Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Harvest of Thorns



Whom are they arresting?

Today, for the bomb in Times Square,

the one that did not go off,

except in people’s hearts

and exploded faith - after calling us back

from the borders of daily care

to stand and watch in horror.

Whom did they arrest?

Not the insatiable hatred, not

this misplaced

passion, obsessed with righting

wrongs at the expense of all

that is

right.

Not the shadow of revenge,

which knows no solace,

runs from loving

caresses, spits out the cloying taste

of reconciliation.

No, they never arrest the right one:

that shadow fleeing

over there, just now

disappearing down the subway,

rounding that corner, the one who

has never yet been caught

in all these millennia

of wars, murderous martyrs,

and lunacy.

Each springs boxes him in,

every butterfly is a bomber,

fixing him in her sights,

every child’s smile a vicious

attack; only a cemetery feels

like home to him.



Such a strange universe, calling for help,

holding so close to its heart

this harvest of thorns.

- Scott O'Brien

To A Terrorist

For the historical ache, the ache passed down
which finds its circumstance and becomes
the present ache, I offer this poem

without hope, knowing there's nothing,
not even revenge, which alleviates
a life like yours. I offer it as one

might offer his father's ashes
to the wind, a gesture
when there's nothing else to do.

Still, I must say to you:
I hate your good reasons.
I hate the hatefullness that makes you fall

in love with death, your own included.
Perhaps you're hating me now,
I who own my own house

and live in a country so muscular,
so smug, it thinks its terror is meant
only to mean well, and to protect.

Christ turned his singular cheek,
one man's holiness another's absurdity.
Like you, the rest of us obey the sting,

the surge. I'm just speaking out loud
to cancel my silence. Consider it an old impulse,
doomed to become mere words.

The first poet probably spoke to thunder
and, for a while, believed
thunder had an ear and a choice.

- Stephen Dunn

Family Garden

Tell me again about your garden
Tell me how you planted, in the small
flat of mountain land, corn seed

and bean seed, how your finger poked the soil
then you dropped in three dark bean seeds
for every yellow seed of corn.

Trees and mountains collared your land,
but the fenced garden opened freely
to sun and warm summer rains.

Your potato rows bulged in July. You ached
from digging them up, your hands down in dirt,
the cool lump of a tuber, brown-spotted,

just recovered, a greeting, like shaking hands.
Baskets full of bumpy brown potatoes filled
your basement until fall, until you gave

away what you could, throwing out the rest.
You gave away honey from the white hive too,
that box of bees beside the garden,

honey stored in Mason jars, a clearest honey
nectar from lin tree blossoms and wild flowers.
The bright taste of honey on the tongue

spoke of the place, if a place can be known
by the activity of bees and a flavor in the mouth,
if a person can be known by small acts

such as these, such as the way you rocked
summer evenings from a chair on the porch
tending your inner garden, eyes closed.

- Hank Hudepohl

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.



- Billy Collins

Another Mother's Day poem:


We Have A Beautiful Mother

We have a beautiful
Mother
Her hills
Are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
Hills.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her oceans
Are wombs
Her wombs
Oceans.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her teeth
The white stones
At the edge
Of the water
The summer
Grasses
Her plentiful
Hair.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her green lap
Immense
Her brown embrace
Eternal
Her blue body
Everything we know.

- Alice Walker

Whales Weep Not!*

They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.

All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of
the sea!

And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep bed of the sea,
as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale-blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and
comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale's
fathomless body.

And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking the
wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and
forth,
keep passing, archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the
sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.

And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-
tender young
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of
the beginning and the end.

And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves in a ring
when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood
and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat
encircling their huddled monsters of love.
And all this happens in the sea, in the salt
where God is also love, but without words:
and Aphrodite is the wife of whales
most happy, happy she!

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.
- D.H. Lawrence

Wired


First She had to heave up mountains,
then cool her blood with ice and wait
a little while for rock to tumble
shatter, allow her glacier plow
to rake the valleys out, until
the last few seconds, so they say,
we came and settled, built dry walls
up to the crags, scattered sheep to eat
forest shoots, and so came pasture.

