Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front


Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy somethin
they will call you. When they wnat you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

- Wendell Berry

Imagine The Angels of Bread
This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.

This is the year that those
who swim the border’s undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.

If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.

So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.
- Martin Espada

Thanks Larry!!

One of my favorite poems from one of my favorite poets. I've read this over and over for many years, and it always inspires, and unfortunately always seems so insightful about the state of the world.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die...

---

Permanently

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

Each Sentence says one thing—for example, “Although it was a dark rainy day when the Adjective walked by,
I shall remember the pure and sweet expression on her face until the day I perish from the green, effective earth."

Or, “Will you please close the window, Andrew?”

Or, for example, “Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on the window sill has changed color recently to a light yellow,
due to the heat from the boiler factory which exists nearby.”

In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, “And! But!”
But the Adjective did not emerge.

As the Adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat—
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.

- Kenneth Koch

I Call Your Name

Before dawn I begin naming
the ten thousand things, one-
by-one, touching each with my mind
as they take their place in this world.
Orion, Cassiopeia, the moon hanging
like a scimitar over the horizon’s edge,
and the milky swoosh arching over,
all these find their places in the predawn sky.
Soon I call the crow out of the black nest
and the jay, blue against the rose light.
Then come the tall pines, needles and cones
and bark plates blackened from last year’s fire.
The soft whisper of the wind
rustling the dry oak leaves
and stirring the spiny holly
waken with the early light.
When the sun comes up, my words rush
to fill the land and space with forms,
lines, and shadows defining each thing
with its proper name and lineage.
Where are you in all these words?
I call your name to awake you
from the lures of the dark knight.
I call your name. Come to me.
*
*
-*Newton Smith

A Chunk of Amethyst

Held up to the window light the Amethyst has
elegant corridors, that give and take light. The discipline
of its many planes suggest that there is no use trying to live
forever. Its exterior is jagged, but in the inner house all is
in order. Its corridors become ledges, solidified thoughts that
pass each other.

This chunk of Amethyst is a cool thing, hard as a
dragon's tongue. The sleeping times of the whole human race
lie hidden there. When the fingers fold the chunk into the
palm, the palm hears organ music, the low notes that makes the
sins of the whole congregation resonate, and catches the
criminal five miles away with a tinge of doubt.

With all its planes, it turns four or five faces toward
us at once, and four or five meanings enter the mind.

The exhilaration we felt as children returns...We feel the
wind on the face as we go down hill, the sled's speed
increasing.

- Robert Bly

The Future


For God’s sake, be done
with this jabber of “a better world.”
What blasphemy! No “futuristic”
twit or child thereof ever
in embodied light will see
a better world than this, though they
foretell inevitably a worse.
Do something! Go cut the weeds
beside the oblivious road. Pick up
the cans and bottles, old tires,
and dead predictions. No future
can be stuffed into this presence
except by being dead. The day is
clear and bright, and overhead
the sun not yet half finished
with his daily praise.


- Wendell Berry

To Say Nothing But Thank You


All day I try to say nothing but thank you,
breathe the syllables in and out with every step I
take through the rooms of my house and outside into
a profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden
where the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups.

I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring
and to the cold wind of its changes. Gratitude comes easy
after a hot shower, when my loosened muscles work,
when eyes and mind begin to clear and even unruly
hair combs into place.

Dialogue with the invisible can go on every minute,
and with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as I
remember who I am, a woman learning to praise
something as small as dandelion petals floating on the
steaming surface of this bowl of vegetable soup,
my happy, savoring tongue.

- Jeanne Lohmann

Just This


When I think of the patience I have had
back in the dark before I remember
or knew it was night until the light came
all at once at the speed it was born to
with all the time in the world to fly through
not concerned about ever arriving
and then the gathering of the first stars
unhurried in their flowering spaces
and far into the story the planets
cooling slowly and the ages of rain
then the seas starting to bear memory
the gaze of the first cell at its waking
how did this haste begin this little time
at any time this reading by lightning
scarcely a word this nothing this heaven


- W.S. Merwin

Upon The Fall Of Troy

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Nothing occurs this morning,
nothing save the near drowning of Odysseus,
who keeps pressing on nonetheless
until, under the tangled bower
of the boughs of the wild and the tame
twin olives, he covers himself with a duff of leaves,
and grey-eyed Athena grants him rest.

Let us then dream with Odysseus
the rest of our lives,
as he did upon such parlous storm.
The door will open
and all our daughters pour in.
And thus the plain day begins.

I hope I wish you well as
I bury my nose in my affairs.
Odd jobs to be done about this place,
A thing or two to write
and the chain of old responsibilities.

If you think the chores and itches of Job
are required, sit down and have
this tea with me. Mercy also is a sacred cup.
It empties suffering. And peace
is neither tedious nor bland.

What burned the capitol down
is long over the horizon.
The earthquake shock trembled mountains,
I can tell you that. But I neither
remember nor recall the indulgence.

So settle with me here. The dogs
may scramble up our knees
and we may forget what we meant to say.
This smile, this smile may depart when we must write:

“They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead.”
It strikes us dumb, our systems shake
and bow down under the heavy news
of the end of the love of our lives.
Words that tell us, yes, there is nothing left to come.
We weep so deeply. Because that, that is the final tremor.

- Bruce Moody

Tourists

Visits of condolence is all we get from them.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.
They have their pictures taken
Together with our famous dead
At Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb
And on Ammunition Hill.
They weep over our sweet boys
And lust after our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool, blue bathrooms.

-*Yehuda Amichai

INVOCATION

Let us try what it is to be true to gravity,
to grace, to the given, faithful to our own voices,

to lines making the map of our furrowed tongue.
Turned toward the root of a single word, refusing

solemnity and slogans, let us honor what hides
and does not come easy to speech. The pebbles

we hold in our mouths help us to practice song,
and we sing to the sea. May the things of this world

be preserved to us, their beautiful secret
vocabularies. We are dreaming it over and new,

the language of our tribe, music we hear
we can only acknowledge. May the naming powers

be granted. Our words are feathers that fly
on our breath. Let them go in a holy direction.

-- Jeanne Lohmann

lluminated by The Light


It could be imagined
That a ship, sailing north to Newport with a cargo of sugar and molasses, was shipwrecked on Gay Head.*

It is conceivable
When the ship broke up, the sugar dissolved, the casks of molasses sank, that the Wampanoag salvaged everything that didn't float away, even the ballast stones.

It could be
That the ballast stones from a New England slave ship were the foundation of the first Gay Head Light.

Possibly
They used 340 ballast stones, one for each slave captured in Madagascar, sailed round the Cape of Good Hope, across the Atlantic, and sold in the Caribbean.*

Historians say
The shipwreck would have been a disaster to Newport's two dozen distilleries, wanting sugar and molasses to turn into rum, to*ship out to Africa, to trade for more slaves.

Whereas
The Southern states with vast arable tracts to farm needed slaves, the Northern states, with poor soil and good harbors, looked to the sea.*

Evidently
It was easier to catch people and sell them than it was to catch whales and boil them on board.*

Records show*
Newport had 150 ships dedicated, whole or in part, to the slave trade in 1750. The economy of New England was based on shipping. Shipping meant slaving, whole or in part.

It is said
Everyone profited one way or another; rope makers, tanners, coopers, sail makers, provisioners like cattlemen and farmers, candle makers, vintners, potters, weavers.*Everyone had dirty hands; the Faneuils, the Browns, the Whipples, the Cabots.*Ezra Stiles, while President of Yale, imported slaves.*

Unquestionably
Ships can't be permitted to sink virtually within sight of home port. A light house at Gay Head was essential.

After all,
Business is business.

It is recorded
That America's most noble names endorsed the Gay Head Light. From Nantucket, a Coffin requested it. George Washington approved it. Alexander Hamilton funded it. Paul Revere was tinsmith.*

It is established
That more than half the American ships involved in the African slave trade were out of Rhode Island. Over a span of two hundred years, Newport ships trafficked 300,000 slaves.

It would seem
On the rum leg*of the Triangle Trade, ships sailed up Vineyard Sound, their way made safe by the Gay Head Light.

New England*
Rectitude and pious protests not withstanding, the Gay Head Light, three whites and one red, illuminated the long night of slavery, and waited with indifference for dawn.

-*Julie Jaffe

Lute Music

The Earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents—
A small franchise indeed.
Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,
Like everybody had once—

Here at the year’s end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts—
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses—
Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.

- Kenneth Rexroth

A Thousand Year of Healing

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

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

-*Susa Silvermarie

A Great Need

Out

Of a great need

We are all holding hands

And climbing.

Not loving is a letting go.

Listen,

The terrain around here

Is

Far too

Dangerous

For

That.

