sky;
a million trees, a haze; a harmony.
We parked, got out. My spirit
flew, expanding,
out into that great bowl;
and returned in silent wonder.
And then my thoughts caught up.
My body remembered knots.
My mind churned out the question:
”What do you do with all that Beauty?”
3
Half a century has passed.
If I were with that boy
I used to be, I’d tell him
“Beauty’s all there is;”
then take him in my arms
and hold him till he quieted
enough to know it’s true.
- Max Reif
Spiritual Chickens
A man eats a chicken every day for lunch, and each day the ghost of another chicken joins the crowd in the dining room. If he could only see them! Hundreds and hundreds of spiritual chickens, sitting on chairs, tables, covering the floor, jammed shoulder to shoulder. At last there is no more space and one of the chickens is popped back across the spiritual plain to the earthly. The man is in the process of picking his teeth. Suddenly there is a chicken at the end of the table, strutting back and forth, not looking at the man but knowing he is there, as is the way with chickens. The man makes a grab for the chicken but his hand passes right through her. He tries to hit the chicken with a chair and the chair passes through her. He calls in his wife but she can see nothing. This is his own private chicken, even if he fails to recognize her. How is he to know this is a chicken he ate seven years ago on a hot and steamy Wednesday in July, with a little tarragon, a little sour cream? The man grows afraid. He runs out of his house flapping his arms and making peculiar hops until the authorities take him away for a cure. Faced with the choice between something odd in the world or something broken in his head, he opts for the broken head. Certainly, this is safer than putting his opinions in jeopardy. Much better to think he had imagined it, that he had made it happen. Meanwhile, the chicken struts back and forth at the end of the table. Here she was, jammed in with the ghosts of six thousand dead hens, when suddenly she has the whole place to herself. Even the nervous man has disappeared. If she had a brain, she would think she had caused it. She would grow vain, egotistical, she would look for someone to fight, but being a chicken she can just enjoy it and make little squawks, silent to all except the man who ate her, who is far off banging his head against a wall like someone trying to repair a leaky vessel, making certain that nothing unpleasant gets in or nothing of value falls out. How happy he would have been to be born a chicken, to be of good use to his fellow creatures and rich in companionship after death. As it is he is constantly being squeezed between the world and his idea of the world. Better to have a broken head--why surrender his corner on the truth?--better just to go crazy.
- Stephen Dobyns
Cleaning Up After the Poetry Salon
It's not always easy.
Proper nouns are manageable.
They stack well.
Biggest on the bottom -
The Great Plains, Idaho, Mt. Rainier -
then the smaller stuff left behind -
Boxcars, photographs, you know.
Adjectives are remarkably tough to clean up.
The dry ones catch on the furniture,
bury themselves in cracks
hide in the pocket of an old sweater.
They crumble to awkward, ungainly,
unmanageable, yes fragile
pieces …that somehow cunningly avoid
the shedding broom some poet has
left behind.
And wet ones like sticky and slimy - yikes!
Cleaning up the leavings of Wendell Berry?
it's a grange meeting hall.
Rich black dirt everywhere,
corn stalks, the lingering thick odor of
compost and just a hint of cow manure
on your shoes and your best carpet.
And Jesus! Those poems about stars -
the poets have no idea.
Whole constellations left behind -
Watch it with the Pleides, they have sharp points
And yes, the Dog Star does bite.
My rule would be -
you brought 'em, you take 'em home.
Food is good in a poem.
Mom's apple pie and romantic dinner's for two
are usually digested by the salon - no leftovers.
It's the ethnic dishes with strange names
luedafisk, sauerkraut, gefiltafish
and anything made with hot peppers
Well, you know.
Poets - a little consideration -
slip in some sponges, maybe
a mop or really - just a mouthful of food,
a spoonful -
yes, spoons for everybody.
And come on,
no animals bigger than a cat or small dog.
polar bears and coyotes are disasters.
Oh I could go on…
mixed metaphors sliding
down the walls and tangled
in the drapes.
Cliches hiding their heads in the corners.
shy, embarrassed marmots standing by dead seals.
stinking sea weed and sharks behind the sofa
And fish - fish beyond number -
flopping on the floor.
Verbs are easy - they move around
so much - just
open the door and they
take care of themselves.
But poets,
It's the birds left behind…
Egret, Robin, wrens, a flock of seagulls,
a murder of crows…
For God's sake leave a window open.
But eagle, oh my friends, the eagle
he glowers there
from the chandelier
Royally pissed!
A moment in a poem
then forgotten
in the closed room.
I know, I know.
I'm making a new mess now -
I'll need some help here with
Idaho and that eagle.
For the rest
I brought 'em.
I'll take 'em home.
- Doug von Koss
Walking Through a Wall
Unlike flying or astral projection, walking through walls is a totally earth-related craft, but a lot more interesting than pot making or driftwood lamps. I got started at a picnic up in Bowstring in the northern part of the state. A fellow walked through a brick wall right there in the park. I said “Say, I want to try that.” Stone walls are best, then brick and wood. Wooden walls with fiberglass insulation and steel doors aren’t so good. They won’t hurt you. If your wall walking is done properly, both you and the wall are left intact. It is just that they aren’t pleasant somehow. The worst things are wire fences, maybe it’s the molecular structure of the alloy or just the amount of give in a fence. I don’t know, but I’ve torn my jacket and lost my hat in a lot of fences. The best approach to a wall is, first, two hands placed flat against the surface; it’s a matter of concentration and just the right pressure. You will feel the dry, cool inner wall with your fingers, then there is a moment of total darkness before you step through to the other side.