And still her brooks course through
her veins, lilting and sighing and
spinning their ways into lake and sea
as she tilts quietly
ominous, egg-timer wired
to our words, feelings, thoughts—
weighing whether to flip it over
or, like the show with too small
an audience, simply close the stage.

- Raphael Block

It’s The Dream

It’s the dream we carry
that someting wondrous will happen,
that it must happen -
time will open
mountains will open
spring will gush forth from the ground -
that the dream itself will open
that one morning we’ll quietly drift
into a harbor we didn’t know was there.

- Olav H. Hauge
(translated from the Norwegian by Robert Hadin)

Jump Rope Rhyme

Tat tvam asi:
thou art that -
that leaf, that tree,
that cow, that cat,
that cloud, that sky,
that moon, that sun,
that you, that I -
for all are one.
So here you are
and there you go
and who you were
you hardly know.

I think this I
is only me:
a drip, a drop,
but not the sea.
Yet when I wake
from all these dreams,

then, like the snake,
I'll shed what seems:
this mask, this skin,
this ball and chain.
I will begin
to fall like rain.

Our heart's last home:
the wind-whipped foam,
the sweet, deep sea.
Tat tvam asi.

- Tom Hansen

Bird of Paradise

I know time flies
because the days have wings
They wake up and fly
with or without me

I know the days have wings
because my heart beats
It beats the way wings beat
between two shores

I know time has shores
because my heart has wings
And wings are made
to reach the other shore

- Clark Heinrich

Elephant Girl



Elephant Girl just wanted to play; no;

She wanted good work without undue stress;

Feed the elephants without accidents;

If there's an accident, call the Veterinarian;

If not, then practice principles of elephant health.

Stay in the game no matter what.

Which game?

She had a desire to go deeper,

Merge with whatever it is

That makes monks so cheerful

With so very little stuff.

- Connie Madden

The Absence That Was The Tree

Two men are cutting the dead maple down:
limbs and branches first, then the trunk
in sections, all the pieces scattered in piles
on the ground out of which it grew.

It's been released from its enormous weight.
It's given us this gift of a new view--
now the church and the woods
across the road can stare back at us

through where it stood and labored
to guard our privacy. The regions
of the sky the branches divided have merged
back again into their undefined whole.

All the nests have come crashing down.
No longer will we hear bird song
from the particular quarter: it will not
serve as orientation or point of discussion.

We remark about the extra light,
the new distance its absence
will afford, the extra breezes
traveling through the opened gate.

Death has a way of allowing us to see
beyond where the body formerly stood.
But we have come to love that body
more than the space revealed behind it.

All winter long we'll hack the remnants
even smaller so they will fit our stove,
where the tree will warm us in its next life. When
it says farewell, it will be as smoke on the air.


- Philip Terman

Before Summer Rain


Suddenly, from all the green around you,
something-you don't know what-has disappeared;
you feel it creeping closer to the window,
in total silence. From the nearby wood

you hear the urgent whistling of a plover,
reminding you of someone's Saint Jerome:
so much solitude and passion come
from that one voice, whose fierce request the downpour

will grant. The walls, with their ancient portraits, glide
away from us, cautiously, as though
they weren't supposed to hear what we are saying.

And reflected on the faded tapestries now;
the chill, uncertain sunlight of those long
childhood hours when you were so afraid.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Sparrow

With its swift
flick and plummet
through the chrism
of these first hours
after the rain
spraying droplets
off its wingtips then
scissoring past
the phone lines
into the blue
distance of roofs
and freeways
how not see it as
diving past
all we slather
onto the world
diving past it
the same way
we survive
our happiness
and also: sorrow.

- Peter Campion

To My Mother

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.

- Wendell Berry

A Hardware Store As Proof of the Existence of God

I praise the brightness of hammers pointing east
like the steel woodpeckers of the future,
and dozens of hinges opening brass wings,
and six new rakes shyly fanning their toes,
and bins of hooks glittering into bees,

and a rack of wrenches like the long bones of horses,
and mailboxes sowing rows of silver chapels,
and a company of plungers waiting for God
to claim their thin legs in their big shoes
and put them on and walk away laughing.