-*Hafiz of Shiraz

(translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

The Exchange*

Between Wytheville, Virginia
and the North Carolina line,
he meets a wagon headed
where he's been, seated beside
her parents a dark-eyed girl
who grips the reins in her fist,
no more than sixteen, he'd guess
as they come closer and she
doesn't look away or blush
but allows his eyes to hold
hers that moment their lives pass.
He rides into Boone at dusk,
stops at an inn where he buys
his supper, a sleepless night
thinking of fallow fields still
miles away, the girl he might
not find the like of again.
When dawn breaks he mounts his roan,
then backtracks, searches three days
hamlets and farms, any smoke
rising above the tree line
before he heads south, toward home,
the French Broad's valley where spring
unclinches the dogwood buds
as he plants the bottomland,
come night by candlelight builds
a butter churn and cradle,
cherry headboard for the bed,
forges a double-eagle
into a wedding ring and then
back to Virginia and spends
five weeks riding and asking
from Elk Creek to Damascas
before he finds the wagon
tethered to the hitching post
of a crossroads store, inside
the girl who smiles as if she'd
known all along his gray eyes
would search until they found her.
She asks one question, his name,
as her eyes study the gold
smoldering there between them,
the offered palm she lightens,
slips the ring on herself so
he knows right then the woman
she will be, bold enough match
for a man rash as his name.

-*Ron Rash

Epic*

It’s you I’d like to see Greece again with
You I’d like to take to bed of cyclamen
You know I nurse a certain myth
about myself *************that I descend
de tribus d’origine asiatique
and am part Thracian or Macedonian
cleaving to a Hellenic mystique
after centuries’ migration inland

a full moon ************rising over the Acropolis
I can repeat the scene *******this time à deux
as then I had no one to kiss
slicing halloumi amid the hullabaloo
of a rooftop taverna in   July
The doors that opened to lovers
pulled like tree roots from darkness * * * *
close upon us now like book covers

The alcove in which we embrace
is cool with brilliant tile
and weirded by a dove’s note ******chase
of ouzo with Uzi *********junta-style
History makes its noise *****we duck
till it passes *****Love we think is our due
Not we think like the epoch
the unchosen thing we’re wedded to

-*Ange Mlinko

Phenomenal Woman

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.

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Maya Angelou

I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It's the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say,
It's in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It's in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.


- Maya Angelou

Ancient Continuities


When we change our watchbands
or our shoes every day, don a new
pair of jeans in the morning, build
an entire world economy on faster
replacement; when we wring just an
instant's interest from transient models
of now, will we watch passively
as one age of consumption succumbs
to the next, the next?
If I had our foremothers' wisdom,
I'd feel our drumming heartbeats
link us with Earth's womb
(so nearly emptied now, nearly sealed)
and with the Moon, our ancient
center of time. Only half our mothers'
wisdom remains on the shelf, to be quartered,
quartered and served like a slice of pizza,
separated from the whole round crust.


- Andrea English

Comprehension

I do not comprehend why mountain reaches for sky with such exuberance,
Why valley curls along the riverbed with such divinity,
Why ravine descends deeper, sometimes, than my despair,
Why hills roll so sweetly out like waves and make me want to walk them,
swim them, dive them,
own them.
They say it’s geography
/geology
/geometry
/human nature
or some combination of all the –ologies and –ometries
and therapies
but I suspect something deeper in the architecture;
like: everything is a reflection of everything else,
like: we are living in a kind of funhouse of mirrors,
that isn’t always fun—
that should be painfully obvious by now—
and for that, mountain reflects sky
reflects valley
reflects river
reflects ravine
reflects despair
reflects divinity
reflects the ink spill of night that hold the stars and galaxies above.

We are the tealeaves in our own fortune’s cup,
and the stars mountains and galaxies
are all steeping with us
in this warm ambrosia;
they, casting our die
as we, cast theirs,
spelling each other’s fortunes
like rain spells the flowers’
or Spring spells Winter’s.

- Gary Turchin

Fear

I release you, my beautiful and terrible
fear. I release you. You were my beloved
and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you
as myself. I release you with all the
pain I would know at the death of
my children.

You are not my blood anymore.

I give you back to the soldiers
who burned down my house, beheaded my children,
raped and sodomized my brothers and sisters.
I give you back to those who stole the
food from our plates when we were starving.

I release you, fear, because you hold
these scenes in front of me and I was born
with eyes that can never close.

I release you
I release you
I release you
I release you

I am not afraid to be angry.
I am not afraid to rejoice.
I am not afraid to be black.
I am not afraid to be white.
I am not afraid to be hungry.
I am not afraid to be full.
I am not afraid to be hated.
I am not afraid to be loved.

to be loved, to be loved, fear.

Oh, you have choked me, but I gave you the leash.
You have gutted me but I gave you the knife.
You have devoured me, but I laid myself across the fire.

I take myself back, fear.
You are not my shadow any longer.
I won’t hold you in my hands.
You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice
my belly, or in my heart my heart
my heart my heart

But come here, fear
I am alive and you are so afraid
of dying.

- Joy Harjo

Hearing a crow with no mouth
Cry in the deep
Darkness of the night,
I feel a longing for
My father before he was born.


- Ikkyu Sojun

Searching for the Dharma

You've traveled up ten thousand steps in search of the Dharma.
So many long days in the archives, copying, copying.

The gravity of the Tang and the profundity of the Sung
make heavy baggage.

Here! I've picked you a bunch of wildflowers.
Their meaning is the same
but they're much easier to carry.

- Xu Yun

I Got Heaven...

I swear that, in Gardena, on a moonlit suburban street, There are souls that twirl like kites lashed to the wrists of the living And spirits who tumble in a solemn limbo between 164th And the long river of stars to Amida’s Paradise in the West. As though I belonged, I’ve come from my life of papers and exile To walk among these penitents at the Festival of the Dead, The booths full of sellers hawking rice cakes and candied plums, All around us the rhythmic chant of min’yo bursting through loudspeakers, Calling out the mimes and changes to all who dance. I stop at a booth and watch a man, deeply tanned from work outdoors, Pitch bright, fresh quarters into blue plastic bowls. He wins a porcelain cat, a fishnet bag of marbles, Then a bottle of shōyu, and a rattle shaped like tam-tam he gives to a child. I hear the words of a Motown tune carry through the gaudy air …got sunshine on a cloudy day…got the month of May… As he turns from the booth and re-enters the River of Heaven— These dancers winding in brocades and silk sleeves, A faithlit circle briefly as warm in the summer night.

- Garret Hongo

Taking Back The Moon

I am taking back the moon
for the lunatics,
the lovers,
and the poets.

The real estate agents
may notice a gap in the night sky,
have to put away their signs.

The scientists can measure
the diamater of this darker
darkness,
triangulate its distance from earth,
and conclude that what's missing
must be the moon.

But I have it right here
under my arm,
wrapped in a notebook
leaking light,
and am coming toward you
with a poem it helped me write.
I pull it out and read by the moon's light:

The Swimmer

He dives into the moon
from the pier on the lake,
hits his target dead center;
and, coming up for air,
finds none.

- Duane Ackerson

Make a Law So That the Spine Remembers Wings


So that the truant boy may go steady with the State,
So that in his spine a memory of wings
Will make his shoulders tense & bend
Like a thing already flown
When the bracelets of another school of love
Are fastened to his wrists,
Make a law that doesn’t have to wait
Long until someone comes along to break it.


So that in jail he will have the time to read
How the king was beheaded & the hawk that rode
The king’s wrist died of a common cold,
And learn that chivalry persists,
And what first felt like an insult to the flesh
Was the blank ‘o’ of love.
Put the fun back into punishment.
Make a law that loves the one who breaks it.


So that no empty court will make a  judge recall
Ice fishing on some overcast bay,
Shivering in the cold beside his father, it ought
To be an interesting law,
The kind of thing that no one can obey,
A law that whispers “Break me.”
Let the crows roost & caw.
A good judge is an example to us all.


So that the patrolman can still whistle
“The Yellow Rose of Texas” through his teeth
And even show some faint gesture of respect
While he cuffs the suspect,
Not ungently, & says things like ok,
That’s it, relax,
It’ll go better for you if you don’t resist,
Lean back just a little, against me.


- Larry Levis

Ulysses: Endgame

Hero? Why is it then I tremble,

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alone at night, when dead men
with desolate eyes wander
the dark corners of my dreams?

In sweat of sleep, I see Achilles
felled by a single blow to his heel
and feel my own life hanging
by a thread from Penelope’s loom.

With every rise of sun, I cough up
blood and ash from smoldering Troy,
my spittle a blot of a once great city
and its people lost to all of time.

At long last, I set sail for Ithaca, but
my knees quake to think of Penelope,
waiting with her weavings of lonely
days and unravelings of lonelier nights.

What will she read in the red script
of my eyes? The slaughter of women
and children? Hector’s obscene death?
Old Queen Hecuba on her knees?

I must scrub the stench of blood
from my pores, wash Circe’s scent
from my tangled hair, take care only
Penelope’s name falls from my lips.

I will swear to her, if I could begin
again, I would choose to stay and raise
our boy, tend the fields, and grow old
with her by my side.

And yet, as I vow to speak these words,
my hands grow restless for heft of sword
and shield and I long for the company
of old companions at my side.


- Patrice Warrender

Whatever It Is

Whatever it is
No matter how fast or how deeply you breathe
The colors on the back of your eyelids
The length of your neck or the tilt of your back
Let it go.

Whether it’s wondering what you want
Or how long you’ve been doing this or what you
Think you must learn in this life
Let it go.