- Louis Jenkins
we are running
running and
time is clocking us
from the edge like an only
daughter.
our mothers stream before us,
cradling their breasts in their
hands.
oh pray that what we want
is worth this running,
pray that what we’re running
toward
is what we want.
- Lucille Clifton
Amazing Peace
Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
Flood waters await us in our avenues.
Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to
avalanche
Over unprotected villages.
The sky slips low and grey and threatening.
We question ourselves.
What have we done
to so affront nature?
We worry God.
Are you there? Are you there really?
Does the covenant you made with us still hold?
Into this climate of fear and apprehension,
Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness
high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship.
It is the Glad Season.
Thunder ebbs to silence
and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.
Flood waters recede into memory.
Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us
As we make our way to higher ground.
Hope is born again in the faces of children
It rides on the shoulders of our aged
as they walk into their sunsets.
Hope spreads around the earth,
brightening all things,
Even hate which crouches,
breeding in dark corridors.
In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.
At first it is too soft.
Then only half heard.
We listen carefully as it gathers strength.
We hear a sweetness.
The word is Peace.
It is loud now.
It is louder.
Louder than the explosion of bombs.
We tremble at the sound.
We are thrilled by its presence.
It is what we have hungered for.
Not just the absence of war.
But true Peace.
A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.
Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.
We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.
We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.
We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come.
Peace.
Come and fill us and our world with your majesty.
We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
Implore you to stay a while with us.
So we may learn by your shimmering light
How to look beyond complexion and see community.
It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.
On this platform of peace, we can create a language
To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.
At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ
Into the great religions of the world.
We jubilate the precious advent of trust.
We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope.
All the earth's tribes loosen their voices
To celebrate the promise of Peace.
We, Angels and Mortals, Believers and Non-Believers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.
Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul.
- Maya Angelou
The Bad Old Days
The summer of nineteen eighteen
I read The Jungle and The
Research Magnificent. That fall
My father died and my aunt
Took me to Chicago to live.
The first thing I did was to take
A streetcar to the stockyards.
In the winter afternoon,
Gritty and fetid, I walked
Through the filthy snow, through the
Squalid streets, looking shyly
Into the people’s faces,
Those who were home in the daytime.
Debauched and exhausted faces,
Starved and looted brains, faces
Like the faces in the senile
And insane wards of charity
Hospitals. Predatory
Faces of little children.
Then as the soiled twilight darkened,
Under the green gas lamps, and the
Sputtering purple arc lamps,
The faces of the men coming
Home from work, some still alive with
The last pulse of hope or courage,
Some sly and bitter, some smart and
Silly, most of them already
Broken and empty, no life,
Only blinding tiredness, worse
Than any tired animal.
The sour smells of a thousand
Suppers of fried potatoes and
Fried cabbage bled into the street.
I was giddy and sick, and out
Of my misery I felt rising
A terrible anger and out
Of the anger, an absolute vow.
Today the evil is clean
And prosperous, but it is
Everywhere, you don’t have to
Take a streetcar to find it,
And it is the same evil.
And the misery, and the
Anger, and the vow are the same.
- Kenneth Rexroth
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
- William Carlos Williams
Imagining
What if God isnʼt a noun
to be empowered and worshiped
but a verb of creation
powered by love?
What if every single tree
drawn in primary school
is a sacred work of art
worthy of joyful notice?
What if our lives are built
on a web of kindness,
a net,
which holds everything living.
What if the rocks are alive
singing strength and courage;
vibrating
from our feet right up to our heart?
What if we loved ourselves
as deeply as the mountain
who,
caressed by water,
surrenders herself
into sand?
What if our most loved,
intra-national pastime
is a game of entertainment
where we all win?
What if no one aspired
to be a millionaire
and money no longer had power
but was simply a means of tender-ness.
What if transforming our world
by imagining it
can
actually make it happen?
- Deborah Rodney
Some Questions about the Storm
What's the bird ratio overhead?
Zero: zero. Maybe it's El Niño?
The storm, was it bad?
Here the worst ever. Every tree hurt.
Do you love trees?
Only the gingko, the fir, the birch.
Yours? Do you name your trees?
Who owns the trees? Who's talking
You presume a dialogue. Me and You.
Yes. Your fingers tap. I'm listening.
Will you answer? Why mention trees?
When the weather turned rain into ice, the leaves failed.
So what? Every year leaves fail. The cycle. Birth to death.
In the night the sound of cannon, and death everywhere.
What did you see?
Next morning, roots against the glass.
Who's talking now and in familiar language? Get real.
What's real is the broken crown. The trunk shattered.
Was that storm worse than others?
Yes and no. The wind's torque twisted open the tree's tibia.
Fool. You're talking about vegetables. Do you love the patio
tomato? The Christmas cactus?
Yes. And the magnolia on the roof, the felled crabapple, the topless
spruce.
- Hilda Raz
The Street Cleaner
She had a purpose
Cleaning the streets
Some days it was dirt
Some days it was trash
And some days it was
Rose petals
From the funeral marches
Strewn on the road
By insane motheres and fathers
Who lost their sons and daughter
Infants and grand-children
To war
She heard the voices
Which arose from the dead
Bodies never buried
With her broom in hand
She dutifully
Made circles of rose petals
In the quiet places
To honor them
A touch of beauty
She thought
In this time of darknes
Then she moved on
Her palm frond broom in hand
Cleaning
- Corlene Van Sluizer