In a world not perfect but not bad either
let there be glue, glaze, gum, and grabs,
caulk also, and hooks, shackles, cables, and slips,
and signs so spare a child may read them,
Men, Women, In, Out, No Parking, Beware the Dog.

In the right hands, they can work wonders.

- Nancy Willard

The Loneliest Job in the World
As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me?,
you are completely screwed, because
the next question is How Much?,

and then it is hundreds of hours later,
and you are still hunched over
your flowcharts and abacus,

trying to decide if you have gotten enough.
This is the loneliest job in the world:
to be an accountant of the heart.

It is late at night. You are by yourself,
and all around you, you can hear
the sounds of people moving

in and out of love,
pushing the turnstiles, putting
their coins in the slots,

paying the price which is asked,
which constantly changes.
No one knows why.

-Tony Hoagland

Ancestors



It was only possible to dismiss them —

Yorkshire yeomen and women

Of London who managed

To meet and marry

And not be thrown into prison

Nor deported -- Cockneys

Of a semi-certain legitimacy

In the hurly of survival there.



The docks of time

Spread an ocean between them

And where I sit, never to be old,

Though I live to a hundred and four

As some of them did.



“Do you understand the strategy of the next pitch?

What the batter’s talent is,

Which out’s left,

Who’s next up?”



The focus of all of that, here, now,

Eliminates the past with

Tension on the future,

And Pee Wee Reese and Oscar Wilde

Are one in oblivion with who’s to come.



I have no ancestors.

And as for descendants,

I have nothing to offer the future

Which they cannot supply themselves.

This writing flows black ink only

Onto the lined paper of my heart.



- Bruce Moody

I know the truth - give up all other truths!

I know the truth - give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look - it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?

The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.

- Marina Tsvetayeva

Inscription for the Door



I have no enemies left,

only some friends who are late.

Come in, hang your coat

beside the fire and pull a chair to its edge.

We shall drink tea and clear the path

leading back to the heart’s first address.

You may have news of these nations beginning

at last to revolve beside each other like seasons

or word of the fires out of control south of us,

where the poor are burning the lies keeping

them poor.

Why are those three ragged strangers still kneeling

Over their ashes, invite them, bring them in,

they can rest here beside this oven of bread.

Children sleep in the corners, taking notes.

A woman is dressing in the room overhead,

her footsteps are tablets I open to sleep.

The new wind is full of branches tonight,

Leaving no holes in the darkness.

Enter. I have no enemies left any more,

0nly some friends who are late.

- Eugene Ruggles

The Cemetery Poem

Michelle finds me long past midnight, shoveling
the grassy turf in our backyard, digging
three feet by six, determined to dig further.
And if she could love me enough
to trust me, to not cover her mouth
in shocked recognition, her hair lit up
in moonlight; if she could simply shovel
into the earth and dig another hole
beside me, straining to bear the weight
each blade lifts in its gunmetal sheen,
then maybe, if she could trust like that
she’d begin to see them — the war dead,
how they stand under lime trees and ash,
here among us, papyrus and stone in their hands.
There will be no dreaming for me.
Not tonight. I dig without stopping and tell her—
We need to help them, if only with a coffin.
Michelle stares out at these blurry figures
in silhouette, the very young and the very old
among them, and with a gentle hand
she stays the shovel I hold, to say —
We should invite them into our home.
We should learn their names, their history.
We should know these people
we bury in the earth.

- Brian Turner

Cancer Prayer

Dear God
Please flood her nerves with sedatives
and keep her strong enough to crack a smile
so disbelieving friends and relatives
can temporarily sustain denial.
Please smite that intern in oncology
who craves approval from department heads.
Please ease her urge to vomit, let there be
kind but flirtatious men in nearby beds.
Given her hair, consider amnesty
for sins of vanity; make mirrors vanish.
Surround her with forgiving family
and nurses not too numb to cry. Please banish
trite consolations; take her in one swift
and gentle motion as your final gift.

- Michael Astriee

Was it Writ?

Was it writ that first
She set her winds to whistle
spiraling round, bringing all weathers;
second, through mist, fog and fern
sortied the soft whistling owl;
third, shepherd intoned to his sharp-eared friend
fetching the lost from bog and fen;
fourth, thundered our jets;
fifth, deafening silence?
Sixth, ructions and ripples convulse!