No matter if you will be going to a movie tonight
Or whether space extends infinitely in all directions
Whether you will ever have a moment with no end
Let it all go.

No matter if you do not understand at all
Or think you must dissect it until nothing is left
No matter if you are having the experience you desire
Or merely having the experience you are having.
Let it go.

No matter if you ever find pervasive joy
Underneath whatever you mistake for sorrow
Or whether you wish to start this life over again
This is no time to wonder about time.

This is no time to wonder how you got here
Or how many lifetimes it has taken before
You can brandish your luminosity as if it were a light.
It is not yours. Or anyone’s at all.
So let it go.

No matter if you can speak your truth or even know it
Whether you like it or not that is not yours either
So speak your truth as if it belongs to everyone
Because there is no speaker and nothing spoken
And therefore nothing to let go.

You came into my life from a land I had not imagined
Speaking a language I did not know that I could hear
But now that I can hear it spoken in my own heart

I let go of you every day as if it is the last.


- Gary Horvitz

This World

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...0_14-20-26.png

I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it
nothing fancy.
But it seems impossible.
Whatever the subject, the morning sun
glimmers it.
The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open and becomes a star.
The ants bore into the peony bud and there is a dark
pinprick well of sweetness.
As for the stones on the beach, forget it.
Each one could be set in gold.
So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds
were singing.
And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music
out of their leaves.
And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and
beautiful silence
as comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we’re not too
hurried to hear it.
As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs
even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too,
and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones,
so happy to be where they are, on the beach, instead of being
locked up in gold.

- Mary Oliver

DOWN BY THE SALLEY GARDENS


Down by the salley gardens
my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens
with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy,
as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish,
with her would not agree.


In a field by the river
my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder
she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy,
as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish,
and now am full of tears.


- William Butler Yeats

Dawn Outside The City Walls

You can see the face of everything, and it is white—
plaster, nightmare, adobe, anemia, cold—
turned to the east. Oh closeness to life!
Hardness of life! Like something
in the body that is animal—root, slag-ends—
with the soul still not set well there—
and mineral and vegetable!
Sun standing stiffly against man,
against the sow, the cabbages, the mud wall!
—False joy, because you are merely
in time, as they say, and not in the soul!

The entire sky taken up
by moist and steaming heaps,
a horizon of dung piles.
Sour remains, here and there,
of the night. Slices
of the green moon, half-eaten,
crystal bits from false stars,
plaster, the paper ripped off, still faintly
sky-blue. The birds
not really awake yet, in the raw moon,
streetlight nearly out.
Mob of beings and things!
—A true sadness, because you are really deep
in the soul, as they say, not in time at all!

- Juan Ramón Jiménez
(Translated by Robert Bly)

Calling All Women

Calling all sisters. Calling all
Righteous sisters.
Calling all women. To steal away
To our secret place. Have a meeting
Face to face. Look at the facts
And determine our pace. Calling all
Women.
We want to reach – first and second
And
Third world women
Come together!
Women in and outside the power structure –
Working women,
Welfare women,
Women who feel alienated and isolated
Women who are all frustrated
Women who have given up – women – women
Questioning women – women
Unpolarized and unorganized.
Ostracized. Tired of being penalized
Come help us start to bridge the gaps
Racial, cultural, or generation
We want some action and veneration.
These men, these men they
Just ain’t doing it.
They’ve had hundreds of years
Now they ’bout to ruin it.
Kitchen, office, ex-prison women
Old and young and middle-aged women
Make this scene
Oh yes, and bring your lunch!
Problems, problems common problems
That we make and cause each other
Sister, daughter, old grandmother
Female child you can bring your little brother
Take the subway, grad a cab
Saddle your mule
Bike it, limo
Take a choo-choo, fly
Or pick ‘em up and lay ‘em down.
Socialism, capitalism, communism
Feminism, womanism, lesbianism
Here-and-now or futurism
We just can’t afford a schism
We got to get together or die.
Now is the time for an evolution
Let’s all search and find a solution
For how we’ll make it to the next revolution
Or die.
Oh yes. And don’t forget your lunch!

- Ruby Dee
(1923-2014)

All ThingsThe brief secrets are still here,
and the light has come back.
The word remember touches my hand,
But I shake it off and watch the turkey buzzards bank and wheel
Against the occluded sky.
All of the little names sink down,
weighted with what is invisible,
But no one will utter them, no one will smooth their rumpled hair.


There isn’t much time, in any case.
There isn’t much left to talk about
as the year deflates.
There isn’t a lot to add.
Road-worn, December-colored, they cluster like unattractive angels
Wherever a thing appears,
Crisp and unspoken, unspeakable
in their mute and glittering garb.


All afternoon the clouds have been sliding toward us
out of the
Blue Ridge.
All afternoon the leaves have scuttled
Across the sidewalk and driveway, clicking their clattery claws.
And now the evening is over us,
Small slices of silence
running under a dark rain,
Wrapped in a larger.
- Charles Wright
(America's new Poet Laureate)

Dad

you
were of a generation
who dressed up for
doctor appointments
airline flights
dinner on Sunday night
your operation

now
I take these clothes
home with me
sad new shoes
your good black trousers
a black v neck sweater
a fresh white shirt

you
were of a generation
who revered doctors
loved the flag
found belief easy

you
a good patient
unfailingly polite
had corny jokes
for orderlies
nurses
people in white coats

now
you are gone
and I am left
holding a bag


- Les Bernstein

For a Father

The longer we live,
The more of your presence
We find, laid down,
Weave upon weave
Within our lives.

The quiet constancy of your gentleness
Drew no attention to itself,
Yet filled our home
With a climate of kindness
Where each mind felt free
To seek its own direction.

As the fields of distance
Opened inside childhood,
Your presence was a sheltering tree
Where out fledgling hearts could rest.

The earth seemed to trust your hands
As they tilled the soil, put in the seed,
Gathered together the lonely stones.

Something in you loved to inquire
In the neighborhood of air,
Searching its transparent rooms
For the fallen glances of God.

The warmth and wonder of your prayer
Opened our eyes to glimpse
The subtle ones who
Are eternally there.

Whenever, silently, in off moments,
The beauty of the whole thing overcame you,
You would gaze quietly out upon us,
The look from your eyes
Like a kiss alighting on skin.

There are many things
We could have said,
But words never wanted
To name them;
And perhaps a word
That is quietly sensed
Across the air
In another’s heart
Becomes the inner companion
To one’s own unknown.

- John O’Donohue

Just Now I Heard My Father Singing

Just now I heard my father singing
an old, old song he used to sing
when his hands were busy
with something, as mine were until
I heard that voice: he has been dead
for eight years!

Just now I heard my father's laughter.
That, too, came from my mouth.


- Alden Nowlan

A Praise

His memories lived in the place
like fingers locked in the rock ledges
like roots. When he died
and his influence entered the air
I said, Let my mind be the earth
of his thought, let his kindness
go ahead of me. Though I do not escape
the history barbed in my flesh,
certain wise movements of his hands,
the turns of his speech
keep with me. His hope of peace
keeps with me in harsh days,
the shell of his breath dimming away
three summers in the earth.

- Wendell Berry

All The Difficult Hours and Minutes

All the difficult hours and minutes
are like salted plums in a jar.
Wrinkled, turn steeply into themselves,
they mutter something the color of  sharkfins to the glass.
Just so, calamity turns toward calmness.
First the jar holds the umeboshi, then the rice does.

- Jane Hirshfield

Although the wind

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

- Izumi Shikibu
(Translated by Jane Hirshfield )

Poem: By The Wild-Haired Corn


I don’t know
if the sunflowers
are angels always,
but surely sometimes.
Who, even in heaven,
wouldn’t want to wear,
for awhile,
such a seed-face
and brave spine,
a coat of leaves
with so many pockets—
and who wouldn’t want
to stand, for a summer day,
in the hot fields,
in the lonely country
of the wild-haired corn?
This much I know,
when I see the bright
stars of their faces,
when I’m strolling nearby,
I grow soft in my speech,
and soft in my thoughts,
and I remember how everything will be everything else,
by and by.
- Mary Oliver

en el solsticio veraniego/on the Summer Solstice

(y a mis queridos cangrejos/& to my dear crabs)


Cancer

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...2_12-43-05.png

The crab longs,
after the long day,
to tear from the sky
that coin of cold silver
that is the moon.
Its eyes are ruby beads
& in its entrails
it keeps a sensitive pearl
which it longs to carry very deep,
very deep
to the cardinal point of the waters,
the primordial depths of the sea.

- Rafael Jesús González


Cáncer

El cangrejo anhela,
después del largo día,
arrancar del cielo
esa moneda de plata fría
que es la luna.
Sus ojos son cuentas de rubí
y en las entrañas
guarda un perla sensitiva
que anhela llevar muy hondo,
muy hondo
al punto cardinal del agua,
al fondo primordial del mar.

Toda Guerra es por Tierra


All war is for land, though
it knocks at our doors dressed
in austere religious robes or cradling
law books in the thoughtless
crook of its arm.

The Land is wordless, she welcomes
lovers, rapists, pilgrims and psychopaths.
She opens, accepts destiny
Dependent on her children’s
memory of the sweet root
of suckle playing on their palates.

Warriors, her children, bewildered
and dumb look to the clerics,
to politicians, poor substitutes
for gods—perverted, cruel understudies
to the One who holds them all.

They seek Her without gazing
beneath their heavy, brutal boots.

She is patient, sorrowful,
She is here.

- Rebecca del Rio

Bird Dance

Each morning I observe
birds coming and going
outside on my deck

I sit out in the sun and sip my ginger tea
and notice them tentative in the trees
all around- maybe one or two stealthfully
sneaking in quickly for a seed or two

When I retreat to watch from inside,
writing at my table gazing out
through the double sliding glass doors,
they eagerly arrive-
Singles-usually a large blue scrubjay or
a black and white red-capped woodpecker
who chases everyone else away-the bullies
The smaller ones- towhees, finches, chickadees
and more mostly brown with a touch of orange or yellow
come in pairs or trios or more.
Now and then a hummingbird hovers circling around
and sips at a nearby flower

The winged adventurers are calling
their family and friends to the party-
Several on the ledge, a couple on the feeder,
one at a time in the nearby hanging birdbath-
a sip from the edge or a dunk plunging in and out,
the water glistening on their flapping wings.
They chirp and chatter calling to each other
like welcome friends-

I have my field guides at the ready trying
to learn a few of their names-
Why can’t they announce themselves on arrival?!
Good morning giant lady, I’m a Red-breasted Nuthatch.
Hello there, we’re Black-headed Grosbeaks.
Hey, look out! I’m a Downy Woodpecker.

Daily I stumble along, I would be an Audubon Society disgrace-
I can’t seem to identify them and remember their names
BUT I enjoy the life energy they bring and share
Reminding me that
Yes, I’m alive and grateful to be here.


- Carla Musik

This poem touches me today since I am realizing that my birdfeeder, and the filling of it, is not in accord with nature's balance and God's creation of it. I am seeing how my desire to feed the birds is based on a selfish wish to see & enjoy (& so I feed) Certain birds ~ not the scrub jays, for example, but the house & gold finches, yes.

So the birdfeeder I employ doesn't make room for jays & other large birds to get to the seeds. Then also, I am realizng, the birds squabble w/ each other, competing for placement on the feeder, whereas in trees and on grasses, there is Plenty Of Room for every one; No need to bicker & peck & chase each other away.

I am feeling that my wish to enjoy the birds in this way is damaging to their otherwise perfectly harmonious life! Including, they become dependent on my feeding of them, morning after morning, perched, looking, waiting for the feeder to be filled... instead of finding seeds, worms, nats and others, God's creation offers all birds, in abundance.

I appreciate this forum... a place to respond to the poems Larry abundantly offers us! Thank You,

To feed or not to feed ? …

Should you feed the birds?

It is a little ironic that all nature enthusiasts know that it is “bad” to feed the animals … they become dependent on the food, and in some cases will become a nuisance or dangerous, prying open cars or breaking into homes to get more food. Then the animal has to be put down or moved to a new habitat. But that sort of bad outcome is more common with, say, bears than it is with, say, chickadees. The irony here is that bird lovers, who are always nature enthusiasts, do not seem to balk at setting up bird feeders. In fact, approximately on half a million metric tons of seed is put out for the birds in the United States and the United Kingdom.

This must have an effect on the birds, for better or worse. Two studies just published by the same research team address this issue.

To read the article in full, go to https://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2...eed-the-birds/

My Mother’s Lost Heart

Loses her heart in life’s trials,
Leaves behind her a closet of nightmares
No one born of her declares
The belly of her predator full.

A loving funeral with naught a tear.
Come Emily D. with your gravity,
Lend words to capture the depravity
Mother/daughter disbanded wear.

Human beings are relentless.
We demand heaven or fall into hell,
Limbo for her stillborn no sell:
That soul insult found her address.

Her youngest lived the play for all to see,
Shakespeare’s depth in that tragedy.
From that one’s husband flowed the grief
Full enough to embrace life’s thief.


- Brian McSweeney

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Ronaldo:

To feed or not to feed ? …

Should you feed the birds?

It is a little ironic that all nature enthusiasts know that it is “bad” to feed the animals … they become dependent on the food, and in some cases will become a nuisance or dangerous, prying open cars or breaking into homes to get more food. Then the animal has to be put down or moved to a new habitat. But that sort of bad outcome is more common with, say, bears than it is with, say, chickadees. The irony here is that bird lovers, who are always nature enthusiasts, do not seem to balk at setting up bird feeders. In fact, approximately on half a million metric tons of seed is put out for the birds in the United States and the United Kingdom.

This must have an effect on the birds, for better or worse. Two studies just published by the same research team address this issue.

To read the article in full, go to https://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2...eed-the-birds/

---

For anyone who is following this conversation, perhaps you'll join me, listening to a seminar on Creating Loving Eco Systems, with AJ Miller (also known far & wide as Jesus) facilitating. I love & appreciate the understanding he brings to this equation -- https://youtu.be/ndtLmM20hH4https://www.waccobb.net/forums/images/youtube.png

Julie (who posted yesterday's response about feeding the birds), wow, the cumulus light of sky this morning!!

​The Call
(The first and last lines of the poem are from Tennyson’ s “Ulysses”)

“Though much is taken, much abides,”
speaks old Ulysses,
home at last but yearning still
for new adventures and a farther shore

as I, becalmed
in this airless city,
yearn for mountains and sea,
space and silence.

Oh, a mad restlessness is on me!

I will not be Penelope,
unravelling
the work of my days
while awaiting – what? – revelation?

Like the old man,
(and at his age, too)
I will count what still abides
and plan my escape.

I hear him shout
from afar,
as if through a shell held to my ear:
“Tis not too late
to seek a newer world!”

- Nina Mermey Klippel

may alchemy spin pain into love
in this moment
may the love course through me
weave fear into gratitude
tendrils touching and being touched by others
with this breath
beaming
brimming
boundless cloth shimmering
deep
full
unfurling with grace
gossamer garden bed
growing courage and kindness
tucking us in with tenderness

- Andrea Marquette

Riprap



Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles—
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.


- Gary Snyder

The Price of Experience


What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house , his wife, his children
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy
And in the withered field where the farmer plows for bread in vain


It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer's sun
And in the vintage and to sing on the wagon loaded with corn


It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted
To speak the laws of prudence to the homeless wanderer
To listen to the hungry raven's cry in wintry season
When the red blood is filled with wine and with the marrow of lambs


It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements
To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughterhouse moan;
To see a god on every wind and a blessing on every blast
To hear the sounds of love in the thunder storm
that destroys our enemies' house;
To rejoice in the blight that covers his field and the sickness
that cuts off his children


While our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door
and our children bring fruit and flowers


Then the groan and dthe dolor are quite forgotten
and the slave grinding at the mill
And the captive in chains and the poor in the prison
and the soldier in the field
When the shattered bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead


It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity:
Thus could I sing and thus rejoice: but it is not so with me


- William Blake

As I Grew Older

It was a long time ago.
I have almost forgotten my dream.
But it was there then,
In front of me,
Bright like a sun--
My dream.
And then the wall rose,
Rose slowly,
Slowly,
Between me and my dream.
Rose until it touched the sky--
The wall.
Shadow.
I am black.
I lie down in the shadow.
No longer the light of my dream before me,
Above me.
Only the thick wall.
Only the shadow.
My hands!
My dark hands!
Break through the wall!
Find my dream!
Help me to shatter this darkness,
To smash this night,
To break this shadow
Into a thousand lights of sun,
Into a thousand whirling dreams
Of sun!


- Langston Hughes

Dreamers


Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land,
Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.


I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.


- Siegfried Sassoon

Emerald Spider Between Rose Thorns

Imagine, not even or really ever tasting

a peach until well over 50, not once

sympathizing with Blake naked in his garden

insisting on angels until getting off the table

and coming home with my new heart. How absurd

to still have a body in this rainbow-gored,

crickety world and how ridiculous to be given one

in the first place, to be an object

like an orchid is an object, or a stone,

so bruisable and plummeting, arms

waving from the evening-ignited lake,

heading singing in the furnace feral and sweet,

tears that make the face grotesque,

tears that make it pure. How easy

it is now to get drunk on a single whiff

like a hummingbird or ant, on the laughter

of one woman and who knew how much I’d miss

that inner light of snow now that I’m in Texas.


- Dean Young

Lime Tree


On a spring day out at Harmony Farm,
among some herbs and sorrel, we bought
a Meyer lemon tree and a Bearss lime
and planted them in urns on the new deck.
And then, so quickly, you were ripped from life
and I consigned to tend these things alone.
Through a hard summer slowly the leaves
of the lemon blackened. I called nurseries
and tree farms. No one knew anything.
Autumn rain left it shriveled and weeping.
When I was out of town a strange cold snap
raved away on the frozen deck,

lemon leaves fell on the new red planks.
The empty, tangled boughs were blighted gray
and the lime too, stricken and it’s green leaves
long gone by spring - I quit watering it.
But a friend came by to help in the back.
The place was a wreckage of my winter.
When she watered it I said “don’t bother,
that one is dead”, but she said “no, look”.
A tiny green defiant speck had cracked
the gray bark to speak a just command
against the blue spring sky - like a barnacle
attached to a world that had died.