Or might we
funnel absolute energies,
swiveling like a deer's ears
towards the source of sounds?

Furies calm;
quakes subside;
walls of hate crack.
We laugh at our pettiness.
A never-before-dance
begins to spin.

- Raphael Block

More Blues and the Abstract Truth

I back the car over a soft, large object;
hair appears on my chest in dreams.
The paperboy comes to collect
with a pit bull. Call Grandmother
and she says, Well you know
death is death and none other.

In the mornings we’re in the dark;
even at the end of June
the zucchini keep on the sill.
Ring Grandmother for advice
and she says, O you know
I used to grow so many things.

Then there’s the frequent bleeding,
the tender nipples, and the rot
under the floormat. If I’m not seeing
a cold-eyed doctor it is
another gouging mechanic.
Grandmother says, Thanks to the blue rugs
and Eileen Briscoe’s elms
the house keeps cool.

Well. Then. You say Grandmother
let me just ask you this:
How does a body rise up again and rinse
her mouth from the tap. And how
does a body put in a plum tree
or lie again on top of another body
or string a trellis. Or go on drying
the flatware. Fix rainbow trout. Grout the tile.
Buy a bag of onions. Beat an egg stiff. Yes,
how does the cat continue
to lick itself from toenail to tailhole.
And how does a body break
bread with the word when the word
has broken. Again. And. Again.
With the wine. And the loaf.
And the excellent glass
of the body. And she says,
Even. If. The. Sky. Is. Falling.
My. Peace. Rose. Is. In. Bloom.

- C. D. Wright

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb, for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not they hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

- Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) spent much of his short, adult life as a volunteer soldier for the British military during World War I. He wrote vivid and terrifying poems about modern warfare. Owen was killed by machinegun fire just days before the end of the war.

THE PRISONER
(In Memory of My Father's Fallen B-29 Crew)

I am the age his mother was
when the telegram came.
I open the crumbling envelope
and find it there.
I am her again as I
read those bold
black words:
"So sorry,
the plane was lost,
shot down over Manchuria.
Your son is missing,
and presumed dead.
Many regrets."

I see him before me
as he left for the war,
handsome and young -
a farm boy
full of his bravery
yet hay-field green.
They all looked like that -
happy and cock-sure
in brown leather jackets
hats off to the side
fighting for the greatest country on earth
fighting for freedom.
But the ones who
will never come home
are already marked.

For fifty years my father
has tried to understand
why he was blown from the plane,
why his life was saved
and others perished.

It is 4 a.m. - I tell my father
to turn off his radio,
but the war wounds are
playing an all-night chess game
on his exiled body,
advancing across him
like the bombers that day
over Manchuria.

And he is listening
for news of his safety,
for Russians coming to
liberate Mukden prisoners of war,
for his release.

He is listening,
just as his mother did
every night for nine months
after the telegram came.


- Jackie Huss Hallerberg

Today I Was Happy, So I Made This Poem

As the plump squirrel scampers
Across the roof of the corncrib,
The moon suddenly stands up in the darkness,
And I see that it is impossible to die.
Each moment of time is a mountain.
An eagle rejoices in the oak trees of heaven,
Crying,
This is what I wanted.

- James Wright

It Was Like This: You Were Happy


It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness—
between you, there is nothing to forgive—
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

- Jane Hirshfield

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.
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

Invitation to the Dance

In the story my father tells
he's running up the marble staircase
at the Boston Music Hall, a young man
late for the concert-
decked out in his coat
and best tie, though earlier today
he's been to the burlesque house,
then counted his change for a doughnut,

saving just enough for the symphony,
the train-fare home.
How tall he is, and slim, his face
the same thin face I wore at 17
and his hair is nearly black,
flying up from his forehead
as he takes the stairs, two, three at once;

and if I could hold him fast at any moment
this would be it-not the thrill of first sex
not the complex joy of marriage,
not the morning of my birth-but as he is
here, now-quick enough to catch the melody,
late enough to move with it, keep time with it,
running with all his life before him
and the world filled with music.

- Martha Carlson-Bradley