- Kevin Pryne

The Flag


At our best
we show our true colors,
fly the flag that stands
for our deepest, broadest
allegiance to each other,
to the Earth holy & diverse.


These are my colors:


red of my love that colors all
& is the root & flower & fruit,
the heart of my belief
& what I know of truth.


orange of my abandon, my surrender
to my living, mindless of laws
that would fetter the steps
of my wildest dances.


yellow of my joy that tastes
of the sun, exultation in the
wealth of the senses,
root of my power & my love.


green of my hopes that wing
my desires & lend will
to my acts, that inform
even my opposition
to outrage.


blue of my memories
that make my history of wings
that soar to the mountains
& drop to the ravines,
complex topography of myself.


purple of my sorrows, my remorse,
my shame for betrayals of the heart,
most often of omission,
through weariness or fear.
This is my flag;
its colors run,
diffuse at the edges,
blend, shade
into hues, half-tones
difficult to name.


The tongues that praise it
are so many, so varied, & so sweet
their chorus rivals the birds'
& silences the angels in their flight.
Known everywhere
as sign of peace & joy,
let this be our flag;
its colors dance.


- Rafael Jesús González

What I visualize after reading Rafael Jesús González's poem:

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Flag


At our best
we show our true colors,
fly the flag that stands
for our deepest, broadest
allegiance to each other,
to the Earth holy & diverse.


These are my colors:


red of my love that colors all
& is the root & flower & fruit,
the heart of my belief
& what I know of truth.


orange of my abandon, my surrender
to my living, mindless of laws
that would fetter the steps
of my wildest dances.


yellow of my joy that tastes
of the sun, exultation in the
wealth of the senses,
root of my power & my love.


green of my hopes that wing
my desires & lend will
to my acts, that inform
even my opposition
to outrage.


blue of my memories
that make my history of wings
that soar to the mountains
& drop to the ravines,
complex topography of myself.


purple of my sorrows, my remorse,
my shame for betrayals of the heart,
most often of omission,
through weariness or fear.
This is my flag;
its colors run,
diffuse at the edges,
blend, shade
into hues, half-tones
difficult to name.


The tongues that praise it
are so many, so varied, & so sweet
their chorus rivals the birds'
& silences the angels in their flight.
Known everywhere
as sign of peace & joy,
let this be our flag;
its colors dance.


- Rafael Jesús González

---

Water Shed


The green expanse of duck weed
Parts and there he sits,
Proud - or so I imagine -
In all his feathered irridescence,
Shedding water with neither thought nor effort.


The late Spring rains
Fall on Sonoma Mountain and English Hill,
Dancing down the Laguna and Atascadero Creek.
So Wintergreen becomes Summergold.


But where are the salmon, the steelhead,
The pronghorn and the grizzly?


There is so much for us to grieve now,
So much lost that we will never see again.
And yet so much still arising
That we have only begun to dream.


Can we shed despair
As we shed our tears
And see with clearer eyes
The shining form just now emerging?


- Larry Robinson

Song


The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction


the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.


Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human--
looks out of the heart
burning with purity -
for the burden of life
is love,


but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.


No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love -
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
- cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:


the weight is too heavy


- must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.


The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye -


yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.


- Allan Ginsberg

The Marvelous Women

All women speak two languages:
the language of men
and the language of silent suffering.
Some women speak a third,
the language of queens.
They are marvelous
and they are my friends.

My friends give me poetry.
If it were not for them
I’d be a seamstress out of work.
They send me their dresses
and I sew together poems,
enormous sails for ocean journeys.

My marvelous friends, these women
who are elegant and fix engines,
who teach gynecology and literacy,
and work in jails and sing and sculpt
and paint the ninety-nine names,
who keep each other’s secrets
and pass on each other’s spirits
like small packets of leavening,

it is from you I fashion poetry.
I scoop up, in handfuls, glittering
sequins that fall from your bodies
as you fall in love, marry, divorce,
get custody, get cats, enter
supreme courts of justice,
argue with God.

You rescuers on galloping steeds
of the weak and the wounded–
Creatures of beauty and passion,
powerful workers in love–
you are the poems.
I am only your stenographer.
I am the hungry transcriber
of the conjuring recipes you hoard
in the chests of your great-grandmothers.

My marvelous friends–the women
of brilliance in my life,
who levitate my daughters,
you are a coat of many colors
in silk tie-dye so gossamer
it can be crumpled in one hand.
You houris, you mermaids, swimmers
in dangerous waters, defiers of sharks–

My marvelous friends,
thirsty Hagars and laughing Sarahs,
you eloquent radio Aishas,
Marys drinking the secret
milkshakes of heaven,
slinky Zuleikas of desire,
gay Walladas, Harriets
parting the sea, Esthers in the palace,
Penelopes of patient scheming,

you are the last hope of the shrinking women.
You are the last hand to the fallen knights
You are the only epics left in the world

Come with me, come with poetry
Jump on this wild chariot, hurry –


- Mohja Kahf

Old Friends


Sometimes I see things at the edge of light --
small animals scurrying into shadow
from the corner of my eye, sometimes a man
shuffling off the road, disappearing
between the trees, lit by headlights, then gone.
And sometimes I hear things
outside the sandy blur of my tinnitus --
the yowl of the tom cat that’s been hanging around for months,
unseen birds, whose presence I scrawl on the white page,
what I think is a machine grinding in the distance, or voices,
the mind’s mutterings, over and over saying – what?
Sadness sadness sadness. There it is again,
grief, guilt, love. My old friends,
what can I do with your unsung laments,
your impossible losses?
Wind stirs the bamboo.
Brazen at last, without its close coat, the lily
blooms bright orange.
Something rustles in the woods and disappears
in the dry leaves at the edges of my life, small
soft animals in the corner of my eye -- no, not ever really
gone. For all our lives are intertwined, our songs
caught in the golden throats of the lilies,
there at the rim of the moment, in the half-light, the half-dark
of the world, where all suffering has its place
within the slightest breeze, the slow turn of petal in sunlight, each vein
distinct amid the gathering density of one life twisting
its strand with another in the great invisible braid
of the hidden river that moves through all of us,
here and after, ever after into mystery.

- Elizabeth Carothers Herron

The Oral Tradition


Read great poems and store them in your heart
No external storage devices are needed
When you begin to fathom the depths
Of the Oral Tradition and start your trek
Into the intricate wilderness of memory.
Of course no one in this casual modern world
Crisscrossed by information super highways
Told you that your own mind is a net
Trawling the seas of infinity,
And the ports of memory you anchor in,
Each one a place from which to disembark,
To trek into vast unexplored mindscapes,
And the synapses your mind weaves effortlessly
While you toil in the fields of poetry husbandry
Will simply surprise you endlessly.


- Brian McSweeney

Writing Unencumbered


I wrote books I thought would please my masters.
I wrote poems that were received as illumination
while others balked at a complexity, too confounding.
I wrote stories, long and short, from the inside out.
first and second person, too often muddled by a
vague and ambivalent author. Someday I hope to
sit under an open sky and write until twilight, maybe
beyond, when all the light is gone and whatever
I am writing is no more than a part of the darkness.
I will refuse a lamp and any revision by moonlight.
And there sitting and merged in intimate dark, my
mind smoothed out over the beckoning blank pages,
I will feel the ease of the pages writing themselves
with the pure natural invisibility of my hand.


- Rich Meyers

Makeweight

Love is the weight of the world
that we tote on our backs
in spite of the weight
longing to recognize
the truth lost in thickets.

Love is the light of the world
that can blind us sometimes
as it shines from behind
a searchlight piercing the dark
a signal to those searching love.

Love is the wait of the world --
that break in the music,
that moment of doubt,
it waits for all to catch up
to find the rhythm again.

Love is the way of the world
that breaks our hearts
then mends them again
and, if we wait,
brings weight and light to us all.


- Don Edward Morris

Their Bodies


That gaunt old man came first, his hair as white
As your scoured tables. Maybe you’ll recollect him
By the scars of steelmill burns on the backs of his hands,
On the nape of his neck, on his arms and sinewy legs,
And her by the enduring innocence
Of her face, as open to all of you in death
As it would have been in life: she would memorize
Your names and ages and pastimes and hometowns
If she could, but she can’t now, so remember her.


They believed in doctors, listened to their advice,
And followed it faithfully. You should treat them
One last time as they would have treated you.
They had been kind to others all their lives
And believed in being useful. Remember somewhere
Their son is trying hard to believe you’ll learn
As much as possible from them, as he did,
And will do your best to learn politely and truly.


They gave away the gift of those useful bodies
Against his wish. (They had their own ways
Of doing everything, always.) If you’re not certain
Which ones are theirs, be gentle to everybody.


- David Wagoner

Ode to the Tomato


The street

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...3_13-50-04.png

filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
the light
splits
in two halves
of tomato,
the juice
runs
through the streets.
In June
the tomato
cuts loose,
invades
the kitchens,
takes over lunches,
sits down
comfortably
on sideboards,
among the glasses,
the butter dishes,
the blue saltshakers.
It has its own light,
a benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we have to
assassinate it;
the knife plunges
into its living flesh,
it is a red
viscera,
a cool,
deep,
inexhaustible
sun
fills the salads
of Chile,
is cheerfully married
to the clear onion
and to celebrate,
oil lets itself
fall,
son and essence
of the olive tree,
onto the half-open hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism:
it is the day's
wedding,
parsley
raises
little flags,
potatoes
vigorously boil,
with its aroma
the steak
pounds
on the door,
it's time!
let's go!


- Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Mitchell


Oda al tomate


La calle
se llenó de tomates,
mediodía,
verano,
la luz
se parte
en dos
mitades
de tomate,
corre
por las calles
el jugo.
En diciembre
se desata
el tomate
invade
las concinas,
entra por los almuerzos,
se sienta
reposado
en los aparadores,
entre los vasos,
las mantequilleras,
los saleros azules.
Tiene
luz propia,
majestad benigna.
Debemos, por desgracia
asesinarlo;
se hunde
el cuchillo
en su pulpa viviente,
en una roja
vícera,
un sol
fresco,
profundo,
inagotable,
llena las ensalades
de Chile,
se casa alegremente
con la clara cebolla,
y para celebralo
se deja
caer
aceite,
hijo
esencial del olivo,
sobre sus hemisferios entreabiertos,
agrega
la pimienta
su fragancia,
la sal su magnetismo:
son las bodas
del día
el perejil
levanta
banderines,
las papas
hierven vigorosamente,
el asado
golpea
con su aroma
en la puerta,
es hora!
vamos!


- Pablo Neruda

Living At The End Of Time


There is so much sweetness in children’s voices,

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...4_09-37-25.png

And so much discontent at the end of day,
And so much satisfaction when a train goes by.


I don’t know why the rooster keeps crying,
Nor why elephants keep raising their trunks,
Nor why Hawthorne kept hearing trains at night.


A handsome child is a gift from God,
And a friend is a vein in the back of the hand,
And a wound is an inheritance from the wind.


Some say we are living at the end of time,
But I believe a thousand pagan ministers
Will arrive tomorrow to baptize the wind.


There’s nothing we need to do about John. The Baptist
Has been laying his hands on earth for so long
That the well water is sweet for a hundred miles.


It’s all right if we don’t know what the rooster
Is saying in the middle of the night, nor why we feel
So much satisfaction when a train goes by.


- Robert Bly

Today


When you're allowed

https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...5_09-24-46.png

To live
When you might have not,
You change forevermore


Become at once
Older
And younger
Than before


Gingerly you try
Your wings
Find that you can
Fly


And horizons
Of the nether world
Bring light
Back to your eyes


What you'd gnashed
With scorn and
Spittle
Only yesterday


Gentles softly in your
Gratitude
To be alive
Today.


- Scott O'Brien

Lines Written After the Funeral of a Holocaust Survivor


In passing over to a brighter side
a good man has left us spirit rich
if body poor—

I was privileged to heap one handful of earth upon his grave
returning a favor

he was never aware of in life— For no reason,
in his gentle, forgiving way he smiled at me once— Although I cried
to see his young daughter

standing helpless over her cold father’s open grave, I knew her grief
would salve her loss some day.



But what of our loss? Who will give us a hand full of earth
when we need it? We live in a culture of death and tattoos
[no stanza break]






without meaning, worthy of no respect— the way she looked
two weeks before she died of typhus Anne Frank could sell cosmetics today— the numbers on her forearm
could win you the lottery.



Don’t take the chance.

Instead, meet me at the cemetery and we will face the hereafter together,
pay our respects holding hands until
his family has passed by wreathed in mourning
awake at last

- Greg Hayes
(1952-2014)

Forgetfulness


The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never
even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a
bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.


- Billy Collins

Someday I Will Tell a Great and Shining Truth

Someday I will tell a great and shining truth
that will buy back all my dignity.
My silver words like coins will drop into the
mouths of my enemies, killing their tongues like ancient
poisons stilled the breasts of enemy kings, confounding
their long-built case against me.
These words will buy back my soul.
Someday I will tell a great and shining truth, in whose
deep structures will finally be exposed
the war I come from: the war of babies fighting
terrible battles, using weapons unparalleled on any field
against foes disguised as friends,
agents of mass destruction vomiting out of their little
mouths: “I need, I need” they scream,
undoing the universe.
Frenzied flags of terror unfurl all around them, banners
of the war: “Be quiet, be quiet” screams back the valiant
army, meeting bravely the battle.
Fists fly, penises stiffen, juices flow, fingernails furrow—
but babies rally their unending forces,
crying simply out their need, their need, O God, their need,
unrelenting in the fray.
In panic the defending troops deploy their only hope:
they leave.
The terrible enemy is defeated, finally, by silence,
and the world is saved.
Someday I will tell a great and shining truth, and
all my burnt tribe, dragging their blankets behind them,
will enter into my heart once again, making me whole.

- Kalia Mussetter

An Arab Shepherd Is Searching For His Goat On Mount Zion


An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
And on the opposite hill I am searching for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
Both in their temporary failure.
Our two voices met above
The Sultan's Pool in the valley between us.
Neither of us wants the boy or the goat
To get caught in the wheels
Of the "Had Gadya" machine.

Afterward we found them among the bushes,
And our voices came back inside us
Laughing and crying.

Searching for a goat or for a child has always been
The beginning of a new religion in these mountains.


-Yehuda Amichai

In Memoriam, July 19, 1914
We aged a hundred years and this descended
In just one hour, as at a stroke.
The summer had been brief and now was ended;
The body of the ploughed plains lay in smoke.


The hushed road burst in colors then, a soaring
Lament rose, ringing silver like a bell.
And so I covered up my face, imploring
God to destroy me before battle fell.


And from my memory the shadows vanished
Of songs and passions—burdens I'd not need.
The Almighty bade it be—with all else banished—
A book of portents terrible to read.




- Anna Akhmatova
(Translated by Stephen Edgar)

"Mein Furhur, I Can Walk!"


And what did Dr. Strangelove have in mind
for border patrols and power struggles? His
first concern was to survive, his one hand
preventing the other from strangling him.
And H.G.Wells, did he imagine the Martian
invasion to be countered by a Islamic caliphate
takeover? Chaos runs amok, there's nowhere it
won't spread in this small world of conflicting
factions. Held hostage to the "news", we can
only expand our disbelief and threshold of pain.
Vengeance and fear and greed are the harshest
poisons that even blue-throat Vishnu, the preserver
could not swallow. Can you see any Phoenix rising in
this story? Words like "terrorist, insurgents, rebels,
extremists" are the smokescreen vocabulary that keeps
the dice rolling in the game with truth.
Crisis after crisis swarm for attention. Drones
and domes, spies and black boxes and be-headings and
new bombs no one can detect, carnage and collateral
damage-- the world is being shaved by a drunken barber.
Whatever species, we're all endangered. Oceans spoiled,
earth choked, abused, can a dream of a golden age and
peace survive? Will the profit-dazed horsemen of this stark
Epoch-collapse gallop faster into the nightmare?
After the generals, the tanks, the cameras and the news
teams move into fresh fields, the chorus of lament will
be silenced in favor of forgetting. Rages,warnings, cries
and prayers may whirl away into scenes in movies everyone
can watch.


- Rich Meyers

Rich Meyer has presented well the toxins of these times, the collective dementia arising from the "spectacular" world (described so preciently by Guy Debord). In contemplating his images of our deep suffering, a question arisies for me-- what is left to us here amid the detritus of a society gone so wrong, but each precious moment?

Finding presence here and now, in the face of such fierce smoke and funhouse mirrors may be the most radical act of all. Let's breathe together, and know we are many, and take heart. There are cracks in the spectacular world. Love, Tashee

The Diameter Of The Bomb


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


- Yehuda Amichai


(translated by Chana Bloch & Stephen Mitchell)

ouch ...

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

The Diameter Of The Bomb


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


- Yehuda Amichai


(translated by Chana Bloch & Stephen Mitchell)

---

For Guy Davenport

Within the circles of our lives
we dance the circles of the years,
we dance the circles of the seasons
within the circles of the years,
the cycles of the moon

within the circles of the seasons,
the circles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again, we come and go,
changed, changing. Hands
join, unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy. The circles turn,
each giving into each, into all.
Only music keeps us here,

each by all the others held.
In the hold of hands and eyes
we turn in pairs, that joining
join each to all again.

And then we turn aside, alone
out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.


- Wendell Berry

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

- Emma Lazarus
New York City, 1883
(Inscribed on the Statue of Liberty)

The song and the flaming sword

Blue throated and beautiful
I had carried the poison
of war and ignorance for decades
before I heard that one song
that left me singing,
knowing then,
I could sing my way
back to the garden,
past the flaming
sword.

- Bill Denham

Ovid in Tears

Love is like a garden in the heart, he said.
They asked him what he meant by garden.
He explained about gardens. “In the cities,” he said,
“there are places walled off where color
and decorum are magnified into a civilization.
Like a beautiful woman,” he said.
How like a woman they asked. He remembered their wives
and said garden was just a figure of speech,
then called for drinks all around. Two rounds later
he was crying. Talking about how Charlemagne
couldn’t read, but still had made a world. About Hagia
Sofia and putting a round dome on a square
base after nine hundred years of failure.
The hand holding him slipped, and he fell.
“White stone in the while sunlight,” he said
as they picked him up. “Not the
great fires burning at the edge of the world.” His voice grew
fainter as they carried him away. “Both the melody
and the symphony. The imperfect dancing
in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.”


- Jack Gilbert

Identity Card

Put it on record.
I am an Arab
And the number of my card is fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth is due after summer.
What's there to be angry about?

Put it on record.
I am an Arab
Working with comrades of toil in a stone quarry.
I have eight children
For them I wrestle the loaf of bread,
The clothes and exercise books
From the dry rocks
And beg for no alms at your door,
Nor lower myself at your doorstep.
What's there to be angry about?

Put it on record.
I am an Arab
I am a name without a title,
Patient in a country where everything
Lives in a whirlpool of anger.
My roots
Took hold before the birth of time
Before the burgeoning of the ages,
Before cypress and olive trees,
Before the proliferation of weeds.


My father is from the family of the plough
Not from highborn nobles.
And my grandfather was a peasant
Without line or genealogy.
My house is a watchman's hut
Made of sticks and reeds.
Does my status satisfy you?
I am a name without a surname.

Put it on record.
I am an Arab.
Color of hair: jet black.
Color of eyes; brown.
My distinguishing features:
On my head the 'iqal cords over a keffiyeh
Scratching him who touches it.
My address:
I’m from a village, remote, forgotten,
Its streets without names
And all its men in the fields and quarry.

What's there to be angry about?

Put it on record.
I am an Arab.
You stole my forefather's vineyards
And land I used to till,
I and all my children,
And you left us and all my grandchildren
Nothing but these rocks.
Will your government be taking them too?
As is being said?

SO!
Put it on record at the top of page one:
I don't hate people,
I trespass on no one's property.

And yet, if I were to become hungry enough
I shall eat the flesh of my usurper.
Beware.
Beware of my hunger.
And of my anger!


- Mahmood Darwish

One Day


One day after another -
Perfect.
They all fit.


- Robert Creeley

Looking Up

The evening sky rolls in
on open arms
just as it has done for
eons

Like breath itself
like water that holds light
like a golden moment
where we stop to
breathe-in to ourselves
that Sacred is here -
Now

In such moments
all of life is seen
our souls speak in a
unifying and quiet
tonal voice of the
connections to all
and the miraculous
beauty of belonging to
one another

Look up -
The clouds just might meet
your loving gaze


- P. Gregory Guss

Appellation Carneros
— for Judy White


A good merlot is equal parts blood and dust—
and when the Alchemist sets his spigot
into the throat of this valley’s mild behemoth
the bloodline surges through an almost eternal fall.

You and I climb the valley’s ridge and stone sober
stand in the anteroom of an old wilderness— escarpments,
low clouds, trails flooded with rain— but I mean
the other wilderness, the one where so much
can be suffered, though sometimes in a pleasant way*—
ah the absolute voluptuousness of not
knowing what the other one is thinking.

And the wine-maker smiles & waits, and waits & smiles—
finally he speaks: How would you like to fall blindly
into the hands of one another’s fate? he asks; and
In blindness you will taste your character and your dust.


- Lee Perron

You might value the connections made in a recent movie review by Ari Siletz: https://iranian.com/posts/quot-apes-...s-of-war-35963.

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

Identity Card

Put it on record.
I am an Arab
And the number of my card is fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth is due after summer.
What's there to be angry about?

Put it on record.
I am an Arab
Working with comrades of toil in a stone quarry.
I have eight children
For them I wrestle the loaf of bread,
The clothes and exercise books
From the dry rocks
And beg for no alms at your door,
Nor lower myself at your doorstep.
What's there to be angry about?

Put it on record.
I am an Arab
I am a name without a title,
Patient in a country where everything
Lives in a whirlpool of anger.
My roots
Took hold before the birth of time
Before the burgeoning of the ages,
Before cypress and olive trees,
Before the proliferation of weeds...

---

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.


- Billy Collins

Putting Out the Fire

for John, who stocks the medicine cabinet of the heart

Hearing children shriek at play,
today, first time in 58 years,
I don't hear that burning boy,
Fire rising like vine, twining
up his thin limb. My mother
chasing him, racing flames
and winning. Wrestling the boy
She smothers the reason for
screams with a sheet, ripped
white from the line, fast as
fire. The koan says

Put out the fire across
the river. Impossible,like
this task of living,
loving the unloveable
in ourselves and each other.
Chasing the screaming child
who forever lives scarred,
Impossible to fix the past.

There is no fire, no river, only
impossible demands—
helping and healing while
we burn. We are the flames.
Every day, more of us
burns, turns to ash. It
is the world's way.

There is no fire, no
river. Only life
ripping through us,
a storm tide pushing
the river upstream, muddy
And roiling. Life,
a slow burn, like sleeping love.
Life, a burning river
Within. No fire to fight,
no fight.


- Rebecca del Rio

Blood on the Wheel

Ezekiel saw the wheel,
way up in the middle of the air.
TRADITIONAL GOSPEL SONG

Blood on the night soil man en route to the country prison
Blood on the sullen chair, the one that holds you with its pleasure

Blood inside the quartz, the beauty watch, the eye of the guard
Blood on the slope of names & the tattoos hidden

Blood on the Virgin, behind the veils,
Behind—in the moon angel's gold oracle hair

What blood is this, is it the blood of the worker rat?
Is it the blood of the clone governor, the city maid?
Why does it course in s's & z's?

Blood on the couch, made for viewing automobiles & face cream
Blood on the pin, this one going through you without any pain

Blood on the screen, the green torso queen of slavering hearts
Blood on the grandmother's wish, her tawdry stick of Texas

Blood on the daughter's breast who sews roses
Blood on the father, does anyone remember him, bluish?

Blood from a kitchen fresco, in thick amber strokes
Blood from the baby's right ear, from his ochre nose
What blood is this?

Blood on the fender, in the sender's shoe, in his liquor sack
Blood on the street, call it Milagro Boulevard, Mercy Lanes #9
Blood on the alien, in the alligator jacket teen boy Juan

There is blood, there, he says
Blood here too, down here, she says
Only blood, the Blood Mother sings

Blood driving miniature American queens stamped into rage
Blood driving rappers in Mercedes blackened & whitened in news
Blood driving the snare-eyed professor searching for her panties
Blood driving the championship husband bent in Extreme Unction

Blood of the orphan weasel in heat, the Calvinist farmer in wheat
Blood of the lettuce rebellion on the rise, the cannery worker's prize

Blood of the painted donkey forced into prostitute zebra,
Blood of the Tijuana tourist finally awake & forced into pimp sleep again

It is blood time, Sir Terminator says,
It is blood time, Sir Simpson winks,
It is blood time, Sir McVeigh weighs.

Her nuclear blood watch soaked, will it dry?
His whitish blood ring smoked, will it foam?
My groin blood leather roped, will it marry?
My wife's peasant blood spoked, will it ride again?

Blood in the tin, in the coffee bean, in the maquila oración
Blood in the language, in the wise text of the market sausage
Blood in the border web, the penal colony shed, in the bilingual yard

Crow blood blues perched on nothingness again
fly over my field, yellow-green & opal
Dog blood crawl & swish through my sheets

Who will eat this speckled corn?
Who shall be born on this Wednesday war bed?

Blood in the acid theater, again, in the box office smash hit
Blood in the Corvette tank, in the crack talk crank below

Blood boat Navy blood glove Army ventricle Marines
in the cookie sex jar, camouflaged rape whalers
Roam & rumble, investigate my Mexican hoodlum blood

Tiny blood behind my Cuban ear, wine colored & hushed
Tiny blood in the death row tool, in the middle-aged corset
Tiny blood sampler, tiny blood, you hush up again, so tiny

Blood in the Groove Shopping Center,
In blue Appalachia river, in Detroit harness spleen

Blood in the Groove Virus machine,
In low ocean tide, in Iowa soy bean

Blood in the Groove Lynch mob orchestra,
South of Herzegovina, south, I said

Blood marching for the Immigration Patrol, prized & arrogant
Blood spawning in the dawn break of African Blood Tribes, grimacing
& multiple—multiple, I said

Blood on the Macho Hat, the one used for proper genuflections
Blood on the faithful knee, the one readied for erotic negation
Blood on the willing nerve terminal, the one open for suicide

Blood at the age of seventeen
Blood at the age of one, dumped in a Greyhound bus

Blood mute & autistic & cauterized & smuggled Mayan
& burned in border smelter tar

Could this be yours? Could this item belong to you?
Could this ticket be what you ordered, could it?

Blood on the wheel, blood on the reel
Bronze dead gold & diamond deep. Blood be fast.


- Juan Felipe Herrera

Flare


1.
Welcome to the silly, comforting poem.

It is not the sunrise,
which is a red rinse,
which is flaring all over the eastern sky;

it is not the rain falling out of the purse of God;

it is not the blue helmet of the sky afterward,

or the trees, or the beetle burrowing into the earth;

it is not the mockingbird who, in his own cadence,
will go on sizzling and clapping
from the branches of the catalpa that are thick with blossoms,
that are billowing and shining,
that are shaking in the wind.


2.

You still recall, sometimes, the old barn on your
great-grandfather's farm, a place you visited once,
and went into, all alone, while the grownups sat and
talked in the house.
It was empty, or almost. Wisps of hay covered the floor,
and some wasps sang at the windows, and maybe there was
a strange fluttering bird high above, disturbed, hoo-ing
a little and staring down from a messy ledge with wild,
binocular eyes.
Mostly, though, it smelled of milk, and the patience of
animals; the give-offs of the body were still in the air,
a vague ammonia, not unpleasant.
Mostly, though, it was restful and secret, the roof high
up and arched, the boards unpainted and plain.
You could have stayed there forever, a small child in a corner,
on the last raft of hay, dazzled by so much space that seemed
empty, but wasn't.
Then--you still remember--you felt the rap of hunger--it was
noon--and you turned from that twilight dream and hurried back
to the house, where the table was set, where an uncle patted you
on the shoulder for welcome, and there was your place at the table.


3.
Nothing lasts.
There is a graveyard where everything I am talking about is,
now.

I stood there once, on the green grass, scattering flowers.


4.
Nothing is so delicate or so finely hinged as the wings
of the green moth
against the lantern
against its heat
against the beak of the crow
in the early morning.

Yet the moth has trim, and feistiness, and not a drop
of self-pity.

Not in this world.


5.
My mother
was the blue wisteria,
my mother
was the mossy stream out behind the house,
my mother, alas, alas,
did not always love her life,
heavier than iron it was
as she carried it in her arms, from room to room,
oh, unforgettable!

I bury her
in a box
in the earth
and turn away.
My father
was a demon of frustrated dreams,
was a breaker of trust,
was a poor, thin boy with bad luck.
He followed God, there being no one else
he could talk to;
he swaggered before God, there being no one else
who would listen.
Listen,
this was his life.
I bury it in the earth.
I sweep the closets.
I leave the house.


6.
I mention them now,
I will not mention them again.

It is not lack of love
nor lack of sorrow.
But the iron thing they carried, I will not carry.

I give them--one, two, three, four--the kiss of courtesy,
of sweet thanks,
of anger, of good luck in the deep earth.
May they sleep well. May they soften.

But I will not give them the kiss of complicity.
I will not give them the responsibility for my life.


7.
Did you know that the ant has a tongue
with which to gather in all that it can
of sweetness?

Did you know that?


8.

The poem is not the world.
It isn't even the first page of the world.

But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.
It knows that much.

It wants to open itself,
like the door of a little temple,
so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed,
and less yourself than part of everything.


9.
The voice of the child crying out of the mouth of the
grown woman
is a misery and a disappointment.
The voice of the child howling out of the tall, bearded,
muscular man
is a misery, and a terror.


10.
Therefore, tell me:
what will engage you?
What will open the dark fields of your mind,
like a lover
at first touching?

11.
Anyway,
there was no barn.
No child in the barn.

No uncle no table no kitchen.

Only a long lovely field full of bobolinks.


12.
When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider
the orderliness of the world. Notice
something you have never noticed before,

like the tambourine sound of the snow-cricket
whose pale green body is no longer than your thumb.

Stare hard at the hummingbird, in the summer rain,
shaking the water-sparks from its wings.

Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no.
Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also,
like the diligent leaves.

A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.

Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.

Live with the beetle, and the wind.

This is the dark bread of the poem.
This is the dark and nourishing bread of the poem.


- Mary Oliver

A Great Rose Tree


This is the day and the year
of the rose. The whole garden


is opening with laughter. Iris
whispering to cypress. The rose


is the joy of meeting someone.
The rose is a world imagination


cannot imagine. A messenger from
the orchard where the soul lives.


A small seed that points to a great
rose tree! Hold its hand and walk


like a child. A rose is what grows
from the work the prophets do.


Full moon, new moon. Accept the
invitation spring extends, four


birds flying toward a master. A rose
is all these, and the silence that


closes and sits in the shade, a bud.


- Jelalludin Rumi
(Ghazal (Ode) 1348
Version by Coleman Barks, with Nevit Ergin)

Zimmer Imagines Heaven
For Merrill Leffler

I sit with Joseph Conrad in Monet’s garden.
We are listening to Yeats chant his poems,
A breeze stirs through Thomas Hardy’s moustache,
John Skelton has gone to the house for beer,
Wanda Landowska lightly fingers the clavichord,
Along the spruce tree walk Roberto Clemente and
Thurman Munson whistle a baseball back and forth.
Mozart chants with Ellington in the roses.

Monet smokes and dabs his canvas in the sun,
Brueghel and Turner set easels behind the wisteria.
The band is warming up in the Big Studio:
Bean, Brute, Bird, and Serge on saxes,
Kai, Bill Harris, Lawrence Brown, trombones,
Little Jazz, Clifford, Fats on trumpets,
Klook plays drums, Mingus bass, Bud the piano.
Later Madam Schumann-Heink will sing Schubert,
The monks of Benedictine Abbey will chant.
There will be more poems from Emily Dickinson,
James Wright, John Clare, Walt Whitman.
Shakespeare rehearses players for King Lear.

At dusk Alice Toklas brings out platters
Of Sweetbreads a la Napolitaine, Salad Livoniere,
And a tureen of Gaspacho of Malaga.
After the meal Brahms passes fine cigars.
God comes then radiant with a bottle of cognac,
She pours generously into the snifters,
I tell Her I have begun to learn what
Heaven is about. She wants to hear.
It is, I say, being thankful for eternity.
Her smile is the best part of the day.


- Paul Zimmer

Flying over clearcut hills


brown wounds scraped raw
don’t require bandaids, antibiotics
Mama Earth heals herself
slowly, by the measure of human time
confident in her immune system
inviting exposure to nutrient sun, water,
coyote scat
Tiny trees and grass stubble earth skin
She always wins in the end
not by force or violence
tho she can thunder and quake
but more by
simply and patiently growing life
over and over again


just because she can


- Monnie Reba Efross

Come to Hiroshima


to those who with no shame condone
annihilation of whole cities or nations
please come to Hiroshima
come in early August when the heat is worst
make sure you're there on the sixth
when the sweat running down your back
somehow feels appropriate
see the museum - learn what you can
imagine as deeply as possible what happened
and try to understand - why


to those who think we need atomic bombs
newer better more useable ones
as certain leaders now claim
please come to Hiroshima
walk through Peace Park
this epicenter - cemetery of ironic serenity
contemplate - meditate - try to understand
would we have done this to whites - dear Christians
here by the riverside thousands staggered to water
"mizu! mizu!" some couldn't even ask
for what could possibly relieve the burning


to those who think that war is still okay
sleepy as people used to be about slavery
come see the shattered wrecked dome
left in jagged shambles to remind us
see at sunset the paper lanterns
red blue and gold - inscribed with dreams
people lovingly made in the park all day
watch them float downstream candles aglow
like thousands of vanished souls
or beautiful hopes - for what might be possible
please come to Hiroshima
and bring pictures of your loved ones


- Ron Hertz

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

This incredible poem, after so many years, still manages to stab me in the heart when I read it. One of the best.
I am at once the falcon and the falconer, trying to hear myself.
Thank you, Larry, once again, for your dedication to doing this every day.

Quote:

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Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

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

---

Wildpeace

Not the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)

Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.

- Yehuda Amichai


(Translation by Chana Bloch, in This Same Sky, ed. by Naomi Shihab Nye)

The Weeping




I have shut my windows.
I do not want to hear the weeping,
but from behind the gray walls,
nothing is heard but the weeping.

There are few angels that sing,
there are few dogs that bark,
a thousand violins fit in the palm of the hand.

But the weeping is an immense dog,
the weeping is an immense angel,
the weeping is an immense violin,
tears strangle the wind,
nothing is heard but the weeping.

- Frederico Garcia Lorca
translation by Kenneth Rexroth
from “Casida del Llanto”

Typing in the Dark

For W.B. Yeats

Don't feel sorry for me
I have only 24 hours to live every day.

I'm looking for letters that glow in the dark,
hidden among the dead letters...
THEY will spell out the real poem I need to write.
for my other mind is being held ransom by the very light of day.

No time to eat
I am commanded by voices in my gurgling digestive acids
Ancient and crying, they bubble into hallucinations:
I heard my crazy mother call my name...
I heard my cat child crying... dying last week
how could he have made his way
back to my belly so soon?

Can my words rescue them
Can my words do any good at all.

No pen is mightier than any sword
There's no contest in dim alleys
Ask someone who works the night shift
of any of the public services that handle the dying.
Some swords squeak clean, some words leak blood
My pen is too sane to hear.

I tune in to the cosmic noise
I turn down the volume of their cries to a low low lull
and cover my ears to dull the lull

Oh, mother, brother, tried to drown the voices in their heads...
They could do no good at all.

Ah to save the world is a crazy notion
But I am still typing on my last night before morning
hoping to write the poem that will save the world from darkness.


Chris Dec © 1989

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:

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

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